Accord­ing to The Reg­is­ter “In a move that has sur­prised naïve observers, the US Patent Office has announced that from now on it will con­sider ‘seri­ous’ appli­ca­tions to patent spe­cific inte­ger numbers.”

As far as I’m con­cerned this only means one thing; I own the num­ber 101 because it’s the sec­ond half of my often used moniker on Instant Mes­sen­ger. From now on any­one that uses this par­tic­u­lar num­ber inte­ger will have to pay roy­al­ties in the form of $.50 for every instance used of said num­ber. Fail­ure to com­ply with this “patent” will result in an auto­matic court sum­mo­nance (not optional by the way).

Con­sider the exam­ple above a silly one, but some­thing that will even­tu­ally make sense if the US Patent office is seri­ously con­sid­er­ing this pre­pos­ter­ous idea.

The ques­tion on everyone’s mind these days is whether or not Jell-O is made from ani­mal hides and bones. Well, look no fur­ther because accord­ing to Snopes​.com “Some­times the most innocu­ous of food­stuffs con­tain con­stituents whose ori­gins are less than appetizing.”

The spe­cific arti­cle in mind sheds light on this pon­der­ing explain­ing that “under­neath JELL-O’s jig­gly whole­some­ness lurks a secret many con­sumers are dis­con­certed to learn: JELL-O is made from gelatin, an ani­mal prod­uct ren­dered from the hides and bones of animals.”

Accord­ing to the arti­cle, cre­at­ing gelatin begins with the process of boil­ing the skins, hides and bones of cows and pigs which secretes a pro­tein rich col­la­gen. This sub­stance is then boiled and fil­tered numer­ous times and then ground into a fine pow­der and accord­ing to Gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion the result is nei­ther cat­e­go­rized as ani­mal or meat.

The pop­u­lar rumor is that Jell-O is made with the hooves of horses and cows, which accord­ing to par­ent com­pany Kraft is a mis­con­cep­tion con­sid­er­ing the hooves do not con­tain the nec­es­sary ingre­di­ents for the col­la­gen.
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Today marks the 75^th Birth­day of Mickey Mouse, pop cul­ture icon orig­i­nally cre­ated by Wal­ter Elias Dis­ney in 1928. I can hon­estly say that Mickey Mouse for me was the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of all that is, was and always will be Walt Dis­ney. The char­ac­ter has sym­bol­ized the pro­fes­sion­al­ism of Dis­ney through­out the 75 years since Mickey was orig­i­nally con­ceived by Mr. Dis­ney himself.

Accord­ing to http://​www​.geoc​i​ties​.com/​d​i​s​n​e​y​s​m​o​use:

“Mickey Mouse was born in Walt Disney’s imag­i­na­tion early in 1928 on a train ride from New York to Los Ange­les. Walt was return­ing with his wife from a busi­ness meet­ing at which his car­toon cre­ation, Oswald the Rab­bit, had been wres­tled from him by his finan­cial back­ers. Only 26 at the time and with an active car­toon stu­dio in Hol­ly­wood, Walt had gone east to arrange for a new con­tract and more money to improve the qual­ity of his Oswald pic­tures. The mon­ey­men declined, and since the char­ac­ter was copy­righted under their name, they took con­trol of it. ”

… So I was all alone and had noth­ing,” Walt recalled later. “Mrs. Dis­ney and I were com­ing back from New York on the train and I had to have some­thing I could tell them. I’ve lost Oswald so, I had this mouse in the back of my head because a mouse is sort of a sym­pa­thetic char­ac­ter in spite of the fact that everybody’s fright­ened of a mouse includ­ing myself” Walt spent the return train ride con­jur­ing up a lit­tle mouse in red vel­vet pants and named him “Mor­timer,” but by the time the train screeched into the ter­mi­nal sta­tion in Los Ange­les, the new dream mouse had been rechris­tened. Walt’s wife, Lil­lian, thought the name “Mor­timer” was too pompous and sug­gested “Mickey.” A star was born!“
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