NEW YORK—Declaring the creation a worthy follow-up to her widely successful news aggregation website, media magnate Arianna Huffington unveiled today her latest project known as the Huffington Man, an enormous creature aggregated from the body parts of 84 different humans.
Huffington showcased the 8-foot-tall, 450-pound being at a press event in lower Manhattan, explaining that the biological amalgam was compiled in a secret underground Huffington Post laboratory using the organs, musculature, and skeletal components of prominent figures from the worlds of politics, sports, entertainment, health, comedy, and technology.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Huffington Man is the culmination of years’ worth of in-depth scientific research and experimentation,” said the Internet entrepreneur, gesturing towards the hulking patchwork of decaying flesh and bone, which stared lifelessly out at the assembled press corps from within a steel cage. “He is the best parts of 84 different men—the athlete, the businessman, the scholar, the pop culture expert—all in one marvelous and extraordinary human being.”
“The Huffington Man is the man of the future,” she added. “With him, there is no need for any other man.”
Sources confirmed that development on the Huffington Man project began in early 2007, as researchers began harvesting the body parts of various corpses from graves across the country. They noted that the composite being includes a combination of brain matter removed from the skulls of the nation’s preeminent film and television critics, muscles severed from the limbs of health and yoga experts, along with the faces of actors Paul Newman, Ernest Borgnine, and Whitney Houston.
According to unconfirmed rumors, the aggregated colossus is also composed of hair, blood, and sinews from various unpaid freelance bloggers.
“When Arianna first told me about the Huffington Man project, I knew this was a chance for us to revolutionize mankind as we know it,” said Dr. Jonas Baumgartner, an eminent anatomist whom Huffington had flown in from Austria to lead the project. “This one magnificent being renders all traditional men obsolete. He possesses the strength of nearly 100 humans and also happens to be emphatic about his liberal political leanings and obsessed with celebrity wardrobe malfunctions.”
“After all these years, the Huffington Man is finally a reality,” continued Baumgartner. “And he has a fairly harsh critique of this season of Downton Abbey.”
According to Baumgartner, completion of the pieced-together man comes after numerous trials in Huffington Labs yielded mixed results. In 2008, the research team reportedly suffered a major setback when a similarly amassed being, which was composed of the fur and viscera of the world’s top 100 cutest animals, had to be put down after mauling four scientists.
Baumgartner noted that his research team was again deeply disappointed in late 2011, when a precursor to the Huffington Man became despondent after catching a glimpse of his reflection in a mirror and subsequently tore his body apart.
While Huffington and her scientists have hailed the new creature as a triumph, others have called the being an “abomination” and a “dangerous precedent for the future of humankind.”
“This savage behemoth does not belong in this world,” said Dr. Lars Szabó, a scientist who claimed to have once worked on the Huffington Man project before leaving on “moral grounds” in 2009. “I warned them—I warned them all that they were creating something unnatural and unforgivable that has no place among humanity.”
“The aggregated man is a challenge to God himself!” Szabó added. “It must be destroyed!”
At press time, the Huffington Man was reportedly on the loose after breaking free from his enclosure, snapping the body of a reporter against his knee, and escaping onto the Manhattan streets while shrieking about the increasing role of women in comedy.
