A LUDICROUS FAIRY TALE

Once upon a time there was a world full of people who did nothing but complain.  They griped about their jobs, the weather, burnt toast, and bad hair days.  That's not the whole list of course, but it's the general gist.

So anyway, the GREAT IRONIC RULER OF ALL THINGS got tired of hearing about stupid crap that didn't matter in the big scheme, and he took care of it.

One day when all the television forecasters had promised warm and sunny weather, it started to rain, which really played havoc with everybody's hair.  As it kept on raining, people moaned about wet feet and whined about flooded cars.  Oy vey!  Just because a SUV is sitting in water up to its roof, it's considered flooded?

The GIROAT laughed with wicked glee and made it rain even harder.

When the waters were high enough to suit, he caused a sudden freeze.  People, cows, TV forecasters, and other odds and ends were caught, suspended like pieces of fruit in a Jello mold.  That's when the penguins took over.

The only things to escape the freeze were penguins and polar bears.  Since penguins were of the higher intelligence, they became the bosses.  Naturally the polar bears weren't very thrilled about that.  A vicious 10-year war promptly ensued, after which the penguins declared themselves the victors.  The polar bears didn't object.  They were tired of listening to the shrill, screeching voices of the little birds, so they just quit.  The penguins magnanimously let the loser bears have a small chunk of glacier to call their own.

The penguins named their home "The Land Of Freedom And Joyousness," and the polar bears named theirs the "Land Next To Many Pains-in-the-hineys That We Will Eat."

Life went on, as it is wont to do, and everyone was fairly happy.  Everyone above the ice, that is.  The suspended whiners were cold and cramped and had to go to the bathroom, but nobody paid attention to them.

One day Joe Q. Penguin noticed that there weren't as many guys hanging around the nesting grounds as usual.  He hadn't had to fight for a prime egg sitting spot—the first time that had ever happened.  It was troubling.  This conundrum took over Joe's normally healthy one-track mind.  He and a group of the smarter geek penguins got together to try and figure out what was up with that.  They performed many scientific studies but got zilch in the answer department.

All the penguins began to worry.  Were aliens abducting them in the night?  Could they be disappearing due to internal combustion that burned with such high intensity that it left no trace of the body and yet didn't affect the surrounding area at all?  The number of daft theories grew, and so did the number of missing penguins.

The GIROAT almost busted his gut with hilarity the morning the National Enquirer's headline screamed, "Purloined Penguin Problem!  Puzzled Public Petrified!!"

By now the stupid polar bears had gotten so fat that their feet could barely touch the ground, what with their enormous stomachs.  They sort of paddled along the ice.  That worked just fine as long as they didn't hit a rough patch and get stuck.  Then other polar bears had to butt the stuck one with their heads until they had pushed him onto smooth ice again.  This was no easy process, and could take a day or more due to the lack of energy that came along with the extra poundage.

The polar bears knew the penguins would get wise to them sooner or later.  Since the PBs were too fat and lazy to fight another 10-year battle, they devised a plan to round up all the little feathered buggers and eat them in a one-time feeding frenzy.  Of course the flaw in their plan is obvious to anyone with more than a pea for a brain, but we're talking polar bears here.

So anyway, they sewed together the pelts from all previously munched birds into huge semi- penguinish costumes.

The GIROAT was so amazed at the sight of these 15-foot, 400 pound hulking faux penguins that he forgot to be ironic for a whole second.  They really were something!

It was snowing lightly when the first Penguinosaurus came lumbering over the glaciers.  The little birds were frozen in place, but that was most likely due to the fact that they'd been swimming and then went and sat on the ice.  Something their poor beleaguered mothers had warned them about time after time.

"If you swim and then sit on the ice, not only will your butt fuse quite firmly, but monster mega-penguins will come and attack you!"

The penguins were more than slightly frightened.  If they could have gotten themselves unstuck, they'd have run screaming across the barren tundra and into the night.  This is where the term "easy pickin's" was invented.

It was right around this time that the author became entirely bored with the story and decided to drop it.  Besides, the pizza delivery guy just knocked on the door.  You, the gentle reader, can take it from here.  If you invent a really good ending, send it to me.  I'm not in the least ashamed to plagiarize.

THE END!