Ballad of the Wal-sphere

Though it may get old for me to begin my writing in such a manner, the following is a story about wal-mart, cancer and Lobbyists.

The efforts of many advertising companies is to attempt to draw customers in. One night a very drunk research analyst for the popular store chain "Wal-MArt" decided that being in a vertical position was a rather bland way to be so he promptly fell over and lost consciousness.

After regaining consciousness the next day in a hospital bed with a cracked skull he had a great idea (as great of an idea as one can get with a cracked skull). Gravity had drawn him to the ground on the previous night. As soon as he was released he rushed home (only falling down once on the way) to do some research on this magical thing called gravity.

As it turns out the force gravity exerts is proportional to the mass of the two objects in question (along with some mumbo jumbo about the distance between their centers). In essence fat people weigh more because they have more mass.

So if Steve (Steve is the name of this particular research analyst) were to find a way to increase the mass of an average wal-mart by a few million kg's then the wal-mart itself would draw customers in of its own accord.

Fortunately for Steve a covert group of scientists under the employ of the US government had come up with a substance that could do just that. This particular group of scientists had gotten rather bored with the idea of coming up with atomic partials in order of weight and decided to get intoxicated and come up (with the help of billions of research funds) with the heaviest possible particle they could manage to construct. The resulting atomic partical which in a drunken stupor was called "holycrapthatsheavium" had a stated atomic mass of approximately 128,432.2. Unfortunately for this particular group of scientists, in the same night they accidentally discovered a cure for cancer. Which as all government funded scientific organizations know; is a bad idea.

The reason being that there is a secret cabal of politicians and lobbyists who are rather fond of the color pink and unfortunately for our scientists, pink was on the precipice of collapse, with the only thing keeping it going as a respectable color is the breast cancer ribbon.

So suffice it to say the lobbyists had the cure and the entire research lab canned and locked up. So that the ribbons could continue to adorn; vests, bumpers and bulletin boards. To celebrate their victory the lobbyists promptly got really stoned and lobbied the government for 2 billion dollars to build the worlds biggest bag of potato chips. After they got the money, they quickly realized that potatoes do not grow that big and ran off without giving any of the money back.

To make up for the lost money the government decided to sell their recently closed science lab to a giant mega-store chain called Wal-Mart. Holycrapthatsheavium was re-dubbed "lowerpricesium" and was used to build a new store. The calculations were made so that the store had enough mass to gently pull customers towards it. Whats more, they also saved on shelving because at the exact center of the wal-marts mass they could pile items in mid air, while they were held in place by it's gravity. Unfortunately for the wal-mart when the scientist calculated the original atomic weight of the particle, it was 1,284,322 and only became 128,432.2 after some wine was spilled to add an unnecessary and completely inaccurate decimal place. The scientists were too drunk to notice and never corrected the mistake, resulting the the wal-mart having ten times the mass then they had calculated it should have.

As a result, when the wal-mart was opened and all the fat people added their mass to the wal-marts mass; the entire store promptly imploded into a sphere approximately 1 foot in diameter. Taking the customers and several wal-mart greeters with it.

The wal-sphere is currently on display at the National Museum of Really Bad Ideas, along with clap activated radios, reality television, and is cleaned on a regular basis by George W. Bush.