Good evening, all. My name is Anthony Martin, and as it states in the title of this post, I am the founder and president of SellMyDNA.com. My good friends at Candy Smokes have graciously given me the opportunity to address you tonight, and I would like to begin with a topic that’s near and dear to my heart — people who don’t believe that SellMyDNA.com is legitimate. 

Usually a person of my stature in the scientific community does not stoop to answering customer service emails, but I pride myself on being a man of the people, and I regularly communicate with the common folk who try to sell us their DNA. Most of the correspondence is fairly positive, once we get beyond the language gap that naturally occurs between a member of the intelligentsia (myself, obviously) and your typical blue-collar worker (the people who most often try to sell us their DNA).

Sometimes, however, I’m bothered to discover that one of our prospective donors does not believe that New Line Genetics is a real company, or that SellMyDNA.com will really give them at least $5,000 for their DNA sample. I would like to provide you an example of such a message, and a taste of the way I deal with such verbal diarrhea.

First, his message to me:

HAH!

Just as I thaught, its a SCAM to extract email and other info from people and send them crap they don’t need. NICE FISHING TRICK.

I don’t want nor need any emails from you, and the names not Alfred if you cared to read the email.

bye!

Next, my response to him:

It’s not a scam to extract your email, my dear reader. If all I wanted to do was find email addresses to spam, I could find a lot easier way than building two in-depth websites, I assure you.

As for your “NICE FISHING TRICK” comment, there is no way for me to collect any valuable personal information from you (social security number, credit card number, etc), unless you foolishly (and unprompted, I might add) included that information in the email you initiated to me. The collection of valuable personal data in an underhanded manner – that’s what real phishing is. And I’ve never done that. I do, however, spell “phishing” correctly, which is something you should probably try. Any outsider who read your email would probably have assumed that I showed you how to tie an Offshore Swivel Knot, and then ferried you over to the weed patch where the largemouth bass like to hang out.

Yes I did care to read and answer your email, sir, and if you had responded with any questions on the current state of medical genetics, or wanted to debate the ethics of any of the scenarios presented on SellMyDNA.com, I would have engaged you fully. However, if you just want to scream “SCAM” to anyone who will listen (which is no one), I’ll just have to say goodnight.

Cheers.

I hope you people can see that I do not suffer fools gladly. Let this message be a lesson to you, and be aware that if you send me an asinine email like the one above, you will be dealt with most severely. That is all.

As all 8 of our loyal readers probably know, building satire websites is one of the things we like to do here at Candy Smokes. We’ve had a lot of fun working on our Hillary Clinton parody site, TheHillaryTheyKnow.com. We’ve gotten bored and lazy with it, however, so we’ve decided to sell it to someone instead of simply letting it fall into disrepair (like the rest of our lives).

So go check out the eBay auction here, and tell your friends that if they want to own a piece of crap history, it’s currently selling for one dollar.

Enjoy.

You could make at least $5,000 by selling a genetics company the right to patent your DNA! Sound too good to be true? Horrified by the thought of where we’re headed as a society?

We were curious to see what the public’s reaction would be if they were presented with the opportunity to sell the rights to their genetic makeup for a hefty sum, so we built a website to let them do it – SellMyDNA.com. It’s based on a very real premise – the fact that DNA and genome patenting is a very real and very legal outlet in the United States. Because of our outdated current patent laws, companies patent genes all the time, and there’s a big debate over whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Michael Crichton wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times condemning the practice last year.

Our site contains plenty of fake testimonials from people who have sold their DNA, as well as a section informing the reader that it’s perfectly legal to patent a friend’s DNA once it leaves their body. You’d be amazed at how many people want to sell their DNA, and are also looking to cash in on other people’s genetic code. We’ve gotten a few interesting propositions in the few months that the site has been up.

The site is funny, yes, but most people who see it think that it’s real. And since this is a pretty serious subject, we have a Disclaimer link at the bottom of every page on the site, alerting the reader that the site itself is a satire, but some of the issues raised are quite real. Also, if people do email us to try to sell their DNA, we respond with a link to said Disclaimer page, so as not to mislead anyone. We also do not collect email addresses or personal information of any kind. SellMyDNA.com exists to educate people on a rather obscure topic in a unique and interesting way.

And also ’cause it’s funny.

Enjoy.

If you’ve been visting Candy Smokes on a regular basis over the last few months (and we know that at least 4 of you have), you’re probably pretty familiar with our content. We do some LOLpics, make a few funny observations on life, design a couple of comics . . . you know the drill. But there is another thing we do here that sets us apart from other humor blogs, though – we just haven’t told you guys about it. But it’s time to ‘fess up.

We like to build satire sites, and we’re going to reveal the first one right now. Here’s the backstory: The Hillary Clinton campaign a few weeks ago decided that she wasn’t likeable enough, so they built a website to showcase a bunch of video testimonials from people who had nice things to say about her. It struck us as a little bit . . . well, let’s just come right out and say it: awkward and stupid.

So, while we were thinking about how to mock the site in a Candy Smokes post, we ultimately decided that it would be better to just go ahead and build a full-blown satire site to get our point across. We figured that would work a lot better than some petty rambling on a two-bit humor blog.

Our site takes her basic idea, but contains only videos of people who “didn’t make the cut” on her site – people who support her for obviously fake (and funny) reasons. You can check it out now at TheHillaryTheyKnow.com. We’ll be shooting more videos and posting them as we go, and we’ll also be taking submissions from anybody who wants to contribute one – the funniest videos will be featured on the site.

With Hillary out on the campaign trail at the moment, we thought it would be a good time to go public. If you think the site is funny and interesting, we’d really appreciate it if you could forward it on to your friends right away – we’re hoping to spread it quickly enough that she’ll hear about it and have to address it at a press conference while she’s campaigning.

And if you have any comments or ideas on anything you’d like to see on the site, please go to TheHillaryTheyKnow.com and drop us a line from the “Contact” link.

Here’s a quick side-by-side comparison of the two sites:

Ours:

Hers:

If you enjoy this one, please subscribe to Candy Smokes with the box on the right, and you’ll be notified when we reveal our next satire site.