Tuesday 31 March 2009

83 Entertainment/Comedy/Urban Myths

The Internet is full of urban myths. One of the most successful is about a lawyer who bought an expensive and rare box of cigars, then insured them against fire. A month later, after smoking all the cigars, he filed a claim against the insurance company, stating that the cigars had been destroyed “in a series of small fires”. The insurance company refused to pay, so the lawyer sued and won $15,000. The lawyer cashed the cheque and was then arrested by the police on 24 counts of arson fined $24,000 and sentenced to 2 years in prison.
The story is clearly ridiculous. People want to believe this is true not because clever crimes deserve clever consequences, but because they believe lawyers are loathsome repellent creatures one notch up the evolutionary ladder from Magicians.
The French actuary Pense LeWeekend penned the most complex urban myth. In 1952 bored with his life of mundanely assessing risk, and inspired by the enormous number of French people that claimed they had been fighting in the Resistance during World War 2, LeWeekend set about creating the Joan of Arc lemma. Briefly stated: ‘The whole pub can not be fighting, as someone has to be shouting ‘leave it John he ain’t worth it!’’ From this he argued it was Frances duty to be the girl holding the handbags and the rest of the world to do the fighting. His complex equations and intricate propositions beguiled France’s penchant for the multifarious, and soon this myth became ingrained foreign policy. A wise man once said that the truth is simple, if it wasn’t everyone would understand it, and Pense had proved him right again. It is for the same reason the entire subject of Quantum Physics is completely wrong, anything with that amount of paradox has to be. All those Nobel Prizes should be returned and Professor Hawking told to stick to the British Telecom adverts.

Monday 30 March 2009

82 Humanity/Vanity/Plastic Surgery

Whether it is to repair the injuries of an unfortunate accident or simply to make your aging wives backside look a little less like Christopher Walken’s chin, plastic surgery is as much a part of life today as watersports or golf. You might be surprised however to learn of the rather diverse beginnings of this trade.
Edgar and Boris Sag, 18th century experts in skin graft technology and bone growth were known throughout the whole of Bavaria for their rather unprofessional but harmless practical jokes; horse burying, house painting and even wife bending were not uncommon stories to come out of the tranquil surroundings of the Alps around the festive period.
In October 1756 however, Edgar, the elder of the two brothers, took the practical jesting one step further when one night, whilst Boris slept, he surgically attached fifteen cadavers penises to his brothers back thus creating what he called ‘the worlds first cockosaurus’.
Hardly best pleased with the new addition to his upper torso, Boris spent the next three months camped at the local Jewish children’s hospital sewing together a twenty-five metre long streamer of discarded foreskin before drugging his brother one snowy January night and creating his own ‘Woolly Todgephant’. Not to be outdone and getting rather tired of dipping other peoples penis shavings into his soup, Edgar went back to work, bolting emu feathers to his brothers arms, plucking out all his hair and boring a thin hole in the top of his head creating what he labelled the worlds first ‘flying shaved vaginador’.
Utterly fed up of the brothers antics, the major of the town Klaus Bonk banished the two surgeons into the mountains, defying them ever to return.
What happened to the brothers over the next few years is a bit of a mystery but one thing is that known is that their combined remains were uncovered in 1942 by the Nazis but were dismissed as one of Reverend Hesston Cambridge’s crazy dinosaur inventions, and burnt.
Their story still continues to this day in folklore however, with the elders of the district telling their grandchildren that if they behave badly and they listen very carefully, they can still hear the noise of the vaginador swooping over the mountains looking for new material for its streamers.
As a result, children rarely misbehave in Munich these days.

Saturday 28 March 2009

81 Entertainment / Practical Jokes / Stink Bombs

Contrary to their promise, stink bombs do not resemble the scent of general flatulence, but instead reek of a rather metallic combination of bleach and dead cats. Stink Bombs were first invented as an aphrodisiac for the self-tormenting people of South Shitty in Herefordshire, the idea being that if you could still find your loved one attractive when they smelt of dead animals, it was a match made in heaven. The plan backfired over several generations though as only the offspring of the sickest self-tormentors were born, and in a rather speedy evolutionary process started to see their noses seal up at birth. The few last remaining south shitters all now secretly live in abject squalor in an area sealed off from the rest of the country, others have moved to Stoke on Trent.
The largest stink bomb ever was recorded in the now-nonexistent town of Palar, fifty miles south of Brighton, where local magician Band-aid Nobbs, sick of his obvious genius being ignored, sat next to the air-conditioning outflow pipe of an old peoples home for thirteen years storing the collective stench in a compressed air-tank in the back of his magimobile. Upon his death he insisted that his assistant, the lovely Angela Donk, transfer the entire tank into his lower colon before sealing all available orifices up with sticky tape. Although underestimating the power which lay in his slowly self-digesting corpse, he correctly calculated the time it would take for the sticky tape to give and, as the vicar laid the first crumbs of earth upon Nobbs' coffin, the once-magician exploded at such force that half of east Sussex was obliterated and washed away into the sea. Ships still avoid the deadly Nobbs Point due to tales of large brown nappy-shaped sea-monsters viciously feeding on hapless fisherman, although the area has recently overtaken Blackpool as the most popular holiday destination of the sealed-face aqua-people of west Staffordshire.

Wednesday 25 March 2009

80 Entertainment / Games / Tramps

The tramps we see wander our streets today are the unfortunate victims of an incredibly ambitious tournament dating back to the 1950s. The game was created by the Lampo brothers, Ned and Jed, notorious drinkers and wealthy inventors of the John Merrick comedy dildo. The game started when they realised that, no matter how much alcohol they could ingest, it simply wasn't up to the standards they required, so spent five years developing the remote controllable tramp-chip, the superAlcho-MD4. The chip was simply inserted under the skin of an unsuspecting commuter and they became fully under the control of the brothers from their nerve centre in their house in Chiswick. The first example of this was local chartered accountant Donald Peep who, on his way back from work to his wife and children, was 'tramped' by the brothers at Charing Cross tube station and before he knew it found himself drinking super unleaded straight from the pump at South Mimms service station on the M25. Each brother then took control of 100 tramps and battled for alcoholic supremacy of London. At the last count, Jed was slightly ahead after Ned had made a disastrous gamble on tramping a group of Fields of the Nephelin fans outside the Good Mixer public house in Camden, causing two of the younger members to instantly explode, spraying the locals with cider and blackcurrant. Over the next two weeks of goth-fuelled alcoholic chaos, four of the group were arrested for trying to drink an entire number 25 bus in the middle of Tottenham Court Road, one received life imprisonment for viciously eating the spleens of three members of an all-girl cyber-metal band during a gig at the Dublin Castle, two became church ministers and one narrowly missed out on the job of chief programming commissioner at channel 4. The battle continues.

Tuesday 24 March 2009

79 Humanity/Achievements/The Moon Landing

Many conspiracy theorists believe the initial moon landing to be a pre-fabrication to deal America’s domination as a world force at a time of national civil unrest in the country. This is indeed the case. Due to an error in judgement by Buzz Aldrin two seconds prior to the Apollo's ascent into the first level of stratosphere, the craft caught the side of small Russian satellite and plunged back towards earth, crash landing in the beer garden of The Blacklayers Tache travellers rest in High Barnet. Correctly realising they were in big trouble back in Houston, the three astronauts decided to get drunk, play some Beatles numbers on the local up right piano and film Buzz drunkenly jumping around in his spacesuit in the car park. They were very surprised when they returned to base to find out that everyone was celebrating their monumental success, so decided to keep quiet.
Strangely, the first actual moon landing was made in September 1974 by Englishman Piers Skag, who managed to do a full descent, landing and moonwalk in his homemade craft, the Romford Feltch VI. Taking some of the most incredible pictures to ever be seen by man, Skag was hugely disappointed on collecting his pictures from his local Snappy Snaps to find 360 photos of fat drunken middle aged women pouring over a rather hideous looking stripper in an Irish working mans club.
Skags pain however, was nothing compared with that of Mrs Maureen Dockerty of the Shankley Road, Belfast as she tried unsuccessfully to explain to her newly wed husband why, on her hen party the previous week, she had ended up jumping around in a big white suit whilst waving an English flag in what looked like a north London car park.

Saturday 21 March 2009

78 Control/Censorship/Word Filters

In these days of technological advances one of the most annoying things is censorship. Particularly word filters. People now have to deliberately misspell words in order to get a feeling across. This has inadvertently thrown up some excellent words. Cvnt for example gives the original word an air of antiquity sort of a Roman feel, old vagina, and an altogether more potent insult. B0ll0x has added concupiscence, the word actually looks like a big pair of testes hanging between an erect penis. Tw4t has added gravitas, the extra 4 acts like a suggestion. The expression ‘W4nker, Ar5e, 6astard’ has a scaling quality that implies increasing annoyance. \!/ actually looks like what it is meant to imply. And people have become more creative in the use of euphemisms and conjured such delights as ‘ What a chutney ferret’, ‘She had a face like a decorators wireless’ and ‘I crashed my yoghurt cart into her spam purse’ in order to scale that firewall.
It is good to see that human creativity has once again thwarted the attempts of mind control and produced an exquisite subverted language that has more depth, texture and expression.

Tuesday 17 March 2009

77 World Peace/Moral and Spiritual Harmony/Tourettes

Humans have always been subject to one of 3 codes: that of nature, society and religion. These codes have never been in harmony and therefore to quote Diderot, ‘there has never been a real man, a real citizen, a real believer.’
If everyone suffered from Tourettes syndrome this would be different.
We would all be real people, as everyone would be completely natural and speak what was exactly on the mind.
Everyone would be a real citizen, because the world population would be in no doubt of where they stood vis-a-vis their fellow denizens.
And there would be believers of sound, reasonable ideas. When a religious spokesman comes to your door and asks you to believe in a book that instructs you to embrace a God that is prone to genocidal rages and that temporally suspends the laws of nature in order to turn water into wine, fish into more fish, and allows someone to walk on water instead of getting a boat like normal people, the usual polite response is to say
‘Sounds interesting, I’ll take a look’ while thinking ‘Why can’t he create peace and abundance for all, instead of all this David Copperfield type frippery’. If you were a Touretto you’d shout ‘Fcuk off, Cvnt, b0ll0x!’ He in turn would reflect and agree that it didn’t make an awful lot of sense and thereby end holy wars and the oppression of millions.
There would be no pointless assignations by snipers as their positions would be easily revealed by the yelps, and the accuracy of the shot would be compromised by the twitches. No burglaries, muggings, confidence tricks in fact most crimes would be hampered. Eventually a state of peace and harmony will be achieved as everyone realises each other’s positions and beliefs, and the outbursts and profanity will cease, as there will be nothing to react against. Bliss.

Saturday 14 March 2009

76 HUMANS/SEX/MONOGAMY

In the zoological sense most species are not monogamous. Ethologists claim that only 1 to 2 percent of all species are, and this is probably an over estimation. It was once believed that 90 per cent of all avian species were monogamous, but the harsh reality is that the female chooses a male to help build a nest and feed the chicks. While he is off collecting twigs, she is most likely off collecting sperm from other males. This is the full meaning of the expression ‘John, shut it! You are acting like a bird.’
None of the simian species are faithful. Orang-utans are fat and lazy so appear to be, but the truth is that they cannot be bothered to lift a finger. The Chimp, a close relative, practices a form of group marriage, the original Mormon. Our very closest relative, the bonobos, indulge in perpetual and indiscriminate orgy. So next time you get caught having a drunken snog at the Christmas party, point out to your other half that Great Uncle Bonobo would have gone through the entire HR department and persuaded Accounts to keep score.
Out of the 850 recognised human societies, 83 percent practice polygyny. Clearly, monogamy is not natural. But is it desirable? Some religions believe that only proper sexual relationship involves pairing inexperienced virgins, who then control and own each others sexual expression and needs until death do they part. This idea has caused such suffering, frustration, and broken hearts that it has to be considered the work of an evil genius. The best sex is the sex you have with the one you love. For most this is a post-polygamous monogamy, for some this is masturbation.

Wednesday 11 March 2009

75 HUMANS/CONFLICT/DICTATORS VS. ROMANTICS

Two Gods, having a day off from being Omnipotent, got to wonder who would win a fight between the artistic and intellectual movement of 18th century Western Europe and the Dictators of the 20th century. They set the battlefield by telling the Romantics that the Dictators were just about to destroy a work of extraordinary artistic beauty and intellectual merit, and told the Dictators that there was a bunch of poofs over there calling their absolute rule and cult of personality into question.
Right from the off, Shelley committed suicide at the futility of it all. This sent the Lord Byron into a murderous rage, and he took out Robert Mugabe and Idi Amin with a copy of ‘The Triumph of Life’. He then proceeded to pen such a devastating attack on the character of Stalin, that Joseph lashed out at his nearest and dearest and had Hitler and Thatcher executed.
Bizarrely Simon Le Bon had got himself mixed up in the bloodshed. Evidently one of the Gods had got Romantics confused with New Romantics. Simon was unsure which side to take: the single ‘The Chauffer’ could stand proudly next to Blake’s Jerusalem but years of survival in the music business had taught him a thing or two about genocide. The Gods quickly realised their mistake and had him replaced by the Marquis de Sade. De Sade got busy torturing valuable strategic information out of Noriega, but Castro retaliated with a Cuban cigar smoke screen. Khomeini and Hussein upped the ante by introducing propaganda in the form of persuasive religious arguments, tying the Romantics in philosophical knots, until Rousseau got them thinking about the ‘noble savage’ and reinstated reason.
The war lasted 20 blood stained lace, leather jackboot scuffed years. Finally the only people standing were Oscar Wilde and Pol Pot. Pol was a massive fan of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ and proceeded to pour praise and adulation on Oscar. Being a crafty butcher (he takes his meat around the back) Wilde slit Pot’s throat. The Gods knew all along that the pen is mightier than the sword, particularly when it has been sharpened and shaped like a dagger.

Tuesday 10 March 2009

74 MUSIC/MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS/THE VAGINA

Before man became infatuated with erotica the primary use for a vagina was as a musical instrument. Procreation was a very tepid third. Various forms of vaginal instrument were available, from the stringed instrument to the percussion.
The stringed instrument was a very delicate affair, involving the ladies pubic hair being strung over the echo cavity and plucked very much like a wee harp.
The wind instrument was perhaps the most difficult to play, relying on exquisite breath control to blow into a catheter that would direct the air over the opening and extraordinary muscle mastery to alter the shape of the chamber and thus produce the different notes.
The Percussion Vagina was not for the faint hearted and special stamina training was required to handle some of the more energetic compositions at the height of Vaginal Music’s popularity.
The Kunt Kazoo was the most popular. The ladies of the orchestra would lay back wearing nothing but wax panties into which the Kunt Kazooist would hum. Kazoo solos could go on, and this is the reason that the popularity of the music died out. No one wanted to train for the more difficult vaginal disciplines when the kazoo was such a pleasure. And no one really wanted to sit through 3 hours of humming and moaning in the name of high art.

Monday 9 March 2009

73 HUMANS/CELEBRITY GLAMOUR/FATWA

Ever since Salman Rushdie was sentenced to death by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei in 1989 his career has gone from strength to strength. Far from pushing up the daisies, the sale of his mediocre book bloomed. He now has a super model girl friend, attends swish parties, mixes in the right circles and is a regular feature of Hello magazine. Consequently, celebrities have eschewed the stalker and adopted the Fatwa as the glamorous accessory of choice.
It is extremely easy to get the Islamic Fatwa, just draw attention to some of their beliefs. Soon the Christianity Fatwa will be as commonplace thanks to the handling of Geopolitics by George W. Bush.
The most prestigious and valuable Fatwa will be the Buddhist. Very peaceable people, how exactly do you upset them? According to Morrissey on ‘Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before’, it is by getting them to smash their gonads into a bicycle crossbar. But he is wrong. He didn’t think it through.
Sprinkle Super Strength Regaine hair loss treatment on their bald pates. The constant itchiness of fast growing hair and the annoyance of having to shave every half hour will interfere with their meditation. Soon whole monasteries of incensed monks with scarred bleeding scalps will be making Osama and the boys look like a Barry Manilow tribute band. The Four Noble truths will be become two: suffering and the cause of suffering. The term Dalai Lama will be changed to Dalai Camel, altogether a more belligerent animal. Buddhist teachings will still focus on ‘detachment’, but with an emphasis of limbs.

Sunday 8 March 2009

72 MYSTERIES/PUZZLES/WHY MOST EXOTIC ANIMALS TASTE LIKE CHICKEN

Noah, son of Lamech, the tenth generation after Adam, had a ferocious appetite. It is well known that he was 600 years old when God told him to build the Ark. Less well known was that he also weighed 600 pounds. Because of his obesity he could barely move and didn’t actually build the Ark. He had his sons, Ham, Shem and Japeth, erect the boat around him and made them herd ‘every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort ‘ on board. It was going to be a long trip and he wanted to make sure he had plenty of provisions. 40days of rain and then another 150 days of ‘waters prevailing on the earth’, Noah was getting through all the really tasty animals at an alarming rate. Like all fat people, Noah was very sensitive about his weight. Consequently, his wife and sons didn’t like to interrupt his eating, but were getting concerned that eventually all that would be left was chicken and things that tasted like chicken, and not even Noah could stomach that. The Zang Zang bird, the most delightful exquisite flesh that could heal all wounds, had been eaten on the first night - Extinct. The Tuba-beast, the sweetmeats of which could cure blindness, went to make a Tuba-beast and kidney pie during week two - Extinct. Not even the Kensit Bear escaped the clutches of Noah’s epicurean adventures, which is a shame because it was a lot cuter than the Koala. Wolfed down with a gallon of mead – extinct.
Eventually all the delicious meat was gone – forever. Two hundred days and two thousand tantalizingly toothsome types terminated. Selfish fat bastard.

Wednesday 4 March 2009

71 POLITICS/TACTICS/SMEAR CAMPAIGNS

Mr Stanley Arthur Tan was the victim of the most horrendous smear campaign in history. Stanley used to be great mates with God, but he had noticed that the Big Feller was starting to lose his grip. In the old days things could not have been better, having a knees up with the heavenly choir, eternal bliss. The Cherubim and Seraphim where blinding at Karaoke, but recently God had them continuously singing his praises and they where sorely missed down the Lamb and Flag on a Friday, ‘We Have All The Time In The World’ wouldn’t sound the same until Louis Armstrong got hold of it millennia later.
It was almost as if the Grand Fromage needed an ego boost. In the old days, he just had to say ‘Fiat Lux’ and a whole Universe would appear. Now it took him six days to create a single planet and He needed to rest after the effort. An eternal being is by definition outside of time, and shouldn’t need an arbitrary period of rotation about the axis of a random planet to gauge his progress. He was definitely struggling and the strain was beginning to show.
Stanley was also feeling guilty about persuading Eve to eat the forbidden fruit; something God had asked him to do, as He lacked the ‘common touch’. Stan thought the punishment was a bit strong for the crime: Eve and Adam and the entire human race that flowed from their loins were damned to ‘eat their bread in the sweat of their brow, to bring forth children in agony, and to suffer death’ all because she munched on a Golden Delicious. Poor Adam what had he done wrong? And Eve? Women cannot help themselves, you just have to watch them shop for shoes to realise that.
The last straw came when the Almighty repented of having created humans and proceeded to murder all but a few of them in a flood. The All-knowing, the Wholly-good was making bad mistakes and getting into genocidal rages.
As Andy Summers said to Sting and The Edge will eventually say to Bono, Stanley said unto God, ‘Listen mate, you’ve lost it. I want out before this gets worse.’
As freedom and autonomy are universal absolutes Stanley simply walked away. As a gesture of goodwill he promised to keep quiet about the Abraham killing his long awaited and only son debacle.
God was furious. He put a press release out that ‘Mr. S.A. Tan had been thrown out of Heaven’ (not even an original smear, Zeus had thrown Hephaetus to earth from the summit of Olympus only last summer). He also decreed that anything bad that happened in the world was to be blamed on Mr. Tan. Initially the campaign didn’t work. God got onto his market researchers to find out why. The reason was that the public could not believe that any man named after a shade of brown could be evil, the only exception being Taupe which isn’t really a colour but a marketing term designed to confuse men in carpet shops at weekends. They suggested merging the initials with the surname into one catchy, attention-grabbing name. Hence the idea of Satan was created. In a final fit of petulance God got an unmarried teenage girl pregnant and arranged for the resulting offspring to be tortured to death in order to create a religion which would go on to murder billions more souls in its name.
At the time of writing Stanley is residing happily in Cornwall, running a small ice cream and Karaoke business.

Tuesday 3 March 2009

70 IDEAS/MONEY SPINNERS/DIETS

Americans spend $150billion annually on diet products; this is equivalent to the gross national product of Ireland, or a lot of Guinness and lucky charms. To loose a pound of weight costs about $600, so going from a 20 stone lard bucket to a svelte 12 stone costs $67,200. Not only are obese people lazy, unhealthy and weak willed they are also very stupid. It is simple: stop eating so much and get some exercise.
However, porcine paunch mongers are creative; It’s my glands, I’m big boned, genetic disposition, I am attractive, these train seats are tiny, but it’s the ‘good’ type of fat, no I couldn’t eat a whole one. This creativity feeds the diet industry, without fat people it wouldn’t exist. All diets are dangerous to the health and none of them work.
The most dangerous diet was the ‘Eat Yourself Thin’ diet created by nutritionist Keith Kineral in 1994. Keith was so frustrated with his corpulent patients continually going against his advice and raiding the larder that he hypnotised them and introduced them to a novel concept. Now every time they felt hungry they would nibble on themselves, thus satisfying the appetite and as bone and ligament are extremely difficult to digest they lost weight quickly. It was also known as the ‘Cannibal’ or the ‘All Pain No Gain’ diet. Not surprisingly, his patients died and Keith went out of business. At last Keith was free of the needy, self-obsessed moaning of unctuous ingrates, and celebrated with a pork pie and a can of fizzy pop.

Monday 2 March 2009

69 CREATIVITY/INVENTIONS/DINOSAURS

The Reverend Hesston Cambridge invented the Dinosaur in 1675, as a test of the faithful. In 1650 bishop James Ussher studied the genealogies of the Old Testament, and calculated the Earth was created in 4004B.C. Hesston fabricated the femur of the Megalosaurus, to make it appear 230 million years old and call into question the age of the Earth, and so the validity of the Bible and the word of God. The Rev. then got busy burying manufactured dinosaur remains all over Britain for erstwhile scientists to uncover, figure out, and collect. Like crop circles, dinosaur counterfeiting soon caught on and the Holy men of the World’s religions started to join in fooling the palaeontologists. Hesston realised it was getting out of control, and in a fit of guilt and panic started leaving clues that would alert the bone experts. He gave the T-Rex tiny thalidomide arms and a big head to make it look impossibly ridiculous, he made the Megalosaur femur look like a pair of human testicles indicating it was all bollocks (Richard Brookes in 1763 actually named it Scrotum Humanum and still didn’t twig), and in an act of total desperation created the Diplodocus, a ludicrously long necked dinosaur that looks like a duck. Unfortunately, the academic community loved it, and the other Holy men were only encouraged to compete, thus spawning the Brontosaurus, Pterodactyl and Cro-Magnon Man. People it seemed were ready to believe another lie. His test had backfired, his ruse was shaking the foundations of religion, and people were losing faith.
Hesston feared for his life, if his subterfuge were ever discovered. He feared for his soul too and prayed for forgiveness until his death of rickets at the age of 45. God was too busy being Omnipotent to notice the Rev. Cambridge’s hoax, but nevertheless claimed it as part of his divine plan. Palaeontologists uncovered Hesston’s last attempt at an apology in 2001; the Latrinosaur, a 600-foot tall winged creature that resembles a lavatory, complete with cistern and flushing mechanism. In its 60-foot beak was inscribed an intricate confession and apology, detailing the methods used to fossilise bone and feathers, and techniques for authentic burial. The BBC has bought the silence of those scientists, and the evidence destroyed, in the process dooming the planet to a diet of increasingly realistic dinosaur documentaries.