[ WP ] Villages are laid to rubble and countless lives are ruined ... all over a bag of chips

Steve Gorilla never meant to be a potato chip magnate. He was at the top of his class at Bongwater University and intended to go to graduate school to get his Doctorate in Sewage Maintenance. But then, in the middle of his senior year, the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke out. Steve was drafted into the navy and spent the next two years fighting for freedom across the globe. 
 
 By the time he got back, Giuliani had already licked clean most of the sewers in New York, and the sewers in New Jersey had been named a National Historic Landmark and were preserved in their original condition. Steve Gorilla lacked a purpose in life and good dental insurance. The potato chip farm across the highway offered both. 
 
 It was hard work. Steve Gorilla toiled fourteen hours a day in the fields, raising potato chip trees from saplings and then harvesting their precious crop once September came. The flat chips he harvested were sent to Lays, the ridged ones to Ruffles. Occasionally the two types of trees cross-pollinated and produced half-flat, half-ridged chips. Steve destroyed these immediately, for they were an abomination to all of mankind and Our Lord, Jesus Christ. Steve began experimenting with genetically modifying the trees, breeding only the largest plants that produced the sweetest chips. In this way, he invented the sweet potato chip and made his millions. 
 
 In his old age he became increasingly eccentric. He retreated to a small island off the coast of Kazakhstan, granting only occasional interviews, and even then pretty much just to *Playgirl. * Rumors spread that he was producing a new kind of chip, a chip that would replace all other chips in stores until the end of time always. 
 
 Unfortunately, humanity was not ready for Steve's new product, the bitter potato chip. Ruffles and Lays got caught in a bidding war for their exclusive rights, ending with a nuclear standoff. Riots broke out across the globe as anticipation mounted. Women abandoned their babies in the streets. Dogs and cats mated with each other. The movie *Bug's Life* was rereleased and made over one hundred million at the box office. At the end of it all, over one hundred billion were dead, among them Steve's wife, the quirky red-haired girl from those Wendy's commercials. 
 
 Knowing he had done wrong, Steve consoled himself by opening a bag of his bitter potato chips and tasting them. These were the end result of humanity — the final product at the end of ten million years of evolution, the thing all of human existence had led to. When extraterrestrials visited Earth, these strange apelike creatures would be judged according to this one innovation, this summation of all their ingenuity. Without hesitation, Steve plunged one into his mouth. 
 
 The potato chip tasted like ass.
