Dog Poop For Gold? Taiwanese Officials Hope To Clean Up

         If your municipality has an issue with pooper-scooping, you might take a page from Taiwan’s book. We all know that what goes in must come out, and any dogfood coupons you use now will yield dog poops down the line – but not all pet owners take the time to clean up after their pets, which can be a frustrating experience for those who accidentally locate stray presents with their feet.

         Hoping to keep their streets and parks clean, New Taipei City in Taiwan is offering raffle tickets to citizens in exchange for each bag of doggy doo doo they submit. Each drawing is for a prize of one of three gold ingots valued at approximately $2,100, $625, and $400, respectively.

            “We believe this innovative measure will raise people’s awareness of the problem,” Chen Chao-mint, an official with the city's environmental protection department, told the Taipei Times. “Through the raffle, we expect the public to pay closer attention to environmental sanitation and play a more active role in keeping their surroundings clean.”

            I think this measure is totally ingenious – I’ve heard of cash for gold, but this is an even better deal: gold for poop! If dog turns were worth money here, you can bet they wouldn’t be left lying in the streets. I might just have to take my dog and my dogfood coupons to Taipei on our next vacation, because I think we’d have a good chance of cleaning up with this arrangement! 

Old Spice: An Explosive Success

         Old Spice made an explosive entry into the marketing world last year when the company introduced a new ad campaign featuring bare-chested manly-man Isaiah Mustafa, aka “The Old Spice Guy.” The ads went viral; the company’s image was instantly given a hip, funny revamp; and the use of Old Spice coupons skyrocketed.

         But as it turns out, Old Spice has always made headlines – just not always on their own terms. I was recently cleaning out my grandma’s basement when I found, in an old issue of the Boston Globe (July 1968 to be exact – the basement cleaning I did was looooong overdue), a story about a guy who tried to hijack a plane by claiming that he had a grenade in his hand. The hijacker waved a fake gun around, demanded to be flown to Cuba, and then pulled out his “grenade” to scare the plane’s 64 passengers into compliance —but that grenade turned out to be a bottle of Old Spice cologne, and the hijacking was ultimately unsuccessful – though the story successfully reached the pages of newspapers across the country.

         I know Old Spice is powerful stuff, but it’s not powerful enough to do what that crazy hijacker wanted it to do! You can’t use Old Spice coupons to induce terror, thank goodness – you can only use it to smell great. 

Deodorant Thieves Strike FL Winn-Dixie

        Two apparently malodorous criminals are on the lam, but these fugitives from justice could have avoided the life of crime all together if they had just used deodorant coupons! It’s not everyday that hygiene products are the aim of a heist, but that was the case in Florida last week, where two women shoplifted 75 (yep, seventy five!) sticks of deodorant from a grocery store last week. Police are currently on the case.

         The sticks were taken from A Winn-Dixie store in Ft. Pierce Monday afternoon, and the duo of deodorant thieves were caught in the act by security cameras that show the women stuffing a purse in a shopping cart with deodorants as they shopped. The ballsy gals waltzed out of the store and came back in with another empty purse and repeated the technique. The total amount of merchandise stolen by these thieves amounted to hundreds of dollars worth of Gilette and Secret deodorants.         

         f you know anything which might aid police in the apprehension of these criminals, call the Palm Beach County Crime Stoppers at 1-800-273-tips. And kids, don’t get sucked into the sinister criminal underworld of deodorant theft – if you have deodorant coupons, it’ll be practically free anyway!