The United States Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement arm of the United States Postal Service, announced the arrest of 137 individuals in a simultaneous, multi-state raid yesterday. Special Agents from the Postal Service seized more than 42 tons of contraband pumpkin pie spice, scales, postage meters, stamps, baggies, envelopes, and other paraphernalia used to ship illegal pumpkin spice through the mail. Also found at the crime scene were more than two tons of Hazelnut-flavored coffee beans mailed with the spice to conceal the packages from pumpkin spice-sniffing dogs. While this raid is the largest since pumpkin pie spice was declared a Schedule I substance in 2020, it is still a small victory over an illegal trade consisting of more than 350 tons of pumpkin pie spice in 2022. Encrypted computers seized in the raid are suspected to have the mailing addresses of several coffee retailers that offer illicit pumpkin spice lattes. The Postal Service has requested the help of the National Security Agency to decrypt the data. More arrests are expected in the coming days.
Three more dogs have gone missing inside the Gladys Maria Shrine Memorial Dog Park in Cleveland, Ohio. The owners and their dogs arrived at the park at different times on Friday, but all three owners have been unable to find their dogs. The Cleveland Police and Animal Control have investigated the park property, found nothing out of the ordinary, and none of the missing dogs. The surrounding fence is intact, there are no places where the dogs could have escaped, and there were no suspicious people or activities occurring in the vicinity. One dog owner, Shari Smitts, had a GPS tracker on her dog’s collar, which still shows that her dog is inside the dog park fence and moving around. However, that dog and the tracker cannot be located. This brings the total number of missing dogs at this specific park to 28. The Cleveland City Parks Department has a public meeting on Tuesday to discuss the matter. Religious leaders held a prayer vigil outside the dog park. Several dog owners have hired dog whisperer Cesar Millan to help bring their dogs back from the park.
Associate Justice Marshall Smithers of the US Supreme Court announced that he can and will influence the outcomes of cases brought to the Supreme Court for a nominal fee. This public announcement brings suspicion about court influence for payment into the open. Justice Smithers confirmed that his vote on the court and his written opinions will favor the side providing the most “favorable incentives”. He also published a “bucket list” and fee table, which included exotic trips, expensive modes of transportation to get to those exotic locations, sports cars, speed boats, sports stadium naming rights, endangered species to be family pets, favorable loan terms (0% or negative interest rates or complete and immediate debt forgiveness), and desired universities for his children to graduate from whether they actually attended or not. The fee table also included an escalating scale based on the importance of the case. Most US Senators were publicly outraged by Justice Smithers’ announcement, secretly envious of his bucket list, duly impressed by his confidence, and called for hearings and impeachment of Justice Smithers. The House of Representatives, where articles of impeachment would have to be debated and adopted, chose instead to announce that the new Speaker of the House will participate in a “listening tour” with major US corporations. The Whitehouse is in price negotiations with Justice Smithers for discounts available to the Executive Branch.
2024 subcompact cars have 21% less interior space and are shorter by four inches, yet the price when compared to the 2023 models remains the same. If this were breakfast cereal, we would all complain about getting less product for the same price. In economics, it is known as “shrinkflation”. Shrinking already shrunken cars leaves big and tall car buyers with fewer choices other than XL or even XXL sized vehicles for a lot more money. A Mini Cooper spokesperson suggested that tall customers buy their convertible models and drive around with the top down all the time, leaving buyers in rainy and wintery states to laugh and cry a little at that suggestion. Critics of the company’s response photoshopped an average-sized clown into the 2024 Mini Hatch convertible with the top down. The clown is shown looking over the windscreen with a big smile painted on his face and a single tear. The American Association for Big and Tall People is pushing Congress to hold hearings on the issue. The Association has also shared its Big and Tall Manifesto, which calls for the enlargement of most products, the installation of people over six foot, four inches in positions of power, and the changes to building codes to raise the height of doorways.
Travelers that want to wake up in a luxury hotel in an exotic location and feel like they were still at home will love the new “Feel at Home” service at Homemark Hotels. Today, Homemark unveiled this hotel service for its Premiere Imposed Rewards members. As a complimentary service, Homemark will recreate the guest's home in their hotel room. Prior to a stay, guests can upload pictures, video, and audio of their families, bedrooms, and living spaces. Homemark’s specially trained room coordinators will create their hotel experience to be just like their home experience—same room, same bed, same furnishings, same annoying sounds, same loud kids, same dirty clothes, and same disorder and disarray. The guest’s social media posts are also mined for information to include complaints about neighbors, co-workers, kids soccer games, loud parties, broken appliances, grocery prices, and politics. Homemark hires actors to play key roles, such as “Annoying Neighbor”, “Whiny Child”, “Ex-wife Complaining about Alimony”, “Unemployed Brother-in-law”, and “Absent Father”. Guest will receive early wake up calls from lawyers, doctors with messages about their poor health, car warranty robocalls, a child asking for money, and even obnoxious neighbors with the latest gossip to share. Despite the extraordinary focus on realism, early reviews hint at trouble for the upstart hotel chain. Guests reported nightmares, panic attacks, depression, a feeling of worthlessness, and thoughts of suicide. In response to the early criticism, Homemark is making slight adjustments to the service to “better serve its sophisticated clientele and their unique home environments.”
General Motors Company has fallen on hard times yet again. However, falling vehicle sales numbers and poor economic conditions are not the cause. Simply put, the company’s investments in non-automotive ventures has not paid off. Chairman Joe Steele announced the change in product focus three years ago at a contentious board meeting where the other members of the board were forced to resign during the meeting. Steele’s plan called for product diversification and included shifting 35% of the auto assembly employees over to manufacturing a new set of products, including lady’s lingerie, fog machines, pet harnesses, beard trimmers and razors, and toothbrushes for large animals. Steele’s own internal “market research” determined that these particular product categories were ripe for automotive-style innovation and disruption and aligned well with the capabilities of the automaker. Steele appointed his cousin Tim to head up the new business ventures, who quickly started re-skilling union labor into industrial sewing machine operators, small appliance assemblers, and plastic mold experts. The costs to retool the ten manufacturing plants was $15B. However, reviews of the new GM products were lackluster at best. One reviewer described a General Motors Strapless Plunge Backless Bustier in White as “Solidly built with good suspension and clean lines. Sirius XM radio seems unnecessary. Nonerotic. GM logo was too large.” The reviews for the toothbrushes are too inappropriate to print here.
Tom Farmus-Gried’s two best friends and his current girlfriend are scheduled to testify in his trial for fraud and blackmail. If convicted, Farmus-Gried could spend the rest of his life in prison. Stewart Grandier, Philip Wang, and Sheila Eastern all served as executives in the Alpha Kat Research company, an investment firm funded by and supposedly independent of KittyExchange, Farmus-Gried’s company of cat web sites and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). “TFG”, as Tom Farmus-Gried is widely known, is accused of financial fraud in intentionally misstating the value of KittyExchange to fuel further trades of NFTs of cat pictures and videos in the marketplace. Alpha Kat’s expensive marketing efforts, outlandish advertising, and lavish spending on celebrity endorsements drove the value of KittyExchange even higher. Questions and concerns raised by investors on the valuation of KittyExchange led TFG and his friends to threaten and allegedly blackmail prominent voices in the feline NFT investor community. As interest in those NFTs waned and their value fell precipitously, TFG was unable to pay KittyExchange debts and allegedly misappropriated Alpha Kat Research funds, with the full knowledge of Ms. Eastern—his girlfriend and hand-picked CEO of Alpha Kat. Eastern, Grandier, and Wang all eagerly took deals from the prosecutor for their guilty pleas, several year of probation, and testimony against TFG. In a statement, TFG claimed that the three were never his friends, that they conspired against him and committed the crimes without his knowledge, and that he hardly knew them, despite being roommates in college.
Three months ago, the Eastern Middle High School Fashion Club announced its intentions to destroy the Chess Club and reclaim its lunch table. Under threat from neighboring lunch tables, the Chess Club, which was assigned its lunch table by the school's principal after the club members had been harassed and bullied by most of the other school clubs, secured an alliance with the Science Olympiad Club and the Mathletes. Tensions have escalated as the Chess Club has acquired more members and needed more lunch table space, encroaching on Fashion's neighboring table. In a recent skirmish, Fashion launched a withering attack consisting of hundreds of spitballs at Chess. The Cooking Club may have supplied the paper-wrapped straws used in the attack and lunch money to supply Fashion's fighters. The Chess Club responded with trebuchet-launched ink pellets that stained the clothes of the Fashion Club, requiring many of them to be sent home for the day. The Science Olympiad claimed that the trebuchet was on loan for a science class experiment and should not have been used in the attack. The Model United Nations held an emergency session to the discuss the situation. The Mathletes vetoed a Security Council Resolution condemning the violence against all club members citing the Chess Club's right to self-defense.
The President of Bolivia has announced an agreement for his country to acquire the Republic of Chile, taking the land-locked country and merging it with an all-coastline country. Citizens of Bolivia were frankly excited but concerned about this merger. However, President Luis Diaz-Silva argued the benefits of the combined nation in a televised address. The President of Chile, Diego Borges, held a hastily assembled press conference soon after to refute many of the claims made by Diaz-Silva. Borges showed a napkin with a hand-written agreement for Chile to acquire Bolivia should the Diaz-Silva lose in a back room poker game, which he did. So, technically, Chile acquired Bolivia. Despite the confusion and uncertainty, the Bolivian Navy is already eyeing its future coastal bases.
The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that National Guard soldiers cannot be housed in their own homes during the President’s War on Sugar. President William Taft VI declared a “war” on sugary drinks and candy at the start of 2023 and called up National Guard troops to assist the USDA and DEA in the search, seizure, and destruction of illicit sugar-based treats and drinks, which were added to the Schedule II controlled substances list. The Department of Defense’s activation of National Guard troops in all 50 states was the basis of the argument made by “Big Sugar”. The Sugar Association, the American Sugar Alliance, and the Union of American Sugar Labor argued that the DoD was quartering troops in personal homes without permission of the owner since most National Guard troops were renting their homes. The Supreme Court agreed in a 8-1 ruling citing the Third Amendment and requiring the DoD to get written permission for quartering each soldier in their own home or billeting those soldiers at military facilities. To continue this confectionery conflict, President Taft must now go to Congress for additional funding for National Guard housing. Without a Speaker of the House, which is currently at a stalemate with the Republicans unable to choose someone that can get more than three votes, the funding request will be delayed for the foreseeable future, pausing the War on Sugar.