Dear Open Salon Bloggers,

We at Brutish Petroleum know that you are an educated and refined audience. We have been seeking venues that will allow us to get our environmentally friendly message out to the world.  We have purchased tons of Google adsense placements.  We now turn to you, the most erudite consumers on the planet.

At the urging of millions, and with the support of the entire Board, we are proud to announce our sponsorship of Open Salon.  We do not take this announcement lightly.  We were first approached about this idea by the Shelloil Company.  They reported that after they sponsored several open call forums on OS that their profits rose 634% in one quarter.  We would like to duplicate their feat.

We are the fourth largest corporation in the world, and we will prevail. Our roots go back to 1901 when the Shah of Iran granted us oil exploration rights in the Middle East (this is true). In 1923 we secretly gave 5,000 pounds to Winston Churchill to allow us to monopolize Persian oil resources (this is true).  In the 1950’s Iran nationalized the company and we didn’t like that (this is true).  

We got U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower to authorize the CIA to join the British government in a coup in Iran (this is true). We prevailed and developed an international consortium to run the company (this is true).  Silly Iranians.  They thought their oil reserves belonged to them.  In 1954 we became the British Petroleum Company (this is true).

In 1959 we moved into Alaska and the North Sea (this is true). In 1978 we bought a controlling interest in Standard Oil of Ohio (this is true). In 1979 the Ayatollah Khomeini took over Iran after the Islamic Revolution.  He tore up all the oil contracts and wrote a new one with BP.  It gave us 90% of the profits and 10% went to him (this is all true).  You remember how much he loved the United States.  Well, we love you even more.

In the 1980’s we got Prime Minister Thatcher to sell all governmental shares of BP to private investors.  A Kuwaiti consortium tried to block this; however, the British Empire government prevailed (what else is new?)  Standard Oil of California and Gulf had merged in 1984 and the U.S. government smelled anti-trust so we (BP) bought part of them and established ourselves in Louisiana (all true).

We also acquired Amoco, Castrol, and ARCO (we had to do something with our cash.)  It was in 2001 that we adopted our “Beyond Petroleum” campaign.  And man, have we lived up to that or what?  Oh yes, we also bought most of Russia’s oil (50% interest with three Russian billionaires owning the other 50%) reserves for future use (this is all true).

So you can see why we are proud to sponsor Open Salon.  Our first open call is a blogging contest addressing the question:  

“Why I prefer cheap oil over a few birds and fish”

All entries must be submitted by June 11, 2010.  Use the tag words “ima fool” in your entry.