Reno, September 22, 2155 -- The festivities were frolicsome, the conversation frivolous, and as the last of the guests slip one by one through the vapor-lock and into their plasma cubes for the bounce home, the hosts sigh at the hurricane-like swath of residue left by the merriment: glass shards, cracker crumbs, innumerable dribblings of hors d'oeuvres. But do they don decontaminant apparel and reach for broom and dustpan?

Individual NannoGoat (shown in front of a half-inch $500 coin)

Upton, New York, March 29, 2009 -- A team of physicists at Brookhaven Lab in Upton, New York are currently developing a revolutionary system that will protect coastal areas of the world against future tsunamis using the unique quantum mechanical characteristics of physicist Erwin Schrödinger's cat. The system should be operational within three years or as soon as a sufficient number of Schrödinger's cats can be cloned, whichever comes first.

STRAI tsunami cat (interior view)

Washington, D.C., January 9, 2007 -- Leading Republican senators who had formed a Suicide PAC prior to the 2006 midterm elections are now reconsidering their positions, beltway sources report. The unusual political action committee was designed to ensure members' reelections by codifying a formal "loss provision", under which PAC members vowed to commit suicide in the event of failure at the ballot box.

Outgoing Senator Rick Santorum, co-founder of DOH!

Paris, February 11, 2008 -- Jerome Kerviel, the so-called "rogue trader" whose actions resulted in a staggering $7.2 billion loss last month for French bank Societe Generale, simply got his millions and his billions confused, according to a French police officer who asked not to be identified.