Poor Mojo's Newswire

He trudged homeward, downhearted, though he was by nature a hopeful man. Evening was coming on. Shadows fell across the road. Among the shadows he saw a tall, beautiful woman standing. “Woodcutter,” she said, “be of good cheer! I am your Gift Fairy, and I will give you and your family enough to live on. You will have food, and can buy shoes for your son and daughter!” “Gracious lady,” said the woodcutter, “you are very kind. What can I do to deserve such a gift?” “To deserve my gift, woodcutter, you must not work, but every day you must look for work,” said the lady. “You must try four times a day to find a job. No matter if there is no work to be found, you must not stop looking for it. I will be watching you. I will know if you grow discouraged. If you cease to look for work for one month, I will know it, and my gift will cease to appear.” “Lady,” said the woodcutter, “I’d be glad to have work, but if I ask for a job four times every day in the village, I’ll be going to the same people all the time, because it’s a small village, and they’ll get sick of me.” “That is not my concern,” said the lady. “Could you maybe, instead of giving me money, give me some kind of job — any kind?” said the woodcutter, who, as we know, was a hopeful man. “I’m not too old to learn a new craft, and I’ll turn my hand to anything.” “That is not my department,” said the lady. “The Works Fairies are not functioning at present. All I can offer you is my gift, on the terms I have told you.”

“How do you get a merger done?” asks Scott B. Connolly, an attorney. There is silence from three well-dressed people in their early 20s, sitting at a conference table in a downtown building here last month. “What steps would you need to take to accomplish a merger?” Mr. Connolly prods. After a pause, a participant gives it a shot: “You buy all the stock of one company. Is that what you need?” “That’s a stock acquisition,” Mr. Connolly says. “The question is, when you close a merger, how does that deal get done?” The answer — draft a certificate of merger and file it with the secretary of state — is part of a crash course in legal training. But the three people taking notes are not students. They are associates at a law firm called Drinker Biddle & Reath, hired to handle corporate transactions. And they have each spent three years and as much as $150,000 for a legal degree. . . .

A Sacramento State professor has come under fire after he dismissed his Psychology 101 lab class last Thursday because they failed to provide snacks. A hand out on the first day of class reportedly read “Not having a snack = no Dr. Parrott or TAs. Now you are responsible for your own lab assignment.” Prof. George Parrott says he has been requiring students to bring snacks — preferably homemade ones — to class for 39 years in an effort to encourage students to loosen up and work together. “Having these goodies in the class breaks down some of the formality and some of the rigidity in the class, which is one of the most stressful for students,” Parrott told the Sacramento Bee. But rather than decrease the stress level of students, Parrott did quite the opposite when he canceled a class his pupils say was supposed to include an essential pre-midterm review. “Our education isn’t worth food, it’s for us,” Psych 101 student Francisco Chavez said. . . .