PFOOEY ON PFIZER AND OTHER SCIENCE NOTES

The pharmaceutical corporate giant Pfizer has announced pflans to pfire 800 researchers, or 8 pfercent of their research employees. Their thinking was basically, "To hell with curing any diseases, there's no money in that. We've had such success with making up pfony mental conditions and inventing new and pfowerful sedatives to control them, we've got lifelong addicts, er... customers pfor our Pfizer pfroducts. Towards that end, we're getting rid of the dead wood among our research pfeople, those pfoolish dreamers trying to cure cancer and AIDS on our dime!" To which sufferers of catastrophic diseases reply: "Pfuk you, Pfizer!"

In other pharmaceutical corporate giant news, Eli Lily has agreed to pay $1.4 billion to victims of their drug Zyprexa, invented to treat disruptive children. Well, after taking Zyprexa, disruptive was a mild term indeed since side effects included risk of sudden death, heart failure, pneumonia, psychosis, dementia and morbid obesity. Parents of so-called "disruptive" children are now advised by medical authorities to deal with having a spirited child rather than a demented, psychotic, pneumonia-ridden and really fat dead kid.

Media reports from all over the nation are remarking on the phenomenon of Arctic temperatures, heavy snow fall and icy conditions striking much of the nation. Some reporters are calling these things a national emergency and demand an immediate government response. Cooler heads call these occurrences "Winter."

Children the world over can now deliver an emphatic Na-na-na-na-na and a huge I told you so to parents who insist on applying that noxious poultice known as Vic's VapoRub to their chests and faces when they are congested. It has been found that this minty, burning concoction actually increases children's production of mucus! So much for 103 years of popular wisdom, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one.

In yet another confirmation that governments don't get science right all that much, the Federal government has exempted second-hand stores from mandatory testing for the presence of lead and other toxins in toys and children's products. Thrift store owners are pleased with the decision since they claimed they would be put out of business if they were legally forced to stop poisoning poor children. The only items that still must be tested for toxins are children's clothing, but thrift store owners are appealing to the feds to cease and desist this body blow to the American entrepreneurial spirit, citing centuries of tradition of major industries contaminating both American citizens and their environment. They are claiming unfair bias against small, independent child poisoners.

Researchers at Durham University have found that people who have a very high intake of caffeine have a greater tendency to hallucinate. That goes a long way towards explaining that guy you work with who says all those nutty things all the time. You know the guy. Yeah, that guy, the one with the suspenders and the taped up eyeglasses who drinks coffee all day long and eats the same thing for lunch every single day, two cans of sardines, a banana and three stale biscuits. The guy who uses Dixie Peach Pomade hair tonic and thinks everybody is plotting against him and that the building is poisoning him and has a girlfriend named Maude he's been dating for seventeen years but she's a real idiot and will never measure up his mother and who wears a yellow rubber raincoat and owns eleven cats and thinks that every sporting event is fixed and swears he gets radio reception through the filings in his teeth. And you thought he was just nuts. Who knew it was the caffeine?

To celebrate The Year Of The Ox, Japanese scientists have announced the cloning of the ancestral bull of a luxurious brand of beef. The late bull, named Yasufuku, has had his testicles frozen for 13 years until it was decided to recreate him. Four calves were cloned, making way for cloned beef to be marketed. The scientists involved in the project are feeling their scientific oats so strongly that they plan on recreating the long-extinct Wooly Mammoth from frozen DNA. They didn't say whether or not they plan to market Mammoth meat or just figure out how to recreate huge mammals after they have killed and eaten the last whale on earth. Construction of a freezer large enough to hold a whale's testicles is underway.