Platte Flats, Utah, June 29, 2166 -- Extra-terrestrials from the planet Koob in the star system Rigel Kentaurus announced today their 200,000-year program of observing and testing human life is now complete.

Koobian Holograph Device

The announcement is expected to come as a welcome relief to the millions of individuals whose generally unwilling participation in the program has long been met with ridicule, ostracism and flawed diagnoses of mental disorders.

Washington, D.C., January 28, 2008 -- In a development that some pundits are already terming “unprecedented”, President George W. Bush, who was scheduled to deliver his final State of the Union address tonight, remained silent throughout the entire proceeding.

President Bush at the 2008 State of the Union: Mum's the word

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)