Hi everybody.
Well, it's no secret that we here at Newspoetry Intranational are operating
on a shoestring budget. I mean, one look at the Newspoetry skyscraper
will tell you that it hasn't been built. Also, it would be helpful
to me to have a real computer to manage the website with. At the moment
I am using an old Underwood manual typewriter upgraded with a Pentium
2 Processor, and it is pretty slow.
Well, I've been trying to look into new ways of generating revenue
for the Newspoetry project. As you remember, the Board vetoed the idea
of making our website a pay-per-view credit-card access site, so I've
been trying to find ways of bringing in money other than selling our
poetry. To this end I have hired as consultants the international patent
lawfirm Weltschmerz & Zeitgeist so I could run some ideas by them.
Here they are:
What I think is the most promising product we are currently developing
(and this is still a secret so try to keep it under wraps) is all-meat
vegetable substitutes. We have been working on a type of lettuce - looks
and tastes like real lettuce - made entirely of beef. We are pretty
sure there will be a market for this. Some meat-eaters get a craving
for salad now and then just like the rest of us. We have also been developing
pork carrots and blood tomatoes.
Now some of you may remember from a few years back (right during the
three weeks or so that Zima and Crystal Pepsi were all the rage) my
failed attempt to market transparent Crystal Beef, and also Crystal
Pork ("the other clear meat"). Well, I admit, that idea wasn't very
good. We had some success with the Crystal Menthol Light 120's (the
invisible cigarette) but studies revealed that clear tar is, if anything,
even worse for your lungs than the black stuff. Anyway, I think the
vegetable substitute is a better approach. Our all-meat vegetable substitutes
are a more direct way to target that segment of the middle class who
would like to become more health conscious without actually becoming
more healthy.
Now don't think this is the only product I have been working on. It
occurred to me recently while reading Simulating Thermonuclear Fusion
Using High-Powered Lasers for Dummies that, if one were really a
dummy, the book wouldn't help much. That's when I called up the Dummy
people and tried to pitch my idea of a series of books "for Real Dummies."
They expressed some interest and so I contacted Brad Wank, a technical
writer I know, and started work on Coffeecups for Real Dummies
- a 150-page guide (laden with helpful illustrations) on how to operate
a coffeecup safely and properly, with a minimum of breakage or spillage.
Real dummies sometimes try to pour in the coffee when the cup is upside-down
or lying on its side, but after reading through our manual, we think
they will soon be able to achieve a 50 percent success rate. We're also
working on Shoes 4.0 for Real Dummies.
In unrelated news, we are having a little bit of legal trouble. As
some of you know, our Newspoetry web server was obtained under very
informal circumstances - a man sold it to me out of his trunk in downtown
Champaign. Turns out that it was (and let me tell you this comes as
a total shock to me) stolen. Stolen, in fact, from the Republican Party
national headquarters (which explains why their site has been down for
so long - I know this because I like to surf the web looking for images
of Dan Quayle (lots of straight liberal guys think Dan Quayle is cute
- there's nothing wrong with it, it's not like I'm going to call him
for help with my spelling)). So there's a little bit of legal trouble
right now (but nothing as bad as what we went through last year when
one of our newspoets kidnapped Illinois State Representative Rick Winkel,
drugged him, and tried to use him to make graphics for use in a Newspoem
- the nighttime cleaning lady over at the Beckman Visualization Lab
called the police when she found an unconscious naked man on a flatbed
scanner). However, this business with the server belonging to the Republicans
might explain why the recycle bin on my Windows 95 desktop keeps disappearing,
and might also explain why, when I have a paper jam, it won't let me
abort the print job.
Well, thanks to all of you for helping with the Newspoetry project.
And let me know if you can think of any ideas to run by our patent lawyers.
All my Best, William Gillespie
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