This Open Letter to My Leftovers

Dear Leftovers,

I'm not eating you. I don't care how awesome a meal you were the first time around. I don't care how zesty and flavorful you were. That was two weeks ago, and unlike Ghostbusters, you have not aged well. Like Ghostbusters, you are covered in unexplained green slime and some people from the EPA want to shut you down. So no, I'm not eating you.

Don't take it so personally. It's not like I didn't want to eat you. I love leftovers. Sometimes food is better the second time around, and leftovers are an under-rated pleasure. That's why I get a to-go box when I'm dining out, as there's nothing like having last night's dinner for breakfast. Believe me, I am very pro-leftover.

Why we should care about The Oatmeal

Last week The Oatmeal, one of my favorite websites, came under attack for no good reason. Yes, there were reasons, but none of them were good. In fact, I'd call these reasons nefarious. (Because I like that word and rarely get to use it in a sentence.) This is something that we all should care about, especially if you, like me, happen to post things online.

Here's the simplest breakdown of events I can manage. Last year Matthew Inman, the writer and creater of the fantastic The Oatmeal webcomic, was upset that another website FunnyJunk.com (no, I'm not linking to them, they don't deserve the traffic) was uploading his work without permission. He made a blog post about it, calling attention to the unethical practice. FunnyJunk did not have permission to host the material and yet was profiting from it. This happens to a lot of people who post their material online: others will steal it and use it on their own sites.

Funnyjunk took down some of the offending (stolen) comics but left plenty more up. Then a year later, Inman got a letter from FunnyJunk's lawyer. The letter ordered him to remove the blog post (rightfully) calling FunnyJunk a den of thieves and demanded he pay them $20,000 or else be sued.