Well fine. After I made the Valentine's Day "Heartbroken Bear" stuff, I figured I should add more items for sale. I revisited the "Caution: Gravity" shirt and changed it to "Beware of Gravity" as shown to the right. What an unnecessary pain in the ass.

Worst of all, though, is that the name of the company utilizes their trademark so I can't tell you what it is without getting permission from them which I don't want to bother to do.

On a related note, some friends [of friends, etc.] of mine had one of their essays published on a website they never permitted. The discussion of what to do began with the American-standard rant of "let's get this guy," but I suggested that they just insist that the website owner simply cite the article properly — as it was, a citation for the correct authors was present, it just wasn't complete.

I mean, what's the deal with ownership of ideas anyway? Wasn't it the point of copyright law in the first place to give the original author a temporary monopoly over their work so they could profit from its novelty? It wasn't to permit ownership of ideas for all of perpetuity to assure the profitability of a corporation (I'm looking at you, Disney). Unfortunately, this isn't the case any more and it seems that the benefits of these laws aren't going to the most creative, only the most litigious.

Think about it this way: everything you've ever know has been told to you. Thus, one way or another, every idea you will ever have is derivative, not novel. By locking up all the source ideas in corporate vaults ... er ... [let me do a little bias correction] ... by making every idea that anyone has thought before you off-limits, all we're doing is choking off the world of progress.

I'm intentionally blurring several thoughts here. To me, the sharing of ideas is what is at issue. Sometimes it is mired in copyrights, but more often than not, patents and trademarks are nothing but landmines on the march of progress.

I mean, consider the "caution" issue I described above. I stepped down because I didn't care all that much to fight, and I couldn't afford to do so even if I wanted to. The thing that burns me up, though is twofold.

First, this kind of thing only fucks the little guy. I can't fight back, so a trademark holder can put the smack-down on my works even if it has nothing to do with them. However, I could go out and start a "Jeb Bush" line of clothing, but do you think I'd have any capacity to sue the Republican party for printing it on a T-shirt?

Second, there's a difference between a signature logo and a novelty T-shirt. Do the makers of Ralph Lauren Polo clothing run around all the time preventing every time someone uses Polo in the name of one of their designs? My point is that the novelty T-shirt has become a tool of free-expression much like the website or the picket sign. While there will be some gray areas — wherein the courts would need to make a call — the use of common language words (English or otherwise) on a T-shirt should not constitute trademark infringement just as they don't in other communication.

Now you'll also see that my "Beware of Gravity" shirt is copyrighted. If someone created a shirt with exactly the same design, I'd tell them to cut it out, but if they thought up the same thing — maybe with a different icon — then I don't really care. And after 10 years or so, they can use the exact same design because its well will have run dry (as if it already hasn't.)

So now let me jump to litigation and responsibility. It seems to be all the rage, what with our beloved president announcing an end to "frivolous asbestos lawsuits." I guess my definition of "frivolous" is different from his, though — rather than being about whether deep-pocketed asbestos corporations might be hurt, my definition has more to do with whether a danger is obvious or knowable.

By that I mean there are some dangers that are obvious. A sharp knife, designed to cut things, can cut fingers just as well — duh. My recurring example is stairs. Stairs are about as least-obvious as you can get as far as danger, but they are really quite dangerous if you think about it. So far (thankfully) I haven't seen a push to put warnings on every staircase enumerating the potential dangers of using one. I guess obvious things are those things that most people will identify if prompted — "did you know you could cut yourself with a knife?" versus "did you know that a live electrical wire on the ground can hurt you just by going near it?"

The other side is "knowable." I put it that way because either it's known, or it can be known. For instance, mesothelioma, the cancer caused by asbestos, has been known since the 1940's, yet asbestos was still used in all varieties of materials — most of the time without any warnings. On the other hand, prior to the 1940's, no such disease had ever been discovered, so as far as a company that did reasonable safety research, it wasn't knowable at the time.

So for the rest of us, this puts worrisome things into two categories.

On the one hand, we take risks on things that aren't known yet. There used to be mercury in shampoo before people realized it makes you go batty — nobody had any idea there'd be a problem and that's just the kind of unknowable risk we all take.

On the other, there's responsibility for our own stupidity. If we cut off our hand with a chainsaw, we can't really blame the manufacturer for making a saw that didn't know the difference between wood and arm — of course, the circumstances may be peculiar, like if the handle was too weak and when it broke, it stuck the throttle open and then wasn't controllable, but that's the reason we have these kinds of laws and courts in the first place.

So beware of those mercury-powered asbestos-lined chainsaw-staircases.

• Because of Winn-Dixie - It's entirely the dog's fault.
• Constantine - Hell wants Keanu Reeves and heaven doesn't want him? Well, Earth doesn't need him.
• Son of the Mask - It's entirely the dog's fault.