Daily Briefs: Tough on crime
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Our Sincerest Condolences on the Occasion of Your Unemployment: Kansas City-based Hallmark Sentiment Prefabrication Industries, Inc. is laying off eight percent of its tearful, sensitive workforce globally. They’re going to fire around 250 workers from their Kansas City headquarters alone. Hallmark is probably the only privately held company in the world that once made a profit by manufacturing products regularly hand-made by kindergartners from folded-up pieces of paper and crayons. At least Chrysler never had to defend their practice of selling a product a little kid could make in his spare time during last month’s bail-out talks. Which means buying Crayola, thereby directly selling the raw constituent materials for greeting cards to their competition, was a pretty Machiavellian move by Hallmark. During the global economic collapse, it’s clear that unemployed workers are finding cheaper ways of expressing indifferent sentimental bullshit than paying $3 for a folded-up piece of paper manufactured in Mexico by cheap Mexican paper-folder-uppers and shipped across the border in trucks.
Boyz II Men: According to KMBC Channel 9, two men were arrested yesterday in connection with attempted armed robbery in Shawnee. According to The Kansas City Star, the two “armed men” were actually “armed teens,” with all the zits, cracking voices, spontaneous boners and preference for Sunny-D over the purple stuff that teenagerhood implies. The suspects are 17 amd 18 years old, which clearly means that they’re not “men,” although I should point out that I was sent on my vision quest at age 15, alone in the desert with no food and a large amount of peyote. Following my one-week experience with my animal spirit guide, a triassic-era pachypleurosaur who spoke with the voice of Fonzie, I was considered to be a man and could legally purchase beer and lotto scratchers (following a painful circumcision ritual). But hey, not everybody is brought up the same way I was.
Anyway, it’s obvious that KMBC Channel 9 wants to see these two hoodlums sentenced to fifty years at hard labor under the supervision of whoever is the Kansas equivalent of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and that the Kansas City Star wants them to be sent to some kind of hippie earth-mother counseling session to get their auras massaged.
