Earlier reports that BP closed its Alaska pipeline due to corrosion have turned out to be erroneous. The company, noticing growing rancor that it would allow such a vital link to corrode to the point of desuetude, altered its story, saying that subsequent examination revealed that the leaks were due to a grizzly bear that ate the pipeline.
While BP was initially at a loss the explain why a bear would attack a metal object, one of its more imaginative research directors noticed that the name BP appeared in a number of places along the course of the pipeline and an aurora borealis went off in his mind. While humans generally know that BP stands for British Petroleum, the bear, they now claim, being less familiar with the meaning, mistakenly surmised that BP stood for berry picking.
As you know, the bears of Alaska are wild for wild berries. They roam the tundra looking for them and eat them so frenziedly that their bear pies, an association for BP that the company rejects entirely, are, in berry season, so chock full of the berry good remnants that they look a bit like blue pomegranates, a third association the company utterly rejects for the initials PB.
As a spokesman for the British corporation told reporters,