NY, NY- In a desperate attempt to avoid another fiasco like Windows Vista, Bill Gates has staged a hostile takeover of Glaceau, aka Energy Brands.  The New York City based company is the producer of Smart Water.  It’s rumored that the takeover cost considerably less than the amount spent for Mojave Experiment commercials.

Initially, Gates became interested in Smart Water when he found out that Apple employees used it while working on the iPhone concept. At one point they were thinking of calling it the iCell and making apple shaped buttons on the keypad but after using Smart Water, Apple chose the name iPhone and used a touch screen. Smart!

The water’s effectiveness was confirmed in a study released by Harvard School of Medicine late last week, it was found that Smart Water will raise a subject’s IQ by as much as ten points. Their control group was given a dosage of 128 ounces (one gallon) per 12 hour period. A Microsoft insider reported that Gates has upped consumption to 1028 ounces per 12 hours for all employees.

The Bobby Builder Construction company of  Redmond, Washington, confirmed an order for an additional 600 bathrooms that are to be completed at the Microsoft facilities before the end of the year. They also hinted that the bathrooms would come equipped with a foldout desk for use with a laptop.

All Smart Water has been removed from supermarkets and funneled to an undisclosed location. Gates plans on replacing Smart Water in stores with a new product to help consumers forget about it: Sexy Water.

DETROIT, MI — General Motors management has developed a backup plan in the event that the Treasury Department doesn’t bail the company out and China decides to spend its yen on developing easier-to-use chopsticks. Every GM car dealership, GM car owner, UAW member and NASCAR fan will receive shortly in the mail this list of 14 tips to help GM save GM. Here’s an advance copy of what they’ll be getting:

1. Buy a small GM car so there’s more place for the Hummers to park at the mall.
2. Put all of your leftover McCain/Palin ’08 bumper stickers on every Honda and Toyota you see.
3. Get rid of your German car so a retired GM worker who lost his benefits can move into your garage.
4. Demand that you grocery store carry alphabet soup with only the letters G and M.
5. If you’re a bowler in a union league, refuse to bowl strikes.
6. Go to an auto show and spread rumors that the beautiful model by the Ferrari is a transvestite.
7. Drive in bike lanes.
8. Rent a Chevy Chase movie.
9. Go to AA instead of the Betty Ford Clinic.
10. Steal only foreign cars while playing Grand Theft Auto.
11. Put Michael Moore’s face on your chair seat.
12. Finance all Hot Wheels you buy for Christmas through GMAC.
13. Refer to your bathroom break as “taking a mazda.”
14. Wear wool socks and sweaters, build up a charge and touch an electric car.

CHICAGO, IL — In a stunning reversal of fortune, the Chicago Cubs (motto: “Wait Till Next Whatever”) have made an offer to purchase Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. Cuban had recently placed a $1.3 billion bid to buy the Cubs, a team that has not won a World Series since the world was flat. “We’re buying Cuban to get the Mavericks,” said Sam Zell, CEO of the Tribune, which owns the Cubs. “We think Dirk Nowitski is being wasted as a center and would make a great first baseman and long-ball hitter.”

Cuban suddenly became affordable when the Securities and Exchange Commission filed insider-trading charges against him over his sale of shares in Internet company Mamma.com. Cuban’s value dropped almost 80% before the NBA stepped in and halted trading of Mavericks’ jerseys and Cuban’s bobblehead dolls. “I’m innocent!” a defiant Cuban told reporters who stood out of spitting and chair-throwing range. “I thought I was selling shares of yomamma.com, my online snaps company.

If the Tribune is successful in purchasing Cuban, Zell plans a major makeover for the Mavericks. “First thing we’ll do is make the fans sing “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” at the beginning of the fourth quarter. Nobody really pays attention to basketball games until then anyway.” Zell also plans to put a green monstrous wall directly up against the rear of the backboard at the Mavericks’ end of the court to intimidate opponents running fast breaks, particularly the Boston Celtics.

Mark Cuban will have no control of either team. According to Zell, “Once the SEC is done with him, we’ll see if he’s got any value left. He’s still got some basketball experience. Maybe ‘Dancing With The Stars’ needs somebody to mop the sweat off the floors after each dance.”

Tenacity. Discipline. Innovation. You lacked all of these qualities in 2008. Avoid another year of failure by adding these Top 10 Business Books for 2009 to your Christmas list.

1. The 4,867 Habits of Obsessive-Compulsive People by Stephen R. Covey—Succeeding in business means minding the details. This new book covers everything from “Be proactive 117 times a day” to “Wash your hands six times before leaving the bathroom.”

2. Getting Shit Done by David Allen—Updated edition for Generation Z.

3. Good to Lousy by Jim Collins—Why some companies make the leap…and how to avoid being crushed under them.

4. Who Moved My Cheese? Episode 2: The Quickening by Spencer Johnson—Two mice enter. One mouse leaves.

5. How to Win Friends While Under the Influence by Dale “Budman” Carnegie IV—Includes classic tips like, “Buy the next round,” “Dude, you could totally take that jackass,” and “Stop staring at her boobs.”

6. The 40-Hour Work Week by “A. Boss”—Full text: “I don’t pay you to read books. Get back to work.”

7. The One-Minute Micromanager by Ken Blanchard—Three hundred pages of strategy that boils down to “Here, just let me do it.”

8. White Collar Crime for Entrepreneurial Dummies—A complete how-to for embezzlement, fraud and bribery, plus a razor-sharp back page for shredding the book.

9. Made to Suck by Chip Heath—Why some ideas survive and slowly choke the life out of your company.

10. Random Metaphor Adapted for a Business Setting by Seth Godin—The Tribes of the Big Red Fez kill a large Purple Cow to make a small Meatball Sundae because Small is the New Big or something.

WASHINGTON, DC — Descendants of Charles Ponzi — the inventor of the famous pyramid scheme that bears his name — have asked President Bush to issue a posthumous pardon for the mail fraud charges that ultimately sent him to prison. “If Uncle Chuck were alive today, he’d be on the short list for Treasury Secretary,” said Arthur Ponzarelli, a nephew who was forced to change his name to avoid getting beat up at Wharton. “He’d be getting a bailout, a bonus and a Nobel prize in economics too.”

For those who have never received an email from Nigeria, Ponzi’s scheme involved paying dividends to his initial investors using money he collected from later investors. He gave double-digit returns while treating himself to a lavish lifestyle. “He got screwed when the payouts slowed down and the liberal business media started snoopin’ where they ain’t supposed to snoop. Sound familiar?” asked Ponzi relative Tony “Anthony” Ponzi, a “businessman” in New Jersey. “He shoulda put on a dress and called himself Fannie. Everybody loves broads named Fannie. Especially Fed chairmen.”

Ponzi’s heirs are upset because he ended up serving time for his scheme. “Those guys on Wall Street did the same thing and got massages, bonuses, trips, bonuses, hookers and bonuses,” said Ponzi’s grandson Al “Fredo” Ponzi. “We don’t want money. We just want Papa to have his name cleared. And maybe one or two hookers.”

President Bush did not rule out a pardon for Charles Ponzi, although he admitted there were a lot of people in line in front of him. He ordered his staff to check the records to see if Ponzi was a registered Republican and whether he made any campaign contributions to Republican candidates. He also asked them to make a copy of Arthur Ponzarelli’s letter and send it along with $100 to each of the names listed on the bottom.

The Money Curmudgeon is tired of politicians arguing over which administration should bail out General Motors and why it is too big to fail (which is #1 on my list of phrases to stop using in 2009, except in the case of student-athletes at my alma mater). We let buggy whip makers fail, whale oil lamp makers fail and TV shows starring Saturday Night Live alumni fail. If you you’re not convinced it’s time to close the story of General Motors at Chapter 13, here’s 15 reasons why the Money Curmudgeon thinks we should:

Michael Moore can finally declare a victory and go away.

I got cut off by a Hummer this morning.

They’ve never figured out a way to bring back tailfins.

Dinah Shore’s been dead for years, but I still can’t get that “See the USA in your Chevrolet” song out of my head.

I can’t find any American parts in their cars.

For applying the concept of “planned obsolescence” to cars but not to GM executives.

They never gave the Pontiac Indian tribe a cut.

It’s the only claim to fame Chevy Chase has left.

I still can’t afford a Corvette.

For all of the EV1s that died so the Chevy Volt could live.

For every day I’ve been stuck behind a Nova that needed a valve job.

So NASCAR will discover the Volkswagen.

If it weren’t for the Corvair, Ralph Nader would have ended up as a high school civics teacher.

Because the Torrent trickles, the TrailBlazer won’t and the Allure doesn’t.

I own the rights to “The Big Two Automakers.”

Scientists at Gillette have won this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics for their development of the Gillette Samurai, the world’s first seven-bladed razor.

“They said man couldn’t fly. We flew,” said project leader, Roger Bigsby. “They said we couldn’t travel faster than sound, but we smashed the sound barrier. They said duct tape couldn’t cure warts … OK, we’re still working on that one. And they said a razor with more than five blades was impossible. Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “You can now have cheeks that will set new standards for babies’ bottoms!”

As recently as two years ago the scientific community scoffed at the idea of a razor with more than five blades. Field experts like Dr. Alexei Dotsenko, a physicist at MIT, assumed Gillette had reached the practical limit of shaving technology with the five-bladed Gillette Fusion. “Are we shaving or fencing?” asked Dotsenko in 2006. “We physicists have a saying—if God meant for us to shave with such razors, he wouldn’t still have his beard.”

Even before Gillette released the five-bladed Fusion, Bigsby and his team explored the theoretical possibilities of six and perhaps even seven blades. Traditional multi-bladed razors lift the hair as they cut, enabling subsequent blades to shave closer, but sometimes sharpening the hairs instead of cutting them off and causing an irritating medical condition known as “Pinhead Syndrome.” For the Samurai, Bigsby envisioned blades which became progressively sharper. The sixth blade, made of finely cut diamond, is sharp enough to cut through time itself, allowing the seventh blade to shave whiskers growing twelve hours in the future, eliminating five-o-clock shadow. “This was the real driving force behind Albert Einstein’s work on the Theory of Relativity,” said Bigsby. “His mistress hated stubble, not to mention that silly mustache.”

Bigsby dedicated the award to the brave scientists who tested the blades. Setbacks were many—five men lost ears, one cut off his nose and two were driven mad by constant nightmares of working in a delicatessen.

Finishing second to the Gillette team was the European Organization for Nuclear Research and their work on the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator. A close third was Scotty McFarlane, a Brooklyn teenager, for his iPhone 3G app “X-Ray Vision” that allows users to take pictures of women and make their clothes disappear.

MENLO PARK, CA — Google, Inc. (motto: “We Know Everything About You – You Pervert!”) announced today that the Google Flu Trends web site has been accepted to Harvard Medical School. “Google Flu Trends knows more about influenza than any student we’ve ever had,” said Dr. Howard Finehoward, Dean of the Harvard Medical School. “That alone convinced us to waive our long-standing rule that Harvard medical students must be human or the descendant of a human Harvard med school graduate.”

The Google Flu Trends web site was developed with the help of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (motto: “Death To Dying!”) and is based on the number of Google search queries made about influenza. “When I designed the site, I never thought it would get accepted to med school,” said Paige Brinn, vice president of R&D&P (Research & Development & Pranks). “Engineering school, maybe, but not Harvard med school. My Jewish friends are SO jealous!”

Google Flu Trends tracks certain search terms that are good indicators of flu activity. These terms include “sneezing,” “vomiting,” “feel like I’m fixin’ to die,” “doctors who don’t lecture you for smoking” and “mommy.” “We’ve had over 100,000 searches in New Jersey for “Can snorting NyQuil hurt you?” said Brinn. “The CDC is rushing flu shots to Newark as we speak.”

Now that Google Flu Trends has broken down the barrier preventing web sites and software programs from entering med school, others are following suit. Johns Hopkins University reports receiving over 100 applications from iPhone apps, including one that is just a GPS tool to help hospital patients find the nearest bedpan. “We have high standards,” said a spokesperson for Johns Hopkins. “If iPhone apps want to become doctors, they should try an online school first.”