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Good news! Now you can help advance the cause of medical science, even after you’re dead!:
A biological anthropology professor at the University of Northern Iowa, Tyler O’Brien, envisions turning some prime pasture in the Midwestern state into a body farm, where human bodies — buried, stuffed in car trunks or exposed to the elements — can provide scholars and criminalists with new benchmark data on human decay.
“This idea has strong scientific value,” O’Brien said. “To answer the question of how long a body has been dead, how long a person has been missing, is critical to criminal investigations.”
O’Brien is seeking a grant of $400,000 to $500,000 from the National Institute of Justice and other organizations to obtain the land and set up the project.
This is big! And it brings up a number of valid concerns:
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Ever eat a lemon?
Picture a series of lemon-eating, funky-lip faces, a wonderful Andy Warhol montage. I would pay $400 Zlotys to see it at New York’s Whitney Museum. I would pay $280 Zlotys to see it at the San Antonio Museum for the Arts. In Burkina Faso you might have to pay me to see it, as there is no direct flight and the rebels have captured all the artists.
I once read that Texas dentists were trying to get children to stop eating lemons. There is a tradition of Southwest lemon eating that goes back generations: cut a hole in a lemon, shove in some dried, salted piece of fruit called “Chinese candy,” and then squeeze the tangy, salty juice all over your tounge and your fringed rodeo shirt and your alligator boots and everything else you?ve got on.
Well it seems lemon eating plays hell with your tooth enamel, and Texans have been urged by their dentists to cease and desist and watch Lemony Snicket movies instead. Which is not to say that Jim Carey is a favorite of Lone Star dentists either, but at least he doesn?t promote tooth decay. They think.
On the other hand, a chat room poster I know named Green Hell reminds us that ?lemons rock, brilliant when your slamming tequila and you just eat one! Gobble…?
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To: Heads of Sales & Marketing
Re: Keeping your jobs and our pricing strategy
All:
It has come to senior management’s attention that we’re spending tens of thousands of dollars a year trying to figure out how to price our items. People, I don’t care if that’s what they teach you at Harvard, Yale, or Wharton. At dear, old Pace University’s night business program, we learned business is all about moving product, and recent figures show me we’re not doing that. To that end, CFO de Krook and I want to roll out our new, more aggressive pricing plan. Let’s call it “Operation Undercut.”
Instead of pulling your chins and scratching your heads trying to work out toe the penny what our logistics and infrastructure costs are, here’s what I want you to do. When you quote a price to a retailer or wholesaler, casually ask what our competitor is charging for the same item. If the price is lower than the one you quoted–say forty-seven cents per item, compared with your offer of fity [sic] each–cough twice, slap your forehead with your palm, and say, “Oh, did I say fity cents a unit? I meant forty-six cents, because you’re such a good customer.”
I know you all work on commission, based on the size of the sale you’ve made, so I understand your fears that shaving margins will also sharply reduce your commissions. That’s why this memo is circulated on the same day that we’ve just introduced our new “Overpriced Executive Line,” basically the same office-supply garbage we already sell, produced at the same places and for the same cost, just stuck in nicer gold-colored and silver-colored boxes with ribbons on them, designed to make executives feel important and willing to pay 40 percent more.
So be of good cheer and keep those expense accounts down. Go forth and sell, sell, sell!
Onward and upward,
The Guy Who Writes The Checks
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Today I visited the Motor Vehicle Division to renew my driver’s license. I thought the photo came out a little better than most:
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There is the old joke about a couple of men at a party watching the dog of the house as he licked his private parts.
?I wonder why he does that,? one wondered.
The other smiled and said ?Because he can.?
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