Selected-By: "Julianna Avedon"

The Internet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:

> Oh Oracle most wise,
>
> Are corporate bodies really alive?
> And are they now our dominant species?

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

Let's see now... I know those notes are round here somewhere... Ah, here they are! These take me back to when God and I were just sitting around his apartment brainstorming on just what Life was going to be anyway. Exciting days! But anyway, there should be a checklist... Here it is.

1. Respiration. Corporate Bodies inhale graduates with no experience and exhale... well, the same graduates, but now with a thin patina of experience to conceal their incompetence.
2. Reproduction. This occurs through a process akin to amoebic division, but termed "re-organization" or sometimes "Department of Justice Investigation". A corporate body will, once it gets too large and sluggish, split into several smaller companies. Often the weakest of these, the "marginal" businesses, will be snapped up by the circling packs of other companies - see below.
3. Ingestion. Corporate bodies are most often found ingesting other corporate bodies, but when those are thin on the ground they have been known to consume reputations, dreams and - occasionally - marriages.
4. Excretion. I don't think I need to say anything here, do I? I think we can all leverage our core synergies to move forwards with a humour-positive mission statement.

You owe the Oracle a holy offering of something tasty, pushed under the cooker. And get rid of those Evil Roach Motels, sinner.