Author: cosmo

I’m waiting breathlessly to hear how the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office decides to handle a recent (March 2005) application by some clown in Hawaii to trademark the name “Jesus Christ”. Here’s a portion of the filing information:

Serial Number: 78583223
Mark (words only): JESUS CHRIST
Standard Character claim: Yes
Current Status: Newly filed application, not yet assigned to an examining attorney.
Date of Status: 2005-03-21
Filing Date: 2005-03-09

Address:
Maria, Ronald./K
PO Box 2868 89226A Farrington Hwy
Waianae, HI 96792
United States

It looks like Ronald has big plans to sue everyone who goes to church or prints a bible. I wonder if you could sue someone for saying a prayer?

Sheesh…

“Build a man a fire and he is warm for a day.
Light a man on fire and he is warm for the rest of his life.”

— Jason K. Larson

A Taco Bell in Pittsburgh seems to think some of its female customers should be paying more for their lunch.

Hint: see the last item on the menu.

Nothing stops the Forehand of Doom.

As part of the sudden increase in shark attacks and lightning strikes– at least from the media’s point of view– comes the story of seven-year-old Kaylee Shriner of Tonganoxie, Kansas. She was asleep in her bed when lighting hit the house, blew through her ceiling, and struck her bed. The bed, which apparently wasn’t manufactured to withstand a lightning strike, promptly burst into flame. She jumped out of bed and told mom and dad, and according to her statement to the media:

“Dad said a bad word, and then Mom heard it, and then she went upstairs, and then she said a bad word, and there were lots of bad words around here.”

Ahh, kids are so much fun because they’re so brutally honest…

So the other day, the Supreme Court ruled that the government can allow one private party to obtain land from another private party by claiming “eminent domain” if it can be shown that the tax revenue from the pre-empting party would exceed that generated by the existing one. This has all sorts of implications, and is of course just another nod to big nasty corporations who want to bulldoze neighborhoods to make way for factories or whatever.

In a stroke of genius, and what can only be called poetic irony, a hotel developer named Logan Clements filed paperwork with the city of Weare, New Hampshire to allow him to bulldoze the house of Justice David Souter and build a hotel in its place. The hotel would be called The Lost Liberty Hotel and would include the Just Desserts Cafe and a small museum with exhibits about the loss of freedoms in America. All guests would receive a complimentary copy of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged.

I love it!

Of course Clements had no problem demonstrating that the tax revenue from a hotel would greatly exceed Justice Souter’s annual property tax, and therefore it’s perfectly within the jurisprudence of the new ruling. If three of the five members of the town council vote in favor of it, I guess Justice Souter will be shopping for a new home…

I’ve got 200GB of storage on my main office server, and it’s just about full. Out of curiosity I checked to see what the heck was taking so much room (I mean, come on, who needs that much space?) and discovered that my music collection has grown to about 85GB. Wow, that’s a lot of music.

Another 90GB is hundreds of thousands of backup files for clients, and the remainder includes everything from my digital photo album to ten years of e-mail messages to general documents and files.

Time to get one of those new-fangled 400GB drives, I guess…

Tonight marked the start of the summer ultimate league season, and we played a wicked fun game. The wind was pretty stiff, making for some interesting plays. We also battled for what must have been the longest point in my fifteen years of playing– a solid fifteen minutes of back-and-forth until we finally took it to the end zone on a (no kidding) diving layout by yours truly.

Of course, in so doing I ripped the scab clear off my knee. For the past two months I’ve repeatedly done this– I make a diving catch and tear my knee open, and just when it seems to be healing I do it all again. I figure at this rate it’ll be Christmas before it heals.

I can only hope that I instill a sense of fear in the opposing team when they see me running around with blood streaming down my leg throughout the game…

Ahh, the life of a consultant…

Now here’s a panhandler with some creativity…