I’ve been out of the daily newspaper grind for … yikes … more than seven years now, but I’m always amused when any of my work lives on. It’s best when people find my stories about the FBI investigation that resulted in the city’s mayor going to federal prison. Or even pieces I wrote about Stephen King or interviews with directors like John Carpenter or George Romero I conducted back in the 1980s.

But I’d guess my most-reprinted or reused work has been the photo above, which was posted as promo art on The Star Press today.

Probably at least 15 years ago, we needed a photo of an iPhone to go along with a story. Probably a crime story. Probably a story about some pervert taking photos of something he should not have and getting arrested and possibly going to jail for it. What the photo was originally taken for is lost to the vagaries of time and memory. It survives in the newspaper’s system, however, and is easily recalled when a reporter needs a photo to go with said stories about said perverts and said crimes.

What’s funny, however, is not just how long that photo has been in use. A funnier (to me anyway) behind the scenes element is that I took that photo of my wife’s iPhone and that it’s immortalized as a substitute for a law-breaking iPhone.

Fame and infamy find their way to us in interesting ways.