"Drove my Chevy to the levee..."? That's a lawsuit. "Pass the Courvoisier"? Yup. Lawsuit too. Artwork using Barbie Dolls? Lawsuit again... It's all part of the
Trademark Dilution Revision Act, which would eliminate the non-commercial "fair use" protections of trademarks in art, literature, and speech--
To amend the Trademark Act of 1946 with respect to dilution by blurring or tarnishment. It goes to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the 16th, and there's a large roster of groups fighting it, including the American Library Association, EFF, and more, saying that consumers as well as artists would be preventing from exercising their free speech rights unless it's amended.
posted by amberglow
on Feb 3, 2006 -
35 comments
Last week, a woman was forced off a Southwest Airlines flight for wearing a t-shirt. The shirt in question bore the phrase "Meet the F*ckers" and an image of US President Bush, VP Cheney and Condoleezza Rice. The passenger, Lorrie Heasley, refused to remove it after other passengers complained. Apparently "Southwest rules filed with the FAA say they can remove a passenger that is offensive, abusive, disorderly or violent or for clothing that is "lewd, obscene, or patently offensive," but the airline says the curse (not the political message) led to her being asked to leave. Ms. Heasley is now speaking with the ACLU to see if she can initiate a lawsuit, but the NYTimes checked with experts in constitutional law and they
don't think she has a case.
Well, the makers of the t-shirt have responded:
"If any T-Shirt Hell customer is kicked off of any commercial airline flight simply for wearing one of our shirts, we will provide you with alternate transportation to get you to your original destination. This transportation includes, but is not limited to, the T-Shirt Hell corporate jet."
posted by zarq
on Oct 11, 2005 -
221 comments
I just finished up reading
The Turk by Tom Standage (briefly mentioned in passing
here) a biography of the chess-playing automaton that toured Europe and later the Americas during the pivotal transition from the 18th to the 19th century. The Automaton was invented as an exercise in national pride by
Wolfgang von Kempelen, who considered it a trifle compared to his experiments with
mechanical speech synthesis. As a celebrity, the automaton had historic encounters with Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon, Beethoven,
Philidor and Charles Babbage, and fictional encounters with the monarchs Catherine the Great, George III and Frederick II. Standage credits it with influencing the development of the
Difference Engine, the power loom, Poe's
mystery stories, and Barnum's
manipulation of the press. The myths surrounding have even caught
James Randi, who seems to have been unaware of a colleague's
reconstruction based on notes from the last owner.
posted by KirkJobSluder
on Sep 21, 2005 -
7 comments
Internets: Serious Business! These last few months have seen an increase in the attacks on the participatory culture of the web. The mainstream establishments, both political and corporate, have been looking with a cautious eye towards this new developing place.
So far we've established that
blogs can get you fired,
keep you from getting a job, give
pedophiles a place to ruminate on snatching your children, threaten journalistic integrity *snicker*,
endanger the marketing ,
product planning, and
product life cycles for automobile manufacturers, can
infect your computer with virii, and have
all sorts of negative consequences. The internets (both of them) can cause
your children to be charmed, seduced, and addicted by readily available porn, and can also provide access to extremist radical and fundamentalist groups, prompting
Congress to discuss more restrictive legislation (
NSFW), but only for the porn. It has even been claimed that the web has given
"Al Qaeda wings". P2P is blamed as causing record loses by the music industry, despite their investments in
local station marketing payola. The FEC has held
public hearings attended by both hemispheres of the blogosphere (amazingly in near-agreement)
discussing the regulation of political speech online. The figureheads of
a certain political party fear that their affiliated slice of the blogosphere may be too far-left. Newspapers and TV are leading the charge, with the internet standing in for pharmaceutical scares, yo-yo diets, and missing white women.
The question is, how will the libertarian-minded digerati respond to this very real attack on the essence of web culture?
posted by rzklkng
on Jul 29, 2005 -
34 comments
David Foster Wallace's commencement speech at Kenyon University
Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
The
author of
Infinite Jest attempts to explain what is wrong with your brain's default settings.
posted by Edible Energy
on Jun 29, 2005 -
26 comments
AT&T Text to Spech put out by AT&T labs is interesting to play around with. Select your language and accent and then go wild. You can even translate if you select the right accent.
posted by tozturk
on May 7, 2005 -
34 comments
Guggenheim lecture on
John Baldessari in his own words:
"People shaking hands, you know: congratulating each other, what have you in a standard shot. I really always found them objectionable and then I realized that these were people making decisions about my life while I was in my studio so there was a kind of uneasiness on my part and one day after carrying these photographs around I had some circular price stickers and I put them on their faces. And I really felt that leveled the playing field somehow."
posted by Mme. Robot
on May 5, 2005 -
9 comments
Address by Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin on Gay Marriage. Taking the bull by the horns, Mr. Martin speaks to the House of Commons regarding
Bill C-38, The Civil Marriage Act:
"This question does not demand rhetoric. It demands clarity. There are only two legitimate answers – yes or no. Not the demagoguery we have heard, not the dodging, the flawed reasoning, the false options. Just yes or no."
One of the finest speeches from a Canadian politician in memory, and an important read for Canadians and Americans alike.
posted by Jairus
on Feb 17, 2005 -
168 comments
George W Bush certainly makes more sense when you can write his speeches for him. Now only if we could make all of his other decisions...
posted by mule
on Feb 3, 2005 -
13 comments
English Accents and Dialects. The British Library has compiled an online archive of northern speech dating back to the 19th century. The recordings range from from audio from Victorian cylinder dictaphones to 1950s football fans chanting.
posted by Masi
on Aug 1, 2004 -
10 comments
The G.W. Talking Sockpuppet The Idiot's Guide to Presidentiable Speechwriting For Dummy
::blink :: ::blink :: ::blink :: ::blink :: ::blink :: ::blink :: ::blink :: ::blink :: ::blink :: ::blink ::
posted by y2karl
on Jul 11, 2004 -
9 comments
Dean is out of cash. Somehow he blew through $40 million and still managed to leave the first Super Tuesday without a first or second place finish,
anywhere. No mistake about his
Meet the Press interview, though, which was felt as an incredibly strong and persuasive performance. It's obvious that Dean overestimated his grass-roots support, which has currently dried up, but the amount of publicity he has generated is surely a huge advantage. Two options come to mind: blow out the Washington Insiders (as he alluded to in his latest interview), or become more of a traditional candidate.
posted by BlueTrain
on Feb 4, 2004 -
72 comments
"A lot of you were jerks." It's one of those scenes that could've been lifted from a John Hughes teen coming-of-age movie. An unpopular kid gets the joke vote for class valedictorian, and he uses the opportunity provided by the valedictory speech to chastise them. Has this ever happened at your high school? If you had a chance to go back (or perhaps forward) in time and address your high school graduating class, what would you say?
posted by AccordionGuy
on Dec 27, 2003 -
36 comments
Bush's Speech on the Spreading of Democracy This is a massive and difficult undertaking -- it is worth our effort, it is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes. The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region. Iraqi democracy will succeed -- and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran -- that freedom can be the future of every nation. (Applause.) The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.
Since
this speech was posted earlier, I just thought it would be good if we are exposed to ideas from both sides.
posted by VeGiTo
on Nov 10, 2003 -
88 comments
The Subpoenas are Coming! The FBI, in an attempt to prosecute Adrian Lamo (discussed
here) is sending letters to journalists telling them to secretly prepare to turn over their notes, e-mails and sources to the bureau. And by secretly, they mean don't tell your colleagues, editors or lawyers, or risk facing obstruction of justice charges. (Via
dailyrotten)
posted by Officeslacker
on Sep 30, 2003 -
11 comments
It's Not What You Say, It's The Way That You Say It: George Bernard Shaw famously remarked that every time an Englishman opens his mouth it's guaranteed that another Englishman will despise him. This website offers a motley and unintentionally hilarious collection of the many, ever-growing pronunciations of the English language. The variety is so wide you could almost be listening to different languages. But is a particular accent still an anti-democratic barrier, strictly revealing your position on the socio-geographic ladder, as it was in the days Nancy Mitford discussed
U and non-U vocabulary? Or have
upper-class accents in the U.K. and U.S. (note the
Boston Brahmin samples), once coveted and preferred, now become the opposite: unforgivable impediments? Does posh speech exist in Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand as it does in the U.K. and U.S.? In other words:
Does it still matter? (
Quicktime Audio for main and fourth link; Real Audio for third.)
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Sep 20, 2003 -
50 comments
Robert Byrd speaks to the Senate, May 21, 2003 Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this Senator that the American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing International law, under false premises. There is ample evidence that the horrific events of September 11 have been carefully manipulated to switch public focus from Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda who masterminded the September 11th attacks, to Saddam Hussein who did not...
...We cower in the shadows while false statements proliferate. We accept soft answers and shaky explanations because to demand the truth is hard, or unpopular, or may be politically costly.
Words of wisdom from a senior US Senator.
posted by jasper411
on May 22, 2003 -
45 comments
"At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: 'Why are you
speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the
voices of dissent?' '
Peace and civil rights don’t mix', they say. 'Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people', they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known
me, my commitment or my calling."
posted by riviera
on Apr 4, 2003 -
9 comments
"My country, right or wrong. If right, to be kept right, if wrong,
to be put right."
--
Carl Schurz
Those of us opposed to this war have made our positions known, and when the dust of bombs and combat has settled, we can be mildly cheered in knowing that although we could not stop the march to war, our vigilance has not gone entirely unheeded and has perhaps averted more harm than would otherwise have come. Now that the war is upon us, all of us, especially we who have identified ourselves as anti-war, run the risk of
truly failing in our efforts if we cannot harness our energies to make certain that those embroiled in this conflict do not suffer in vain. However unjust the means of this invasion have been, it is now our responsibility to attempt to ensure that the ends uphold the ideals we have been trying to safeguard.
It's time to check our fears about what has been done and look ahead to
what must be done.
posted by grrarrgh00
on Mar 23, 2003 -
15 comments
"But if the threat cannot be removed peacefully, please let us not fall for the delusion that it can be safely ignored."
Speech by Prime Minister Tony Blair at Labour's local government, women's and youth conferences, SECC, Glasgow.
posted by hama7
on Feb 17, 2003 -
69 comments
Confronting Empire
"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
Arundhati Roy in her inimitable style speaking at Life After Capitalism at the World Social Forum, 2003, Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 27, 2003, organised by Znet.
posted by nofundy
on Feb 3, 2003 -
53 comments
Self-fulfilling Prophecy? Enron video says maybe... A video from an Enron company party from 1997 shows executives or other employees playing execs making jokes during skits about how to make "a kazillion dollars" et al. Some of the "methods" they speak of apparently are exactly the things that brought the company down. Looks like the cat was let out of the bag in front of a lot of unsuspecting individuals..
posted by djspicerack
on Dec 16, 2002 -
4 comments
Steve Jobs Begins Macworld Keynote. Macworld keynotes often bring with them innovative products that mac fans generally go crazy for. Today's keynote is rumored to bring with it 17" iMacs. On the other hand, it is also
rumored that Apple will discontinue it's free and widely used iTools service in favor of a paid service. Is this right for a company that only has 5% of the market?
posted by devo
on Jul 17, 2002 -
88 comments
