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Snake Oil

This deserves a post of its own.

Where does the term snake oil come from?

Chinese labourers on railroad gangs involved in building the First Transcontinental Railroad first gave snake oil to Europeans with joint pain.^[1] When rubbed on the skin at the painful site, snake oil was claimed to bring relief. This claim was ridiculed by rival medicine salesmen, and in time, snake oil became a generic name for many compounds marketed as panaceas or miraculous remedies whose ingredients were usually secret, unidentified, or mis-characterized and mostly inert or ineffective.

Patent medicines originated in England, where a patent was granted to Richard Stoughton‘s Elixir in 1712.^[2] Since there was no federal regulation in the USA concerning safety and effectiveness of drugs until the 1906 Food and Drugs Act^[3]and various medicine salesmen or manufacturers seldom had enough skills in analytical chemistry to analyze the contents of snake oil, it became the archetype of hoax.

The snake oil peddler became a stock character in Western movies: a travelling “doctor” with dubious credentials, selling fake medicines with boisterous marketing hype, often supported by pseudo-scientific evidence. To increase sales, an accomplice in the crowd (ashill) would often attest to the value of the product in an effort to provoke buying enthusiasm. The “doctor” would leave town before his customers realized they had been cheated.^[1] This practice is also called grifting and its practitioners are called grifters.

As you can see, it’s a very common and OLD phrase and yet someone at the trademark office apparently thought to award it to BPAL to use.  So now, BPAL is apparently abusing this TM and they’re going after another small formulator.  Not because she’s duping their scent.  Because she has a product with the same name as one of their one million (crappy) scents.  Say what?

Needless to say, they’ve successfully made my Black List for being a bully!  You can read another opinion on it here.

Indie Style

I think the first mailing of the Awesome Box was a success!  Still, I know there are a lot of people who haven’t heard of it or indies that might want to participate.

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The Black List

Don’t forget to submit y our entries to my Black List.  There will be two parts, my personal list as well as a list of companies complied by readers.

So far, there have been some eye-opening submission!

The Links

Don’t forget The Morbid the Merrier has it’s own site now!

BRB, doing this to all my shoes.

Oh, dear God.

Green with envy.

I almost bought these.

So Springy!  I’m already looking forward to it.

Your Turn

Have a Merry Christmas if you celebrate, if not, have a wonderful weekend!