Talk:Gnorm Gnat

Lost Strips

Does anybody have any of these strips? I've always been curious as to what the comic was like, a side from the 3-4 strips that have been published. Perferably, does anybody have the last strip?--Gen. Quon (talk) 20:47, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Joke

Does the story tell if the foot going down was accompanied by a farting noise after the liberty bell? Falez (talk) 08:49, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Google Books Entry with Incorrect ISBN

This book was linked as a source for this article; page 122 in the book preview shows the quoted text.

However, it appears that Google Books has made a whoopsie. That link should contain information about this book: https://isbnsearch.org/isbn/1578600723 Instead, it contains information about this book: https://isbnsearch.org/isbn/1578600979. At first, I thought this happened with some form of politically motivated vandalistic intent, as I decisively narrow my eyes at what looks like an attempt to insert references to the Confederacy into random Wikipedia articles.

However, I think something more technically interesting may be in play! When you convert those ISBNs to hexadecimal, the book about the confederacy has the ISBN 5e178913, and the book about Hoosiers has the isbn 5e178a13. Here they are side-by-side:

 5e178a13
 5e178913

You can do the same thing in binary to see a single bit has migrated a single place upwards, adding 256 to the ISBN. I think this is fascinating! At some point, a bit living somewhere inside a Google server decided to shimmy one place over, changing a reference about the Confederacy into a reference about famous Indianans. I don't see any way that even a super canny vandal could do that, much less coordinate the ISBNs for these disparate sources to allow such a minor change with such interesting consequences.

I've contacted Google Books to let them know that one of their bits got restless, but their responses are delayed due to COVID-19, and I didn't want to leave this mystery behind without recording it somewhere, so now you know too. 76.85.36.92 (talk) 15:53, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

I have received communication from Google Books indicating they'll no longer offer the cited book, so it seems the citation of Legendary Hoosiers will need to be converted. Robert lavery (talk) 17:47, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

I have been in further correspondence with Google Books as well as the author of Legendary Hoosiers, Nelson Price, and have reviewed the copyright pages for these works. It appears that both books were printed with ISBN 1578600979, and that this has caused degradation of how these books are displayed in many digital archive and catalog systems. Duplicate ISBNs are apparently not a particularly uncommon problem, but I'll be contacting the Internet Archive and other digital archive services which appear to have confused these two works. Robert lavery (talk) 19:09, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

I have received further correspondence from the author of Far, Far From Home, Gary Loderhose, who told me "The original ISBN for Far, Far from Home's first printing is: 1578600723." This would seem to confirm that the printing of Far, Far From Home with Legendary Hoosiers' ISBN was a misprint. Thanks for coming with me down this entire rabbithole. Robert lavery (talk) 18:17, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Dubious

Re: copyright claim

An editor claimed that Gnorm Gnat, because it was published without its own copyright, would be public domain. Here's the problem with that: the publication was made as part of a newspaper, The Pendleton Times, and nowhere else. Because of that, it would almost certainly be covered under the copyright of the Times, which I assume was copyrighted. It would be no different than a local news story being published without a copyright in the byline, because it was a work for hire of the paper itself; the copyright falls on the work as a whole. J. Myrle Fuller (talk) 02:51, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

I'm no lawyer, but I believe it would come down to the contract between Jim Davis and the newspaper. Cartoons are very different from news stories, so I wouldn't be surprised if they involved a different contract, but I also wouldn't be surprised if they didn't. - furrykef (Talk at me) 01:28, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

@JMyrleFuller The Pendleton Times was itself published without a copyright notice during the relevant time period. The entire paper is available on newspapers.com, and I have personally checked the issues in question. They uniformly lack any copyright notice for the newspaper as a whole. This was actually pretty common for small community newspapers — they often lacked a copyright notice. D. Benjamin Miller (talk) 23:48, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

@D. Benjamin Miller Good to know. Thank you! (The fact they wouldn't copyright such a thing is somewhat surprising but not that much given that it was 1976 and copyright laws were tougher to claim, plus how small Pendleton is.) J. Myrle Fuller (talk) 23:55, 15 August 2024 (UTC)