Druids Out In Force For Solstice Celebrations

A long-dormant colony of druids surprised revellers at Stonehenge at dawn this morning, stepping out of the tree trunks within which they had secreted themselves two thousand years ago and slaughtering everybody in sight.

"Fuuuckin' 'ell," whispered a man in a particularly silly Andean hat as he trembled in a ditch - just an innocent partygoer who only moments ago had been randomly plucking strings on some kind of balalaika. "I thought it was all like wow, look at the sun coming up, that's sooo amazing, and the sky's like red and blue at the same time, which was like rilly awesome. Then these mistletoe-covered maniacs appeared out of like nowhere and started laying into us with sickles. That was like sooo uncool."

He then screamed over an ominous dry rustling, and the line went dead.

An estimated 36,500 solstice-watchers are believed to have either been slashed to ribbons where they danced, or ritually carved to death on the blood-soaked sarsens of Stonehenge.

As he mourned the loss of his entire Time Team, who had been slaughtered on homebrew even before they were slaughtered for real, a shaken Tony Robinson said that a bloodbath was bound to happen sooner or later.

"What these raddled old hippies and middle-class students don't realise is that all that stuff about white-bearded chaps in pointy hats is a load of cobblers, largely invented by Victorian romantics," he said. "The simple fact of the matter is that the horrified Romans went to great lengths to wipe the druids and their sickening lust for human sacrifice from the face of the earth forever - and it's not like they were exactly a bunch of fainting namby-pambies themselves, if you were holding a competition for bloodthirsty public slaughter."

"Frankly, if the Roman legions were quaking in their boots at the thought of what the druids were getting up to, we should probably be thanking them for making Britain a safe place to bring your children up in, without some nutter who thinks he's a shrub snatching them from your arms and flaying them alive just for the hell of it," he added.

TV's leading high-speed archaeologist went on to suggest that the record numbers attending this year's solstice - tragically boosted by the date falling on a weekend - may have created sufficient psychic energy to awaken the murderous druids from their bark-encased refuges.

Armoured units of the British army - who had been exercising on nearby Salisbury Plain - were swiftly deployed with flamethrowers and napalm-filled shells to deal with the deadly druid threat, and soon Stonehenge's blackened stones bore mute testimony to the charred remnants of an evil death cult from the dawn of recorded history.

A punitive expedition is expected to be mounted against the Welsh National Eisteddfod in six weeks' time.

Newspapers Relinquish Last Vestiges of Grip on Reality

Claims in the Sun that Atlantis has finally been found, thanks to pictures posted on Google Earth, have been wearily dismissed by Google.

"The reason the scans in question show criss-crossing lines is because the boats that made them travel in criss-crossing lines," said a spokesperson, speaking very slowly for the benefit of hard-of-thinking journalists.

The Sun claimed that the grid pattern was a clear indication of modern urban planning, and that the area off the coast of West Africa was one believed by Atlantis experts to be a likely site for the mythical lost island.

"Sorry to piss on your fireworks, dummies," continued the spokesperson, "But every single square inch of the world's ocean floor has been claimed at some time or other as the probable location of Atlantis by these so-called experts. Speaking of which, would any of Mr Murdoch's investigative geniuses like to explain to us how the hell anyone can be an 'expert' in something that isn't there?"

Intrepid Sun reporters promptly rushed off to doorstep Plato and demand to know why he was cruelly conning the gullible British public with blatant lies about a made-up holiday destination.

Bigfoot Strikes Again...

Experts remain sceptical of the claims of a pair of American hikers that they have discovered the body of the legendary ‘Bigmouth’ in the backwoods of northern Georgia.

Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer claim that the body, which they have stored in a freezer, is the mortal remains of the famous ape-like creature of popular myth. Despite widespread US media coverage, however, experts were queueing up to pour cold water on the pair’s story.

“I think the pictures cast grave doubts on their claim,” said Jeffery Meldrum, professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University. “It just looks like a costume with some fake guts thrown on for effect. In that respect, it does indeed resemble ‘Bigmouth’ – or President George W Bush, as he is also known. However, the real President Bush is alive and well and loping round the White House even as we speak, eating a banana.”