I know we’re a little late to the party on this one, but let’s face it: alyx is on vacation, still, and I drink a lot, so I suppose we’re lucky that either of us is able to post anything at all, ever. So anyway, the Dow Jones indexing service is for sale.

While that sounds like the lead-in for a salacious tale of corruption, favoritism, and market manipulation, it really isn’t. The index itself is actually for sale, for money, by owner News Corp, who ended up with it after buying the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago, which was apparently to Rupert Murdoch what buying a car and getting included a family of mice that lived secretly in the trunk would be to you or me.

The real potential here though, is if the index finds itself renamed by its new corporate masters like a sports arena. DJIA is kind of a dull, unpronounceable mishmash of letters, and with the right buyer, that could improve vastly. Naturally, I have some suggestions.

If there is an entity out there called Univeralist Tabernacle Of Peace, we could find ourselves living with UTOPIA. Iowa’s tourism board could spin off a sub-group called Vamping In the Snow Incites Tourism, giving it free advertising as VISIT_IA. Perhaps a conglomerate of foreign governments could band together and purchase the index to keep it moving: Industrialized Nations of Europe Round Table, or INERTIA. A scary children’s non-profit, People Helping Out Boys? PHOBIA.

Or perhaps most appropriate, the Board of Urbanites Leading us Into Muerte Industrial Average.