Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

So I'm getting threatened with yet another frivilous lawsuit (and once again, it really has nothing to do with me). Here's the start of a letter I (well, “Ms.” me anyway) got via courier:

Basically their complaint is that in some fantasy story on Eunuch.org someone talks about sticking a Bardex™ catheter up their ass, therby risking “misuse” and “potential injury” when other people try and stick catheters in their butt as well (so they say). Aparently their catheters are safe for urethras, but not for rectums. Or something like that… They asked me to “revise the story to refer to an enema nozzle or other non-infringing phrase”.

First, it's not my site and not my problem.

Second, if someone wants to shove a Bardex up their ass, it's cool by me. If Bardex wants to be sure everyone knows it's a registered trademark of C. R. Bard, Inc., I figure it's fair to let folks know, but I'm not in the business of censoring sites that I provide hosting for… Anyway, here was my response:

Subject: Bardex trademark use

I received a letter (FedEx) from you today regarding online use of the BARDEX trademark in erotic stories.

I should point out that you are writing to the wrong person. While I do provide hosting services for many sites, I am not the webmaster or owner of the site in question (eunuch.org) nor am I aware of the identity of the author of the story you're concerned about (other than the name and email that you've forwarded to me of course) that involves customers of your client's enjoying your client's products in a way perhaps more pleasurable than your client had intended.

My advice would be that when you want to get in touch with the owner of a website that you use the contact information on that website. Contacting registrants usually just puts you in touch with an ISP who has no control over matters such as this.

Other than that, if you'd like to send me a suitable press release on the erotic uses of your client's products I'd be happy to post it on my own web site.

Shannon

The letter was actually couried by UPS. I hope they pick up on that because I thought it was funny in terms of tradename usage. And yeah, I know… Baiting lawyers is a real bad idea, but it's oh so fun.

I don't know if anyone is under a clear sky or not, but if you are, check out the Northern Lights… They're pretty bright tonight. My camera isn't the greatest at night, but here's a photo. The triangular shape is the barn roof, to put it into context:

Mike pointed out this story about yet another schoolboard talking about a ban on body piercing. They don't seem to realize that the more they ban it the cooler it gets — want to stop kids from getting piercings? Don't tell them they're not allowed — encourage all your teachers to do it too. That'll make it so uncool it'll stop immediately, except on the kids that need piercings.

Board member Bob Markwell, who is also a physician, had two questions, “One, is it really creating health problems? Two, is it disruptive to the educational process? Or is it just a generational gap?”

And yes, I realize that might be seen as three questions, but at least it's a reasonable course of thinking for a change.

I wanted to mention an interesting QOD-type story that had been brought to my attention lately. I'll paraphase the question here:

Lately all of the latex at our studio has been breaking down — gloves tearing and crumbling when we put them on and stuff like that. The only different thing is that we've been running our de-ionizing air cleaner 24/7. Have you ever heard of anything like this?

I'd actually never heard of anything like this, so I did some asking around and Tom Brazda pointed out that one of the side-effects of these air cleaners is producing ozone. Ozone speeds up oxidation, which thereby breaks down the latex.

I'm headed off to Toronto shortly for Liam's CLASH show. The opening is tonight at the “a” gallery (or something like that)… It's located at 24 Spadina Road (the part of Spadina that's north of Bloor) at the opening is at 6 PM. The show continues until January 10th. Anyway, I'm quite looking forward to it and I've picked up a little low-tech tape recorder to use to interview with so if it turns out I'll BMEradio it, and if not, it'll be in my next column.

Consider stopping by if you're in the area… And I think you should probably dress nice, but I don't know. Not that I have any “nice” clothes. Maybe I can find something with buttons at least.

PS. Does it amuse anyone that the US is inspired by the Nazis?

Check out who's been outside chainsawing… (Not me; Rachel)

First, if you want to see something crazy, check out Orbax's page and look at the burn pictures, espcially the first ones… You may not have known this, but you can actually cut his arm off and after about two weeks, another one grows back. It's crazy, I've not seen any other real humans that can do that.

Anyway, I ran a poll a little while back asking, “is it acceptable to cut off a part of your child's genitals?” Not surprisingly, 73% of people said it was never acceptable. 21% would accept it given the right culture, and 6% had no problem with it whatsoever. I followed this up with “is it acceptable to circumcise your child?” Now, it's basically the same question, just asked using different words, but the results were dramatically different — only 47% objected to the idea, with fully 34% having no problem with it whatsoever (19% accepted it given the right culture).

I also ran a follow up poll and it turned out at 14% of people didn't know that circumcision involved the removal of genital tissue (how is that even possible?), and 4% of those refused to believe that it did! My personal take on it is that if someone gets or is given any modification, they should have to be old enough to consent and want it… and that includes circumcision except when medically needed (which is extremely rare of course).

Anyway, I might do a few more experiments in the future seeing how people answer the same question differently depending on how it's worded. For example, I'll bet that if you asked “is it acceptable to kill someone who has committed a very serious crime?” you'd get a different response from “is the death penalty acceptable in the case of very serious crimes?”… And those two are really closely worded.