I was lay leader for Shir Shabbat today; I also was the Board rep, so I had to read the announcements; I was also the darshon, the person who talks about the Torah portion. Today’s portion was Vayigash (Genesis 44:18-47:27), the end of the Joseph story. It is full of material – Joseph reveals himself to his brothers and is reunited with his father, Jacob’s family (all 70 of them) come to Egypt, Jacob and Pharaoh meet, Jacob’s family are allowed to dwell in Goshen, Joseph institutes a 20% tax on all the land in Egypt, and more.

I couldn’t decide what to talk about. And I was running out of time. So I did some quick research on Sefaria and found a text study by Nicole Auerbach of the Central Synagogue which quoted an article by Rabbi Shai Held about “The Fourth Cardinal Sin of Judaism, Humiliation” which gave me material to read aloud and add my own spin to. Dayenu (it was enough).

This evening, there was Havdalah and Happy Hour at Shir Hadash to give some of us a chance to meet another Rabbinical candidate. It was a good event, with too much food and some good discussions. The candidate did a little teaching, too, but the bulk of the opportunity for that will come Monday evening.

And in between all of that, we took some nice (if chilly) walks before the rain that’s expected for the next couple of days.

Not a bad way to spend Saturday, not at all.

I started following a few lawyers on Twitter during the period between the election and the Inauguration – they would interpret the filings and rulings in the various cases that were being filed in an attempt to nullify the election. As the cases got nuttier, the interpretations got funnier.

One of the lawyers I’m still following is Akiva Cohen. He’s writing about topics other than the elections most of the time these days, but he still gives amusing disaster tours of goofy litigation. Yesterday, he wrote about a bonkers lawsuit against Wizards of the Coast (the owners of Dungeons and Dragons) by a new company, “TSR LLC”, which wanted D&D-related copyrights assigned to them on the grounds that Wizards wasn’t using them (which apparently is not possible).

His explanation ran for 40-50 tweets, going into the differences between trademarks and copyrights, and I laughed all the way through.

In discussing trademarks, he threw in a reference to “genericide” – when a company loses its trademark because they don’t defend it when it’s used to refer to an entire category of products (for example, “dry ice” was a trademark, owned by the DryIce Corporation of America).

Some companies go to extremes to defend their trademarks – both Coke and Pepsi used to send mystery shoppers to restaurants which didn’t carry their product to make sure that someone who asked for it was told it wasn’t available. A few years ago, the Velcro Company created a funny video begging people not to say “Velcro” when referring to hook and eye fastening cloth – I enjoyed it, as well as the “behind the scenes” video and the one with responses from viewers. Watch it here:

TSR LLC withdrew their complaint today, btw.