Our sister site Wordlab, created by one of Igor’s founders (me), just re-launched today in a big way. I completely re-designed and re-coded the site, changing it 100% from the old Wordlab that had remained largely unchanged since it launched in 1998.
The new Wordlab is a full-fledged social network for naming and wordplay, collaboration and creative thinking. As such it is structured a bit differently than what you are used to if you were a user of the old Wordlab and its Wordboard forum, but the opportunities for interaction and collaboration are much greater and more powerful.
Check it out, sign up for a free membership, and join in the fun, either as someone looking for naming help, someone who can lend suggestions and advice to other users, or both.
Paul Revere and the Raiders schilling for the ’69 Pontiac GTO Judge. The “Judge” name came from the popularity of “Here comes da judge!”, a cultural catch phrase made popular on “Laugh-In”.
Keith James Dunlap of Portland Maine (my very old friend, er, ex-bartender at the Great Jones Cafe) writes, via Facebook:
Help me launch this phrase, social networthing, i.e. where the conversation is designed to allow everyone involved to drop enough hints about how much money they have or make, so that by the end, each knows exactly where he or she stands in terms of the income ladder.
Keith would also like you to know that he is now a successful attorney and his wife is a famous novelist.
“Skippy” was first used as a trademark for peanut butter by the Rosefield Packing Co., Ltd., of Alameda, California, in 1933. Percy Crosby, creator of the “Skippy” comic strip, had the trademark invalidated in 1934, but Rosefield persisted after Crosby was committed to an insane asylum, and its successor companies, most recently Unilever, have been granted rights to the trademark over the objection of Crosby’s heirs. There has been much litigation on this point over the decades, some of which remains in progress.[1]
The Associated Press
Monday, April 5, 2004; 4:59 PM
ANNANDALE, Va. – For nearly 40 years Joan Crosby Tibbetts has waged a one-woman campaign against the makers of Skippy peanut butter, claiming the name was stolen from her father’s popular Depression-era comic strip.
On Monday, Tibbetts’ legal battle ended when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear her suit against Skippy’s manufacturer, a division of the multinational conglomerate Unilever. But Tibbetts, 71, said she’ll continue her battle in the court of public opinion.
“This case involves a very important principle … ‘Thou shalt not steal,’” Tibbetts said Monday. “If this case is allowed to disappear and they succeed in shutting me up, who has won? These big corporations that believe they can just wear others down.”
Tibbetts’ crusade began in 1965 when the state of New York tasked her with administering her father Percy Crosby’s estate. She had not seen her father since 1939, when Crosby’s wife divorced him and took the children.
Crosby died in December 1964, after spending the last 18 years of his life in a mental hospital, his cartoon character by then largely forgotten…
Her research led her to the conclusion that the trademark for Skippy peanut butter had been improperly obtained by the Rosefield Packing Co.
She has waged her campaign ever since, a few episodes of success interspersed with endless legal wrangling and frustration.
In 1978 she won a $25,000 settlement from Bestfoods, which had purchased Skippy peanut butter from Rosefield. But Tibbetts said the settlement was with the understanding that Bestfoods would use the original Skippy character in its marketing, which never occurred.
It was also before Tibbetts found documents that she says prove Skippy’s manufacturers knowingly obtained their trademark by fraud and covered up the evidence. One document written by lawyers in 1954 as Bestfoods prepared to buy Rosefield suggested that Bestfoods’ chief counsel should deny knowledge that the Skippy mark had been fraudulently obtained.
Another victory for Tibbetts, of Annandale, Va., came in 2000 when a federal appeals court overturned a ruling that had barred Tibbetts from claiming on the Internet that she was the legitimate holder of the Skippy trademark.
That ruling, on First Amendment grounds, allows Tibbetts to continue her campaign, telling her story on the Internet and agitating for change and advocating a boycott of Unilever products. And now that her civil claim has been denied, she plans to petition the Justice Department for a criminal case.
She acknowledges crusade’s toll – financially, emotionally and physically. She also has been subject to nasty e-mail comments, including one writer who hoped she drowns in a giant vat of peanut butter.
A spokeswoman for Unilever, which has previously said Tibbetts’ claims are without merit, did not immediately respond to a call seeking comment.
And just so we don’t leave you with a good taste in your mouth, a Skippy peanut butter television commercial from the 1950′s (caution, the ad may be a tad bit sexist):
John Updike’s sex scenes — including a romp with a “Widows of Eastwick” witch in a beachside motel room — won a Lifetime Achievement Award at Britain’s ever- anxiously awaited Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.
Rachel Johnson, the sister of London Mayor Boris Johnson, captured the 16th annual Bad Sex Award itself for a scene in “Shire Hell” that begins with moans and nibbles and works up to screaming and other animal noises.
Previously won by Tom Wolfe, Sebastian Faulks and Norman Mailer, the contest seeks to dishonor the author of the year’s worst sex scene. London’s monthly Literary Review inaugurated the prize in 1993 “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”
Hypermiling is the Oxford Universtiy Press “Word of the Year” and “moofer” is a runner-up amongst these finalists:
frugalista – person who leads a frugal lifestyle, but stays fashionable and healthy by swapping clothes, buying second-hand, growing own produce, etc.
moofer – a mobile out of office worker – ie. someone who works away from a fixed workplace, via Blackberry/laptop/wi-fi etc. (also verbal noun, moofing)
topless meeting – a meeting in which the participants are barred from using their laptops, Blackberries, cellphones, etc.
toxic debt – mainly sub-prime debts that are now proving so disastrous to banks. They were parceled up and sent around the global financial system like toxic waste, hence the allusion.
I prefer to think of myself as one of a new breed of digital nomads.
We learned today from the carnival of law blogs hosted this week on Securing Innovation, the business blog of IP.com, that some people are marking the invention of the ballpoint pen on the birthday of its inventor, Laszlo Biro. Apparently, folks in England, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand call a ballpoint pen a biro. Who knew?
Anyway, knowing Igor’s artist-in-residence Jay would appreciate Biro-Art, we seached the interwebs for a biroday card to amuse him, but the best we could come up with was this, which we knew would make sense to Steve.
WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a longtime proponent of deregulation, acknowledged on Friday that failures in a voluntary supervision program for Wall Street’s largest investment banks had contributed to the global financial crisis, and he abruptly shut the program down…
…Christopher Cox, the commission chairman, said he agreed that the oversight program was “fundamentally flawed from the beginning.”
“The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work,” he said in a statement. The program “was fundamentally flawed from the beginning, because investment banks could opt in or out of supervision voluntarily. The fact that investment bank holding companies could withdraw from this voluntary supervision at their discretion diminished the perceived mandate” of the program, and “weakened its effectiveness,” he added.
What the hell, let’s give him the “Moronic Statement of the Decade” award while we are at it, for, one more time:
“The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work”.
The last six months??? How about the last fifty thousand years? Jackass.
Here’s an idea, you know that program whereby the I.R.S. may audit you? Let’s make that voluntary — you know, opt-in / opt-out, whatever works for you.
Or that annoying thingy where the cops pull you over for drunk driving? Same deal, you want out of that program? No sweat, we’ll give you a special decal for your windshield. You know, the “honor” system. It could work, who knows?
“Who are these guys?” (thanks Paul, for everything)
…you aren’t in either of these videos. Both of these jingles are brand buiding tools for the same product. Which is more effective?
Frankly, I don’t believe the first video is actually a period piece circa 1983. The song just has too many tongue-in-cheek lines. I think it is a parody, made this year.
