The story behind the snowman's appearance in pro-Taliban posters.

The facts:

Antonio Verpicci, a San Francisco artist, started Snowman is Evil!, a long-time favorite humor site on which, as a running joke, he attempted to prove the snowman was "evil" by inserting him, Zelig-like, into photographs with notorious people and infamous historical scenes...including this one with Osama Bin Laden.

The picture of the snowman with Osama bin Laden was inadvertently picked up by someone in Bangladesh scouring the web looking for photographs of Osama bin Laden to use in a collage-like poster:



The Osama bin Laden poster -- with the snowman -- was displayed at rallies by pro-bin Laden protesters and appeared in photographs carried by news agencies such as Reuters and Associated Press.

Mohammed Kabul, production manager of Qaeda Products, the Dhaka shop that made the posters, told the AP he had gotten the images off the Internet. "We did not give the pictures a second look or realize what they signified until you pointed it out to us,'' he said The company had printed about 2,000 posters, and they were snapped up by the demonstrators, who were angry over the U.S.-led attacks on Afghanistan. Kabul said he would leave out the controversial images from his next posters.