Welcome to Declassified, our weekly humor column.
Petty retaliation is not enough in international trademark law.
For example, if I was working at discount retailer Lidl (despite repeated applications for the job, which have yet to materialize), following last week’s chocolate bunny court ruling, a large scale planning a revenge.
As you may have noticed, a Swiss court ruled that a foil-wrapped chocolate bunny made by premium chocolate maker Lindt & Sprüngli Sprüngli sounds like an infection) and should be protected from imitators, including those created by Lidl.
As a result, a German discount retailer was ordered to stop selling versions of the rabbit-shaped confection and destroy all remaining inventory.
Now, I hope the word “destroy” doesn’t mean throwing the rabbit in the trash or feeding it all to Jürgen in the warehouse. Chocolate can certainly be melted and used again in another form. For example, the middle finger could be waved in the general direction of the Swiss jury, or molded into the letters FU LINDT.
Jonathan Drucker, former general counsel for Belgian chocolate maker Godiva, told The New York Times that Lindt was “the 800-pound gorilla of the chocolate industry.” So maybe they could turn Lidl Bunny into. An 800-pound chocolate gorilla?
Speaking of chocolate, in the UK the pound was devalued by Liz Truss and Kwasi Quarten and now the Mars Bar is the official currency.
And at a Conservative party conference, business secretary and cursed pencil Jacob Rhys-Mogg called for “freedom for chocolate oranges.”
Rees-Mogg urged shoppers to move chocolate closer to the checkout counter against new government rules in his country limiting where stores can display junk food.
“As a passive protest, may I encourage people to move the chocolate oranges to the checkout counter?” he told a packed room at the conference’s fringe event. “What I mean is chocolate orange freedom.”
Speaking of oranges, Donald Trump himself, the hellbeast of smashed apricots, gave his support to the work Truss is doing as British Prime Minister (Lest we forget, most others are dumping (The dumpster was full of dirty diapers and fish guts.)
“I feel like she might be right,” the golfer and former president said of Truss’ near-universally panned tax cut plan, which is somehow still on-going for the broadcaster. We talked about GB News.
Trump also claimed that Truss looked “very nice, very good” and received “a wonderful send-off from the Queen.”
caption competition
“The last one to ruin the economy is the loser.”
Can you do better? e-mail [email protected] or on twitter @pdallisonesque
I sent you this photo last time.
Thank you for many entries. Here are the best of our post bags – there are no prizes other than the gift of laughter.I think we can all agree that the gift of laughter is worth far more than cash or booze.
“Yes, ‘global’ is out of the question right now,” said Fred Meyers.
Paul Darrison is Politicoslots news editor.