U.S. Government Shutdown Fails To Affect Barney Thomson Sales

Added on 08 October 2013

With the U.S. government shutdown entering its fifteenth week, with the streets of Washington lined with the unburied dead, with the economy of the entire western world hanging in the balance, and with China hovering on America's doorstep, poised to call in its debt and do to America what it did to Tibet, one question more than any other is on everyone's lips.

How are sales of Barney Thomson books holding up in the States?

'Sure,' says the WSJ's Chip Huberstein, 'the shutdown hasn't affected sales. No one was buying them anyway, and they're still not. Look, sales for Barney Thomson books overall in the last ten years are like three copies, some shit like that. Given that there are something in the region of eight or nine hundred Barney Thomson novels available for purchase in the US, it averages out that each Barney Thomson book sells a copy in North America once every 1.8 million years. Maybe my math ain't so good, but you get the picture.'

Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the future of the western world hangs in the balance, and several pundits, including Professor Malcolm Connery of the Seattle Institute of Special Things, have identified the Barney Thomson series as a crucial tipping point indicator.

'For sure,' said Professor Connery this morning, from inside a giant cup of Starbucks vanilla spice latte, 'most people in the US have never even heard of this Barney Thomson. Yet even the smallest thing can make the most enormous difference. There's a well known saying in the north west: if a butterfly flutters its wings in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, which way round will the egg float in the soup? In this unprecedented situation,we don't even know which of those is the Barney Thomson series. Is it the soup? Is it the butterfly? Or, significantly, is it the egg?'

Speaker of the House Boehner (R-OH) refuses to be drawn on the Barney Thomson issue, while his office makes absurd claims that the Thomson series is completely unrelated to the government shutdown and the imminent collapse of the American empire. Of all the heinous mistakes of which Boehner has been guilty in the last few weeks, commentators, pundits and crazy guys on the internet are beginning to ask if this might just be his worst yet.