- Verrrrry respectful, Disney, very respectful. While the rest of America and other parts of the world were celebrating the long-overdue demise of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden on May 2 at the hands of an elite Navy SEAL team, the Walt Disney Co. was rushing to put the finishing touches on its application for a trademark on the name "Seal Team 6," the name of the unit of specially trained Navy SEALs bin Laden in a raid in Pakistan. Disney actually filed three patents applications on May 3 — the day after the raid — with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office. The applications by Disney Enterprises Inc. state an intention to use the mark for a range of products, including entertainment and education services, clothing, toys, games and Christmas stockings. Not to say that Americans won't buy these products and that the hottest Halloween costume this fall won’t be either an Osama bin Laden mask with a bullet hole above the eye or a SEAL uniform, but couldn’t we have held off at least 48 hours before bum rushing the patent office to cash in. After all, we are still talking about the death of a human being, a human being who was behind the deaths of tens of thousands of other human beings during his life. Sadly, this is far from the first time a company has rushed to trademark a phrase, image or likeness tied to a major combat operation. Just one day after U.S. allied forces entered Iraq in 2003, Sony Corp. applied to trademark the war's catchphrase, "shock and awe," for use as the title of a video game. Sony eventually withdrew its application, but Disney has given no indication that it would consider doing so and actually seems hell bent on cashing in as early and often as possible on the likeness and image of those anonymous SEAL team members whose names we’ll never know and who will never receive any tangible reward for their efforts other than their normal paycheck and the anonymous gratitude of a nation. Well done, Disney…………
- One simple question: How was there not an all-out riot at a Vallero gas station in Wilmington, Calif. Sunday between 8:30 and 11:30 a.m.? With gas prices at or near $4 (or $5 in some places around the country), any time the numbers on those giant digital boards outside the local BP, Speedway or Chevron station begin with a 3 is cause for an absolute fistfight for a spot at the pump. As such, how was no one shot, stabbed or beaten when a temporary computer glitch at the Vallero station allowed drivers to fill up for $1.10 a gallon? No one under the age of 50 remembers paying that little for gas on a regular basis, so gas that cheap was bound to cause a melee. Sure enough, customers rushed to take advantage of the discounted fuel for four hours as word quickly spread around the area. “I was shocked that it even happened,” said Aureliano Galvez, who took advantage of the slashed prices to fill up his tank. Station owner Kenny Nguyen said that 8,000 gallons of gas were sold during glitch resulting in a loss of $21,000. To many, that sort of loss might be just desserts for anyone associated with a gas station, even if the owner of one local station losing $21,000 has no effect whatsoever on oil companies and the price they’re charging those station owners for their product. Ultimately, the true miracle of the day (other than dirt cheap gas) was that no one pulled out their 9mm or Bowie knife when someone tried to crowd in front of them for a shot at the cheapest gas anyone alive will probably see during their lifetime. Big ups to the people of Wilmington for conducting themselves with a reasonable amount of restraint during this golden opportunity and not sending anyone to the emergency room with a gunshot or stab wound just because they tried to edge in front of someone else to fill the tank of their Chevy Cobalt…………
- Nice try, Burmese officials, nice try. The country more commonly known as Myanmar may think it’s doing something positive by releasing more than 14,600 prisoners under a clemency program, but in reality the prisoners are no one of consequence and their number includes very few political prisoners. Prison Department Director General Zaw Win announced the release of the convicts, including 2,166 women, to take place by the end of the day Tuesday. The convicts were to be freed Tuesday from jails around the country under the new program, which commutes death sentences to life imprisonment and cuts one year from other convicts' prison terms. It has drawn intense criticism from many who expected the sentencing cuts to be more severe. Human rights groups have unanimously ripped the program as too weak and not addressing the issues involved. Those groups could have a point, as cutting one year from the sentence of prisoners serving sentences of up to 65 years isn't going to make much of an impact. But hey, it’s an improvement over the usual practice of granting token amnesties to mark important national days. There hasn’t been one of those since 2009, when 7,114 prisoners were freed. Typically, only petty criminals are released but a handful of lesser political detainees occasionally find their way into the mix. With thousands of wrongly detained political prisoners, both from the pro-democracy movement and from out-of-favor factions in the government, rotting away under life sentences, the government doesn’t seem all that eager to address cases of a true significance. The government did have a humorous response on the issue of political prisoners. When asked how many political prisoners were among those to be released, Zaw Win reiterated the government's position that it has no political detainees. He did allow that "some prisoners who are charged under emergency laws and for links with illegal organizations will be among those freed." Those so-called emergency laws are vague, general security statutes usually used to prosecute political activists accused of having ties to banned political groups. Among the prominent detainees with no hope of being released any time soon or probably ever are activist Min Ko Naing (serving a 65-year prison sentence) and ethnic minority leader Hkun Htun Oo (serving a sentence of 80 years). They have company in the form of scores of former intelligence officers who were on the losing side of a power struggle and are now living life behind bars. None of these individuals is going to sniff an amnesty program this century. The U.S. State Department responded to Monday’s announcement by reiterating its call that all political prisoners be released immediately. In total, Myanmar has more than 60,000 prisoners in 42 prisons and 109 labor camps. Given the level of government oppression and intolerance, those numbers are shockingly…….low……….
- New Yorkers inevitably esteem themselves as better than just about everyone else. Their city is the best and the most interesting and if you don’t believe that, just ask any Manhattan resident. Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to further that superiority complex with his new plan to make New York “the premier digital city.” Bloomberg’s plan includes a redesign of the city’s website with the ultimate goal of enhancing social media as a means of allowing citizens to more easily engage with the city government. “Digital media has an enormous potential to enrich our economy and strengthen our civil life and this road map will show us the way,” Bloomberg said. To launch the initiative, the city will hold a weekend-long “hackathon” in which
developers and designers will be invited to create prototypes for the nyc.gov web site. City officials are also building digital partnerships with social media companies including Facebook, Tumblr and Foursquare in an effort to update New York City’s social-media presence. Foursquare, known as the app losers who are too attached to their smartphones use to check in everywhere they go before they actually do what they went to that place to do in the first place, will team with NYC to allow visitors and residents to digitally check in when they arrive at public spaces and people will be rewarded with a virtual badge when they check in at enough parks and cultural centers. “Foursquare grew out of the New York tech scene, and we are super excited to continue to contribute to the growth of that community and to New York’s emergence as the nation’s leading digital city,” said Foursquare CEO and Co-Founder Dennis Crowley. The city will also update and streamline its Facebook page with resident polls and a direct link to 311. Lastly, a Twitter account under the name @nycgov will also provide residents with real-time updates on city news and services. In other words, everything iPhone, Android and BlackBerry users already do on their phones and have no need for government assistance with will now get some good old-fashioned government assistance……….
- Thanks for stating the blatantly obvious, Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers. River said Monday that the biggest fallout from the much-maligned mid-February trade that sent Kendrick Perkins to the Oklahoma City Thunder was the resulting lack of continuity between the new players and the rupture the trade caused in locker room chemistry. Rivers said that if given the chance to make the decision over again, he would have waited until the end of the season to make the trade. "I would wait until after the year was over. I'll put it that way," Rivers said in an interview with a Boston radio station. "I do think Jeff Green has a chance to be a starter for us in the future and a hell of a basketball player, and [Nenad] Krstic can help, but making that trade at the time we made that trade, that made it very tough for us. And not only that, we added other pieces as well that we tried to fit in, so it was just a lot of moving parts to a team that the advantage that we had was that we had continuity, everybody else was new. Chicago was new and the Heat were new. They couldn't
fall back on what we could fall back on with our starting five, and once we made that trade, we took
that advantage away." The deal sent Perkins and guard Nate Robinson to Oklahoma City in exchange for Green, Krstic, and a future first-round pick. The Celtics made another trade that sent reserve big men Luke Harangody and Semih Erden to Cleveland, further turning over the roster. At the time, the team’s veterans were noticeably upset about having Perkins, a trusted and beloved teammate, shipped out. They went just 15-12 down the stretch and seemed to have lost their edge. After sweeping the New York Knicks in the first round of the playoffs, the Celtics were pummeled in the second round by the Miami Heat and looked old, slow and disjointed. "Well, it was more not that the trust went away, the know-how went away, the continuity went away," Rivers said of the Perkins trade. "That's what the trade affected more than anything. Obviously [Perkins] was great to our team and all of that, but it was more that you had new guys playing different positions and you had a floor guy who could literally reach back into a playbook and throw out something that was three or four years old and they all knew it, when Perk was there. When you lose Perk, you take that one guy out of that starting lineup. Now there's the fifth guy who doesn't know your offense three years ago. He only knows what he knows since he's been there, and that limited our group.” So why make the trade and lean so heavily on 39-year-old center Shaquille O’Neal, who was injured at the time of the trade and never recovered enough to help the team at all? Perkins intimated that an instant chemistry developed between O'Neal and the Celtics' other four usual starters, giving the team the confidence it needed to move Perkins. Needless to say, trading away a key piece from a championship contender didn’t work out well and now the Celtics are in need of a drastic offseason overhaul…………
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