William Gluckin & Co. v. Int’l. Playtex Corp., 407 F.2d 177 (2d Cir. 1969), is an opinion upholding the issuance of a prelim­inary injunction against Playtex, manu­fac­turer of, ahem, ladies’ support garments, prohibiting Playtex from pros­e­cuting a lawsuit it had filed against Woolworth & Co. for selling brassieres manu­fac­tured by Gluckin at Woolworth’s stores in Georgia. See, what happened was this: Playtex had a patent, and Gluckin (allegedly) infringed the patent and sold the infringing unmen­tion­ables to Woolworths, who sold lots of them in Georgia. Woolworth’s, Playtex, and Gluckin were all New York corpo­ra­tions amenable to suit in New York, but Gluckin was not amenable to suit in Georgia. Playtex sued Woolworth’s for infringing its patent in Federal court in Georgia. Gluckin found out and filed their own suit (for a declaratory judgment) in Federal court in New York.

See, if the Georgia suit went ahead, the Georgia District Court would have had to determine whether the bust supporters sold by Woolworth’s indeed infringed Playtex’ patent. This would be the same issue as what would have to be decided in the declaratory judgment action in New York. So if the Georgia court made a decision on the subject, that decision would have had a binding effect on the New York court under the doctrine of res judicata. (Woolworth’s probably could have had the Georgia case dismissed for failure to join a necessary party who could not subse­quently be joined because of a lack of personal juris­diction, see Fed. R. Civ. P. 19, but that’s not what happened.)

Gluckin, therefore, really wanted to make sure it had the oppor­tunity to litigate the patent infringement issue itself in the New York suit, and not by proxy through Woolworth’s in the Georgia suit. But ordi­narily, the suit that gets filed first gets priority, and later suits get enjoined until earlier ones get finished.

Fortunately for Gluckin, there is an exception to this first-​​filed-​​goes-​​first rule, arising out of patent law. An infringement suit against a customer of a manu­fac­turer always has the manu­fac­turer as the real party in interest, and the policy of the Second Circuit is to place pref­erence on the real party in interest liti­gating his own claim, so long as it is more conve­nient than the customer suit. Which is why Gluckin got the injunction against the Georgia suit.

Anyway, I’m sure all you peoples out there who don’t care about civil procedure were bored to tears reading about all that.

On a more enter­taining note, reading this case reminded me of this fun yet highly inac­curate account of the invention and patenting of the brassiere from the ultra–tear-​​jerker film Beaches, starring Bette Midler and some other people whose names I cannot remember.

This one isn’t a faux pas.

Atlas Shrugged was featured as the question to the $200 answer in this evening’s “Literary Titles” category (Jeopardy Round). It was the first answer of the game. I don’t think the Jeopardy! people like having clips from the show up on the YouTube, so I can’t post a video. The clue was cute. Alex gave a spoken clue (“1957 novel about a strong female executive”) while a video clip ran. The clip depicted a member of the “Clue Crew” with a giant inflatable globe on his shoulders, which he set down and “shrugged” in an exag­gerated fashion. The other clues in the category also included humorous visual puns. It made me smile.

Expect subtle spoilers.

I went to see Atonement this afternoon. I was a tad disappointed.

First of all, the movie couldn’t decide which story it was trying to tell. I wanted a love story. It was supposed to be a love story. But it couldn’t focus on the romance. It spends reels 1–3 and 6–7 on Birony’s story of guilt and atonement, while reels 4 and 5 are spent on Robbie’s WWII Interlude. It spends a lot of time with Robbie in France, following him as he tries to “come home” to Cecilia, which would all be well and good if we had spent a little more time with the two of them before he went off to prison. But we didn’t. We were following Birony around, because it is ulti­mately her story, not Robbie’s or Cecilia’s.

Consequently, what romance that was there wasn’t really all that romantic. There was very little infor­mation given on which to base a romance. We know a little about how Robbie and Cecilia met; how she was pissed off that he went up to Cambridge at the same time she did when she was an heiress and he was the favored son of the house­keeper; how she wouldn’t talk to him for years; how she thought him beneath her; but we get jack on how and why she grew to love him. There’s next to no basis for the kind of romance they appear to have later on. They act like they’re in love, but there’s no reason given for them to actually love each other. The romance is born out of mere circum­stance, making the War Interlude feel very hollow.

On a related note, the sex scene is shot like a hand-​​held porno. Shaky, out of focus, here an arm, there a breast. The kind of image where you’re not exactly sure what you’re looking at, but it sure is naughty. And no sound. This three minutes in the library is supposed to be the ultimate recog­nition of their love for one another, but it’s utterly unro­mantic and made to look messy, dark, and shameful. It really upset me.

Of course, I under­stand why they did that. The sex had to look bad in order for little Birony to misin­terpret it. Again, the story tries to split its attention between Birony’s story and Robbie and Cecilia’s story, and comes out the worse for it.

Fortunately, Birony’s story at least has some nice drama. The first three reels (with the exception of the sex scene) were at least inter­esting and engaging in that way. And much of the film was very beau­ti­fully shot. There is a single shot in the War Interlude that lasts a full five minutes, weaving on a wonder­fully smooth Steadicam through the British evac­u­ation from Northern France, and there’s a beautiful scene where Robbie finds himself behind the screen in a movie theatre, showing a romance movie, pining (hollowly) for his lost love.

There is a scene, just before the epilogue, that was very disori­enting and confusing, based on what had happened earlier in the film, and I found myself unnec­es­sarily confused. Turns out, there is an expla­nation to be had in the epilogue. The epilogue opens with an abrupt time shift that completely dropped me from the film. It took a moment to pick it back up again. The epilogue is a tear­jerker ploy, but I wasn’t as offended as I usually am by such devices because it was not entirely unsup­ported by the previous events. That confusing scene just before the epilogue turns out not to be true, and the epilogue tells us why. It was an odd scene for me because Birony’s story had been told well enough for me to guess that it wasn’t true before the explanatory epilogue. Still, the attempt at an emotional ending was rather forced.

Overall, the film (and whatever critic it was who described it as the most “achingly romantic film” in so-​​and-​​so a time) confuses roman­ticism with sorrow. There is no happiness in the film. Even Birony’s concluding assertion that she finally gave Robbie and Cecilia the happiness they wanted is really quite empty, given the method by which she chose to do it.

I like most of my family. I do not waste my time on those family members whom I do not like, their pathetic attempts to induce holiday guilt notwith­standing. Funny, I haven’t spoken to some of these people in over a dozen years and they still think they can guilt slash bribe me into calling them. Or visiting. Or even acknowl­edging their existence. They just don’t get it. I really like Christmas. I’m not going to spoil it by concerning myself with unpleasant people.

On a marginally-​​related note, has anyone had any pleasant expe­ri­ences with any of the various gift-​​card exchange services on the Internets?

Most of the family members I do like come to my mother’s house for the Christmas. This year, some came early for my little sister’s grad­u­ation party. I say little, but she is only four years younger than I am. She just graduated from University with a business degree. Yay, her.

The day before her party, she had an interview with a local sales firm. Or at least, that’s what she thought she had. She found the position through online job-​​hunt service Monster Dot Com. The position was adver­tised as being with High-​​Profile Sales Firm A. She was excited. The interview was an all-​​day affair. Now, in the legal world, all-​​day inter­views mean fancy lunches, meeting the partners, chatting with asso­ciates, cigars, expensive liquor, and high-​​profile social affairs. Alas, my poor sister arrived at her interview to discover several unfor­tunate things.

First, the position for which she was being inter­viewed was not with High-​​Profile Sales Firm A, but with No-​​Name Back-​​Door Shady Firm B, which only had a passing business asso­ci­ation with High-​​Profile Sales Firm A. To wit, they shared an office. No-​​Name Back-​​Door Shady Firm B didn’t even have its own offices.

The business cards were home-​​printed. And had colorful graphics.

And it turns out, “all-​​day interview” means shadowing someone doing door-​​to-​​door business solic­i­ta­tions in area strip-​​malls.

A truck-​​driver offered her ten extra dollars to take a ride in his truck with him.

She got a citation from the police for solic­iting without a license.

The poor thing was trau­ma­tized, and imme­di­ately decided to go to graduate school to get her MBA. She said to me, “If these are college-​​educated people, I want nothing to do with them.” I promised her I would blog about her experience.

Unlike Filbbert, I have a really neat sister. She lives near me, and we do stuff together sometimes.

Some 40 people showed up at the house for her party. I knew she was much better at the making friends thing than I am, but this was ridiculous! I don’t like crowds of people, espe­cially people I don’t know, making inane conver­sation and drinking too much wine. I hid in the kitchen most of the time, and spent some time talking with a friend of the family (who also happens to be an attorney) about law school. Yet again, law school manages to taint every corner of my life.

I did make an extra­or­dinary triple-​​chocolate peppermint cake, though.

Yes, those are candied mint leaves. It was a major hit. The recipe is here. I followed it exactly except that I used only 1/​2 cup of chocolate chips in the cake batter, because I couldn’t find miniature chips and I thought 1 1/​2 cups of full-​​size chocolate chips would make the cake way too chunky, and I baked it in two pans instead of one. They took only about 28 minutes to bake.

The chopping of the chocolate, however, was quite time-​​consuming. All in all, I spent about 4 hours on it, excluding the buying of ingre­dients, forgetting the cake pan, and having to drive all the way back to the Wal-​​Mart to get it. It became known in the family as the “All-​​Day Cake,” and I have been informed that I will be asked to make it again in the future.

After the party, the rest of Christmas was mostly unre­markable. I kept alive my three-​​year-​​old tradition of being miserably sick on and around Christmas, but that didn’t stop me from making the most of it. I’ll spare you the unpleasant details of this year’s ailment, but I should make a general warning never to sneeze while eating raw cauliflower.