‘It’s so strange,’ said head judge and holiday camp manager Tim Porter, ‘usually it gets better and better every year. This must be the first time in our eight-year history we haven’t had a statistically implausible group of nine or ten inexplicably talented divas. Frankly I find it very strange none of them have ever gone on to successful pop careers. But this year we just got a bunch of ordinary kids who sang as badly as you’d expect a bunch of kids to sing. Most of them can’t even carry a tune. I’d even have hated Minnie’s performance if she hadn’t followed that fat boy who kept forgetting the words and the tune and which way he was supposed to be facing.’

Despite her poor performance, it was decided that Minnie was still a clear winner, thanks for the most part to the atrocious standards set by her competition.

The other judge said simply, ‘it’s contests like this that remind me why I hate working in this stupid sodding place.’

They made the discovery using a machine called the Holy Smoke Chamber. A fragment of the True Cross was accelerated to 40% the speed of light and collided with a King James Bible. The 25m wide device is cooled by a constant stream of holy water.

According to Christian scientific theory, God is composed of three smaller particles called father, son and holy spirit. The experiments has been criticised by others, however, who claim that earlier work by Revelation et al suggests that recreating the son particle on earth could trigger a process known as ‘armageddon’, which potentially could wipe out Life on Earth.
andrewtaylor

The Prime Minister said in Parliament that snowmen were being lost at an alarming rate and that this was more than just a ‘face saving formula’ (although bits of coal were being provided for this as well). David Cameron lashed out at the plans, claiming that the government’s snowmen proposals were ‘all carrot and no stick’. The Liberal Democrats said that seasonal factors should be taken into consideration and perhaps we should come back to this problem in the summer. David Cameron also announced that the Conservatives may approach Raymond Briggs about setting up a ‘Snowman task-force’ to devise a workable plan for Britain’s hardworking snowmen and women.

However there were concerns that not all snowmen were deserving of emergency government support from the so-called ‘slush fund’. Some have been photographed lounging around on park benches, while others have been reported for exposing their genitals in public places. One guilty snowman claimed ‘exposing my penis like this really isn’t me. Honestly, this big thing was stuck on afterwards by a couple of schoolboys.’

andrewtaylor (one line malgor)

In the latest in a series of apparent personal data blunders, the government has been forced to admit that an Isle of Wight resident found a book containing the names and telephone numbers of hundreds of thousands of people ‘literally left on his doorstep’.

‘As soon as I found the book I knew something was wrong,’ said Michael Sexton who found the incriminating volume. ‘I started flicking through it looking for myself and my family, and it was all there. I just can’t see how something like this could have been allowed to happen. How could they know my number, my address, my postcode and everything? It’s frightening.’

Sexton fears that had the book been found by a less honest individual, they might have been able to commit identity fraud, although he admits that he isn’t sure exactly how. ‘When I realised that,’ he said, ‘I immediately resolved to contact my MP and discuss the security breach with him. Unfortunately I don’t have his phone number. Is there something where I can look them up?’

A representative of the Home Office told reporters that the information contained in the book does not constitute a leak. ‘This is the telephone directory,’ he said to the scorn of reporters. ‘The phone companies compile it and you can opt out at any stage. Everybody gets a copy. I… I don’t understand what you think has happened here.’

But Sexton is not convinced, and with the backing of the Daily Express has launched a campaign to force Gordon Brown to start an inquiry into how so much personal information came to be left on his doorstep. The campaigners have also announced that they intend to investigate the claim that a group of children recently visited his home asking for a donation of chocolate. ‘How did they know where I live? That’s what I want to know.’

Elderly residents of Manchester are reporting that they found it much easier to walk the streets yesterday evening, since the trick-or-treaters were in fact far less frightening than the same youngsters in their normal clothes.

‘It was such a relief’ reported Edna Jeffries, 76, of Whitefield. ‘I can cope with skeleton masks, devil outfits and ghost costumes. It’s the rest of the year when they lurk around with their hoods up that terrifies me.’ Other pensioners were reported to be delighted that just a handful of stale chocolate buttons seemed enough to make the muggers disperse. ‘Normally they take my purse and my keys, and then come back to the house to get the television and the bottle of sherry.’

Local residents were reportedly using this brief period of calm to stock up on supplies and shopping so as to avoid having to venture outside in the run-up to Bonfire Night, when the youngsters will be armed with projectile explosives.

In other parts of the country, police were called out to a cul de sac in Norwich where youngsters had been left confused and disorientated when a householder responded to their rhetorical question ‘Trick or Treat’ with the cryptic reply ‘Trick!’ Eleven year old Darren Hayes later told reporters: ‘I didn’t know what to say – in all my four years of trick or treating I’ve never seen anything like it. Normally people just hand over the goodies without a fuss.’ His friend, 10, agreed, adding: ‘this came completely out of left-field – we were quite simply lost for words.’

Meanwhile, parents groups took the opportunity of Halloween to reiterate their assurance to children that there were no such thing as ghosts or monsters, and that their children should not take sweets from strangers. They then dressed them up as ghosts and monsters and sent them out to knock on strangers’ doors to ask for sweets. ‘You think that’s weird’ said one Thames Valley policeman. ‘We’ve had a report come in of a Bracknell family, actually eating the flesh of a pumpkin!’

andrewtaylor, Peter74940, Quaz and The Big Yin

The current line up for guest Labour leaders are Alexander Armstrong, Boris Johnson, Clive Anderson, Jeremy Clarkson, Ann Widdecombe, Bruce Forsythe, William Hague, Anne Robinson and Mr Blobby. The initiative is expected to hand direction of party policy to a different politician or celebrity each week until the general election, after which it is hoped that a new permanent leader may have been found.

But a Liberal Democrat party spokesman claimed that Labour had stolen the idea from them. ‘We have been using a similar system since we tried out Charles Kennedy, and look where that got us. The irony is that he was actually quite good when he just stuck to going on Have I Got News For You.’

A growing number of stupid people are becoming nervous about the imminent opening of the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva, claiming that the world’s largest particle accelerator may ‘create or big black hole that will suck us all in or mess up our DNA or something’.

The LHC which is funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries will be switched on in August. It will collide opposing beams of 7 TeV protons, revealing hitherto unknown information about what the world is made of, potentially including the existence of the so-called ‘God Particle’, the Higgs boson.

‘That’s all very well…’ said one leading stupid person. ‘But I don’t like the sound of it… What if, like matter meets anti-matter and stuff, and we all flip over into an alternative dimension like in that film?’ Walter Wagner is now leading a coalition of stupid people opposed to the opening of the LHC, gathered from radio phone-ins and letters to the local newspaper. ‘I’ve heard that it could create a time vacuum, creating nuclear fission in the protein particles of our lymph nodes. Or something…’ asserted Wagner, who does not own a mobile phone in case its cancer rays give him brain AIDS.’

His Stupid Alliance has now filed a lawsuit against the scientists behind the LHC, claiming that they are about to unleash a micro-black hole, or a wave of dangerous particles called ‘strangelets’, or maybe a resonance cascade or a reality bomb, or some other overblown sciencey-sounding doomsday scenario that he’s read about on the internet or seen in a film or whatever.’

Lyn Evans of CERN has dismissed his fears as impossible, and the consensus of all credible scientists is that the collider poses no threat to mankind. Wagner, however, insists that they are all wrong, and that he knows more than them about science because he saw every episode of Star Trek up to 2003, when he learned that his television had something called a ‘cathode ray tube’ inside it, and immediately ripped out the plug and now refuses to go near it.

See also David Blaine to work in mundane job for forty five years