Future Perfect

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association 1993 “Where’s Mister Beef?” promotional campaign ended in ignominy after an apparent “Mister Beef” was actually located by a Minnesota Girl Scout Troop while on a camping trip: The last member of a cryptic splinter-lineage of hominid (youngest common ancestor estimated to have lived 200,000 years ago) who happened to bear a passing resemblance to the crude “caveman” caricature designed by McCann-Erickson for the campaign. As a member of a culture based around bison husbandry, it is in truth not surprising that his name could be roughly translated as “Mister Beef,” though a more faithful rendering of the implicit meaning would be “Trustworthy Butcher.” Already in his eighties—his exact age is not known, as the time-keeping system he described to anthropologists relied in part on changes in water conditions at several culturally-significant lakes—Butcher died in 1997, only four years after his first contact with Homo sapiens sapiens. As his language bore little resemblance to any existing language group, and as Butcher’s memory grew increasingly erratic in his final years, conversing with the last Ox-Uncle was difficult; however, he successfully communicated his wish to have his funerary rites conducted by the Scout troop with whom he had built a rapport. The Beef Association took advantage of their absence to lobby the IUCN to formally designate a species ”Homo ubitaurus”; fortunately, Butcher’s people appear to be a subspecies of Homo sapiens, and the name was consequently discarded. The USPTO would later rule that the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association had infringed on Trustworthy Butcher’s right to his own likeness, and was subsequently barred from further use of the “Where’s Mister Beef?” campaign. (An attempt to hold estimated profits deriving from the campaign in escrow for the eventuality of contact with another member of Butcher’s people failed in court.)