Trivia for Logan's Run (1976)

* The costuming was originally intended to be relatively scanty for all the actors in the film, but it was decided the resulting demands on makeup were prohibitive.

* The first choices for the roles of Logan and Jessica were Jon Voight and Lindsay Wagner. The role of Peter Ustinov's character, the Old Man, was offered to James Cagney.

* The character of Francis was originally to be played by William Devane, but he pulled out of the film.

* According to Michael Anderson, the old man's buttons are United States pennies. He made makeshift buttons out of them because he couldn't find any real buttons.

* An extra makes the Star Trek Vulcan salute when waving to the old man after everyone escapes the exploding city.

* The shots of the pistons that controlled the elevator leading to the scene in the ice cave were taken directly from director Michael Anderson's previous film, The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959)

* The life clocks on everyone's hands all start out clear (at birth), turn yellow at age 8, green at 16, and red at 23. Everyone wears clothes the same color as their life clocks (except Sandmen, who wear black uniforms). As Lastday - age 30 - approaches, the life clocks flash red and black, then, at 30 turn totally black.

* During the encounter between the old man and the runners Logan and Jessica, the old man often quotes poems out of "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" by T.S. Eliot.

* The waterfalls and steps that Logan jumps into to get back into the dome are real. They are located in Ft. Worth, Texas.

* Michael York, Richard Jordan and Michael Anderson Jr. were all over 30 when they made the film.

* This was originally going to be produced by George Pal, but by this time, Pal had already left the studio.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/trivia

Skunk bites man ...

This is not your everyday 'Skunk bites man' story
Posted: Feb. 26, 2005
Jim Stingl


Every time Carol Infalt's phone rings, she's not sure if it's going to be condolences for her deceased skunk or a joke about her husband's formerly private parts.

She's been getting a lot of both since Ozzie the pet skunk paid the ultimate price for biting Dan Infalt's penis.

I think it's a Freudian typo, but in an e-mail to my newspaper Carol said, "This is when the hole disaster starts."

While the embarrassing news crackled over the emergency scanner, Dan was rushed to Oconomowoc Memorial Hospital last week.

At that same moment, Department of Natural Resources warden David Walz was heading for the Infalts' Jefferson County home to take Ozzie into custody. The animal quickly was euthanized so it could be tested for rabies, which has stirred up the skunk-loving community.


Meanwhile, Carol received a call at work from the hospital and was told it concerned her husband. She assumed "car accident."

"They told me where he got bit. I had to come and pick him up," she said.

She's not trying to add insult to unspeakable injury, but she blames her husband and not Ozzie for this one.

Rough-housing with an animal equipped with fangs is a bad idea. She'd warned Dan and their three kids about that countless times since they bought Ozzie as a baby for $100 last year from a game farm in Iowa.

"He was playing rough with him on his lap, and Ozzie bit down on my husband's penis," right through his sweat pants, she said.

Several stitches later, Dan's is fine except for the realization that he'll forever be known as the guy with a skunk on his junk.

"He always wanted to be famous. Maybe now he will be. He was hoping to do it more through hunting," Carol said.

Ozzie was just like a dismember of the family. The de-scented, chocolate-brown skunk slept under Carol and Dan's bed, and his favorite meal was a hard-boiled egg smothered in cheese. Carol had hoped he would live out his life of 10 or 15 years and then she would have him stuffed and mounted at home.

It was quite a scene at their 7-acre homestead in a rural area near Rome when warden Walz showed up along with deputies and a humane officer. Carol's macaw and cockatoo were screaming, and the family's pot-bellied pig was raising a ruckus. Walz found Ozzie hiding under a bed.

Walz contacted a veterinarian, and the Wisconsin laboratory that does rabies testing and was told the law says quarantine is not an option for a wild animal, even a pet one.

A specimen needed to be submitted for testing immediately. Unfortunately for Ozzie, that specimen was his brain rather than saliva or a little blood.

First of all, this was not a wild or vicious animal, but a pet bred in captivity and neutered, Carol argues. She kept reminding me that the breeder has been "rabies-free since 1932."

"I'm 100 percent sure my skunk did not have rabies," she said.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/feb05/304927.asp

Weird English

From Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien, Weird English
(Cambridge, MA: Hravard UP, 2004) ...

  "Unlike print-language culture, e-language cultures
do not encourage monoglot reading publics; they
encourage linguistic individualism.  Internet
communities don't require monoglottism, since they are
closer to physical communities than to imaginary ones.
Internet exchanges can occur with the same timing as
the fluid, fast bilateral exchange characteristic of
conversation.  This makes the internet community
tangible and effable; as a result, language is
colloquial and proximate in tone, rather than
distant." (p. 286, n. 9 cont'd)

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/CHIWEI.html

Positive Black Talk Inc., et al. v. Cash Money Records, et al.

5th Circuit Rules in Rappers' Battle Over Phrase 'Back That Ass Up'
Tuesday January 25, 3:02 am ET

John Council, Texas Lawyer

As often happens in the hip-hop world, two rappers became embroiled in a dispute over who owned the rights to a song that utilized a popular phrase. And it took the musical ear of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to settle the matter.

Positive Black Talk Inc., et al. v. Cash Money Records, et al. plunged the conservative appellate court into the world of booming bass lines and popular street slang.

Chief Judge Carolyn Dineen King, who wrote the opinion, boiled the case down to a dispute between Louisiana rappers Juvenile and D.J. Jubilee over who owned the rights to a song "that included the poetic four-word phrase 'back that ass up.'"

In its Jan. 13 opinion, the 5th Circuit sets out the following facts: In 1997, both rappers recorded songs with similar titles -- D.J. Jubilee, also known as Jerome Temple, recorded "Back That Ass Up," while Juvenile, also known as Terius Gray, recorded "Back That Azz Up."

Juvenile's song was a hit, sold more than 4 million CDs and grossed more than $40 million in sales. However, D.J. Jubilee's song failed to elevate either his bank account or his profile. D.J. Jubilee continues to work as a special education teacher.

On Feb. 15, 2002, D.J. Jubilee registered his song with the U.S. Copyright Office. On that same day, he filed a copyright infringement suit against Juvenile in U.S. District Court in Louisiana; Juvenile denied the copyright infringement allegation.

To prevail, D.J. Jubilee had to prove that he had a copyrighted song and that Juvenile's song was "substantially similar" to his.

After a 2003 trial, a jury ruled in favor of defendant Juvenile, finding that D.J. Jubilee failed to prove that his version of "Back That Ass Up" was substantially similar to Jubilee's version of "Back That Azz Up."

D.J. Jubilee appealed to the 5th Circuit, arguing that many of the jury instructions were flawed, including instructions on substantial similarity, specifically when applied to the use of the phrase "back that ass up."

Juvenile believed that the songs were substantially different and used different hooks; D.J. Jubilee's hook was the phrase "back that ass up" while Juvenile's was a sample from the Jackson 5's song "I Want You Back." But D.J. Jubilee believed the jury should have been instructed to review specific portions of both songs, rather than both songs as a whole, according to the 5th Circuit's opinion.

The appeals court disagreed with D.J. Jubilee's arguments and affirmed the jury's verdict. The jury, as instructed, likely believed that the hook in Juvenile's song was not the phrase "back that ass up" but rather a sample from the Jackson 5's song, according to the opinion.

"And that belief would explain why the jury determined that the songs are not substantially similar," wrote King in an opinion joined by Judges Jerry Smith and Emilio Garza. "Accordingly, we cannot say that the jury instruction, even if it had been erroneous, probably resulted in an incorrect verdict."

REP TO PROTECT

Bruce Schewe, a partner in New Orleans' Phelps Dunbar, says his client, Juvenile, is pleased with the decision.

Juvenile viewed the copyright suit filed against him as a personal affront, Schewe says. "It was a claim of theft, and he was offended by that," Schewe says.

"It was entirely a lyric case. I was never able to get the plaintiff to concede that," Schewe says. "The real question was whether the phrase was the hook in either song and was novel in either song."

Nathan Gisclair, a partner in New Orleans' Montgomery Barnett Brown Read Hammond & Mintz who represents D.J. Jubilee, says the opinion is disappointing -- it gives little guidance on how plaintiffs should litigate cases such as this one in the future.

In its opinion, the 5th Circuit noted that D.J. Jubilee contended "that the district court committed reversible error by excluding, as hearsay, several newspaper articles that purported to find strong similarities between Juvenile's and Jubilee's songs."

The 5th Circuit ruled that they are hearsay, Gisclair says. However, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that such evidence is relevant in copyright cases, he says.

"The people are the intended audience, and music critics are part of the intended audience," Gisclair says. "And you don't see that [discussion] anywhere in the 5th Circuit opinion."

Gisclair says he won't appeal the decision -- his client doesn't have the means to do so.

NO FORMULA

Even though Louisiana and Texas have produced numerous hip-hop stars, music copyright decisions such as Cash Money Records are rare for the 5th Circuit, says David Schenck, an appellate partner in the Dallas office of Jones Day.

"They're expensive cases to litigate and often they settle," Schenck says. "You don't usually have people dodging and flexing all the way to a court of appeals decision."

Judges and juries usually come up with wildly divergent results when they're asked to answer substantial-similarity questions in music copyright cases, says Siva Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University.

"Courts don't have a good formula for this," Vaidhyanathan says of the Cash Money Records decision. Such cases force judges and juries to act as music critics and music historians to reach their decisions. And rap music is a battleground in these types of copyright disputes because the artists commonly take the current language of the street and turn it into songs -- songs that may be similar to another performer's, he says.

"Substantial-similarity cases become thorny," says Vaidhyanathan, author of the book "Copyrights and Copywrongs." "And you're asking judges and juries to do readings of very complicated texts. They're going to come up with wildly divergent results."

As a matter of fact, Judge King says she listened to both rap songs before issuing her opinion.

"I don't know that I had to," says King, who admits she's not very familiar with rap music. "I'm interested in Brahms, but I did listen to it."

http://biz.yahoo.com/law/050125/3ca296706935d6daa129ac6221b70b85_1.html

Quote of the Day

"People are still using Wangs in the State Department. Not that there's anything wrong with Wangs ..." --Condoleeza Rice

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4456664