Breaking News What Shaked the World

OSAMA BLAINE LADEN
The US of States rejoiced yesterday as it was unveiled that the tragic events of the 11th of September the 11th were in fact an illusion created by man of magic David Blaine. Over eight years after the event, Blaine called a news conference at the site of Ground Zero and, in an emotional and somewhat self involved speech, declared that he could now reveal his trick.

With quite literally a click of his fingers, 4000 illegally imported Mexicans pulled a giant cloth that had been covering the Twin Towers for some 97 months. ‘Wow! said one amazed onlooker. ‘I've literally walked past this site everyday for some eight years and never noticed that it was just a table cloth covering the buildings. The man's just incredible. If I wasnt so devoutly Jewish I'd say that he is the second coming of Jesus.' explained another, spitting burger.

Blaine went on to explain that the images of the planes crashing into the buildings and their eventual collapse were in fact just him miming the events in front of a Lego model of the towers.


As America rejoiced, so did the actor playing the part of Osama Bin Laden, Jed Ploothe. After nearly eleven years wandering some of the harshest terrains known to man, could finally go back to live with his parents in Swansea and reclaim his job as a postal clerk, just in time for the Christmas strike.

Blaine closed the press conference with prayers for the 2,973 people that he had killed to make the illusion of the 11th of 9/11 September the 11th that more visceral.

YOUTH WASTED ON THE JUNG
A study by East Dunstable University has revealed that the majority of young people are damaging their physical and mental health by what has been coined as 'binge postulating'. The Government have issued a string of warnings against free thought, and even an expensive series of adverts depicting Marx, Heidegger and Socrates screaming Bing Crosby songs and throwing kittens off church roofs to try and dispel their 'cool' image.


Yet some youths maintain that they're just enjoying themselves, and after a long week at school drinking and smoking drugs they like to relax by 'challenging traditional axioms', 'injecting some Freud' and even 'chillaxing with Kant'.


QUACKS FOR QUACKERS
An error in recent government legislation has meant that all NHS hospitals will be closed down, and demolished, by September 2010. The hospital sites will be replaced with duck ponds of varying sizes, all to contain at least 40 ducks at any one time.

'This seemed ridiculous in the first place, but it's the next bit in this article that's the most outrageous' said Dr Pheltch. Indeed, all practicing medical staff must remain on site and treat people in the pond, actually in the pond. 'I'm not sure we're going to be able to provide the equipment for this to work. There's certainly not enough breathing apparatus for the female doctors. Or 'common lower nurses' as we call them'.

This monstrosity of a decision has come at just the wrong time for the Labour government, as a YouGov poll shows that the public's former largest concern, 'that thing Brown does with his mouth when he breathes in' has been overshadowed by 'grievous heart-stricken teary-eyed worry with general policy'.


GELDOFFER ME YOU HAIRY MAN
Constant whinger and tramp impersonator Bob 'I Don't Like Days' Geldof has been found guilty of breeding and eating children.

A small cellar was discovered by Paul David Hewson when he had been sent by Geldof to fetch some more hashish from the kitchen. 'I couldn't believe it', he said 'It was unbelievable.'

412 children of mixed origins and ages were found stockpiled in a pantry the size of a small garage. Some of the children at first denied any mistreatment, but later admitted after police torture that Geldof would enter the room shouting 'Give us your fucking mummy' before plucking several children from their makeshift beds and eating them raw.


Mr Geldof has been sentenced to 30 years in prison and is expected to serve at least 40.

ELEMENTARY MY DEAR DARLING - Special Report from Nonsense Correspondent James Rae
Alistair Darling defiantly married fictional character Sherlock Holmes yesterday after reporting that 'real people just don't do it for me'. Arthur Conan Doyle was unavailable for comment.

Fatigo ad Absurdum

Last Wednesday I watched, in comfortable amazement, a man sprint after a child of about five or six years of age who was wandering down towards a stream. The young boy wasn't making much ground on his elder and I don't think he would have been able to scale the four foot fence surrounding the surprisingly glistening park pond, but his father was obviously deeply concerned that he would bound over it like Colin Jackson chasing a back-to-school speedo model.

A very careful parent I thought, I doubt that child would have the swimming ability, nor the body fat, to keep afloat in a stream with such an unruly current. However, when he returned carrying the little boy he said to the mother, sitting smoking a cigarette that looked as though she had rolled with Vaseline covered boxing gloves on, 'He was going for those swans. They would've broken his arms'.

At first this seemingly irrational fear of Her Majesty's finest poultry dish struck me as an absurd worry - the man stood in the bush shaking a fist rapidly in the direction of the child would have been higher on my list of concerns - but then it struck me like a rubber fist in a steel glove;

I'm a worrier too.

I worry that when I walk past someone with an umbrella that they'll randomly thrust one of the corner bits in my eye, blinding me.

I worry that when I'm walking along the street and a bus drives past I'll be sucked into the road and crushed by a malevolent HGV.

I constantly worry that while I'm slagging someone off in the pub that they'll walk in behind me, or worse, I'm somehow accidentally ringing them in my pocket.

I'm worried that my constant fear of going bald will cause me to go bald.

I worry my sister is in fact my mother and the last 26 years have been a charade played out to save the blushes of a plastic catholic family falling apart at the seams.

I also worry that one day I'll try and lift something really heavy in the gym and shit myself.

But mostly I worry that my sister is my mum.

I worry that every time I get an erection and don't use it that it might have been the last erection I can ever get, like I've got some kind of phallic built-in obsolescence.

I worry that when I throw a cigarette down a drain that it will be full of gas or something and blow up.

I worry that my girlfriend will slip in the bath, rub up against the shower curtain the wrong way and get pregnant.

I worry that when I'm stood at Victoria station that out of the huge black abyss will come a horde of zombies. But not even proper zombies but the shit ones in 28 days later that can run. I worry that despite stories of the amount of adrenaline my body would produce in such an occurrence would mean that I could jump up to the ridge above and climb up to daylight, that that is complete bollocks and I could never jump that high, and secondly, what if they'd installed those spikes to stop people climbing on things and to fuck up pigeons legs with on the bar, and I jump up and pierce my hand on them, and I'm hanging there spinning round like a fucking human kebab and the zombies are eating me from the feet up and I can't move?

I worry sometimes when it's really, really busy on the train and I'm by the doors that a bit of my body will be forced out of the train and the door will slam shut on it. I'm worried that a) it could just be my arm or my leg and the train will drive off and drag my arm or leg along the tunnel reducing it to nothing more than a bloody stump, or b) that it's my head and it'll slam so hard that I vomit up my brain.

I worry when I sit next to really old people on public transport that they might die and roll or collapse on to me so I can't even just ignore it and let someone else find out.

I used to worry about walking under scaffolding and a window above exploding outwards and covering me in glass - but then it happened. As it turns out I was overreacting.

I worry about Global Warming (not enough to recycle or turn lights off during the day), an asteroid hitting the Earth a minute after I get a commissioned by BBC 3 to write a sit-com set in the Boer War, eating green crisps, walking over three drains, stepping on the cracks, on crack, for the craic. I worry whether the one time my mum doesn't play the lottery her numbers will come up, then I worry that even if she did play would she still give me any money after 'The Incident'.

All of these things are pretty unlikely to happen. But 'the chances of anything coming from Mars, are a million to one, but still they come'. If 'They Came From Uranus' has taught us anything, it's that irrational fears are only irrational until a swan breaks your arm.

A Distinct Failure

I have now been unemployed for two weeks. Ten working days. In the last three months I have applied for 102 jobs. I have heard back from six of them. Five of them rather negatively.

I went to one interview for an investment firm that would require me to write FPQ's. (Or something like that, that probably says a lot - essentially I'd be digging pieces of information about previous trades and investors and writing to people explaining why the company made the decisions that they did. Enthralling.) The recruitment manager put me forward for it because he said that the brief he had received said they were looking for a writer to refresh their style, and that, and I quote quite ferociously, 'No investment knowledge is needed.' Just as well really.

SO. I put on my suit for the first time in a year and went to the first interview, which was an hour long test which included a spelling and grammar exam and then to write a mock FPQ letter. I sat down at the long table in one of the company's many boardrooms and took a nervous sip of water waiting for the lady with the kind face to return with my test.

When she did, I couldn't help but notice that she was carrying what can only be described as a 'wad' of paper. Like an ostrich burying my head in the sand, I refused to look at part ii until after I had completed the Spelling and Grammar section, that off cause I obviously breesed thru.

I then turned with the eyes of a dying calf to the mock letter. The lady had said to 'just skim through these and try and write a suitable answer'. Right yeah, I'll just skim through Swann's Way and translate it into Chinese.

The first thirty pages were FTSE graphs and the like. I looked at them in blank dismay, my eyes surveying the jagged line as if it were a forty mile mountain trek that I was about to embark on with nothing other than boots made of broken glass and snakes.

I considered what I knew about finance and some of the terms I'd heard at the end of the news.

'The Market' always seems to come up a lot. 'Upturns' and 'Downturns', although I wasn't sure which of those two were positive. 'Float'. I was floating.

The lines started at the bottom of the left hand side of the page and made their way up almost uninterrupted to the top right. That's got to be a good thing.

Then it struck me. Think GCSE French.

In my GCSE French writing exam there were twenty dictionaries out of the 90 that with each word came a sentence using it. I had scrambled like a two legged caterpillar through a hairbrush to a respectable mark in that exam, even if it did mean I had to write to Jean-Pierre explaining that the reason I couldn't go to the zoo was that I my father was gang-raped by a group of savage monkeys.

So, with no French dictionary to hand, I just sat about taking full sentences out of the bumf that was in front of me, and putting them into an order that didn't make it sound as though I was reading the shipping forecast.

Three days later, I get a call from my man in recruitment saying that the company would like me to go back for a second interview. He then asked me what sort of investment knowledge I had. 'None,' I replied, 'you know that, that's why you put me forward for the job? Because they wanted a more journalistic style?' I thought the inflection on my voice would perhaps make him reveal that he was joking.

'Ah, right' he said as though he'd burnt his toast. 'Yeah, okay, well in this interview they're really going to grill you on you knowledge.'

Perfect. You bastard cretin.

Intro Test(es)

So.

Back.

Been back a while actually, nearly five months.

152 days.

3,648 hours.

218,880 minutes. 218,880 minutes of thinking, 'Good grief, what on Earth am I going to do now?'

I mean, when we first got back it didn't really hit me straight away. I had people to see, things to do - blog to write. Then after a couple of weeks the excitement faded. I began to wonder what I was going to do 'about money'.

Fucking money.

Oh well, there's a space in the internet read to be filled with blather, so here we (I) go again. Cheers.