Great Moments in Failure

Major beverage company attempts to raise the world’s largest popsicle in Union Square, ice chunk melts in summer sun and leaks into the street, objective fails:

Under the noontime sun of New York’s first day of summer, [Beverage Company], the soft drink maker, answered the question of whether a 171/2-ton Popsicle can be made to stand upright in Union Square.

It cannot.

In a brave attempt to surpass a Guinness record – “The World’s Largest Popsicle” – [Beverage Company] mixed and froze a gargantuan icy doppelganger of its new kiwi-strawberry flavored [Beverage Company] on Ice. Then the frozen treat was hauled by freezer truck from Edison, N.J., and raised with an enormous crane in Manhattan.

Alas, like James Arness in the 1951 alien thriller “The Thing From Another World,” the giant [Word Combining Beverage Company Name and “Popsicle”] began to melt. Soon pedestrians were fleeing in not-quite terror, fire trucks were converging and the police were closing off streets to contain the publicity stunt gone wrong.

[Beverage Company] officials first started to worry when the pink liquid began to flow onto East 17th Street. They feared cyclists and automobiles would slip in the ooze.

Ice sculpture specialists who were helping [Beverage Company] with the publicity event also wondered whether the [Word Combining Beverage Company Name and “Popsicle”] was beginning to become hollow in the middle and would topple when set upright.

[Beverage Company] officials then decided to stop the [Word Combining Beverage Company Name and “Popsicle”]-raising at a crowd-disappointing 25-degree angle. The mushy giant block was then trucked away and a television-sized ice sculpture in the shape of the [Beverage Company] logo took its place.