Forget Magazine - Remember, Remember, Remember

I was watching an old episode of Family Feud on the Game Show Network one afternoon not too long ago. It was a particularly good one because one of the teams was made up entirely of women-one mother and four daughters in their late teens and early twenties, all hot. It was better than Petticoat Junction.

During one of the commercial breaks, I started flipping through the channels and landed upon the Food Network. The Galloping Gourmet was on. After a few seconds of watching Graham Kerr shredding one medium head of lettuce for his coleslaw with cumin-lime vinaigrette, I noticed the bug at the bottom right corner of the screen. Bugs, for those television illiterate people reading, are the network logos that constantly sit at the corner of the screen during television programs, but never during commercials. They are there to remind the viewer of which network he or she is watching so he or she will remember how much he or she loved watching Smart Solutions on HGTV and then he or she will come back to see other programs like Room by Room or Appraisal Fair. So there I was, looking at the logo for the Food Network and it reminded me of something. I stared at the logo for several minutes, but I couldn't recall what the logo resembled.

For days afterwards, the logo for the Food Network haunted my mind's eye. Every time I closed my eyes, there it was, mocking me, telling me how much I sucked. I tried to remember the other logo, but I could not. The logo was right: I did suck.

Then one evening when the Game Show Network was not showing anything good, I found myself surfing the world wide web. After I exhausted all of the sites that I frequently visit, I decided to check out some sites that I visit once in a blue moon, one of them being a web magazine co-created by Kent Bruyneel, my former editor-a website that was slowly but surely becoming the darling of a handful of unemployed post graduates Canada-wide.

And lo did my eyes see what I had been trying to picture for days: the Forget logo! I felt the way Lazarus must surely have felt when Jesus gave him back his sight. The Forget logo was almost exactly the same as the Food Network logo. The fonts were not identical, but they were similar; and Forget's letters were italicised and the Food Network's were bold; and the letters are much more crammed together in the Forget logo; and some of the letters in forget are upper-case, whereas they are all lower case in the food; but what really convinced me was that same big f extending below the rest of the letters. There was no denying that these two logos were too close for comfort.

So what was I going to do? It was clear that Forget's logo was a direct copy of the Food Network's logo. I could not in good conscience allow Forget to rip off a respected and well-established cable television network such as The Food Network. And besides, I never did like the way Kent looked at me when he thought that I wasn't looking. So I wrote a letter.