Days after the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, predicted that New Orleans would soon be a “chocolate city” again, the Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) poured cold water on those plans, arguing that building a city out of chocolate was “unfeasible.”

Harland DeBellis, a spokesperson for the USACE, said that the agency had given plans for a city constructed entirely out of chocolate the thumbs down only after engineers painstakingly built a scale model of New Orleans out of Hershey’s bars and found the results “problematic.”

“If the existing levees in New Orleans were breached by the floodwaters of Katrina, imagine how much worse they would have been if they had been made out of chocolate,” DeBellis said at a press briefing in Washington today. “Chocolate is simply not a suitable building material.”

DeBellis said that as vulnerable as a chocolate city would be in the event of a hurricane, it would be even more endangered during the hot summer months, when temperatures in New Orleans routinely climb into the 90s.

“A chocolate city would be in constant danger of melting, and then when the temperatures drop, that gooey chocolate mess would harden and be impossible to clean up,” he said.

In conclusion, the USACE spokesperson added that given the revelry associated with New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, “The last thing you want is a city that a bunch of hungry drunks are going to eat.”

Elsewhere, a new study shows that aspirin prevents strokes in women, and headaches prevent sex with men.

Award-winning humorist, television personality and film actor Andy Borowitz is author of the new book “The Borowitz Report: The Big Book of Shockers.” To find out more about Borowitz and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate

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