Well I sent the letter to KFc on Friday. I don't know if I'll get a straight reply or not.But whatever it is should be interesting, and since it is a letter from them and even if it is corporate hype type CYA it will still be a primary source piece of material and IMO take priority to Snopes or Wiki since it's at least from the mouth of the corporation. I fully expect something along the lines of "Thank you for inquiring about KFC. We adopted the name as part of our corporate restructuring on Jan 1-Dec 31/ of 19whatever. Stockholders overwhelmingly approved the name change. Since then we've experienced a 9,999% growth rate. In reqards to your question about lawsuits, on the advice of counsel, it isn't the company's policy to comment on past,present, or pending litigation or to discolose royalty agreements that we might have with private or government agencies, since these usually have binding two-party non-disclosure agreements. Thank you for your interest in KFC and we look forward to you joining us for another meal at one of our fine restaurants." Or some such.


Turning to John Fogerty. All very interesting and as usual, the truth is much more subtle and complicated than it first appears. When it comes to copyright and patent law I'm strictly a camp follower. If something sounds interesting I follow it for a little while if it doesn't I ignore it. The last one I heard was that some food company applied for a patent on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The Patent Office turned it down since it was considered "self evident and unpatentable." The food company appealed saying that they had developed a process to prevent the jelly from soaking into the bread. Just heard it once on the news. So I don't know if it's for real or not. But I notice I haven't seen any PBandJ sandwhiches for sale yet. So how knows. Since Google Patents has been released I spend my time surfing that, since these have been issued and there's no disputing their validity. Here's one for the pharaohs. Portable tomb for resurrection from mummified tissue DNA US Pat. 5987720 - Filed Jul 8, 1997. Like the old commercial goes don't leave home without it. or how about hubcaps for your skateboard? Then look up Skateboard hubcap retrofit assembly US Pat. 4962968 - Filed Jun 5, 1989. Haven't seen Tony Hawk with any hubcaps on his skateboard so I'll assume that rolled into patent history. Do you need a solar powered mailbox? Check out Solar powered mailbox US Pat. 6799716 - Filed May 22, 2003 - World Factory, Inc. The list goes on and on and on. In addition to that I keep an eye on DARPA who gave us the internet and the stealth fighter. Now they're working on robots that look like birds can land on power lines and recharge themselves before taking off again and cigarette size RPV's Along with a whole list of other mind-boggling inventions.

As far as using Wikipedia goes everytime I've used it it has checked out correctly with other sources. In addition to that I got the definition of an obsolete job description that matched up perfectly with my what my research showed and answered an important question in my novel. When I researched the main character they had information that was correct, even though they didn't have any meaningful information on that person. My son who is a science major says that the Math, chemistry, and physics is right on the money and has always been accurate. And yes I too noticed that Wiki quoted snopes but snopes didn't cite anybody, which triggered my frustrated letter to KFC, to find out what really happened. So with Wiki and Snopes let the researcher beware.