Month: December 2008

Monster Cable Products is a company which makes a brand of cables called Monster Cable. You’ve probably seen their products at big box retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City. Hell, you’ve probably gotten the hard-sell about them from a Best Buy salesman. And no wonder – the cables are a quality product, but are outrageously overpriced for what they are. The big box retailers make an obscene amount of profit from them, and thus will resort to scare tactics to sell them: “Oh yeah, those Sony HDTVs will explode on you if you don’t use a Monster brand cable!”

I personally hate Monster cables, and it’s not just because they have the nerve to sell a $2 cable for $150. No, I hate Monster because the company will seemingly sue anyone that uses the word “Monster” in their name. I could understand the legal action if a company was in the cable or electronics accessory business, but Monster Cable has threatened legal action against anyone with Monster in their name, such as:

Monster Garage (a car show on the Discovery Channel)
Monster Energy Drink
Snow Monsters (a children’s skiing group)
MonsterVintage (a small used clothing store)
Monsters, Inc., a Disney animated film
“Monsters of the Midway”, a nickname of the Chicago Bears that dates to the 1940s.
The “Monster seats” at Boston’s Fenway Park
Monster.com, an employment website
Monster Mini Golf

Look, I understand how trademarks work. You have to defend their use, or else you’d lose the rights to that trademark. That’s why the legal departments at Xerox and Kimberley-Clark send letters to DJs and TV reporters reminding them to use the terms “photocopy” and “tissue” instead of “Xerox” or “Kleenex”. But Monster is a company gone mad. And now you can do something about it! This post at Consumerist.com has contact links for Monster’s CEO where you can tell him to stop wasting his time (and taxpayer money in the court system) by ending Monster’s ridiculous trademark campaign!

From the L.A. Times:

Bettie Page, the brunet pinup queen with a shoulder-length pageboy hairdo and kitschy bangs whose saucy photos helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, has died. She was 85.

Page, whose later life was marked by depression, violent mood swings and several years in a state mental institution, died Thursday night at Kindred Hospital in Los Angeles, where she had been on life support since suffering a heart attack Dec. 2, according to her agent, Mark Roesler.

It’s a sad day. 🙁

99.99% of the human population is deeply offended by child pornography. But, as the United States Supreme Court ruled in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, child pornography is bad because it exploits children, not because there’s something inherently illegal about being a pedophile. In its judgment, the Court ruled that Congress’ only mandate was to prevent the exploitation of children, and that it could not ban “virtual” kiddie porn, like cartoons, computer-generated pornography, or images where children’s faces have been photoshopped onto otherwise legal adult pornography. In other words, if children aren’t involved, then it’s not child pornography, and therefore it’s not illegal.

Things are quite different in Australia, however… as New South Wales resident Alan John McEwan found out. McEwan was somehow busted for having a collection of images which featured characters from The Simpsons – especially kids Bart and Lisa – engaging in sexual acts. He was taken to Parramatta Local Court and found guilty of possession of child pornography in February of this year. And, this morning, the New South Wales Supreme Court upheld McEwan’s conviction… for child pornography… for having cartoons of Simpsons characters having sex.

Look, I’m not going to defend pedophiles here. I’m as kinky as the next guy, but you’ve gotta draw the line somewhere, and sex with children is absolutely out of bounds. However, simply being a pedophile is not a crime, nor should it be until a pedophile actually acts on it. So this ruling simply baffles me. McEwan had drawings of fictional cartoon characters on his computer.

While I appreciate that the justices were probably trying to “do the right thing”, you should really read their ruling for the tortured logic it contains.

Martha “Sunny” von Bulow, the wealthy American heiress who was the subject of the 1990 film Reversal of Fortune, has died after spending 28 years in a coma. She was 76.

The only daughter of utilities magnate George Crawford, Martha Crawford inherited millions of dollars after her father’s untimely death when she was four. She married His Serene Highness Prince Alfred of Auersperg in 1957. They had two children before divorcing in 1965. A year later, Sunny married Claus von Bulow, then an aide to billionaire oil man J. Paul Getty. The two had a daughter, Cosima Iona von Bülow, who was born in 1967.

By 1980, tensions had begun to mount in Sunny and Claus’ marriage. In April of that year, Sunny slipped into a coma, which was attributed to reactive hypoglycemia. At a Christmas celebration with her family on December 21, 1980, Sunny appeared disoriented and confused. Given her reputation as a heavy drinker and pill popper, her family put her to bed. The next morning, however, it was apparent that she had something far more serious than a hangover. She was rushed to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with brain damage severe enough to leave her in a coma.

Continue reading “R.I.P. Sunny von Bulow”