Give Generously

I give and I give and I give and still you want more. You're like a bunch of zombie vampires or something. Sorry, I've been immersed in another blog and some of it seems to have rubbed off.

So. What have I missed?

Well, for one thing, the fuckwitted city council of Birmingham (not Alabama, the other one) have seen fit to ban apostrophes from their signage. Apparently the cost of reintroducing them would be astronomical. Maybe I can help out. Hey, Brum! Here, have some apostrophes! '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

While were on the subject, whats the correct spelling of the half-street that runs through Embra city centre?
Thats right - Princes Street. Named after the two sons of Mad King George III. No apostrophe needed. Your welcome.

You have no idea how hard it is for me not to go back and punctuate that paragraph.

Mrs F decided we should buy a bassinet for Little Miss Farty's baby, due in August.
Me: So we're going to play it soothing music?
Mrs F: WTF?
Me: I've heard that's good for developing fœtuses.
Mrs F: What exactly do you think a bassinet is?
Me: Er, some kind of musical instrument?
Mrs F: How did you arrive at that conclusion?
Me: It's a cross between a bassoon and a clarinet, innit?



I wonder which part you blow?

Did you know New England isn't actually a US state? I didn't.


An atheist campaign group was cleared to run ads on London buses claiming that there's probably no God. Christians wanted the ads banned on the grounds of substantiation and truthfulness, but the ASA ruled that the ad wasn't misleading, because they used the word 'probably'. Now the backlash - Christians want to place ads saying there is a God. Won't they have to prove it first?


On the subject of invisible flying things, did you hear about the Lincolnshire wind turbine that was hit by a UFO? According to The Sun, "there was no trace of one of the turbine’s three huge 65ft blades." Until it turned up a few feet away. And in order to hit two of the blades, any object must have been about 170 feet long. Er...unless the blades were rotating. Its It's all very mysterious.

I Prefer To Think Of Them As "Coworkers"

Apparently anyone who drinks more than seven cups of coffee a day is three times more likely to have hallucinations, i.e. "seeing things that were not there, hearing voices, and sensing the presence of dead people". I need at least that much just to wake up. And the voices are usually saying, "Why does that guy have to pee in a bucket? Is the men's toilet blocked again?"

Graham Stringer, MP says that dyslexia doesn't exist and is merely a creul fcition invented to cover up pore teeching. He also claims that theirs no Santa, there never was any weapon's of mass destrucshun in Irack and piracy is not responsible for keeping global warming in cheque. Wotevs, Graeme!

Hands up who didn't laugh when they heard that five pirates drowned while making their getaway with a $3 million ransom? Now there's kaaaarrrrma!

And shock, horror! New research shows that three days of normal human farts cause the same amount of damage to the planet as a Google search. Unless we capture the farts, light them and use the energy to boil a kettle for a nice cup of coffee while we surf the interwebs.

Finally, take a look at this and say: "Awwwwwwwwwwww!"



Now go to your documents and post the 6th picture in your 6th file.

Toot toot!

So Much To Do, So Little Time

Since I added those new blogs to my reader, it's getting harder and harder to keep up. Despite which, I've had time to notice:

Bottoms up. Councillors in Perth, Scotchland, have proposed that alcoholics should be provided with a drinking den as a means of keeping them off the streets. We have those in Embra - we call them "pubs".

Touched by His Noodly Appendage. Merkan VP candidate Sarah Palin is pro-Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. When asked about her views on whether only evolution should be taught in schools, she allegedly said: "Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."

Jesus H. On the subject of holy schemoly, have you seen this?

More Here.

Me, I'm just a lawnmower. According to New Scientist, boffins at the Jet Physics Laboratory have worked out how to recognise a terrorist by the way his shadow moves when he walks. "In tests on footage shot from the sixth floor of a building, [Adrian] Stoica says his software was indeed able to extract useful gait data." This would totally work with satellite photos too. Unless the terrorists only went out at noon, or lived in Britain: you don't get shadows when it's raining.

There's your problem! According to a source quoted on Slashdot, the fine structure constant, which governs nookular decay, may vary with the Earth's distance from the Sun. FSM, I'd hate it for the astrologers to be right all along! "Ah, you took your measurements when Virgo was in the ascendant, but if you'd done it when Mars was aligned with Uranus, you'd have got twice the number of alpha particles emitted." Personally, I don't believe a word of it, but then I'm an Aries and we're naturally sceptical.

What a scream. Have you ever noticed that if you stand in the street and start screaming, people just look at you as if you're some kind of weirdo, but if you do the same thing in a plane, they all want to join in? I'm so going to get hate mail for that one.

Nightmare. I have this recurring nightmare. I'm in bed with Beyoncé on one side of me and Rihanna on the other side. I don't know which way to turn.

Click your heels together. There's no place like 127.0.0.1.

Toot toot!

Expelled

I've been ordered to write a post debunking some creationist film called Expelled.

Since I haven't seen Expelled, and don't intend to watch Expelled, and don't like being ordered around by a conspiracy of the scientific élite, I don't think I shall write about Expelled.

Feel free not to link to Expelled yourself.

I'm off to see what my fellow worshippers of His Noodly Appendage have to say about this.

Half and Half

The UK government is shortly to vote on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. This would, if passed, allow scientists to create half-human, half-animal cybrids.

How cool would that be? We could cross humans with fish (fishes?) to create people who could breathe underwater through gills, feed off krill and plankton and release some of the population pressure on the land surface of the planet. No more worries about global warming inundating the cities - just live under the sea!


Or we could cross humans with horses to create people that could eat and digest grass. Cut out all the time and effort of beef production. Forget about raising and killing cows for food. That would keep even the vegans happy!


Or if you just love the taste of steak, at least you could give the creature a fighting chance. I'm astonished nobody has thought of this before!



Or if it's just sport you're after, why not have a human-lion hybrid that's just as interested in hunting you down for lunch?


There's also human-goat hybrids (I'm starting to wonder how people got these ideas in the first place).


The possibilities are endless. We could probly even cross a sleazebag with a rug to create a slug. No, wait. That's been done.


Whatever next? I suppose we could even cross humans with trees...

Putting The Fun Back Into Fundamentalism

That bloke in the skirt - no, the other one, the Archbishop of Canterbury - has gone completely bananas (no offence intended, GB!) and demanded ¹ that the UK should immediately adopt Sharia Law. Because Britain is an Islamist state and the British people demand the right to have innocent rape victims jailed and given a taste of the lash.

Of course that could never really happen here. Can you imagine the uproar if someone in the UK, say Aberdeen, was arrested and thrown behind bars simply for having a bad dream? Oh. Right. What do you want to bet she's a Muslim?

Some good news from Iraq. It appears that "Sunni Arabs of the central and western part of the country may submit to Shia dominance". Who would have thought Sunni and Shia could ever reunite after all this time? I thought he'd died...

Anyways, if Islamic law is to be given equal footing with our own laws, then there is every reason why FSMism should also be given legal status. I demand the right to wear Full Pirate Regalia to work every Friday. Arrr!


¹ In the sense that he didn't really. But it sells newspapers.


Update: John reckons that the pirate wench above looks like Heather Mills McCartney. Admittedly they're both gold-diggers with big boobs and wooden legs, but really?

Competition Results

So how did it go?

All in google.co.uk with safesearch off:

Diesel with 'Monkeyhands chicken' - 1/68.

Zoe with 'girlfriend daughter' - probly somewhere in the top 100,000/1,080,000.

Sewmouse with 'Schroeder Trundle' - 1/14,400.

wtf is a trundle anyway? Oh.

Laurie with 'zebra elucidation' - 1/41,600.

Cat with 'Lorraine Kelly' - nowhere to be seen in the first several hundred out of 322,000.

...despite six hits on her own site - bi-curious?

Brom with 'nhadau topographic' - 1/37.

Apparently a nhadau is a type of short giraffe, native to the mountains of Norfolk.

Step forward Laurie and collect your prize. Erm. Send a suitable snail-mail address to mrfarty at blueyonder dot co dot uk and I'll stick it in the post. You like spaghetti, right?

Time For Calm Reflection

What is the world coming to? I cannot believe that the entire religion of Islam is under threat from a children's teddy bear, yet that seems to be the jist of the argument coming from Sudanese fundamentalists this week, who are now running amok in the streets calling for the immediate execution of schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons.

Thank goodness for the voice of reason. Tory MP Boris Johnson has rightfully described these reactionary forces as "utterly bonkers". Mind you he also claims that "There was a time when Britain would have sent a gunboat to rescue her".

Um, Boris, old chap, Khartoum is 400 miles inland. True, it lies on the Nile, at the junction of the White Nile and Blue Nile, but that's a hell of a long way to send a gunboat. By the time you got there, there wouldn't be much left to rescue except for a pile of bleached bones.

Not that the Sudanese still go in for cannibalism, God forbid! There hasn't been a single recorded case of that since, lessee, 1993. Ok, bad example.

Still, they should calm down and take a leaf from Western tradition. You don't hear about God-fearing Christians getting all hot under the collar over a disagreement about how their children should be educated. No, wait.

Still, with any luck she'll be out of there and on her way home in just over a week.

Unless they find the other toy first.

Winter Draws On

The nights, as they say, are fair drawing in, and Scotchmen and Scotchwomen across, er, Scotchland have taken to wandering around with their heads tilted back and mouths hanging eagerly open. Aye, there's a nip in the air...


In the run-up to Halloween, police have been warning ordinary folks that "young people" are evil monsters and will be arrested if found in possession of flour or eggs. "We do not want to be seen as killjoys", said a killjoy yesterday, "but would you like it if some young-un were to bake you a sponge cake? Why, the chloresterol could kill you in twenty or thirty years!"


If they can avoid getting arrested while they're at the shops getting kitted up for trickle-treating, the kids will of course be buying the usual bag of nuts - "and no' too many coconuts!" I still love that one.

Good news for nerds this week. Apparently, boffins have declared that love and sex with robots are inevitable. Given the choice, which of these would you rather have?

Happy Halloween!

Gothamated!

Sounds like something from a Batman film. A really baaaaad Batman film.

In fact, a certain Welshman, who claims to be Spanish, living in Belgium, my head hurts already, has tagged me. For those who can't be arsed reading the original tag, here it is in full.

I nominate the following, for the Thinking Goth Award, which will expire in about 2 days or when I get bored shitless of the concept.

GOTHIC RULES
- Nominate 5 sites that only make sense after several drinks or spliffs
- Do NOT send me links to them, I don't care
- Feel free to nominate yourself as many times as you want
- If you nominate yourself less than zero, you are shit at maths
- You have explain why you ended up there, or even read it
- There will be no voting or any of that meaningless crap
- You have to explain why you are Gothimating the site

GOTHIMATIONS

My Thinking Spot - because she makes me cry with her honesty and I cannot pollute her comments with my inane bullshit

Boob Pencil - anyone collecting pencils under her tits must have something really interesting to do.... or not [and she's a real author and that, so she knows how to write proper]

Mr Farty - anyone that delights in the ignition of their own emissions is always handy in a dark tunnel [who he?]

This Old Broad - anyone that old who still wants to be a groupie must be SO good in bed

Princess Diaries - anyone that cute who is not getting sex on a regular basis must be, well, missing something

See HERE for more details

So. I love rules, me. Especially the tinkling sound they make as they shatter into a gazillion pieces. Think I shall nominate five sites, but they will be ones that I consider fartworthy.

And I've done a badge and all.

First up is Chaucer's Bitch, not least for this post, but also because she is a good egg. CB is a keen rower, and it broke my heart when she did her back in. Working back to full health one step at a time, with the help of The Pirate. Oh and she's a Pastafarian wench. Feck alone knows how I found her, but she is one of the few bloggers who can write long, long posts that don't make me get bored and - hey, wake up at the back there! And there's nooky.

Second has to be Done A Poo. Someone done a poo in my comments box and that was it. I'm hooked. Not as good as farting, but hey ho.

Next we have BOSSY. Not too strong on the farting, but definitely full of shit. At least according to some reviewer who couldn't write a decent blog post if their life depended on it.

In penultimate position (second last) comes Mr Brom of The Windsor Castle Hot Air Balloon Festival, purely because of this little gem.

And finally, way over in Australia Kentucky, is the delectable, dimpled, downright gorgeous, feck who am I kidding, she's as funny as a fart in a nunnery, Apos! I think I found her in a review by Hot Coffee Girl. Gone a bit quiet since she finally made it Stateside, but worth dipping into her archives for a sniff while you wait for a new emission.

Toot toot!

Neighbourgate (or Neighborgate if you're Merkan)

So. Upstairs neighbours went on holiday and left the keys with us to house-sit. You know, feed the goldfish, clear the daily mountain of junk mail from behind the front door, take the kids to school, that sort of thing.

Imagine my surprise when on one such visit, I stumbled across a copy of Whitehouse periodical magazine. I say stumbled, but that might be stretching the definition of the word "stumble" a tad. In actuality, it was under a pile of VAT receipts. On the top shelf of a wardrobe. In the spare room. In the loft conversion.

Never having heard of this publication before (*ahem*), I opened it expecting to read about US fiscal policy, the history of the greatest democracy in the world, Dubya's latest foot-in-mouth episode and the race for the 2008 presidency.

Gentle reader, I can only say that surprise turned to amazement as my eyes beheld...young ladies in various states of undress, in ones, twos and sometimes threes, inserting lubricated, battery-operated devices into places where the sun most assuredly does not shine^*!

Who would have thought that sweet Mrs Thingy upstairs was a closet lezzer all this time? I was so shocked at this revelation that my trousers and pants dropped around my ankles completely of their own accord. Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I just hope poor Mr Thingy never finds out about his wife's fetish, he might have a stroke. So to speak.

^*Has anyone seen that film Sunshine yet? I read a review in New Scientist which said it was crap, but then it would, wouldn't it? Just because the film's premise demands a suspension of disbelief that would make the Flying Spaghetti Monster look completely at home in the Vatican. Some people are so picky. Astrophysicists, cosmologists, stellar dynamicists, quantum theorists...

Political Correctness Gone Out The Window

Sometimes I struggle for ages trying to think of something deep, meaningful and profound to write about. Then I give up and do some blogging instead.

But sometimes a subject presents itself, as it were, on a plate. With spaghetti and meatballs. And pasta sauce. Aaaaahhhh! Or even, Aaaaarrrrggghhh!

No, it's not that Russell Brand has threatened to pull out of Big Brother's Big Mouth - Eeeuw! - although that would mean that the dandy fop is available for other work; say, a figurehead for some new-fangled religion.

No, far better than that, schoolboy Bryan Killian has been suspended from the yardarm school for, woodja believe it, turning up for class dressed in Full Pirate Regalia. He claims that his Constitutional rights to freedom of religion are being violated, while the school claims he's an arsehole. His mummy says, “I think Bryan should be able to voice his opinion, but he kind of got carried away.”

Me? I think the more pirates there are, the better prepared we are to combat Global Warming and that. Or perhaps it's just the thought of all those Pirate Wenches. Aaarrr!

Three In A Bed

Tagged by Kissme. I've never been kissed tagged before, so I'm quite nervous. Not. I saw one tag last week that ran to 150 items, feck that. But this is quite short. Except that I'm making it unnecessarily longer by yammering on about it.

Three Things That Scare Me:

1. Ghosts.
2. George W Bush.
3. Bungee Jumping.

Three People Who Make Me Laugh:

1. Phil Kay.
2. George W Bush.
3. Non-Working Monkey.

Three Things I Love:

1. Farting.
2. Mrs Farty.
3. Choclit.

Three Things I Hate:

1. Them green things, wossname? Vegetables.
2. George W Bush.
3. ICBMs.

Three Things I Don't Understand:

1. The Inflationary Theory Of Cosmology.
2. QED.
3. Women.

Three Things On My Desk:

1. Cuppa tea.
2. Shortbread crumbs.
3. Speakers.

Three Things I'm Doing Right Now:

1. Writing this fecking post.
2. Listening to The Beautiful Corrs.
3. Farting.

Three Things I Want To Do Before I Die:

1. Swim with dolphins. I've watched them surf. Wow!
2. Dance on George W Bush's grave. Or Margaret Thatcher's.
3. Discover the secret of immortality.

Three Things I Can Do:

1. Can you guess?
2. Play Go. Badly.
3. Make people laugh. Knickers!

Three Things I Can't Do:

1. Stop farting.
2. Learn To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb.
3. Put up with intolerance.

Three Things I Think You Should Listen To:

1. Music. Any music except rap.
2. Your heart.
3. Me farting. Ahhhh!

Three Things I'd Like To Learn:

1. To fart The Flight Of The Bumblebee.
2. SCUBA diving. See dolphins above.
3. HTML, so I can pimp my blog. Getting there.

Three Favourite Foods:

1. Banoffee Pie.
2. Choclit.
3. Pasta.

Three Shows I Watched As A Kid:

1. Captain Pugwash. Arrrggghh!
2. Dr Who. William Hartnell was my favourite right up until David Tennant arrived.
3. That one with the two numpties with the idiotic expressions, the jerky, drunkard's walk and the unintelligible flob-a-dob speech, flanking the pretty-but-shy one in the middle. No, this one.

Three Things You Should Never Listen To:

1. Rap music.
2. George W Bush.
3. People who tell you it can't be done.

Three Wonderful People To Inflict My Meme On:

1. Non-Working Monkey.
2. Apos-itivepessimist.
3. Cheerful One.

Aye Thang Yew.

International Talk Like A Pirate Day

It be only six months until International Talk Like A Pirate Day, so I be thinkin' I'd better be startin' to getting ready^*. So here be somethin' to educate yez, with the three four five R's.

It all be startin' with the Flying Spaghetti Monstaaarr!


His chosen people be pirates. Arrr!

Mrs Farty and I always be takin' it in turns to walk the plank. Ah-harr!

Then there be the lovely wench Tasha Yarrrrr...


And A Vast Behind were just a bonus. Aaaarrrrrgggghhh!

Now keel-haul the mainsail, belay the demon rum and buckle that swash^**!

^*If the Christians can start preparing for X-mas in August, for FSM's sake, why shouldn't we start early too?

^**Erm, anyone know where I can get a decent swash?

Serious Post

Where do I start? At the beginning, I suppose...

Forty years ago, I remember my closest brother sticking pins in my mum's cigarettes to make it harder for her to poison herself. She must have got through twenty a day, easily. 'Cancerettes', he called them. And 'coffin nails'. This was in the days when the killers were still blithely claiming that fags were good for you, but everyone with half a brain knew the truth. Still, she claimed, she'd rather lose five years off her life than spend those years missing the joy of fags.

Fair enough, Mum, I thought, it's your choice and your funeral. And yes, it was her choice. Of course, had I known about passive smoking in those days, I might have made more of an effort to persuade her to give up. Or at least open a window. We had to paint our living room ceiling twice as often as the kids' bedroom, to hide the smoke stains.

Well, Mum's funeral was five years ago. But there's a parallel going on on a much larger scale right now.

Thirty years ago, during the "energy shortage" of the mid-70s, James Burke had a tv show where he asked members of the public to try to predict the future. One prediction, generally agreed upon, was that the private car would be a thing of the past by 1982, an unaffordable luxury. Even then, it was recognised that cars cost a lot to make, a lot to run and a lot to maintain. And they contribute to atmospheric pollution.

Twenty years ago, climate scientists announced that they were a bit worried about global warming and perhaps we should, you know, do something about it? So the oil companies trotted out their own scientists who said that there was no such thing as global warming. There may not have been as many naysayers as doom-mongers, but they were far better financed and people like a positive message.

Ten years ago, it really looked serious. All the major players got together in a city called Kyoto and signed an agreement to cut their carbon emissions to below 1990 levels by 2008. Except that the US and Australian governments refused - and still refuse - to ratify the treaty. Their own published reports showed that although global warming does indeed exist, it's mostly due to circumstances beyond our control and there's nothing we can do about it.

Now, it turns out that Dubya has been in the pocket of the big oil companies all along. Who would have thought it? A major government forging official reports to make it appear that all was well? Shock and indeed, horror.

Of course, it's what comes next that worries me. Climatologists are saying that we're rapidly approaching a tipping point, beyond which no power on Earth will be able to prevent the tundra from thawing, the polar ice caps from melting and the oceanic conveyor belt from shutting down, plunging Europe into a new ice age while Atlanta becomes the new Atlantis; small islands will disappear forever; Waterworld, blah blah blah.

Any bets on how long it takes Big Oil to come to the conclusion that: "We've already passed the tipping point, so we might as well eat, drink, drive, fly and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die"?

There is still one hope, if we act now. It has been proven that there is a link between global warming and the number of pirates on the seven seas. As pirate numbers have fallen, so average global temperatures have risen. Bobby Henderson is trying to negotiate the purchase of a ship which his Pastafarians can use as official missionary transportation to spread the word and boost pirate numbers. Please lend your wholehearted support to this worthy cause.

I love messing about in boats, me.