THE GUIDE TO EVERYTHING

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2010-09-24T03:51:00.000-07:00

129 Wastage / Food / Masterchef

2010-08-17T03:25:00.000-07:00

The Oxford dictionary describes time-wasting as ‘sitting down for an hour to watch two rather arrogant grumpy people you don’t know taste some food made by a few other frantic people you don’t know and say it’s a bit crap, or that it’s quite good. You don’t get to taste it yourself either.’ As dear gran used to say ‘what a steaming pile of horse felch.’ But as with most other pointless activities such as ballroom dancing and Jade Goody it has become a staple televisual extravaganza. Only Kerry Katona can honestly say she is truly of less use. Leading dinner lady Mavis O’Reilly describes the juxtaposition between the culture of victuals being seen as standard provisional necessity with the commonplace urbanity misconception of what she labels the ‘fiscal luminary fare’ in her 2007 book ‘You’re Just a Fucking Cook, Cunt’.

Amazingly television producers pulled off an even more amazing feat with Junior Masterchef. A preference to watching Graham Nortons attempts to dock some recently crowned X Factor numpty on the other side it may well be but how any human with the ability to vomit can sit through rubber panted 13 year old Augusta from Oxfordshire picking the shot from a freshly slaughtered grouse while talking about mummys’ walk-in butler is staggering (although strangely sexually alluring). However, it does seem to thrive in the ratings game. This is unlike senior citizen Masterchef, which was taken off air two episodes into the series after Coventry based Maggie Stern simply cooked a house brick to warm up little Alfies bed before George Smith from Huddersfield, initially refusing to be filmed by a Fuzzy Top, spent the allocated thirty minutes boiling his own wellington boot in a bucket.

But more interestingly is how much can be deciphered about the contestant from their choice of dish. Whereas Martin McGuiness’ Cherry Bomb Pie hardly came as a surprise, eyebrows were certainly raised by Beryl Reeds Horny Vagina Crumpets and John ‘Johns Not Mad’ Davidsons’ Cunt Shit Fuck Nigger Nigger Whore Fuck Bitch Greek Cunt Salad, but at least uncertainties were finally put to rest about Nick Griffin when he produced his now notorious Masterchef final winning Ku Klux Flan.

128 Seaside Entertainment/Violence/Punch and Judy

2010-07-20T00:59:00.001-07:00

Unsurprisingly created by an Italian, the Punch and Judy puppet show has been entertaining generations of would-be psychotics and wife beaters for centuries. Seen by most of Yorkshire as a government advice programme, the show is performed by a single puppeteer known as The Professor. What is less known is that the professor must perform this show while simultaneously torturing small mammals, reading the Codex Gigas backwards and furiously masturbating every time the crocodile appears. As 21 year old serial rapist Bernard Manson of Ripley, Derbyshire explained in his memoirs ‘That’s the way to do it (Bitch)’ in 2004 ‘I wouldn’t be nuffink if it weren’t for punch. He made me know that even someone like me can have success. I could be working in HMV now with keys angin’ round me arse like a queer. Thanks punch. Fuckin straight.’. A less controversial version of Punch and Judy was created by Guardian columnist and post modern feminist Alison Bore in 2006 called ‘Gerard and Angela’ and plotted the main characters Kentish Town based garden dinner party. The storyline showed the unmarried couple talking about trips to South America and modern folk music with a succession of sub-characters such as Brian and Marcio a gay couple from number 4, a dried up middle aged lady from across the road and a token black called Percy who is dead clever. Gerard and Angela ran for a number of weeks before being closed down after parents complained that their children had suddenly started showing interest in advertising, making constant music comparisons to Fleet Foxes and Joanna Newsom and impatiently tapping their laminated school bus pass on the glass coffee table around 8pm each evening after dinner.

127 People/Habits/Holocaust Deniers

2010-07-20T00:58:00.000-07:00

There are people who will deny anything. Whether it be telling an angry red-faced Catalonian in Covent Garden ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t know where Leicester Square is’ or facing a wigged gentleman with the line ‘But obviously she looks younger in her uniform’ we’re all at it. Some take it further than others. In 1984 8 year old Wolverhampton schoolboy Martin Fregold started the Holocaust Denier movement by shouting ‘No he didn’t no he didn’t no he didn’t’ over and over again during a war documentary in his history class. What started as a defiant display against primary school teacher Mr Warcombes rather bad mood ended in the thousands of Germans, Austrians and American UFO abductees entirely rejecting the Nazi treatment and slaughter of millions of jews during the third reich. It also led to Fregold getting detention, a letter being sent to his parents, a D on his History report and Fregold himself being bought up in front of a war crimes tribunal in Geneva and hanged as a traitor to humanity. Other famous denying movements include the Saab Marketing Team, Lenny Henrys talent agent, Holocaust Denier Deniers, the Stoke on Trent appreciation society and the more generalised ‘Yeah, as if’ movement by 12 year old Annie Porter from Stockport. If she gets her way nothing will have ever happened and the whole world will be pulled screaming into a space/time tear the size of Vanessa Feltz.

2010-07-20T00:50:00.000-07:00

126 Prophecies/Scary Prophecy/The End of Days

The End Time or End of Days has various meanings in different religions. The Jesus janglers reckon it’s a time of tribulation and the Messiah will usher in the kingdom of god. Your Jew will tell you its the coming of Mashiach, the anointed king. And a Muslim will point at the day of Judgement, Allah’s final assessment of humanity. Fortunately they are all wrong. It’s not as bad as that. Phew! Coz your average human doesn’t stand a chance against the erratic perfection of omnipotent god. (41 Puzzles/Mysteries/Omnipotence Paradox).
The actual end of days is a time prophesied by the Great Mungo in 150,000BC. You can now see the problem with this BC/AD malarkey. The span of recorded history is thought to be 5,000 years but little do scientists know, enlightened humans who could write have been around a lot longer. It was just that they were sensible and kept their numbers small so they weren’t a strain on the planet, and that’s why they don’t appear in the fossil record. Natural de-selection eroded this enlightened, god-like being until they became the fornicating, sex obsessed, planet plunderers we have today.
The Great Mungo 152,010 years ago foresaw the final battle between good and evil, between greed and sharing, between Bill Gates and Benedict Farse. All subsequent legends have been based on this one true prophecy: Cain and Able, Jesus and the Devil, Kylie and Jason just tawdry copy cat imitations. And Mungo in his wisdom decided to leave out the detail as to who was the good guy and who was the baddie. That is for you to decide. Who do you choose? The Lamb or the Beast? Team Gates or Team Farse?

125 Animals/Humans/Mind

2010-07-20T00:47:00.000-07:00

The common definition of mind is ‘that aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination’. But that’s exactly what it wants you to think.
The mind is like the distant cousin on your mother’s side that you should not serve Sunny Delight. He seems alright but you never quite know what he’s going to do. One minute stroking the cat, the next exploding it to furry bits using anally applied fireworks.
If you think your mind is different, it is only because it is biding its time. You feel in control now, but there will come the day where it will post a steaming turd through your letterbox. Or shred your entire wardrobe with the garden shears. Or scratch every one of your music CD’s with a pentagram, and your DVD’s with a childish depiction of an ejaculating penis.
The mind is not to be trusted.
There is one way to get the better of your mind and that is to view it as a tool. An extremely imperfect tool, like the B&Q budget set. One day you accidently fracture your nose and lose an eye when the cheap hammer breaks and smashes you in the face. You then decide to pay up and replace it with the Stanley Fatmax range. What is the Fatmax? That’s for you to find out (see 333 Puzzles/Mysteries/Fatmax)
Never believe you are your mind. Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am, is wrong. Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum; I think that I think therefore I think I am, is closer to the truth, but still wrong. Find your Fatmax and realise the truth.

WWW.CultComedy.NET

2010-06-27T13:32:00.000-07:00

Our new site is www.CultComedy.NET. It is 145.67% funnier than this old site and 53.6% more likely to get laid by Emma Bunton

124 Mysteries/Puzzles/Credit Crunch

2010-06-22T07:15:00.000-07:00

124 Mysteries/Puzzles/Credit Crunch

A credit crunch is a reduction in the number of loans from a bank; less money, less wealth, less stuff. So why is your best mate still driving a new car every six months, going on fancy holidays and sending his mum flowers on a weekly basis. This is due to a human selection bias. Simply put you have many friends all doing slightly better than you in one area of your life. But your bastard mind makes it look like all of them are doing incredibly well in all areas of life and laughs at your pathetic achievements. Dust off that Duke of Edinburgh bronze award and be proud. But that’s another story (See 125 Animals/Humans/Mind).
Maximilly Von Lucrative (See 98 Employment/jobs/lawyers) invented the credit crunch in an attempt to bankrupt Benedict Farse (See 30 Animals/Humans/Bill Gates). To create a credit crunch you need a sustained period of careless and inappropriate lending. Loans turn sour. This leads to losses for lenders and the borrowers. Interest rates should normally rise to make it more difficult to borrow, less money and everyone goes bankrupt. But this hasn’t happened. Interest rates have gone down and there is more money sloshing about than lube at a lesbian lido.
What went wrong?
Nothing.
Max is right on course to bring down the Mighty Farse. Because Max is a really evil man, he has decided to inflate the bubble again, so the impending crash will be even more catastrophic.
Fortunately Max has such utter, diabolical adamantine depravity he will inflate this bubble to infinity. So one new pence invested today will be worth the Universe at the limit of Max’s shocking malevolence. Benedict Farce realises this and has open a Post Office savings account.
The only thing that can go wrong is if Max Von Lucrative realises his flawed logic or if Nature wins its appeal and Max is banished from the Universe.

123 INVENTIONS/MATHEMATICS/THE EQUALS SIGN

2010-01-09T08:45:00.000-08:00

123 INVENTIONS/MATHEMATICS/THE EQUALS SIGN

The Equals sign (=)was invented in 1557 by Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde. He chose the two lines because as he put it "noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle". Upon hearing this his research assistant, Dai 'Taffy' Edwards, was immediately plunged into a coma.
Like all research assistants Taffy did all the thinking, and it was this phrase that locked his enormous brain in a never ending iterative logic cycle. No 2 things more equal? Taffy could think of many things more equal than a couple of hastily drawn lines. The size of his bosses stupidity and the size of the universe for starters.
2 dots : would have been a lot more accurate and more simple than those 2 lines. What about a simple line _, and leave the observer to appreciate the beauty of where that line dissects into 2 equal parts?
Taffy's logic loop grew in size and anger. However, Robert Recorde thought that Taffy was sulking again because he'd nicked yet another of his ideas. Robert ignored the danger of Taffy's ever increasing head temperature and used it to dry out his tea towels.
Near death and after drying 1300 Irish linen cloths, Taffy's thought processes were freed. Taffy went beyond thought. He realised that thoughts were not important. He realised that the core thought was the "I" thought and was neither positive or negative. Just a conceptual pointer towards something that does not exist. Concepts can never grasp the real. Taffy was not real, Robert was not real and the world and the Universe was not real. Taffy woke up.
He took the almost dry tea-towel off his rapidly cooling head and left Robert to get on with meaningless nonsense.
Taffy having discovered the secret of immortality, is alive today amusing himself by trying to convince Benedict Farse to leave Bill Gates alone.

122 HUMANS/ANIMALS/1980’s POP ICONS

2009-08-14T14:07:00.000-07:00

What are they doing now? Well most of them are getting together to do reunion concerts in order to save the world from the Credit Crunch. The better question is what have they been doing up until now?It is widely appreciated that the legends of 80’s pop such as Nik Kershaw, Gary Newman, Rick Astley, Phil Oakley and Joe Dolce are musical prodigies the like that has not been seen since Mozart. Indeed some commentators remark that they are better than the classical legends, the main NME magazine argument being ‘Did Wolfgang play Live Aid? No! Kershaw did.’
Having contributed a vast legacy of influential, uplifting, world uniting and not forgetting catchy tunes, the Paladins of Pop all jointly decided to give further to mankind by joining mediocre local level bands. And such is their humility they also agreed to take on the minor band roles that no one really wants.
Astley plays third triangle in Shropshire based 10 piece triangle band ‘My Lumpy Triangle’.ABC front man Martin Fry is roadie for Christian Folk group ‘The Jumping Jesus’, despite his preternatural ability to nail the tricky bit in Kumbaya. And the genius that is Nik Kershaw unpretentiously plays the drums for Dad Rock Band ‘Papa Snax’.
Unfortunately ‘Papa Snax’ is managed by evil mastermind Lucius Von Sprout. Lucius plans to infiltrate society by booking gigs at schools across Britain. Starting by playing the glorious power ballads of the 80’s they will be come the darlings of young society and the most popular band in Britain. Slowly, imperceptibly Von Sprout will change the bands direction by slipping a few subversive protest songs into the set, such as Pink Floyd’s ‘We Don’t Need No Education’ and ‘Small Town Boy’ by Bronski Beat.
Over the course of years the band will evolve into the genre of Doom Metal and mentally influence the children of the nation, without anyone noticing. If Mr Sprout has his way the traditional heart warming Nativity Play will become a gore fest, with primary school children dressing up as bleeding Jesuses and playing Obscura Arcana Mortis by Forgotten Tomb.
The boy Kershaw knows of his plan, as he was told by Saint Jimi of Hendrix in a dream. This is why he joined the band. Evil shall not prevail. No one except Kershaw knows how to stop Lucius Von Sprout. But we do know it involves the snood, seven pairs of fingers gloves and the lyrics to ‘The Riddle’.

121 Transport/Drivers/Post Office Vans Drivers

2009-08-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

Post Office Van (POV) drivers wrote the 'Highway Cvnt', the variant of the Highway Code used by Bus drivers (see 1 Transport/Public Transport Buses).
Taxi drivers have 3 posters on their bedroom walls; Oswald Mosley, Eva Braun and Gupta Singh, Post Office Van Driver of the year 2005. A POV driver is the only thing a taxi fears.
There is no engine in the Post Office van, that burnt out long ago. Instead it is fuelled by the drivers squealing anger. The raging fury at having to do the menial task of delivering parcels while they wait for their genius to be recognised. Most POV drivers are failed magicians, novelists or golfers. They are all bagpipe playing Freemasons.
They have only one skill: to drive a van with such erraticism and speed as to cause Beelzebub himself to papper his snacks in appreciation of their dedication to mayhem.
Nothing can survive inside a POV and so God created the parcel pixie to mend the damage.
The shrill, shrieking cocophony created by the POV was voted the second most terrifying noise in the Universe by the Council of Accousticness. The first of course being Cold Play.

120 Animals/Humans/Japanese Women

2009-08-04T13:18:00.000-07:00

Japanese women were put on the earth by God to give paedophiles something legal to do. And it almost worked. Until 1994, most youngsters outside of a church environment could skip around quite freely in playgrounds and shopping centres without the fear of an unknown uncle offering them a lift to see his latest litter of Afghans. The soft skin, cute silliness, partiality to gym-slips and virtually hair-free bodies of Gods newest creation kept the youngster-obsessed social outcasts confined to oxygen bars in Soho and ordering their evenings entertainment directly from the internet. All that changed however in the early spring of 1994 when the rather horrid Dr Wu’s Hairy Asian Beaver website opened its domain to the masses. Such was the utter disgust at Linda Chu from Osaka’s unkempt downstairs areas that instantly all the worlds paedophiles switched straight back to their original preferences. It would seem then that the Japanese woman had no further use on the planet and Pope Geldof the 3rd was given his instructions to deal with the situation. And that would have been that, had it not been for a rather unfortunate incident in Splitlipskis Gentlemens venue in Prague the following day, where a particular worse for wear God was so impressed with the accuracy in leggy Sun Pok’s use of her creators carefully crafted reproductive organs to fire ping pong balls at St Peters head from the stage that he instantly issued a statement to the pope that he should stop the cull immediately. To this day, Japanese women continue to thrive in all areas of the world such as niche internet porn genres, all thanks to a little-known stripper in Eastern Europe and her incredible powerful vagina. Although it is rumoured that God does now admit in his upcoming autobiography ‘Bible 2: I Can’t Be Everywhere at Once You Know – HaHa’ that Yoko Ono was indeed a mistake.

119 Singers/Female Singers/The World's Best

2009-08-03T12:59:00.000-07:00

The World’s best female vocalist is 14 year old Sandra Argentaria. Streisand, Dion, Beckham: all pretenders in comparison. Unfortunately her audience is only one person; her father, M25 corridor travelling salesmen Arthur Argentaria.
Arthur took custody of Sandra in 1995 because his obsession for satellite navigation gadgetry drove his wife mad and into the local lunatic larder.
Arthur’s only skill was selling SatNav and so he had to continue his pointless job in order to provide for his family. Sandra would accompany him on his jobs learning her songs from the car stereo. Her voice grew in timbre, melody and assonance in the back of his Ford Focus, bringing joy and comfort to Arthur. Arthur soothed became a better salesman and promotion followed. As his car upgraded it seemed Sandra’s voice would upgrade too; with the Ford Focus Coupe came deeper resonance, the C-max brought diapasonal consonance and when the 5 door Mondeo Titanium X arrived she managed to nail the tricky bit in that Titanic song.
Unfortunately because of the SatNav in those cars and because Arthur was a huge fan of the Terminator films, the songs would be interrupted by the Arnie TomTom Voiceskin.
Not having the common sense guidance of a mother, Sandra would faithfully replicate Mr Swarzenegger’s guttural Austrian dialect. Halfway through Whitney Houston’s ‘I will always love you’, Sandra would sing ‘I will always take the 3rd exit on the left at the next roundabout’. Meat Loaf’s power ballad ‘I’d Do Anything for Love (but I Won’t Do That)’ became ‘I’d Do Anything for Love but I wont follow the road for another 8 miles’ Even with Sandra’s beautiful voice, Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U Calculating a New Route’ and Barry White’s ‘You’re The First, The Last, The Next Turning on The Right’ would lose some romantic appeal when punctuated with Arnie’s deeply terrifying voice . The world is simply not ready for Teutonic-voice punctuated, road related, instructional love songs.
Of course Sandra could be retrained and wipe the floor on X-Factor, she would become an international superstar bringing joy, exalted bliss and serenity to the world. Her mother’s sanity would be restored at seeing her daughter achieve her true potential. But Mr Argentaria’s gadget obsessed, blinkered world view prevents him from seeing the abundance available to him. Fortunately, most men are not like Arthur Argentaria, other wise the world be full of missed opportunities and in a right mess.

118 Emotions/Feeling/Love

2009-07-26T09:23:00.000-07:00

Many think the concept of love is not amenable to one authoritative definition. Philosophy and Religion have speculated for centuries, and recently psychologists, biologists, anthropologists and neuroscientists have added to the debate and made it as complicated as a transvestite's make up bag.
Curiously this is the most appropriate definition for love. Like a Tranny Bag, love contains mystery, colour, illusion, and an enormous amount of chemicals.
The possible combinations of the ingredients are colossal. Most people's love ends up looking like Jordan (aka Katie Price); all the bits are there but deep down you still know it's a bloke. Often love is a Danny La Rue or a Lilly Savage; a passable definition, strangely attractive, but wont stand up to meticulous scrutiny.
Occasionally things can go really wrong and you get Norman Wisdom in a dress with only crudely applied blue eye shadow as a concession to femininity. This is disastrous as only the very cruel and terminally mean could kick the hapless Wisdom out on to the streets. And so this loves endures until one party dies, and we all know Norman is indestructible.

117 Humans/Jobs/Prostitution

2009-07-25T11:21:00.000-07:00

Rimington Smyth-Knismesis is the gentleman's gentlemen and the best paid hooker in the world. Remington specialises in the needs of the urbane, well-healed individual and is in constant demand. He has exacting standards of his clientele, and they must be immaculately turned out before they can enter his chambers. His manservant, Nickleby Nonce, is there to provide last minute grooming for punters who arrive slightly dishevelled. Spit and polish shoe shining, wet shave, manicure and fluffing are just some of Mr Nonce's services.
Rimington will greet his customers with a firm handshake and a pithy comment concerning the weather. Hand relief and oral are they only utilities he supplies, and is expert in both. The whole messy business is over in seconds. His real skill lies in the mop up operation as any stray flying semen is quickly cleared and banished to his patented 'seed incinerator'. Awkward silences are smoothed over with his masterful knowledge of cricket and adroit prediction of England's chances in the latest test.
Unsurprisingly Rimington is not popular with the ladies. He thinks a clitoris is a type of fruit to be found in New Guinea.

116 Humans/Inflictions/Ability through Disability

2009-07-11T02:37:00.000-07:00

Deaf people have a very valuable skill in lip reading. They get to 'hear' all the good swear words that are 'beeped' out of You've Been Framed. Similarly lip people can deaf read; mutes can read ears to find out what is going on. This is a very specialist skill as most mutes can hear, and deaf mutes can lip read anyway.
These skills are usually developed through cruel necessity. However, Smudge Deaf people have a very valuable skill in lip reading. They Maxwelton, a spy for MI6, developed them out of boredom. Smudge was a preternaturally gifted individual. Double first from Oxford and Cambridge in 17 subjects (per University), holder of running, jumping, throwing, shooting, swimming and snuggling World records, Grandmaster martial artist of all 1023 known styles and 2541 unknown ones, Grandmaster chess player, Grandmaster Soduku, Grandmaster Reiki and Grandmaster Flash (he DJs at weekends). Eventually, Smudge ran out of things to learn and turned his attention to ear reading.
He quickly became a Grandmaster Ear Reader and it became his obsession, discovering new principles, techniques and minutiae he took the art to new levels of understanding. One of the effects he discovered was ‘Sensory Interference from Earlobe Micro Waggle’. Whilst spying on arch nemesis Otto Von Lucifer from the obligatory position of apparent safety, he failed to notice Otto shout ‘Get that Cnut!’ point to his hiding place and the dozen armed-guards descend upon him. This was due to Otto's earlobes vibrating at very high frequency interfering with his normal sight and hearing senses. Smudge was caught and quickly dispatched, Otto being efficiently ruthless and not giving the spy the usual sporting chance to escape. This is cited as the best example of disability through ability.

115 Humans/Speech/The Great Vowel Shift

2009-07-08T14:56:00.000-07:00

No one really knows why or how the first vowel shifted. Some speculate that it was because of fashionable imitation of an admired or powerful person as is alleged to be the origin of the Spanish lisp. This is in fact the correct answer. People love to imitate and pretend to be something they are not.
The Spanish were lucky. Many now extinct tribes have copied some terrible and pernicious traits. The Hen people of Ailsa Craig, Scotland had a glorious and fabulous leader in Morag. She was kind, beautiful, intelligent and benevolent, but had a habit of pecking people on the head. One person doing this would have been fine, but the entire population decided to emulate their Queen and soon became extinct from brain aneurysms.
The Tabbies of Farne Island, England looked up to Peter the Cheetah for his wisdom, sense of justice and lithe graceful movements, but soon died out for copycatting his preponderance for late night wailing and territory marking sessions.
On Samson Island, UK the Barnetmen followed a priest named Michael Bolton to their deaths for spending too much time on their preposterously elaborate hairdos.
Perhaps the most senseless waste of life was witnessed on Goat Island, New York. The most admired person here was Brentford Ulysses Brentford Xavier Brentford Nylons the Third. He was the islands top Bladder Ball player and charming, generous and gallant to a fault. But Brent had the nasty habit of getting drunk after games and making animal shapes with his scrotum. The Bat, Bunny and Rattlesnake were great crowd pleasers but the Goat was his trademark. This involved tucking his entire package between his legs so that his member and scrunched sack could be seen protruding from his backside, vaguely resembling an annoyed ram. Once again the people of Goat Island imitated the wrong trait and soon the male islanders as a source of pride and prowess would walk about with their tackle trussed up. This severely damaged sperm production and they were wiped out within a generation.
If history teaches us anything (and it doesn’t) then it is to be yourself.

114 Emotion/Controlling Emotion/Revenge

2009-07-07T12:54:00.000-07:00

Apparently revenge is a dish best served cold. And with this in mind biochemist Kenneth Bumford paid a visit to his unfaithful boyfriend Harry Monk, armed with a canister of liquid nitrogen and administered his own ‘special frosty enema’. This was not the first time slightly dodgy advice had been misinterpreted. The surprise rimy, rectal injection caused Harry to enter a partial cryogenic suspension. Fortunately the Leidenfrost effect had Mr Monk skittering around the room on his exposed backside, like bunched drops of water on a hot frying pan, and warmed him up enough to defrost him back to life. In a freak coagulation event, bright blue ice hexagons dropped out of Harry’s chapped bottom. Intrigued by the phenomena Ken analysed the cerulean shapes at the lab and correctly identified them as the Aids virus that Harry had caught from his illicit fling. Ken had saved Harry’s life. Harry overjoyed vowed never to stray again. Ken forgave Harry and the two homosexuals adopted 7 children and lived happily ever after.

113 The Bible/Gospels/The Lost Gospel of Keith

2009-07-03T15:29:00.000-07:00

It is not well known that many gospels did not make the final Biblical cut. There are at least a dozen gospels, including the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Nicodemus and Mary Magdalen. The reason for this was that they contained stories that were even more embarrassingly implausible than the 4 that made it past the ecclesiastical censorship.
The worst offender was the Gospel according to Keith. Jesus and Keith were great childhood friends and inseparable. He would persuade Jesus to cause mischief with his divine powers.
Nails to rubber was one of their favourites, and they very much enjoyed running away from an irate, hammer wielding Joseph, who could never quite finish the wardrobe he had been working on for years.
Speaking in Lungs abused the power of omniscience and voice throwing. ‘Cut out the Rothmans Granddad!’ could be heard emanating from the rib cage of bronchitic pensioners. This was particularly unnerving for the sufferer not least because they had possessed chests, but also because they had absolutely no idea what a Rothman was 1,890 years prior to the invention of that brand of cigarette.
Walking on Daughter would see Jesus hovering above the women at the local synagogue, especially at Bat Mitzvahs.
Water to swine was one of Keith’s too.
Keith laments in his gospel that Jesus changed for the worst when he found religion and their fun loving relationship was lost forever. He also gripes that Jesus never gave him due credit for the ideas that he later developed and used to convert people. Especially the Healing Pig Tree. Not surprisingly Keith’s writings were ‘mislaid’ along with the Women Are Better Than Men Scrolls.

112 Law/EU Bureaucracy/Song Lyrics

2009-07-01T13:36:00.000-07:00

After 31 December 2009, it will become illegal to make any mention of feet and inches, pounds and ounces, pints and gallons in activities relating to economics, health, safety, administration and song lyrics. This is good and bad news. The ever emotive ‘the pounding of my heart’ becomes the sanitised ‘ the 453.59237 gramming of my heart’. However the Rolling Stones are ‘pleased in principle’ at their future name change to The Rolling 6.35 kilograms, and the Italian crooner Paolo Conte will provide great hilarity as he tries to get his latin tongue around ‘Happy 30.48 centimetres’.
The band ‘Nine Inch Nails’ has had a mare. A nail is 1/16th of a yard. They are not happy and have asked if they can combine and round up to the slightly more simple 0.04 metres.
The front man of the Pogues, Shane McGowan, is furious. He is no longer allowed to say firkin and has to use 318.2 litres instead.
The esoteric post rock madness art band ‘Bushel Bovate Barleycorn and the Butt Hundred Weight Ounce Pints’ are as pleased as Punch, as their name works out to be the very cool ‘Mega Mole’, which saves them loads on printing costs. By extraordinary coincidence, Mega Mole’s imperial unit obsessed lyrics translate into beautiful sonnets that have been hailed as the modern Shakespeare and sales of their 16 concept albums are set to soar in 2010.

111 Sport/Dangerous Sports/Extreme Explanation

2009-06-30T10:40:00.000-07:00

Explaining the rules of cricket in Japanese to a scaffolder on his tea break is one of the most hazardous things a person can attempt. And for this reason it attracts only a limited number of danger junkies. The idea is to have the worker put down his brew and say ‘Ah-So!’ in an exclamation of far eastern enlightenment. However, ‘Ar5ehole!’ and a beating are more usual.
Extreme Explanation (EE) started with Richard Taut to help him get through the terrors of teaching at inner city schools. Dick’s speciality was ‘Agro Algebra’ and he could easily get across the salient points of quadratic equations whilst dodging phlegm and sharpened compasses. At the height of his game he could make even the most delinquent pre-pubescent understand axiomatic algebraic systems and their topological applications. This later caused Billy ‘Battery Acid’ Bateman great consternation as he suddenly started contemplating the axiom of the empty cash register as he held up the Welcome Break at South Mimms service area at junction 23 on the M25 Motorway.
Like all extreme sports there are casualties and the EE community are praying hard for Jacob Funt who attempted the ‘Pain’ gambit. The task was to explain to his wife why biologically women can endure more pain than men and so are best equipped to give birth. He undertook this 18 hours into her protracted and very unpleasant labour. The ensuing verbal torrent would have made a Regimental Sergeant Major dressed as a Goth blush, and caused severe psychological scarring to the Midwives present. It is unknown what the effect on Jacob was, due to the coma it induced. Mother and baby are doing fine.

110 Humans/Needs/Drugs

2009-06-29T13:09:00.000-07:00

Humans have been using medication to lift their spirits for millennia. More people die in one day from alcohol abuse than the combined annual deaths from pot, shrooms, ecstasy and acid. About the same number that die in 1 week from cocaine. Obviously the government’s war on drugs is working by reducing the menu of drugs available and encouraging people to take the more destructive and expensive substances.
On the plus side certain species are getting high for free. Jaguars, lemurs and bees love getting mashed. They chew bark, suck on millipedes, and even eat each other’s wax in pursuit of getting wasted. No fancy cocktails and dwarfs carrying bowls of processed coca leaves for these hardcore party animals.
In short we have forgotten how to do it properly. The media fill our heads with images of exotic bars, glamorous rock stars and gorgeous coke whores. People need a lesson from Agues McCatheter, Scotland’s premier tramp. No one knows the age of Agues, as he has always existed, but he looks about 59. McCatheter is completely resistant to the usual effects of alcohol and often uses it to sober up. His favourite tipple is his own urine; generations of Trampdom has produced a self-reliant species, his internal organs having evolved so as to turn any liquid into an intoxicant. On particularly heavy sessions Agues can be seen sobering up on the Diamond White and Tallisker at his local wine shop, Thrashers. Soon his golden elixir is flowing and mayhem ensues. On his last binge he was able to be ‘Best Pals’ with the whole of England and half of Wales, an incredible feat for a Scot. So intense was his experience that he completely skipped the ‘domestic violence’ and ‘the self-loathing, I love you, I’ll never do it again’ phases and settle nicely into reminiscing about 70’s television programs. Not since the Sag brothers (See 82 Humanity/Vanity/Plastic Surgery) has a town witness such bizarre high jinx. In 5 amphetaminesque hours he had shrunk 14 Churches and with ingenious application of super glue replaced them with 40-foot high ‘Towers of Cow’. He still had time to thrill the Turkish population of Aberdeen by eating a year’s supply of doner kebabs; the resulting ‘Tower of Salad’ exceeded the cows by 8ft. When the fight stage finally took hold, McCatheter created a mini Amsterdam in Scotland with loads of nakedness and windmills.

109 Attributes/Bravery/Hero

2009-06-24T14:29:00.001-07:00

People need heroes, even heroes. Geriatric 95-year-old bare-knuckle champion Sally Shingles is the hero’s hero. The British government have been trying to decorate Sally since 1914. She has so far turned down 14 Victoria Crosses, 26 Military Crosses, and a Blue Peter Gold badge. She doesn’t think she is particularly brave. She just loves fighting. When asked what was her biggest regret of World War II, she replied ‘When it ended.’ Her favourite weapons are her hands, followed closely by her tartan shopping trolley.
In the 1950’s she got cancer and simply told it to get out. She beat Winston Churchill in a ‘Who Has Got The Most Testicles Competition’. By four.
Sally’s biggest test was capturing Osama Bin Laden. Shingles was deep undercover in Afghanistan and one of the few people who look good in a Burka, so was ideally placed to attempt the honey trap. Unfortunately, Sally got carried away and took out all of Bin Laden’s elite guard whilst experimenting with the application of the veil as a deadly weapon. Fortunately, Laden was so impressed with the shapes she was pulling, the devastating moves and lightening reflexes that he instantly fell in love and agreed to become one of her house husbands. The reason that there is mystery as to whether Bin is a live or dead is because he his in fact retired. He lives happily in Kilburn with Sally’s collection of dictators and testicles. Osama’s duties are feeding the cats and tucking Hitler in at night, reading him his bedtime story while Ms Shingles is away on missions.

108 Humans/Skills/Conmen

2009-06-23T12:20:00.000-07:00

Good conmen never get caught. Charles Ponzi, Kilroy-Silk, Princess Di: all off to a good start, but eventually found out.
The best conman is currently 24-year-old Frank Kosher. At his birth he had the ‘Extra Milk Scam’ working, persuading the midwives in attendance to lactate, including the male nurses. By 2 he was grifting his old worn dummies, exchanging them for baby strollers and cabbage patch dolls in what has since become known as the ‘Great Mothercare Swindle’. At the age of 9 he had graduated to the long con and his version of the ‘Fiddle’ involving donkeys and circus dwarfs was raking in £20,000 a week.
When puberty struck Frank was ready to take confidence trickery to a new level and invented the Tate Stone Fence. Inspired by the audacity of the Brit Art movement of the mid 90’s, he erected a barrier outside Tate Britain made entirely from marijuana resin, coated the structure with a granite composite, erected a sign announcing ‘Stoned Fence’ and stood by dressed as a dishevelled Rastafarian policeman, complete with dreadlocks and truncheon. The critics saw a work of genius, the criminals an opportunity. Attracted to the installation by the chance to off load their stolen items at a good drug induced price they were immediately confronted by the metaphysics and warping implications of the piece. Confused they handed the items over in exchange for an ‘Evening All’. The best cons are legal cons, such as the Insurance Industry or the Royal Family, so Frank would return the items to their owners and claim the reward. He scaled the business by opening branches outside every major art gallery including the Le Louvre, Guggenheim and the Setagaya.
On his 18th Birthday Frankie retired and donated his entire fortune to charity by setting up the Kosher Foundation. KF did a lot of good work in its first year but attracted the usual hoard of embezzlers so Frank came out of retirement and taught them all a lesson by fleecing his own philanthropic enterprise, quadrupling his money in the process.
Frank Kosher is the 3rd richest man in the world and good mates with Benedict Farse (See 30 Animals/Humans/Bill Gates, 93 Finance/Money/Hierarchy of Charities, 98 Employment/Jobs/Lawyers and 104 Humans/Power/The Power Behind The Throne). Bill Gates is unaware of this relationship and the 2 friends often giggle at the futility of Billie’s situation.

107 Humans/Skills/Being Moronic

2009-06-22T12:13:00.000-07:00

On the last Monday of October in offices everywhere someone will comment that it is getting dark really early in the evenings. Less depressingly they may note that it is good to see the mornings getting lighter. In reality Daylight Saving Time has played its trick on the thick. The evenings have been getting shorter since the Summer Solstice in mid June, and only the dense point it out 4 months later. It is the same mutton flaps that wearily whine ‘not too bad for a Tuesday’ when asked about their disposition. Or as the weekend approaches ‘TFI Friday!’ thus triggering the revolting association of bespectacled gingerness with forced fun.
Why are these people tolerated, indeed positively encouraged with weak laughter as they spout their astoundingly bereft observations? By rights their irritating catch phrases and tiresome mewling should induce cathartic violence leading to their death. However, they provide an invaluable service and are in fact a spiritual lubricant.
They shake us from our dream state and make us notice sunset and sunrise, stopping
us from trying to make sense of life by solving riddles but instead make us see life, in light streaming through clouds, trees and water, in wind waving in trees and hair, and in the imagined blood pouring from their imagined broken noses.

106 Relationships/Flirtation/Philandering

2009-06-11T12:45:00.000-07:00

Casanova was an amateur next to Carlos Portion, the Stepney born libertine. Abandoned as a child he just wanted to be loved, and people found him irresistible. At any one time he is being tailed by at least 17 private detectives, hired by Carlos’s various jealous lovers. Half of the investigators will fall in love with Carlos and report back complete fidelity, the rest would be consumed with jealousy as they witness him fraternising with their own partners.
At the height of his prowess Mr Portion filled the Royal Albert Hall. In 1997, at a Sarah Brightman concert, 5543 people came to see him: his date for the night and 5542 private investigators. Ms Brightman was ecstatic as the previous night only her mum and Andrew Lloyd Webber had turned up.
During ‘I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper’ Mr Portion needed the lavatory and so the only people left in the auditorium were 2 Brightmans, 1 Lloyd Webber and the surviving members of 70’s raunchy dance troupe Hot Gossip. Detectives are cunning and so as not to appear suspicious didn’t return at the same time but queued for the latrine instead. Five and a half thousand detectives fed on a diet of doughnuts, coffee and ready meals relieving themselves continuously put a huge strain on the RAH plumbing and blocked the sewers. The stench from the drains in the Kensington area caused a temporary but not insignificant drop in local house prices. The auditorium gradually began to fill up as the PI’s returned.
The sudden emptying and subsequent slow trickle of people returning to their seat that night was rather like the action of a cistern and is often cited as the most succinct criticism of any Lloyd Webber production.

105 Construction/Building Materials/Lego vs. Stickle Bricks

2009-06-10T12:18:00.000-07:00

Lego is a vulgar nonsense compared to Stickle Bricks. The Stickle Brick is purity and Lego the painted whore. Only a Danish company could be pretentious enough to use a French word to demonstrate what they are all about: L’ego.
When the young want to construct an aeroplane, 2 colourful plastic oblongs and an imagination are enough (1 fuselage and 1 wing). You don’t need propellers and ‘minifigures’ to get your vision across. To a creative a roof is 2 interlocking slanted rectangles, or if gifted, 4 interlocking triangles which then transforms into the Great Pyramid at Giza. A shaped plastic Lego piece complete with chimney and painted slates doesn’t come close.
LEGO boast that just three eight stud bricks can be put together in 1,560 ways. Not nearly as impressive as a single stickle brick, a fertile mind and an infinite number of creations from a simple flower to a galactic battle cruiser.
A sure sign that it has all gone wrong for Lego is the business consultancy ‘Lego Serious Play’.
Teams are invited to build metaphors of their organisational experiences using Lego. They then work through imaginary scenarios using the visual device of the models and explore ‘possibilities’ in a ‘serious’ form of ‘play’. Meanwhile the Stickle Kids are looping the loop around an event horizon and bringing Elvis back to life.
There is no such thing as Stickleland because wandering around a model village for a child is very frustrating. A kid sees a 6ft Big Ben and wants to knock it over. There are no explosions, no fires and no rockets taking off, just adults telling them not to touch. Pointless. Legoland would be much more impressive if it was designed and built by children. This will never happen because the youngsters untainted by rigid play parameters are too busy saving the Universe from the giant blue Stickle-O-Tron.

104 Humans/Power/The Power Behind The Throne

2009-06-09T11:23:00.000-07:00

Who is the most powerful man in the world? Bill Gates? Benedict Farse? Media Moguls? These people are in fact all puppets of Arthur Skreeb.
Arthur is 2467yrs old. He was great mates with, and shared the same bicycle as Hippocrates. Hip was the first great physician, the ‘Father of Medicine’ and a very clever man. Arthur was also good chums with Plato and could have him in an argument. In fact it was Plato who taught Arthur sophism, the art of winning a discussion even when you are wrong, but because Plato was a bit la-di-da and valued the pursuit of truth above all else, he inadvertently provided Arthur with the perfect foil with which to perfect his insidious persuasive techniques.
Hippocrates discovered the secret of immortality and told Arthur all about it. Screeb seized the opportunity and persuaded Hip that to live forever would be tedious, no one really needs more than 90 years to have a full life, and it would be wise to keep his trap shut about all the healthy living nonsense.
And so everyone was denied the right to live forever and Arthur Skreeb evolved into the repellent, insipid weasel he is today. Arthur is a shadow, the power behind the power behind the throne, completely invisible. He often gatecrashes funerals naked except for a giant 2-foot red and black hornet covering his tackle, shouting ‘I love wasps me!’ and dancing like Heather Mills at the end of a divorce, and no one notices. He has persuaded everyone to look the other way, that they are free to believe what they choose, read what they want to read, view what they decide to view. He has done all this for the sake of power.
But is he happy?
Oh yes.

103 Humans/People/The Unluckiest Man

2009-06-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

Born on the 13th of January 1313, Brother Unctuous Sack of the Order of Beard Huggers is widely considered to have been the most unfortunate man in history. Not blessed with looks, folk would often mistake him for a large ginger pigsty and throw scraps of left over food into him. He could be seen shambling along a path, irritably removing turnips from his cassock and picking nettle soup from his meagre beard. Another curse was extreme intelligence and he was plagued with wonderful ideas that he had no way of realising as no one would listen to a soliloquising swine shack. More frustrated than Gary Glitter on a bouncy castle, he took up the hobby of partridge pickling. Vinegar soaked fowl gave him chronic flatulence which only added to his loneliness. No one in the order could find the compassion to hug his beard and Unctuous found it difficult to hug theirs when his love was not reciprocated.
Things got worse when in an act of desperation he converted to Islam so that he could claim he was born on the 15th of Ramadan 712, a Tuesday, instead of the supposed unlucky date of his birth under the Gregorian calendar. But Lady Luck has no appreciation of common superstition and on his first pilgrimage to Mecca he became know as ‘The Man Who Gives Succour To Pigs’ and was repeatedly stoned for his association with the 'filthy animal'.
Miserable, alone and bruised Brother Sack had a rare moment of clarity and decided to embrace his talents. He invited a piglet named Elizabeth to take up residence within his person. Pigs have no prejudice and Betty loved her new home. Unctuous was ecstatically happy that something needed him and cried uncontrollably from emotion and worried that the bliss would end. The dehydration weakened his immune system and he died 13 days later from swine disease.
As ginger people rarely decay, Betty continued to live all her natural life in Brother Unctuous, happily gorging on the nutritious scrapes that folk continued to throw.

102 Humans/Misunderstandings/Oxymoron

2009-05-29T05:47:00.000-07:00

Most think that an oxymoron is a conjoining of contradictory terms. Examples often cited are United States, military intelligence or a funny Jew. All of those examples by that definition are not oxymoronic; the States are united in their love of massacring the English language, military intelligence is very clever but often misguided, and there are funny Jews; Woody Allen and Leet Fabric are just 2 fine examples, both annoying yes, but also funny.
Oxymoron is actually a chemical compound yet to be discovered. It is a combination of oxygen and a super heavy element that will eventually be synthesised called Moron. Moron is a radioactive noble gas with an atomic number of 150 and a half-life of 10-44 seconds. The Planck time is 5.4 x 10-44 seconds, the earliest time after the Big Bang that theoretical physics can describe. But as discussed previously they are wrong (see 83 Entertainment/Comedy/Urban Myths). There is only one thing quicker than Moron’s half-life, Leet Fabric opening and closing his wallet at the bar.
Moron is so named because you would have to be a total mental defective an utter Planck to try and detect it.

101 Control/Social Management/Invisible Policemen

2009-05-27T10:43:00.000-07:00

The quaint religion of Catholicism has 37% of the world’s population following its musings. The confessional, a small, enclosed booth, is a fabulous invention and a very powerful invisible policeman. People will enter and under the ruse that no one but God and his representative need know, sins are confessed.
However, the priests were missing 63% of the world and were convinced the flock were holding back on the really lurid stuff. They craved deeper sordid titillation and so invented the ultimate confessional, the Internet Search Engine. The suggestive ‘Go Ogle’ was the original engine, and the initial success at extracting confessions was remarkable. Not even the Spanish Inquisition could get people to admit they had a penchant for www.slutsinburkas.com. However, there was a problem, the number of closet homosexuals and cross dressers it revealed was alarming. The clergy thought it had controlled those problems by inviting known miscreants to join their ranks. Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.
The shear numbers unearthed by Go Ogle presented a very big problem. There simply was not enough room to house them all. Advertising executive Brandon O’Yeah (see 57 Pastimes/Rituals/Sunbathing) partially solved the problem by inventing New Labour and thus creating a large number of public servant and administration jobs with time consuming but wholly pointless occupations like Cornish Language Officer, Problem Otter Counsellor and Lesbian Ham Carver in order to distract them from thoughts of frocks and bottoms. Some were squeezed into the all ready over burdened entertainment industry and more still were shoe horned into Human Resource Departments. Diablo Ex Machina. Throngs of deviants are being discovered every day and the Church is despairing.
On the plus side people have become more honest.

100 Puzzles/Mysteries/The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything

2009-05-25T12:00:00.001-07:00

In 1977 the genius Douglas Adams deduced the answer to be 42. Leet and Fabric have since performed a more detailed study using the techniques of neutron particulation, slepton stretching and graviscalar baking and have found the more accurate answer of 42.001656. They expect the Noble Prize for Comedy for this discovery.

99 Linguistics/Conversations/Marital Arguments

2009-05-23T11:45:00.000-07:00

Arguments can start for the silliest reasons and quickly escalate. Couples that have been co-habiting or married for 25 years can stab each other to death over whether Greenshield shopping stamps were better than Co-Op Blue Chip. The point of cataclysmic failure, the straw that breaks the feltcher’s rehabilitation attempts.
It is fortunate these couples haven’t got nuclear weapons and a real grievance. Even better that they are not generally mad. What would happen if say they had an imaginary friend to which they prayed for guidance, 10,000 nuclear warheads and some one threatening their philosophy and way of life?
The first exchange would be in the bedroom, a tactical nuclear strike right where it hurts. Not a big explosion, just enough to take out the genitalia and leave a message. The retaliation would be swift and just as brutal, in the bathroom replacing the Colgate toothpaste with chemical tactics, mustard gas in the bidet and anthrax in the Optrex eye drops. The children will then be asked to take sides with bribes of sweets and toys and the chance of going to heaven. A savage and pointless ground war will follow, involving ingenious conversions of KerPlunk! and PlayDoh Hairdresser into weapons of mass destruction, such a pity that a cheap and renewable source of fun can be used for such horror. When it is realised that neither party can win the house will be destroyed and the garden scorched, leaving nothing but a playground for the cockroaches. And all because of a trivial disagreement over collectable shopping stamps.
Fortunately no one is that mad.

98 Employment/Jobs/Lawyers

2009-05-18T13:13:00.000-07:00

Some view lawyers as cripples that hate dancers, old serpents who cannot shed their skin and call others naked and shameless, oxen that love their yoke and deem the forest deer a vagrant thing, vampires that turn their back to the sun and see only their shadows, and these shadows are their laws. But to most they are simply venal molluscs in league with the Devil.
The most repellent Lawyer is Maximally Von Lucrative the inventor of Jurisprudence- Jurisprudence. The philosophy and theory of law is Jurisprudence, and is complicated enough. Max created the philosophy and theory of the law of the philosophy and theory of law. So labyrinthine that the definition alone could make Albert Einstein’s ears bleed.
Philosophers are a subclass of magician - concept magicians, and so deserve the same scorn as magicians (see 56 Jobs/Entertainment Industry/Magicians). Lawyers are a type of magician too – word magicians, and so also deserve contempt.
Essentially Von Lucrative is a magician four times over. Ordinarily this would mean that the whole of nature and its laws would shun Max. No creature would be able to stand his presence; no light would reflect from him, no strata would support his passing, he would be banished from the Universe. However, Von Lucrative managed to find a loophole. Nature has appealed, but there is nothing natural about Law so will fail.
Max is currently working for Bill Gates trying to outsmart Benedict Farse.

97 Entertainment/Games/Board Games

2009-05-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

In the early 70’s before television became so unbelievably rubbish, board games were an extremely popular form of family entertainment. Ker Plunk and Buck-a-roo were the Ant and Dec of the day.
More fascinating are the ones that didn’t quite make it, the Terry Christian/Vernon Kay/Mickey from Magpie board games:
Mouse Feltch. – No one really knows what a feltch is and this game was an attempt to explain. It was like the original Mousetrap but with straws.
Ladders and Ladders – This amusement was over very quickly so wasn’t much fun. Snakes and Snakes didn’t fare much better for being impossible to finish.
Open the box – After the success of the surgery-based game ‘Operation’; ‘Open the Box’ was targeted at budding gynaecologists.
Hungry Gippos - Players have to support their incredibly large and ever-increasing brood of colourful tykes by gathering lucky heather and clothes pegs before PC Plod investigates their tarmac business.
Pat-a-Hake - like Pat-a- Cake but with fish.
Tiddlywanks – this was a game against the clock involving a twelve-inch ejaculating clockwork dwarf. Tiddlywanks has been voted the worst concept for a game ever but is never the less a collectors item.

96 Entertainment/Music/Brass Bands

2009-05-11T12:54:00.000-07:00

Brass bands used to be about colliery pit closures and harsh redundancy policies, juxtaposed with a strong undercurrent of renewed childhood romances. Since the Americans have got involved the game has changed. Now steroid abuse, exotic interpretation and horn tampering has bought the noble art into disrepute.
As usual the Americans have totally missed the point. Life is not all about being the best. A large part of life is about gritty working class unpleasantness and using a trombone as a political tool. It’s about losing your job and reclaiming your soul, smiling through coal dusted tears while contemplating suicide but instead deciding to get dressed up as a clown.
The Americans have entered a game they don’t understand. Brass Bands are more complicated than cricket and they should leave well alone.
At the recent World Brass Band Championships the Americans came a humiliating 98th out of 96. Their version of the Black Dyke Band, an all female ensemble of Afro-Caribbean decent, performed an Elgar influenced hip-hop fusion that put the girl back into Flugelhorn. The original Black Dyke band, so named after the geological basaltic vertical igneous intrusion in West Yorkshire, were horrified to see them attempt ‘Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves’ by the Eurythmics. They had no idea that the euphonium could be so versatile.

95 Mysteries/Puzzles/Why Do Women Talk About Nothing?

2009-05-06T09:06:00.000-07:00

Women chatter. They can talk for hours about almost nothing. Often on public transport they will gossip at one another with abandon. No information will be relayed or received by either party. It is like an idling engine, the parts are moving but the vehicle is going nowhere. It is as if they are keeping ready for something. Like a warrior will still train for conflict in times of peace, a woman trains linguistically in times of confusion.
Woman’s primary role is as a chaos maker. All the clues are there: Eve and the apple, damming the entire human race to an eternity of suffering. Boadicea gave the Romans a beating and in the process doomed the British to deep fried lard with everything instead of a healthy Mediterranean diet. Joan of Arc threw the French into shock and chaos by actually winning wars for them. Sharon Osborne enough said. And marriage.
The world is currently in such disarray that this discordant womanly skill is not needed.
It is in no ones interest to achieve total annihilation of the human race, so if it looks like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are about to invite the Hoards of Hell to a barn dance, 3 billion persuasive linguistic engines will shift into gear and the soothing words ‘Leave it John, he ain’t worth it’ will be heard and the balance will shift towards peace and harmony. However, this state will never be achieved because women love shoes and chocolate. A satisfied human would only require a small piece of chocolate after a modest repast, and one pair of well made comfortable shoes. Where is the fun in that? So just as peace is about to be realised, ‘I’m happy, but something is missing’ will be uttered, sending the balance back towards war.
And so the human race is doomed to an ever-repeating pattern of war/peace/war, until someone invents the chocolate shoe to confuse women and render them speechless.

94 Employment/Jobs/Marketing

2009-04-30T16:24:00.000-07:00

Unknown to Peter Fisher and Susan Shostakovich (see 65 Skills/Linguistic/Bartering), they had met before in 1975. At a student party they had a fornicacious fumble. The result of that union was Susan’s pride and joy Dylan. Due to his parent’s superior linguistic genes, Dylan grew up to be a genius marketer.
In 2004 at the age of 28, Dylan persuaded Sky TV to commission the impossible, a television program detailing the history of the Universe in real time. For the first several billion years the viewer will see just a blank screen and hear no sound. He sold it on the premise that in today’s frenetic world this will be soothing and extremely cheap to make. In case for some reason the subscriber misses the program he can also catch it over on ‘The History Of The Universe In Real Time +1Hour’ channel.
In a stroke of brilliance he also sold them the rights to ‘The History Of The Universe In Real Time’ series one through six. All series have a similar theme but as they are in fact detailing parallel Universes the screen displays a very slightly different black – something for the intelligent viewer to pick up on and feel rewarded by. Series 1 through 5 all approach the Big Bang in the same way, after a couple of billion years the screen will glow incandescent and a huge sonic blast will render the viewers profoundly deaf. Initially the advertisers wouldn’t go for this interpretation, but Dyl got Bose on board to give out free noise cancelling headphones with every subscription – every good TV program needs a gimmick.
Realising that after 12 billion years of the same treatment of the Big Bang the program might become a little predictable, Dylan persuaded Keiffer Sutherland to film a special middle for series 6. Instead of the usual gravitational singularity and expansion, a Russian terrorist with a nuclear bomb and Jack Bauer simultaneously spring into existence. Jack then has 24hrs to get the Universe to behave properly.

93 Finance/Money/Hierarchy of Charities

2009-04-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

Charities are rich. They have to be to pay all those amazingly persuasive street performers who cajole the public into ‘sparing a minute’ to look at a clipboard. Why are these workers so happy? Tackling such heavy issues as Amnesty, World Poverty or Aids and at the same time saying ‘Nice jumper mate, can I have a lick of your ice cream?’ The fickle fakers. Also bored upper class housewives run charities and just want to be paid expenses for their trouble. A champagne lunch at Bibendum doesn't come cheap.
So which is the wealthiest charity? Some say the Catholic Church, but that is a business not a charity. Some say it is an organisation that engenders the most sympathy: children, furry animals (only the cute ones though) or a horrific illness. Surprisingly it is none of these. A perverse human selection bias operates, namely the herd goes with the underdog. When presented with a list of worthwhile charities the average person will donate to the least well known, reasoning that the others are well supported and it is nice to give money to something worthwhile and unusual.
Unknown to Bill Gates (see 30 Animals/Humans/Bill Gates), Benedict Farse has a secret identity. He is also the charity Edna Stokes’ Scorpion Sanctuary. Through cunning marketing ploys Mr Farse has managed to make himself the wealthiest charity in the world. He is also the brain behind the fickle fakers, realising that people would intuitively mistrust these performers and be further persuaded to donate to the underdog. No one has ever heard of the Edna Stokes Scorpion Sanctuary but all have subconsciously donated to it. Benedict realised that he could not rely on Enya to bring in the dough and the Asian economy is too volatile and risky to win the bet. At the time of writing Mr Gates is 199.99% of Mr Farce’s income, and is looking forward to retirement. However, Benedict is pissing himself with anticipation of the moment when he can reveal the identity of Edna Stokes, and plunge Bill Gates into second place as the World’s richest man.

92 Humans/Strife/Jihad

2009-04-25T03:32:00.000-07:00

Jihad is one of those nebulous terms like ‘fancy dress party’; it is difficult to gauge how much effort to put in. Should the Jihad be by the heart, tongue, pen, hand or sword? Should I go dressed smartly, charismatic, cleverly, normally or with the full on feathered chicken suit? The chicken suit is the lesser jihad as after the initial shock value it becomes tiresome watching a clumsy yellow puff of nonsense knock drinks over and sweat a lot.
One of the most disastrous and bloody jihads was the Girl Guide Gihad of 1956. 14-year-old genius Girl Guide Greta Gnathostomata decided to introduce a new category into the merit badge system. At the age of 8 while still in the Brownies, Greta achieved the highest award in Guiding, the Baden-Powell Challenge Award (BPCA). She then spent the next 6 years training an elite corps of high achievers. Greta and her garrison wanted more, they wanted the ultimate challenge, and with a subtle bit of interpretation of point 8 in zone 5 of the BPCA they created the Girl Guide Gihad badge. They desired to convert the World to Guiding.
All the girls had advanced badges in Camp Craft, Agility, Needle Craft and Fund Raising and most had Active Response, First Aid and Ballistics, and so were ideally equipped to wage war. The element of surprise was on their side. No one would suspect a Girl Guide. And no one suspected the first attack to be so vicious and cunning. Imagine holding a party where every guest turns up as a giant feathered chicken. Carnage.
They very nearly achieved their goal. Fortunately Marilyn Monroe decided to marry the playwright Arthur Miller on June 29th of that year, and that glamorous spectacle turned the thoughts of the Gihad from world domination to boys. If it wasn’t for Mr and Mrs Miller we would all be wearing woggles, attending Jamborees and know the words to "Ging-gang-goolie".

91 Food/Restaurants/Michelin Stars

2009-04-22T11:01:00.001-07:00

In recent years the celebrity of chef has become a common media phenomenon, Gordon Ramsey and his 3-star French Fusion, Heston Blumenthal and the Molecular Menu and Jamie Oliver with his Mockney Mess. All these bakers owe a huge debt of gratitude to the pioneering techniques of Bing Sinatra the worlds first and last Quantum Qook.
Bing was the son of failed pub singer Albert Oppenheimer, who wanted to give his son the best possible chance in show business. As often happens the child totally destroyed the parent’s plans and Bing became a restaurant owning physicist.
In 1984 he opened Le Manoir aux Cat Schrodinger. This establishment put the fusion into cookery. The signature dish was the Chinese influenced Special Relativity fried rice. It is well known that 30 minutes after eating Chinese food the diner will start to feel hungry again. With special relativity fried rice the diner travels back in time to the moment when he took the first mouthful, and instantaneously feels hungry again.
This was an extremely dangerous meal as it took exquisite self-control not to eat oneself to death.
Conversely, Toad in the Black Hole was popular with dieters. As nothing can escape a black hole not even light, it was extremely difficult to get the sausage and batter into the mouth.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Custard was a best selling novelty dessert. A normal looking apple pie would arrive covered in custard. As soon as a spoonful of custard was eaten the pie would disappear. If a piece of pie were taken the custard would vanish. You could eat one or the other but not at the same time. Ultimately it was doomed to failure as most people love a bit of custard with apple pie.
The restaurant vanished into a singularity in 1986 when the pot of String Theory Spaghetti boiled over and caused the magnetic field containing the Plasma Porridge to fail. Curiously Frank Sinatra’s ‘Let’s Take An Old Fashioned Random Walk’ was playing on the kitchen radio at the time. Perhaps parents know best after all.

90 Humanity/Skills/Alien Abductions

2009-04-21T10:29:00.000-07:00

Aliens are very difficult to abduct, but it can be done. They are more cunning and clever than the average human, so it takes special skills to hunt and steal them. 83-year-old Ethel Fluent is the most successful and only Alien Abductor (AA). Tired of continually being the subject of abductions during the mid 1950’s, Ethel decided to turn the tables and get even with her extraterrestrial tormentors. Her collection quickly grew and she now has well over 2 thousand specimens. She keeps them in an abandoned zoo in the town of Twatt, Orkney.
Ethel reasoned that as Aliens are an advanced race and have never been exposed to religious doctrine, they would have a very low tolerance to its effects. She then postulated that if she Christened them all Roger in an elaborate Catholic ceremony a type of Stockholm syndrome would be triggered in the alien psyche, and they would instantly become loyal and loving to her. She was right.
Ethel loves the attention and adulation, but doesn’t realise that due to the advanced alien technology and their fanatical devotion to her, the Army of Rogers she has in her possession is the most powerful fighting force in the universe.
Recently the Council of Twatt has angered Ethel with the introduction of an overly complicated household waste recycling scheme. The Roger Army sense her frustration and are mobilising. Galactic battlefield mathematicians have calculated with a 98.9% probability that a hosepipe ban in Orkney this summer would decimate Ethel’s patio plants and thus precipitate a bloodless coup of the Universe.
Ethel Fluent would be Queen of Everything.

89 Food/Cuisine/The Great British Café

2009-04-18T08:17:00.000-07:00

A fresh cup of deep fried tea is what makes Britain great. The only place you can get deep fried tea is Bernie’s Lardorium, Shoreditch, London, where today’s special is last year’s catch of the day.
Bernard Runnymede has such a disregard for basic hygiene that Microbiologist Monthly voted the Lardorium the most toxic place on earth. It is so pestilential that not even germs can survive, and paradoxically is therefore the safest place to dine.
Bernie has eaten from his own menu for the last 20 years. His arteries furred up and ceased to function in the normal way during the first year. As the arteries narrowed his heart pumped faster. Due to the enhanced stimulant properties of deep fried tea, his heart was able to keep up and push the blood around his ever-narrowing veins at close to the speed of light. At these speeds any attempt to resolve the forces generated by the blood must take into account Einstein’s special theory of relativity, namely that the blood started to move in its own frame of reference. In other words Bernard’s blood started to move independently of the completely blocked arteries, it started to move outside his venous system, indeed outside of his body. A nebulous mist of high velocity blood shrouds him. It is moving so fast that it does not have enough time to react with oxygen in the air. This is why Runnymede is completely blue.
In an effort not to draw attention to himself Bernard wears a pair of 2 foot long black floppy ears and gave his restaurant a Beatles Yellow Submarine make over.

88 Modern Culture/Television/Ratings

2009-04-15T15:25:00.000-07:00

Just because many watch a television program does not make that program good. It simply implies the program is popular.
The same can be said for a religion. So with this in mind, Christianity with its 2 billion viewers is the X Factor of faiths. In second place with 1.2 billion fans is Islam, the National Lottery Jet Set. A close third is the Eastenders Omnibus Hinduism with 828 million watchers.
The least popular program is The Church of Satan with about 60,000 channel hoppers, kind of like a sinister Fred Dibnah’s Age of Steam over on UKTV Documentary.
Surprisingly the Jews are only 14 million strong, a very tiny number considering the influence they exert in the World. Judaism is like one of those programs that due to peer pressure everyone says they have watched and enjoyed but in reality watched for 5 minutes and turned over because it was tedious, Deal or No Deal with Noel Edmonds.
Having no faith at all is very popular. Encouragingly, 775 million people out of the 6 billion in the World have decided to switch off the telly and do something more constructive.

87 Entertainment/Cruelty/Pantomime

2009-04-13T03:53:00.000-07:00

‘He’s behind you!’ shout the simple kids.
‘Why are you shouting? It is clear that the man is acting. He knows the whereabouts of the other man. He toys with you’ shout the clever kids.
‘Why do I fancy Peter Pan? He looks really cute in that tight fitting green outfit. Am I homosexual?’ Shouts the confused boy going through early puberty.
It was this last question that made Quentin Length pen the Butch Panto. Horrified by his strange feelings not only for Peter Pan but also for Buttons, and fearful of the retributions from his father Tarquin Length the founder of The Barnsley Supremacists if he ever suspected his son was a lifter, Quentin set about creating the most masculine Pantomime.
Named ‘Puss in Boots’, it is about a Royal Marine platoon forced to march several hundred miles in ill-fitting Wellingtons only to arrive at the Dragon’s den with chronic foot seepage. Unfortunately Quentin’s imagination wasn’t well developed and the play consisted of just 2 scenes; 1hr of a group soldiers dressed in lederhosen and rubber boots marching to the tune of ‘In the Navy’ followed by 30 minutes of taking off boots and fighting a glamorous feathered Dragon called Devine.
Also unfortunately for Quentin the play was confused as the work of Elton John, who after the success of Tommy, had written a musical similar to but not as good as ‘Puss in Boots’. The critics claimed it as an important iconic masterpiece. An allegorical work: the hour of monotonous marching symbolised the struggle to come to terms with homosexuality, the taking off of the boots represented the release felt when a homosexual was allowed his true nature, and the fighting the flamboyant Dragon was railing against the stereotypes of society.
Fortunately for Length the Panto flopped at the box office. The lack of animals, men in drag, women looking sexily boyish and double entendre were to blame.
The play is still performed at specialist gay theatres and is secretly his father Tarquin Length’s favourite work of art.

86 Mysteries/Puzzles/Who is Leet Fabric?

2009-04-11T03:23:00.000-07:00

Leetington Fotheringale Fabric (born October 27 1993 in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England) is an English comedian and musician best know for being excellent.
As a boy, Jesuit Nuns educated Fabric, at the Order of the Loose Cassock. He was expelled for the humorous defacing of school property: he had decided to make all the statues of Jesus Christ historically accurate and painted them black. His talent for comedy was only matched by his expertise in music and by the age of 13 had formed and fronted a total of 20 bands, all called ‘Keith’s got Asthma’, and to this day he remains the only person to have 19 simultaneous number one hits in Britain. All the ‘Keith’s got Asthma’ bands got one, apart from ‘Keith’s got Asthma’ which due to the corruption of the music business Madonna’s ‘Touch My Lady Giblets’ was awarded instead.
He has co-written a total of 42 sitcoms, amongst them the multi-award winning KantCant, it’s equally successful sequel CantKant, and not forgetting KantKant and CantCant. When asked about the inspiration for these comedies his reply was, ‘Always thinking of Kant mate’.
Recently Fabric has decided to give even more to society and founded the Leet Academy for Underprivileged Gays and Homos (LAUGH). The academy’s work is primarily to teach these unfortunates how to commission proper programs for television, radio and theatre, but also to keep them off the streets.

85 Mysteries/Puzzles/Why Does the Plug Always Get Caught in Furniture When You Try to Move the Lamp?

2009-04-07T11:18:00.000-07:00

The Coven of Dampness, a group of Satanist from Shropshire, invented the BS1363 British 3 pin plug in 1963. Their chief tenet was ‘Liberation through Irritation’, and so not being ‘Hammer House of Horror’ hardcore type Satanists, they only wanted to cause a little mischief. The original design was to cause mild annoyance to people positioning electrical appliances around the home. However they forgot to take into consideration the dreaded house move. Consequently the BS1363 has been responsible for more failed marriages and relationships since the invention of the secretary. Several attempts by the coven to recall their product of destruction brought them in to negotiations with the Cabal of Carnage, a small group operating out of Basildon. CoC had created the lazy tongued celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, and had been grooming him successfully to become the next anti-Christ. After a promising debut Jamie soon started to go off the rails and began doing unexpectedly good deeds. The final straw was his school dinner initiative, potentially the most beneficial nutritional program to mankind. Despite this monumental stroke of goodness, Jamie remained really annoying, with his mockney accent and scooter twat act. CoC got wind that CoD were trying to recall the BS1363 and saw an opportunity. They decided they could take responsibility for each other’s creations.
Since taking responsibility for the 3 pin plug, CoC have issued a statement to the various comedy acts and ‘Universal Truths’ Internet sites: ‘The most painful household incident is not stepping on a 3 pin plug whilst wearing socks, it is having your genitalia burnt by hot metal. We are developing ways to make nude ironing more popular.’
CoD have bought Mr Oliver a lifetime subscription to ‘Cockney Lambretta Monthly’, and successfully persuaded him against having speech therapy.

84 Humans/Struggle/Wealth

2009-04-01T13:36:00.000-07:00

A good proportion of attention is spent on the accumulation of wealth. Darwin hinted at the reason why, Dawkins explained it best and Stanovich, being Canadian, made it complicated. Genes created a machine in order to carry them around safely and propagate, so they achieve a kind of immortality. They gave this machine some basic but delightful urges in order to make sure the machine obeyed. Unfortunately the gene didn’t bank on the machine becoming sentient and rebelling against its plan. Money is a powerful aphrodisiac and most people want a bit of pump action. We are now at a stage in our evolution of extreme conflict.
Gene: Go on, have a baby.
Body: No way! They hurt. I won’t get any sleep, sex stops, my hair goes grey, I’ll be tired all the time and I will die prematurely.
Gene: Ah go on, please. You will become more socially accepted, credit rating will improve, you’ll be invited to a lot of dinner parties and you get to drive a Volvo.
Body: Oh OK that sounds nice and safe and I can still have fun, right?
Gene: Good, good, very good.
Later.
Body: Gene you absolute utter sh1t! Look what has happened now!
Gene: Muuhahahaha! I win again.
Thanks to divorce, people will evolve to a stage of agreement. The genetic program will be modified so people can spend time finding the ideal partner, the type of person who doesn’t mind years of hardship and strife raising offspring in order to ensure their lovers immortality.

83 Entertainment/Comedy/Urban Myths

2009-03-31T13:06:00.000-07:00

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.

82 Humanity/Vanity/Plastic Surgery

2009-03-30T13:23:00.000-07:00

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.

81 Entertainment / Practical Jokes / Stink Bombs

2009-03-28T05:37:00.000-07:00

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.

80 Entertainment / Games / Tramps

2009-03-25T12:44:00.000-07:00

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.

79 Humanity/Achievements/The Moon Landing

2009-03-24T13:14:00.000-07:00

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.

78 Control/Censorship/Word Filters

2009-03-21T01:15:00.000-07:00

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.

77 World Peace/Moral and Spiritual Harmony/Tourettes

2009-03-17T12:56:00.000-07:00

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.

76 HUMANS/SEX/MONOGAMY

2009-03-14T00:28:00.001-07:00

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.

75 HUMANS/CONFLICT/DICTATORS VS. ROMANTICS

2009-03-11T11:01:00.000-07:00

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.

74 MUSIC/MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS/THE VAGINA

2009-03-10T12:06:00.000-07:00

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.

73 HUMANS/CELEBRITY GLAMOUR/FATWA

2009-03-09T13:30:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2009-03-08T04:30:00.000-07:00

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.

71 POLITICS/TACTICS/SMEAR CAMPAIGNS

2009-03-04T10:48:00.000-08:00

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.

70 IDEAS/MONEY SPINNERS/DIETS

2009-03-03T12:27:00.001-08:00

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.

69 CREATIVITY/INVENTIONS/DINOSAURS

2009-03-02T12:25:00.000-08:00

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.

68 HUMANS/POLITICS/DICTATORS

2009-02-26T15:05:00.000-08:00

Today’s mass murdering, despotic, totalitarian git is tomorrow’s Nobel Peace Prize winning visionary. However, a few push the envelope too far and end up with the sobriquet of Dictator. These people create a cult of personality, give themselves ludicrously long titles and try to kill as many people as possible.
Stalin is widely considered to hold the record for democide at 43 million souls, but on an annualised basis this only equates to 1.48 million for every year in power. In the Tyrant Top Ten the number one slot goes to a woman, Empress Dowager Cixi with 2.4 million dissenters per year. This is the reason that women should not be allowed to drive a country, indeed not allowed to drive anything. For about 7 days a month they get a bit irritable and murderous. For 25% of the year women can be a tad tetchy and homicidal. When confronted with this alarming irascibility (obviously during the safe three quarters of the year) the response is a flippant ‘Yeah, Sorry about that.’ – not the sort of defence that holds any water in a Human Rights Violation Trial.
Idi Amin had one the most ridiculous titles: ‘His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadji Dr. Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, King of Scotland Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular’. Empress Cixi prefered the more modern title of ‘Mother Bitch’.

67 PUZZLES/MYSTERIES/THE VURP

2009-02-25T12:28:00.000-08:00

Sometimes a human will belch so violently that a small piece of vomit will pop up into the mouth. This will be swallowed back down with a slight grimace. If however the Vurper was asked to spit the piece out into a sterile cup and then told to swallow it back down, that grimace would turn to a facial deformity that would make Ross Kemp sleep with the light on. It is a puzzle, same piece of vomit, same temperature, consistency, texture, smell and taste, yet as soon as it leaves the body it becomes a thing of total revulsion.
Ear wax too, a person would be happy to poke around with a cotton bud, but if you asked that person to introduce the wax to the body orally, they would rather introduce their grandparents to Harold Shipman.
Semen tends to prompt a mixed reaction, ranging from surprise to ecstasy, depending on gender of the consumer and the origin of the white hot love lava.
Fanny batter in the heat of the moment is delicious but you wouldn’t want to sip it cold. Even Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall would pass that one up, ‘Placenta marinated in tepid bile any day, but fanny batter straight from the fridge, are you off your rocker?’
Spittle is a strange one. Kissing with tongues is very popular in most cultures, but gobbing into a loved one’s mouth from a distance isn’t.
Semi dried mucus in the form of nasal detritus is about the only bodily secretion that has universal recognition as a tasty snack.

66 SKILLS/COMBAT/MARTIAL ARTS

2009-02-24T11:10:00.000-08:00

Globally there are over 1000 martial art styles in 29 countries, from Aikido to Xingyiquan. So who is the Daddy? All styles share a common goal: to defeat a person physically or to defend oneself from physical threat, and to develop the practitioner personally, mentally and spiritually. So with this as the criteria Jumble-Jitsu comes top.
This system, developed by Enid Butterworth at the beginning of World War II, arose from Enid’s austere experiences of rationing. The British Ministry of Food introduced rationing in January 1940 and it did not end until 1954. This provided Enid with 14 bitter years of hard fighting on the streets of East London. Like many Grand Masters before, Sensei Butterworth achieved enlightenment by battling her demon of chronic addiction. The path of excess leads to the Tower of Wisdom. Her obsession was not the glamorous Far Eastern heroin or opium dependence, but that of Victoria Sponge cake, a key ingredient of which is jam and eggs. The standard ration contained just 2 oz of jam and 1 egg, enough to make one cake every 3 weeks. At the beginning of the war she had a 4 cake a day habit, and this proved a problem. She developed a system to train her senses to detect diary and sugar based products from large distances. A rigorous physical and acrobatic training regime helped keep her fit and supple in order to manoeuvre herself to the front of any queue, and also to keep her weight down. Complex bartering equations kept her mind sharp and lithe; 1 wool jumper = 3 eggs and 4oz of jam, 2 pairs of knickers will get half a cake, if they are soiled and the Yanks are in town they could possibly fetch 3 whole Victorias with extra cream. Rumour has it that she could predict the delivery of butter and eggs to within seconds, and her elbows were so sharp and lightening quick that the mere act of rolling up her sleeves was enough to deter even the most ardent Jumble Sale goer.
She achieved enlightenment and freedom from her addiction in 1965, whilst queuing for the Harrod’s sale. As usual she was at the front of the line, running through her litanies, focusing her mind, the prize a rare cashmere sweater for the bargain price of 1 shilling. Eyewitnesses claim that a bright light surrounded Enid and a halo appeared above her head. She began to levitate and the cashmere sweater materialised beneath her feet, followed by 888 Victoria Sponge Cakes which, realising she was finally free of her curse, she distributed to the tired and hungry crowd. The mountain had come to Mohammed. She continued to train other housewives in the art of Jumble-Jitsu until she was called to the Great Bric-a-Brac in the Sky. As so often happens, the system has since been diluted by people’s egos. Jumble-Jitsu is now called Car-Boot-Do, and while an effective fighting art, is a mere Bakelite tea tray to Enid’s pure porcelain preaching.

65 SKILLS/LINGUISTICS/BARTERING

2009-02-23T11:20:00.000-08:00

The most skilled negotiator in the world was Susan Shostakovich. Experts agree that negotiation is a highly complex and valuable talent. Susan knew her art implicitly. She understood the many approaches; Advocate’s, Win/Win and Emotional Focus. She was a virtuoso in planning and preparation, setting the tone, exploring underlying needs, selecting, refining and crafting an agreement. Ms Shostakovich was a tactical genius that could deploy many techniques with devastating effect. Good Guy/Bad Guy, Limited authority, Deadlines, Caucusing, Walking out, Concession patterns, High balls, Low balls, Intimidation, Fait accompli, Rejection, Demands and Pre-conditions were her weapons of mass destruction. However, what really set Susan apart from the crowd was the use of her chronic lisp. From the very first introductions as Susan Shostakovich proudly lisped her name, making the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami look like a slightly leaky tap, she would have the higher (and dryer) ground.
The opposition would be so disarmed, surprised and drenched that clear rational thought was impossible. They would usually spend the rest of the negotiations subtly wiping spectacles, brushing clothing and smoothing down hair, barely contributing to the dispute resolution. They would normally rapidly agree to the most outrageous demands just to get away from the spittle soaked negotiating table.
Unfortunately Susan met her nemesis in January 2005 when negotiating against Peter Fisher on behalf of Allied Seepage Inc. The process lasted a record breaking 7 days 13 hours and 4 minutes. Mr Fisher had a secret fetish, Watersports, and was really enjoying the shower. As a matter or pride Susan lisped on, oblivious to Peter’s dark passion. She died of dehydration. Peter Fisher died 2 weeks later of a broken heart, knowing that he would never again meet anyone who understood his needs more than Susan.

64 HUMANS/PROBLEMS/NIPPLE CONFIDENCE

2009-02-17T21:38:00.000-08:00

All people suffer from surprise nipple erections. Loose fitting shirts and the anatomical size of the male nipple inhibits its display, and is usually restricted to outings at garish Gay Pride Parades or butch building sites. The female nipple however is a different beast, and can be encouraged to grow to monstrous proportions. Women in tight fitting tops can look as if they are smuggling mint imperials or planning to crotchet a crafty jumper, a problem that can cause consternation to the owner. What is the correct way to deal with this; brazen or bashful? Brazen is always best; they are out, so what, they will get tired soon and have a little lie down, end of drama. However, this isn’t always easy to pull off, especially if lactating. So numerous devices have been invented to hide the embarrassment:
Cardigan Cover Up (CCU) – Right hand covers right nipple with right cardigan edge, body turns to shield left from familiar ‘nipple gaze’. This is done without looking down, allowing the gazer to be met with the ‘Pervert! I’m calling the Police’ stare as he looks up.
Crossed Arm, Ear Lobe Stroke – Left arm goes across chest to stroke right ear. This is used when the gazer is quite attractive and the CCU is deemed too militant. It sends out the signal ‘Thanks for the attention but I’m not a slut…yet’.
Spit and Shine – Pretend to spit on to fingertips and rub into nipples whilst winking suggestively. This technique should be used on only 2 occasions, 1) when desperate to pull or 2) during a period of excessive lactation, when it may be the lesser of two embarrassments.
Similar methods are used for the Lazy-On Conundrum, Camel-Toe Tout and Prince Albert Arrangements.

63 PUZZLES/MYSTERIES/DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME (DST)

2009-02-17T09:25:00.000-08:00

Spring forward, fall back is supposed to be a helpful mnemonic to aid with the setting of clocks. However, it only happens twice a year so people have a fifty/fifty chance of getting that wrong too. After all ‘spring back, fall forward’ makes as much sense.
In Britain where the term ‘fall’ isn’t fully understood, many injuries occur around the time of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, due to people leaping back and forth trying to get their timepieces correct.
The German government first adopted this bizarre system during the First World War as a means to confuse the enemy. This is one of the reasons that the Swiss stayed out of the fighting; they where too busy inventing clocks and watches that would make the transition to DST automated. They then planned to sell these items to the highest bidder.
Germany’s plan of confusion however backfired. They anticipated that the Brits would forget to set their watches on March 31st 1916 and so turn up for the various battles planned across Europe too early, and be forced to wait in the cold, getting annoyed while the Hun had an extra hour in bed. Germany expected the advantage of a good nights rest and then to meet a tired and resentful enemy and so win the battles with ease. However they didn’t count on Private Derek ‘Sally’ Sullivan. Sally was in charge of the British Army DST Brigade, and remembered the mnemonic as ‘Spring back’, and so inadvertently ensured the humble Tommy an extra two hours in bed and it was the Bosch who got worked up and worn out, and endured a sound thrashing. This was the beginning of the end of WW1. Derek was court-martialled for failing to get correct the one thing for which he was trained. It was only when the Top Brass tried to write the report and explain BST and why they had won so many battles on that day, that they realised what a fiendishly complicated affair it was and decided to promote Private Sullivan to the rank of General because it was better to be lucky than good.

61 PUZZLES/MYSTERIES/AMERICANS AND THEIR FASCINATION WITH FRACTIONS

2009-02-17T09:22:00.000-08:00

Quarterback instead of thrower, quarter instead of coin, haff instead of half, Americans have deep issues with fractions. Americans will say ‘haff a haff a hundred’ if they mean 25, and ‘quarter haff a hundred’ if they mean 12.5. It can get all rather confusing. Americans are the only nation in the world able to order a coffee from a coffee shop Bastardista; this is due to excessive use of fractions and the fact the Bastardista instinctively knows not to provoke these Masters of the Oblique.
American: I’d like a haff a haff a hundred fluid ounces of double decaf, half mocha, eighth double semi skim yaks, over rye, demi java, with sprinkles.
Bastardista: Yes Sir!
As it is impossible for a Bastardista to lose face in any coffee related negotiation, the American will end up with a cup of milky chicory and blame it on the ‘wadder’.

60 HUMANITY/CLASS STRUCTURE/HEIRARCHY OF AFFLICATIONS

2009-02-12T16:36:00.000-08:00

Profoundly deaf people take great offence to the term hearing impaired. They consider it politically incorrect. And so inadvertently have set up a hierarchy of afflictions. You can be ‘not deaf enough’ to be excluded from a select cultural and linguistic minority group. This has spilled over into all parts of society; people with lisps cannot stand the company of the lazy tongued, Tourette syndrome sufferers think the nervous tick brigade are just amateurs and Ginger folk look down on Strawberry blondes. You have to pass a freckle count to be a germane ginger.
So the most elite club in the world turns out to be the Lisping Outburst Deaf Ginger Establishment. There are not that many members. At the last annual meeting of the LODGE all 4 associates managed to upset each other by being either more ginger, deaf, lisping or erratically rude than the others. This led to a splintering into 3 other clubs the DOGLE, OGDLE and the GODLE. It was the arrival of the colossal stationary bill for the various organisations that made the founders realise how ridiculous the whole thing was, and that they were just ordinary people with problems. They promptly disbanded and focused their energies on more important things. A lesson to us all in these enlightened politically correct times.

59 SPORT/ULTIUMATE CHALLENGE/WINNING THE FATHER'S RACE AT THE PRE-SCHOOL SPORTS DAY

2009-02-12T16:34:00.000-08:00

This is the most difficult race to win ever. Linford Christie, Allen Wells, Ben Johnson (both the runner and the playwright) have all failed. It is a race of extraordinary skill. If you come first you have lost.
There is only one way to win this race, and that is to come last. If you actually win you may be accused of trying too hard and being over competitive. The loss must be crafted and executed with precision. You must lose with style. You must let your son/daughter know that it is acceptable to fail, particularly in this day when everyone is a winner. Failure is part of success:
Arrive on the start line in spikes, and lycra all in one running suit - the streamline hood optional.
As all the other hypocritical father’s are joking with each other, and saying what a marvellous bit of fun this is and no one is taking it seriously, do a vigorous warm up of burpies and star jumps.
Psyche out the other dads by either staring, growling or shouting ‘you are going down!’ If they ignore you do all 3 until they notice.
Just before the firing pistol, shout out, ‘I’m doing this for you Son, I love you!’. Hopefully this will cause a false start and lead to more growling, staring and ‘you are going down’ing.
Repeat 4 until the race gets under way.
Let at least one person over take you. Dive on that person shouting ‘This means more to me than you, I won’t let you win! I won’t let you take away my dream!’ Grabbing hold of his trousers pull them down exposing his backside to the crowd. ‘Accidentally’ push your face into the cleft whilst shouting ‘ Oh my god, Bateman! I thought I recognised you’.
Release the man, sit in the middle of the track, take off your running spikes and throw them after the disappearing pack. Put your head between your knees and sob. Turn to your son/daughter and cry, ‘Next year, I promise! It will be different next year!’
Return to your seat, have a Pimms and talk about golf handicaps as if nothing happened.
Your progeny will never worry about losing again.

58 PASTIMES/HEALTH/SMOKING

2009-02-10T12:48:00.000-08:00

Smoking used to be cool. Mayans got in contact with the Gods by tripping on tobacco 1500 years ago. The explorer Rodrigo de Jerez was grassed up by his neighbours and imprisoned for 7 years by the Spanish Inquisition just for having a puff outside his house, which is much more glamorous than modern day pop star Pete Doherty getting his collar slightly felt by the rozzers for Heroin abuse. Movie stars like Heburn and Bogart used to light up before getting hold of the opposite sex. Only squares hated tobacco; Queen Victoria, Surgeon Generals, Adolf Hitler and the Swiss.
Nowadays, smoking has a terrible image. Everyone hates it, including the hunched wretches standing outside office buildings in all weathers, begrudgingly drawing breath on their toxic terminus. The sad sallow faces occasionally forming a rictus grin as a co-worker joins the death drag.
Cigarettes are very dangerous. Linda Codstrap proved this with flair in 1987. Because of her 80 a day habit she had a significant collection of John Player & sons cigarette cards. Hypnotherapy courses had cured her of nicotine addiction but not of collecting, and she was only one card away from having the complete set of 50 Territorial Army Uniforms 1939, reprint edition. The 48th Division Midlands Infantry was proving elusive. In an act of total desperation she kidnapped a young new recruit, and by a complicated process of steaming and crushing, shrunk the grunt to 3 inches in height and mounted him on thin white board. The resulting card was a very good forgery and only the expression of astonishment on the soldier’s face gave it away. Linda was arrested and sent to the loony bin. In recognition of his tragic and senseless waste of life, Private Edmund Ruckman was voted Passive Smoker of the Year 1988.

57 PASTIMES/RITUALS/SUNBATHING

2009-02-10T12:46:00.000-08:00

Sunbathing is proof that advertising doesn’t work. For centuries humans have been inundated with media instructing them what to wear and how they should look. Yet any lunchtime, in a park, on a hot day, thousands of wonderfully misshapen, beautifully deformed and blissfully naked torsos bask like elephant seals after the fish fairy has come to town.
The want of the perfect tan is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. So powerful it can override the most persuasive advertising campaign and hence Satan’s will. To prove this point advertising executive Brydon O’Yeah, strapped himself to a human size basting spit, that would coat him in a film of the finest oils, balms and poultices known to man. This contraption was then bolted to the wing of a plane, which later followed the Sun around the Earth, keeping his distance and angle of incidence at a constant optimum for 48hrs. All through this flight Brydon was subjected to a variety of subliminal, sexual and shameless advertising media, all the tricks in the Book of Beelzebub. At the end of the journey he was made to pass through Heathrow Duty Free in order to get to a mirror. He rushed as fast as he could, desperate to see the glorious result. There was a slight moment of hesitation by the soft drinks counter as these companies have some of the most pernicious commercials, and also he had worked up a bit of a thirst from the trip. But his eye caught the glint of the mirror at the end of the corridor of commerce and the spell was broken.
As with all tans, it wasn’t perfect. O’Yeah was slightly disappointed and wanted to get back on the spit to sort out his calves. But on the whole was pretty pleased when he noticed David Dickinson, just back from Bermuda, staring with jealous scrutiny.

56 JOBS/ENTERTAINMENT/MAGICIANS

2009-02-10T12:44:00.001-08:00

At school the hierarchy goes something like this:
Girls: More mature in everyway. Better at everything cerebral. More creative and artful, but it does all go pear shaped when they get boyfriends.
School Bully: He is the bloke that reached puberty at the age of 8. He quickly realises he wont amount to much due to the Neanderthal gene. This gene, while making him preternaturally strong, weakens his brain and dooms him to a life as a builder’s mate. As he will die early of pork pie abuse by the age of 32, he decides to have some fun at other people’s expense.
The Heart Throb: This Lothario has the bully in his pocket because he can get the ladies and that makes Dave the Caveman’s winky feel nice and funny.
The Musician: Plays either the guitar or saxophone. The recorder doesn’t count. Sits there playing Baker Street or Stairway, and girls swoon. This man will be the first to loose his cherry.
The Joker: Everyone loves a joker. He amuses his colleagues with his fine wit. The bully unfortunately has trouble understanding his references and puns, so the joker will punch himself in the face in the name of physical comedy, and in order to avoid a substantial beating from Dave the Caveman.
The Ordinary Joe: He gets along just fine. He doesn’t do too much work. No outstanding talent. Does a line in soft pornography s to keep Dave at bay. He’ll end up as an under manager at the local Budgen with a golf handicap.
The Swot: he is the target for abuse by all the above. He will be psychologically scared for life and will end up in Government getting his own back with stealth taxes, by-laws and designing impossibly complex household waste recycling programs.
The Ginger Kid that Smells of Biscuits: Everyone is cruel to this person. He sits alone at all times and so has plenty of time to think. He will either dye his hair or become enlightened. Ginger Kids secretly control everything.
The Magician: A person so wretched that the only way he can get attention is by learning complex puzzles to fool people. No one likes a magician; irritating catch phrases, smug grins, annoying tricks that make you feel stupid because you cannot do them and really bad dress sense. If its not velvet jackets and ruffs it’s the other extreme of leather trousers and ripped t-shirt with homoerotic tattoos. The greatest trick these repellent venal molluscs have learnt is how not to get beaten to death by a baseball bat and to have their rotting carcasses left on a village greens as a warning to others.

55 PASTIMES/IDIOCY/BUNGEE JUMPING

2009-02-10T12:41:00.002-08:00

This rather ridiculous pastime originates in the deepest reaches of the African jungle, where pubescent boys are required to throw themselves hundreds of feet through razor-sharp tree branches while being barely attached to a rope made rather poorly from leaves and vines. This is to prove their manhood and allow them to choose the bride of their choice. Two words lads, go gay. However, at least this stupidity has some tradition attached; unlike the same process being played out by either ecstasy fuelled 18 year olds from Chorley in Aya Napa or fat girls losing all their loose change outside the Tache and Bishop in Norwich.
The most extreme bungee jump ever made was by 23-year-old Gavin Gorman from Stafford in 1995. Gavin, on holiday in Rhodes and high on crack tubes and Ealing head-mangers, decided that jumping was becoming predictable and rather dull and decided to try the feared house-bungee. Paying Barrett Homes an estimated £130,000, he stood still for 3 months while the builders built an entire replica of his East Midlands council house around him on the very edge of the highest cliff on the island, weaving a connecting rope through the insulation gap in the bricks and around his waste. On completion of the house and in front of a crowd of nearly 60,000, he ran full pelt at the kitchen wall, dislodging the foundations and tipping the whole structure over the edge. What he was unaware of, however, was that due to an oversight in the building plans, the rope foreman, Tommy Badger, had forgotten to attach the rope to the house and had instead stuck it through the letterbox at the last minute. As the rope tightened at the pinnacle of the descent, a moment which should have been Gorman’s glorious achievement, Gavin realised the problem exactly 30 milliseconds before his entire body was squeezed through the little brass slot. Barrett Homes refused to take responsibility saying the problem was general wear and tear and Gavin Gorman’s fly-covered fleshy monolith still hangs there as a constant reminder to others to never again attempt the dreaded house-bungee.

54 HUMANITY/EMOTIONS/FEAR

2009-02-10T12:41:00.001-08:00

Fear is the mind killer. It is all in the mind. So if you don’t have a mind it is impossible to fear. That explains why some people want to be Presidents, Generals, Prime Ministers and Chat Show hosts. For the rest of us fear is all too real.
Some people are inflicted with terrible fears. Think what it must be like to suffer from claustrophobia and agoraphobia at the same time. Just exactly what is the right size space in which to feel safe?
The fear of long words has been inappropriately named as Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, how cruel can you get? Searching the Internet for some help and you come across that bastard. Would you ever recover? Some say it is best to confront your fears, but you don’t learn to ride a bike by entering the Macau GP.
Ideophobia - the fear of ideas, you’d never be cured, ‘Mr Trimble I’ve got an idea that might just cure you. Nurse where has he gone? Was it something I said?’

Hypnophobia - the fear of sleep, people who suffer with this wake up screaming every morning ‘I’ve done it again!’
The fear of feeling pleasure, Hedonophobia, must be very tiring: ‘Oh that’s nice. Oh no I’m feeling pleasure, I’m scared. That’s better I don’t feel pleasure any more. Phew what a relief! Oh no I’m feeling pleasure again…’ and that’s just taking a shower.
Imagine dying and discovering that you suffer from Uranophobia – the fear of Heaven. Not a lot of final destination choices left.One of the worst phobias to suffer from is Tremophobia – the fear of trembling, a self-feeding loop that only stops when you pass out with exhaustion. Only to start again when you wake up tired and cold.

53 JOBS/SERVICE INDUSTRY/TAXI DRIVERS

2009-02-10T12:40:00.001-08:00

Only tell a Taxi driver what you do for a living if you want to know how to do it better.
‘Brain surgeon eh guv? Well technically you mean a Neurosurgeon. OK here’s one for ya: Cerebral Aneurysm, restore the deteriorating respiration and reduce the intracranial pressure within the first 3 days. Instead of the usual catheter I find the straw from a 288ml Ribena Blackcurrant carton works a treat. Have that one on me.’
Like Bus drivers they are experts in the ‘Highway Cnut’. They also have special powers:
Cycle Vision: They can knock a cyclist flying just by looking at them.
Cloaking Device: Jedi mind trick over the police when doing illegal U-turns and other infractions of highway law. ‘This is not the Taxi you are looking for’.
Mighty Fare: Not satisfied that they are already 1000% more expensive than public transport, various ruses have been designed to add a further 500%. These include: the unexpected road works, time of day tariff, luggage tariff and person tariff. After all that they also expect a tip.
There is only one natural predator of the Taxi, the cycle courier. However, couriers are terrible hunters. Rarely hunting in packs the lunatic courier prefer suicide missions and at worst only manage to clog up the front grill with bits of bike and flesh. Couriers have only ever killed one taxi (see Wars/ Lucozade Wars/Kingsway Underpass Ambush). This explains the epidemic proportions of taxis, but doesn’t explain why they are never sodding available.

52 SOCIAL EVENTS/GATHERINGS/BLACK TIE DINNER DANCE

2009-02-10T12:39:00.000-08:00

If you are a white male over the age of 24 you should not attempt to dance, you will look ridiculous. An exception can be made if you try the following:
Early Evening: The dance floor is empty. There is a run up of at least 30 feet (open doors if not available). You are wearing your Dad’s 1970’s white DJ, hipsters with flares. Slide into the middle of the floor on the knees, pirouetting slowly. Pop up onto toes, flick imaginary dandruff off the shoulders and moonwalk back to your seat. It is worth getting your trousers reinforced with Kevlar knee pads, this reduces the run up needed or gives an extra 2 feet to the slide.
Middle Evening: The dance floor is full. Get the guests in a large circle and make them clap. Dive head first into the floor and do the caterpillar for 30seconds.Back flip on to toes, dust the shoulders, and moonwalk back to the clapping throng. When no one else volunteers to demonstrate a move, robot dance around the perimeter.
End of Evening: As the couples smooch to the Foreigner classic ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’, stand on the side nodding your head to the beat. Introduce your set with some gentle Toprock, a couple of preliminary breaking steps and gentle body popping. When the ballad reaches the line ‘In my life there has been heartache and pain’, drop into the downrock classic, the one-handed pike freeze, preferably left handed as this sets you up nicely for the Windmill power move, ending on the head spin as the chorus kicks in. Time your set for one minute 30 seconds, finishing off with a suicide move of your choice. Spend the rest of the love song challenging the couples into your battle. When there are no takers, strut back to your table with the knowledge that you own them all.

51 HUMANITY/SINNING/REPENTANCE

2009-02-10T12:37:00.000-08:00

In general people apologise too much. And that is a good thing. When other people bump into each other both parties normally say sorry. Forgetting to hold open a door, breaking wind violently and with olfactory nastiness, flirting with your partner’s mother or father, all these things are normally forgiven by saying sorry. It is when apologies are not forth coming that things get dangerous.
The Pope said sorry on behalf of the Catholic Church on 12th March 2000. They hadn’t apologised for 20 centuries so were penitent for a quite a few whoppers; the Crusades, the Inquisition, the torture and burning of heretics, holy wars, ethnic cleansing, genocide, forced conversions of Indians and Africans, discrimination against women including their enslavement by excessive childbirth resulting in poverty and poor health and its role in the Holocaust. So the next time you forget your Mother’s birthday don’t feel too bad. Get on the blower and say sorry before you start an
atrocity.
The worst offender has got to be God. He has said sorry on a couple of occasions. In Genesis 6:6 he repents that he made man, but in general has been fairly belligerent and free with the humanity destroying floods, earthquakes and diseases. Perhaps if he sat on the naughty step for a bit and reflected on how he was ruining it for everyone else, and when he was ready, came and said sorry, we could all get on. The only explanation for this behaviour is that, being an omnipotent being, he is showing off again and creating something that is impossible to forgive and then later we will forgive him.
(See 41Puzzles/Mysteries/Omnipotence Paradox).

50 PUZZLES/MYSTERIES/DO DECEASED RELATIVES WATCH YOU MASTURBATE?

2009-02-02T08:35:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately they do; normally from the ceiling, or from inside a wardrobe. If you squint really hard you can sometimes catch them cheering you on. This is perfectly natural. It is as natural as crying when you masturbate, but judging by the expressions of the other passengers on British Rail this morning, not everyone agrees with the crying rule.
This is also why mediums moan a lot when they are trying to contact the dead. A spirit wouldn’t bother materialising if there wasn’t a chance of watching a five-digit disco.
The largest spirit audience for a solo masturbation event was 42. This was recorded in 1946 when Lorna Pendrangle, from Frome Somerset, laid down for a Friday night fumble. Buffin the muffin wasn’t popular in the forties so this was considered a novelty act in the spirit world. Six generations of ancestors settled down to watch Lorna prepare the bean and fish taco. She was rewarded for her efforts by a rousing standing ovation. Understandably, Lorna was a little disturbed by the clapping coming from the ceiling and the five pieces of furniture in her bedroom, but it was the site of recently deceased Aunt Hattie trying to hand her a hairbrush that put her off slapping the happy hole for good.

49 HUMOUR/JOKES/THE WORLDS FUNNIEST JOKE

2009-01-29T12:18:00.000-08:00

It is possible to define the funniest joke in the World, despite all the cultural diversity, the many different types of humour and the myriad language barriers. Gupta Sing-Bali, wrote the World’s funniest joke in Brest, France in 1841. Being the only Indian in this Brittany naval port, Gupta had to develop an acute sense of humour in order to survive. He originally tried opening a Take–Away Restaurant, but misjudged the French passion for haute cuisine, and was almost beaten to death for serving Oysters Vindaloo with a dessert wine. As he lay recovering from his wounds he had an epiphany and realised the divine comedy. Fortunately, Gupta understood the power of slapstick and didn’t go the route of Dante. He replaced Paradise with Parody, Inferno with Innuendo and Purgatory with Absurdity, making for a much funnier read. Unfortunately, his efforts were so good, Mr Sing-Bali, all the patients and the entire nursing staff of the Brest Hospital died laughing when he told the one about the duck who eats monkeys. Divine comedy indeed.

48 HUMANITY/GENERAL STUPIDITY/RACIAL HATRED

2009-01-28T13:42:00.000-08:00

Up until March 29th 1983, all colours, creeds, religions and castes had indeed lived together in perfect harmony, tolerating and appreciating each other’s beliefs and diversities with interest and fervour. However, such was the utter contempt and horror at Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney’s appallingly sycophantic collaboration ‘Ebony and Ivory’ that within twelve minutes of its first airing on national television, the worlds first known race riots broke out simultaneously in Los Angeles, Oldham, Somalia, Brixton, South Africa, Texas and most of Eastern Europe. The songs co-producer Andy McFluffer, life-long member of far right-wing underground political party, The Barnsley Supremacists, has since been awarded multiple accolades by Campaign magazine for one of the greatest marketing coups of all time.
Such was the escalated sensitivity surrounding music and its new-found possible link to racial bloodshed that just two weeks later, during a live performance on middle eastern TV favourite, Shalom of the Pops, the thus-far tranquil continent was instantly thrown into infinite military instability the moment Kazakhstan’s most celebrated comedian cum songwriter uttered the words to the chorus of his highly awaited new release.
Most historians believe it a little harsh to lay the blame for an entire territory’s political problems on a simple singing light entertainer. Others, however, admit that the moment they heard Mohammad ‘Chubby’ Ali gaily holler the words ‘Allah, Allah, who the f*ck is Allah’ they feared the worst.

47 LANGUAGE/GRAMMAR/COLLECTIVE NOUNS

2009-01-27T10:03:00.000-08:00

Some collective nouns are mundane, for example ‘a bunch of bananas’. Some however are inspired, like ‘a murder of crows’ or ‘an ambush of widows’. Most have been lost to time and some have been banned. ‘A feltch of homosexuals’ dropped out of common parlance in 1984, due largely to the rise of the Aids epidemic and a distancing from unsavoury practices. ‘A munch of Lezzers’ however is still widely used in North Wales and parts of Shropshire. ‘A twitch of Spastics’, ‘a hastiness of Flyds’ and ‘an arsecunt of Tourette Sydrome sufferers’ never caught on due to people’s general reluctance to embrace the issues involved. ‘A tackle of Trannies’ is commonly applied but only in specialist circles.
Both midgets and dwarves demand the exclusive right to ‘Pantheon’, a feud that has lasted centuries. The Midgets think the Dwarves should have ‘shrubbery’ and the Dwarves think it should be ‘a clump of Midgets’. Understandably, their choice of collective nouns for each other has only escalated the tension. It culminated in the Dwigit wars of 1905 where millions of little people were killed by circus cannons, collapsing clown cars and when the confetti from the ‘bucket of water’ gag was replaced with anthrax. Pedantic nomenclature caused such futility.
Surprisingly, the collective noun for collective nouns is ‘a Mavis’. No one knows why.

46 FIGHTERS OF THE UNIVERSE/THE BEST FIGHTERS/THE BRITISH

2009-01-26T09:49:00.001-08:00

The British are the best fighting race in the Universe. This doesn’t mean they are dangerous. Lovely sense of humour and brilliant raconteurs; when they conquered the world they painted all maps pink, to tell the losing nations that they fought like girls. They view fighting not as conflict but more of an entertainment, like a dance. Every dancer needs a partner and as war is traditionally a very male domain, the Scottish wear skirts and makeup to address the shortage of ladies in a fight. The Welsh will often put vegetables on their heads to give the others a laugh when the going gets tough.
The British take fighting very seriously. They had the choice of any land in which to settle, and chose a cramped, damp island with long dark winters and miserable wet summers to keep them hard. When it became apparent that terrorism was a tricky form of fighting the Irish split themselves in two in order to practice. Even when relaxing the British are training for a scrap. The British Pub is in fact a Battle Gym. The English have made themselves immune to chemical warfare by drinking real ale, eating pickled eggs and breathing toxic fumes. Darts, better than a knife, got range and if dipped into a pint of Old Bishop’s Nostril becomes an instant poison arrow. Pool, good for ballistics and pressure points. Pub ashtrays are impossibly heavy and made of glass for a reason, training.
Americans can’t figure out why the British civilians are unarmed. Simple, guns are not necessary when you are that tasty. If you want to win a war get the British on your side. The Americans at least understand that much.

45 INVENTIONS/BAD INVENTIONS/POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

2009-01-26T09:46:00.000-08:00

Political Correctness (PC) is a form of intellectual bullying. Some people simply are not blessed with the ability to think up imaginative, nice sounding phrases like ‘Motorially Challenged People’ and find the expression ‘Spastic’ easier to remember. Others have trouble pronouncing the words and find ‘Spasmo’ less effort to blurt out, especially motorially challenged people.
Some PC words are too cold and clinical. Lezzer is an expression that is warm and embracing; it suggests action, some one who is lezzing. Lesbian sounds passive and lugubrious in comparison. The same axiom applies to knob jockey and homosexual.
The PC way to deal with someone who doesn’t agree with you, is either to get lawyers involved, or invade them. Both solutions are very expensive. Soon all Saturday night pub brawls will be resolved with legal teams and BLU82 Daisy Cutter bombs. The phrase ‘Leave it John, he ain’t worth it’ will soon be replaced with ‘My council has issued you a ten point ultimatum. Non compliance will result in an all out nuclear strike.’ Queue jumpers beware.

44 INVENTIONS/MARVELLOUS INVENTIONS/RONDABOUTS

2009-01-24T02:48:00.000-08:00

The Roundabout is the Richard Feynman of road junctions, a brilliant problem solver and sexually liberal. They simultaneously reduce collisions, injuries and fatalities whilst providing an area for copulation by exhibitionists.
Many geometries were initially tried; the triangle-about wasn’t as good and the square-about was too German. None were so successful as the round.
Percy Perkins, a philosopher and town planner in Leicester, toyed with the ideas of the point-about and the line-about. His colleagues would argue that these were just the same things as roads, but Percy would draw upon the subtleties of Euclid’s Elements to demonstrate their validity. In a moment of exasperation they finally agreed to his Pentagram-about, if he promised to give the Euclidian metaphysics a rest. But little did they know that Percy was a particularly nasty Satanist bent on summoning the anti-Christ on the A607 to Melton Mowbray. The confusion, angst and rage caused by the ten-sided junction, created enormous amounts of negative energy. The Earth began to crack and Hell spawn prepared to enter our realm. Fortunately, the Nation noticed that the Mowbray pork pies were running low, due to delivery lorries getting lost in the pentagram. The county council of Leicester, in an unprecedented act of efficiency, quickly replaced the Pentagram with a Round. The Earth closed crushing the demons and normal pork pie percolation resumed.
Never underestimate the power of the pie.

43 SCIENCE/UNITS OF MEASUREMENT/INCHES

2009-01-21T13:25:00.000-08:00

The inch is a thinly used imperial unit of measurement, used to scale only three things known to man; vinyl based music recordings, rainfall and penises. It was widely thought by the world’s foremost science scholars and metaphysicists that the inch would disappear completely once the sun slowly supernovas and scorches the earth to a crisp, digital downloading takes over the music industry and someone invents the metric cock. However, a ancient secret pact was made by Peter Pleater, a 14th century window-blind salesmen from Olde York town to the sacred master of the Inch that he would create a sect which would never allow the use of the Inch to deprecate. This sect, he promised, would pass down through his family forever, thus creating an infinite future for the measurement unit. In return for this commitment, he would be given the secret of how to create the pull mechanism on a Venetian blind. In a moment of genius, Pleater came up with a way of securing this pact without the risk of passing the secret verbally down through his family, and by simply training his children into two separate employment paths. At the last census, every one of Pleaters 18793 descendants now work as stubborn market stall holders or interracial porn website designers. The Inch will be safe forever.

42 HISTORY/TRADITIONS/WELLS

2009-01-20T13:27:00.000-08:00

Wells were designed to slowly drown inquisitive children. Although this sounds alarmingly harsh, inquisitive children were seen as pests in the Middle Ages, questioning the clergy on topics such as dinosaurs, the outer universe and the purpose of the feltch. Wells were put in large flowing fields miles from anywhere, alongside bags of mysteriously good quality pornographic material left to tempt the children even more. The bags were removed shortly after however when thirty percent of the country’s clergy also ended up down wells. The routine of child murdering still goes on to this day, although the disused Second World War bomb shelter is used in preference to the well in most cases. Well sympathisers still to this day lay down bags of Razzles and Escorts on railway sidings as a testament to this tradition. No one knows who these people are.
If you play the Beatles white album backwards you will hear the cry of a five year old boy whose cries were accidentally fired into space by a freak katabatic, returning 500 years later, drifting down the chimney of Paul McCartney’s Liverpool residence during an early Christmas members-only performance of the Quarrymen. The PRS are following the rumour up and will pay the murdered child’s parents ancestors £80M back pay for radio play should anyone come forward. Pete Best may not apply.

41 PUZZLES/MYSTERIES/OMNIPOTENCE PARADOX

2009-01-19T21:48:00.000-08:00

Could an omnipotent being create a rock that it could not lift? There are numerous ways to tackle this one. Accidental omnipotence, where the omnipotent being creates the rock, cannot lift it and becomes non-omnipotent. Essential omnipotence, where it is impossible for the being to be non-omnipotent and cannot do what is logically impossible and so has a nice sit down and a cup of tea instead. Logically impossible omnipotence, where the being can do the impossible, so creates a stone it cannot lift but lifts it anyway just to show who the fuck he is. All worthy attempts but miss the point of omnipotence.
To be omnipotent means to have unlimited power. So when a being creates a rock he cannot lift he creates it, doesn’t lift it, sits down has a cuppa, then lifts it. He then asks himself a question he cannot answer and at he same time makes a cup of tea so hot he cannot drink it. But drinks it anyway. Then answers that tricky question from before. He then goes on to prove that, although he loves everyone and everything, he can create something that is impossible to love. These beings are not very popular and rarely worshipped because they are too busy showing off to do anything really useful like create abundance, peace and love for all. However, a few have slipped through the net and reside in Worlds where the inhabitants like playing golf, tuning bagpipes and listening to the impossible to love Cold Play.

40 ELECTRONICS/MUSIC/iPODS

2009-01-19T21:46:00.000-08:00

Devastated by the loss of his partner Alan Barton in 1995, and as a result of a promise made to him on his deathbed, Colin Routh, the other half of pop duo Black Lace, invented the iPod. In order to disguise his plan from dark forces Colin gave the idea to Apple in 2001. When more than 51% of the world’s population is listening to the iPod simultaneously, a special Black Lace hidden program will be activated and ‘Agadoo’ will be played. The inability of any human to resist humming this tune will result in the remaining 49% of the world’s population to be caught off guard and join in. Soon everyone will have the uncontrollable desire to go to the LA Showbar at the Beverly Hills Club in Tenerife, where Colin will be waiting. On this great and momentous day DJ Routh will lead the world in the rave to end all raves. Everyone will be pushing pineapples and shaking trees, the entire World will be The Music Man; all nations will do the Superman. The orgiastic spectacle will culminate in a mass action of the Birdie Song, and a special Routh and Barton rendition of the Hokey-Cokey will thank all the old timers for making the effort and turning up. With a renewed sense of not taking themselves too seriously the World will unite in love and harmony. Peace will last for a thousand years.

39 SOCIAL EVENTS/GATHERINGS/DINNER PARTIES

2009-01-16T13:24:00.000-08:00

Men should be excluded from dinner parties. They don’t like them. Judy Chicago, the feminist artist, had the right idea to just invite women. She got very close to the perfect dinner party with the triangular table and 39 guests. If she replaced Amazon with Jordan, Eleanor of Aquitaine with Vivien of Emmerdale and Emily Dickinson with David Dickinson, then she’d have a beauty. David would be fine, he could hold his own, exchanging make up tips, and talking antiques with the Primordial Goddess. He’d like that.
All women make excellent dinner party guests. If you are male and want to be a good invitee discuss sex, religion and politics. Drink lots and swear. Only use the C word at the end though, preferably as you fumble for your car keys and drop them down the drain. This will guarantee you a revisit because everyone likes a social sacrificial anode. A good guest never talks about soft furnishings, uses the correct cutlery or flushes the loo. Always wear light coloured trousers and a blue shirt, these display stains to full effect. Always draw attention to the groin stains and never try and blame an over zealous tap. Take credit for any bad smells. Complement the cook on a fine meal by falling asleep behind a sofa. Never apologise.

38 PUZZLES/MYSTERIES/CHICKEN AND THE EGG

2009-01-15T09:11:00.000-08:00

The chicken came first. You cannot have an egg without a chicken. But you cannot have a chicken without an egg. This is a familiar philosophical debate in any nursing home. Normally that is as far as it gets, before the folks start talking about soap operas and the price of cat food, or the Alzheimer patients get involved. Which is a shame because the next logical step is to surmise that they both came first. And last. Which is the correct answer.
The Chegg was half bird half ovum, essentially an egg with wings. Evolutionary wise a complete disaster. The Chegg could fly but landing was impossible without offering itself up as an omelette. It couldn’t feed properly; pecking at seed was fraught with danger. Mating was ridiculous, shell and albumen coated feathers everywhere. This calciferous aviator had to evolve fast or face extinction. So the egg part went one way and the bird part the other. This type of evolutionary step can be seen everywhere. A modern day example is the Spice Girls or any Government.
The Chegg grew from an egg. The more correct question is which came first, the Chegg or the egg? And of course the answer to that is obvious.

37 MIND CONTROL/HYPNOTISM/BREASTS

2009-01-14T10:09:00.000-08:00

In 1994 two philosopher’s, Peter Swinehund and Bernie Backschlag, sat in Nina’s Coffee Cup on the Old Kent Road. They had been pondering the meaning of life for 8 hours. Drawing on their expert knowledge of aesthetics, logic, metaphysics and epistemology they were on the cusps of solving the ultimate mystery. Just then a young lady sporting a tight fitting halter neck top walked past:
PS: So if as you say the reason for the generic vibration is membrane flow across capacitor ordinance, then it implies the answer to be…Jesus! Look at the cans on that. Swinging like a punch drunk boxer.
BB: Yes exactly capacitor ordinance will reverse the rumination and… Blimey! Oscillating like two ocelots fighting over an owl.
Twenty minutes silence followed. Finally:
PS: What were we talking about?
BB: Dunno. Football?
Breasts are the most powerful hypnotic in the world. All stage hypnotists have breasts and wear halter-tops, even the males. Look closely and you will see them shimmy their chest whilst inducting their victims.
Most chairmen of large companies enjoy a big lunch. This is to develop man breasts so they can hypnotise their subordinates and shareholders and get away with ludicrous policy decisions.
Hitler had a huge pair and used them to devastating effect. The Geneva Convention banned the Hitler-Halter in 1946, considering it more dangerous than chemical, biological and nuclear weapons combined.

36 EVIL/ABSOLUTE EVIL/COLD PLAY

2009-01-13T10:21:00.000-08:00

Whilst shaving, Satan looked in the mirror and finally confessed to himself that the Fire and Brimstone angle wasn’t really working. The innate goodness of Man was surviving. He called an emergency convocation and all the devils and minions of Hell did some crucial blue skying, thought outside the box, pushed the envelope, got on the same page, touched base offline. There were loops, 360 feedback, low hanging fruit, 3 way streets, big thinking, parking on line and by close of play they came up with the concept of Cold Play. This is the band that encourages people to play golf, join the Freemasons and offer Battenburg cake to small children. The constant whining, the misery, the affectations acts like a virus that has spawned many copycat bands. Fortunately God foresaw this plague and gave us ten fingers. Whenever someone creates a Coldplayesque dirge, that person is compelled to cut his finger off to teach himself a lesson. It is a very powerful evil, which is why He, in his infinite wisdom, gave us 10 chances. If all ten are lost then that person will not be able to play the guitar or piano and the spell is broken. Satan is really evil and has foreseen this, so included in the virus the urge to play wind instruments if all digits are missing, particularly the bagpipes. But God is book smart, and has programmed in them the desire to punch themselves repeatedly in the stomach with their bloodied stumps, so they will be winded and unable to blow into any breath related musical contrivance. Gruesome, but God is Old Testament hard core.
Armageddon will occur when Cold Play release a Christmas record involving bagpipes and a children’s choir. There is no coincidence that there have been recent rumblings of Pink Floyd reuniting. These are God’s champions and are getting ready to beat Cold Play to the number one slot. If things get really nasty and Cold Play team up with U2 in the name of charity, then Jimi Hendrix will be resurrected. Evil shall not prevail.

35 MUSIC/MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS/GIBSON LES PAUL

2009-01-12T12:23:00.000-08:00

35 Music/Musical Instruments/Gibson Les Paul

This guitar represents design collaboration between Gibson Guitar, Les Paul and Sergeant Stanley Bollox of the Tottenham Light Artillery - Bicycle division.
After the success of the Fender Telecaster, Gibson thought they could do better. And they did, but only due to the intervention of Sergeant Bollox. At a Muddy Waters concert in Memphis Tennessee, short-sighted Stanley mistook Les as his commanding officer Captain Tarquin Beaucannon. The conversation went something like this:
Sergeant Bollox: Permission to speak Sah!
Les Paul (startled): Er granted. Um Sergeant. (Relieved his national service training didn’t go wasted).
Sergeant Bollox: I couldn’t help but notice that if Mr Waters had a bit more fire power he could get the job done in half the time. Those 2 single coil pickups aren’t nearly enough ordinance Sah! With a bit more punch he could blast through ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ in seconds.
Les Paul: OK Sergeant what do you recommend?
Sergeant Bollox: May I suggest 2 double coils in reverse polarity configuration, thus reducing the noise and interference and increasing the output to amplifier Sah! ‘Mannish Boy’ and ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ could be done on the double, leaving more time for groupie and beer action. You can’t get shag nasty with a Telecaster Sah!
Les Paul: Genius! And the body of the guitar?
Sergeant Bollox: Replace the Ash with Mahogany. Harder wood. Will take punishment. Good in the field Sah! With the right application of spirit would make a first class bayonet Sah!
Les Paul: Whammy bar?
Sergeant Bollox: For pooftahs Sah!
Les Paul: Good point, well presented.
And so a legend was born. Fortunately Stanley’s solution for replacing the Ludwig drum kit with 3 siege mortars, two 105 light field gun, and 140 Panzerfaust didn’t catch on.

34 FOOD/BEANS/MUNG BEANS

2009-01-12T12:21:00.000-08:00

These dark green sprouting beans were called Mong beans up until the early 1980’s but out of respect for handicappers, spastics, disabilists and retards the PC police replaced the O with a U. They originally tried an I, but no one would buy them.
Hurston Heatherclad, a Yorkshire man industrialist, first imported the Mong from China in 1874. His entrepreneurial idea was to replace coal with beans. He invented the Mongo, an engine that was far superior to the Uniflow industrial steam engine of the time, and is indeed more efficient than anything produce to date. Because growing sprouts is not very macho and mining coal is, the idea was doomed to failure. Hurston was branded a Mincing Mong Merchant and his engine lost to time. In a parallel Universe Hurston succeeded. In this alternate world there is no famine, disease, war or the other one. Everyone has nothing but a feeling of love, acceptance and understanding of everything else. Hurston is a healthy 164-year-old married to pioneering brain surgeon, Gerri Halliwell. The Spice Girls and Health Food shops do not exist.

33 SOCIAL EVENTS/RELIGIOUS/CHRISTENINGS

2009-01-08T13:48:00.000-08:00

Not the friendliest of introductions to a religion. A strange man, wearing a dress, smelling of wafers and wine, pours several ladles of water over a baby’s head. No wonder they cry.
These ceremonies can go on a bit too. But the Hymns do relieve the tedium, particularly ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. In the third verse the lines ‘The purple headed mountain, The River running by’ are guaranteed to elicit schoolboy sniggering from even the weariest congregation. Baptisms have the widest range of ages of any religious gathering. Because of this a very rare type of dissonance occurs during the singing. Various styles of music compete to be heard; operatic soprano with crooning with rap with beat poet with lip sync. The cacophony is not unlike the augmented fourth or a diminished fifth. Not so much a tritone as a try tone, an acute straining to achieve tone. Not Diabolus in Musica but diabolical music. The only resolution this dissonance achieves is when the song finishes. To endure this every weekend is widely consider in ecclesiastical circles as the ultimate test of faith.

32 CONSPICUOUS SPENDING/JEWELRY/EXPENSIVE WATCHES

2009-01-08T13:45:00.000-08:00

There is a clock on almost everything; Mobile phones, shops, iPods, computers, televisions, street corners. Like rats and London, it is impossible to be more than 4 foot away from a clock. So watches should be a redundant item. But business is booming. Fuelled mainly by men practicing for a mid-life crisis. As cars become ever more homogenised, watches are becoming the penis extension of choice. There is little difference in performance between a Ferrari and a child’s pedal car when stuck in a traffic jam, but vast differences in watches.
Last bank holiday Monday, 20 Glamour Girls, 14 trophy-wives, 3 super models and a toy boy of a Greek shipping magnet changed vehicles in the car park that was the M25. Colin Crabtree sitting in his hand-me-down Morris Minor, was very surprised to see Claudia Schiffer climb into the front passenger seat. She had mistaken his Timex Indiglo, 30m water resistant digital watch for a 1999 Gianni Vive Sulman. She didn’t realise her mistake until the South Mimms service area, but by then she was so captivated by Colin’s knowledge of the 2nd World War that she never let on.
As a rough guide: a Gianni Vive Sulman will get a Schiffer, Rolex bling a Naomi Campbell and shouting ‘One freckle past hair’ a Kate Moss.

31 PASTIMES/SPORT/CHILDREN'S PLAYGROUNDS

2009-01-08T13:42:00.000-08:00

Despite recent attempts to make these places safe by using brightly coloured paint and comical cartoon pictures, children’s playgrounds remain an extreme sport heaven. Even the addition of sponge flooring has increased the element of danger. During the 2001 Ultimate Seesaw final, the 36 year old Swede, Jensen Johnson was able to set a new world record by the ingenious use of the double bounce granulated rubber mat technique. His opponent, the World Champion 34 year old German Jurgen Pretzelmeister, was catapulted an extra 3 feet, hit the monkey bars with his neck, fractured his scapula, and was forced to retire from the competition. With Pretzelmeister out, the free style ‘wobbly spring car’ title was up for grabs and rank outsiders, the Japanese, won the synchronised ‘Swing Jump and Knee Burn’ gold medal. ‘Peak Playground 2009’ is due to see the revolutionary inclusion of ‘Don’t
Step on the Cracks or You will be Eaten by the Horrible Monsters’. The favourite for this highly intricate event is 43-year-old Susan Sumppump, a particularly paranoid housewife from Salem Massachusetts. Susan was the only surviving witness to the 1984 ‘'Hop-scotch Death-Drop' incident in Aberdeen. (See 7 PASTIMES/SPORT/HOPSCOTCH)