It's true:

Trump said he intended to emblazon "You're Fired" on games and casino services, and "You're Fired! Donald J. Trump" on clothing.



Other tyrannical bosses won't have to alter their vocabulary if the application wins approval, a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office official said, as it will only protect those specific uses.

The article goes on to say that "three other applications for "You're fired" have been filed." I must admit I am a HUGE fan of the show (Go Amy! And if not Amy, then Troy!), but there's no way I'd wear a t-shirt with "You're Fired!" on it.

Feministe and Trish Wilson are commenting on the Melissa Rowland case; long story short, she's being prosecuted for the death of one of her twin infants, which is ostensibly a result of her refusing to have a C-section. They link to this article and this sublime one from FindLaw.

Needless to say, I am outraged about this.

In other news...The First Woman President Symposium is actually on September 10 and 11, not September 24 and 25 as I had read before. I'm there; we need that woman president now more than ever, it seems.

• I need to pre-order the new book by Siva Vaidhyanathan. Also, now might be the time to buy an iPod.
• Another article on gender in the blogosphere. Consider this thought:
  

  If you accept the premise of the blogosphere as a true meritocracy, a place where our intellectual (and emotional) impulses can flourish unchecked, then you're buying into the concept of the blog world as a window into human nature. If that's the case, the blogosphere -- with perhaps just four percent female participation in poliblogs -- shows us that while women are just as interested as men in spouting off, they're fundamentally less interested than men in spouting off about politics.

  Or perhaps people don't recognize what women spout off about as politics proper.

•   Irish Sushi, via Rebecca Blood. Yum.
• Ann Wizer, an American artist in Indonesia, is making tote bags out of ephemeral plastic bags (grocery bags, etc.). She did this in an attempt to clean up the environment and create jobs. So guess what happened...
  

  Not all manufacturing companies appreciate Wizer's efforts. Last year, the German soft drink company Capri-Sonne threatened to sue for trademark infringement. They settled out of court when Wizer agreed to distribute her Capri-Sonne bags -- her most popular design -- through schools only.
  
  
  
  "For the big companies, this is the real issue. When does trademark die? When it's thrown away or when it goes up in toxic flames?" she says. "Frankly, they should be paying me for cleaning up their trash."

  Aaaargh!

• A friend of mine whom I haven't talked to in years just emailed me. I can't wait to catch up with her. One night she and I attended a Gloria Steinem talk at the University of Tennessee, which a bunch of horrid archconservatives had also attended. She and I hung around and met Steinem afterward and then were so wired that we picked up burgers at Wendy's, went back to her apartment, and talked about feminism until about 1:00 a.m. Good times.
  :-)

A summary of an informal discussion in which I participated.

People seemed to like it on her blog, so I thought I'd show off the pic here too. Enjoy.

Charlie Lowe has published an excellent article in Across the Disciplines on open content and the state of our current intellectual property model. It's well worth the read, especially for those who are not all that knowledgeable on IP matters and how they are relevant to composition. Charlie has also posted a comprehensive bibliography of sources on intellectual property in rhetoric and composition.

You might have noticed that I added a culturecat.net email address to my sidebar. After much frustration with the University of Minnesota's email client, I have decided to make my hosting company's email program, SquirrelMail, my primary email interface, meaning I arranged for my UMN email to forward there. I was absolutely fed up with the fact that, first off, the UMN Webmail interface has no BCC field, even though if you want to email all your students and they have arranged for total suppression of all their information, FERPA says that you must put the students' email addresses in your BCC field. Well, in order to do that, I have to have a BCC field to put them in, don't I?! Also, it's very annoying that if you put an apostrophe in the subject line of the email, UMN Webmail (don't know about Pine) drops it. Can't becomes cant, don't becomes dont, Clancy's becomes Clancys, etc.

Now I'm overjoyed that I can actually put apostrophes in the subject line and I can BCC people! Woo-hoo! Plus, SquirrelMail allows me to have separate identities, so I can email someone as ratli008 at umn or as clancy at culturecat. Sometimes I feel that I need the credibility that an institutional email address offers, especially if I'm emailing someone I don't know at another university. Funny how that works.

Edited to add: Another reason I love this email client is that they have a lot of different visual display themes, including one called "In the Pink." The name makes me cringe, but I have always wanted to have a pink email interface.

Today I took a 2-hour no-books, no-notes midterm exam in my rhetorical theory class. I answered this question:

Below are two quite different ways of thinking
about figures of speech.

“’Ornament’ is what goes beyond Lucidity and
Acceptability. Its first two stages [lucidity and
acceptability] consists in conceiving and carrying
out your intention; the third is the stage that puts
the polish on and may properly be called
‘finish’”(Quintilian, Institutes 8.3.62)



“The important is that in metaphor, metonymy, and
synecdoche alike language provides us with a
direction that thought itself might take in its effort
to provide meaning to areas of experience not
already regarded as being cognitively secured by
either common sense, tradition, or science”
(Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse, 73).



In his essay, “The Four Master Tropes,” does
Burke embrace one, reject the other; embrace
both; offer a third view: what? Explain.

Below is my attempt: