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Got stressed-out employees? Don’t bother lightening their load; don’t send them home early; don’t give them more control over their work. Hell, don’t even hire the “office masseuse” for a gratuitous 30-min visit.

Just feed them gum.

You can’t make this stuff up. From a spam press release:

“Time pressures, deadlines, office politics and bosses are the main causes of stress in the office, according to a new workplace wellness survey conducted by Eclipse® gum and the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp). Looking for a solution? Now, according to new research, chewing gum may be the simple tool your readers can turn to for day-to-day relief from on-the-job stress.

… Managing Up: According to the i4cp survey, 65 percent of respondents don’t feel their organization is effective in helping them manage stress, leaving the responsibility on the individual. To beat office tension, the Eclipse Big-E-Pak is especially convenient, as it contains 60 pellets and sits right on the desk.”

[Emphasis added but the associated giggling may not have come through.]

From a Chris Gourlay article on the rising popularity of the mini-cow — i.e., one “that stands no taller than a large German shepherd dog, gives 16 pints of milk a day that can be drunk unpasteurised, keeps the grass “mown” and will be a family pet for years before ending up in the freezer” — comes this sidebar of other trendy pets:

African pygmy hedgehog:

Only a quarter the size of wild British hedgehogs, their purring noises and “smiling” expression have made them the latest fad in pets. They’re expensive, though, costing up to £200.

Dwarf hamster:

Russian dwarf hamsters are becoming popular in Britain. Good-natured and energetic, they’re also compact, fitting neatly into the palm of the hand. As they can squeeze through the bars of most hamster cages, owners usually house them in fish tanks.

(h/t A&L Daily)

Over at Slate, Juliet Lapidos asks, how much is $700 billion?

Let’s say Slate charged its advertisers $30 per 1,000 ad impressions, a common industry rate. And let’s imagine for a second that the federal government decided to nationalize Slate in order to pay for the bailout. We’d need our readers to rack up enough page views to see 23.3 trillion banner ads before the feds were satisfied.

For historical perspective, consider that the Marshall Plan, which helped finance the recovery of Western Europe after World War II, cost the United States about $13 billion. Of course, in 2008 dollars that’s more like $100 billion. And Niall Ferguson has estimated that as a comparable share of the U.S. GDP, it’s more like $740 billion.

Do not miss this very funny NPR piece by Robert Krulwich on some of the liberties taken by scientists in naming species. (The audio is great — don’t stop at the text.) Preview:

The rule is that anytime someone finds an animal, vegetable or mineral new to science, the discoverer, like Adam, has the privilege of giving it a name.

Most of the time, this is done soberly, responsibly and carefully — but not always. Linnaeus, for example, punished a critic by naming an ugly, insignificant weed after him: Siegesbeckia.

Richard Fortey, senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum, tells of a colleague named Rousseau H. Flower who despised Communists and Communist Party chiefs, so he named a worm he discovered, Khruschevia Ridicula, after former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. On the other hand, Fortey had a friend who loved the ’70s punk band The Sex Pistols and named some ancient trilobite species after Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten: Sid viciousi and Johnny rotteni.

We’ve received a fair number of angry letters on our anti-mutual-funds column in Fast Company — exclusively, btw, from mutual fund employees or investment advisors. Here’s a teaser:

Let’s pull off the Band-Aid quickly. You’ve come to believe that mutual funds are a smart place to put your money. They’re not.

That’s the assessment of the smartest minds in finance, supported by a mountain of historical data. If you own actively managed mutual funds, you will almost certainly retire with less money — a lot less money — than if you’d simply dumped your money into boring index funds. So two questions: How can this possibly be true? And why, in gleeful defiance of the data, do more people keep buying mutual funds every year?

For more mutual-funds bashing, check out this great NYT piece by Mark Hlbert. Money quote:

A new study builds on this research by applying a sensitive statistical test borrowed from outside the investment world. It comes to a rather sad conclusion: There was once a small number of fund managers with genuine market-beating abilities, as judged by having past performance so good that their records could not be attributed to luck alone. But virtually none remain today. Index funds are the only rational alternative for almost all mutual fund investors, according to the study’s findings.

And for those of you who want the Extended Mutual Funds Hatred Package, go buy David Swensen’s book.

Let’s keep that anger flowing!