There are days when you wake up after a 16 hour day at work and all you want to do is post cut-and-paste chunks from the New York Times and say...LOOK AT THIS! Especially when you have a long soppy essay half written not ready for posting, maybe not ever ready, about the unified theory of the weirdness of now. Well, that cutting-and-pasting is what I am doing today after getting in from work under eight hours ago...so there. I can't even look at the essay.

So...look at this!

...the team can be the Nationals forever more, but the Nationals may not want to be the Nationals because they may not be allowed to sell merchandise under that name, and who in professional sports wants to have a name that cannot be marketed for financial gain?

Did someone say, "Oops"?

Last week the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted a request by Bygone Sports, a Cincinnati company that specializes in historic trademarks and historic sports apparel, for federal trademark registration on the name Washington Nationals. The company applied for the trademark in September 2002.

Major League Baseball was aware of the Bygone Sports link to the name and thought it had reached an agreement with the company for the rights to the name. "We believe we own the name and the rights," said John McHale Jr., a baseball executive vice president. "We struck a deal prior to the announcement with the people who claimed they owned the name, and we've been fighting to get that agreement enforced. They didn't live up to the agreement.

It is one thing for someone to come out of the woods and claim to a name based on unregistered copyright or tangential trademark that really is not in the same field of human activity...but when someone like MLB enters into an agreement with some other person over a name it is pretty hard to later say that the name really is not the other guys.

This happens all the time or at least is not unknown. I know two people who owned small businesses with name "X". In one case, the family shop had been there for generations and low and behold a US conglomerate emerged by the same name that later wanted to move into Canada. Suddenly the small business family were very happy and the shop had a new name. In the other case, in the dot com boom, a boomy company found it needed to spend the foolish money of investors on a name it coveted...again a cheque passed hands and the general level of happiness in the world increased a little bit until the crash of April 2001.

But how do you end up awarding a name to a sports franchise when you are aware someone else owns the name already? Not good. Secretly, though, I hope they are the Washington Expos by 2007.