But I find the entirety of One World’s official complaint hilarious. Prior to the launch of One World and its Water Lantern Festival events, the term “Water Lantern Festival” meant nothing to people.īecause I work in the financial sector, I regularly look at documents that would be extremely boring to anyone of moderate intelligence who actually values their time, so maybe my filters are screwed up. When One World first approached venues about the type of events it wanted to host, venues did not immediately understand the concept of floating lantern festivals because no such event existed at the time within the continental United States. What fascinates me is the way in which One World’s legal complaint describes the specific and unique qualities of the calculatedly generic water lantern festivals they began, in either 2017 or 2018 (it’s a little bit unclear), trying to talk cities into allowing them to host: (They also own YOLO Enterprises, LLC, almost certainly because Prestige Unlimited was already taken.) They are also claiming that one of their competitors, 1000 Lights, LLC, is run by a former One World employee ( what?) who stole not only their idea for putting on generic water lantern festivals ( really?) but, according to the claim, also some of their clients ( gasp!). One World Lantern Festival, LLC, an entity started by gentlemen by the name of Michael Schaefer and David Knight, runs Water Lantern Festival and is claiming to be the inventors of water lantern festivals in toto. What I learned is that some guys in Utah are instituting legal action against some other guys in Utah about who owns what intellectual property regarding the invention of lantern festivals. I know this because I was so badly shaken by the experience that as soon as I got home and tossed the bucket of ice cream at my ungrateful family members who had no idea what a harrowing experience I had just endured, I ran immediately to the computer and researched like a madman. It’s not Water Lantern Festival-it’s just a water lantern festival. Was I so checked out, my citizenship so lazy, that I didn’t even know about Portland’s esteemed Water Lantern Festival? My thought was stupid.) As I made my way out of the park and toward the store where I was supposed to procure a bucket of ice cream for my mewling family, I found myself walking against the traffic of people who continued to file into the park. Was it possible that through some strange, multiple-decades-long sequence of events, I had never turned to a certain newspaper page, had never clicked the right web links, and had never overheard a conversation about the yearly lantern festival? The more I thought about this, the more I began to talk myself into the idea that this was not just possible, but in fact quite likely. I am not the most assiduous reader of the city’s newspapers (like many mid-tier cities, Portland no longer has a daily print paper), and I began to wonder if Portland did indeed have a lantern festival, but I had somehow never heard about or noticed it. Because I am an adult of great competence, however, I did what I usually do when confronted with something I don’t understand: I became disoriented and frightened. A banner read “Water Lantern Festival,” but I had no memory of lantern festivals in Portland. I could think of no particular holidays in early June. No matter where or how I looked, though, I could not discern just what the Officially Sanctioned Community Event was. I knew it was officially sanctioned because evident in great quantity were tents and banners, wristbands and branded knapsacks, the sound of amplified music, and food trucks. I assumed there would be the usual clutches of homeless people, a handful of folks smoking joints while watching their friends try to juggle exotic juggling implements the names of which I do not know, and of course people in the Dogs May Run Free and Terrorize Each Other Here area smiling in that determined, nervous way dog park folks smile, since they must be prepared for a dog- or human- or dogs-and-humans fight at any moment.īut that is not what I found at all! What I found instead was a park semi-full of people, all of them either already at, or walking rapidly toward, some kind of Officially Sanctioned Community Event. When I stepped into Laurelhurst Park in Portland, Oregon, last Saturday evening, I expected to find the park as lovely and quiet as it usually is at the end of the day.
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