Tag Archives: news

When Your Parents Read The Daily Mail

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The Daily Mail and its alternately salacious and harrumphing Sunday counterpart The Mail on Sunday are Orwell’s five minutes’ hate morphed and expanded into tabloid form.

They are to the brain what a mallet is, em, also to the brain – a big, sturdy mallet painted red, white and blue, with each side of its face carrying conservative slogans, ranging from ‘We should bally well help our own first’ to ‘Help our own? They should bally well help themselves, you know, like I had to, by God!’.

The people who read The Mail have been bashed with this hammer so many times they don’t even realise they’re concussed any more, nor that they’re in danger of their brains leaking out from their ears to be smushed underfoot by their own wingtips or fluffy tartan slippers. It’s a comfort to them, that hammer. If it ever stopped thudding they might have to think for themselves, or possibly even be forced to give a shit about someone out-with the green and pleasant lands of their own, nostalgia-flooded recollections.

I’m possibly judging readers of The Mail too harshly, especially since my own parents count among that much-maligned readership. My parents’ reason for buying the paper in the first place doesn’t appear to have been ideological, though long exposure to its contents inevitably has certainly helped to shape their ideology. Whether The Mail planted right-wing sentiments in the egalitarian gardens of their minds or merely provided the necessary nutrients to allow certain long-buried seeds to grow is a matter of conjecture. I do know that when I was a teenager ‘The Independent’ was the family newspaper. Then it was The Times. And now it’s The Mail. A sort of steady slide from left to right. What comes next? A subscription to Breitbart? A signed photo of Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins?

Their reason for becoming Mail readers was simply this: price. They don’t like things like The Sun or The Star, and beyond those tub-thumping, shit-and-tit-covered dish-rags, it’s the cheapest newspaper option out there. Beautiful, right? Bargain bigotry.

Each time I visit them I never pass up the opportunity to offer withering comments on their choice of ‘news’ – remembering always to pronounce those inverted commas around the word ‘news’. My mum tends to get angry when I chastise her, claiming that her choice of newspaper in no way informs her outlook on life, even though for many years now her mouth has been filled only with false teeth and Daily Mail headlines.

On my last visit I gave her a guided tour of the edition she had sitting on her kitchen counter-top.

Page three was taken up by a full-page splash about Ewan McGregor’s divorce, complete with corny Star Wars headline. So far, so Express. Next up, the Royal Family. Whereas The Express is still hung up on the ghost of Princess Diana, the Mail is pursuing an endless, obsessive vendetta against Meghan and Harry.

Now, I’m no fan of The Royal Family – I’m  something of a republican in that regard – but the vitriol handed out to those two turns one’s stomach. Mail readers are a curious breed. Many of them like to get the bunting out, and buy cups and saucers emblazoned with the visage of old Lizzy Lizard. Most of them probably own a tonne-weight of commemorative coins encapsulating such epoch-defining moments as Prince Phillip scratching his arse with a gilded shoe-horn or the Queen staring witheringly at a foreign dignitary.

These people clearly harbour a desire to go back in time, not to the knees-up-Mother-Brown, Blitz-tinged days of the 40s and 50s, but way, way back – five or six hundred years back – to experience the sheer joy of living as serfs under the boot of some tyrannical, maid-murdering, family-fucking monarch of the true dynastic golden age. ‘Be a priv’lige to have you shit in my worfless dead mouff, m’am.’

Elsewhere in the ‘newspaper’ there was an attack on Devi Sridhar, Professor and Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, misrepresenting an interview she gave to the New York Times about the differences between how the Scottish and UK governments have handled the coronavirus outbreak, which they topped off with the disingenuous and inaccurate headline: SNP AIDE BLAMES ENGLISH FOR RISE IN CASES’.

Never one to miss a chance to stick it to Labour, there was a piece on Jack Straw’s son blacking up. And another one with a headline straight out of The Daily Mash: DID CORBYN’S MARXIST HENCHMAN GIVE BORIS AND CUMMINGS VIRUS? Good question. Once you’ve answered that, let’s find out if Jeremy Corbyn intercepted the Roswell aliens, stole the recipe for AIDS from them, and then used it to sink the Titanic.

I knew this next headline would be divisive, given that my mother and I have polar opposite positions on both the SNP and Independence: ‘£30M BILL FOR SWINNEY’S U-TURN ON EXAMS FIASCO’. I could almost hear my mother’s face tightening into a scowl as I read it aloud.

This was the story of the Scottish Government apologising for allowing geography and socio-economics to have a more impactful influence on post-COVID student grades than the measured predictions of their teachers. Not ideal, though can you imagine The Mail’s headlines in some alternate universe where the Scottish government hadn’t at least made a token effort to compensate for the teaching profession’s very human impulse to be nice to their kids during these troubling times: ‘EVERYONE’S A WINNER in SNP SCOTLAND: CLASS OF 2020 CERTIFICATES NOT WORTH THE PAPER THEY’RE WRITTEN ON.’

However, in the face of evidence and dissent the government was big enough to concede that its methods, reasonings and results had been flawed. They then issued a full and frank apology, and then promised to make the appeal process quick and pain-free. And literally free. Which they did.

I guess if you were being uncharitable you could characterise that as a U-Turn, but genuine political U-Turns usually come with less apologies (usually nearer zero) and a million per cent more obfuscation. So, again: disingenuous framing.

Mum, however, wouldn’t accept any defence of John Swinney or the SNP . ‘I’ve always hated Alex Salmond,’ she said. I just shook my head and kept flicking the pages.

The most unforgivable piece in that day’s hell-rag was probably the one carrying this head-line: ‘SO WHY IS BBC HANDING YOUR LICENCE FEE TO THIS SLEAZY PEDDLER OF PORNOGRAPHY?’

BBC The Social commissions online videos from contributors on a wide range of themes and topics, ranging from humour and health, to inspirational stories and educational vignettes. The fee for having a video accepted and featured isn’t huge.

One of these occasional contributors, Mandy Rose Jones, whose content is predominantly focused on mental health and body image, also sells pictures and videos of herself through an adult on-line portal called AdmireMe.

Both this site and the lady herself are unaffiliated with the BBC. Nevertheless, the poor girl was horse-whipped across two pages, as The Mail held her up as some sort of pervasive sexual deviant out to warp the nation’s kids. The article was nothing less than ritual humiliation, the modern equivalent of burning witches at the stake. A spurious, offensive diatribe. What this woman chooses to do online – as long as it’s legal – has no bearing whatsoever on the videos she produces for BBC The Social. And for all that it matters, which it doesn’t at all, no-one would’ve known about Mandy’s presence on AdmireMe had the Mail not chosen to turn her into collateral damage in their ongoing ideological war against the BBC.

The Mail is a hateful, gossip-filled tabloid that lends the illusion of a broadsheet. To make stupid people feel clever; and important. If this newspaper were a person it would be a dead donkey with the face of Katie Hopkins. It’s disingenuous, dirty, despicable, deceitful and disgusting. And I wish my parents wouldn’t buy it.

‘Come on, son,’ my mum said to me, with a proud and wounded look on her face. ‘What am I supposed to do? Buy The Daily Record?’

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just closed the newspaper and walked away.

America’s Deadly Shame: The National Panther Crisis

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A Citizens’ Rights group in the United States, NAW TO JAWS, has appealed to President Trumpelstiltskin to undertake an urgent review of Panther Ownership legislation. This follows the mauling of a young boy, Jackson Towtruck, at his family home in Scottsdale, Arizona, the seventeenth accidental home-based panthering this year alone. NTJ say this latest incident is part of an ‘all-too familiar tragic pattern’ that is ‘completely unacceptable and wholly avoidable in America in 2019.’

The boy’s father, Shard Towtruck, had left the panther free to roam in the garage instead of keeping it locked in a secure steel cage. The boy’s decision to play fetch with the panther while his parents stitched slogans into their baseball caps upstairs proved a fateful one that ultimately resulted in the emergency services having to play fetch with the boy’s limbs.

Tragic: Shard Towtruck

To the shock of many in the local community, the father has not only been allowed to keep his panther licence, but has also decided to retain ownership of the panther who killed his son. He told a local news network: “What y’all, snowflakes? A panther rips my son’s face off, and somehow the solution is to get rid of panthers? Maybe it’ll give my other twelve kids a wake-up call about using panthers responsibly.”

While news crews staked out the Towtruck family home, scores of pro-panther activists crowded into the sleepy suburban street, each of them wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan that’s become synonymous with American notions of liberty: PANTHERS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, PEOPLE DO.

Protests against panthers are at an all-time high following a chain of pantherings at schools and government buildings all across America. Some schools have installed elaborate panther-mazes at their entrances to slow down any panthers that might be released into the student body by crazed assailants.

The National Panther Association, always ready to counter-protest anti-panther protests, has called for teachers to be be-panthered in class. NPA spokesperson Bolt Grundy reminded the association’s million-strong members: ‘The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a panther is a good guy with a panther.’ The former head of the NPA, the famous actor Chortles McMonkey-Chariot, last week echoed the organisation’s most famous proclamation, coined by the organisation’s founder, that they could ‘have his panther when they prise it out of his cold dead hands.’ A few days later, McMonkey-Chariot’s panther turned on him and chewed his leathery old body into a hundred different dessicated sections, after which first responders had to prise his cold dead hands out of the panther’s mouth.

The President burying McMonkey-Chariot on the White House lawn

President Trumplestiltskin has praised McMonkey-Chariot, a man he described as being ‘almost as famous as me.’ In a press conference on the White House lawn, Trumplestiltskin went on to stress his support for panther owners across America. ‘We love panthers, black panthers, but not the kind who wear those funny hats and black jumpers, and not the one from that movie, not the ‘black’ black panthers, just the black panthers, the actual panthers. Black panthers shouldn’t have black panthers, because they’re animals, and I don’t know if they have panthers in Mexico, but if they do, the wall will have to be higher, because they tell me panthers can jump. But I’m going to jump over the White House. And I’m going to do that easily. I’m the best at jumping. No-one does jumping better than me. Especially not the Mexican jumping beans. God damn Mexicans.’

The notion of panther ownership is a particularly hard one for protest groups to unpick and counter. After all, the right of US Citizens to bear panthers is written in to the national constitution. It harks back to a time when defenders of the fledging nation state were urged as a point of patriotic duty to carry a panther with them at all times in case they had to repel an invasion party of British troops, who were renowned for their deadly surprise attacks using hordes of coked-up foxes.

NTJ has been criticised by the NPA for its suggestion that citizens should arm themselves with guns to protect them from rabid panthers. ‘GUNS?’ said NPA spokesperson Bolt Grundy. ‘GUNS? Are you crazy? Do you know how fucking dangerous those things are?’

‘No, I really think the best thing we can all do is just keep on thinking and praying.’

The Jobs of the Future, Today

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The jobs people have and the work they do can tell us a lot about what it was like to live during different times in human history. The technologies and philosophies. The hopes and dreams. The haves and have-nots. But what about the UK now, today, in our machine-led age of brands, connectivity, the internet, and social media? What kind of work is out there, and what does it tell us about the experience of living and working in 2019?

Roving reporter Jamie Andrew waded into the workforce to find out.

Davey Johnson, 46, Salt-of-the-Earth Compliance Officer, Alloa, Scotland

I’m a no-nonsense, tells-it-like-it-is, salt-of-the-earth type, and my job is to make sure that the rest of the world knows it. I carry out most of my work on the threads underneath articles shared on social media by local news organisations.

It’s exhausting work. I’m there, first thing in the morning, desperately trying to find ways to put a right-wing spin on the more gentle and whimsical articles with which these outlets tend to start the day. It can be tough. You know, I might have to find something militant to say about, say, a wee boy winning a prize for drawing a nice picture of a rabbit at his school. I’ll do it in baby steps, start off with a, ‘Wisnae like that in my day’, maybe follow it up with a, ‘These snowflakes and their pictures – I was shooting rabbits at his age’, and before I know it, I’ve slam-dunked it with a ‘Wonder if they’ll still let us draw rabbits come the Muslim caliphate, eh?’

By lunch-time it’s easy. Me, I’m feeling like Neo fae the Matrix: whoosh, bam, kaplow! Everything’s just happening, like magic. I’m skimming the headlines or the wee prompts by the page admin, and the replies are just boomin’ out of me…

‘Should kids start school at 10am instead of 8am?’ BOOM! Should they FUCK! ‘What do you think about smacking children?’ BLAM! Dae it as hard as possible. Never did me ony harm! ‘Breast-feeding in public?’ SLAP! Tits oot for the lads, absolutely NOT tits oot at my dinner table, ya manky bastards. ‘What do you think about the government’s initiative to lower the murder rate in our cities? ‘BASH! Bloody pansies! My grandfather murdered me when I was 12. And it never did me ony harm!’

The trick is to sound a bit like you’re in that Monty Python’s Yorkshireman sketch, but eighty per cent more racist.

I’m bloody good at my job. Science, solidarity and compassion are no match for the angry, knee-jerk opinions of working-class, salt-of-the-earth types like me.

Randall McCallum, 31 Dinner Photographer, Bangor, NI

Not everyone can afford a new car or a dream home to rub in their followers faces on Facebook or Twitter. You don’t need that. These days, the battle to win over hearts and minds – well, the battle to make hearts and minds seethe with rage and envy – is being fought at the dinner table. That’s where I come in.

Forget fortune. You don’t need a new car to make Elspeth who used to be in your class at school jealous as fuck. The new signifier of social sophistication is food. Or, as I like to say, Duck L’Orange is the new hatchback.

All you need is a really snobby meal slapped on a dinner plate and snapped artistically, perhaps with some augmentation filter added in so the food looks like it’s glowing or glistening – just as long as you don’t use the wrong filter and end up accidentally attaching donkey ears to your Colombian goat-loin curry.

I’m so good at what I do I can make waffles look like a meal Gordon Ramsay might one day demand to impregnate. I drape parsley over them, sexily – so bloody sexy that it seems like Leo Di Caprio might paint it – then I tag it with something like #FreshPotatoGriddles, maybe even translate it to French first, because French makes everything shit sound really good, you know, with the possible exception of Citreon and Renault.

Before I got in to dinner-plate photography, I was in the wine business. I used to snap pictures of women’s hands clutching wine glasses, and then I’d add captions in post-production like, ‘WINE O’CLOCK’, ‘BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS ALL DAY’, and ‘OBLIGATORY AIRPORT PHOTO’, you know. The work dried up, though, mainly because my clients didn’t. They all died of cirrhosis.

For the future, I’m thinking about going into business with my cousin, Tristan, the world-famous ‘Dick-Pic Stylist’. Super talented guy, he used to have Wayne Rooney and Leslie Grantham on retainer.

Jeremy Phillipston, 23 Professional Netflix Content Absorber, Cardiff, Wales

The best part about my job is when I’m talking to someone, and they’re telling me that they’ve heard about this great new series that’s just arrived on Netflix, and I get to cut them off with, ‘Yeah, I finished it last night, it’s great, you should watch it.’ I love that.I love watching their little smiles become hyphens.

The Haunting of Hill House, the Ted Bundy Tapes, the new season of Daredevil, sixteen new films that were only dropped on Netflix last night – before you’ve even had a chance to hear about them, I’ve fucking seen them. All of them.

Not everyone appreciates what I do. Parents with young children, people who work, people who don’t sit in their pyjamas for entire days at a time eating nothing but crisps – they all resent me. It’s not my fault they’re lazy, though. They should get their priorities straight. Problem they have is, they’re spending too much time playing with their children. Too much time talking to their partners. In short, too much chilling, not enough Netflix. If I can make people feel inadequate and excluded enough that they feel driven to binge-watch television to the exclusion of all else in their lives, then job done.You’re welcome, society.

This job was recommended to me because of my interest in my grandfather’s career. He was a Full-time Plot Spoiler, and he was bloody good at it. He’d walk out of elevators with a big mobile phone clamped to his ear shouting things like, ‘YEAH, YEAH, BRUCE WILLIS WAS DEAD THE WHOLE TIME, I KNOW, I KNOW, WHAT A FUCKING TWIST.’ He once took out a full-page ad in The Times that said, YOU KNOW THAT MOVIE ‘SAW’? WELL, THE DEAD GUY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM IS THE BADDIE. PS: STONE ME, DARTH VADER IS LUKE’S FATHER.

They’re making the story of his life into a 12-part series on Netflix next year, which I’ve already seen last week.You should watch it.

Sharon Grantham, 35 Worker in a GIF factory, Huddersfield, England

Me mam worked in a factory supplying funny pictures of cats and husbands to Bella and That’s Life magazines from 1969 to 1998, so I guess this sort of thing’s in me blood – along with the diabetes.

I started off in the Meme Warehouse, but most of me friends ,last few years, said the money was in GIFs – well, they pay more, in them GIF factories, ’cause it’s more dangerous an’ that. Some of them GIFs – they don’t look big on the screen, or, like, when you use them on your phone, do they? – but some of them are, like, the size of cardboard boxes, you know, them great big ones. The big boxes you’d use if you were movin’ house and that. And heavy. I knew a lass who got crushed to death by a GIF of a dancing beaver, just splatted her face off, it did. Bits of her brains all over me shoe. Worse, though, them that ordered the GIF deleted it almost as soon as they put it on Facebook, cause what they wanted was actually a GIF of a dancing Diva, but the predictive thingy put the wrong word, so me friend died for fook all, which is a shame. Still, the boss donated a nice GIF for her funeral, it was a flower all growing fast in fast motion, like it were speeded up, so the flower started off hanging down then jumped up and out, you know. I thought it were nice, but Jimmy who works the line with me was like, Christ, Sharon, that’s the GIF me and me mates use if we wanna say a woman’s given us a stiffy, and I said oh my God, and he’s like, well, I guess she is a stiffy now, so maybe it’s alright?

It’s dead hard in the GIF factory. We can be on the production line, and the big horn’ll go off, and the boss will say over the loudspeaker, he’ll shout something like: ”ERE, YOU, YOU LAZY BITCHES, THERE A WOMAN ON A GROUP IN FACEBOOK WHO’S NOT ‘APPY ABOUT SOMETHING, SO SHE NEEDS A GIF OF A BIG BLACK LADY WAGGLIN’ ‘ER FINGER. NOT TOO SASSY IN THE FACE CAUSE SHE’S ANGRY, BUT SHE’S NOT ‘ANGRY’ ANGRY, IF YOU KNOW WHAT AH MEAN. ALSO, ‘OW WE GETTIN’ ON WITH THE BATCH OF GIFS OF ALL DIFFERENT PEOPLE BEING SICK? NEED IT FAST, PIERS MORGAN’S ABOUT TO GO ON AIR.”

I’m proud of it, cause the boss says most folk just talk in GIFs now anyway, like, cause it’s easier and more fun, and you can say lots more than you can with words, and there won’t be any words left by this time next year cause of Brexit, cause once we run out of words we won’t be able to get any more sent in from Sweden or wherever they come from. Where is it we get words from again?

READ MORE OF JAMIE’S ROVING REPORTS BELOW

After the ban: What happened to Tony Tiger and friends?

Is the billionaire superhero ‘fake news’?

 

Is the Billionaire Superhero Fake News?

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Sometimes all you can do is wait, and hope that a billionaire will save you.

It was a cold, dark night in Gotham City. Wisps of black and violet smudged across the sky like old paint. The moon struggled to illuminate the gloom below its ephemeral bulk; the night – getting darker and heavier with each passing minute – threatened to swallow not just the faint glimmers of light, but the moon itself.

Bernie Roberts stood inside his underpass. If he wasn’t exactly comfortable, then at the very least he was sheltered from the elements: it could be worse. He warmed his hands in his pockets, trying to flex the feeling back into his fingers.

Here he was, spending another night of countless nights beneath the neon stars of his hollowed-out home, empty tonight of the howling wind that sometimes threatened to evict him. He was 48. This was his first and last step on the property ladder. He didn’t feel sad about that. He didn’t feel much of anything. There was no time for pity in a city that alternated between cold indifference to your very existence one moment and then actively trying to snuff it out the next. Gotham had all the love and wisdom of an Iron Age God.

There was death on every street. Down every alleyway. Round every corner. That was just a fact.

Bernie watched as a crowd of men in bowler hats and balaclavas sped towards him from the darkness outside, their heavy wads of stock portfolios held aloft like clubs. He didn’t even try to run; there was nowhere to hide, and, besides, his limp was too stiff to take him anywhere fast. They swarmed him; beat him long and hard; beat him until so much blood fell from his face that he looked like he was fighting not men, but Ebola.

Bernie had lived inside that underpass since he was a teenager, and now he had to face the prospect that he was going to die there.

No, he said to himself, in a voice he’d long considered dead.

I will not die here.

Not here. Not tonight.

I want a home of my own. A family. To get a job in a hotel and raise chickens in the backyard. It’s not too late… I won’t let them kill me…

Adrenalin returned sharpness to his senses. His arms turned to steel, propelling the boulders his fists had become into the faces of his shocked attackers. He clung on to the miserable shadows of his life with a violence and vigour that hadn’t raced through his sunken veins in decades. His fire and fury caused the bankers to redouble their efforts to destroy him. Or at least try to. They were reeling. Hurting.

They were losing.

And their breed wasn’t used to losing.

Their blood splashed the walls of the underpass like paint flicked from a laden brush, as those grimy, bony fists of Bernie’s continued to punch and pound at the bankers’ Bryl-creamed skulls.

From the darkness beyond the underpass came a sound like a kite unfurling in the wind. Something swooped from the murk and dropped down firmly at the tunnel’s dark jaw. The men’s shaking fists all fell silent as they turned to look. They froze: meat-puppets in a life-sized diorama. The eerie, artificial lights of the underpass made it difficult to make out the dark figure who was now watching them from the night beyond. But the dark figure could see them.

And he was angry.

“It’s… it’s the Batman!” cried one of the bankers, as the caped crusader emerged from the darkness.

Batman hated these kinds of scenes; they made him sick to his stomach. That’s why he’d made the mask. That’s why he paced and prowled through the city of Gotham at night. Waiting. Watching. Ready to put things back the way they should be.

Ready to make things great again.

Batman swished through the underpass, and positioned himself right in the middle of the huddle of men.

“Now you’re going to pay for what you’ve done,” he growled.

And, with that, he grabbed Bernie by the scruff of the neck and started kicking the ever-loving shit out of him.

BIFF! (Tannen)

“You’re a bad dude!”

KA-POW!

“You’re deep state!”

SMACK!

“You’re fake news!”

CHA-CHING!

The bankers huzzahed and hoorahed!

“Thanks for saving us, Batman!” they shouted excitedly.

Batman dropped the tramp’s corpse to the ground, reached into his utility belt and pulled out his bat-penis, before showering the dead man’s chest with a tremendous amount of bat-piss.

“I’m Batman,” he said. “The greatest Batman. Believe me. Nobody Batmans better than me.”

The bankers danced in a circle around Batman shouting ‘MAKE GOTHAM GREAT AGAIN! MAKE GOTHAM GREAT AGAIN!’ as Batman found a hidden reservoir of piss in that little winkie of his, spun round and around in a circle, pissing all over them, too, as they grinned and clapped with glee.

I watched – astonished – not quite sure what to make of it all, and feeling slightly guilty that I’d just stood there scribbling down notes as a middle-aged man had been beaten to death by a fat old maniac.

Batman’s identity is no secret, of course. No sooner had billionaire property magnate Bruce Trump yanked on his suffocatingly-tight bat-themed corset for the first time than he’d taken out a full-page ad in the New Gotham Times that revealed his ‘secret’ persona to the world. Naturally, this was next to a full-page ad, also taken out by Bruce Trump, in which he vehemently denied that he was Batman, and threatened to sue anyone who repeated the claim. Which of course he’d already done himself in the adjoining advert. Bruce Trump is now the only man on earth ever to have successfully sued himself. Under the terms of the law-suit, Trump now has to pay himself damages of £500m.

Which of course he’s refused to do.

Trump always releases details of his vigilantism schedule well in advance to ensure full-spectrum press coverage. That’s how I managed to be present at the bloody demise of Bernie Roberts. I conducted a short interview with Trump as we stood next to the piss-covered dead guy.

I first asked his opinion on other superheroes in the public eye.

“Superman?”

“Weak.” He nodded, before adding: “Retard.”

“Captain America?”

“Unpatriotic.”

“The X-Men?”

“Shouldn’t be serving in the military.”

“Wonder Woman?”

“You know my policy on fucking all things Amazonian.”

“Doctor Victor von Doom?”

“Great guy. Strong. His people love him.”

I pointed out that Dr Doom rules the Kingdom of Latveria as a brutal dictator; not to mention that he harbours super-criminals and ploughs billions into developing different ways in which to destroy the earth.

“Strong,” he repeated, nodding. “Good chest.”

I asked him what had motivated him – a man of such disgusting wealth – to take a more direct hand in society through his role as Batman – besides, of course, being able to bill the city for his services, and forcing the mayor to give him a massive tax break to boot.

“Well, I’m finally able to take on the greatest scourge that modern America has yet faced.”

“Income disparity? Inequality?” I asked.

[“You?” I thought to myself]

“The poor,” he said.

“The poor?”

“And Mexicans.”

“Are there any Mexicans in Gotham City?”

“Not now,” he said, pouting.

“OK. But let’s talk about tonight: what’s the tangible benefit to society of kicking an ostensibly innocent homeless man to death?”

“And poor Mexicans, they suck the worst,” he continued.

“We’re done with Mexicans now.”

“You’re damn right we are. Bad hombres.”

“Let’s get back to the matter at hand. You kicked a homeless man to death.”

“Did I? Or did Trump just free up hospital staff and help to lower house prices?”

He tapped the side of his skull.

I stared down at my notepad. I didn’t know what to say.

“How much do you spend on R&D at Trump Enterprises?”

“If they want to dance, that’s their business, but I’m not paying for it.”

I stared at my notepad again. “It means Research & Development…”

He continued. “I didn’t do it anyway.”

“You didn’t do what?”

“The homeless dude. It wasn’t me.”

“You didn’t beat him to death?”

“It was the Black Panther.”

“Obama?” I asked incredulously.

He nodded.

“But I watched you do it.”

“’Trump has more class than to do what Obama just did, which is to beat a homeless gut to death.’ Use that quote in the write-up, OK?”

“But…” I said again, “I saw it with my own eyes.”

“Your eyes are fake news,” he said, “You see, Jamie, the problem with Trump City is that the…”

“Gotham City,” I corrected him.

He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “There are bad hombres here.”

“And you’re getting rid of them?”

“I’m draining the swamp.”

“I thought that drain the swamp thing was a reference to corruption. Aren’t you supposed to be fighting corruption? How does attacking the poor and making life easier for the rich fight corruption?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but I cut in before he could say it: “Fake news?” I suggested.

He slapped me on the shoulder. “You’re getting it.”

I later discovered that prior to losing everything and ending up cold and alone in a Gotham City underpass, Bernie had run his own construction company. He and his crew had worked the contract for the ‘Trump Enterprises’ building back in the 90s, but the business was wiped out when Trump failed to pay Bernie for any of the work he’d carried out or compensate him for any of the cash outlaid for materials. All of which makes Bernie Roberts’ last words all the harder to process:

“Thank you… Batman.”

Bruce Trump would like to think he’s a mystery wrapped inside an enigma, when in reality he’s a contradiction wrapped inside an improbability. Without his inherited wealth and narcissism a man with a face such as his would’ve struggled to seduce Mrs Miggins the school dinner-lady – a lady with significantly more chin-warts than hygiene certificates – and probably would’ve found himself fired from a succession of fast-food restaurants for continually sexually harassing customers and pilfering from the till, before eventually finding himself – quite appositely – sleeping in an underpass before being beaten to death by a crazed billionaire.

I wondered if there really was such a thing as a benevolent billionaire, or if the billionaire alter-egos of ostensibly ordinary superheroes in comic books are only written rich to explain how they’re able to finance an expensive life as a vigilante without having to work.

Was Tony Musk – aka Iron Man – a good guy?

Tony Musk looks like the by-product of a DNA-gangbang between John Barrowman, Ally McCoist, and some description of hideous merman. Musk is his name, his brand, and he very much looks like he has a musk; a heavy one, probably redolent of seaweed, skunk and self-satisfaction.

I interviewed him in his lab in Musk Tower as he pored over plans for the new crowd-control robots he planned to market to the middle-east.

“You know, it might shock you,” he said, his eyes darting around crazily, “but I’ve got some great ideas for the poor. First of all, to put them in rockets and shoot them into space.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding. “So they can learn satellite repair, and maybe help to explore and seed other planets?”

He stared at me blankly for a moment. “Yup. Yup, let’s go with that.”

As we were talking, a woman fell past the window, as she hurtled towards the city streets below. We both ran to the window. War Machine whooshed down from the roof, scooped the woman in his arms and carried her ground-wards to safety. The crowd cheered.

Musk shook his head.

“Paedophile.”

Read Jamie’s other celebrated special reports:

After the Ban: What Happened to Tony the Tiger and Friends

After the Ban: What Happened to Tony the Tiger and Friends?

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It’s exactly one year since the government banned all brand mascots from appearing on the packaging of sugary breakfast cereals marketed at children. The ban also covered advertising, ensuring that iconic characters like Tony the Tiger and the Honey-Monster – beloved of the breakfast table for decades – would never be seen by children again, except maybe in old photographs or on-line shrines.

While it could be – and frequently is – argued that the ban was good for the hearts and waistlines of our nation’s children, it had an undeniably devastating economic and psycho-social impact on the brand mascot community, many of whom have struggled to pick up the pieces of their lives and careers.

Cecil in happier times.

Tony the Tiger – real name Cecil T. Entwistle – is perhaps the most vocal member of the ‘Breakfast Club’. I met him at a Soho bar at 11 o’clock in the morning to discuss how he’d coped since the ban. He was already drunk. Truth be told, he’s drunk a lot these days – just pick up any copy of The Sun or Heat magazine to see the proof of that – but this time he had perhaps some small justification for his behaviour: he’d just settled his fifth divorce.

“Do you want to know what’s Frostie?” he asked with a caustic grin. “That bitch’s mother. Good fucking riddance to both of them.” He downed a gin & tonic. “I hear she’s fucking the Coco Pops’ monkey now…” This seemed to amuse him greatly, and he started singing his old rival’s TV ad jingle: “I guess she’d rather have a blow of Coco’s cock.”

He gave a sad little laugh, picked up another G&T, swirled it around, and then downed it, too. “You can BET that little fucker turns the milk chocolatey.”

He downed another. Then another. Then another, before spinning down memory lane like a tornado.

Coco the Monkey: shagger

“See, I had it all, man. Money, power, pussy on tap – I’m talking primo, free-range jungle pussy: lions, tigers, bears, Dorothy, the little dog… you name it. I had a platinum litter box, Versace tail-caps, balls of wool as big as buses, open-top fish tanks with genetically-modified basking sharks in them – man, they were fucking delicious. I could scratch where I liked, piss where I liked, lick my own balls whenever I liked – and, boy, do I like doing that. Man, it was grrrrrrrr…”

With a sudden and terrifying ferocity he threw a glass across the room, shattering it against a wall. “I can’t even say my own CATCHPHRASE any more, can you believe this shit? Covert advertising!! Covert advertising my hairy orange arse!”

Tony brought a clenched paw down hard on the table. “They take my face off the fucking boxes, and GUESS WHAT? The kids are STILL fat cunts!”

Tony Tiger was probably the worst hit financially and professionally by the ban. A matter of hours after the ‘Tigers and Monkeys on Boxes and That’ 2018 Act came into force, Tony gave a heated interview to the BBC, at the climax of which he asked: “What am I going to do now? Work in a fucking bank?”

He now works in a bank.

Or rather he did. Later on the day of our interview I learned that he’d been fired from his position as clerk for stealing stationery, and eating his line manager. He’s now waiting to hear if he’s been accepted for the next series of Big Brother.

By mid-afternoon on the day of our interview Tony was alternating between sobbing into his hands, and ranting that Jamie Oliver was a Jewish conspiracy. As I walked through the door of the pub into the daylight beyond I left him with a karaoke mic gripped in his paw, shouting ‘GGGGGGGRRRRRREEEEEEEAAAAAAAAATTTTTTT!’ into it over and over again as the words to ‘Sweet Caroline’ flashed up on a giant screen behind him.

I pity him. But his lot is a pleasant one compared to those of some of his contemporaries.

Of all the ‘Breakfast Club’ mascots, Honey Monster was the one who seemed to accept the end of his career with the most grace and the least rancour. He had options. For a time afterwards he worked as Boris Johnson’s body-double, but was fired for being too competent and handsome. He also enjoyed critical and commercial success with his autobiography, ‘Would Still Taste as Sweet’, becoming a darling of the talk-show circuit. He dated both the Nesquik Bunny and Count Chocula, releasing hit singles with both of them. No matter what he turned his hand to, his intelligence, wit and playfulness shone through. Perhaps as a consequence, no-one realised just how lost and shattered the Honey Monster was at his core, and by the time they did it was too late: not just for Honey Monster, but for his victims, too.

In January last year he suffered a psychotic break while at a reunion party. During a ten minute rampage he snapped the necks of Snap and Pop, eviscerated the Lucky Charms’ leprechaun, and battered the Milky Bar Kid to death. When police arrived at the scene they found Honey Monster sitting calmly in an armchair drenched in blood. When asked to explain what had happened, he just shrugged and said: “The Milky Bar Kid is on me.”

Professor Weeto as he looks today.

When detectives investigated Honey Monster’s house they found over 20,000 pictures and photographs of Jamie Oliver, all with the eyes cut out. Well-known celebrity psychiatrist Professor Weeto appeared as a defence witness at the trial. He said that in his professional opinion, each of Honey’s victims had been a proxy for Jamie Oliver – the moon-faced chef who’d been instrumental in bringing the era of the brand mascots to an ignominious end. Weeto then appealed to the jury to acquit the Honey Monster on the grounds that Jamie Oliver ‘was a total fucking arse-piece.’

They didn’t listen. Weeto later said: “It’s hard to convince people a defendant isn’t a monster when his name literally has ‘Monster’ in it.”

Could Hioney Monster be described as a ‘cereal killer’? I asked him.

“Fuck off,” he replied.

Honey Monster was sentenced to life imprisonment in HMP Glen Michael, where he now spends his days in an underground isolation cell behind an impenetrable Plexiglas wall, reading, thinking and shitting in a bucket. When I met him he was in a characteristically loquacious mood.

“Sugar has become emblematic of the struggle against freedom,” he began. “That sweet, refined nectar is nothing less than a stand-in for our souls. If we lose our right to imbibe sweetness and to impart it to others, then we lose ourselves. We lose control. We, the cereal mascots, were painted as harbingers of corruption, enemies of youth, monsters, and we were summarily executed for our crimes by that taste-bud tyrant who sits upon his throne in the hypocritical heaven of his rich man’s paradise. I used to be so angry about what he did, but thankfully I’m at peace with it now.”

The person you described there, I asked. Do you mean Jamie Oliver?

The Honey Monster reached inside his pants, shat violently on his hands and clapped twelve times, sending foul fireworks of faeces shooting into the air, into his mouth and everything. He rubbed some of the slimy brown mixture into his eyes, before nodding calmly.

“That’s the fella, yeah.”

Oliver’s luxury Ivory Tower

I wanted to ask Jamie Oliver if he felt responsible for what had happened to the mascots. We met on the top floor of his ivory tower, in a room shaped like a giant quinoa and spinach patty. Dark storm clouds pushed against the curvature of the window. Now and then a flickering tongue of lightning would pierce the gloom, lighting up the clouds like electrocuted jellyfish.

Oliver stood with his arms folded against his chest, a cloak of organically-sourced hemp billowing around his body thanks to the air blasting up through powerful jets he’d had installed around the room for that express purpose. No small wonder that Jamie Oliver has won the prestigious ‘Most Pretentious Cunt in the World’ award six-years-running.

“Do I feel… responsible?” he asked himself, re-positioning himself as the interviewer. “DOES A BOOT FEEL RESPONSIBLE FOR SQUISHING AN ANT?”

Tragic

I repeated the question. He walked up to the window, and gazed out over the clouds. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long, long time.”

I pointed out that I hadn’t actually said anybody’s name. He turned to face me with hatred in his eyes.

“There will be NO food in the future. Only air that’s been filtered through a free-range hen’s lungs, and scented with jasmine. I HAVE SPOKEN.”

I made my excuses to terminate the interview and started walking towards the lift. Oliver rushed over and grabbed me by the arm.

“Mate, you don’t have any Mars Bars or Turkey Twizzlers on you, do you? I’m fucking starving.”

I was glad to be leaving this spaghetti junction of human and cartoon misery behind me. When I was perhaps half a mile distant from Jamie Oliver’s tower, I turned around and looked at it. I couldn’t help but reflect that the moral high ground is an incredibly lonely place. Few have escaped the brutal domino effect of the mascot ban, even its own architect, who has been left in a fugue of madness and low blood-sugar.

All stories, however tragic, usually have at least one happy ending, and this one is no exception. Crackle – lucky to have left his encounter with the Honey Monster with his life – has risen Phoenix-like from the flames of death and loss to embrace something of a career renaissance. He’s going to be presenting Britain’s Got Talent alongside Declan Donnelly.

“Crackle and Dec,” he smiled, “Who would have thought it?”

Dec shoved him. “Dec and Crackle, you little cunt.”

Say What, Momma?

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mawOf all the things you might expect to hear your mum say to you as you walk into her house, this probably isn’t even in the top 500: ‘Are you here because of the murder?’

I had no idea what she was talking about. It was rather easier to predict what she would say next, and indeed she didn’t disappoint my expectations: ‘There’s been a murrrrdddeeeeerrrrrrr,’ she said, followed by a chuckle; a chuckle that seemed to say, ‘That’s a cracker, that one. Bet no-one’s ever said that after a murder before.’

According to my mum, a man had been stabbed to death in a local pub a mere mile from her house and had then staggered a few hundred yards down the road to his house, whereupon he promptly died. Her source for this information? Twitter: the cyberspace equivalent of a gossiping conga line stretching across a billion tenement back-fences. Fuck you, Reuters! By the time the story had been banded about the kitchen a few times, the villages of Polmont and Brightons were on lock-down, armed coppers were perched in sentry towers, people were being detained and then airlifted for extraordinary rendition in Germany, helicopters were commanding the skies like a swarm of angry wasps, and martial law had been declared. In addition, six old ladies were shot coming out of the butchers, which at least spared them the horror of the nuclear blast that erupted from ‘Auld Nessie’s Cat Charity Shop’ across the road.

My mate and I did some car-based reconnaissance. One tiny street with a pub in it was cordoned off, and two coppers were standing outside of a house. Miami Vice, motherfuckers. As we drove past the first cordon, my mate clocked the police tape and asked thoughtfully, ‘What do you think the police would do if we just ran through that tape like we’d finished a marathon?’ A tenner for anybody who does that at the next murder scene they stumble across. Twenty quid if they’re a copper (thirty if they’re the suspect). Do it in slow motion, though, yeah?

taggWe rounded the corner from the pub, past the local Spar, and clocked a heavy-set man coming out of the store wearing a fleece that said ‘NYPD’. We couldn’t help but share a giggle. ‘Jesus,’ said my mate. ‘They’re really taking this case seriously.’ Well played, NYPD guy. Well played.

Back at my mum’s house, we sat down to watch Scotland Today on STV. A murder in a sleepy hamlet in Falkirk? There’s no way that won’t feature on the news, even if it only merits a few solemn sentences. So we watched. And waited. Yadda yadda yadda underage drinking. Yadda yadda yadda kids voting. And then we were treated to approximately twelve minutes – TWELVE MINUTES of a twenty-seven minute news show covering all of Scotland – about tonight’s Celtic vs Barcelona football match. TWELVE MINUTES of interviewing Celtic’s coaches, directors and managers, where we gleaned such insights as: ‘It should be a good game,’ ‘I hope we win,’ and ‘The players just need to go out there and play the game.’ Fuck me. Then a woman in a near-empty stadium told us how exciting it was to be standing in that near-empty stadium, just knowing a football match was about to happen. Then we were treated to an ‘interview’ with some young Barcelona fans who were enjoying a couple of pre-match pints in Glasgow city centre. Shockingly, they hoped Barcelona would win, but whatever happened they thought it should be a good game, and urged the players to just get out there and play the game. They were then asked to sing a typical Barcelona terrace song – in Spanish obviously – which I can only hope was about shagging the bodies of their dead foes.

What a coincidence that STV had the broadcast rights to the same football match it plugged for twelve minutes during its own fucking news programme.

I get that it’s a Champions’ League match, and that the event has great cultural significance and entertainment value, but surely if the story’s featured in THE FUCKING NEWS it should be covered thusly: ‘Celtic are playing Barcelona at home tonight.’ What more is there to say? SPORT is not NEWS! Was there nothing else of any significance happening elsewhere in the country? No bribery, corruption, controversial legislation, or, oh I don’t know… MURDER??

dugWell, yes, there was something better than all of that, actually (but not as good as football, obviously). Some fat guy with long hair was so angry about tourists rubbing the nose of Edinburgh’s Greyfriars’ Bobby statue  that he went on TV to complain about it. They captioned him as a ‘Campaigner’. A campaigner for what? A blacker nose on a pretend dog? Bono’ll be in touch soon, my man.

The fat guy went on to tell us that his mate’s been putting shoe polish on the dog’s nose to dispense some rough justice to the tourists. Tourists? TERRORISTS more like! (impulse to write ‘ruff’ instead of ‘rough’ resisted)

Here’s a genuine quote from that news story:

‘It’s amazing how the tourists feel when they come away with a slightly grubby, waxy hand after doing something they shouldn’t be doing.’

So said the fat man, with a proud, steely look in his eyes as if he’d just participated in the vigilante murder of a child killer – instead of what he’d actually done, which was to over-see the repainting of a statue’s nose. Pulitzer’s all round.

(another tenner’s going spare for anyone who paints a big cock on Greyfriar’s Bobby)

And still no murder. Does nobody give a shit? Why is this not deemed important enough to share news space with a rubbed statue? So we switched to Reporting Scotland on BBC1. The headline? The murder rate in Scotland has dropped by 32 per cent. What? Not only was there nothing about the murder, BBC1 was actually reporting the absence of murders (Admittedly, if the news editor had already decided to lead with a story about how there’s no murder in Scotland  – possibly at the behest of the police and government – then they wouldn’t allow a pesky little thing like a fresh murder to come along and waste the composition of the news bulletin)

Now I’m not even sure if there’s been a murder at all. It’s funny how the rumour mill goes into meltdown when something horrid happens on your doorstep. Anyway, a man has died, and it’s a horrible tragedy, whatever the circumstances. Of that I’m sure, at least. I just thought the news – the Scottish news at least – would tell us more about this, and rather less about a man getting angry about a statue.

I’m off to not watch the football.

USA Declares War on Scotland

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Megrahi: Guilty of a terrible crime - those glasses are fucking horrendous.

al-Megrahi: Guilty of a terrible crime – wearing those fucking horrendous specs.

CIA files leaked earlier this week reveal the extent of the hostility felt by the US towards Scotland in the wake of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s (but buddy, you can call me Al) release from a Scottish prison in 2009. US officials were so incensed by the decision to release on compassionate grounds the Libyan man convicted of bombing Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 that a plan was set in motion to destabilise Scotland by sabotaging its national cultural identity and legacy.

"I WANNA SPEND MY LIFE WITH YOU!" Nah, you're alright, pal...

“I WANNA SPEND MY LIFE WITH YOU!” Nah, you’re alright, pal…

The first victim of this diabolical plan – codenamed Operation Bomby Scorch land – was Scottish ‘musical’ act The Proclaimers (it’s a fallacy that The Proclaimers consists of two brothers; in reality, The Proclaimers is a single entity, believed to have been created in a laboratory). Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny McAskill, the man ultimately responsible for releasing al-Megrahi, received a ‘Letter from America’ informing him that the Proclaimers had been brutally murdered. A mysterious phone-call followed:

‘The Proclaimers are dead,’ said the anonymous caller.
‘What have you done with their bodies?’ demanded MacAskill.
‘You’ll find them if you take a look up the rail-tracks, from Miami to Canada.’
‘That’s quite a long route,’ said MacAskill, ‘could you be a bit more specific?’
‘Oh, all right, then, their corpses are just outside Miami Central Station.’

The US army: ready to kick Scotland right in the bad teeth.

The US army: ready to kick Scotland right in the bad teeth.

Thankfully, it was a false alarm. The Proclaimers were alive and well. Government spooks had accidentally murdered two very, very ugly guys wearing shit glasses who had travelled to Florida from Glasgow on holiday. Their families were informed, and they just laughed. ‘Aye, they do look a wee bit like The Proclaimers, right enough,’ said one mother.

‘Daft cunts,’ she added.

Despite The Proclaimers setback, the CIA pressed on with their mission, and successfully  managed to:

  • Go through every episode of the original Star Trek series and change Scotty’s name to ‘Englishy.’
  • Spread a rumour that the Loch Ness monster is a homosexual communist with ties to Yemen.
  • Convince every American celebrity to refer to Annie Lennox as ‘Tranny Lennox’, and always make the gesture of possessing a massive cock whenever she walked past. The joke was on the US, though, as Annie Lennox later hung herself. No, I’m sorry, I read that wrong… what I meant to say was, it turns out Annie Lennox WAS hung after all.
  • Fund a tourism campaign, with the slogan: ‘Don’t go to Scotland, it’s shit and they don’t brush their teeth.’
  • Destroy every existing copy of Braveheart, and then reshoot the movie with an uzi-toting Arnold Swarzennegger as King Edward, and the guy who played McLuvin as William Wallace. They also changed William Wallace’s name to ‘Full-Blown-AIDS McCunty’.
X-rated Krankies: a black helmet pushing through a big purple cunt.

X-rated Krankies: a black helmet pushing through a big purple cunt-hole.

The US only backed down from its onslaught when McAskill threatened to deploy The Krankies on US soil. A US government spokesman said: ‘OK, we’ll back off. But know this: if you assholes ever again even think about sending The Krankies to America, we’ll melt your disgusting little country into hot mush like it’s a fucking petrol-laced welly boot in a microwave.’

Use of any Krankie as an instrument of warfare, either singularly or in conjunction with another Krankie, is prohibited under International Law, and is in direct contravention of the Motherwell Convention of the United Nations. The Krankies are currently the only weapons of mass destruction to regularly appear in panto.

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Young Jamie: Portrait of a Serial Douchebag (Part 8)

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At first glance nothing seems to be too wrong with this picture. We’re going up to Tasha’s place to celebrate my friend’s (aka my step-sister’s) birthday. That’s normal, right? Wrong. Tasha’s a dog. I thought so highly of my step-grandparents that I airbrushed them from history, and even ascribed ownership of their house to a dog. Hey, it could happen in real life. I‘ve certainly dealt with solicitors dodgy enough to embark (geddit!!) on such deals: ‘Well, Rover, do you want to accept the offer of £45,000? That’s one bark for yes, two for no. Oh, and lick your balls if you want me to take an extra ten per cent… Goooooood.’ Never mind that, though. Let’s admire my grasp on reality through the medium of artistry. Hmmmm. Interesting picture. Tables, as we all know, needn’t rest exclusively upon floors. They can also be stabbed into a dog’s back; all the better to transport yellow hedgehogs that have been set alight. Looking at the picture itself my main question would have to be: what in the name of Jesus were we about to do to Tasha the dog? Maybe I’d watched Animal Farm on VHS, but the wrong one. You know… the bad one. Don’t pretend you don’t know the one I’m talking about. I’m pretty sure George Orwell never included a chapter about a women being pecked in the minge by a duck, or a guy being whacked off by a chimp. If you haven’t seen the naughty version of Animal Farm, here’s the tagline for the movie: ‘All animals are sexy, but some animals are more sexy than others.’

At first glance nothing seems to be too wrong with this picture. We’re going up to Tasha’s place to celebrate my friend’s (aka my step-sister’s) birthday. That’s normal, right? Wrong. Tasha’s a dog. I thought so highly of my step-grandparents that I airbrushed them from history, and even ascribed ownership of their house to a dog. Hey, it could happen in real life. I‘ve certainly dealt with solicitors dodgy enough to embark (geddit!!) on such deals: ‘Well, Rover, do you want to accept the offer of £45,000? That’s one bark for yes, two for no. Oh, and lick your balls if you want me to take an extra ten per cent… Goooooood.’ Never mind that, though. Let’s admire my grasp on reality through the medium of stick drawings. Hmmmm. Interesting picture. Tables, as we all know, needn’t rest exclusively upon floors. Tables can also be stabbed into a dog’s back; all the better to transport yellow hedgehogs that have been set on fire, apparently. How bizarre. It looks like the dog is serving an unusual canape at a really fucked up version of the Ambassador’s reception: ‘Ah, meester dog, weeth thees charred woodland mammal you are really spoiling us!’ Looking at the picture itself, though, my main question would have to be: what in the name of Jesus were we about to do to Tasha the dog? Maybe my young self had just been corrupted by watching Animal Farm on VHS, but the wrong one. You know… the bad one. Not the one that’s an allegory about totalitarian states. Don’t pretend you don’t know the one I’m talking about. You know, not the George Orwell one… I’m pretty sure Orwell never included a chapter about a woman being pecked in the minge by a duck, or a guy getting whacked off by a chimp. If you haven’t seen the naughty version of Animal Farm, here’s the tagline for the movie: ‘All animals are sexy, but some animals are more sexy than others.’

Young Jamie: Portrait of a Serial Douchebag (Part 1)

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I found a holdall in my mum’s attic that’s full of old jotters from primary school. Over the next few weeks I’m going to share a few choice entries from primaries 2 – 5.

Today’s sample comes from my Primary 2 News jotter, in which I expertly summarised my actions, thoughts and deeds from the weekend.

Ah, yes. I might've been greedy (seventeen colouring books? How very middle-class of me) and shit at writing, but at least I had counting nailed. There are indeed seventeen splodges of colour in the beautifully rendered picture above the diary entry. I was deadly at counting, and this skill has paid dividends in the adult world. I'm awesome at counting up how much money I don't have. Sorry for saying there were seventeen splodges of colour. There are clearly 'seventeene.' It wasn't a spelling mistake, as my teacher knew fine well. Clearly I was so advanced I'd decided to slip in a wee bit of Shakespeare.

Ah, yes. I might’ve been greedy (seventeen colouring books? How very middle-class of me) and shit at writing, but at least I had counting nailed. There are indeed seventeen splodges of colour in the beautifully rendered picture above the diary entry. I was excellent at counting, and this is a skill that has proven indispensable in the adult world. Now I can itemise all of my bitter regrets, and count up all of the money I don’t have. Sorry for saying there were seventeen splodges of colour. There are clearly ‘seventeene.’ It wasn’t a spelling mistake, as my teacher knew fine well. Clearly I was so advanced I decided to slip in a wee bit of Shakespeare. I was always doing that at school. Even when I needed a piss I’d put my hand up and say, ‘O but that thou wouldst graciously grant me leave from this place so that I may take a wee-wee, perchance a jobby, fair maiden.’ Either that or I’d just blow my face purple and shite in my Ghostbusters’ Y-fronts right there at my desk. Also note how I clarified my intended use of the colouring book to avoid confusion: ‘to colour in.’ Why am I not Prime Minister by now?

 

MSN Picture Editor’s Last Day of Employment

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Somebody at MSN news is going to get their balls footed for this moderately amusing mix-up.

If these mis-matched pictures are to be believed then Obama’s got involved in the Jimmy Savile sex case, Clive Dunn was an impersonatory paedophile and David Cameron is a schoolgirl.

Jackson’s Brain on Insane Child Sex Rampage

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jackoDozens of LA police strike teams were mobilised yesterday in a bid to neutralise Michael Jackson’s reanimated brain, which had escaped captivity and gone on a horrifying 12-hour child sex-attack marathon.

Police were first alerted to the atrocity by kindergarten teacher Jizzia Johnston, 36, who was teaching her class when Jackson’s brain struck.

‘I heard thumps on the class window, and all of the kids screamed,’ said Johnston. ‘I looked round, and saw why they were screaming. There was a chimp banging a brain on the pane. And the brain was going crazy, sucking on the glass like one of those facehuggers from the Alien films. The chimp was whacking off. ‘

Scientists had been conducting tests on Jackson’s brain at a secure facility in the north of LA, in a two-prong bid to ‘resurrect’ the drug-addled child-abuser and to isolate and remove those parts of his brain responsible for his deeply naughty behaviour, before finding him a new host body and sending him back through time in order to stop himself from abusing.

Big-shot scientist that thinks he’s better than the rest of us, Tony Cawziecowolski, explained: ‘Re-animation of a dead junky’s brain?: easy. Engineering his brain so that it had the power of independent movement?: piece of piss. The hard part was stopping Jackson from shagging DVD box-sets of Home Alone.’

Cawziecowolski believes that Jackson called on Bubbles the Chimp to help rescue him from captivity.

‘I wish I’d recognised the signs,’ he continued. ‘Jackson would sit on my desk and pulsate manically for hours on end. I just assumed he was engaging in some sort of ingenious ‘brain wank’. In reality he was harnessing his evil in order to telepathically summon his pet monkey to break him out of jail. But hindsight’s 20/20.’

Bubbles breached lab security at approximately 0645, and incapacitated 17 members of staff during the mission to liberate his former master. ‘It was like something out of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but obviously with a heavier plot emphasis on the theft of a famous paedophile’s brain.’

Bubbles’ last stand.

There was a stand-off with armed police in the playground of the kindergarten school, which culminated in Bubbles being gunned down by rapid assault fire just as he was at the point of masturbatory climax. One of the armed officers who participated in the take-down, Gerry Mazterphucker, was visibly shaken by events.

‘I dunno, man,’ he said, tears snaking down his face. ‘What can I say, I just shot a monkey. Every time I think about that glistening monkey jizz, like morning dew, hardening to crust on its dead little paw, I start to cry. Game over, man. Game over.’

Another officer, ‘Crazy’ Charlie Ramirez, said: ‘Holy shit, son, last month I was on traffic, and this month I get to shoot motherfucking monkeys? This is the kind of shit I signed up for. Fuck you, monkeys, fuck you! Next time I want to beat a tapir to death! WOOHOO! America rules ass, son!’

During the gun-fight, Jackson managed to squidge off into the undergrowth. All that was left of his horrifying attack were the words ‘MMM CHIDREN’ scrawled on the windowpane with brain goo. Pretty good spelling for a disembodied brain.

Over the course of the afternoon Jackson’s brain was spotted moonwalking provocatively past a child’s picnic, gazing menacingly at a school bus, and in one terrifying instance was caught on CCTV palpating the face of a sleeping child. But, for horror, nothing tops the moment at 1615 when Jackson leapt past a line of kids at a road crossing and slapped each and every one of them in the face with his throbbing cerebellum.

Police strategists managed to lure Jackson to Macaulay Culkin’s house, within which Culkin had set up a series of ingenious traps, like swinging paint cans and doorbells with makeshift flame throwers in them and that. Jackson was only – and finally – apprehended after he was startled by the sounds of what he believed to be machine gun fire coming from the living room, and slipped on a pile of bouncy balls. Jackson’s brain was returned to the scientists.

“It’s the kids, Marty. Something has got to be done about the kids.”

‘Actually, we kind of fucked up,’ admitted Cawziec… Caws… Cocacol… the scientist, ‘As soon as we got Jackson back, we were so keen to make lemonade from these lemons that we maybe acted a bit hastily. We immediately fitted his brain into a new host body and sent him back to his own past. The trouble was, we sent him back a bit too far. And, unfortunately, instead of acting to alter the course of his tragic life for the better, Jackson decided to sexually molest his own boyhood self. thereby causing all of this shit in the first place. Still, Beat It‘s a great song, right?’

‘Whoops,’ he added.

Undeterred, the same team will be sending Rolf Harris into space in 2015: dead or alive.

‘There’s no scientific benefit this time,’ the scientist admits. ‘It’ll just be for a laugh.’

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