Demand for the aniseed variety of the 65-year-old winter warmer has meant an unprecedented rise in production. Key ingredient star anise – pure aniseed – is also contained in the swine flu treatment Tamiflu, reports the Daily Mirror.

“We make no claims for our product – though enjoying a Fisherman’s Friend will certainly do no harm. People are making the aniseed link themselves.”

In any case, Fisherman’s Friend has got to be a better swine flu bet than Cocoa Krispies.

The Yankees won the world series last yesterday, thanks in part to Hideki Matsui’s stellar performance. They also top the MLB payroll for 2009. Here’s part of the list, as compiled by the AP:

1. New York Yankees $201,449,289
2. New York Mets $135,773,988
3. Chicago Cubs $135,050,000
4. Boston Red Sox $122,696,000
5. Detroit Tigers $115,085,145
6. Los Angeles Angels $113,709,000
7. Philadelphia Phillies $113,004,048
8. Houston Astros $102,996,415
9. Los Angeles Dodgers $100,458,101
10. Seattle Mariners $98,904,167

See the full list here.

Clearly, the Yankees used more than money to win last night. And if payroll is that crucial, what happened with the Mets, the MLB’s second-highest paying team this year?

Breeders around the world covet certain animals for their economic potential. Some produce a lot of meat. Some are iridescent. Others fit well into small spaces.

Nevertheless, all of the animals featured below have two things in common. One, they have highly unusual attributes. Two, those very attributes make each a potentially lucrative business proposition:

7. Giant Guinea Pig

Cuy meat is lean, protein-packed, and versatile. Better yet, cuys, or guinea pigs, reproduce quickly, offering a steady supply of meat. One Lima official said that guinea pigs will feed a family of up to eight people for only USD $3.20. Peruvians eat about 65 million guinea pigs per year.

With meat in mind, scientists in Peru set out to supersize the cuy. 34 years after they came up with the idea, scientists introduced a giant cuy weighing about 2.2 lbs, twice the usual size. The guinea pigs were especially prized for export, allowing Peruvians living abroad to get a (big) taste of home.

6. Belgian Blue

Known as the Incredible Hulk cow, Monster cow, and Schwarzenegger cow, the Belgian Blue takes the world’s blue ribbon for buffness. The cow’s hereditary myostatin defect results in excessive muscle growth known as “double muscling.” As a result, the breed produces a large amount of lean beef, endearing it breeders looking to penetrate a health-conscious beef market—or just trying to look good with a stable full of manly cows.

5. Fainting Goat

Fainting goats are bred to fall over. A hereditary disorder, myotonia congenita, causes their muscles to freeze when they’re scared, often resulting in them collapsing on their sides. Their small size makes them ideal for small farms, where they won’t hop fences—or will scare themselves into collapsing when they try.

According to oral history, the fainting goat was a good asset protector. Handlers would keep them with other (more valuable) animals, like sheep. When a predator came around, the fainting goat would collapse, effectively sacrificing itself so that the other animals could safely run away.

4. German Giant

The German Giant, one of the biggest domestic rabbit breeds on Earth, can grow to the size of a dog. Breeders covet giant rabbits for their looks, their fur, and their meat.

Breeder Carl Szmolinsky produced Germany’s biggest rabbit in 2006. His win inspired North Korean officials to purchase twelve of Szmolinsky’s German Giants to start a food breeding program. The giant bunnies’ offspring would help alleviate North Korea’s endemic food shortages.

Szmolinsky was scheduled to fly into Pyongyang to help them establish the program. North Korean officials, however, canceled his visit. He suspects that government officials ate the rabbits. “North Korea won’t be getting anything from me any more,” the upset Szmolinsky told Spiegel in this interview.

3. Minicow

If supermarket beef is becoming too expensive, don’t fret. You can purchase your own German Shepherd-sized minicow for a few hundred dollars. It’s tiny, meaty and, best yet, fits in your backyard. Homesteaders can choose from Irish Dexter, Mini Hereford, or Lowline Angus cows, which the Times says produces 70% of the steak of a cow twice its size. All you need is a couple of acres of grass and a little fencing. In return, you get organic, grass-fed beef, sans hormones or slaughterhouse.

2. Jersey Giant

Why eat turkey when you can buy a giant chicken instead? That’s what 19th-century breeders John and Thomas Black were thinking when they introduced the Jersey Giant. The breed, originally crossbred from three other kinds of chickens, produces hens weighing an average of 11 lbs, and cocks of 13 lbs. The meat industry initially took to the idea, but then cast Jersey Giants aside because they don’t grow fast enough.

1. GloFish

Swim aside, goldfish. The Sunburst Orange ® GloFish ™ is genetically engineered to outshine you by miles. And unlike you, boring, traditional goldfish, the GloFish ™ also comes in Starfire Red and Electric Green.

These colorful zebrafish hold the dubious honor of being the world’s first genetically modified pet. In 1999, Singapore-based scientists inserted fluorescence proteins from coral and jellyfish into a zebrafish embryo, resulting in the GloFish’s luminescent qualities. The idea was to create a fish that would fluoresce when it came near toxins, allowing it to detect pollution.

When businesspeople caught wind of the glowing fish, they saw great pet potential. In the US, Austin-based Yorktown Technologies licensed the GloFish—initially created in Singapore—for consumer sales. People continue to buy the dazzling danios, though GMO laws in Canada, and the EU ban people from possessing them.

ESSENCE Magazine claims that a novel authored by Michael Jackson is making the New York publishing rounds. The details:

ESSENCE.com has learned exclusively that a novel written by the “King of Pop” himself is currently being shopped around to New York publishers, according to a source in the industry.

The book is expected to sell in the six figures.

Two things come to mind: a) Is this for real?; and b) wouldn’t that be an interesting twist to the MJ story?

Baker Hughes Inc., the third-biggest oilfield services provider in the world, bought rival BJ Services Co. an oil shale company, for $5.5 billion today. Bloomberg has more:

The price represents a 16 percent premium to BJ Services’ stock price on Aug. 28 and will leave BJ stockholders owning about 27.5 percent of Baker Hughes’s outstanding shares, Houston-based Baker Hughes said in a statement today. BJ Services shareholders will receive 0.40035 share of Baker Hughes’s stock and a cash payment of $2.69 a share.

BJ Services is the third-largest provider of so-called pressure-pumping services, whereby slurry, often sand and water, is injected into a well to stimulate production. Pressure pumping is used in unconventional gas plays such as shale formations to break up rock. The method is expected to account for about 20 percent of the combined company’s revenue, compared with less than 1 percent for Baker Hughes last year.

The Financial Times adds:

The purchase of BJ Services will significantly boost Houston-based Baker Hughes’ ability to perform pressure pumping services, which are in increasingly high demand around the world as oil fields age and require stimulation to keep producing.

Baker Hughes’ pressure pumping business will jump from less than 1 per cent of its revenue to more than 20 per cent when the deal is completed. That is still less, on a percentage basis, than the amount of revenue larger rivals Schlumberger and Halliburton derive from pressure pumping.

Daily Finance says this is the third biggest mergers & acquisitions deal of the year, behind Pfizer-Wyeth and Merck-Schering Plough.

The Scottish government’s release of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi last week has sparked outrage among some American groups. Bloomberg has more:

Visit Scotland, the government-funded agency promoting tourism, received e-mails from Americans saying they plan to cancel holidays and staff have been preparing for a backlash after the release of al-Megrahi, spokeswoman Alison Robb said. A Web site was set up to encourage people to boycott Scotland.

Visitors from the U.S. accounted for 340,000 trips to Scotland in 2008 and spent 260 million pounds ($429 million) in the country, according to figures published by Visit Scotland. U.S. citizens account for 21 percent of spending by people from outside the U.K, the organization said.

Scottish officials claim Al-Megrahi was released to Libya last week because he has terminal prostate cancer, with less than three months to live. The Scottish legal system regularly offers prisoners compassionate release when they are near death.

Time has an interesting article about how most US money contains traces of cocaine:

A study that tested paper money from 30 big cities in five countries—including the U.S., Brazil, Canada, China and Japan—found that big metropolitan areas in both Canada and the U.S. have an alarmingly high presence of cocaine on their currency, with traces of the narcotic on 85-90% of bills. Brazil, coming in just behind the North American nations, had contamination on 80% of paper money. On the other end of the spectrum, in China and Japan, cocaine was present on a much lower 12-20% of banknotes.

The findings, presented Sunday at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C., suggest that the prevalence of cocaine-laced bills in U.S. cities has jumped about 20% since just two years ago. University of Massachusetts chemistry professor Yuegang Zuo, the lead author on the current study, conducted a similar analysis in 2007 which found that 67% of U.S. banknotes had some traces of cocaine. The study authors speculate that the increase of residue on bills is likely in step with an increase in cocaine consumption—already as much as a $70 billion annual industry in the U.S., according to the researchers. An estimated 6 million Americans use cocaine each year, consuming somewhere between 259-447 tons of the stuff.

Read more here.

As news goes, the dollar bill-coke connection isn’t new–Snopes breaks down how it works.

Campbell, CA-based Psycho Donuts might be the only place in the country where you can buy donuts with names like Bipolar, Manic Malt, or Psycho. It also entertains customers with a padded cell and servers dressed as nurses.

It’s a neat novelty idea–or so the owners thought. However, soon after the store opened, people started protesting, claiming that the donut shop was aggrevating the sense of shame and stigma mental health patients already expreience. They gave the shop bad reviews on Yelp.com, and staged regular protests in front of the store.

Recently, Psycho Donuts co-owner Kipp Berdiansky appeared on TV to debate mental-health advocate Oscar Wright, who is the CEO of the nonprofit United Advocates for Children and Families.

Wright said that the country’s mental health crisis–1 million kids are diagnosed with mental illness annually–involves shame about coming forward and accessing services. Psycho Donuts only accentuates the stigma by playing on mental health terminology. “The message that mental illness can be a joke causes a serious problem,” Wright said in the interview (featured above). “Kids have very impressionable minds. The images and ideas that they see at an early age influence them later in life.”

Berdiansky states his point in the Psycho Donuts blog:

It’s a shame that there are a handful of folks out there who do not have a sense of humor. Follow me here – if our donuts are crazy, does that make us insensitive to the mental health community? Is El Pollo Loco insensitive to Crazy Chickens? Was Patsy Cline being hurtful when she wrote the song Crazy? Is it insensitive to call a donut bipolar? …let’s agree on one thing: donuts are not people; and the names of our donuts do not correspond to any opinion or pre-conceived notion about people.

In this day and age, all of us are a little crazy. 25% of Americans have some clinical form of mental health challenge – and our take is that the rest of us just haven’t been clinically diagnosed yet! I might add that Psycho Donuts contributes to NARSAD (www.narsad.org) – which is a mental health research organization. We might make light of the topic in our store, but we aim to be a positive contributor to positive mental health. Psycho Donuts is a testament to the human condition, and a place where we can all accept our individual faults. If people can leave our store with a smile on their face, then we’ve done our part contributing to people’s positive mental health.

Amen to that. Psycho Donuts’ ability to bring levity to the mental health epidemic reminds me of something I read recently in a book called Creating Mental Illness. In it, author Allan Horwitz claims that although the DSM-IV contains about 400 different diagnoses, the real diseases among them–psychotic disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder–make up only a small portion of the list.

Many of the other diagnoses attempt to medicalize conditions without taking cultural factors, stressful life events, or social deviance. Professionals have a tendency both to pathologize and overestimate the prevalance of mental disorders.

A medicalized, pill-popping society is the result. According to NIMH, “26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older — about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.” That’s almost 58 million people. Many are diagnosed with more than one mental disorder.

Who benefits? Pharmaceutical companies, for one. Professionals such as psychiatrists and therapists. The media. Anyone who can use the industry to their advantage.

It’s hard to say how many patients (outside of those with serious disorders) benefit from identifying their condition with a pathological cause. Perhaps names give people comfort. Perhaps experts and pills are just a modern replacement for the priests, shamans, and tribal elders of yore. As long as we search for medical names for our anxieties, fears, and obsessions, and find comfort in customized medication, the industry will continue to thrive.

Back to Oscar Wright, the mental health advocate in the debate. To me, part of his message says “stop stigmatizing these poor, victimized people who feel shamed as a result of the labels an overly pathologized system has given them!” By “protecting” people–I still don’t think the donuts are that serious–he is supporting the sense of insecurity and shame that keeps people with vague problems in the grip of the medical industry in the first place.

Instead of targeting a tongue-in-cheek donut shop, Wright should be focusing on the advertisers who try to convince people that they have problems, or the drug companies who keep coming up with new uses for their psychotropics (like the anti-kleptomania pill). This country needs innovative, community solutions to mental health “issues,” not attacks on a satirical small business.

Like Berdiansky said, if you don’t like the donut shop, don’t go there.

The Harvard Business Review’s Umair Haque discovered that a Made-in-USA, “fair labor” iPod would cost only 23% more than its Made in China counterpart:

…how much would it cost to produce a “Good iPod”? One not produced in a sweatshop, but under decent labour conditions. Like, for example, one produced in the USA — hardly a paragon of labour standards, but a starting point.

The results are surprising. An American made iPod Classic costs just 23% more than a Chinese made iPod Classic: $58 more, to be precise. The same relationship holds across the iPod family (price differentials in the 20-30% range) The iPod is a durable good, so that’s a difference — but smaller than one might expect.

Haqu claims that charging $58 more for an iPod is not only a reasonable expectation, but necessary to preserve innovation and rebuild the American manufacturing sector. He concludes:

If goods cost what they should, we would consume what we could authentically afford, instead of overconsuming what we couldn’t. If their prices reflected real human costs, perhaps yesterday’s unsustainably large macro imbalances wouldn’t have built up in the first place. And that, from an economic point of view, would be good for everyone.

Not everyone. What about the Chinese supply networks who would go out of business? Or the American consumers who couldn’t afford that extra $58? Or Apple, if it gave up its current competitive advantage by sacrificing a level of affordability?

The bottom line is still, well, the bottom line. Companies should bear responsibility for fair labor practices, but I can’t see Apple, or any other market leader, opting to put itself in second place as a result.