Photo-Lettering Inc. used a system like this starting in the late 1950s in order to select fonts from its huge library based on a wide array of font characteristics. A similar digital system is built into the TrueType spec, but a lot of font developers don't use it (or don't know how to use it).

I agree with those who say that this is not a Photoshop blunder, but an optical illusion caused by a combination of a long lens and bad composition. Tangential objects (that is, objects that share an edge) are a no-no in picture composition because of the ambiguity it creates, and this image illustrates why. It's the basis of a lot of trick photography.

Besides which, I find it difficult to believe that someone could create an in-front-of-and-behind-at-the-same-time Escher effect by accident in Photoshop. Think of what it would take to do: You'd either need three layers, with one of the images duplicated in two of them so it could be both in front of and behind the other, and masked as needed, or you would need to erase or mask out the foreground image where it overlaps to make it appear to be behind the other. You'd have to be aware of what you were doing.

Occam's Razor says it's unintentional trick photography.

I heard an interview where Lynch was raging against these kinds of extras, saying something like they took the mystery out of, and distracted from the finished piece of art.

I'm in the middle of reading Lynch on Lynch. He does say that he won't to do commentary tracks, for the reason you said, but I don't think he minds talking about his films--otherwise this book wouldn't exist. There are some things he refuses to talk about, though, like how the baby in Eraserhead was done.

Wow, I never expected this to happen because of all the legal and copyright issues associated with the magazine. I run Mark's Very Large National Lampoon Site (www.marksverylarge.com) and usually hear about these thing ahead of time from insiders hoping for a little free publicity, but this is a big surprise to me. I think it's very good news. (Nothing beats reading the real thing, though, what with all the clever printing tricks and different paper stocks they used for the sake of a joke.)