Prince Philip Killed My Wife...

In a sensational development, pensioner Len Bigpodd has claimed that Prince Philip is responsible for his wife's death. "I saw him with my own eyes," sixty six year old Mr Bigpodd told Scunthorpe Crown Court, where he is currently standing trial for his sixty-four year old wife Edna's murder. "I hadn't been able to sleep, so I went down to the kitchen to make a cup of Ovaltine, when I got back the bedroom he was standing over her, holding a pillow." According to Bigpodd, the Duke of Edinburgh simply laughed when he saw him standing in the doorway. "It was an evil cackle, I was so shocked that I couldn't move to stop him as he pushed past me and ran down the stairs," he claims. "I snapped out of it in time to look out of the window and see him get into a chauffeur-driven Daimler, which sped off into the night!"

Quentin Harvard-Ponce QC, for the Crown, dismissed Mr Bigpodd's claims as 'preposterous'. When asked under cross-examination what possible motive the Duke might have for smothering an old age pensioner in Scunthorpe, Mr Bigpodd replied by asking what his motive had been for killing Princess Diana. "I mean, she was already divorced from Prince Charles, so she weren't any real threat to the Monarchy, was she? I know she was carrying on with a darkie, but nobody seems to care these days," he told a horrified Court. "You'd think he'd get the secret service to do it for him, but my mate Bernie swears his cousin knows a bloke who was on holiday in Paris the day she died and saw Prince Philip underneath the Mercedes, tampering with the brakes, just hours before the accident!" Looking aghast, the jury also heard that, according to another of Mr Bigpodd's mates, it was an 'open secret' that the Duke had also been responsible for the deaths of his both his mother-in-law and his sister-in-law. "Of course, in the cases of both the Queen Mum and Princess Margaret, they were mercy killings, to put them out of their misery. The old dear was well past it - completely incontinent and ga ga - and Princess Margaret wasn't much better, pissed out her mind and her liver wrecked," he testified. "It was getting embarrassing, them pissing all over the furniture at the Palace, especially when they had visitors. They couldn't keep blaming it on the corgis."

Significantly, Bigpodd claims that the Duke smothered both the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret with pillows, the same method he allegedly used to murder Mrs Bigpodd. "I think that because he got away with those three murders, he's gone kill-crazy," speculates the pensioner. "He knows the authorities will cover up for him - look how quick they were to rule Diana's death an accident, despite all the evidence to the contrary! Let's face it, he's a bit past it for the hunting nowadays, so he has to get his thrills some way - isn't man said to be the biggest game of all?" Mr Bigpodd's counsel, Rupert Winstanleigh-Todger QC, has told the Court that the defence intends calling the Duke as a witness and has urged the authorities to check his whereabouts with regard to every recent unsolved murder. "How many other innocent people has this fiend killed for kicks, secure in the knowledge that it will be hushed up," he told a press conference. "Take those drive by shootings in Manchester last week - several witnesses reported seeing a chauffeur-driven Daimler with an elderly man in the back seat apparently loading a double-barreled shotgun. But have the police done anything about it? Of course not - they're blaming it on gangs."

The trial judge, His Honour Judge Julian Fruitnutt, has already warned both Mr Bigpodd and his counsel that they could face further charges for perjury and be held in contempt if they continue with this line of defence. The court had earlier heard that just hours before Mrs Bigpodd's murder, she and the defendant had had a blazing row over, during which she had refused to allow his ferrets - which were allegedly sick - sleep with them. The row had culminated with Mrs Bigpodd burning her husband's prized collection of beer mats, which he had collected over a forty year period. As he attempted to stamp out the blazing beer mats, Bigpodd was heard by several neighbours to scream, "I'm going to kill you, you fucking bitch", before storming off to his local pub and drinking ten pints and half a bottle of whisky. The case continues.

Jehovah's Nazis?

One of the disadvantages of being home all morning (I was waiting for the garage to finish servicing the car), is that all the door-to-door weirdoes can catch you in. The funny thing is that I usually have no qualms whatsoever about ignoring knocks at my door if I can't be arsed to speak to anybody. However, for some unknown reason, this morning I answered the door. Big mistake. It was the Jehovah's Witnesses. Interestingly, whilst they are usually middle aged women, this delegation consisted of a pair of male OAPs. Anyway, to get to the point, they did the usual bible brandishing and religious spiel, but then started drifting off into right wing politics. I kid you not. All of a sudden we'd jumped from the word of Jesus to the fact that Britain was being over run by immigrants. Clearly, this was seen as some sign that the end times were upon us, another sign being the recent flooding.

I must say, I was somewhat shocked. Bearing in mind that Jesus told us to 'Love thy neighbour' and to 'do unto others, etc.', I'd always assumed that Christians of all stripes would be seeking to help immigrants and make them welcome. Indeed, I have a friend who is a Jehovah's Witness and she's one of the nicest people you could hope to meet, so, quite naturally, I was quite perturbed by the visit of Himmler and Goebbels. Could it be that the Jehovah's Witnesses have been infiltrated by the Nazis? Are they using the Watchtower as a cover for spreading anti-Semitism and extremist politics? Perhaps the two I encounter dress up as SS stormtroopers at weekends and re-enact the Battle of the Bulge (with the difference that this time the Germans win)? Who knows. What I do know is that I won't be opening that door again unless the person on the other side is using my patented secret knock...

Thank God for Bank Holidays

August Bank Holiday. This is quite possibly my favourite public holiday. Then again, I love August in general. There's nothing quite like late Summer. Normal time seems suspended - the days seem longer and lazier, nothing at all is happening in the world to distract you from enjoying yourself. For me, August will always hold pleasant childhood memories of trips to the New Forest in my father's ancient Ford Consul (it had a bench seat across the front, column gear shift and was always reluctant to go up hills), driving past Balmerlawn Hotel and watching them play cricket on the green outside. To this day, if I drive past there in August, I'm disappointed if they aren't playing cricket.

Getting back to the Bank Holiday itself, when I was a child I hated Bank Holidays. Back in those far off days everything closed on a Bank Holiday. It was like having two Sundays in one week (yes, I'm talking about those ancient times before Sunday trading laws changed). It seemed so bloody boring. If it rained and you had to stay in, you could guarantee that all afternoon your TV viewing choice would be sport, Ben Hur or The King and I, (yes, there were only three channels back then). Now, of course, as a working adult I love Bank Holidays. Quite apart from giving you a day off work, they represent one of those rare 'shared experiences', when nearly everybody abandons their daily routine to engage in social activities, or just do something different.

At least, it used to be like that. Nowadays it seems that everywhere is open, staffed by spotty teenagers, and all that people do with their day off is shop. The very thing I used to hate, everywhere being shut, has been 'rectified', and now I hate the new situation. Having said all that, Bank Holidays still have one wonderful feature which never seems to change - early morning silence. Living in a town centre, close to a main road, I really notice the difference. It really is great, that lack of traffic noise. Outside of Bank Holidays, the closest you'll get to it is on a Sunday morning - but even that isn't as quiet. Ah well, back to normal tomorrow. Well, actually it isn't for me, I'm still off work for another couple of weeks, but despite not having to toil in the office, none of the days will feel quite the same as the Bank Holiday.

Going Underground

Having broached the subject of bad films in the last post, I'm in the mood to continue. I saw another stinker courtesy of digital TV the other day, this time of much more recent vintage and on Film Four, rather than ITV 4. This one was Creep, which was apparently backed by the British Film Council. They should ask for their money back. A horror film set on the London Underground must have seemed like a good idea. So good, in fact, that somebody did it before, back in 1972. Creep desperately wants to be the far superior Death Line (or Raw Meat, if you saw it in the states), but completely lacks the earlier film's grasp of plot, characterisation and atmosphere. My most fundamental objection to Creep (apart from the fact it rips off and fails to acknowledge a far superior film), is that its plot lacks any logic, therefore insulting the intelligence of its audience. From the off, it would be pretty bloody difficult to get locked into a tube station if you simply fell asleep on the platform. Quite apart from the fact that the stations are physically checked by staff before they close, they are also monitored by CCTV (which, incredibly, subsequently becomes a plot device for the film!). Even worse, twice tube trains stop for the heroine, but the drivers are murdered. Now, apart from the fact that the movements of trains - even out of hours - are monitored and sudden stoppages would be investigated immediately, both trains vanish, never to be seen again. Where the fuck did they go? Why didn't the second one collide with the first - there are no passing loops or sidings at tube stations?

Unlike Death Line, this film makes no attempt to explain its 'monster' (like the earlier film, the menace is presented by some kind of degenerate tube dweller). In Death Line we learn that 'The Man' is the last surviving descendant of a colony living in disused tunnels after a cave in a century earlier, and forced to kidnap the odd commuter for food. Ludicrous, but it does sort of make sense. Fast forward to Creep and all we get is a photo of the 'creep' as a child standing next to a man in a white coat (by implication a surgeon) and some pickled foetuses in a room. What the hell does that tell us? Depriving him of a proper back story deprives him of a character. He becomes simply a plot device, existing only to chase the heroine around darkened tunnels. Indeed, the film becomes incredibly repetitive as one tunnel looks much like another. Death Line, by contrast, juxtaposed the tunnel dweller's miserable existence with the above ground lives of the other protagonists, most of whom also seemed to live isolated lonely lives. Indeed, the earlier film handles its subject with wit and black humour. Nobody notices vanishing commuters until a senior civil servant - a 'somebody' - is snatched. Creep makes a vague attempt to make a similar point, but very half-heartedly.

The most dispiriting thing about Creep is that, technically, it is very well-made. However, it is utterly soul-less. You just don't give a damn about any of the characters. In Death Line - which was made on an even tighter budget - you even end up feeling sympathy for the 'monster'. What it all goes to prove is that films don't have to be shoddily made to be bad. They can be glossy and technically competent, like Creep and Twisted Nerve (which I discussed in the previous post), but still be bad. Creep could have been a reasonable film. What let it down was the limited vision of its makers - who seemed content to turn out a US-style slasher pic with people being chased around dark corridors by a maniac - and their obvious contempt for the intelligence of their audience. Oh, and another point of factual accuracy - I don't know which tube station it was filmed in, but it was far too clean to be the real Charing Cross underground station. I was there yesterday and it was as shitty as ever. Curiously, it was also far more atmospheric and menacing than portrayed in Creep...

Causing Offence

Ah, the wonders of digital television! Thanks to this modern miracle of telecommunications I sometimes find myself able to catch up with films which are never likely to be released on DVD and, to be honest, really shouldn't be allowed to see the light of day anywhere. The other night I was amazed to see Twisted Nerve in ITV 4's schedules. Surely it couldn't be that Twisted Nerve, I thought? But it was indeed the notorious 1968 attempt by the Boulting brothers to get in on the Peeping Tom/Psycho inspired craze for psychological shockers. To say that it was poorly received back in 1968 would be an understatement, and it still has the power to offend today. Obviously, bearing in mind its vintage, it isn't violence and gore which offends. Nor is it the casual racism exhibited by various characters - an Indian trainee doctor is referred to, even by his consultant, as the 'Maharajah' - this simply reflected attitudes of the time, and the Indian doctor ultimately turns out to be the only sensible character in the film. What still shocks and offends is the attitude exhibited toward the mentally handicapped.

When Hywel Bennett (playing the first in his long-line of disturbed young men) pretends to be mentally handicapped in order to get close to young Hayley Mills, with whom he is (quite understandably) obsessed, it's bad enough. But this can simply be written off as bad taste. The offence comes when his aberrant behaviour (he murders his father and Mills' mother) is put down to the fact that he is a sibling of a 'mongoloid' (as Down's syndrome sufferers were referred to in those days). It stated as fact that having a Down's syndrome sufferer in your immediate family makes you genetically more likely to be a homicidal maniac. To add insult to injury, Bennett's character is then referred to as being 'autistic'! Interestingly, even in 1968 these references were considered offensive, so this isn't a case of retrospective 'political correctness'. The film deservedly failed at the box office and has rarely been shown since. Having seen it, I can assure you that it is no lost classic. Even when the offensive attitudes are set aside, the film is still a dreadfully slow-paced and trite tale of how beastly life can be for nice middle class people in 1960s Britain. I must admit that I've never been a fan of the Boulting brothers - their much vaunted 'satires' of the 1950s and 1960s always came over as too smug and self-satisfied, presenting stereotyped middle class views of the working class, for my liking. This one simple substitutes the mentally ill and handicapped for the working classes.

Soldiering Blues

Whinge, whinge, whinge. That's all I bloody hear from the military these days. They spent years complaining that they weren't allowed to fight the wars they were trained to, but now that they've got two at once - Afghanistan and Iraq - they're still bloody griping. What the fuck do you people want? Now you've got your wars, you spend all your time moaning about how badly the government treats you - how some mythical unspoken 'pact' has been broken. What 'pact' is that? Well, apparently it is that they do these awful jobs under shitty conditions and the government gives them some kind of special treatment in return. Hmm. I thought that they were paid by us, the taxpayers, to do a bloody job. Most of the time, as they themselves used to moan, they didn't actually have to do it. Now they're being asked to do it, they don't seem to like it. Maybe that's the problem, too many of them joined up to a peace time army, thinking that they could get all the privileges without doing the dirty work. Tough.

OK, I know that I spend a lot of time slagging off the military, particularly the army, and that when I'm bent over the bonnet of a jeep being bum-raped by some heavily bearded Islamic insurgent/Bolshevik/IRA bomber, I'll be wishing that I'd been nicer about them, but the fact remains that there is a dangerous tendency in this country to worship at their feet and try and make out that they are beyond reproach. As I've pointed out before, not only did I have the misfortune to grow up in a town with many nearby barracks, but I also had to work with the bastards for many years. Trust me, up close and personal, you find that they are extremely fallible. Indeed, a significant proportion of them are simply drunken thugs and bullies with the intellectual capacity of a midge. let's not forget that these guys are all volunteers, nobody forces them to play at soldiers - they're in a war zone through choice. They are also - despite what the press will try and tell you - very well paid, get subsidised health care, food and housing, and very generous pensions.

Having said all that, I suspect that much of the 'moaning' isn't coming direct from the military, but rather being done on their 'behalf' by the right wing press and politicians, as an exercise in political point-scoring. However, that doesn't change the fact that I still don't like this bunch of public servants with delusions of grandeur. They're a necessary evil, nothing more, nothing less.

Yo Ho Ho!

Apparently there's been an upsurge in piracy on the high seas in recent years. Personally, I blame Johnny Depp. It's all his fault for making it cool to be a pirate again. It wasn't so long ago that they were seen as a bunch of scurvy-ridden imbeciles with bad hair and straggly beards or, even worse, refugees from the new romantic era, forever painting their faces and posing around in pop videos. However, thanks to Mr Depp and Pirates of the Caribbean, they've become identified with lovable (if slightly grubby) rogues who can pull pull posh birds like Keira Knightly whilst making cheeky quips and robbing treasure-laden ships. You can see how it happens - someone goes to see one of the films, decides to emulate their hero's fashion sense and puts on a tricornered hat and an eyepatch. Before they know it, they've moved on to saying "Aharrr, Jim lad!" and they're jumping aboard ocean liners and forcing the rich bastard passengers to walk the plank. It stands to reason - we all know that nobody commits any crime or form of anti-social behaviour until they've seen it glamourised on TV or in a film.

All of which begs the question, of course, of what was it that inspired the likes of Blackbeard and Calico Jack? Did they see a series of woodcuts glamourising piracy when they were children? While we're on the subject, what drove Jack the Ripper to commit his terrible crimes? Was the music hall really that depraved? Or maybe he saw a blood-drenched production of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus? At the time of the murders it was suggested that there might be a link to a popular stage production of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The star of this, Richard Mansfield, apparently came under suspicion as he was so convincing as a murderous Hyde. Perhaps it was simpler than that - some toff saw the play and was inspired to turn into a sexually depraved monster at night and murder prostitutes in Whitechapel. They should have banned it. They should certainly ban those pirate films - even if they aren't inspiring piracy, there's always an outside chance they'll spark an Adam and The Ants revival...

Unrequited Love

Surely the most futile waste of emotional energy imaginable. Unrequited love can only result in pain and heartache. Yet still we persist in being sucked into its embrace - even when we know full well that it is utterly pointless. I know all about it. I'm a serial sufferer. The objects of my affection are nearly always unattainable. The stupid thing is that I know this in my heart from the outset, but I just carry on. The bottom line is that unrequited love is like a drug. Although we know that it is bad for us, we can't help but keep going back because those little moments when you delude yourself into believing you've seen a glimmer of hope in something the object of your desire has said and done give you such a high! For a while you are utterly elated, nothing can bring you down. Pretty soon though, they do or say something else which drags you back to reality and plunges you into the depths of despair.

The absolute worst thing about unrequited love, in my experience, is that it completely robs you of the courage of your convictions. The logical thing to do in such situations would simply be to put your cards on the table and tell the object of your misplaced affections how you feel about them. At least then you'll know for sure, once and for all, where you stand. But you don't. You keep pussyfooting around, hoping for those little highs generated by their smiles, laugh or he odd kind word. You keep deliberately reinterpreting everything they say and rewriting your memories to try and 'prove' to yourself that your feelings are reciprocated, thereby generating a few more of those highs. Again, its back to that drug addiction analogy - if you actually speak your mind and reveal your true feelings, you run the risk of losing them completely, and with them the opium of hope that comes from the furtive approach. Of course, we rationalise this in various ways. My usual rationalisation is that if I come out and actually say something, then I'll risk losing a valued friendship, and as I know they don't reciprocate my feelings, its better to suffer in silence and at least retain a friend.

Well, there you have it - a week of downbeat and melancholy posts rounded off with a sad crie de couer! I really need a rest! Hopefully next week I'll be back to my normal offensive self!

Obsessed?

Since making that last post, I've been asking myself some hard questions. Chiefly, am I getting just a little bit obsessed with what these weirdoes are saying about my stories? Why should I care? Let's face it, does it really matter what a bunch of socially maladjusted fruitcakes think? After all, if they believe in these whacked out conspiracies, they can't really have much in the way of critical faculties, can they? Does the fact that someone, even if they are nutters, is talking about me in some way validate my existence? Is that what I'm really seeking - some kind of acknowledgement for what I'm doing?

There's no doubt that web publishing can be a very lonely business. No matter how high your traffic gets, the lack of feedback from readers is deafening. You bang out stories, each one, you're sure, so controversial that it will result in a flood of angry e-mails. But there's nothing. Not a bloody thing. This complete lack of reaction is quite disturbing. It isn't just confined to me, either. Most satire site editors I've asked about this have had the exact same experience. So there you have it - clearly, I'm so desperate for some kind of feedback on my literary efforts that I'll even seize upon the demented ramblings of the sad bastards on conspiracy sites! Jesus! I've really got to get a life!

The Morons March Again

Back to the 'Paul is Dead' brigade, most specifically the freaks over on the 60IF boards. They're back to commenting on my McCartney death conspiracy satires. It seems some of them really aren't amused:

"I don't believe all this.I just don't. I think he is just not that kind of guy. (I mean him f***ing everything that moves)Seriously. That I BURIED PAUL post is just sick. Seriously. "

So, I make conspiracy nutters 'sick'? Wow! I really must write more of this stuff! If nothing else, this confirms my suspicions that obsessives really don't have a sense of humour. They're like religious nutters in that respect. Seriously folks, if you can't take a joke, you really have lost all perspective. Let's face it, if your belief system can't withstand a robust piss-take, then it really isn't up to much, is it? But back to the freaks - it seems that one of them might have some critical faculties:

"Sorry guys but I think you will find that the posts are not ezwizards fabrications, he/she (sorry) was just showing an article that some random had written, lets not go over the top and I'm sorry if my post offended anyone but hey it was a joke, get over it."

Yeah, get over it! So I'm 'some random', eh? Again, it's that conspiracy theorist arrogance coming through! If you aren't 'one of them', you can't possibly have the right to know anything of their whacked out beliefs, let alone talk about them! Fucking morons!

Past Caring

Maybe it's because I've been having a rough few days (bad hay fever symptoms, Spurs losing on the opening day of the new season, Google doing its best to sabotage my web traffic by refusing to index my main archive index page), but I find myself suffering from compassion fatigue. It really doesn't matter how heart-rending the story the media tries to push at me, I find that I'm just past caring. Really. I'm too tired, too cynical and just really can't be arsed. The bastards have tried to toy with my emotions too many times, and right now, I'm not in the mood. I find myself simply shrugging 'So what' in response to stories of yet more teenagers being shot in the street. After years of demonising young people, whipping up public fears of violent crime and telling us that the streets are awash with guns, why are the media apparently so surprised by such occurrences?

Then there's the ongoing saga of the British child apparently abducted in Portugal. I'm afraid I'm left unmoved. I agree that it's a tragedy, that it must be terrible for her family. But the fact is that there's nothing I can do about it. Not that it stops the media from continuing to shove the story in my face and try to manipulate my emotional response to it. There always seems to be this subtext in such reporting saying 'if you don't feel devastated by this, then you are a heartless bastard'. People seem scared to actually come out and say 'look, I know this is really sad, but let's be realistic - it's not my child involved, there's nothing i can do personally. Why don't we just let the family and the authorities get on with it?' - which is what a lot of us are thinking. It comes back to something I've banged on about before - our modern obsession with making the private public. These things are essentially private tragedies - let's try and keep it that way. OK, I know that cases such as child abductions need a degree of publicity to try and resolve them, but let's try and keep it within reason. I'm tired of seeing posters of this missing child in every other shop I visit - we're in the UK and she disappeared in Portugal, so putting the posters up here really isn't going to help much, is it? Of course, it will show the world how compassionate you are...

So there you go - high Summer and I'm emotionally exhausted. There have been too many things I've been asked to care about these past few months - missing children, teenage gun crime, flooding, foot and mouth - and my capacity for caring has worn thin. Like I said, I'm past caring. In fact, I'm not just past it, it is rapidly disappearing in my rear view mirror as I speed away. Maybe I'll feel better when I've had a few weeks off work (starting at the end of this week). Just so long as the media don't make any more demands on my sympathies, of course.

Weirdness From the Inbox of Doc Sleaze

I fear that some readers become a little confused and think that my qualification is a medical one, whereas, of course, it is simply an honourary title bestowed upon me by the Bracknell Institute of Sleaze. Nevertheless, I do like to try and help my faithful seekers after sleaze with their problems from time-to-time:


Dear Doc,

I’m hoping you can help me with a problem of a rather delicate nature. Since an early age I’ve had the gift of pyrokinesis - fires have always spontaneously ignited around me, usually at times of extreme emotional distress. After a series of childhood incidents, including my father’s shed burning down when I threw a temper tantrum after my mother refused to allow me to get my ears pierced at age nine, and the family cat being seriously scorched when I had my first period two and half years later (it suffered forty percent burns and some of its fur never grew back), I gradually learned to exert a degree of conscious control over my strange ability. I’ve learned to remotely light candles and my family have never needed to use fire lighters. Indeed, since my early twenties I have enjoyed a highly successful and rewarding career as a professional arsonist who leaves no physical evidence behind her! Nevertheless, there remain certain times when my powers still run amok - namely when I am in the throes of sexual passion. A series of promising relationships have broken up as a result of bed sheets catching fire and partners having their pubic hair - or worse - singed. One boyfriend broke up with me after his parents thirty-two inch widescreen TV exploded in a ball of flame as we made love on the living room carpet in their house. The insurance firm are still refusing to pay-out. I finally thought my problems were over when I met and fell for a young man with similar abilities to my own. However, I now fear for my own safety! Whilst we have not yet had penetrative sex, I recently wanked him off - to my horror, instead of ejaculating normally, a six foot long flame shot out of his penis, scorching my bedroom curtains! I am now terrified that if he comes inside of me during normal intercourse I will be baked from the inside out! What should I do?

Miss S Ronson, Budleigh Salterton

The Doc Replies: I’m afraid that I’m at something of a loss here as, in all my years tending that eccentric little practice we call weirdness, I’ve never come across anything quite like this. The last time I had patients experiencing combustion problems in bed, the root cause turned out to be a lack of proper lubrication - the friction caused by the man’s frenzied thrusting set their genitals and surrounding area alight, like a boy scout vigourously rubbing his stick. A jar of Vaseline solved the problem. I did have another case where a young man of my acquaintance found that his testicles glowed red after making love - they were so hot you could fry eggs on them (and we did, on at least three occasions). His solution was to keep a bucket of ice cold water by the bed and, when his nads began to sizzle, he’d give them a quick dip. Whilst this tended to fill his bedroom with clouds of steam, it did serve to cool his equipment sufficiently to avoid damage. Indeed, I think that a similar approach might be one possible solution to your problem - try packing your vaginal passage with ice before making love with your young man, hopefully this will douse any flames sufficiently to prevent serious internal injuries. The only other alternative I can think of is to have him wear an asbestos condom, although I’m afraid I don’t know whether these are regularly available at high street chemists.

Floods of Sin?

So, according to the Bishop of Carlisle, all these floods we’ve been having are God’s judgement on us for ignoring his teachings. Forget global warming, it’s all down to moral decadence, apparently. If we don’t want to see our treasure possessions water damaged, our houses swimming in water and our loved ones drowning, we’ve got to roll back the permissive society and stop introducing laws which undermine institutions like monogamous marriage. You know the sort of laws he means: the ones giving those damned homos equal rights. It’s all their damned fault! If only they hadn’t legalised homosexual relations between consenting adults, then God wouldn’t have had to punish us forty years later. I guess he was a bit busy in between, what with those famines and wars he was inflicting on Africa as punishment for being poor. Oh, and let’s not forget the single mothers. Some of this has to be their fault, undermining the concept of the traditional family unit by daring to bring up children on their own after being divorced, widowed, raped even. Send ‘em to the nunnery and put their bastard offspring into church run orphanages. At least there they can experience the true joy of being sexually abused by an appropriate father-figure.

The inevitable conclusion we must draw from the Bishop’s comments is that large parts of Yorkshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire, along with the whole of Gloucestershire have been overrun by homosexuals. Luckily, I appear to live in an entirely gay-free area. I just thank God for the local council, who had the foresight to round them all up and stone them to death in the market place. I knew there was a good reason for voting in the neo-Nazis at the last council elections. (I’m joking, obviously. We actually strung a couple up from lamp posts before the rest were run out of town by a mob wielding flaming torches and wearing pillow cases over their heads). Judging by the extent of recent flooding in Bangladesh, I can only conclude that the place was rife with buggery. That’ll teach ‘em not to worship a non-Christian God. I shudder to think what depravities must have been going on in those countries hit by the tsunami a few years ago – after hearing the Bishop’s wise words, I regret donating that twenty quid to them now. The perverted bastards clearly got what they deserved.

Close Encounters From Behind

This coming August Bank Holiday a group of UFO enthusiasts will be baring their bottoms on a Welsh mountain side in the belief that they will be taken from behind by aliens. "It's the standard intergalactic means of greeting," says Glenn Tootland, the group's spokesperson. "Throughout the cosmos sentient beings see it as the ultimate sign of trust, that you are willing to turn your back on a stranger and allow them to enter your bared behind." According to Tootland, the aliens contacted him in a lay-by near Preston to inform him of the mass contact event. "It's their regular contact place - every Tuesday I park there in my car and wait to see if they have a message," he reveals. "As soon as I see the lights of their spaceship appear in my rear view mirror, I get out of the car, drop my trousers and wait to be taken!" As the aliens take him from behind, Tootland claims that they enter into telepathic communication with him. "As I'm thrown across the bonnet of my car and their ice cold probe slides into my rectum, I hear their strange guttural voices in my ear, grunting and gasping as they try to master our language," says the fifty three year old telephone engineer. "Often I can barely understand what they are saying. But this time they clearly told me to gather together the other contactees and prepare for a major event on the mountain."

Whilst Tootland is convinced that the aliens are benign and that the Bank Holiday event will herald them revealing themselves to the world, other UFOlogists are more sceptical. "They're clearly immoral perverts taking advantage of the weak and gullible," declares Leonard Jossty, president of the East Anglia UFO Contactee Society, who meet every Thursday night at the 'Severed Foot' public house in Harwich. "Everybody knows that the galaxy is rife with such deviants, who cruise solar systems looking for innocent lifeforms who aren't advanced enough to realise that they are being abused!" The heavily bearded librarian claims that his group have compiled a catalogue of incidents in which unsuspecting humans have fallen into the clutches of evil alien perverts. "Often they are abducted after being lured into the aliens' shiny spaceships with promises of sex with beautiful extraterrestial women, or sometimes just boiled sweets," Jossty says. "Once there, they find themselves subjected to all manner of filthy depredations, often disguised as scientific experiments!" These depredations often include painful anal probes, electrodes attached to the testicles or nipples, or simply general groping. Tootland remains unmoved. "Such incidents are merely misunderstandings stemming from the human race's immaturity," he argues. "We still find it impossible to interpret the penetration of our orifices in anything but a crudely sexual way. I look forward to the day when I won't be considered a sex pest for firmly grasping a strange woman's breasts in public and jiggling them up and down, and instead it will be recognised as a legitimate form of non-verbal communication. Hopefully, once we've all been given a good mass buggering by the aliens, the human race will finally be brought to galactic maturity!"

Yet More Musings on Morons

With regard to the previous post and my comments about the lack of critical faculties displayed by many web-users, I direct you to this, and rest my case. Yes indeed, it's yet another bunch of dullards 'discovering' an old story (The Devil and Paul McCartney) and failing to notice (despite all the obvious clues) that it is a piece of satirical fiction. OK, I know it is nothing new, but this instance just drips with irony. These particular dullards are part of a community apparently devoted to undermining the 'Paul is Dead' nonsense (not that it requires much to refute it, other than a working intellect), demonstrating all the idiocy of their mortal enemies by taking something they find on the web at face value. The best bits come when they characterise the author (me) as some kind of nut:

"Ok, call in the NEXT WHACKO. This one is just another face in that ever-growing crowd of lost and confused dimwits. Though his story may be fascinating (to some), it's just another tale concocted in that place found somewhere between being in a deep sleep and waking up. "

Jesus, what a fucking pretentious pillock! Trust me dickhead, that story was 'concocted' (or, as I like to call it, written), in the cold light of day. But it gets better with the next idiot who posts:

"This guy sounds nuttier than the TKINers! And that's no small feat. He doesn't think Paul has aged much? Try the sagging face and the gray hair visible through the hair coloring. Granted, he does look good for his age, but so does Ringo. Maybe he made a deal with the devil as well? "

THe 'TKINers', for those of you still holding on to your sanity, are the bunch of 'Paul is Dead' pricks I usually take the piss out of (and whose ramblings inspired I Buried Paul). Now, bearing in mind that I am satirising the TKINers, is it surprising that the story doing this has to propose a conspiracy even whackier than any of theirs? And no, shit-for-brains, I don't think that McCartney hasn't aged - I'm taking the piss. Obviously taking the piss. Well, obviously to every intelligent person who has read the story (and that's quite a few thousand by now). In fact, the only other people who took it seriously are those TKINers you so love to pour scorn on.

Like I said, ironic, huh?

Don't Believe a Word of It

Another month, another TV 'fakery' scandal. This time it's ITV's turn, with them being accused of false advertising by claiming a documentary showed the death of an Alzheimer's sufferer, when in fact it only showed him slipping into a coma. What a bunch of bastards, eh? Depriving the viewers of a chance to see someone pop their clogs - what's the world coming to? We don't just want real life these days, we demand real death too! To be frank, I was quite relieved to find out that his death wasn't filmed - it would have been a gross invasion of privacy, not to mention tasteless. Still, the way things are going all so called 'fakery' on TV will be frowned upon. They'll have to start using real bullets instead of blanks in cop shows and thrillers and start importing real aliens for Dr Who to battle.

But really - did anyone ever seriously think that you could 'trust' TV and believe everything you see there? Personally, I take everything I see or read in the media with a pinch of salt. The problem isn't so much with TV, but rather with the morons who watch it. I know that's a sweeping generalisation (and I don't make many of those), but it is getting to the stage where I sincerely believe that you should be made to sit an intelligence test before being allowed to have a television licence. As someone who writes completely made up 'news' stories and publishes them on the web, I'm painfully aware that there are a disturbing number of people out there who actually believe them to be true. It doesn't matter how bizarre and obviously fake I make them, there's always someone out there who takes just about every story I publish on The Sleaze at face value. Scarily, they aren't all unemployable drug addled simpletons. Many of them are apparently intelligent professionals. Often employed as researchers for TV companies.

Getting back to the point, best of all about this TV 'fakery' furore is that it has largely been stirred up by the print media. Yes folks, those self-same newspapers who couldn't tell that the Hitler Diaries were a fake, so they published them anyway. Like I said, don't believe a word of it.