Interesting mystery. In March 2009 Jessica took this photo of her cat Mr Friday with her iPhone, but she didn’t upload it to Facebook until August 13, 2009. As far as we know, the photo never left her iPhone.
On April 2nd, 2009 her brother forwarded a chain email full of “Awesome Photos”. At the time Jessica didn’t even look at the email but today her sister looked at the email (takes her awhile to check her email?) and saw Jessica’s picture of Friday in the email. Huh?
So how did a photo from Jessica’s iPhone that was taken in late March and never uploaded to the web end up in a chain email a few days later on April 2nd?
It gets even stranger.
The photo appears on this website which claims to have posted it on February 22, 2009, a full month before the photo was even taken! The explanantion here must be that the date on that webpage is wrong, or it’s actually a different photo that looks exactly the same.
In fact, there are other photos (february 2, 2006) that are remarkably similar.
The photo from that site (shown below) looks very similar, but is subtly different. Not Mr Friday:
Now Jessica’s photo is all over the web, as you can see here and here.
But still the question remains … how does a photo from Jessica’s iPhone end up on the web if it didn’t ever leave her iPhone? I guess the most likely explanation is that Jessica actually emailed the photo (iPhone didn’t have MMS at the time) to someone and doesn’t remember doing so. And whomever she emailed it to felt it was ok to forward on the photo or post it to the web without her permission.
Bizarre.
to me, those look like the exact same cat. same faucet too… what’s the difference?
In Jessica’s photo (the top one), the cat is touching the faucet, the tongue is curled differently, the whiskers are different (see one in front of the nose?), there’s a water droplet off the tip of the tongue… you have to look closely, but they are different. Odd how similar they are though, right?
The craziest part of the whole story is that she took it with her iPhone. WOW. That’s the best advertisement I’ve ever seen for one, that photo. I’m assuming since she emailed it from her phone that there wasn’t even any editing done? That’s crazy. Amazing picture. And so frustrating it’s floating all over everywhere without giving her credit.