Memo: Sexual harassment training session

From: Blader, aka Fearless Leader, CEO and so forth and et cetera
To: Blader Industries, Inc. Colleagues
Re: Sexual Harassment in the Workplace Intranet Chautauqua

In order to comply with article VII of Title IX, VII or X, III of XI and II of XII in the 8,987 pp OHSA WorkPlace Standards Manual, abridged version, as you know we conduct monthly case studies on sexual harassment from the comfort of our tastefully appointed offices via intranet chautauqua. So I now ask that you pull up a chair, smoke if you got 'em, and begin to discuss amongst yourselves the following question:

Is the apparent male authority figure in this training video fondling the apparent submissive female in a sexually suggestive manner, or did he simply see an extremely large pimple suddenly grow inbetween her scapulae, and grabbed her only to squeeze the puss out of it before it exploded on its own?

Alternately, did she 'ask for it' by her sexually provocative attire and the way she sat upright in the chair and was giving everyone else in the conference room those 'bedroom eyes'?

As usual, don't forget to provide a written summary of your discussion, not to exceed 14 words and two punctuation marks. As usual, the most poignant summary will be posted on the lobby wall downstairs for all of next month.

Selling Memorabilia, has it come to this?

Colleagues, you may have heard that I've been banned from the Hall of Fame. Allegedly their collective will, according to JDerion, who no doubt spearheaded the campaign against me. I'm fine with that. I really didn't ever "aspire" or even perspire to be in the Hall of Fame. The notoriety might have put me in a higher class for royalty income proceeds, but other than that, it would have just been another chautauqua in a long line of chautauquas to attend.

Nevertheless, I was counting on that income and had budgeted accordingly. So the news that I won't make it is a call to make some adjustments in my personal financial situaiton.

Besides my health, I suppose my next greatest asset would have to be my extensive collection of sports memorabilia. So I've decided to sell it all off to raise some funds, and if I raise enough money, I might even give a third of it to the United Nations, an idea I'm sure has never wandered into the mind of Pete Rose.

To enhance the value of my collection, I've made a strategic decision to autograph the whole lot of it!! I hope the auction goes well. Bid fast and furiously, as if the future of the world depended upon it.

Vote a Straight Republican Ticket

No more gays in congress! LOL!! We've had more than enough 'bad news' because of them, and its taking us "off target".

Every once in a while it is important for those of us in the corporate world to stand up and make a stand.

Here's a list I had our Public Service Subsidiary construct of the Republican candidates, please do your vetting and then vote as you see fit.

TIA

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl

--AZ-01: Rick Renzi

--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth

--CA-04: John Doolittle

--CA-11: Richard Pombo

--CA-50: Brian Bilbray

--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave

--CO-05: Doug Lamborn

--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell

--CT-04: Christopher Shays

--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan

--FL-16: Joe Negron

--FL-22: Clay Shaw

--ID-01: Bill Sali

--IL-06: Peter Roskam

--IL-10: Mark Kirk

--IL-14: Dennis Hastert

--IN-02: Chris Chocola

--IN-08: John Hostettler

--IA-01: Mike Whalen

--KS-02: Jim Ryun

--KY-03: Anne Northup

--KY-04: Geoff Davis

--MD-Sen: Michael Steele

--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht

--MN-06: Michele Bachmann

--MO-Sen: Jim Talent

--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns

--NV-03: Jon Porter

--NH-02: Charlie Bass

--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson

--NM-01: Heather Wilson

--NY-03: Peter King

--NY-20: John Sweeney

--NY-26: Tom Reynolds

--NY-29: Randy Kuhl

--NC-08: Robin Hayes

--NC-11: Charles Taylor

--OH-01: Steve Chabot

--OH-02: Jean Schmidt

--OH-15: Deborah Pryce

--OH-18: Joy Padgett

--PA-04: Melissa Hart

--PA-07: Curt Weldon

--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick

--PA-10: Don Sherwood

--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee

--TN-Sen: Bob Corker

--VA-Sen: George Allen

--VA-10: Frank Wolf

--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick

--WA-08: Dave Reichert

Dealing with Disgruntled Employees

It is always a great challenge, I can tell you that. And I can't say that I've got the "one-size-fits-all-of-them- all-of-the-time-usually" answer, either. And fortunately its rare at our conglomerate. But we see it from time to time.

Take Mabs, for instance. She was a down on her luck bonobo, well, maybe "down on her luck" isn't the best way to describe her. Let's just say she was spinning her wheels, eeking out a sustenance existence, copulating with just about whoever and whatever wandered along, on a quiet Congo River tributary, when she was discovered by a crack team of our talent agents out on an African expedition chautauqua.

They enticed her to come back with them by offering her, along with a bucket of fresh tropical fruits, the standard, generous compensation package all of our colleagues receive, including a windowed office at our corporate headquarters, One Blader Plaza. So it's not as if we simply captured her. Mabs came willingly, and the only reason she was transported back in a cage was so as not to get stuck in a long line at immigration after the flight.

After she got here, things got much better for her than our scouts first assumed. Unbeknownst to them, I was working on the PLAYBONOBO concept and it was immediately obvious to me that, with professional air brushing, she would be perfect as our inaugural issue centerfold Playbonobomate!!

Boom! Our first issue is out and now she is a rising star, and I'm told the folks over at the National Enquirer have made some calls and are interested in doing a half-page interview with her!

Well, Mabs called up to my office this morning and somewhat brusquely demanded a meeting, which we've just finished. It didn't go well. She walked in the door, and defecated into her hand saying, "Ooh, ooh, oh, ooh-ooh" which roughly translated means, "If you don't renegotiate my contract, I'm going to fling this pile of shaz all over your curtains."

Can you believe that?

It's Worse Than We Thought

OMG!!


Clearly, you can now understand why you've received a notice that the terrorist threat level has been changed from "Medium Rare" to "Rare", our highest level of vigilance.

My crack team of analysts have just informed me that, and I quote, "The latest JDerion tape indicates we may have erred in describing the first as "a call to jihad via the medium of interpretive dance.' Indeed, the second clandestine video appears to indicate that JDerion has acquired the capability of a Shaman, and intends to use dance as a weapon of mass destruction, mostly for deployment against iconic landmarks of major societies worldwide."

Since I can think of no landmark in this country more 'iconic' than One Blader Plaza, JDerions intentions vis-a-vis the US are quite obvious. As such I'm ordering all colleagues who work at the rank of Vice President and higher to obtain first class airfare and plan to reconnoiter at the designated chautauqua site, which is, ahem, NOT at the Bikini Atoll in case JDerion is listening.

JDerion 'Chatter' Elevated-Threat Imminent

I've just received a disturbing package from one of our operatives who had been tracking JDerion. He had spotted him in Belarus but we haven't heard from him since that communique and we fear the worst, so we've gone ahead and cut the operative and his family off our generous medical plan. But I digress.

Our crack team of analysts have had a chance to review the contents of the most recent package and have rendered the following summary:

"Mr. JDerion is using the medium of interpretive dance to call for a global jihad. Please pass the mashed potatoes."

There you have it, colleagues. This man is truly a menace. As a result, the Homeland Security subsidiary of Blader Industries, Inc., feels compelled to raise the threat warning to 'Medium Rare' and urges great caution, vigilance, and a gentle reminder to vote a Straight Republican ticket in November. For the sake of God, let's not elect any more homo's to congress!!!

The Tragedy of Arnesto Martinez

I've asked my secretary to make sure this one get's out on the corporate intranet, with my recommendation that Blader Industries, Inc., colleagues go home and hug their dog tonight. There is a message here. I'm not exactly sure what the message is, but if I'm not mistaken, it seems like a tale as old as time.

PLAYBONOBO, our newest print media play

Colleagues, I'm pleasured almost to the point of flatulance to announce Blader Industries, Inc's., newest foray into the media sector. Playbonobo comes on the heals of our successful rollout of Bladerpalooza, and seeks to achieve certain synergies and economies of scale in the media sector that are only possible through print. What is PLAYBONOBO? PLAYBONOBO is entertainment for primates.

I got the idea the other night while watching The Girls Next Door, you know, the episode where Kendra visited her mother's condo complex with Hef and the other girls. At the same time, because unlike bonobos I can multitask, I was reading about some Blader Industries, Inc., sponsored research indicating women are 'turned on' by bonobo porn.

Well, it didn't take me long to put two and two together and voila! PLAYBONOBO was born! Our target market is men who 'bring home the bacon' who can use PLAYBONOBO as a tool to help make their women more receptive and thereby enhance their copulatory and evolutionary potential. Our crack team of sales associates is looking to find shelf space in stores that sell bacon, and our chosen marketing jingo for the campaign will be, "Why don't you bring something else home she would like along with that slab of bacon."

It has not escaped our notice that a secondary market niche for PLAYBONOBO will be primate research colonies throughout the world. We're actually looking to create in-kind synergies and economies of scale and what not with such enterprises. For example, in turn for a complementary subscription to PLAYBONOBO, we'd ask primate research facilities for permission to exploit their research results for commercial gain, etc and so forth. Stuff like that.

I've Changed My Mind

I think Ann Coulter takes herself seriously.

I used to think that after one of her college performances she'd go backstage and say to anybody within earshot, "can you believe how those idiots out there are buying this crap I'm shoveling? I'm a performer, and yet they've taking me seriously. What a hoot!"

And then I'd imagined she'd have a big guffaw, light up a cigarette and take a big hit off a brewski while she rubbed the check for her $25K speaking fee up and down her crotch a few times so it can pick up the scent while saying, "Yeah, baby! In God we effing trust, you betcha!"

But I don't believe that anymore, at all.

Now I think she really believes in what she is saying.

People are weird in that way sometimes.

Bush Orchestrates Major Setback in Global War on Evolution

I awoke yesterday from a long sleep, deeply disappointed to see that my good friend and former copulatory industry angel investor and visionary, George Doubleyou Bush, has flip flopped on an crucial issue. He has signed documents recently creating the largest marineland national monument in the Hawaiian archipelago, preserving a unique ecosystem for generations to come. This is disturbing for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, you hate to see a world leader of his stature flip flop on any issue. You stake a claim and hold on to it fast. But this is the kind of flip flop that will resonate loudly both domestically and internationally. My goodness, what will our enemies think? This morning, his spine looks to have the tensile strength of an overcooked piece of rigatoni.

Secondly, and most importantly, I can't imagine a worse setback in the global war on evolution. Everybody knows that islands are hotbeds of evolution and speciation. This decision preserves not just one, but several isolated ecosytems upon which evolutionary processes will run completely unchecked. This sets back any hopes of stomping out evolution in our childrens' life time, something we'll need to accomplish ruthlessly and deliberately, one archipelago at a time, if we have any hope of success.

Finally, in this decision, he shows an uncanny ability to ignore and jettison his political base on the right for obviously expedient, but unclear, political purposes. We elected him because he promised to protect our homeland from the evil forces of evolution. Through this flip flop, he has forsaken us when we least expected it.

Pat Robertson endorses Blader Industries, Inc. products

It is my pleasure to announce that Blader Industries, Inc. has just inked an historic co-branding agreement with Pat Robertson that makes our firm the exclusive copulation accessory product supplier for the 700 Club.

As Chairman, CEO and Fearless Leader of Blader Industries, Inc., I would like first to congratulate my crack scientists in our Research and Development subsidiary, who showed that the decline in the population of European Christians was not fully explainable by alien abductions, as is widely believed, but is also attributable to a real reduction in birth rates.

If there is one thing that Blader Industries, Inc. knows how to do well, it is to reverse declining birth rates.

Although I was marooned on a small iceberg while away on a Chautauqua studying the copulatory behavior of marching penguins in Antarctica, when I heard the results I personally called the Rev. Pat Robertson, who said to me, "Blader, you are right. Europe is right now in the midst of racial suicide because of the declining birth rate. Can I use this information on my program?"

After I indicated to him that the research results were proprietary, the Rev. Robertson quickly recognized the synergy a co-branding agreement could bring to each of our firms. He was also careful to deny that he had no intentions of personally using any of our products (anymore) for his own copulatory activities.

He indicated that his copulatory activities are no longer conducted for procreative purposes, but instead performed because he has been commanded to share "God's goodness" with the women in his life.

As part of the agreement, Blader Industries, Inc., announces that it will add to it's popular "Big Bad Brother" suite of male enhancement pills a new brand line called, "Good God!"

http://mediamatters.org/items/200602070002

New Corporate Copulation Policy

It has come to my attention that the Blader Industries, Inc. generous corporate copulation policy is being abused.

Internal employee surveys conducted by our Human Resources Subsidiary consistently tell us that the number one reason you choose to work at Blader Industries, Inc., and not for one of our competitors, is our generous copulation policy....and also the fact that we don't have a sexual harassment policy, either.

We of course allow, and sometimes even encourage on the job copulation, provided appropriate hygienic standards are followed.
What most concerns me is the increased frequency of complaints that some employees are abusing this policy and interfering with the work product of their coworkers.

We expect that all of our employees will respect the career trajectory of their fellow workmates, and to refrain from workplace copulation when it might interfere with their ability to provide Blader Industries, Inc. products to our customers.

For this reason, I remind you that our corporate copulation policy allows you to copulate only in your cubicle or the cubicle assigned to the individual with whom you are copulating.

Furthermore, the threatening of a fellow co-worker who angers you by interrupting your copulation, for any reason, is grounds for dismissal, pending review.

My goodness! It's difficult to imagine how a species would have survived at all if it's members grew angry and hostile each time their coitus was interrupted!

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

--Fearless Leader (aka Blader)

The JDerion FAQ

And the utility of redheaded subjects in pre-market testing
Prologue--I recently received a series of unsolicited email messages that I initially dismissed as gibberish. Thinking more about them during a five day sleepless chautauqua, where I primed myself each morning by ingesting a very small maintenance dose of peyote extract, it suddenly struck me that these messages were, in fact, rambling and sometimes pornographic demands from JDerion.


It won’t be helpful to share those messages with you in their entirety as a matter of simple pragmatism: It’s highly improbable you’d be able to replicate the altered state of consciousness I achieved that was necessary to decipher their meaning. Besides, to print them off would consume the equivalent of 200 pages of text.

So, to summarize his salient point, JDerion wrote me to insist that, since I have previously published my very own FAQ, he also deserves to have his FAQ published.

In principle and fairness, it’s not difficult to see some logic behind this. You, my loyal reader, deserve to know more about JDerion…and you SHOULD hear it in his own words. I’ve thought about this matter deeply and reached the conclusion that I have little to fear from giving him a voice on these pages. I’m certain that upon careful and open analysis, you are likely to draw many of the same conclusions as I have about his character.

However, I want to make it explicitly clear that mortal threat, extortion, and malfeasance underlies the publication of JDerion’s FAQ below. He resorted to these tactics because he lacked sufficient confidence that I would share his concerns with you in a fair and impartial manner.

His most alarming threat is one that forces me to post his FAQ in some haste. For unless I do otherwise, he has promised to grind into bone meal over 20,000 squirrel baculum that he’s collected from one of our recently discontinued products. What’s even more despicable, JDerion threatens to use the bone meal to lace salt shakers in the cafeteria of a prominent Midwestern coeducational college prepatory Catholic High School. More horrifying, he claims he will close and lock all exits over the next several hours while he pipes in the collected works of Warren Zevon.

To fully explain the serious nature of this threat, and why he must be stopped, it’s necessary to peel back a few layers of mystery that surround JDerion and his association with Blader Industries, Inc. I’ve resisted sharing the shocking details of this information with you to this point, but now recognize that perhaps some good can come from your understanding of how our paths first intersected.

Several years ago, while taking night classes in algebra and accounting at a local community college, JDerion was selected by my human resources division to work on the day shift as an extract chemist for the New Jersey based Nutriceutical Research and Development subsidiary of Blader Industries, Inc. Let me state from the outset that I did not know the man during his employment with us. No, it’s not because I consider my factory workers as “little people”. But now that you mention it, to be honest, it’s no accident that they have their own bathrooms down there on the factory floor rather than a key to those in the executive suites.

In any event, his responsibilities were to prepare extracts from any number of natural products as a first phase in a program of research designed to identify aphrodisiacs. This is almost embarrassing to admit, so I point out only that these were early days at the Blader Industries, Inc., a time when we were actively probing in any number of directions to fulfill our corporate mission to enhance our customer’s copulatory experiences. Besides, at the time, aphrodisiacs weren’t the anachronism they are today.

In retrospect, what is most notable about JDerion’s personnel record during this period are his daily citations from supervisors for not wearing a protective respirator equipment to shield him from almost certain brain damage caused by the volatile organic solvents with which he worked. One supervisor even wrote, “I have NEVER once seen JDerion wear his mask. Worse, he spends most of his breaks respiring deeply above the dichloromethanol vat. He seems obsessed by the color. Did I mention that he also has a sickening body odor? If we fire him can I be the one to tell him?”

In my defense, these records didn’t come to my attention until long after he was dismissed from our company on the basis of poor personal hygiene, for refusing to cover up his extremely large calf muscles, and because his repeated self-exposure to dichloromethanol was causing him to expel little fragments of his hypothalamus every time he sneezed. Had I known him when he worked here, I would have pulled him aside and had a chat about his behavior. I regret this omission more than any other in my career, because much of everything with him that has occurred subsequently could have been avoided had I intervened.

Near the end of JDerion’s employment, I had returned from a Mongolian chautauqua, where I was deeply inspired by an intriguing bone meal grind highly valued by the indigenous. It was prepared from baculum harvested from the prolific wild Bactrian camel of the central Asian steppes.

At Blader Industries, Inc., we feel a duty to demystify ancient habits and practices, to scratch and see if they are buttressed by any reality. Sometimes they are, but more often we find devices of folklore are little more than a cultural prevarication passed down over the generations to hide some unpleasant truth. So I managed to collect the handful of Bactrian camel baculum from my host’s yurt while he was out with his herd, and brought them back to our laboratories for study.

In a now classic study, late one winter we distributed Bactrian camel baculum bone meal to specially selected volunteers, comprising every red headed worker at Blader Industries, Inc. At the company Christmas party several months later, the results were unequivocal: red headed infants outnumbered blonde and brunette infants by a whopping 10 to 1 margin. We knew we were on to something to something big. There can be no doubt JDerion saw these proprietary results, as he spent the entire evening slouched next to the punch bowl, lasciviously spying the ladies from the secretarial pool, who were engaged in a ribald game of strip truth or dare.

Our subsequent research quickly told us that baculum extracts from wild species were more potent than from domesticated animals. Our key observation was that rodent baculum had a more favorable activity profile than that of any other class of mammal, including the Bactrian camel.

You can imagine for yourself how we progressed from that point to our complete and legendary line of baculum-based products and services, which I won’t recount in great detail other than to mention that Dust o’ LustTM, our proprietary North American grey squirrel baculum-based bone meal, is regarded industry-wide as the most potent and effective pro-copulatory agent ever discovered. Independent analysis of our product conducted by UL, Consumer Reports and others consistently shows that as little as 2 ppm is sufficient to throw our customers into convulsions of passion necessitating either immediate sexual relief or emergency medical services, which ever comes first.

Unfortunately for him and us, JDerion played no significant role in the development of Dust o’ LustTM , although he was on the payroll at that time and had access to those who know our proprietary formula.

Suffice it to say that Blader Industries, Inc. is good corporate citizen, and we recognize the serious danger associated with releasing Dust o’ LustTM in a roomful of Catholic adolescents listening to Warren Zevon for the first time ever. We must do everything in our power to prevent such a tragedy.

For this reason, I’ve agreed to post the JDerion FAQ list, as transcribed by him to me. I can only assert that I have attempted to translate his FAQ list as carefully and faithfully as possible given the hallucinogens I was consuming at that time. To the best of my knowledge, what follows is precisely what he seeks to be published:
--Blader

The JDerion FAQ List as communicated to Blader by JDerion

Here are some questions that are frequently asked of me:

What time is it?
Do you have the time?
Have you seen the remote?
Have you seen the phone?
Did you remember to take out the trash?
Can you stop at the store on the way home?
Are you playing golf on Saturday?
Why don't you get as excited to hang out with me as you do to play golf?
Can you pass the butter?
What is it you do here?

I'd say that those are the ten most frequently asked questions I encounter. Do you want my frequently used responses, or just the questions?

Yours sincerely, JDerion

Where have all the squirrels gone?

When market analysis goes wrong: the story behind the success of the ‘Rocky’ aftershave product line

We get it wrong sometimes at Blader Industries, Inc., something I’ll be the very first to admit. It’s not at all uncommon for a big player in any industry to act upon poorly developed data or upon the basis of errant assumptions.

Well, at Blader Industries, Inc., our guiding principle is that recovery from institutional error defines us just as much as do our successful product campaigns.

I’m often asked, “Blader, how did your Rocky fragrance become such a great success?” Well, the story is far more convoluted then you could possibly imagine, but like all good stories, it begins with a chautaqua that first led to a marketing disaster.

While out on a chautauqua in western New York state, I just love the chautauqua, I spent an afternoon reflecting alone in a temperate mixed oak/hickory climax forest. A pair of squirrels scampering on the branches and limbs above served as a distraction. At one point, they raced down a tree trunk from high in the canopy to ground level, pausing in front of me on an old decaying fallen tree. There, fifteen feet away, the male, without taking his eyes off of me, briefly mounted the female while perched on a bed of lichen. And they copulated.

If I had turned my head for only an instant I would have missed it. But I was transfixed by the boldness of their act and could think of nothing else for the remainder of the week-long chautauqua.

Each afternoon I returned to that forest, but never saw the squirrel pair again.

Before that day, I had only observed copulation between wild animals at the zoo, or on the Discovery Channel. At home during the night, I am sometimes awakened by the sounds of feral cats “doing the deed”. But that’s as close as its come.

And so it struck me that what I had witnessed was something rare and privileged, not unlike, for example, getting a peak inside Catherine Zeta-Jones’ locker at her health club.

Upon returning to the executive suite at our corporate headquarters, I promptly called a meeting to confer with our New Products subsidiary. Heady over the enormously successful rollout of our ‘Forged’ and ‘Cast” copulatory aids, we hatched a plan to market product that all of us felt would be a sure thing: radio controlled stuffed squirrels as toys.

You know how the mind can race at times, and I confess that this idea crystallized in my mind out in that forest as quickly as those two squirrels completed their business.

We stole a page from the book of my good friend Bill Gates and so a member of my crack team of MBA’s came up with a code name for the development phase of the product. We called it “Rocky doing the wild thing”, as it aptly describes a unique feature of the product unprecedented in the radio commanded toy space: By flipping a switch Rocky and his mate could be directed to mimic any of three copulatory acts….missionary style, spoon style or the rear mounting “squirrelly style” I witnessed in that New York forest.

Working off of some dusty market research data that Blader Industries, Inc. had collected years before, we felt we could use “Rocky doing the wild thing” to tap into a niche market comprised of children, aged 4-8, who enjoy both fury animals and who were developing important motor skills with simple radio controlled toy objects. Our target market also included those who are also regular viewers of nature programming on Animal Planet and Discovery Channel.

We positioned “Rocky doing the wild thing”, a stuffed animal toy that could copulate upon command, to take the environmental educational toy sector to an entirely new level. The idea was both robust and revolutionary, exactly the kind of thing consumers have come to expect from Blader Industries, Inc.

You might wonder by now what on earth any of this has to do with a successful aftershave fragrance?

Unfortunately, two issues conspired to destroy the genius of “Rocky doing the wild thing”. First, we were quickly sued by attorneys representing a class of customers claiming defective manufacture and false advertising.

These parents mistakenly believed they were purchasing toys that would only copulate. In fact, the toys were programmed to scamper up and down trees and across telephone lines, leaping into nearby bird feeders, and so on, and to copulate at any point in this ‘foreplay’ upon command. The parents claimed to incur extraordinary, painful and unexpectedly high battery costs as a consequence of this programmed ‘foreplay’.

Furthermore, since the children so much enjoyed watching the toys copulate, they would trigger the ‘copulate’ button whilst the toys scampered high on wires or in trees. Oftentimes, the toys would lose their balance and fall from these positions. Unlike real squirrels, the toys would shatter and break from falls in excess of 50 feet or so. On this basis, their lawyers claimed defective manufacture.

A second crippling issue was that 80% of our inventory during the rollout phase was purchased at retail cost by a single, and initially mysterious, client. This made it very difficult to keep up with demand from our retail outlet customers, who eventually grew tired of the persistent back orders and eventually stopped ordering the product.

Before we knew it, competitors had taken a cue from us and began marketing copulatory paired toys. For example, Mattel began co-packaging Barbie dolls with members of their GI Joe collection. Before we knew it, the competition had saturated the very market that Blader Industries first cultivated!

Details on the mysterious client were initially nebulous. But it soon became clear that it was none other than JDerion, who attempted to remain anonymous during the process. He would instruct our delivery personnel to deliver shipments to a remote and apparently abandoned New Jersey warehouse in the vicinity of the Pine Valley Golf Club, making every attempt to evade visual contact. He ordered the shipment to be stacked outside the warehouse, from which he would only emerge after the driver had left and was well down the road.

I had spent much of the rollout period, while all this was going on, in the Djiboutian Highlands, negotiating for delivery of the fall wool harvest. I only became aware of this development well after the damage was done.

I knew instantly that it was JDerion when our driver mentioned, almost in passing, that the oddest feature of what had become for him a regular delivery, was the music booming over the warehouse campus each time he visited: Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” :

Well, I really don't mind the rain

And a smile can hide all the pain

But you're down when you're ridin' the train that's takin' the long way

And I dream of the things I'll do

With a subway token and a dollar tucked inside my shoe

There'll be a load of compromisin'

On the road to my horizon

But I'm gonna be where the lights are shinin' on me

Like a rhinestone cowboy

Riding out on a horse in a star-spangled rodeo

Rhinestone cowboy

Gettin' cards and letters from people I don't even know

And offers comin' over the phone

Knowing JDerion’s obsession with my life’s work, and his compulsive taste for awful music, it was simple to connect the dots.

Our associates were eventually able to draw him out of the warehouse by erecting a king kong sized fake stuffed squirrel near the entrance of Pine Valley. Upon entering, they managed to shut off “Rhinestone Cowboy” only to be horrified by the sight of tens of thousands of stuffed squirrels strewn about the facility haphazardly. Perhaps what is most sickening was that a small incision was made in the genital region of each male, from which the os baculum was removed. The stuffed female squirrels were untouched but the missing os baculum were nowhere to be found.

We faced a problem. What on earth could we do with the corpses, albeit lifelike in every way thanks to the finest taxidermy this side of the Pecos, of tens of thousands of stuffed squirrels, half of which no longer possessed their os baculum?

After a quick brainstorming session we struck upon an obvious solution: We’d make a male aftershave fragrance based upon a squirrel motif. It turned out, at that very point, we were searching for a product that could go head to head against “Ouder”, the latest from the formidable marketing talents of our competitors at Calvin Klein.

We called our aftershave “Rocky”, and the real genius behind Rocky is our sales driving promotion: with each bottle sold, the customer receives a complementary mounted squirrel head, for show in his home or office or even in his remote wilderness cabin. Our customers know that nothing primes their mates better for copulatory activities than wall-mounted representation of fierce, wild creatures, slain by their man in a death match for the ages!

The “Rocky” fragrance rollout has been so successful that we’ve long since exhausted our supply of squirrel heads from that New Jersey warehouse.

And so this story also explains how Blader Industries Inc. has become the top squirrel farmer in North America, where simple due to corporate necessity we have revolutioned sustainable squirrel farming to the extent that we’ve practically invented the industry as everyone now knows it.

--Blader

I am Bob Woodward's Source

All I need is a little soap and a shave and I'm coming clean

In a sort of a high stakes exercise in musical chairs, everybody who is anybody in Washington is issuing a public denial that they served as Bob Woodward's source for the leak that Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, worked at the CIA and was classified as a spy.

So to save everybody a lot of angst worrying about where they might be when the music stops playing, let me simply admit, on the record, that I was the source of this information.

And it was a total accident.

I ran into Bob in a terminal at the Boise Idaho Airport some time ago. Here's a relatively recent picture I have of him. Although quite frankly, he didn't have the beard and appeared somewhat older at the airport than the picture shows. I wondered if perhaps the irregularity that comes with frequent travel might be responsible for the latter.

Bob pretended not to recognize me, which is not surprising given the sensitive nature of his work, but we chatted it up anyway. He was real fidgety, and actually didn't really say too much. He had a nervous smile, kept looking at his watch, and at me, and elsewhere, seeming kind of anxious, while we talked.

He did say he was on his way home, and offered me his autograph, but I declined because I didn't have one of his books on me.

His behavior reminded me of some of the people I'd interact with back when I worked for the government, so after we chatted about my business ventures and so on, I got to talking with him about some of the better looking women I knew who worked at the CIA. I was just listing them off, starting with the natural blondes, and Valerie's name just kind of tumbled out.

What was really neat was that when the flight to Los Angeles was called, Bob got up and boarded, even though he said he was going to his home, which I'm sure is in Washington because I've been on his front portch, talking to him through the door, on several ocassions.

What a professional!! He can really be trusted to keep a secret, even though he got this one by total mistake.

Bladerpalooza

The genesis of the 'transcendental TV' genre

People often point out that I have a lot in common with guys like Donald Trump and Richard Branson.

I'm usually insulted by such talk.

Those guys just play themselves in their "reality tv shows", which doesn't strike me as very difficult or particularly creative.

I can assure you from personal experience that there is nothing at all difficult about being a larger then life megamogul. I can't imagine having an easier life and I find nothing simpler than being me. So how could me playing me in a tv show prove challenging?

True, I am hounded by an obsessively halluncinogenic jihadist-wannabe, hell bent on seeing a tortured and bloody end to my life...but that's all mostly just a nuisance that, if anything, adds more color and texture to my life.

As I write this I'm comfortably reclined in the first class cabin of a Delta Boeing 777, piercing the sky over the pacific en route to Atlanta, smugly satisfied that I've just, once again, intuitively taken advantage of an opportunity to set an entirely new cultural paradigm.

Currently, I think it's fair to say that my media presence transcends life, and so it only makes sense that any programming based upon me should also be transcendental in scope. As I routinely tell producers and pitchmen, it's not enough for me to just be some central character cultivating proteges in a reality tv format.

I boarded the flight with several members of a troupe of World Wrestling Federation members, heading home after a string of shows in Japan, where their performance art is highly valued. Still creatively juiced from their tour, the wrestlers were very receptive to new ways of thinking when I introduced myself.

They are now back in the business class cabin, sleeping off one heck of a beerfest we enjoyed together in the Narita Airport Delta Crown Room, where we hatched and consummated a plan to revolutionize mogul TV.

My loyal readers, you are witnessing the end of the tired 'reality TV' genre and the dawn of a new media epoch tentatively called, 'transcendental TV'

For in that waiting lounge I and the wrestlers broadly outlined the development, along with some of the initial choreography, of a new slam-fest wrestling event that will depict, as allegorical epic, my righteousness, my struggles and my ultimate victory against my archenemy, JDerion.

In the matches, I will be depicted by a wrestler in white trunks, as white is the internationally recognized symbol of the good guys. The wrestler depicting the evil JDerion will wear black trunks.

The show, tentatively entitled, Bladerpalooza, will air on WTBS at 11:00 pm EST on Saturdays.

[To my good friends at Delta Airlines I deeply regret the damage caused to the Narita Crown Room sofa and also the 4 chairs and table next to the beer refrigerator. These were inadvertant casualties as we experimented with some initial staging for our allegory. However, the damaged pair of reclining chairs closest to the entryway are NOT our responsibility. The middle easterner wearing the fez and the suspicious, paranoid and vaguely familiar looking man with him were not members of our party and were involved in an entirely separate imbroglio. You can contact the help-desk at Blader Industries, Inc. to be compensated for your losses, in addition to a generous 10% discount off our products and services for your troubles.]

Stunning Research

The Importance of R&D

I tell my associates over and again that you can't do too much research in our industry. If you pause for just an instant, the competition will be watching you from their rear view mirrors.

Because of that, I'm always proud of Blader Industries, Inc. record of innovation in the world-wide copulation market sector, and I'll boast about it to anybody who listens.

So it's a rare day that you'll find me impressed and humbled by the research conducted by other entitities.

It doesn't take a brilliant business person to notice the importance of carefully conducted placebo controlled research on breast size in terms of long term profitability.

What a long strange trip

From Uzbekistan to Narita

Well, it turns out I needn't have worried about that caravan approaching up the valley. They were not a JDerion-led death squad, but a contingent of CIA and US State Department operatives desperately hoping I'd help them out with a little problem.

Good thing too, because I never did find my kalashnikov in that whore house.

It's a long story, but they came to ask me to join President Bush's diplomatic mission to Asia, which will be capped by extremely important high level discussions in Beijing.

The bottom line is President Bush has a notorious reputation in diplomacy. He routinely forgets the names of his counterparts from other countries.

For example, at last years Chilean APEC conference, the President persistently addressed China's President Hu Jintao as, 'Cowboy', as in the following off the cuff statement he made to the assembled press: "Good ol' President, er, Cowboy, and myself just discussed my opinion that he should allow more US exports to China, especially guns and tanks."

For reasons not entirely clear to me, career diplomats find this kind of talk embarrassing.

So I agreed to help them and caught a CIA transport out of Uzbekistan, landing at Andrew's AFB just in time to board Air Force One. There I was given a Stewards' uniform and instructions to frequently service the presidential cabin.

For his part, President Bush was instructed to address me as 'Hu Jintao' each time he saw me. Other 'stewards' had joined the flight to play surrogates for other heads of state in Japan and Korea. The hope was this would burn the names of these important people on President Bush's, lips so that by the time we arrived in Asia, the names would be second nature.

But by 3 hours into the flight President Bush was hopelessly confused, and had reverted to addressing us all as, "cowboy" each time he saw us.

So we simply chilled out in the press cabin, becoming involved in a vicious high stakes scrabble game with an AP pool reporter and some hack from the Washington Post.

When we landed in Japan, the State Department functionary responsible for the plan learned of our failure and became livid.

She called a taxi, and gave us each a $1000 voucher for return travel.

So I'm in the Narita terminal, pondering my next move.

Rolling out new copulatory products

Blader Industries, Inc. announces "Forged" and "Cast"

Blader Industries, Inc. is a world wide leader in copulatory aids and devices, with a corporate mission to improve copulation frequency and effectiveness, thereby ensuring the survival of the species.

It is our position that "Forged" is the most significant advance in breast implant material since the invention of salt, and it will revolutionize copulation.

Briefly, "Forged" provides instantaneous feedback to a gentleman when properly massaged during the commission of a foreplay act. When caressed perfectly, "Forged" emits a very long wavelength, inaudible hyposonic tone perceptable only to his subconscious, triggering receptivity in the female and instinctual mounting behavior in the partner, leading to successful completion of the copulatory act.

The research and devlopment group at Blader Industries, Inc., a crack group of engineers and scientists recently returned from their annual brain-storming chataqua on the Bikini Atoll, recognizes that copulators come in many sizes, shapes and talents.

Therefore, we have also released our companion product--"Cast". "Cast" is almost identical in every way to forged except that in addition to triggering the brain's mounting centers, "Cast" also directs subliminal information towards the brain motor centers. These cues allow for a more forgiving fine motor control of copulation in those customers for whom this is problematic.

Not intended for use with farm animals. Blader Industries, Inc. is a multinational publicly traded concern listed on the worlds major stock exchanges. This announcement contains forward looking statements that may or may not be true and is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be used as a sole source in making investment decisions.

My most embarassing professional moment

Cruising with retired homies ain't what it's cracked up to be

Several years ago, as I was just starting out after college, I was hired on by North Star Cruiselines to serve as the night shift Entertainment Steward on their New York to London trans-Atlantic voyage.

One of their representatives had seen me in action one night while I was in college, where I frequently volunteered as a DJ at fraternity parties. My natural talents at working a party crowd into a throbbing frenzy, whether drunk or sober, were obvious to most even at a young age. And I liked the challenge.

The whole market model of this particular cruise ship service was to attract recently retired passengers for some "roaring 20's escapism." The shipping lane went through the North Atlantic ice fields as the customers, newly unshackled from the responsibilities of making a living, partied on and laughed in the face of the apparent danger.

Normally after a night shift I'd go catch some sleep, but on one day I went up to the tee range, driving golf balls off the deck for hours on end, trying to hit passing ice bergs. I was working to 'sustain the lag' during my downswing, and having pretty good success groving this particular 'secret of the golf swing'. I was enjoying the joviality and digging with some of the passengers, who had gathered to marvel at my shotmaking prowess.

Whether it was because I hadn't napped following the previous night shift, or the chill North Atlantic air or the hard excercise, or a combination of all three, but I became pretty tired, and the sun was beginning to set.

One of my duties each evening was to program the Muzak system, piped into the ships restrooms, hallways, decks and elevators, for a 12 hr intervals. I simply had to make some musical selections and load the play list of about 100 tunes, and hit 'replay' after the last tune just in case it doesn't run through the night and it can start back at the 1st tune of the list.

Well, as I mentioned I was tired, and when I get tired I tend to get a little goofy. So I added the theme song from the movie "Titanic" deep in the middle of the playlist. I figured maybe one or two guys with enlarged prostates waking up to urinate might hear this at 3am and get a little chuckle from the irony.

Unfortunately, before closing the window on the playlist page I somehow managed, without noticing, to check the replay box on the "Titanic" tune and simultaneously delete every other song in the play list!!

So what ended up happening was that the only song piped out that night on the Muzak system was the "Titanic" theme....over, and over, and over again.

I went to my cabin to take a little nap before going on shift, only to fall asleep immediately before setting my alarm clock.

I didn't learn of my mistake until the next morning, when the captain woke me up. He told me that all of the ship's passengers, and some of the crew, had begun assembling on the decks in life jackets beginning at about 1 am, and that by 6 am it was a full panic situation!!

The captain was kind enough to stay in my stateroom to help me compose an explanation and apology to our passengers, which I went out on deck to read shortly before breakfast.