Self-Absorbed Realise Something Big Happened, Wonder How They Would Have Felt

The generation of the chronically self-obsessed are slowly noticing that something quite major has happened somewhere, and that it didn’t include them.

The internet is anxious to know what this cat makes of it all

Bloggers, bedroom musicians and Saturday paper columnists alike gasped in horror as they realised that the thing that happened was totally beyond their own personal experience, and immediately began typing heroically about how that made them feel.

“I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I was watching some reality show and congratulating myself on being superior to everyone on it and then suddenly the telly’s all like, bing bong! You’re going to have an earthquake!” tweeted one blogger to himself. “But I daresay I can get at least a thousand words out of trying to.”

Op-ed writers in the morning’s papers struggled valiantly to compare the big bad event to the most vexatious tribulation they could remember, and then expended more ink on trying to put an exact figure on just how much more annoying it might be to survive a gigantic earthquake only to see a ten-metre wall of water barrelling toward them at 100mph.

Back on the internet, a typically pretentious little turd who regularly pollutes YouTube with his ill-considered twaddle bravely uploaded some webcam footage of himself telling nobody in particular: “My mate sent me this clip of shitloads of mud washing all the cars away, and I thought to myself, ‘If that was my car, I’d be going ‘Fuuuuckkk!!!’’”

“Then I saw this fuck-off great boat riding along with it and I thought, ‘Shit, man, if I was on that boat I’d be straight on the phone to all my mates going ‘Fuuuuckkk!!!’,” he continued pointlessly, “Except my phone would be all like dead and shit, and I’d be going ‘Fuuuuckkk!!!’ because I’d have nobody to go ‘Fuuuuckkk!!!’ to, which is just like totally tragic.”

“Basically, at that point I reckon I’d probably be thinking, ‘Fuck my luck,’ and wondering why shit like that only happens to me,” he concluded. “I’m writing this really cool song about it, I’ll put it on SoundCloud and post you all the link.”

Meanwhile, an anxious world is on tenterhooks to hear what Jeremy Clarkson will make of it all in his Sunday Times column tomorrow.

Armchair Environmentalists Looking Forward To Hubristic Nuclear Blast

Told you so

As the situation at Japan’s earthquake-hit Fukushima Number 1 nuclear power plant goes from bad to worse, Britain’s tree-hugging community were unable to contain their glee, delightedly posting glib ‘told-you-so’ messages to the world at large.

“When I heard there’d just been an explosion, I was all over the NHK website looking for a satisfyingly huge mushroom cloud that would pour black, irradiated rain down on the silly Japanese population, serving them all right for building nuclear power stations,” said someone on Facebook with a made-up name and a picture only they found amusing. “Unfortunately this explosion is a bit crap, but hopefully it’s only a matter of time.”

“Why oh why do evil power companies persist in building their deadly atomic bombs right next to the obvious supply of water to cool their reactor cores?” wailed somebody else who is apparently a glitterdaisy, whatever the hell that is. “It’s madness. I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if the earth didn’t send this earthquake just to show humankind its insane folly. Wake up, people! There’s less than twelve months to the end of the world, and if you’re not as gorgeously enlightened as me then you won’t be transformed into a pure thought-being made of concentrated love.”

“I’ll be smug and irritating again later,” she added, “First, I just need to set this awesome footage of fleeing cars being engulfed by a black wall of water to the Benny Hill chase music.”

Meanwhile, everyone who has friends or relatives anywhere on the farthest edges of the Pacific Ocean, or ever went there on holiday for a week, is busy racking up the caring brownie points by solicitously praying that everyone they know will somehow survive the cataclysmic six-inch tsunami rushing toward them.

Just Rest Your Chin On This Post, Lib Dems Tell Clegg

Nurses have nearly mastered the bodyline technique

Senior party figures have just led Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg out onto the stage at their conference in Sheffield, and reassured him that the pole with a cup on top of it is has been thoughtfully provided as a chin rest in order to prevent neck strain.

“There is a tendency for public speakers to move their heads around a lot, as they try to make fleeting eye contact with all sections of the audience,” explained former cabinet minister Dame Shirley Williams. “We wouldn’t want you to do yourself an injury now, would we? Don’t you worry - that’s our job.”

Mr Clegg had previously allowed his hands to be tied firmly behind his back, to minimise the danger of dislocating a shoulder whilst making emphatic hand gestures during his speech.

Earlier, as rank-and-file party members queued outside, they had each been thoughtfully provided with several large cabbages to mark the party’s ongoing commitment to green issues.

“Mr Clegg was also pleased to hear that the LibDems’ NHS Cricket XI have been fastidiously practicing their bowling for weeks,” backbench MP Andrew George told reporters. “In fact, he assured me that he sincerely hopes they will be able to give him a demonstration of their speed and accuracy at the earliest opportunity.”

Internet Utterly Swamped By Footage Of Tsunami

Sony's TV factory seems to have exploded

The world has been left shocked and reeling today, after a massive wave of footage thundered out of Japan in the wake of a massive earthquake and swamped the internet before people’s very eyes.

“I just logged onto Facebook to pass on this pants-wettingly hilarious picture I found of some utter retard doing something slightly unconventional that I wouldn’t do myself,” said leading social networker Josh Geake. “And I was bowled over by a mass of video clips showing lots of people standing in streets and things falling off shelves in a supermarket.”

Worse, however, was to follow.

“As the page scrolled relentlessly down and down, I saw some ring binders flapping wildly in a filing unit,” stammered Mr Geake. “Then I saw a man wearing a pair of headphones talking over an internet connection, saying he was perfectly OK although he had taken the precaution of hiding under a desk for five minutes. His internet connection was down but luckily his neighbour’s wasn’t, and on top of that he couldn’t get a signal on his mobile. I just can’t imagine that happening to me. The horror… the horror...”

Even as he spoke, Mr Geake’s newsfeed shuddered with afterposts of footage showing a fishing boat cresting a large wave - as fishing boats often do – and cars being pushed about like toys by the advancing floodwaters.

And then, as experts feared, the expected wall of trite comments struck.

“omg!!!” texted one stunned victim in London, David Pr1meCameron. “its rly rly bad! soz to evry1 in jpn!”

Another horrified networker, Will-I-Am Hague, just managed to tell the world, “<3<3<3 2 ma jap homyz. Gotta go 4 cobra mtg bak laterz,” before he vanished under the murky tide of links to the BBC and CNN websites.

As the world looked on in mounting horror, nation after nation warned its web communities that they were about to be swamped by an unstoppable wave of dangerously inappropriate jokes, while the newsrooms of London frantically searched among the avalanche of detritus in the vain hope of finding a British earthquake victim.

Ban This, Goodwin, You Wanker

Stop that at once

Thanks to the wonderful institution that is parliamentary privilege, it is now possible to report that Sir Fred Goodwin - the notorious self-polluter who ran a major wanking group based in Scotland - sought and obtained a super-injunction banning the media from talking about his shameful activities, or even from calling him a wanker at all.

Thanks to fearless backbench Lib Dem MP John Hemming, who tabled a question in Parliament about the gagging order, it is now possible once again for anyone in the media to shout “Fred Goodwin’s a wanker – wanker, wanker, wanker!” from the rooftops morning, noon and night and pretend they are merely filing a report on parliamentary proceedings.

“In a secret hearing this week ‘Wanker’ Goodwin has obtained a super-wanky injunction preventing the wanker being identified as a wanker,” Mr Hemming told the House of Commons yesterday, shaking his hand in a certain way. “Will the government have a debate or a statement on freedom of speech and whether there's one rule for wankers like Fred ‘Wanker’ Goodwin, the complete and utter wanker, and one rule for the poor?”

Sir Fred gained notoriety as the former chief wanker of the Royal Wank of Scotland, where he encouraged out-of-control wankers to shamelessly flout all the conventions of responsible wanking, causing a disgusting stench and leaving sordid stains on the reputation of the country that will never wash out.

“The emergence of the super-injunction has had serious implications for free speech in Britain,” commented a spokesman for Index on Censorship. “While every wanker has a right to privacy, it’s vitally important that rulings on press issues should not be kept secret. It is an unfortunate state of affairs that a free society needs to rely upon parliamentary privilege to call Sir Fred Goodwin a wanker.”

Government To Hide Your Fags When You’re Not Looking

Playing hunt-the-fags-counter should keep the kids occupied

The government announced today that, from 2012, ministers will sneak into your house while you’re on the lavatory and quietly deposit your fags in the last place you’d think of looking.

“Anti-smoking measures in the last few years have failed to produce any further reduction in the number of British smokers,” admitted a shrew-faced government doctor. “It looks like pretty much everyone who might be persuaded to give up has given up, leaving a hard core of sinful hedonists who are fully aware of the risks of tobacco but obstinately continue to enjoy it anyway. How dare they.”

“At the same time, the government is unwilling to actually stop the sale of tobacco, because that tax revenue is all that’s keeping the NHS ticking over,” he added sourly. “However, computer modelling suggests that if the government breaks into smokers’ homes and hides their fags somewhere they’ll never find them – preferably while there are still at least 15 left in the packet - sales will actually increase even though consumption will fall.”

Government inspectors will be checking all smokers’ homes in the next few months, surreptitiously noting any nooks and crannies which might be able to conceal several hundred cigarette packets.

Just to annoy people, the government will also be persuading supermarkets to camouflage the tobacco counter behind milk cartons or cereal packets and keep moving it at random around the store on a daily basis. Also, starting in 2015, small retailers will have to remove their counter displays, forcing their customers to chase a furiously-pedalling man on a bicycle who will not be allowed to stop and serve them.

“It is wrong that, in this day and age, a small group of people can freely choose to poison their respiratory systems with toxic chemical compounds,” said a joyless man with a clipboard. “That is a skilled task which is best left to the experts who run the motor, power-generating and cereal-packaging industries.”

Newspapers Strangely Not Spreading Panic About Deadly Ink In Newspapers

Deadly poisonous crap

The yawning British public opened their newspapers this morning at the breakfast table, to be confronted with screaming headlines urging them to put rubber gloves on straight away, take the box of Cornflakes outside, douse it in petrol and burn it if they wanted to live.

Under huge headlines such as ‘DON’T DIE OF CARDBOARD’, ‘RECYCLING IS EVIL CANCER PLOT’ and ‘LABOUR’S DEADLY CARDBOARD LEGACY’ the best scientific minds working in the newpaper industry applied their 2:2s in Journalism Studies to the vital task of persuading the public that recycled cardboard packaging is the silent killer in the kitchen, and their editors to give them a paid job at the end of their internship.

Not deadly poisonous crap

The murderous cereal packets – made from an evil, recycled effluent which science is calling ‘newsprint’ - kill their victims slowly and painfully, warned all newspapers, by exuding black, treacly ink through the completely harmless plastic liner to coat your favourite breakfast munchies, at which point a chemical reaction or something occurs and renders the lethal slime both invisible and intangible.

The newspaper industry says it has top people working round the clock to discover the cynical and utterly unethical origin of this incredibly poisonous material known only as ‘newsprint’, for which there is no cure.

Independent researchers, meanwhile, are pointing out that they have been warning for years about the toxicity of the Daily Mail in particular.

“If Daily Mail rot gets into your system it stays there, narrowing your views, hardening your heart, tightening your sphincter and shrinking your brain to the size and texture of a walnut,” warned the Nev Filter’s resident biochemist. “It’s the most corrosive substance known to science. Don’t touch it.”

Census Form Ushers In New Dark Age Of Nazism

Hooray! It's the listening totalitarian state you always wanted

The government began construction of a system of extermination camps and started planning the invasion of Russia today, as soon as private data-processing contractor Messerschmitt AG had put the last batch of 2011 Census forms in the post.

“It’s very simple,” announced fűhrer David Kamerad, as tailors measured him for a stylish black uniform and natty red armband designed by John Galliano. “You tell us how fast you can get up the stairs, whether you believe in Yoda and your understanding of the different usage of ‘to’ and ‘too’, and if you get any of them wrong we take you away and incinerate you. So you see there’s really nothing to worry about, schwein. Unless you’re functionally illiterate, immature or feeling a bit peaky.”

“Everyone agrees that Britain is overcrowded,” smiled deputy fűhrer Klaus Klegg. “Well, then this is the answer you’ve been waiting for.”

“So let’s hear no more complaints that the government doesn’t listen to the views of the man in the street,” he added. “Because that too will get you a one-way ticket up the chimney. Sieg!”

Angry Police Vow To Hit Protesters Even Harder

Rank-and-file police officers angrily condemned proposals to slash £60m off their jollies, as announced in Tom Winsor’s independent review of their pay and conditions published today, and warned that they would be forced to vent their rage by hitting protesting students, trade unionists and particularly the disabled even harder than they do already.

Make their day

“For silly reasons of law and order, Britain’s police are cruelly denied the basic human right to mount public protests or go out on strike,” pointed out a spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers. “This explains our natural antipathy towards anyone who not only does have the right to protest, but has the bloody cheek to exercise it right under our noses.”

“It’s provocation, that’s what it is,” he added, “And when some lah-di-dah prick in a suit tells our lads they can forget claiming a night’s overtime just for answering a phone call, well, they’re going to be a mite peeved and ramp their already rather generous definition of ‘minimum force’ up another notch or two. It’s only human nature.”

Until their demands for continued freebies and treats are met in full, officers will be implementing the following set of on-the-spot penalties to be applied to demonstrators whose sole aim is to piss off a copper:

- For protesters standing on the edge of a moving crowd of placard-wielding lefties: ‘steely glare’ to be upgraded to ‘pointing at troublemaker, baring teeth and repeatedly slapping truncheon into palm of hand’;

- As above, but crowd is kettled: from ‘shouting “Step the fuck back now, Trotsky”’ to ‘removing offending article’s front teeth with edge of riot shield’;

- As above, but protester is unable to move: from ‘administering light taps with truncheon’ to ‘attempting ad-hoc lobotomy with truncheon and, once patient is unconscious, steel-capped boot’;

- As above, but protester is also disabled: from ‘drag sponger across cleared road’ to ‘drag sponger to nearest busy road and leave in path of oncoming bus’;

- Protester dies from injuries just to spite police: from ‘repeating stock platitude “lessons will be learned” whilst crying with the aid of an onion in court’ to ‘fitting explosive belt to corpse of deceased and planting kiddie porn on their computer’.

“I’m sure the public will be behind us 100% on this one,” said the spokesman. “In fact, the lads are all hoping people will take to the streets to show their solidarity with us.”

Wills Urged To Challenge Wicked Duke To Mortal Combat

Britain’s newspapers spoke with one voice today, urging the dashing, handsome Prince William to restore his family’s tarnished honour by throwing down the gauntlet to his evil uncle Andrew, the Duke of York, and challenging him to single combat.

Experts say this is how the duel would probably look

Despite winning public support from Cameron the fool, black-hearted Prince Andrew has recently vexed the kingdom’s ministers sorely by allying himself openly with an evil paedomancer and a Saracen princeling, blasphemously neglecting his holy mission to sell sharp-edged English ironmongery to the sultans of Araby.

“Ye natiouns yonge darling ys William yclept; / Yvil Andreue, his eem, moot he outrely bet,” proclaimed herald Geoffrey Chaucer in Ye Sonne. “With blade of Chynooke he moot smite hym somdel / And, as God ys his fere, ye trewe squier mowe preuaile.”

Tournament experts say that William is a “ful felowe”, his strength and dexterity honed to perfection by service in the forces of the Queen. However, they warned that Andrew – dextrously massaged to peak firmness by his 17-year-old squiress - will undoubtedly try to turn his bulk to his advantage, battering away at his young challenger with swingeing blows from his fearsomely-spiked ski-mace.

Scribes up and down the land have been quick to outline the potential spoils of victory, should plucky William take to the field and conquer his baleful uncle.

“Myn conseil to Wills,” suggested Mr Chaucer, “(May he take it or lete): / Maken quike fornicacioun with lusty made Kate.”

Ross Kemp, Alex Reid, Danny Dyer and Vinnie Jones Safely Evacuated To Malta

Ross Kemp's identity is covered by the Official Secrets Act

Britain’s hardest men have been successfully rescued from Libya after their abortive diplomatic mission to the rebel forces, confirmed foreign secretary William Hague today.

The crack squad, led by heroic Lt. Ross Kemp, was ignominiously taken prisoner by Libyan rebels after being dropped head-first out of the back of a Hercules.

“With the benefit of hindsight, maybe our forces would have been able to meet up with the right people if they hadn’t been driven into the hard Libyan soil like angry nails,” opined Mr Hague, “But Lt. Kemp and his men made an operational decision after they all agreed that parachutes were gay.”

Details are scarce, but Libyan sources claim that Lt Kemp, Sgt. Reid and Trooper Dyer were escorting tough-talking diplomat Jones on a trade mission to make the rebels an offer they couldn’t refuse, namely a BOGOF deal on anti-tank missiles.

“Alex Reid’s legs would have been flailing uselessly as he struggled to kickbox his head and shoulders out of the stony ground of North Africa,” said an unnamed military source, “And plucky little Danny Dyer would have been vainly trying to chew himself free, much as he chews the English language into submission. Meanwhile, Lt Kemp would have probably been slowly working himself free with the aid of his terrible prehensile eyes.”

The embarrassing failure of Britain’s legendary black ops unit contrasts sharply with its previous successes, notably the successful storming of the Iranian embassy in 1979 by Lewis Collins and Martin Shaw.

HSBC Email Servers Overloaded With Directions To Hong Kong

IT engineers are struggling today to unblock the data pipes leading into HSBC, as millions of people emailed the bank with directions showing the quickest, shortest and cheapest routes to Hong Kong after the corporation allegedly threatened to move its headquarters from London.

Don't bother about the 'Inbound' part, you won't be needing it

The bank’s board of directors is now backpedalling furiously, claiming that “no decision whatsoever” has yet been made after shareholders told the Sunday Telegraph that a move was “more than likely”.

HSBC has recently hit out at chancellor George Osborne’s plans to levy a tiny proportion of the bank’s massive profits, which tripled to £12bn last year.

“London is ideally positioned as an international financial centre, what with its easily-distracted regulators, the splendid laxity with which corporate taxation is enforced and the superb generosity of the UK government in bankrupting the entire country for our sole benefit, and we have been clear that it is our preference to remain headquartered here for as long as we can continue to get away with it,” said an HSBC spokesman. “However, if it really starts to look like the party’s over, I suppose we might consider inflicting the benefits of our financial acumen on China once again.”

Meanwhile, an inscrutable spokesman for the Chinese government told reporters: “Ancient Chinese proverb say: When you are poor, neighbours close by will not come; once you become rich, you'll be surprised by visits from ‘relatives’ from afar.”