How to Spot a Psychopath

While I wasn't looking, Leo Stoller went bankrupt.

Yay!

In case you haven't been keeping tabs on the world's more obnoxious crazy people, Leo was the operator of a company called Rentamark, whose Web site is now dead. Stoller's companies' only reason for existence was to pretend they owned the trademark rights to large lists of dictionary words, despite the facts that (a) Leo conducted no business besides suing people for using his "Famous Marks", (b) the people he sued had often been using the name before Stoller had registered it, and (c) Leo sent out scattershot legal letters to anybody who ever used one of his precious words ever in any context, business or not, on the off-chance that they were dumb enough to give him some money just 'cos he sounded scary.

Leo never won a case and indeed could never win a case if he lived to be a million; worse lawsuits have been filed, but that doesn't say anything in Leo's favour.

But some major companies actually did settle with him rather than go to court. And that kept him going, for a while.

Read all about it in my letters column here, wherein is told the tale of a poor kid scared out of his wits by legal letters from this nut on the other side of the world.

Anyway, Leo's finally broke now. Not in jail, but broke. That's a start.

But have no fear - he's still got a blog!

[2009 UPDATE: That BlogSpot blog is now dead. Leo moved to rentamark.blog.com, but that now appears to belong to someone who's pretending to be a lion. The wit and wisdom of Leo Stoller can now be found at www.rentamark.net. This other blog.com blog serves, I think, as an interesting counterpoint to Leo's own writings.]

In it, Leo applies his towering intellect to many issues, like for instance the vital importance of voting Republican, for the sake of some people he thinks are called "General MaCarthur" and "Donald Rumsfelt" (awww, he must be all cut up about that, huh?), among other well-thought-out positions.

In many of his recent posts, Leo advertises his services as a very professional and important "trademark expert" with an, um, Hotmail address. But he screws up the mailto: link so there's a trailing slash on the end of "hotmail.com". That breaks the address.

It's visible right there on the page as well as in the mailto: itself, over and over, but Leo's eagle eyes ain't spotted it yet.

I doubt there are many people who are dumb enough to want to talk to Leo, yet smart enough to remove the trailing slash before sending their message.