UCPC, Day 1

Ok, there's only one day, but it feels like a multi-day event.

First, I was surprised to find that there were several people who traveled great distances. Kudos to everyone who made it out. I'm sure it was worth your while.

As a presenter, I was sorry that I only got to attend two of the other presentations, neither of them by my ex-teammates, who were presenting at the same time. Each presenter gave his talk twice during the four sessions (14 presenters total, I think). Even the full-time attendees still then had to choose between presentations.

My talk (powerpoint here, one-page summary here ) went well, I thought. The two sessions had different feels to them. I incorporated some of the questions from the first session into the second, and as a result of that and other changes, I ran over on the second session after having 10-15 minutes in the first one just for questions. The second session went smoother as well, as I didn't have to fight over as many words, and knew when to just go ahead and leave one slide and start on the next.

I left before the panel discussion, as it was already after 5 pm and there was still a presentation going on in the auditorium.

Good job by George and Tiina assembling the myriad volunteers and vendors. You never would have known that this was the first of its kind by how well things seemed to go. Thanks to them.

what's in a name?

DoG, by any other name, would swill just as sweet.

So, who owns the name Death or Glory? A few years ago, a bunch of us got an email from some kid at a high school in Georgia, I think it was, who wanted to call themselves Death or Glory in our honor. Most of us, I think, didn’t want it to happen, as it might somehow sully the name, or perhaps would imply a relationship between the teams, and as we didn’t know them at all, couldn’t say they’d be good followers. It didn’t even occur to me at the time that there are tons of little Red Sox or Patriots teams out there without any hint of a link with the professional team, but then again, a Little League team would not be eligible for the World Series, while the junior DoG would technically have a shot at meeting big DoG in the finals of Nationals. Anyway, I don’t know if a few people responded or if every single one of us ignored the request, but we never heard from him again nor did we ever run across another DoG (not to say that there haven’t been copycat names like RoQ or BoG or anything else with the meme X or Y).


What got me thinking about this was that another old-timer suggested to me that now would be a good time to retire the name DoG, as Alex and I are almost certainly (usual disclaimer here) not coming back for another season in Open. Do we (and the other departed DoG from the early days) have any rights to the name? What if the team split into two factions and both wanted to keep the name? What if we wanted to call our Masters team DoG? What if the team started to play the HnH and the alumni decided that it wasn't appropriate for DoG? Could we ask the current players to think about a new name, and should they listen?

Who owns the name? There is no team owner. The members of the team have the right to come up with their own name, subject to decency requirements at big events, but what about when names are already taken? There have been a couple cases in ultimate history where teams have appropriated their names or logos from copyrighted entities (Arm and Hammer, Twisted Metal) and got into some trouble. How about Furious George even?

I knew I should have trademarked the name back in 1994.



PS. Did anything happen at the UPA Board meeting? Haven’t seen anything yet.