The real quote is 'Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a man of infinite jest and mirth' An James T Kirk never actually said "Beam me up, Scotty' either. Heleanor Feltham ---------- From: daemon To: MUSEUM-L Subject: Re: Ketchup and Hollywood Date: Tuesday, 12 August 1997 12:33PM Ketchup is actually not "copyrighted" but is a tradename of the Heinz company. That's why others call their product ketSup (or some other variant). McDonalds has been able to prevent even this having won suits over just the MC part, for instance against a furniture store called McFurniture. In other instances though, popular tradenames have crossed the threshold into public domain. This is why you now see so many oddly personalized editions of "monopoly". I don't know how it hapenned but Milton Bradley was not pleased to have lost their exclusive right to the product. On the hollywood bit, accuracy of perception has affected every type of perception. The line "play it again Sam" does not appear in that Bogey movie. But even Shakespeare was not immune from this. If my memory is correct, the line "Alas poor Yorick (sp?), I knew him well" was NOT one written by Shakespeare. As in the case of brandnames where the origins of many words AS brand names have been entirely forgotten, many many "facts" started as a bad piece of info that got into so many textbooks to be copied then by other textbooks that no one is even aware that the info pedegrie is dubious to begin with. There are many examples of this and I am sure museums fall prey. In one of my own fields of Theatre lighting, we make use of a luminare and lens identified both as simply a "Fresnel". ALL the books correctly identify that the unit and its associated stepped type lens are named after the French optician by the same name, but over the many years people then assumed that the naming meant that Fresnel had invented the new lens design. In fact, he had not. Although he aparently worked with the design and may have even made enhancements his name first became associated with the product because he had been the minister in France with jurisdiction over lighthouses. His insistance that all lighthouses use the new lens revolutionized coastal navigation. Once associated with him the lens became "his" lens. One more fun example from American Pop culture can be found with Bugs Bunny. As I understand it, the name came from one of the annimators (Chuck Jones ?) who at the time was nicknamed "Bugs". If the version I heard is correct, while the character without a name was being developed, the colleagues were left to call the character "Bugs' Bunny". Sometimes too I find that wrong impressions come from years of over simplification. Again in theatre history lore, the texts often cite Gilbert & Sullivan's Savoy Theatre in London as the first to be lit by electricity. Imagine my horror as a researcher, though, when I looked at actual accounts to discover the now unreported fact that the electrification only applied to the LOBBY. In the scheme of theatre lighting this doesn't count, but alas, now it's HISTORY so it has to be true! We know that "history is written by the victors". This seems especially true today of CORPORATE victors. In my lighting research I found an ad in The New York Times for a flashlight.....four years before "the flashlight was invented". It didn't take long armed with this info to trace down the origin of the misinformation. Much of lighting history comes from books written by those associated with General Electric (Edison's Company). So my strong guess is that the date one sees for the "invention of the flashlight" is really the date of the introduction of General Electric's flashlight! I can't WAIT to see the history of the personal computer......as it later will be written into history.....by Microsoft! RF