Recently I had a most unusual experience. It involved a virtual trip to to the south of Thailand and going inside the head of award winning crime author, Colin Cotterill. Colin had in the early days of Thailand Footprint (and to this day) been very accommodating in providing me with the Gop the frog image that makes this site fun for me and hopefully for you the reader, too. And the best part is, if you want a Colin Cotterill original cartoon drawing for your very own, to tack next to your bookshelf with your Dr. Siri and Jimm Juree series books, it is now within your reach.  But with the rapid success of Thailand Footprint in order to keep the massive audience glued here, as opposed to the other thousands of blogs out there or at time wasting sites like CNN.com, the management felt an upgrade was necessary. Of course nothing is ever simple in this connect me – connect-me-not, dot com, social media, big data blogosphere.  A second trip was made above to CBAY, also known as, Colin Cotterill Original Art (you can click it and go there after you read this post, of course); it is an on-line mega store with an eastern philosophy. Naturally,  that meant I had to get my lawyer involved:

My lawyer by Bangkok artist, Chris Coles (Click to go to Chris Coles Noir Blog)

And once my lawyer contacted CBAY again, he went down to the south to begin negotiations with Colin’s “people”. My lawyer took longer than expected to close the deal down in Pak Nam. Details on the expense account are sketchy but he seems to like pina coladas. Eventually, though, an agreement was reached and Gop, the literature loving frog in the huge coconut shell is now in living color. Or at least in as living a color as you will get from a cartoonist known for writing novels about an old coroner in Laos. Drum roll, please …

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And now, you, the valued reader, get a say. You get to vote. Do we keep the black and white version of Gop in the upper left hand corner logo or do we replace him with the living color one from the coroner writing cartoonist? It’s up to you, massive audience. We’ll give this poll 48 hours. The numerical results will be released upon conclusion. In the interim you can view percentage results by clicking, View Results. Let the corruption begin: