Kid Stuff

Here’s a question for you: Where do Googles come from? You’ve probably used Google for years without wondering where these benevolent, informative creatures originated, but you should be able to guess.

The answer: the Planet Goo!

Really. It’s right there on the Internet at the Googles.com website. It seems a group of Googles showed up on Earth at some unspecified point to “take our children to a better place — right where they are.”

I guess it’s not kidnapping if they don’t go anywhere.

Strange as it may seem, the Googles did not invent Google. Hence, not surprisingly, there was trademark litigation that ended in a settlement in 2008. The owner of “Googles” did not get stomped because that trademark was registered before “Google.”

I don’t know the terms of the agreement, but this explains why there hasn’t been a “Google Kids, a Tool for Being a Smartass Around Adults.”

There are now, however, a YouTube Kids and Google Play and they sparked the Googles lawsuit over a breach of the settlement agreement.

You’d think, since the settlement, that the Googles people would have profited mightily – from careless typers if nothing else. But as recounted in a federal court ruling in New York last week, that hasn’t happened. In fact, Googles.com didn’t have much of anything on it for years.

Now try searching for Googles on Google.

Googles? What Googles?

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a website sells T-shirts on the internet and no one can find it on Google, does it make a sale? The philosophical implications are profound.

The federal judge ruled against the current Googles owner, SM Kids, LLC, because it hadn’t been using the trademark for online kid stuff.

It is using it now, though. Probably not a coincidence.

Youth. Kids — they grow up so fast. Really, really fast it seems these days.

Check out the beginning of the first sentence from a ruling the other day by the Vermont Supreme Court: “Juvenile G.B., born in June 2017, appeals the court’s order denying his petition to terminate mother’s parental rights ...”

Later, we learn that “G.B. argues that the court failed to view the question of whether mother would be able to parent within a reasonable period of time from the perspective of the juvenile.”

This is either the world’s smartest infant or there’s something going on that we don’t know about in Vermont. This could explain Bernie Sanders.

And then there was this in a federal ruling in Michigan: “All claims arose out of Jimmy’s kindergarten classmates’ taking inappropriate photographs of Jimmy on their school-issued iPads.”

The genius of this is that the kindergarteners devised a clever workaround for what they must have deemed an annoying restriction — they were given iPads that didn’t allow access to “inappropriate internet content.” So they created their own.

Jimmy, by the way, does not seem to have been an innocent victim. There’s a picture of him “with his pants pulled down, bent over spreading his butt cheeks with his hands, with his head turned facing the camera and smiling.”

It’s never too early to learn modeling technique.

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