UT hassling Longhorn users

IP lawyers for the University of Texas are busy creatures, according to Eric Johnson:

A couple years ago, they sued an outfit making t-shirts, sold to fans of rival Texas A&M, that depicted a broken Longhorns logo with the taunt, “Saw ’em off.” (Fellow UT alum Siva Vaidhyanathan’s take is here.)

And I remember when I was going to school at UT, in the early 1990s, the university was hassling local business with “Longhorn” in their names. Since then, UT has been very aggressive about trademark issues.

Yet all this activity has not really been as much of a profit center as you might think: the cost of running the IP program, Johnson calculates, may eat up something on the order of half the $800,000 in annual royalties brought in (via Ron Coleman).

By reader acclaim: great moments in “targeted disabilities”

The federal government is seeking applicants who are mentally ill, mentally retarded or both to work as lawyers in the Justice Department. Specifically, a job announcement for “up to 10 experienced attorneys for the position of Trial Attorney in the Voting Section in Washington, D.C.” contains the following language:

The Civil Rights Division encourages qualified applicants with targeted disabilities to apply. Targeted disabilities are deafness, blindness, missing extremities, partial or complete paralysis, convulsive disorder, mental retardation, mental illness, severe distortion of limbs and/or spine. Applicants who meet the qualification requirements and are able to perform the essential functions of the position with or without reasonable accommodation are encouraged to identify targeted disabilities in response to the questions in the Avue application system seeking that information.

[via Eugene Volokh and many others]

Stripper: getting tipsy was part of my job (update)

Patsy Hamaker, who in 2007 had an alcohol-related one-car wreck on the way home from The Furnace (NSFW link, unless you work some place that approves of stripclub websites) and sued her employer over the accident, claiming that the club encouraged her to drink, won $100,000 from a Jefferson County, Alabama, jury, somewhat less than the $1.2 million she sought.

Hamaker, whose stage name was Tessa, went to work at The Furnace on Oct. 17, 2007. She drank enough that night for her blood-alcohol content level to rise to nearly three times the legal limit, was pulled by security from one of the VIP rooms, and then left after at least three attempts to stop her, according to testimony during the trial. Her car wrecked on the interstate, and she suffered a broken nose and back.

The club’s records show a customer bought Hamaker one “dancer drink,” a commission drink or bottle ranging in price from $12 to $2,500. The club did not have a record of other drinks she may have [ordered on her own].

Attorneys for the Furnace pointed out that dancers can specify their preference for non-alcoholic or diluted dancer drinks. And the club’s general manager, Jennifer Etheridge, testified that she does not want dancers getting intoxicated. Asked why, Etheridge said: “You try working with 30 drunk people.”

(Erin Stock, “Former stripper gets $100,000 in lawsuit: Blamed club for drunken wreck”, Birmingham News, Feb. 2) (h/t P.E.).

February 3 roundup

Poutine injuries in Canada

Canadian health officials require poutine—a Canadian dish of french fries, cheese curds, and gravy—to be heated to 140 to 165 degrees for health reasons, a temperature somewhat that below of hot coffee. Alas, this is a temperature that can cause second-degree burns if a consumer happens to suffer an epileptic fit and fall face-first into their poutine, as happened to an Ontario teenager dining alone at a local KFC. No lawsuit appears to be planned, though her father seems to be demanding warnings of some sort. (Don Peat, “Teen burned in KFC poutine mishap”, canoe.ca, Jan. 19 (h/t Bumper)). Of course, given that warnings cannot deter epileptic seizures, it’s not clear why this would have made a difference. And as the Mocking Words blog points out:

What if instead she ended up falling down and hitting her head on the concrete floor? Are you going to go around warning people that concrete is a very solid material and that people should be aware that if you fall and hit your head on the floor that it’s going to hurt and is possibly going to injure you?

Lancet repudiates MMR vaccine study

It only took twelve years, but Lancet, which oft publishes politically motivated papers masquerading as medicine, has conceded that the 1998 paper criticizing MMR vaccines was simply “false.” [Lancet; BBC]

No telling how many children died in the meantime, all so trial lawyers could line their pockets attacking vaccine manufacturers.