White Asparagus. D. R. Belz

the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. Farewell to arms.

      Sagittarius

      November 23 to December 21

      Venus is in your seventh house. Jupiter is in your lunar house. Obama is in the White House. You are in the dog house. There is smoke in your chimney, snow on your eaves, water in your basement, and all your chickens have gone to roost. Return to the womb.

      Capricorn

      December 22 to January 19

      You have erotic fantasies about sharks. You will have more than a casual relationship with a war-surplus vaporizer. Suppress your desire to imitate mummies. For a good time, call 1-900-555-8000.

      Aquarius

      January 20 to February 18

      Someone in a car will ask you for directions. Check the soles of your shoes before traveling extensively indoors. A man with two teeth will vituperate your person in Esperanto. Someone will ask you to examine her mica collection; be diplomatic.

      Pisces

      February 19 to March 20

      if u cn rd ths, u tw cn hv an xcting creer in mtchbk cpy edting.

      Aries

      March 21 to April 20

      Beware oversized snowshoes. Do not take syphilitic Berbers into your confidence. Expect serious repercussions from a decision to invest in a sort of organic transistor. Synchronize your watch. Mars is in your lunar house: some will give you a doughnut machine.

      Taurus

      April 21 to May 21

      Don’t take any guff from a loudmouthed Virgo: get physical with this person, if necessary. You are correct in thinking that everyone with an apostrophe in his name is a socialist. Someone close to you will attempt to get you to eat poison. Accent on ballistics.

      Gemini

      May 22 to June 21

      Some people tell you that you possess a charismatic personality; they want something. You are considered to be a boring chess partner. Demand your own lifestyle: eat with your fingers.

      Cancer

      June 22 to July 23

      Be cautious of dirty money. You will notice that one of your ears is lower than the other; remedy this. Chew your food thirty-two times. Accentuate the positive. Your mother reads The Congressional Record for the racy parts.

      Leo

      July 24 to August 23

      There is nothing in any of your houses. It should not surprise you that buses and taxis will not pick you up; a lint brush would refuse to pick you up. This portion of the zodiac has been discontinued. May your cusp wither and drop off. Raspberries.

      TM

      I’d like to be a fly on the wall at the annual convention of the International Trademark Association. It’s a group I had initially assumed must be made up of high-powered lawyers closely connected to the Association of People Who Put the Little Round Stickers on Every Piece of Fruit in the Grocery Store.

      The INTA, founded in 1878, is actually an organization that just wants us to observe good grammar. They even publish a media kit so that writers and editors will understand the rules of trademark use and, through a kind of trickle-down marketing, educate the public on the importance of trademark names.

      The big danger, they tell us, is that because of misuse by the public and writers, trademark words are in jeopardy of falling into everyday use. And if a trademark word is used unprotected often enough in the common parlance, if writers use it uncapitalized as a common noun without the necessary trademark symbol, it may cease to be private property and become, well, just any old word.

      You’d think product-makers would be falling all over themselves to turn their products’ names into the garden-variety term for a given product. It’s all a little like getting dressed up to go to a singles bar, only to keep telling everyone you meet how happily married you are.

      The folks at INTA do make a couple of interesting grammatical points. One is that trademarks were never intended to be nouns at all, but rather adjectives that carefully describe a generic product or service name. For example, you should say, “Oops, I just spilled sulfuric acid all over the Formica brand laminated-plastic countertop,” instead of saying, incorrectly, “I think I just trashed the formica.”

      In addition, you should never pluralize trademarks. Never use them in the possessive form and never, ever, use them as verbs. This means you would never write: “Jim was chased for several blocks for his new Nikes.” Or, “My Rottweiler loves to chew Pizza Hut’s boxes.” Or, “I need to Xerox my resume.”

      Certain former brand names have, in fact, fallen into everyday use, including aspirin, cellophane, cement, dry ice, dynamite, escalator, kerosene, laser, linoleum, margarine, mimeograph, nylon, shredded wheat, telegram, trampoline, yo-yo and zipper.

      A few words–never protected by trademarks to begin with–have vainly struggled to preserve their unique identity in the face of impostors; take champagne, for instance, or potato chip.

      Avoiding unwitting trademark abuse is practically impossible because, according to the INTA itself, what you might think are some rather dog-eared words are actually trademarks.

      For example, if you send your kid’s teacher a note saying that the Band-Aid adhesive bandages all over his shins are from taking a pair of Teflon non-stick fluorocarbon resin spikes in the shins at Little League Baseball practice, you may get a Post-it self-stick note back stuck to the Velcro hook and loop fasteners on his Windbreaker jacket requesting you apply some Vaseline petroleum jelly to his scrapes and get him to take up Rollerblade in-line skating or better yet, Ping-Pong table tennis.

      After some fairly Saccharin sweetener thoughts about sending a Xerox photocopy of this saucy reply to the school principal, you opt instead to raid the Frigidaire refrigerator-freezer for some Jell-O gelatin or a Popsicle flavored ice.

      Just then, your Realtor real estate broker, who is anxious to sell in your Zip Code mail coding system, parks her Jeep all-terrain vehicle and comes walking up the front walk, trips on a Day-Glo daylight fluorescent color Hula Hoop plastic hoop you thought you had long ago pitched in the big Dumpster trash container down next to the Laundromat self-service laundry.

      She vaults backward into your Fiberglas fiber Runabout boat, bumping her head against the Plexiglas acrylic plastic windshield. You play the Boy Scout rescuer, take her a Kleenex tissue and some water in a foam cup (INTA says cups are not made of Styrofoam plastic foam), just as your dog bounds up with her empty Rolodex rotary card file like a Frisbee flying disc in his mouth.

      See what I mean? While trying to get by without brand names can be virtually impossible, life with trademarks for most of us can be just one big Rollercoaster amusement ride.

      The Million Monkey Room

      Report to the Senate Appropriations Committee re: FQ4 2008.

      Senator, I appear here today to testify on why Congress must refrain from cutting funding for the Million Monkey Room Project. As you know, the Project was a research initiative funded as an add-on provision to the recent Economic Stabilization Act of 2008—otherwise known as the “Wall Street Bailout Bill.” As you recall, this provision was justified by the Committee for both strategic and national security concerns.

      Our project’s goal was to prove the often-quoted saying: Put a million monkeys and a million typewriters into a room, and at some point, one of them will type out Shakespeare. The thinking was that—if feasible—this technique could then be applied to other texts of strategic importance to the country.

      It worked.

      I am proud to report today that our project has achieved historic results.

      In fact, on