Entertainment

ANTIBODY - against everyone

BENIGN - what you be after you be eight

BOWEL - letters like a,e,i,o,u

CAESARIAN SECTION - a district in Rome

CAT SCAN - searching for lost kitty

CHRONIC - neck of a crow

COMA - punctuation mark

CORTISONE - area around local courthouse

CYST - short for sister

DIAGNOSIS - person with a slanted nose

DILATE - the late British princess

DISLOCATION - in this place

DUODENUM - couple in jeans

ENEMA - not a friend

FALSE LABOR - pretending to work

GALL BLADDER - bladder in a girl

GENES - blue denim

HERNIA - she is close by

HYMEN - greeting to several males

IMPOTENT - distinguished, well-known

LABOR PAIN - hurt at work

LACTOSE - person without digits on the foot

LIPOSUCTION - a French kiss

LYMPH - walk unsteadily

MICROBES - small dressing gowns

OBESITY - city of Obe

PROTEIN - in favour of teens

PULSE - grain

PUS - small cat

RED BLOOD COUNT - Dracula

SECRETION - hiding anything

SERUM - sailors' drink

SUBCUTANEOUS - not cute enough

TABLET - small table

TUMOR - extra pair

ULTRASOUND - radical noise

Merger Mania

A number of years ago there was a proposed merger between Fairchild Electronics and Honeywell Computers. Rumor had it that the new company would be called Fairwell Honeychild.

There is a merger in the works involving Polygram Records, Warner Bros. and Keebler. It will be called Poly-Warner-Cracker.

There has long been a rumor that W. R. Grace Co. was going to buy the Fuller Brush Co. and Mary Kay Cosmetics and then merge with the Hale Business Systems. This would result in the new mega-corporation Hale Mary Fuller Grace.

Don't forget the failed merger between Yahoo and Netscape: Net'n'Yahoo. It didn't work out because they were afraid they would have to relocate the headquarters to Tel Aviv.

Others in the works:

3M & Goodyear = mmmGood

John Deere & Abitibi-Price = Deere Abi

Honeywell & Imasco & Home Oil = Honey, I'm Home

Denison Mines & Alliance & Metal Mining = Mine, All Mine

3M & JC Penney & Canadian Opera Company = 3 Penney Opera

Grey Poupon + Dockers Pants = Poupon Pants

Knott's Berry Farm + National Organization of Women = Knott NOW

Crabtree & Evelyn and Apple Computer = Crab Apple

Swissair & Cheseborough-Ponds = Swisscheese

Zippo Manufacturing & Audi & Dofasco & Dakota Mining = Zip Audi Do Da

Once Horace Gold [my editor] went too far. He rejected a story of mine which he called "meretricious." The word is from the Latin meretrix, meaning "prostitute," so that the implication was that I was prostituting my talent and was writing a bad story that would get by on my name alone because I was too lazy to write a good one. (This was not true, by the way. This particular story was sold elsewhere and received considerable acclaim.)

Swallowing my annoyance, I said mildly, "What was that word you used?"

Obviously proud at knowing a word he felt I didn't know, Horace enunciated carefully, "Meretricious!"

Whereupon I said, "And a Happy New Year to you."

(By Isaac Asimov)

Although he was a qualified meteorologist, Hopkins ran up a terrible record of forecasting the weather for the TV news program.

He became something of a local joke when a newspaper began keeping a record of his predictions and showed that he'd been wrong almost three hundred times in a single year. That kind of notoriety was enough to get him fired.

He moved to another part of the country and applied for a similar job. One blank on the job application called for the reason for leaving his previous position.

Hopkins wrote, "The climate didn't agree with me."