David Hoyle

CAMBRIDGE, MA — There were few surprises at this week’s Déjà Vu conference, held at the MIT Center for Cosmic Redundancy.

Leading experts in the field of Déjà Vu studies gathered to compare notes on this strange psychological or neurophysiological phenomenon, which manifests itself as the illusion of having previously experienced something actually being encountered for the first time.

But conference participants seemed disappointed with the lack of spontaneity in the conference agenda. “Every year it’s the same thing,” said one conference-goer. “We always know exactly what to expect. It’s as if we’ve heard all of the lectures before, and even the food is predictable. And every night after dinner they make us watch Groundhog Day. By the way, you look sort of familiar — have we met before?”

When asked to comment, conference chairman Dewitt Agin seemed unperturbed. “I knew someone was going to say that,” said Agin. ” I totally saw that one coming. In our field of study, everything is to be expected. By the way, don’t I know you from somewhere?”

A minor controversy erupted when several conference participants accused keynote speaker Duke Plicate of presenting the same lecture — entitled “Been There, Done That” — year after year. Unfortunately, there was no way to prove or disprove the assertion.

ATLANTA, GA — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today issued a stern warning against kissing balls.

The CDC fears that kissing balls — which involves the oral transmission of copious amounts of saliva from person-to-person — may lead to widespread disease, a global flu pandemic, and even death.

“Kissing balls may seem like harmless fun, but in fact can be extremely dangerous” said  Dr. Ann Tybody, the CDC’s Interim Deputy Director for Science, Public Health, and Oral Hygiene. “Given the risk of disease transmission, particularly with the advent of the H1N1 flu virus and the delay in vaccine distribution, we strongly recommend that the public avoid kissing balls.”

Government officials are particularly concerned about young adults, who tend to minimize the risks associated with kissing balls. “We especially need to reach out to this high risk group,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Seeballsus, who today announced the launch of a new public service ad campaign, “Kissing Balls? Not Cool.”

But some have expressed frustration with the new government guidelines. “It’s bad enough we’re supposed to treat sick people like lepers, wash our hands fifty times a day, and panic every time we get a cold,” said Jenna Tull, a Los Angeles, California massage therapist. “And now we’re supposed to avoid kissing balls?”

If you absolutely cannot avoid kissing balls, the CDC recommends the following precautions:

• Persons with influenza-like illness (ILI) (i.e., fever with either cough or sore throat) should avoid kissing balls until at least 24 hours after they are free of fever (100° F [37.8°C]), or signs of a fever without the use of fever-reducing medications.
• Kissing balls should involve the use of a facemask or respirator.
• Disinfect balls with soap and water, an alcohol-based hand rub, or hydrogen peroxide.

Kissing balls may be hazardous to your health

SESAME STREET (AP) — CDC officials confirmed today that Miss Pigathius “Piggy” Lee, widely known as “Miss Piggy,” has been involuntarily detained and quarantined pending the outcome of testing to determine whether or not she has been infected with the swine flu virus.

Officials were alerted to the potentially deadly situation by Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy’s common-law husband. Kermit became alarmed after Miss Piggy developed flu-like symptoms shortly after returning from a vacation trip to Cancun, Mexico.

“Miss Piggy just kept saying,  ‘Oh, Kermie, Oh Kermie,’ and smothering me with kisses, even though I kept asking her to stop,” said Kermit. “Then I saw the news reports about swine flu.” As a precautionary measure, CDC officials have also quarantined Kermit the Frog.

Sesame Street police reported that Miss Piggy, who holds a pink belt in Pig Kwon Do, actively and violently resisted detainment, assaulting officers with a series of karate chops and kicks while shrieking, “HAI-YA!”

Ultimately, police were forced to use a taser to subdue Miss Piggy.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today that a total of seven cases of a previously undetected strain of mime flu have been confirmed in humans in the United States.

The CDC reported that the victims are infected with a virus called mime influenza A H1N11, whose combination of genes has not been seen in flu viruses in humans before. The new strain attacks the vocal cords of its victims, rendering them unable to speak and prone to rampant, uncontrollable pantomime.

The first two cases were picked up through a special influenza monitoring program, with stations in San Diego and El Paso, Texas. The program aims to detect new cases through routine and expanded surveillance for people walking against nonexistent wind, pulling or climbing imaginary ropes, or leaning against imaginary objects.

“Mime flu depletes the amount of hemoglobin and lowers the blood pressure of its victims, causing their faces to take on an extremely pale complexion,” said  Dr. Lynne Guini, the CDC’s Interim Deputy Director for Science, Public Health, and Pantomime. “Also, for reasons not currently understood, victims of mime flu feel the need to don black and white striped shirts, black pants, black hats, and black or white gloves.”

Symptoms of mime flu in humans are expected to resemble regular human seasonal influenza symptoms, including fever, lethargy, lack of appetite, and coughing.

Other reported symptoms include pretending to eat food, walking in place, climbing imaginary ladders, and becoming trapped inside invisible walls.

Experts recommend the following precautions to avoid mime flu:

1) WASH YOUR HANDS after contact with mimes.

2) Decontaminate mimes with hydrogen peroxide.

3) Quarantine mime flu victims inside invisible walls until symptoms abate.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today that a total of seven cases of a previously undetected strain of swine flu have been confirmed in humans in the United States.

A swine flu victim

The CDC reported that the victims are infected with a virus called swine influenza A H1N1, whose combination of genes has not been seen in flu viruses in either humans or pigs before. The new strain triggers mutations that cause humans to spontaneously generate some of the physical characteristics of pigs.

The first two cases were picked up through a special influenza monitoring program, with stations in San Diego and El Paso, Texas. The program aims to detect new cases through routine and expanded surveillance for people with pig faces.

“One of the victims is a young girl suddenly cursed with a pig face,” said  Dr. Anne Chovi, the CDC’s Interim Deputy Director for Science, Public Health, and Plot Summary. “She is isolated by her parents, but then breaks free to discover life beyond the protective walls of her home. The curse will be lifted when she can get someone to love her for herself…or when researchers develop a new swine flu vaccine.”

Medical personnel who have contracted swine flu

At this point, the ability for the human influenza vaccine to protect against this new swine flu strain is unknown, and medical personnel treating swine flu victims run a higher risk of contracting the disease, she said.

Symptoms of swine flu in humans are expected to resemble regular human seasonal influenza symptoms, including fever, lethargy, lack of appetite, and coughing.

Another victim of swine flu

Other reported symptoms include runny nose, sore throat, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and growing a pig nose, snout, or a cute squiggly tail.

“There is no danger from contracting the virus from eating pork products,” Chovi said, “but you probably want to stop hanging out with pigs.”

In a shocking disclosure, the CERN Laboratory today revealed that one of its research scientists used the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to heat a Lean Cuisine frozen entree.

The Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, intended to collide opposing particle beams at extremely high energies.

According to CERN Research Director Professor Rolf-Dieter Stoufferz, “The LHC was not designed to heat food, and Alfredo Pasta with Chicken and Broccoli was not part of our series of regularly scheduled experiments. We are more interested in generating subatomic particles such as the Higgs Boson, rather than healthy and delicious dinner entrees.”

The unauthorized experiment was performed by Dr. Hugh Junger, a gifted but eccentric scientist with dual PhDs in Quantum Physics and Hotel & Restaurant Management.

“There was a line for the break room microwave AGAIN,” said Junger. “This thing cost billions to build, but for some reason we only have one freakin’ microwave for like, 10,000 people. And I was starving. So I figured what the hey, dual proton beams with an energy of 7 TeV per particle ought to heat my ‘Fredo up with a quickness.”

Proton beams converge on the Alfredo Pasta, reducing it to subatomic particles

Unfortunately  for Junger, the Lean Cuisine entree was vaporized almost instantaneously, yeilding equal amounts of pasta and anti-pasta, gamma rays, and a Quark-gluon plasma in a creamy alfredo sauce.

Undeterred, Junger plans a series of experiments with microwave popcorn.

Rev. Al Sharpton today raised strong objections to the use of the term “Dark Matter” by astrophysicists.

At a rally in New York, Sharpton described the term as “insulting to African-Americans and people of color in general, and yet another glaring example of the deep racial divide that still exists in America today.”

“Okay, this is starting to get a little bit ridiculous,” said Dr. Kraig Nibson, chairman of the Astrophysics department at the University of Wynonna, when asked to comment. “We refer to it as Dark Matter because it does not emit light or any other type of radiation. Its presence can only be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter. We certainly didn’t mean to insult anyone.”

But Rev. Sharpton insisted that “they could have called it Invisible Matter or Unseen Matter. But no, they had to go with Dark Matter. Apparently it’s not enough to denigrate and disparage people of color here on Earth. Now you feel the need to project racism and intolerance to the very ends of the universe.”

“And don’t even get me started on Black Holes,” added Sharpton.

What’s in a name? Plenty, especially if your name is Ann Chovie, May O’Nays, or Robyn Banks. Studies show that having a silly name can negatively affect your chances of getting a job, as well as your overall financial success and status.

A new employment study by the Bitter Business Bureau demonstrated that job applicants with “normal” names were 10,000% more likely to get a callback than those with silly names. A job applicant with a silly name — Terry Dactyl, Lou Briccant, or Lynn Guini, for example — found it much harder to even get an interview, let alone a job.

Ben Dover, an unemployed Technical Writer, has had many painful experiences with discrimination because of his name. “They never respond to my resumes, and then when I call they just laugh and hang up on me,” says Dover. “And it’s the same with my wife, Eileen.”

But people with silly names are fighting back. A group of activists, including Emma Roids, Beau Vine, Hugh deMann, Jim Nasium, and Dan Druff, have banded together to form SPAZ (Silly, Proud, and Zealous), an organization dedicated to fighting silly name discrimination. Joining them will be Ellie Vader, Al Luminum, Gene Poole, Ann Tartica, Helen Hywater, Archie Pelagos, Pete Zaria, and Herbie Hind.

Al Gore, widely recognized as an authority on Global Boring — raising the boredom level of the entire planet — today announced the release of a new documentary, An Incessant Truth.

With the fate of his speaking career arguably hanging in the balance, An Incessant Truth may prove to be one of the most important and prescient documentaries in the history of Al Gore.

As he jokingly refers to himself,  former President-elect  Al Gore felt an urgent personal calling to draw attention — as he had been doing throughout his political career — to himself.

In the first two hours of the 12-hour documentary, Gore drones on about politics, climate change, the global economy, the mainstream media, ethical forthrightness, education, health care, the Internet, online organizing, his childhood, his family, his coin collection, his favorite foods, what he likes to watch on television, how he organizes his sock drawer, and God only knows what else. Thus far, no reviewer has been able to remain conscious to see the remainder of the film.

Gore’s previous film, An Assault on Consciousness, won an Oscar for “Least Animated Actor in a Documentary Feature.”

A controversial new theory contends that the dinosaurs were wiped out not by a giant comet, but by a widespread prehistoric intestinal disease. According to Dr. Hugh Keck, Chairman of the Department of Gastropaleontology at the University of Wynonna, newly discovered fossil evidence points to a highly contagious stomach virus that spread quickly and wiped out the dinosaurs.

“We are quite certain that at the end of the Cretaceous era there was a period of massive vomiting,” says Keck. “During the late Cretaceous, huge gastric eruptions were spewing forth floods of vomit which can be seen today at the K-T boundary in the form of a thick layer of fossilized vomit.”

According to Dr. Keck, the widespread vomiting would have made it much more difficult for the dinosaurs to take in enough nourishment to survive. Keck also maintains that the floods of acidic vomit would have damaged a wide variety of Cretaceous plant species, leading to less available food for plant-eating dinosaurs, and eventual collapse of the entire food chain.

“Over a period of years,” says Keck, “the food supply dwindled as the volume of vomit increased exponentially. The dinosaurs literally ‘hurled’ themselves into extinction.”

But according to Craig Heever, a Planetary Gastrologist at Emesis College, this “nuclear winter caused by vomit” theory can’t fully explain the K-T extinction.

“Vomit itself is fairly benign,” says Heever. “We have vomit being emitted regularly and copiously today, for example, because of stomach flus or Barry Manilow concerts. While vomit may have initially contributed to changes in the climate, it would not have caused fundamental climate changes because the vomit would have been diluted by rains over a period of a few weeks or years.”

Heever instead believes that long-term global climate changes were caused by extraterrestrials, who wanted to destroy the dinosaurs and seed the earth with their intergalactic spawn. The fossilized vomit, he says, “was deliberately put there by the aliens to throw us off track.”

Despite Heever’s assertions, Keck is standing by his findings. “Professor Heever is an esteemed colleague, but he has not been quite the same since his unfortunate head injury last year while on a dig in the Gobi desert. The fossil record points to one inescapable conclusion: widespread extinction caused by cataclysmic vomit.”

Startling, yet generally incomprehensible new findings have revealed that the universe is largely comprised of “Dork Matter.” But what exactly is Dork Matter?

It's complicated...

According to Dr. Kraig Nibson, chairman of the Astrophysics department at the University of Wynonna, “Dork Matter is incredibly complex and counterintuitive, and is therefore utterly impossible for the vast majority of people to even begin to understand.”

“You need to be a complete and utter Nth-degree Dork to even begin to grasp it, hence the name,” says Nibson. “It is incomprehensible for Brainiacs, Techno-Dweebs, Super-Weanies, and even Uber-Geeks. You really need to be a card-carrying, stone-cold righteous, quantum-spazzed Ultra Mega Dork to get a handle on this stuff.”

Dr. Nibson’s advice is, “don’t worry about it. Just go watch TV or something. We’ll let you know when we come across something you can understand.”