E-mail the Giz Wiz, a.k.a. The Gizmo Guy, & read about Dick's other career as MAD Magazine's Maddest Writer.
Has Dick De turned into Alfred E?
No, not yet anyway, but he and Alfred go back a long way. Dick sold his first piece to MAD Magazine back when he was in high school, and now he's been in every issue of MAD for the past 35 years! That's some record. Not a very good one, but a record non-the-less!
Thanks to John at JHW Designs for doing that great Morph. Even though it only lasts for a few seconds, it's fun to see what I look like with hair! --- Dick De
Hmmm....so what's the Match Game logo doing on this website?
About once a week people who watch credits at the end of TV shows e-mail me and ask if I'm any relation to the Dick DeBartolo whose name appears on the credits of the old Match Game. No, no relation, it is me. I wrote questions for The Match Game for 17 years. As a matter of fact, when the show first went on the air, the questions were things like: "Name a red flower". "Name something you can make with a potato". I told executive producer Mark Goodson I worked for MAD, and would he like to try some silly questions like "Mary like to pour gravy on John's______." That was the first Match Game question with a blank I ever wrote, and Goodson said: "yeah, let's try some of those". Who dreamed, that thanks to the Game Show Network, The Match Game would live on! Royalities? I got $1.87 so far. (Yep, for real, $1.87!) www.gsn.com
Dick De and Alfred E. In addition to being the Giz Wiz, Dick wear's another hat, which could explain his severe hair loss! He's also MAD Magazine's Maddest writer, with a story in every issue of MAD magazine for the last 35 years! Click the link below to revisit your youth, and the MAD Magazine site.
Here's a look-see at MAD Privacy statement that I wrote for a recent issue of MAD.
Hundreds of thousands of you have visited MADMAG.COM, or called our toll-free number: 1-800-4-MADMAG. Under the law, every company that collects personal information must make their “privacy policy” known. Fortunately that law doesn’t say that the “privacy policy” need be easy to understand. So with that nice loophole in mind, here is MAD Magazine’s Privacy Notice. Your privacy is important to us. Why? Because by invading your privacy, we might just be able to make a few bucks!
Our privacy policy is just your “everyday, typical “privacy policy” that you’ve seen and read hundreds of times, so we recommend you skip reading it, and move on to something more interesting.
Are you still reading this? Well, one thing we learned about you already, is that you’re quite uncooperative! Now PLEASE stopping reading this, and move on!
If you insist on reading further, make sure you’re not driving or operating heavy machinery, because you should grow drowsy and fall asleep in a matter of minutes! And don’t blame us for that! Why you should care about what we do with information we collect on you, your family, and your friends, is beyond anything we can comprehend! So here’s our privacy policy, nosey body!
The Information We Collect.
If you’ve ever visited MADMAG.COM, you know that you can order products, enter contests, vote in polls, and express an opinion. You should know that we value your opinion. We value your opinion more if you also buy stuff from us!
At MADMAG.COM the information we collect includes: name, address, e-mail address, telephone number, fax number, credit card information, and information about your interests. If you have a web cam hooked to your computer, when you’re not looking, we may turn it on from this end, and take a peek around your room. If we find anything interesting, we may take some photos, but they are ONLY for our own files. (Unless, of course, they turn out to be real interesting photos, in which case we may share them with other employees, friends, family, and from time to time, total strangers.) So as not to invade your privacy, we will never tell you when we’re doing this.
At times you might submit a person's name and e-mail address to send them an electronic greeting card or order a gift online. The types of identifiable information that may be collected about those other people include: name, address, e-mail address, and telephone number. We also will note their complete lack of taste; that they’ll accept some piece of crap from our website. These names are filed under our “easy pickings” category, and are targeted for other slipshod merchandise.
We may also collect certain non-personal information when you visit our web pages, such as the type of browser, and the type of operating system you are using. We do not use that information ourselves. However we are paid big bucks by turning over the names of anyone using any program or service that is not 100% owned, or controlled by Microsoft!!
How We Use the Information
We sometimes use this information to communicate with you, such as to notify you when you have won one of our contests (Very, very rare!) or when we make changes to our subscriber agreements (Very, very often!) Actually, to be more precise, we make changes to our subscriber agreements very, very often, but if we notify you about these changes, it is very, very rare.
We use the information that you provide about others in order to send them your gifts or cards. Then we use it again to fill their mail boxes with every kind of shoddy offer we can think of, including offers for those Time-Life book and record collections that have been gathering dust in our warehouses for the past 20 years.
It is important to remember that the information we collect provides for an interactive experience. We send you e-mail offers you don’t want, and you e-mail back, asking us to stop, and to remove your name from our e-mail lists. This is about as interactive as you can find anywhere on the web! And the fact that we rarely pay attention to those “remove my name” requests, make it even more interactive for you as your e-mails for us to stop get more and more hostile!
Who May Obtain Personal Information We Collected
We may disclose personally identifiable information in response to legal process, or in response to a law enforcement agency's request. Or maybe in response to someone who just calls up out of the blue and says: “got any hot dirt on ‘so-and-so’”.
Although we take appropriate measures to safeguard against unauthorized disclosures of information, we cannot assure you that our safeguards actually do anything to protect you. However, we do use the words “WARNING! PRIVATE FILES!” somewhere on our data base, which should deter most hackers, 3 years old and younger, from invading your privacy files.
Collection of Information by Third-Party Sites and Sponsors
Some of our sites contain links to other sites whose information practices may be different than ours. We have no control over information collected by these third parties. However, for your peace of mind, we should state that we have yet to encounter a third-party site with security standards lower than ours!
Our Commitment to Security
We have sophisticated electronic safeguards to prevent unauthorized access to your personal data. We use a super secret security password that no one would think of willy-nilly. As a matter of fact, that is our super secret password: willy-nilly! Who would ever think of using willy-nilly as a password to get at the trillions of personal facts we have on file in our data banks? Probably no one! And for added security, we alternate our willy-nilly password every month, with another obscure password: willy-nilly 1.
Feel better about your privacy when it comes to info collected by MAD Magazine, 1-800-4MADMAG, and madmag.com now?
Just nod your head, we can see you!
(Above copyrighted 2002 by EC Publications, DC Comics, AOL TimeWarner.)
