Due to my busy end-of-semester schedule and my total hatred of the silliness of playing jokes on others (having fallen victim to many such pranks in my youth), there will be no April Fool’s Day post on my blog this year.

It seems like my strategic management class has inspired me to think outside of the box a lot lately — probably way too far out of the box, and in the wrong direction, but thinking in general is good, right?

Anyway, during each class session we have a discussion about the strategic issues in a case study covering a particular industry or company. Last night’s case was on the airline industry in 2002 and Delta’s options for dealing with the threat of low-cost carriers like JetBlue or AirTran. Before the case discussion, our instructor said she was going to tell a joke about airplanes. It must have been a short joke, or my hearing problems may have come back, but I missed it.

That did happen to remind me of a joke about airplanes, though. I heard this joke from a psychologist who specialized in the psychology of women (a very beneficial thing to know, I’ve found), and it goes something like this:

A women’s studies professor is boarding an airplane on her way to a women’s studies conference. After she finds her seat and gets situated, the captain comes on the loudspeaker to introduce the flight crew.

“This is your captain for today’s flight. My name is Sally Smith. Your co-pilot today is Jenny Johnson. Your navigator is Missy Matthews.”

The women’s studies professor is amazed to find that the entire flight crew were women. She stopped the stewardess and asked if she could go to the cockpit to meet this all-woman crew. The stewardess chuckled and responded, “Oh, I’m sorry. We don’t call it the cock-pit anymore.”

Yup, that’s women studies humor for you. I was feeling almost ornery enough in class last night to raise my hand and ask if I could tell a real joke about airplanes. In retrospect, my impulse control won out last night. Too bad that didn’t hold true tonight.

Once there was a woman who went to her plastic surgeon once a month begging for a new facelift. Now as you can imagine, this got on the plastic surgeon’s nerves that she kept coming in so often and distracting him from his other patients. So one day, he tells her about a revolutionary procedure where a knob is put on top of her head that she can use to give herself a facelift without coming to see him. She was just ecstatic that she could give herself a facelift whenever she felt she needed one. After months and months of not hearing from her, this woman shows up to see her plastic surgeon.

“So how are you liking your knob,” asked the plastic surgeon.

The woman replied, “It’s great except for these two bumps that have shown up — one under each eye.”

The plastic surgeon was alarmed and exclaimed, “If you don’t quit turning that knob so much, soon you’ll have a beard too!”

The moral to this story — Hillary Clinton has the knob.

Now, I don’t mean to criticize women having a little (or a lot of) work done. Hell, I’ve been seriously considering getting some botox and some eye work. Hillary gets run down from all the campaigning, she twists the knob and looks a lot better. But the real kicker to this story is whether Chelsea Clinton will need to go to the same plastic surgeon and say, “I’ll have what my mom had” so that she will look like her mom as she gets older.