A Solitary Mind

Zen Habits has been threatened with a lawsuit because of the use of the phrase “feel the fear and do it anyway” in his blog.

Leo Babauta from his blog post “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (or, the Privatization of the English Language)” – Today I received an email from the lawyers of author Susan Jeffers, PhD., notifying me that I’d infringed on her trademark by inadvertently using the phrase “feel the fear and do it anyway” in my post last week, A Guide to Beating the Fears That Hold You Back.

The phrase, apparently, is the title of one of her books … a book I’d never heard of. I wasn’t referring to her book. I’m not using the phrase as a title of a book or product or to sell anything. I was just referring to something a friend said on Twitter.

Her lawyers asked me to insert the (R) symbol after the phrase, in my post, and add this sentence: “This is the registered trademark of Susan Jeffers, Ph.D. and is used with her permission.”

Yeah. I’m not gonna do that.

It’s one thing to trademark a product name or logo. It’s quite another to claim you own a phrase that has been in use for many years.

I found this on Dr Jeffer’s contact and permissions page:
The phrase, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway®, is Susan’s registered trademark. If you wish to use this phrase for any purpose whatsoever, you are legally required to seek permission from Susan. You can do so by contacting admin@susanjeffers.com.

For my part I’ve decided to follow her example and I have applied for both copyright and trademark protection for the word “the” and when I get it I’m going to charge everyone a penny every time it’s used.

Have you ever wondered what happened to the child stars that were famous and then seemed to vanish into thin air.

Jon Provost, who played Timmy for 7 years in Lassie, for instance is alive and well, now in his late fifties with two kids, aged 25 and 23.

At age 14 he declined to renew his contract with Campbell Soup for another 3 years so the show was revamped to go on without him but it never regained it’s popularity.

He did have a recurring role as a real estate salesman – a job he had in real life – in The New Lassie but beyond that has done very little in the industry.

Probably the only thing he will be remembered for is Lassie. Which is still so popular that it’s playing in 50 countries. In fact the check shirt and jeans he wore for the entire series hang in the Smithsonian right next to Archie Bunker’s chair.

His bio, released in time for the show’s 50th anniversary, is titled Timmy’s in the Well and is in it’s second printing and he’s working on a cookbook called Timmy’s in the Kitchen due out this summer.

Known as a humanitarian and expert on dogs, Jon writes regularly for the dog-lovers magazine Fido Friendly. But the project that is closest to his heart is Canine Companions for Independence, an organization that provides extraordinary service dogs to the handicapped. He has served on its NW Board of Directors for more than 20 years.

He was also a judge in this year’s ugliest dog contest.

The British government has told teachers not to teach the “i before e, except after c” rule because of the huge number of exceptions.
For a government agency to say something that makes sense and may well be against the law.

Of course there are people who oppose this change. They say that this rule is one of the few language rules anyone can remember.
???Tell me again how a language rule that’s wrong more often than it’s right serves any purpose?
–And they say the dinosaurs are extinct.

For a list of the exceptions click here.

Tehran Times:

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan (Los Angeles Times) — The accusation was damning: U.S. soldiers were said to have tossed a grenade into a crowd of Afghans in the eastern province of Kunar on Tuesday, killing two civilians and wounding five to 50 others.

American public affairs officers previously have been slow in responding. U.S. military officials here complain that Taliban leaders are often better and faster at spreading their versions of deadly events.

This time, however, public affairs officers mounted a swift and detailed information operation. Within 24 hours, a public affairs team at Bagram air base released a video showing an explosion as U.S. soldiers worked to free an American military vehicle stuck on a median in the town of Asadabad. It also provided technical details it said proved the grenade was a Russian-made version commonly used by insurgents.

It is not clear from the murky video, taken at a distance, who threw the grenade. But no American soldier is seen throwing anything.

It’s interesting that the Tehran Times and Al Jazeera have mentioned the fact that no American soldier was seen throwing anything. —They seem to be mellowing since we got rid of President Cheney… I mean Bush.

Now if we could get the idiots on the long ridge to take a break we could all catch our breath. Unfortunately it appears that our President Obama, is going to have little choice but to continue the Bush policies along the Afghan Pakistani border.

One of my email accounts is with Yahoo and on the whole I’m fairly happy with their filtering. But today I got 4 pieces of spam that were so obvious that they should have come in a tapered can.

These were not the usual couple of lines of text that sneaks through now and again. These are big, color, professional ads.

They were from:
GovernmentAuctions
KillyourBills
Best Rated Cleanse of 2009
Business Cards

The last one I can understand. It sounds innocuous enough, but “best rated cleanse”??

In the last few moths Yahoo’s spam filters have erroneously stopped Dell, Hp, Sun and one or two individuals. This is to be expected and is the reason I look in my spam folder every day.

But these ads were fancy-shmancy so you know they had to send them to lots of people, which means they probably should have shown up on the radar. –From this it would appear that the bad guys have found a hole in Yahoo’s filters, or Yahoo somehow profits from them.

As a side note: When I send them from my inbox to my spam folder Yahoo blocks remote images for my protection, but as long as I leave them in my inbox the images come up nicely. –I found the problem. The default setting under mail options-spam-block images is “Always show images, except in Spam folder,” so I changed it to “Initially block all images.”

It’s probably the use of remote images that allows them to slip through.

The image part doesn’t bother me so much as the “remotely served” part. It makes me wonder what else is Yahoo allowing people to remotely serve us via their email system.