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Shiv to Shank

Tim Kirplowski, 11, of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, known to his friends and family as “Tiny Tim” died last weekend due to a congenial bone disease after his father’s employer, EsCo, INC. International’s CEO, Ebenezer Scrooge traded the company’s health care plan for their 10,000 employees for an exclusive membership to the elite Dickens’ Greens golf course and country club. When asked about the horrific ordeal, Scrooge reportedly commented, “The little tike may be dead, but shit, you should see the back nine on the Greens. My handicap is up something dreadful.”

As we at the Shivtastic desk of Shankdom have always suspected, while Kwanzaa continues to gather respect in the United States, recent polling suggests that white people still have no idea what it is.

Recently, Santa’s Workshop has come under fire from human rights groups, who claim that the working conditions at the North Pole are inhumane at best. “What we are dealing with here,” Walter Simonsen, president of Elf Watch International (EWI), stated in a recent press release, “is a CEO-call him Kris Kringle, Father Christmas or whatever you like-but he refuses to acknowledge the reality of the working conditions in his factories. We have dealt with Elf rights all over the world and I’ve never seen such violations of human dignity before. It’s cold, it’s damp, there is no sunlight for over half of the year. We have seen as many as 300 elves at a time brought in on dog sled. These elves are working eighteen hours a day without as much as a bathroom break; sometimes working triple shits in poorly lit and ventilated ‘workshop’ conditions. Not a single one has received any payment for services rendered, not to mention overtime. And the saddest thing about all of this is that this Claus fellow has set it up that we’re powerless to stop it. As of today, there is still no governing body of the North Pole to address these egregious conditions.” When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Christmas, INC., representing Mr. Kringle stated that his client had hired the elves for “their slender fingers and hard work ethic” and that they were “unaware of any registered complaints issues by Mr. Simonsen on behalf of Elf Watch or anyone else for that matter.”

A Shiv from the Future: Sticking true to his New Year’s resolution, Secretary of Defense Donald “Rummy” Rumsfeld will gather public scrutiny in the weeks following after he announces to the media that he is, indeed, an “ass man.”

Jewish Americans across the nation decided recently that enough is enough and emphatically told all of their coworkers that Chanukah is not in fact a holiday in which “the US government sells fighter jets to Israel for 11 days,” but is actually a holiday commemorating an event much sadder, yet more real than Christmas.

President George W. Bush was recently the center of much controversy as he was placed upon “the naughty list” for recently signing his forest bill into effect. While, we at the Shivtastic desk of Shankdom, agree that the bill itself was bad, we have to question Santa’s system of gauging the naughty/nice paradigm, since Bush seemed to have flown under the radar on the whole invading countries, placing US citizens in harm’s way, and that whole exploiting a national tragedy thing.