NEW ORLEANS—Barely 24 hours after both market analysts and the technology industry were shocked by the announcement of a $7 billion merger between BP and the Apache Software Foundation, executives from both organizations are scrambling to explain a new contamination of the Gulf ecosystem, apparently by URLs, HTML tags, and other basic building blocks of the World Wide Web.
TAMU Professor of Oceanography John Kessler was the first to discover the bizarre contamination, posting to his blog this morning: “We were tracking a swarm of electric eels, when suddenly the entire population began rhythmically reversing polarity. Our underwater cameras revealed that they had accidentally strayed between two widely separated <blink> tags. Then a school of luminescent blowfish wandered into a CSS field and began changing size and colors. When several dolphins suddenly lined up and swam across the ocean floor, we knew we had a marquee on our hands.”
Web 2.0 researchers began arriving to aid marine scientists in shoreline Gulf territory by late evening, but aid efforts were halted when they discovered that AT&T coverage was nonexistent and none of their iPhones worked. Unable to tweet for emotional support and 75 miles from the nearest Starbucks, the best minds of the new media industry reverted to a state of nature, requiring environmental support groups to abandon brown pelicans in order to instruct them in the finer points of human survival. “It was really quite pathetic,” said Eve Lundstrom, a World Wildlife Fund volunteer from Minnesota. “After they were cut off from Facebook, they started questioning whether anything they did mattered if they couldn’t update their status. We found them trying to make lattes from seawater, and covering themselves in oil to resolve something they called ‘AntennaGate.’ When several of them stripped naked and swam straight out into the Gulf, we knew we had a real problem. The one we saved said they were looking for something called a fail whale.”
Sally Khudairi, Apache vice president of marketing, held a rapidly-called press conference on shore, within sight of a rapidly forming cluster of floating unmatched <div> tags. “Yes, we had begun integrating our technology into the reclamation efforts as of several weeks ago, and the servers we are using have worked perfectly for fifteen years. But for some reason, at the moment the Foundation signed the deal and entered into partnership with BP, all of our infrastructure suddenly began glitching. It was almost as if some sort of retroactive incompetence had been inflicted on the program code—which, of course, is impossible.
“Frankly, we have no idea how it is even possible for binary data to contaminate seawater as it has. But BP has promised that they will have a complete answer and solution to the problem in the next two weeks.”
Today’s announcement overshadowed continuing confusion stemming from the merger, about which both parties have been tight-lipped. The Apache Software Foundation gives away its software for free, and is generally believed to be financed by donations, so it is not known how they acquired the money for the all-cash deal, or how much they have left in reserve. BP issued this statement on an IRC channel in Finland early this morning: “We were as surprised as anyone when Apache approached us, and were unsure about the seriousness of their offer. But when they unzipped those dufflebags, and started piling bricks of cash and sacks of Krugerrands on the conference table, we stopped asking questions.”
Reaction to the announcement was highly negative, especially from the programming community which has contributed their time pro bono to Apache for years. “I’ve been living on nothing but off-brand Red Bull and 7-11 microwave burritos for nine years,” said one Linux programmer who identified himself only as Mar|<us. “It’s my code they’re using to work around an IE 6 bug with transitional XHTML 1.0, and what thanks have I gotten? A free pizza at the tweetup, and a LinkedIn blurb which hasn’t done shit for me in this economy.”
Apache has said nothing about the deal or why they made it, excepting a 4:42 AM EDT tweet from fundraising executive Serge Knystautas, which read in full: “‘Bout time you learned who really owns the web. Keep the Caymans transfers coming, boys. And fuck you, Stallman.” No further information has surfaced since, although speculation by Crunchgear blaming Apple and Steve Jobs personally for Apache’s apparent takeover of the Internet has been linked to by 14,482 blogs.
It is also unknown why the BP-Apache deal has apparently been subjected to a blackout moratorium on both Google’s and Yahoo’s search engines, both of which only show a single AP clipping posted on a Chinese language edition of the Epoch Times. A highly placed source within Google commented, in a quavering voice, “Man. You do not want to know what they threatened us with.”
When asked for comment at her press conference, Khudairi answered, “Klaatu barada nikto. Qapla’!”
At press time, reports are arriving from Austin that a viscous oily substance has begun leaking from the Ethernet ports on cable modems in homes and businesses throughout the city. Unconfirmed witnesses say that some wireless routers have begun spraying this substance in fine droplets in a 200-meter radius from the base station. Details are not available, but the phenomenon appears to be spreading outward to other cities in a drunken salesman pattern. Comcast issued a statement saying they were looking into the matter, but that this had absolutely nothing to do with BitTorrent throttling.