Ad Pox Cured by Branded Products

Aug. 31, 2064
ATLANTA–Officials at the Centers for Disease Control released Wednesday a set of guidelines for the treatment of ad pox suggesting that consumption of certain popular consumer products may offer remedial treatment of some of the disease’s symptoms. “Though we don’t yet have a full epidemiological understanding of ad pox, we have confirmed clinically that use of the listed products offers at least temporary relief from some symptoms,” explains CDC Director of Home Cures, Dr. Evan Tripe. “Since these products are already routinely used by most Americans, we have no concerns about recommending their use for treatment, even at this early stage in our research.”

CDC reports indicate that as many as 1 in 7 American children between the ages of 6 and 12 are affected by the disease, while infection rates among adults have continued to climb, with as many as 1 in 12 expressing symptoms while an estimated 1 in 5 are infected. “This disease has spread with alarming rapidity,” notes Dr. Tripe. “We’ve known about scattered cases for years, but because the condition is relatively mild and non-fatal, we couldn’t justify dedicating resources to it. Now that infection rates have reached these levels, though, we’re taking a serious look.”

Ad pox symptoms include headache, mild nausea, and sporadic, marginal fever, but the disease is best known for its characteristic sores, blisters and rashes, commonly thought to take the form of popular advertising logos and slogans. “I’ve had a very itchy outbreak of hives in the shape of the AOL pyramid thing,” explains one sufferer. “And I can’t tell you how many weeping Nike swooshes and Coca-Cola logos I’ve been picking at for weeks. At one point a rash on my thigh clearly said ‘You’re in Good Hands.'”

Companies whose logos and slogans have been associated with ad pox uniformly deny that their products have any connection to the disease. “This looks to me like the work of a bioterrorist with an axe to grind against successful American companies,” opines Gerri Cracken, McDonald’s VP of Public Information. “We certainly don’t want our brands associated with skin irritations of any kind. In fact, we plan to pursue trademark and copyright claims once the ad pox engineer is identified. Though, if you ask me, none of the sores I’ve seen really look anything like our Golden Arches.”

CDC guidelines suggest consumers use branded products associated with the logos and slogans in which they break out. “It’s quite a simple treatment methodology, and we have noticed significant reductions in swelling, weeping, and itchiness when it is followed,” explains Dr. Tripe. “People afflicted with lesions they identify as Nike swooshes experience notable relief while wearing Nike shoes and sportswear. The same goes for other sores. In many cases relief is just a Coke and a Happy Meal away.”

The origins and mechanism of the disease have yet to be understood. “The fact that the suggested treatment guidelines work suggests that ad pox may be an unprecedented disease,” notes Tripe. “What symptoms caused by a conventional infectious vector could be relieved by watching TV? Well, that’s what happens with the NBC Peacock rashes. How can using AOL remediate boils and blisters? This disease is a challenge to our understanding of disease itself.”

Martha Stewart Mauled by Dust Bunnies

April 12, 2045
NEW YORK–Speaking on Wednesday from the company’s Manhattan headquarters, Martha Stewart Omnimedia VP of Operations Victoria Waiste reassured shareholders and employees that a recent household mishap involving Stewart, the company’s chair and CEO, would not adversely affect the company or its prospects. “Martha had an allergic reaction to an unidentified household cleaning product,” explained Waiste. “She is receiving the care that she needs and I have every confidence that she’ll be back at work within the month.”

Sources inside the company indicate that the “unidentified household cleaning product” was 3M’s soon-to-be-released Dust Bunnies, an intelligent, distributed nano-scale soil and dust aggregation product that Stewart had been testing as part of a joint-marketing scheme between her company and the household products manufacturer.

The Bunnies, distributed in a sealed, foil pouch, start as a fine, graphite-like powder meant to be shaken liberally throughout a room, office, or entire house. The powder consists of small, RF networked nano-scale devices that seek out both dust particles and each other. Over time, the individual devices and the dust they collect self-assemble into tiny, rabbit-shaped dust creatures capable of hopping, and wiggling their noses and ears. The Bunnies continue to clean horizontal surfaces throughout their habitat by absorbing any dust they encounter and growing to the size of conventional rabbits. Reproducing through a process of Bunny-division, the creatures can be compressed and thrown away with conventional trash.

Stewart had reportedly been testing the Bunnies for several weeks and was in the process of shooting a special segment of her program introducing the Bunnies and demonstrating home-made Bunny accessories including colorful bows and gingham bonnets when dozens of the dust-creatures swarmed her, nipping at her face and hands. “It was really more frightening and terrible than it might sound,” explains an unnamed source present at the shooting. “I mean Martha was choking and coughing, really having a hard time breathing. People were running around trying to smash all those dust things, but they just kept coming out of the woodwork. It was like something out of ‘The Birds.'”

Responding to questions about the incident, 3M officials indicated that “an investigation is ongoing” and that researchers were focusing on the possibility of an unanticipated interaction between the Bunnies and Stewart’s company’s own “Face Au Fondant” home nanomechanical face-lift treatment. “The Stewart Omnipharmaceutical ‘Fondant’ product includes some nanomechanical processes and signals that our Bunnies might have misunderstood,” explains 3M Chief Media Officer Burt Bert. “We understand that both products make use of some components from the same outsource and that there may have been an unintended compatibility between them.”

Face Au Fondant, a widely-marketed topical cream that Stewart herself is reported to use, employs a combination of chemical and nanomechanical processes to recreate a young, smooth, collagen-rich layer that binds to the user’s conventional skin.

During the attack, a number of the Bunnies reportedly bonded with the Fondant treatment on Stewart’s face and hands. “Martha wasn’t really hurt in the attack,” confides an inside source, “but there’s been a serious, lasting effect that everybody’s afraid to talk about. She now attracts dust like you wouldn’t believe. She hasn’t been in public since because we can’t keep her clean, not because there’s anything medically wrong with her. She’s just like that kid Pigpen in the Peanuts cartoons. It’s horrible. If we can’t find a solution I’m sure 3M will be hearing from our lawyers.”

Stewart, founder and CEO of over a dozen companies that each bear her name, is the author of “Entertaining,” one of the most beautiful and influential books ever published.

Emeralds Are Grue, Sky Is Bleen

Jan. 2, 210
PASADENA–Responding to recent panic surrounding the sky’s dramatic change in color, a team of logicians and philosophers of language at the California Institute of Technology has released findings designed to calm the public and explain the transformation. “We have heard the press speculation that the change in the color of the sky is related to an unexplained and possibly toxic pollution event,” notes Caltech Professor of Nomenclature Dorinda Pocopollo. “Our aim with this press conference is to dispel those rumors. This is not an ecological catastrophe, as many have feared, but a logical one.”

Scientists and religious leaders alike have struggled to account for the January first transformation of the traditionally blue sky to a shade of green likened by many to key lime pie. In an effort to diffuse apocalyptic and alarmist fervor, a number of scientific institutions have offered preliminary analyses and have taken efforts to disseminate available concrete facts about the transformation.

The U.S.-based National Center for Atmospheric Research (“NCAR”) announced late yesterday that the change was not coordinated with any “apparent modification of atmospheric state or behavior” while atmospheric observatories and weather stations worldwide report no measurable change in the physical properties of observable light reflected from the sun through the earth’s atmosphere. “As far as we can tell the sky is still blue,” exclaims NCAR Executive Director Herman Grout. “Even if I didn’t trust my own eyes, though, I’d have to trust the 30 billion other eyes out there that also are telling me it’s green. At this point it seems safe to say the sky is, indeed, green. There are, however, no indications that it is falling.”

Noting that the largely overshadowed change in the color of emeralds occurred at the same time as that of the daytime sky, Professor Pocopollo’s Caltech team speculates that the changes are related to a traditional logic problem known as Goodman’s paradox. “Goodman’s paradox is a challenge to our intuitive understanding of induction,” explains Professor Pocopollo. “It postulates a language in which the properties ‘blue’ and ‘green’ are replaced with ‘grue’ and ‘bleen.’ Something is ‘grue’ if it is ‘green’ before a certain time and ‘blue’ after it, while something is ‘bleen’ if it is ‘blue’ before and ‘green’ after.”

Discussions of the paradox have traditionally used emeralds as a heuristic example, and typical analyses have hypothesized a definition of ‘grue’ objects as objects that are green before 2100 and blue afterward. “We aren’t offering a conclusion concerning what’s happened,” opines Professor Pocopollo, “But we would like to point out that the change in the color of the sky, and in that of emeralds, has been fairly accurately placed at 12:00:01am Greenwich Mean Time, and while Goodman’s paradox does not traditionally use the sky as an example of a potentially ‘bleen’ object, the sky is the paradigmatically blue object.”

Asked to speculate about the implications of her team’s findings, Professor Pocopollo indicated that, rather than a sign of an impending apocalypse or ecological disaster, the green sky may simply be “the first fact about the state of the world to confirm that our language is out of step with the case. Until now we’ve concluded, inductively, that the sky is blue; now we’ve learned that it is most likely bleen. That’s an inductive mistake that certainly isn’t going to kill us, however much it may shake the entrenched foundations of our confidence in the familiar inductions on which we rely in everyday life.

“If you ask me, and if the green sky is related to Goodman’s paradox, people shouldn’t worry about anything else than getting used to saying ‘bleen’ and ‘grue,'” confided Pocopollo. “The thing I worry about is what this might portend for Hume’s paradox. Hume pointed out that our belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is inductively derived from our habitual experience of the daily rising of the sun. If we’re as wrong about that as we were about the color of the sky we could be in for a rude surprise tomorrow morning.”

Lay an Egg, Grow an Organ

Feb. 18, 2072
MINNEAPOLIS, MN–Consumer biosciences giant Monsanto Mills today unveiled plans to market a replacement-organ cultivation technology with a novel, consumer-friendly interface modeled on traditional agrarian processes. The as-yet unnamed product embeds organ cultivation in the familiar practice of plant husbandry, and is designed to evoke the warm, nostalgic feelings associated with America’s historic farms. “The real challenge for replacement-organ cultivation isn’t actually growing genetically compatible organs,” explains Monsanto’s VP of Human Development Eunice Freelie. “The real challenge is getting people to adopt organ cultivation as a part of their everyday lives. Our new approach will overcome some of the popular, though undeserved, aversion to organ cultivation.”

The new product, packaged in wood pulp cartons reminiscent of those traditionally used to market food-grade chicken eggs, consists of a series of color-coded, egg-shaped “sample vectors,” each designed to produce a particular organ system: red for kidneys, blue for a liver, pink and yellow for a heart, and ecru for lungs. The eggs are covered in a flexible selectively-absorbent membrane containing a proprietary combination of natural and artificial proteins and growth-factors. Consumers swallow the eggs whole, as many as three at a sitting according to preference. “It’s a bit like downing a large oyster,” explains Freelie. “We considered chewables, but felt that anything that violated the integrity of the eggs would not be consistent with our vision.”

Resisting digestion, the eggs’ absorbent membranes collect an array of samples as they pass through the digestive tract, including cells from the lining of the stomach and small intestines. Exploiting a patented hemo-osmotic process, the complex polymer membranes store imprints of key proteins, enabling the eggs to tailor subsequent organ development to the protenomic phenotype of the individual consumer.

After passing the eggs, consumers plant them in conventional potting soil. Within 7-10 days, the first sprouts appear, and, after 4-6 weeks of cultivation, the plants begin to bear large, egg-shaped fruit. Colored to coordinate with the egg from which it has sprouted, the rind of each fruit also bears tattoo-like marks shaped like the organ with which they are associated. The fruit ripens within days and can be picked once it makes a full, hollow sound when thumped.[p]
The melons each contain a set of organs of the appropriate type: handy, portable, and ready for immediate transplantation. Stored in sawdust, or in a cool, dry place, they can keep for up to 8 weeks.

“This new process has been testing very well in our focus groups,” notes Freelie. “Research had shown us, time and again, that people wanted to have genetically compatible organs available for transplant, but were intimidated by the popular image of weird tanks in a sinister lab. They also didn’t like the idea of giving up control over their own tissue.

“Now we’re addressing those concerns. This is a very user-friendly process. It involves cute eggs, something everybody can relate to. And the laying of eggs, just like a chicken on the farm. Plus growing a beautiful plant. There’s nothing more natural and human than working with the soil. We’re leveraging familiar skills and ideas to drive adoption of a technology everybody wants but few are yet comfortable with. This is a sure winner, and a real triumph for our product design folks.”

Market trials are scheduled to begin late next month, with world-wide product roll-out planned in time for the spring planting season.