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Everybody’s been a little down around here ( here being the Institute) since the shutdown started. What with the furloughs, and the food shortages, the staff has rebelled and no amount of beating will get them to eat one more serving of Lamprey, in fact there have been two suspicious fires at the Lamprey storage locker, and on top of that we still haven’t had any contact with Les Firgotin, other than finding a few tooth marked baseball caps, she is still missing. People have gradually been finding their way back to the compound, I mean campus and trying to put their life and careers back together.

Generally the morale has been totally in the crapper. Nothing seemed to cheer these people up, not even the somewhat vague promise of a payday in the near future… perhaps. However just in the nick of time a good thing has reared it strange but weird-looking head and has helped a little towards lightening the mood. I’m talking about our 26th annual game of “What Is It?” a fun-filled loony exercise in which our contestants who also happen to be our very own employees try to identify a common object and win big prizes. Due to the hardships of the last several weeks we have pulled out all the stops in selecting prizes this year. Third prize is a  full month of not having to eat Lamprey in the commissary, Second prize is two weeks in Hawaii with the director, First prize is a 5lb. ham.

So once the prizes were announced and the picture posted the game began. The following choices were put up on the bulletin board and people started making their selections. The first correct answer, time stamped using the PhD’s Time Clock would be the winner, the next closest would be second and so on, and since we rarely get more than two correct answers in any of the contests we run, the third place award would be given to the one who managed to get the check mark in any of the boxes.

The choices for “What Is It?” were

(A) The spiritual representation of Ted from the planet Itchy.

(B) Something the cat threw up

(C) A gay Ping-Pong ball

(D) A flower

As expected we only got one correct answer, which was (A) of course, but surprisingly there were 31 votes for (C) but then we pride ourselves on having a very free thinking, desperate, I mean, spirited staff here at the Institute. We just didn’t take in how nuts they were. Everyone seemed to have great fun anyway and their was much jostling and friendly eye-gouging as they tried to exit the building after the director announced that since no one had claimed second prize he would personally select a winner for that award.

Hopefully things will continue towards the healthy healing we all need here in our wonderful nation, America, or America the Great as we like to call it, and that we will be back to normal before the next crisis looms, which is scheduled to occur on February 7th, 2014, that would be another occurrence of the chaos we just went through. But that is 10 long weeks away, surely they’ll be able to work things out by then. Of course given the caliber of those representing us in Congress I can’t see any cause for worry, can you?