The Treasury Department’s Bureau of Public Debt is looking for a contractor to run a couple of three-hour discussions on “Humor in the Workplace.” According to this FedBizOpps notice, which topped the Drudge Report today, the programs will “discuss the power of humor in the workplace, the close relationship between humor and stress, and why humor is one of the most important ways that we communicate in business and office life.” The requirements: Participants shall experience demonstrations of cartoons being created on the spot. The contractor shall have the ability to create cartoons on the spot about BPD jobs. The…
Browsing: Friday Fun
The Smoking Gun reports that FEMA pulled a children’s coloring book from its Web site earlier this week after it drew criticism for including images of the World Trade Center attacks. The coloring book, “A Scary Thing Happened,” was intended to teach children about disasters and the emotional turmoil they cause. But some felt that showing the smoldering Twin Towers might be going too far. “Oh gosh, that was on the front of a coloring book?” Kim Pressley-Herrick, founder of Coloring Away Pain, told Fox News. Pressley-Herrick’s company produces coloring books intended to help children deal with traumatic events. “As…
No, little green men have not been found on Mars and residents of West Windsor Township, N.J. have nothing to fear. But a team of NASA scientists have discovered something that could prove there is life on the red planet: methane. The gas is a byproduct of biological and geological activity. On Earth, much of the methane in Earth’s atmosphere is released by organisms as they digest food. But geological processes, such iron oxidation, also release the gas. NASA observations of the Martian atmosphere over the last several years have shown that methane is being continually released into the air…
We at Federal Times had an enlightening editorial board meeting at our offices earlier this month with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, which resulted in several interesting stories. But the crack staff at the Onion appears to have scooped us on the real story:
Hanukkah starts Sunday and Christmas and Kwanzaa are about a week away. To get you in the holiday mood, we bring you a special winter holiday edition of Friday Fun Facts. Today’s fun facts come to us courtesy of the Census Bureau, or as I like to call it, the Fun Fact Bureau. The Postal Service will deliver more than 20 billion pieces of mail throughout the season. Last year holiday shoppers spent $30.5 billion on gifts. Christmas tree farmers sold $493 million worth of pine trees last year; $114 million worth were sold in Oregon alone. Approximately $1.3 billion…
Did anyone catch NPR’s news quiz Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me this weekend? Because it was [bleeping] awesome. And not just because Carl Kasell did the best reading of the Rod Blagojevich tapes I’ve heard to date. But because CIA Director Michael Hayden was the guest for “Not My Job,” the portion of the show where they ask famous people obscure questions to win a listener the privilege of having Carl Kasell’s smooth voice on the listener’s answering machine. After telling some funny spy stories, Hayden was tested on his knowledge of obscure breakfast cereal. So how did the director of central intelligence…
Anyone with a human resources background — or even a lick of common sense — will cringe as often as laugh at the boneheaded management tactics depicted on NBC’s The Office. But if you want to find out what HR people really think of Michael Scott’s … um … unique leadership style, check out the blog That’s What She Said. Every Friday, a former HR professional analyzes the management sins from the previous night’s episode and tabulates how much the fictional Dunder Mifflin paper company might have to pay if a fed-up employee filed a lawsuit. For example, the entry for the episode “Did…
Exactly 75 years ago today, the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, which lifted the national prohibition on the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol for consumption, was ratified.
Thanksgiving is tomorrow. Let’s talk turkey shall we? How about 271 million turkeys for starters? That’s the number of turkeys that were raised in the U.S. since last Turkey Day, according to the Census Bureau, the keeper of all fun facts. According to Census the average American consumes 13.3 pounds annually. Here’s what else Census has to say about other Thanksgiving eats: The U.S. cranberry industry produced 689 million pounds of cranberries this year, up 5 percent from last year. And surprise, Wisconsin, not Massachusetts, leads the nation in cranberry production. Approximately 1.8 million pounds of sweet potatoes were harvested…
The proof is out there…thanks to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble took the first picture of a planet outside our solar system orbiting a star called Fomalhaut, NASA has announced. Hubble astronomer Paul Kalas, of the University of California at Berkley, and his team have been studying debris around the star since 2001. Obervations taken 21 months apart show that there is an object moving around that star the way Earth moves around the sun. To celebrate this federally supported discovery, we give you the following facts, courtesy of NASA: The planet called Fomalhaut b is located 25 light-years away from us in the costellation Piscis…