I was mostly too busy nibbling on Wombat's little cheeks to get any great pictures. I think you'll all forgive me.
I was mostly too busy nibbling on Wombat's little cheeks to get any great pictures. I think you'll all forgive me.
At Artesa Vineyards, Carneros, Napa.
It's a thankless job, drinking your way through Napa Valley, but someone has to do it.
At AT&T park, during a simulcast performance of Puccini's Tosca. Which was incredible, by the way.
Brunch at Zazie in Cole Valley. Not at all indulgent when you follow it with five hours of walking and one badass hill.
Nightlife at California Academy of Sciences
It's four in the morning. The dog is with his Aunty. Work has been blissfully put on hold. Guide books studied, walking shoes packed, perishables emptied from the fridge, the awesomest of peoples awaiting our arrival on the left coast and dare I say it we might even stick some flowers in our hair. Nothing left to do here; we're headed to San Francisco.
Remind us to come back, will you?
Remind us to come back, will you?
Petit Hiboux, you know I love you. But lately, I've been blogging a lot more over at my new baby, Sunset Bark. Well, "blogging a lot" = "frantically writing posts and creating pages and adding widgets". See, people, Nano deserves a dog run. And my park hasn't got one. So what do I do? I join the local Dog Owners group that's been working towards a run for years, and promptly sort of take over all communcations/website stuff. YEAH! Because, you know, I wasn't busy enough.
Anyway, go over there and check it out - the more hits, the better, as we all serve the Google Master. And particularly if you're a Brooklynite, or even better, a Sunset Park-ian, say hi. Let me know I'm not blogging endless optimistic exclamation-point laden posts for naught. Because seriously, y'all, I've never used so many exclamation points in one blog post before. Ever.
Anyway, go over there and check it out - the more hits, the better, as we all serve the Google Master. And particularly if you're a Brooklynite, or even better, a Sunset Park-ian, say hi. Let me know I'm not blogging endless optimistic exclamation-point laden posts for naught. Because seriously, y'all, I've never used so many exclamation points in one blog post before. Ever.
It's spring, bitches! Just in time for summer. Some elements of the past month:
Don't ever say I don't give you the good stuff at pH, in bullet points, and with a minimal amount of excessive capitalization.
- finished with my first semester in school, definitely the right decision to go back to school - it was moderately stressful, particularly from mid-March to last week, but I really enjoyed every minute and loved the challenge (shut UP, Simon, it was NOT that easy). Plus I learned a bunch of stuff, ask me about reference! and the Type-A in me is excited that I finished it with a 4.0, pretty sure that'll be the only semester I can say that. I've never in my academic career done that well so I'm gonna brag a little, mmkay?
- I am currently obsessed with: getting a new (old) bike, the color yellow, long scarves, gold shoes, trader joe's lasagne, delicious library 2, the new yorker, nars blush, and good margaritas.
- finally spent the day at May's for our much-missed writing/dogs/lunch date, in anticipation of this Friday's rooftop Salon Esse, last of the season. Writing groups are awesome, especially when combined with drinking. I know that fire was a bitch and all, but this apartment (now neighbors with Robin!) is incredible, perfect for our writing dates, which is a pity since
- I've gone and ruined my lazy summer by getting an internship here, so from mid-June to mid-August I'll be working five days a week between that and my regular part-time job. SUMMER LAZY FAIL!
- But I'm excited, people, oh so excited, to be working in a gorgeous old law library on awesome projects with a director who's really keen to show me the ropes and teach me new stuff about librarying in a library. Oh yes. I just used it as a verb.
- Have I mentioned we're going to San Francisco to stay with the incredible Pickard-Johnsons and visit the Alameda Flea and Napa and the seals and the cable cars and AL-CA-TRAAAAAZ (*note: may not actually go to Alcatraz, may just make Eddie Izzard jokes constantly) and maybe drag these gorgeous people and their baby out to coffee?
- No? I didn't mention it?
- Well then now is the time to start leaving me dozens of comments about your favorite places to eat/shop/walk/drink/boogie in San Francisco. I am sure in five short days in early June we will manage all of them. We'll just forego sleep.
- WHAT? I know it's June. I know it'll be cold and raining. The tickets were like no dollars. Shut up.
Don't ever say I don't give you the good stuff at pH, in bullet points, and with a minimal amount of excessive capitalization.
So, I've got a little narrative for you.
Back in 2006, a flurry of people emailed me to inform me that a restaurant in the West Village was opening up, bearing the name the little owl. Fair enough, I thought this was adorable. I emailed the owner and pointed out the cute connection and he was very nice, saying he'd known about my blog and also thought the coincidence was cute; he invited me to swing by and check it out and just let him know when I wanted a reservation. I've never taken him up on it, although I've heard the sliders are delicious. I've always been a little proud to walk by the place; it IS a cute name! Owls are awesome.
Then in 2007 I started getting another slew of emails because a drink had turned up on the menu at the restaurant bearing the same name as my blog: Le Petit Hiboux. Fair enough, I emailed him again (in the same email thread) and again we exchanged pleasantries over it, and again he mentioned it was a nice coincidence.
This story would basically be a non-starter if "le petit hiboux" was a direct translation in French of "the little owl". It's not actually; as a lot of you know, it's (deliberately) grammatically incorrect. When I started this blog in mid-2002, I tried out le petit hibou (the correct spelling of one singular small owl) on a blog banner and it looked damn weird. Like caribou. I didn't like it, so I decided to add the x, thus making it plural and incorrect (the correct way to pluralize owls would be "les hiboux"). I didn't care; I just liked the way it looked and I figured I knew enough French to botch it if I felt like it. I also, of course, had no idea the thing would be around seven years later.
Over the course of those seven years, I added a Creative Commons license back in 2004 (attributive non-commercial share-alike) and started a flickr stream and a twitter stream using the same name. It is for me my website nom-de-plume, my online identity. Right? We all have those. Heck, Dooce(tm) is trademarked. And while my blog name, and blog identity, isn't trademarked, it is under a CC that restricts use of its content for commercial purposes and requests attribution.
I've noticed that the drink is coming up all over the web. I'm fairly sure that drink names aren't copyrightable, so frankly once the restaurant created it, others were free to use it and distribute the recipe (which the restaurant has graciously shared). So now, since this blog has become a little less active recently, this drink is starting to creep up the rankings on Google, which makes sense.
So the question becomes, when does an expression become my property? Was it in the moment of misspelling, when I decided that the phrase could use improvement and thus transformed the expression into my own? And even if it wasn't a misspelled phrase, if I'd "owned" it, would it be mine anyway? And as owner, however tenuously, what can I do - or not do - with it?
Please understand: I'm not considering suing a restaurant for using my blog name as a drink. It's understandable that the owner used it; it's a drink with French ingredients, and he assumed (I can only guess he assumed, that is) that as I said in my email, "le petit hiboux" is the French translation of his restaurant's name. I didn't, in reviewing those emails, ever mention that the X was incorrect, a choice I'd made to change the translation, and presumably, the owner or bartender (whoever created and named the drink) didn't type "the little owl" into a translation engine to check. And anyway half the time you get "chouettes".
So my intention isn't to sue because of course, suing is something you do when you feel that there has been a copyright infringement on your property (or, when you're just a huge asshole). What I think is that it's an interesting dilemma that encapsulates the Web, the CC movement, and the purposes of copyright - something I'm spending a fair bit of time studying this semester, and something that tends to get more complicated the deeper you go into it. On the one hand, it's not like I lose any income if there's a drink bearing the same name; on the other hand, I specified "non-commercial" on my CC license. On the one hand, it's not like the word "coincidence" applies since there's clearly a communication between myself and the owner on this exact subject, but on the other hand, what would I have him do - hand out a credit line with every frosty delicious glass? Make a note on the menu? Pay me freaking royalties? All these options sound ridiculous, much like so much of the ridiculousness inherent in traditional copyright and fair use disputes that I've railed against. So perhaps this is fair use - that murky, complex underbelly of intellectual property that no one likes to talk about.
See what I mean? I honestly have sat here for twenty minutes thinking about this - instead of writing my term paper - and can't really see which way is right, and I'm not even sure what the goalposts are. So I think I'll get back to my paper about Creative Commons. Anyone with any strong (respectful!) opinions or clarifying ideas should make good use of the comments box; I suspect there are as many (plus one) opinions about this as I have readers.
Back in 2006, a flurry of people emailed me to inform me that a restaurant in the West Village was opening up, bearing the name the little owl. Fair enough, I thought this was adorable. I emailed the owner and pointed out the cute connection and he was very nice, saying he'd known about my blog and also thought the coincidence was cute; he invited me to swing by and check it out and just let him know when I wanted a reservation. I've never taken him up on it, although I've heard the sliders are delicious. I've always been a little proud to walk by the place; it IS a cute name! Owls are awesome.
Then in 2007 I started getting another slew of emails because a drink had turned up on the menu at the restaurant bearing the same name as my blog: Le Petit Hiboux. Fair enough, I emailed him again (in the same email thread) and again we exchanged pleasantries over it, and again he mentioned it was a nice coincidence.
This story would basically be a non-starter if "le petit hiboux" was a direct translation in French of "the little owl". It's not actually; as a lot of you know, it's (deliberately) grammatically incorrect. When I started this blog in mid-2002, I tried out le petit hibou (the correct spelling of one singular small owl) on a blog banner and it looked damn weird. Like caribou. I didn't like it, so I decided to add the x, thus making it plural and incorrect (the correct way to pluralize owls would be "les hiboux"). I didn't care; I just liked the way it looked and I figured I knew enough French to botch it if I felt like it. I also, of course, had no idea the thing would be around seven years later.
Over the course of those seven years, I added a Creative Commons license back in 2004 (attributive non-commercial share-alike) and started a flickr stream and a twitter stream using the same name. It is for me my website nom-de-plume, my online identity. Right? We all have those. Heck, Dooce(tm) is trademarked. And while my blog name, and blog identity, isn't trademarked, it is under a CC that restricts use of its content for commercial purposes and requests attribution.
I've noticed that the drink is coming up all over the web. I'm fairly sure that drink names aren't copyrightable, so frankly once the restaurant created it, others were free to use it and distribute the recipe (which the restaurant has graciously shared). So now, since this blog has become a little less active recently, this drink is starting to creep up the rankings on Google, which makes sense.
So the question becomes, when does an expression become my property? Was it in the moment of misspelling, when I decided that the phrase could use improvement and thus transformed the expression into my own? And even if it wasn't a misspelled phrase, if I'd "owned" it, would it be mine anyway? And as owner, however tenuously, what can I do - or not do - with it?
Please understand: I'm not considering suing a restaurant for using my blog name as a drink. It's understandable that the owner used it; it's a drink with French ingredients, and he assumed (I can only guess he assumed, that is) that as I said in my email, "le petit hiboux" is the French translation of his restaurant's name. I didn't, in reviewing those emails, ever mention that the X was incorrect, a choice I'd made to change the translation, and presumably, the owner or bartender (whoever created and named the drink) didn't type "the little owl" into a translation engine to check. And anyway half the time you get "chouettes".
So my intention isn't to sue because of course, suing is something you do when you feel that there has been a copyright infringement on your property (or, when you're just a huge asshole). What I think is that it's an interesting dilemma that encapsulates the Web, the CC movement, and the purposes of copyright - something I'm spending a fair bit of time studying this semester, and something that tends to get more complicated the deeper you go into it. On the one hand, it's not like I lose any income if there's a drink bearing the same name; on the other hand, I specified "non-commercial" on my CC license. On the one hand, it's not like the word "coincidence" applies since there's clearly a communication between myself and the owner on this exact subject, but on the other hand, what would I have him do - hand out a credit line with every frosty delicious glass? Make a note on the menu? Pay me freaking royalties? All these options sound ridiculous, much like so much of the ridiculousness inherent in traditional copyright and fair use disputes that I've railed against. So perhaps this is fair use - that murky, complex underbelly of intellectual property that no one likes to talk about.
See what I mean? I honestly have sat here for twenty minutes thinking about this - instead of writing my term paper - and can't really see which way is right, and I'm not even sure what the goalposts are. So I think I'll get back to my paper about Creative Commons. Anyone with any strong (respectful!) opinions or clarifying ideas should make good use of the comments box; I suspect there are as many (plus one) opinions about this as I have readers.
So I have a lot of dreams.
Three nights ago I dreamed that I was traveling through a post-apocalyptic city with a group of nameless friends and Nano; we found an unoccupied apartment and hunkered down and I remember trying to open a can of soup with my keys, and wondering whether the glass doors that led to the balcony were safe from marauders. Two nights ago, I dreamed that I discovered by best friend's fiance was cheating on her and what's more, unrepentantly, and I had to be the one to tell her about it a week before their wedding. I also dreamed I worked at the UN library. Then last night, I dreamed I was once again running the orientation for interested students at my college paper, where I was EIC; then I dreamed that I was a rabbi trying to convince people that the Holocaust was about to happen again. I woke up halfway through a dream where my friend's boyfriend was standing in my bathroom, chatting to me while I showered in a turquoise prom dress. I remember hoping my mother didn't walk in as she'd legitimately think it strange.
I'm not telling you about these dreams in that, oh, look at the crazy things I dream, anyone want to interpret them? sort of way. I'm just wondering whether anyone else dreams this vividly, this crazily, every night. Some mornings I wake up exhausted from them. Is it something in my diet? Is there some sort of homeopathic remedy I should look into that, I don't know, dampens the timbre of my dreams? Conrad once told me that kava kava makes you dream crazy, dreams like the ones I have all the time. Don't even get me started on the one about the cat hookers.
It'd be nice to wake up and not have any memory of how crazy my brain is when it's unleashed on my imagination.
Three nights ago I dreamed that I was traveling through a post-apocalyptic city with a group of nameless friends and Nano; we found an unoccupied apartment and hunkered down and I remember trying to open a can of soup with my keys, and wondering whether the glass doors that led to the balcony were safe from marauders. Two nights ago, I dreamed that I discovered by best friend's fiance was cheating on her and what's more, unrepentantly, and I had to be the one to tell her about it a week before their wedding. I also dreamed I worked at the UN library. Then last night, I dreamed I was once again running the orientation for interested students at my college paper, where I was EIC; then I dreamed that I was a rabbi trying to convince people that the Holocaust was about to happen again. I woke up halfway through a dream where my friend's boyfriend was standing in my bathroom, chatting to me while I showered in a turquoise prom dress. I remember hoping my mother didn't walk in as she'd legitimately think it strange.
I'm not telling you about these dreams in that, oh, look at the crazy things I dream, anyone want to interpret them? sort of way. I'm just wondering whether anyone else dreams this vividly, this crazily, every night. Some mornings I wake up exhausted from them. Is it something in my diet? Is there some sort of homeopathic remedy I should look into that, I don't know, dampens the timbre of my dreams? Conrad once told me that kava kava makes you dream crazy, dreams like the ones I have all the time. Don't even get me started on the one about the cat hookers.
It'd be nice to wake up and not have any memory of how crazy my brain is when it's unleashed on my imagination.
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