I will not bemoan but briefly restate, as an introduction to new readers, that I am Oscar the oft-ignored pig who dwelled deep in a Calabasas canyon. I make that reference in past tense for today I can reveal I have maneuvered, boldly rather than treacherously, to improve my station. While my wealthy owners, who never invited me inside and treated me little better than a swine, have been yachting on the Mediterranean, sailing on the Nile, and skinny dipping in the Euphrates, I’ve huddled with the most senior executives of Wal-Mart, a magnificent army of super stores providing a tidal wave of products at rock-bottom prices for the modest working people of this nation. Naturally, my owners have always belittled the endless wares of Wal-Mart, though they’ve never deigned to enter any of our stores, and they slander Wal-Mart customers by portraying them – in altered photos relentlessly emailed and posted in cyberspace – as unbathed, unpleasant, droopy-pants, crack-showing boobs who have heretofore been banned from gentrified Calabasas.

These outrages I overturned after discovering, from a shrewd corporate investigator, that my owners were many years arrear on property taxes and their home was thus forfeited, auctioned, and sold to a buyer in the Walton family. With special-operations speed and efficiency we then pounced to bribe and otherwise motivate local politicians to change zoning requirements and open up the ritziest Calabasas neighborhood to commercial development, which begins today right here on my turf.

I won’t pretend this move has not induced stress and ignited criticism. Some are asking how I can betray those who years ago rescued me from the road to the slaughterhouse, fed me, sometimes took me to the doctor, and occasionally said hello Oscar. In a neighborhood of actors, directors, producers, developers, computer whizzes, and elite call girls, I simply needed more horsepower. Microsoft and Toyota and other swells never responded to my resumes, so I rightly accepted this profound opportunity to manage history’s most divinely located Wal-Mart, which will use the opulent home of my owners as an entrance before soaring out of the canyon from whence I came and moving west to embrace the nearby mansion of a popular actor, who has also lived too high, and finally scale an adjacent hill. This Wal-Mart will not be so much a store as a retail castle, in the Neuschwanstein mold, and I do hope we can keep prices down or we’ll lose our traditional customers and perhaps become like those who shun us.