ChittahChattah Quickies

You’ve Been Left Behind – Another niche offering, online: a service that will, after the Rapture, deliver a final message to those who weren’t pulled up to the sky. The name is a bit misleading: “you” refers not to the customers but to those who the customers are reaching out to.

Q:How are the emails sent out after the rapture if you are all Christians?

A:I have a team, of Christian couples, scattered around the U.S. 4 active couples and one alternate. One of each, of the active couples, are required to log into the system everyday. They are scattered to protect us from having the team wiped out by attack, natural disaster, or epidemic. They are couples in case one is sick, injured, killed, and to assure their walk with God. If they (3 out of 4) fail to log in for 3 days the system figures the Rapture has taken place. There are then notices sent out to each of us daily, for 3 more days, warning us we must log in to prevent the sending of documents. If, we do not, then the system sends out all of the stored data to all of the email addresses. There is one alternate team member to ready as a replacement for a lost teammate. Also one team member is located near enough to the server bank, with access, in case the net goes down, or malfunction.

Trade in Pork Bellies Comes to an End, but the Lore Lives – Like seeing the obituary of someone you thought was already dead, there’s a bit of a surprise here that pork bellies really are a thing (well, if you dine out fancy, you already know that), and they are a thing that actually does get traded. Or used to.

When the Chicago Mercantile Exchange announced the other day that pork belly futures would no longer be traded, it was hardly a shock. Trades had shrunk to almost nothing. Volatility was too much. The frozen bellies, used to make bacon, were, in the view of some, losing relevance.

Pork bellies have long held a puzzling mystique to the public. Experts in the field offer a range of sometimes conflicting explanations: everybody likes bacon; the word “belly” sounds funny; no one actually knows what a pork belly is. Whatever the reason, pork bellies pop up in an inordinate number of references in magazines, popular culture and movies, like “Trading Places,” the 1983 film in which Eddie Murphy’s character used pork bellies to explain, in unforgettably bare terms, how a market works.

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