ESPN's Bill Simmons, Boston sports junkie and master of the rhetorical question, is not a master of airplane engineering. Yet, as a reader pointed out to the columnist in one of his recent mailbags, his image was used by small-aircraft maker Western Aviation on the company's "experts" page. Simmons, unsurprisingly, was confused, so Gelf decided to check it out.
"The web development firm changed it quickly once I notified them who it was. The project manager who would have picked the photo was no longer with the company so I could not ask her why she used this photo. But I did approve the photo when the site was originally built in April 2007. The photo has been up all this time only now did someone put the face to a name. I am not an ESPN buff so I did not know who it was so I just thought it was a photo of an anonymous person, just a photo they could use."
An honest mistake, we suppose, though we're pretty sure that even a photo of an "anonymous person" can't be used without authorization. And for a noted sports personality, it's probably better to have your photo associated with a private jet company than, say, a gay cruising site.
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