Being left off the list- oh, the pain, the pain!

Yep, but by then, they'll have cashed in and will have to pay some sort of damages out of that money.

I had kind of given up on marriage, ended up getting married at 44 and now about to turn 48 with two sons, a three year old and a five month old. My grandparents all lived longer than normal for their generations, but my dad died from heart trouble at 62 (he was a heavy smoker, drinker, etc. and had had quadruple…

I admit Bai Ling's crazy does the same thing for me- you know she's be crazy hot in bed, and then do something weird like leave while you're still asleep and take your dog with her.

Spot on.

Being old enough to remember the days before things like cosplay and cons seems to have expanded their bases to include more women, I've seen a certain class of guys become hypersensitive to the inclusion of 'pretty girls' into what they perceive as their club. I've heard comments that essentially complain that the…

No kidding- you'd think someone as vain, shallow and neurotic (not to mention rich) would have actually gone to a decent plastic surgeon.

That if you met her at a party, no matter how fat, scrawny, goofy-looking or broke, you are she'd still probably have sex with you because she's at the apex of the intersection of 'hot' and 'crazy?'

Where did you hear this? From all that I've ever seen, the Tolkien Estate is unhappy with, but has no choice, the films in general, because Saul Zaentz has the film rights to "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings," and that it is material from "TLotR" appendices that are being used as filler for the "Hobbit"…

It's not that cut and dried, which is why Zaentz and his legal team are going to really push hard on this case. If these filmmakers can show that there's now a second, non-Tolkien meaning for the world in common usage, they might be able to get away with using it.

I think that's going to be the upshot of their defense- "Look, it you want to get mad, blame the scientists and/or journalists who started calling h. floriensis 'Hobbits,' not us."

As I understand it, Tolkien feared saddling his heirs with huge death taxes and sold the film rights to only two works, "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" to United Artists. Saul Zaentz later bought them from UA. Tolkien's estate, particularly his son Christopher, was more concerned with protecting the…

The thing is, the global media latched on to "Hobbits" for h. floriensis, giving it a secondary legitimate meaning. This is the kind of slippery slope that copyright and especially trade mark holders fear, since it could mean that a court would agree that there are now two meanings, the fantasy beings in Tolkien's…

I had an intellectual property class in law school by the guy who literally 'wrote the book,' as well as having represented a substantial number of Motown singers and musicians over the years. We touched on this issue, the so-called 'Kleenex effect,' wherein a copyrighted or trade marked name, such as 'Hobbit,' falls…

I won't watch Tom Cruise in anything. The weirdness of his real life just overwhelmed my ability to see him in any role other than 'crazy eyed Scientology promoter.'

I was joking- like that there were no Hispanic people until Nixon signed a piece of paper and created them out of thin air. Kind of like Al Gore inventing the internet.

The ultimate root of 'civilized' is the Latin 'civitas' meaning a city or city-state. One interpretation of 'civilization' is the combination of laws, societal roles and expected behaviors ascribed to those who live in large numbers in concentrated areas, which often includes distinct divisions of labor, including…

Even if you've seen it before, it's fun to revisit.

He also created Hispanics.*

Some poor nerd in 6th grade had someone check out "Are you there God, it's me, Margaret?" in his name and then didn't turn it in, so that the librarian would come to our classroom and announce, "Ronald, you still have out the copy of "AYTGIMM," much to his chagrin and the amusement of half the knuckle-draggers in…