Blog Archives
That’s So Not Raven! Disney Reportedly Applied To Trademark “Day of the Dead!”
CNN reports that the Walt Disney Company ”filed an application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to secure the phrase ‘Día de los Muertos,’ or ‘Day of the Dead,’ across multiple platforms.”
More from the article, followed by original comedy:
“Día de los Muertos is a traditional holiday celebrated on November 1 and 2 in Mexico and across Latin America. People honor the lives of lost family members or friends by building altars, holding processions, decorating gravesites and placing offerings for loved ones.”
Following a backlash, Disney reportedly withdrew the application.
3 More Potentially Unpopular Things For A Family Entertainment Company To Try To Trademark
1. Mother’s Day. Sorry folks, we’re going to have to wish you a happy “Person-Who-Lugged-You-Around-For-Nine-Months-Prior-To-Birth” Day to avoid paying royalties.
2. The Word “Trademark.” Just try to write news stories like this ever again for free, CNN! And kids may find a movie about trademarks as magical as movies about death.
3. “Brunch.” Yeah, we’ve got more bad news, kids. Now that “Brunch” has been trademarked, you’re going to have to take out your mother for “Fast-Lunch” to celebrate ”Person-Who-Lugged-You-Around-For-Nine-Months-Prior-To-Birth” Day. And because the restauranteurs take the idea of “Fast-Lunch” literally, the whole meal has to last under ten minutes, nine minutes of which your mother will remind you is significantly less time than she spent in labor.
Yeah, But Does This Company Give A Severance Package For My Cats, Too?
MarketWatch reports that Yahoo Inc. is offering a new incentive employees: gifts for their cats and dogs!
What could the gifts be? According to the article, Yahoo will not comment beyond saying that the gifts will be “Yahoo-branded.”
3 Yahoo Branded Gifts We’d Like To See For Employee Cats And Dogs
1. Voice modifiers that change your dog’s bark to a Yahoo yodeler’s yodel. Time to give the neighbors something more interesting to complain about than “incessant barking.”
2. Lasers that live stream Yahoo Finance stock quotes for Yahoo onto your dog to determine whether employee pet gifts are correlated with stock values.
3. Dog and cat sweaters with controversial headlines to get people to click on (formerly known as pet) your cat at dog. A sweater with a link saying “You won’t believe who Justin Bieber had ice cream with” or “Which ice creams in your freezer may actually kill you” will lead to plenty of clicks on your pet!
While Everyone’s Been Talking About Apple Innovating “This” and Google “That,” McDonald’s May Be Doing Some Innovating Of It’s Own!
In a CNBC interview with the CEO of McDonald’s, the CEO reportedly said that McDonald’s is looking at “innovative ways” to extend breakfast hours for customers!
We haven’t attended McDonald’s Hamburger University outside Chicago, so we can only speculate as to what these “innovative ways” may be, and also whether students at Hamburger University are being asked for innovative ways to serve breakfast in exam questions.
3 Innovative Ways To Extend Breakfast Hours We Would Write In Response To A Question On A Fast Food University Exam
1. Use the equipment that makes breakfast during non-breakfast hours! Then insert breakfast ingredients like eggs, burrito shells, and cheese-melted-to-wax-paper into the breakfast-making equipment.
2. Instead of in store and drive-thru menu boards that magically make breakfast items disappear way too early in the day, put all of the items on one menu. Or if technology will not allow for that, use one “secret” menu. Because if you really have to consult a menu at McDonald’s, you’ve kind of missed out on decades of pop culture and probably don’t think Happy Days has jumped the shark, if you even knew what that saying meant. Which you don’t.
3. Make students with Bachelor’s degrees from Hamburger U get Masters Degrees at Waffle House University, and Ph.Ds at Denny’s U! Those innovators have been making breakfast and hamburgers and, in at least one case waffles since long before Fonzie jumped the shark!
If Nobody In Italy Wants To Make Pizza, We Wonder If This Will Force A 30 Days Or It’s Free Policy…
CNBC reports that despite having the worst unemployment record in two decades, Italy has a shortage of 6,000 pizza-makers, that it is having trouble filling!
3 Pizza-Related Shortages We Do Not Want To See!
1. A shortage of items to stuff Pizza Hut crusts with. Cheese! Hot Dogs! More pizzas like a Russian Matryoshka doll! We just hope the madness never ends!
2. A shortage of Dr. Oetker products. Dr. Oetker provides frozen pizzas in countries like Canada and the United Kingdom and luxury hotels elsewhere. We don’t know whether the Doc had a Ph.D or medical license, or even why being a doctor is necessary for frozen pizza products, but if you test us with a shortage, we will ask to see your license, Doctor!
3. A shortage of junk mail related to discounts on delivery pizza! This is a waste of paper that could be used to stuff the crusts of cheap pizzas!
Man Could Have Had Incredible Return On Investment On 14-Year-Old Hamburger on eBay!
CNN reports that a Utah man found a 14-year-old McDonald’s mummified hamburger in his coat pocket, which he has since refused to sell to on eBay for $2,000 or to a radio DJ for $5,000.
The man paid $0.79 for the burger, so that would be over a 632,000% rate of return for something bought in 1999 before the dot com bubble crash! Look out, Warren Buffett, Omaha isn’t the only rural state full of awesome investors!
3 More Things The Man Could Consider Selling For $5,000
1. 60 Bottles of 14-Year-Old Whiskey. The man lives in teetotalling Utah, he should take what he can get! Especially since we’re guessing the whiskey is probably safer to consume than a rebellious, teenaged-hamburger. As Jim Cramer might say “Sell, sell, sell!”
The bigger question: is plastic a good long-term investment?
2. IKEA meat products filled with horse or the-opposite-of-elk or any-creature-not-on-the-label DNA! These items are rare to begin with. When was the last time you noticed food in the winding furniture maze of an IKEA store? And these food items in the news are becoming rarer by being recalled. That’s where we’d put our food-in-the-pocket-for-14-years investment money! Buy, buy, buy!
3. His soul. As we wrote last year, those things totally go for less than $2,000 on eBay, so $5,000 is a fantastic deal relative to an old burger. That said, souls are valuable for making proper decisions of which food items to buy or sell on eBay. Hold, hold, hold!
Congratulations! You Did Not Win The Lottery! And That Is *Good* News!
Golden Girl Finance reports that a 2010 study by researchers at several universities indicates that “the more money you win in the lottery, the more likely you are to end up bankrupt.”
From the article:
“Similar research from the National Endowment for Financial Education estimates that 70 percent of people who had unexpectedly come into large sums of money ended up broke within seven years.”
Didn’t win a lottery today? That’s great news! You don’t need money to read these:
3 Ways To Celebrate Not Inheriting Money, Winning The Lottery, Or Gaining Other Unexpected Windfalls (That Would Lead To Your Financial Ruin!)
1. Time for a ticker tape parade in your living room! Don’t know what ticker tape is in 2013? That’s okay – it was used to let people know stock prices before the internet was invented. Which means if you can get your hands on some old ticker tape, you can celebrate not only how lucky you are that you didn’t win the lottery, but also that you didn’t invest your winnings in shares of apparent blue chips of the 1970s Kodak or Polaroid!
2. Get really out-of-control drunk on the cheapest light beer your convenience store sells. Why? Because you can celebrate the fact you won’t do something stupid like buy a round for strangers in a bar, because you have no money for cab fare to the bar. Remember, you have no money. After buying the beer, you can’t even buy rotating hot dogs or useless lottery tickets at the convenience store, so enjoy your freedom!
You luckily can’t afford to buy these drunk young people a thousand yards of beer!
3. Don’t spend the night in a haunted mansion! Only suckers hoping for inheritances from rich eccentric uncles they never met have to spend a night in a haunted mansion. At least that’s how it worked in 1950s movies and the Flintstones. Anyway, while you’re watching your walls not bleed tonight, and nobody’s crawling out of the TV like Poltergeist while some weather girl reads useless lottery numbers, you can celebrate that no eyeballs are going to peer out of the paintings on your walls. Ghosts really aren’t interested in watching someone drink a couple of six packs of Natural Light while watching some other sucker try to get a windfall on American Idol!
Are Upscale Homeless People Thumbing Their Noses After Urban Outfitters’ CEO Reportedly Called Customers “Upscale Homeless” People?
Buzzfeed reports that at a September 2012 analyst day, the CEO of Urban Outfitters described the namesake store’s customer as “the upscale homeless person…”
Here’s the quote from the article, which also refers to the company’s Anthropologie brand:
“”The Urban customer, we always talk about, is the upscale homeless person, who has a slight degree of angst and is probably in the life stage of 18 to 26…The Anthropologie customer is a bit more polished, a bit more older and she has much less angst…”
Sounds like a great idea for a marketing campaign, if by “marketing campaign” you mean “potentially poor choices of words you tell analysts and not your customers.”
The good news is hearing this may create more angst in the company’s customers, leading to greater angst-driven sales based on their apparent business model!
3 Questions That Arise From This Story
1. If the hipsters shopping at Urban Outfitters are “upscale homeless” people, what are the hipsters who shop at “American Apparel?” “Upscale” isn’t the first adjective that comes to mind based on some of the scantily clad models we’ve seen in American Apparel ads. Are “fluorescent” or “neon” adjectives? We hope so, because those are the first words we’re thinking of.
2. Is there a lesson here suggesting that spending too much on clothing might make you homeless?
3. Which kind of jeans best convey “angst?” We’ll vote skinny jeans since putting on tight jeans seems more likely to put people in a bad mood than looser denim.
Iran Confirms It Does Not Have A Time Machine, In Case You Wonder Who Those People Visiting You In Silver Unibody Suits from 2050 Are!
Update on a recent story we’ve been following! ABC News reports that Iran has set the record straight: they do not have a time machine.
3 Reasons We Already Knew An Iranian Scientist Didn’t Invent A Time Machine
1. The plot for the movie Hot Tub Time Machine seemed more plausible than the scientist’s explanation that the machine brings the future to you.
2. We already invented the time machine, which is how we keep a daily blog going, mocking news in what virtually seems like real time!
3. Iran didn’t go back to the year 2008 and sell all of its oil when it was at record prices. Instead, in 2008, Iran was reportedly holding a Chris de Burgh concert, which we can all agree was 20 years too late for that, a clear sign of not having a time machine!
Did Time Machine Inventor Use Time Machine To Predict China Would Steal His Time Machine?
Yesterday, we wrote about an Iranian scientist who claimed to have invented a “time machine” that sounded more like a “crystal ball” or “coin-operated fortune teller” or “random person who will take your money on the Atlantic City Boardwalk” than a time machine. According to the scientist, the machine can tell you your future for the next five to eight years.
According to the article, the scientist said this:
“The reason that we are not launching our prototype at this stage is that the Chinese will steal the idea and produce it in millions overnight.”
3 Questions That Arise From This Statement
1. Really, you think Chinese hackers don’t have the ability to break into your time machine and hack into its future? Are you sure the real reason you aren’t launching your machine is because it doesn’t work, and doesn’t provide kids with free Chuck E. Cheese coupons for prizes? What a rip-off!
2. Does China really need to build a million machines that tells people the next five years looks a lot like the last five years: producing iPhones 6 through 11 vs. iPhone 1 through 5?
3. Do you really believe Chinese pirates will take a break from pirating Scary Movie 5, which opens in theaters tomorrow? p.s. China, we’re certain sending this straight to DVD is actually doing audiences a favor!
