Filing a Mickey Mouse Lawsuit
My seven-year-old son's a huge fan of Mickeyroni & Cheese, boxed Mickey Mouse pasta sold at Disney World that occasionally makes it to the local Disney outlet store. (The combination of rehydrated Vermont cheddar cheese, 1.5 tablespoons of milk and semolina pasta shaped like a rodent's head is pretty good.)
When he heard yesterday that Disney has discontinued the product, my son announced that he was going to sue the company to force them to continue making it.
My wife replied that "you should only sue somebody when you have no other choice."
His response: "Everybody sues dad."
Five Things About My Secret Nude Past
I've been tagged with the five things you don't know about me virus, so here's my list:
1. In 1988 I spent two weeks at a nudist campground in Orlando, though I was tricked into going by my future mother- and father-in-law, who said we were going to DisneyWorld.
2. People play contact sports in nudist camps, including basketball, which was a surprise to me because of the threat of reaching-in fouls.
3. When elderly male nudists play shuffleboard, they still wear knee-high black socks tucked in to their open-toed sandals.
4. There's an unspoken bond among men who are comparably equipped -- a sense of our shared struggle that's conveyed by a friendly head-nod or a crisp wave of the hand. Though my father in-law dubbed this the "Dinky Dinkus Club" when I told this story to other relatives at a large family gathering, that was not my point at all.
5. If you put a restaurant in a nudist camp, do not under any circumstances use vinyl seats.
Five bloggers I'm now obligating to answer this question: April Winchell, Dave Linabury, Katrina vanden Heuvel, All My Children's Cady McClain and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.
'Quite a Few Martinis Were Consumed'
Ron Nessen, the press secretary for President Ford, tells the San Francisco Chronicle about the 1975 assassination attempt on Ford by Sara Jane Moore in San Francisco:
Nessen recalls that as the shots rang out, he looked for a car in the waiting motorcade that already had its doors open. He jumped into a car with Donald Rumsfeld, who was then Ford's White House chief of staff.
After racing from downtown, the Ford motorcade drove onto the tarmac at the airport, and the presidential party hurried aboard Air Force One. Before it could leave, however, the plane had to wait for first lady Betty Ford, who had been carrying out her own schedule of events on the Peninsula.
Nessen, who now lives in suburban Maryland, said the first lady had no idea that her husband had been attacked. "She said something like, 'How are you, dear? How did your day go?'"
"I think it was Rumsfeld who finally told her that someone took a shot at the president. ... We took off and what had happened sunk in. I can tell you that quite a few martinis were consumed on the flight back," Nessen added.
A few years later, Betty Ford became the nation's most prominent alcoholic and painkiller addict, admitting her problems, the family's staged intervention and her subsequent trip to rehab. Considering all of the things she discussed openly -- psychiatric treatment, substance abuse and a mastectomy to treat breast cancer -- one of the things that ought to be remembered today about President Ford is his wife's willingness to talk candidly about her travails.
Top 10 Wargames of 2006
After hearing about the battle over Wargames.Com, the Los Angeles weblog LAist asked me for a list of the top 10 wargames of 2006. Since this could be the last year I'm legally allowed to use the word "wargames" in a sentence, I jumped at the opportunity.
10. Naruto CCG: Every time I play a seven-year-old kicks my ninja's ass and tells me I bring shame to my family.
9. Advanced Squad Leader Armies of Oblivion: Published by Curt Schilling, who spends his time between pitches calculating how to keep his supply lines open to the Sudetenland.
8. Army Men Sarge's War: You're either with the Green Army or you're with the terrorists.
7. Call of Duty 3 (XBox 360): Makes you glad to live on the continent that's uptight about sex and comfortable about violence and not the other way around.
6. Confrontation (3rd Edition): Way more action than Negotiation or Capitulation.
5. Activision Remix Chopper Command: Back in my day we had one button on our joysticks and we liked it.
4. Memoir '44: Win the last well-liked American war in 60 minutes.
3. Gears of War (XBox 360): The chainsaw bayonet is wrong on so many levels.
2. Victory in Iraq: This isn't a real game, but the guy who comes up with it should be our next Secretary of Defense.
1. BattleLore: Huge medieval hordes fight like in Lord of the Rings, but without any hobbits holding back their homosexual yearning.
Microsoft Seeks Patent on RSS Platform
Don McArthur passes along some huge news in the syndication world -- Microsoft filed for a patent today on the Windows RSS Platform, a common feed database and API that can be used by other applications to read, write and store RSS and Atom feeds:
The web content syndication platform ... can be utilized to manage, organize and make available for consumption content that is acquired from the Internet. The platform can acquire and organize web content, and make such content available for consumption by many different types of applications. These applications may or may not necessarily understand the particular syndication format. An application program interface (API) exposes an object model which allows applications and users to easily accomplish many different tasks such as creating, reading, updating, deleting feeds and the like. In addition, the platform can abstract away a particular feed format to provide a common format which promotes the useability of feed data that comes into the platform. Further, the platform processes and manages enclosures that might be received via a web feed in a manner that can make the enclosures available for consumption to both syndication-aware applications and applications that are not syndication-aware.
Although the invention has been described in language specific to structural features and/or methodological steps, it is to be understood that the invention defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or steps described. Rather, the specific features and steps are disclosed as preferred forms of implementing the claimed invention.
My initial take is that this doesn't sound like a patentable invention, considering other software that exposes feeds, and the patent system has a chilling effect on software innovation.
One of the strengths of syndication is that you don't need an API to share feed data. Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser and the Planet Planet community aggregator both offer a lot of the functionality described in Microsoft's patent application.
Red Herring: The War Over Wargames.Com
Red Herring interviewed me for a news article on the war over Wargames.Com. The story's pretty fair, though I was never uncertain about what I wanted to do with the domain. I've been playing wargames since Dungeons & Dragons was still considered a wargame in the late '70s.
She covers my background in the article:
Two years ago, Mr. Cadenhead registered www.BenedictXVI.com. When the new pope announced his new name, the website saw 500,000 hits in two days. Mr. Cadenhead decided to donate the domain to a charity rather than sell it to a porn operator and have to face the ire of Catholics everywhere.
He's not, he insists, a domain investor. "When I acquire a domain, my intention is to publish a site," said Mr. Cadenhead. "I would never trade on somebody else's trademark for a profit."
This is a point I'd like to emphasize, as self-serving as it sounds. I'm a computer book author and web publisher who tries to conduct myself ethically. I've turned down a lot of easy money over the 10 years I've published sites -- refusing ads for absinthe, laser pointers, Cuban cigars and countless porn opportunities. I have too much Catholic guilt to enjoy committing any of the deadly sins, except for sloth.
'The Deck is Stacked Against Cadenhead'
Jim Ledbetter, writing for the Business 2.0/Fortune blog The Browser, covers MGM's effort to grab Wargames.Com:
Over at Techdirt, they're pretty pessimistic about the little guy's chances: "Given the history of the domain name arbitration game, where the big company almost always wins, the deck is stacked against Cadenhead".
But wait! The Browser is not an attorney, and does not play one on television. But we noticed something curious about MGM's trademark of the term. Although the movie came out in 1983, MGM did not bother applying for a trademark until 2001 -- three years after Cadenhead got the domain. If Cadenhead can prove he acted in good faith, that might be enough of a loophole to let him slay the MGM lion.
News of my predicament also has been Slashdotted, where they're excited to find out there's a WarGames sequel:
This news is a little late, but on November 20th WarGames 2: The Dead Code began filming in Montreal. (I only became aware of the new production when I read that MGM is suing the rightful owner of WarGames.com for his domain name.)
Techdirt shouldn't be so pessimistic about one man's chances to stand up against a heartless corporate behemoth and triumph in the end. Has he learned nothing from the movies?
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