DINNER AT LUCHOW'S

On a rain-soaked night in October 1913, an Irishman, a Scotsman, and a Romanian-born Jew walked into Lüchow’s Restaurant, the German sausage and schnitzel emporium on Manhattan’s East 14th Street. The punch line? The dinner those three European émigrés shared on that night 100 years ago set in motion a chain of events that has…

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Y-M-C-A: NO DANCING IN THE END ZONE YET, OFFICER

 In one of the very first posts on this blog last year, we reported on Victor Willis’s “early victory” in his quest to recover valuable copyrights on songs he co-wrote for the Village People back in the 1970s.  (Willis, pictured here, was also their lead singer, dressed back in the day as the “cop.”) Willis was one of…

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ENGLISH LANGUAGE 1, SUBWAY 0

No, this is not another contribution to the on-going debate over whether Subway’s vaunted “footlong” sandwiches actually measure 12 full inches. I will leave that to the consumer affairs bloggers. Our concern is with Subway’s effort to monopolize the word “footlong” as a registered trademark for 12-inch, give or take, heros/submarines/wedges/hoagies/grinders. Last week the Trademark Trial…

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