Art school hires empty coke can as new professor

Students at North Hampton College of Design will have their chance to participate in one of the art world's most creative gags as they attend lectures from a silent literal coke can that was hired as part of a creative prank by school administrators. 

"You've seen the banana taped to the wall, the abstract paintings where children say, "I could have done that," and of course Duchamp's clever little jokes.  Our school wanted to exemplify those same strides in modern art, so we hired an ordinary object from every day life to teach our studio art majors.

 

Some students dropped the class when they found out their professor was a coke can.  "I just cant sit there in silence for two hours," said Janine Dawkins, a sophomore art student focusing on painting and drawing. "There's only so much you can learn from staring at a piece of junk from off the street.

 

Others actually felt that they were participating in art history by indulging the school.  "I totally get it," said Fred Smith, who creates time lapse videos of books not moving at all.  "It's like okay, you say the teacher is a piece of trash, and then it really is.  And if the can gives you a C, what do you do?  If that's not art, I don't know what is.

 

Some parents were mad that their children's tuition dollars were spent on something like a coke can for a teacher.

 

"Well actually," said the dean, "it didn't cost us that much.  It was only a dollar fifty and then one of our grad assistants drank it before we hired the can.  We've saved a lot of money and can pass this along to the school in other ways."

 

The thing that the school didn't think about was having to ask students to take the coke can back and forth from its office to the classroom.

 

"Well, it's kind of not my job," said Samantha Earl, who transports the can from time to time. "But I'm trying to be a famous artist."

Mensa announces decision to base membership on Candy Crush scores instead of IQ tests

Mensa, a worldwide high IQ society, announced Tuesday that they will stop admitting members based on IQ test performance and will instead require top Candy Crush performance for acceptance.

We realized that the IQ tests just don’t correlate as well to actual IQ as the ranking of candy crush levels on people’s phones,” said Fred Wilkins from Mensa headquarters.  “Like what is more telling, completing a pattern in a test center? Or wiping out the whole candy crush board with two speckle candies that just “happen” to be next to each other?

Sonia Gomez, who was admitted to Mensa at nine years old, agrees with their decision.  “I made it to level three hundred on Candy Crush and no one even gave me an award at school.  Finally I feel like the grownups see what my mind is capable of.”

Some mensa members who tested to qualify are skeptical of the new policy.  “Can’t you just buy gold bars to beat the levels?” said Lin Chung, who joined Mensa based on a perfect SAT score ten years ago. “I am not sure they can proctor the phone games as well as a standardized test.”

Mensa disagrees. “Deciding which bonus candies to use and budgeting for online gambling is surely as much an act of genius as any kind of medical research or literary achievement,” said Wilkins. “The top 2 percent of intellectuals will probably be winning the unicorn challenge if they really are serious about joining our organization.”

At mensa conferences, members used to try out new board games and work puzzles.  “Now everyone is just on their phone,” said Gomez.  “And who knows, maybe we are playing against each other with the different avatars.”

“Many folks have asked us if we also accept scores for Royal Match, Worldle, or Block Blast,” said another Mensa spokesperson.  “All I can say so far is ‘of course not.’”

Bronx police investigate suspicious part of sidewalk with no trash scattered over it

 Officers from the main Bronx precinct near Parkchester and Pelham Bay areas taped off several blocks of sidewalks and road ditches late Wednesday morning when a floral shop owner called to report a suspicious absence of litter and biohazardous waste.

“There’s no trash on the ground this week,” the shop owner told police, who confirmed the lack of littering as soon as they arrived at the scene.

Up to three large squares of pavement had no dirty cat food, paper bags, used drug needles, empty pill bottles, torn psychiatric notes, or wadded up hairnets within several feet in all directions.

“Has someone actually swept this area?” asked deputy George Kafafenstern, walking almost ten yards to kick a beer can into the dirt next to the nearest pile of tires and plastic bottles.

“Maybe it’s because the liberals outlawed plastic straws,” said the florist’s neighbor, who at first was worried that the cops suspected him of some of his actual illegal habits.

“I doubt it,” said Kafafenstern. “That’s as likely as if people had actually walked by without littering. Kafafenstern has ordered a review of video footage so see if adopt-a-highway volunteers somehow found themselves in the wrong neighborhood, or if the waste management company hired overachieving illegal immigrants.

“There has to be an explanation,” he said. Trash doesn’t pick up itself, and that’s why the streets look like they do in the first place.”

Torture Survivor Program announces limit on spaces for Verizon salespeople

A spokesperson for the Bellevue survivors of torture program announced Friday that they are going to have to cap participation of Verizon workers in their protected population category.

“We really can only accommodate ten or fifteen more thousand Verizon workers and then we need to reserve space for immigrants and refugees of similar oppressive regimes,” said Consuelos Jenkins, director of the “unlikely recovery” division.

The torture program began taking in former and even current Verizon workers when Apple rolled out its Iphone 11 combined with deliberately frustrating data plans in 2014.

“Honestly we had never seen anything like it,” said Consuelos.  “We realized we may have to consult with the United Nations to reconsider modern definitions of torture.”

A worker who asked to remain anonymous said that at first he thought he could count the clock like he had at his other retail jobs, and imagine anger fantasies of bad things happening to customers. But he described his workload as becoming unbearable, and found himself screaming “I don’t know,” to people on the street during his walk home from the Upper East Side location of Verizon in Manhattan.

“Is it 128 GB on the SE that comes with unlimited data for 55 dollars more per month and if your friend changes his name on their own friends and family account then what if it doesn’t show up in your contacts when we transfer the data? All I can say is I don’t know.  They want me to tell them it’s free. They want me to say they have an upgrade. But the truth is that they are being charged the full price of a phone and the charger isn’t included.”

Onion reporters brought that same question to a store manager from Ohio and that staff person tried to kill himself.  He is in the hospital being evaluated with twenty other managers and a large group of Kurdish refugees who immediately mistook the Verizon nametags as being symbols of the Taliban.

“All we can say is it is very confusing, and part of life that we don’t understand,” said Consuelos.  “The suffering of these workers is beyond what most people could even imagine, and our program has to recognize its own limitations in confronting the evil powers in this world.”

“Much of the persecution is ingrained into the societies that harbor networks like the Verizon Friends and Family promotion, and you can’t just root it out person by person,” said Bellevue’s corporate liason Martha Hoppins.  “That’s why we stopped asking for donations from some companies and started requesting employee rosters.  “We want to rescue as many people as possible, but some of them can only be found from their phone contacts, which makes this crisis almost as complicated as a verizon wireless data plan.”

Popular girl at school has eye on China’s one billion people

Misty Suarez from Freemont High School in Kansas City, Missouri already has a lot of friends.  Recently voted as both “Best All Round” and “Most Likely to Succeed” in her high school class, most students really know that she is also by far the most popular.

Between checking her facebook account for messages from her three hundred and fifty “followers,” and silencing her phone so the dinging sound can’t be mistaken for a fire alarm, Misty enjoys chatting and catching up with classmates who find her charm to cross any borders of shyness or awkward conversation.

That is why it came as no surprise when Misty announced to her fourth period history class that she wanted to move to China instead of going to college.

“There are one billion people there,” she said. “I’d love to get to know them better.”

Misty’s friends nodded along and thought about whether they would want to go with her or not.

“I am sure that some people there have never had bubble tea, but I happen to like it a lot,” she said.  “We could get together about a million of us at a time and talk about what happened when the yellow river flooded during the 1400s.”

Some “friends” from other classes accused Misty of “collecting people,” or just using everyone to get the attention of everyone else.

“Well frankly it is a numbers game,” said Misty. “And when there are one billion of you then maybe you won’t take me for granted as much.”

Apple testing new technology that would cause the iphone to disintegrate in your hand

Apple inc unveiled plans for the new Iphone 17 featuring a disintegration capability that would erase your contacts and cause the phone to melt as soon as you make a call or use the internet.

“We knew that we couldn’t always rely on faulty charging ports that wear out in a year and a half,” said CEO Tim Cook.  “It took us a while as far as the tech world goes, but we now have a way to make the phones essentially become useless upon purchase.”

Some apple customers have questioned the idea and wonder if it is really user friendly enough or if apple is overdoing it with its advances.

“I just think it is hyper ambitious,” said Tabitha, a millennial who switched from Android phones when she started working in advertising. “Like it’s a form of showing off that you are better than the Samsung customers because you don’t even have a phone.”

Apple executives disagree.  “If you do the math, it’s about 800 dollars a month that can be re-invested in our company to apply to other technological advances.  “One thing we are experimenting with is membership so people can pay apple a fee for access to their social life but not even go through the formalities of ever buying a computer at all.”

Some executives attributed their innovation skills to time spent in universites where classmates aspired for a passive income.

“The whole world falling apart, is that passive enough for ya?”

City Officials meet to decide whether mental hospital or jail is the best place to torture schizophrenics

After several hundred cops complained about being bored with the “same old tasers and zip ties,” leaders of New York City met last week to discuss the most cost effective yet satisfying ways to harm some of its most vulnerable populations.

Social Workers and Doctors consulted with elected officials to review video footage of arrests and confinement for people suffering from depressions, delusions, and perhaps the most damaging: modern medical treatment.

“We know that many of these people are already in agony,” said Fran Jones, LMSW.  “But without much effort at all, we can give someone else a meaningful life by hiring hospital workers to take away any remaining shred of humanity.”

Fran and other hospital workers felt that the psych patients would best be abused in the locked wards of overcrowded mental hospitals, where layers of personel could all benefit from the payments for benefits benefitting the government benefit offices.

But cops argued that the path to solitary confinement and even execution was much more clear if they were allowed to provoke mentally ill people into being suicidal. “Once they are truly hopeless, we can make them scream like animals,” said Louie from the Bronx precinct. “It makes us feel like maybe we are the humans for a change.”

No real solutions were found to the dilemmas tackled by the guardians of civilization, but most authorities walked away with renewed motivation to be more efficient in changing the one in four mentally ill people to two in three electrocuted “some how some way.”

CVS and WALGREENS Sign Corporate Agreement to Try to Ruin Country

After several weeks of deliberating and meeting with lawyers from both companies, CVS and Walgreens opted out of competition regulations, bypassed a merger plan, and decided together to try to ruin the future of all Americans.

“We realized that instead of our petty and unethical aggressive marketing battles, we could really destroy the whole society if we worked together,” said Eric Morton, merchandise manager at CVS store 2558 in Wisconsin.

“It’s kind of funny,” he said. “We’ve actually already accomplished a lot of that goal already.”

Morton cited examples of closing the pharmacy at one oclock and reopening it precisely after most nearby workers’ lunch break.  “Why are we closed then?” he said. “Because that’s when people need us to be open.”

Many times, if a CVS opened, a Walgreens would build a store right next door, or vice versa.  The company leaders realized if they directed that kind of disrespect more to the customers, it would have a better likelihood of ruining the whole economy.

“Honestly I already felt disrespected by the music,” said Marsha Hoolihan of Massachussetts, who buys her heart medicine from one of the CVS stores near her house.  “I have always wondered how any of the workers can stand listening to people scrogging each other to an electronic beat all day, with screeching electric guitars speeding up sales and making anyone with morals wish they were never born.”

Walgreens managers said they had considered switching stores as employees before, just in case benefits were better or they might not be jerked around by their schedules any more. But they might not need to bother under the new team work vision outlined by the drug store CEOs and stockholders.

“I guess our unified dream now is to actually be the locations in the middle of a burned down wasteland where actual barbaric child sacrifice occurs. Some people already are claiming our morning after pills are part of that effort, but we definitely see much more potential for a horrifyingly bleak landscape of total destruction and devastation.”

Facebook Algorithms Genuinely Hurt that Area Man Does Not Like Deer Video

 Several local algorithms tried as hard as they could to find a video that New Hampshire resident Ronald Hooper would appreciate but were truly disappointed when he clicked away from the deer and snake video, and then away again from the cow and snake pit video, and then wait a minute, here’s a few seconds watching a python attack a different large mammal of some sort.

The Algorithms felt some relief when Hooper did stop to watch the video of children playing with a giant boa constrictor in a foreigh country, and his effort to report the incident caused another full ten seconds of watch time, granting facebook’s bot system the go ahead to roll out the other cobra cow videos that had been saved from previous scrolling.

“The algorithms are smarter than you are,” said facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “Instead of calling it artificial intelligence, for some people we should just say artificial consciousness, or thought.  In fact, maybe that is the next tech advancement, “artificial below average intelligence,” or “remedial artificialness.”

Many of the algorithms had all but given up on creating a steady feed of reptile/cow scenes, but Hooper’s failed attempts to report international child abuse bought facebook the time they needed to counteract any security help that was given based on other reports from hundreds of people.

“People have different goals for using facebook,” said Zuckerberg.  “But facebook’s goal has always been to bring people closer together, or closer together to snakes if we say so.”