On: Ask PG: Why are apostrophes filtered out of URLs?

Are you missing the other arm of the 'or'? Try the following, which assumes 'except' returns null if the second parameter equals the first.

  (or someone
      (except 'Apple some-company))

As a general style, although somewhat inverted, I prefer 'tailing syntax':

  (or
    (except someone 'pg 'rtm '_sh)
    (except some-company 'Apple 'Weyland-Yutani))

Yeap... you are right... this is why I shouldn't never post from my phone :)