OddThinking

I am a unicyclist, and I was designing a new unicycling t-shirt; I needed a logo.

A brilliant idea occurred to me. Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man is an anatomical diagram showing the proportions of the human body; you are probably familiar with the diagram, even if you don’t recognise its name.

All I needed to do was remove the centre two legs, replace it with a unicycle, and there’s your logo. Vitruvian Man trying to ride a unicycle, legs akimbo, arms waving backwards and forwards for balance.

I didn’t have very powerful image editing tools back then, and my attempts to draw a unicycle, front on, were totally unsuccessful. Either I could make the drawing unrecognisable as a unicycle, or I could make the perspective so out-of-whack that it looked awful.

I gave up on being able to implement my idea, and I posted my idea to a public forum in the hope someone more skilled at graphical design than me, somewhere in the world, could carry it off.

Fast-forward eighteen months. A small unicycling tournament is held in Sydney, and a team from Canberra drive up to take us on.

To my horror, they are wearing t-shirts with my logo! When I challenge them on it, they are confused; they got the idea from some loser on the Internet who hadn’t been able to carry it off, so they had had a go, with far more success.

When I donated my idea up to the world, I didn’t think it would be taken up by my enemies, to mock me!

Not only did those brutes win the tournament, but they did so with my own shirt on their backs.