When Paul told me the name of this ceremony, I was left with little choice but to offer him the highest of fives. If I were you, I’d look for this to be an annual thing.

Tarantino has a serious problem when it comes to dialogue; it almost sounds like a Tarantino-bot wrote it. The way he strings words together is his brand, and he’s had a very successful career doing it. But you can smell a Tarantino script 30 mother-fuckers away. I imagine this makes it very difficult for him to innovate in the mother-fucker area, where so many other talents have withered and died.

Thankfully, films are protected by copyrights and not patents, or else Tarantino would get a nickel anytime another filmmaker used “a system whereby two characters interact through the process of speech, and one is incredibly insulting to the other, and the act of sexual congress with the female parent is implicitly or explicitly suggested.”

I recently took my iPhone in to get replaced because the Home button (one of exactly three moving parts on the thing) started flaking out. While the Genius™ was activating my new phone, he asked why the previous one was replaced. I told him it broke when I dropped in on a very large rock, and asked whether AppleCare would have covered the cost. He said it depended on which Genius™ you spoke to on any given day.

I was very uncomfortable with that answer, and I told him so. I don’t like that degree of uncertainty when there’s that much money involved. The idea that the chi latte some guy in a knit Apple cap just drank might be disagreeing with his stomach could mean the difference between a free phone after this and paying $200 out of pocket just doesn’t sit well with me.

Intellectual property law has the same affect on me. The cold, hard fact is that no patent, no contract, no agreement, no piece of paper declaring ownership of anything matters until a judge makes a decision, at which point you can really get screwed with your pants on.

You don’t even have to actually sue somebody to extort them. You can just threaten them. Like the Mafia used to do. It doesn’t matter if you’re right and they’re wrong. If they’re willing to expend the time, energy and money our court system requires, then you’re in trouble.

Unless you pay the very reasonable price they’re asking. Then nothing has to happen to your beautiful delicatessen. So nice in here. Real shame if something broke or caught on fire.

I heard they sent Alex off to the Gulag.
Yeah. He was exhibiting anti-socialist behavior.