Slylock Fox, 8/4/25

You might remember a few years back when supposed genius entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes started a company called Theranos that could run multiple medical tests from a very small amount of blood, something that was of great interest to me as a needlephobe and apparently to lots of other people too, because the company raised billions of dollars and had multiple former Secretaries of State on its board of directors, but then it turned out that the technology never worked and the product was never shipped and it was all an enormous scam. At a certain point Theranos stalled for time by announcing a big partnership with Walgreens and sending them these machines that were big boxes that performed "blood analysis" if you stuck in a vial with a normal-sized blood sample, and eventually someone opened it up and discovered it was just running the exact same tests a regular lab would run, with off-the-shelf equipment kind of all jammed in there together. What I'm trying to say is that Count Weirdly isn't selling fake honey; he's selling real honey out of a "machine" that's full of enslaved bees. It's an easy mistake to make for a fox who wasn't sapient during the final, fraud-heavy chapter of human civilization.

Judge Parker, 8/4/25