Google Officially Drops "Cleaners" From Name

FRIDAY, Feb. 2, 2007 (MM) - Google, Inc. announced today that its corporate name would no longer be officially registered as "Google Cleaners, Inc."

Originally incorporated in 1974 as "Professor Google's New-Fangled Tetrachlorinated Waterless Clothes-Laundering Sensation", the company had held the simpler "Google Cleaners" name since 1982. Once known for its chain of Gay Nineties-themed dry-cleaning outlets bearing the red, yellow and blue Google logo and beloved, mustachioed and monocled "Professor Google" mascot, the company in recent years had closed down its chain of brick-and-mortar dry cleaners and concentrated on its popular Internet search service and related business, though an Internet-based "Google Cleaners (BETA)" service ran experimentally in its Labs section for 17 months in 2004 and 2005.

Analysts believed that, while Google had stopped using "Cleaners" in official promotion and correspondence since 2003, the company had retained the name to strengthen its defensive position in trademark lawsuits from Googlesphere, licensing rightsholders for the lucrative "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith" newspaper comics publishing empire. While Google's counsel argued that the almost complete non-appearance of Barney Google in his eponymous comic strip since the death of creator Billy DeBeck in 1942 rendered the trademark indefensible, Googlesphere pointed to a 1978 settlement forbidding Google Cleaners from entering the comics business under the Google name as an enforceable contract, and had entered a total of 1,645 trademark lawsuits on the subject following the rise of Google's Internet search engine, whenever it could be proven that a search for "comics" on Google returned at least one hit.

The flood of trademark suits was interrupted only by Google's short-lived decision to exit Internet search and focus on its core dry-cleaning business for six months in 2001 and 2002, during which period the search engine was temporarily part of the Geocities free-home-page service and existed as "Blortal! The Portal That Blinks Constantly."

"Barney Google and Snuffy Smith" is currently drawn by John Rose.

Cognitive milestone update

At about a week shy of six months, Jorie has become much more adept at sitting up unsupported; she can do it for minutes at a time. It's important to keep spotting her, though, since she tends to tumble over unexpectedly and doesn't like it at all.

In just the past couple of days, she's also become interested in the cats. I'm not sure if she perceives them as intentional agents, but they're at least objects of interest for staring at and touching. Since the latter activity involves some risk, I've tried to make sure she is gentle about it and mostly touches Nestor, who is the most docile to humans, if not to other cats or to carpeting. She'd previously shown some interest in Lindsey's dog Mika when she was here, but Mika is much more energetic and Jorie found her funny.

Meanwhile, she's just on the edge of finding a game of peekaboo entertaining. She knows there's something peculiar going on there, but I think it's near the current limit of her intellectual capacity.

Mooninites and guerrilla marketing

I missed the whole Mooninite Scare while it was going down, and figured that Rob's summary was a good enough wrap-up of the whole sorry thing that I didn't need to say anything. But, reading between the lines of a Boston Globe article, Lindsay Beyerstein (who has been complaining about intrusive corporate "guerrilla marketing" campaigns for some time) has a new angle: the Glitch Crew guys who actually put up the signs and got arrested may have been hung out to dry by the marketing firm that served as the intermediary between them and Turner, a company called Interference. While Glitch Crew had no intention of creating a bomb scare, Interference might have tried to let it roll once it started.

There's a considerable amount of disagreement about what really happened, though, and Interference of course denies all this.