Entertainment

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."

A mechanic who worked out of his home had a dog named Mace. Mace had a bad habit of eating all the grass in the mechanic's lawn. So the mechanic had to keep Mace inside. The grass eventually became overgrown.

One day the mechanic was working on a car in his backyard and dropped his wrench losing it in the tall grass. He couldn't find it for the life of him, so he decided to call it a day.

That night, Mace escaped from the house and ate all the grass in the backyard. The next morning the mechanic went outside and saw his wrench glinting in the sunlight. Realizing what had happened he looked up to the heavens and proclaimed...

'A grazing Mace, how sweet the hound, that saved a wrench for me!'