“And on that farm he had some er…wind?” he sings, experimentally. “On that farm he had some turbines…?”"With a whoosh-whoosh here, a whoosh-whoosh there….oh dear, it’s not right, is it?”

He jots, furiously. Wind is the least of his worries. He is also under pressure from educational reformers to replace the line “E I E I O” with the more literal “A F A R M”. “They’ve got a point,” admits Macdonald. ” But I’m still grappling with the noise problem.”

As if on cue, the peace is shattered by a cacophony of dogs, ducks, sheep and cows, as tea tray in hand, Mrs Macdonald opens the door to his famously soundproofed farmhouse. “It’s that ‘everywhere-a-quack-quack’ line that I’ve always regretted,” admits Macdonald. “Really catchy, but the rules of good husbandry mean animals should be kept separate. The dogs harass the sheep, and the cows crush the ducks. In a way modernisation, with less emphasis on animal farming, will mean less noise and chaos, but then it’s a real challenge lyrics-wise. ‘And on that farm he had some barley…’ I mean what noise can you have for barley? Everything’s just going to be whooshes, unless I can think of something. Maybe a subsidy will help me sort it out…”

“This is yet another great innovation from our Spurious Engineering department”, demanded Wolfgang Hock, Dictator of Operations. “By designing a feature that makes this leviathan slightly more economical on paper, our customers can adopt a lofty position with a clear conscience.”

The Q8 and its larger stablemate, the Audi Arabia, both feature the new bumper. Using a 9-litre engine to quickly and efficiently speed the vehicle towards the car in front, the system automatically triggers the foglights and special headlamp flashers to show when it’s working.

“The Magnetronische ecoDrücken allows our cars to travel just millimetres from the car in front with ruthless efficiency”, insisted Hock. “The flashing lights were a late addition, but we had to fit them for safety reasons. Motorists in the UK aren’t quite ready for an Audi sitting on their arse that isn’t lit up like a Christmas tree.”

Runestone Cowboy

“It turns out Radio 4′s presenters and guests between them were producing such vast quantities of smugness that they simply couldn’t pump it all out over the airwaves,” explained DEFRA spokesman Danny Coffee, who is leading efforts to uncover full details of what some are calling ‘The worst environmental crime since Bill Oddie.’

“We’re not sure how long this has been going on,” he added “It seems that it has been impossible for standard FM and DAB transmission facilities to fully disperse the levels of self-satisfaction generated by the likes of Melvyn Bragg discussing bloody Kierkegaard with a bunch of tosspot academics at nine o’clock in the morning. Something had to give.”

“Clearly BBC technicians have been trying to sluice off some of the slappable self-satisfaction, passing it onto listeners, using ploys like ‘Weekend Woman’s Hour’ and regular Front Row podcasts, but this is clearly not enough to disperse the backlog. Only last week we found 73 parts per million ‘Jenni Murray discussing alopecia’ in the Wye – there’s no way that stickelbacks and pike are gong to survive with levels like this.”

Mike Damazer, head of programming for Radio 4 has admitted that they have been dealing with “Unusually high levels of producer/presenter gratification” following the introduction of A History of the World in 100 Objects onto the schedule. “I’m sure we would all agree: the demise of a few species of inedible freshwater fish and algae is a small price to pay for us being right about everything. And by ‘right’ I mean ‘well-balanced’. It’s the same thing if you don’t think about it too much.”

After earlier methods of stopping the leak using engineering methods proved unsuccessful, BP has been forced to resort to the traditional method of using seals, penguins, pelicans and other aquatic animals to mop up the oil from the surface of the ocean using their ultra-absorbent fur or feathers.

‘We understand that the public are concerned about the oil washing ashore,’ said a BP spokesman. ‘But if we can just get enough fluffy or furry animals, we’ll be able to soak up most of it and wring it out into bottles, see? And people said this was going to be some kind of disaster.’

Thackeray

Airspace over the south of England remains closed today due to an impenetrable  low-lying sulphurous cloud of smugness hanging over the Brighton area. The cloud follows a major eruption of self-satisfaction in the early hours of last Friday morning, after the election of Britain’s first Green MP Caroline Lucas in the Brighton Pavilion constituency.

Holidaymakers planning to visit Brighton are being told to reconsider, as the cloud is said to represent a serious health hazard. ‘Travelling through Brighton has always been nightmarish,’ explains Ken Warbiton, environmental health expert. ‘The concentration of jugglers and micro-scooters often exceeds eight parts per 1,000 in the town centre. But this latest eruption outstrips anything we have seen for years; to find comparable levels of smugness you would have to go back to the premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11 in Islington, or that Banksy retrospective in Bristol.’

The Green victory is being attributed by pundits to the work of the grassroots Dinner Party Movement. But the election win has been deeply controversial, and is being roundly condemned by mainstream ‘Dinnerpartistas’ – many of whom are claiming that the movement has been infiltrated by members of the far-right-on.

‘This win is a huge embarrassment to us,’ claimed Sara Cleese, de-facto non-head of the Dinnerpartistas.  “The whole point of the Dinner Party Movement is to declare to your friends over crema catalana that you are heartily sick of all the main parties and jolly well plan to vote Green this time, not to actually do it, yah?’

Animal rights campaigners have criticised plans to cull Wombles in an attempt to stop the spread of eco-smugness across the country.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs acknowledged that previous attempts to contain the condition had been a failure. ‘Eco-smugness can strike down entire middle class families overnight,’ said a spokesman. ‘No-one wants to live in an area where your neighbours all look down on you because you put plastic bottles in your general rubbish, or shun you because you once took a perfectly re-usable three-piece-suite to the tip. This sort of awareness is all the fault of these Wombles. It’s got to be stopped.’

The cull will begin with a pilot scheme around Wimbledon, south London, which has the highest rate of Womble infestation and eco-smugness in the country. If successful, the government may launch culls of further infectious pests, such as the Teletubbies and the Tweenies. ‘Not because they spread anything,’ said DEFRA, ‘just because they’re annoying bastards’.

There were more violent scenes in Nottinghamshire today as environmental protestors campaigning for the closure of the UK’s largest coal-fired power station at Ratcliff-on-Soar received unexpected reinforcements from hundreds of Thatcherites, a group previously believed to have disbanded.

Protestors dressed in clown makeup were joined by city gents in pin-striped suits in a combined effort to bring an end to pollution, global warming, and inefficient state-run industry. Fifty people were arrested and one policeman injured when the enraged Thatcherites and eco-campaigners charged police lines, waving placards reading ‘No to climate chaos’ and ‘Scargill the monster’.

One protestor, clad in garish braces and clutching a mobile phone the size of a house-brick, told reporters ‘we’ve risen again, and this time we’ll finish what we started in the 80s – by continuing to offer a market for British coal this plant is sustaining an embarrassingly creaky and inefficient coal industry and keeping the trade union dinosaur alive. Oh, and it’s bad for the enviro-what-what, yah.’

Rapscallion ]]> http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2009/10/20/environmentalists-receive-unexpected-support-from-thatcherites-in-bid-to-close-coal-fired-power-station/feed/ 0 http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2009/02/13/human-released-into-the-wild/ http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2009/02/13/human-released-into-the-wild/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 06:00:18 +0000 red http://newsbiscuit.com/?p=10027 Has learnt to forage for nuts, berries and Fry's Turkish Delight.]]> Simon Wincroft, an office manager from Nuneaton, was today released into the wild following a moving and sombre farewell ceremony attended by a number of distinguished people and company representatives who had hitherto been fighting to keep him in captivity.

‘It finally dawned on us that try as we might to ease the plight of this poor office worker, the stress of being kept in the work environment day after day was simply getting too much for him,’ said company boss Nigel Prenderthorn. ‘It was becoming increasingly apparent that the little critter really wasn’t happy, and none of us here could sit back and watch that, so we decided it was time to set him free.’

After being transported from his Nuneaton base in the boot of an estate car with the dog guard up, Mr Wincroft was finally released at a secret location north of Uttoxeter where he will be able to roam around in over a thousand acres of mixed woodland and open countryside and will generally be free to make it up as he goes along without the oppressive restrictions of his former workplace.

The farewell ceremony was attended by the company accountants, the HR manager, and the chief executive who modestly played down suggestions that he might become something of a hero to the environmental movement. Senior politicians also attended the happy ceremony, accepting that some of their colleagues had probably added to the stress caused to Mr Wincroft, with inadequate, ill thought-out and corrupt policies at local and national level. ‘Think of all the bankers and call centres who had hounded him, all the salesman and insurance brokers trying to get money off him all the time. He won’t have to worry about that any more.’

In preparation for the big day his employers had carefully managed his behaviour, secretly encouraging him over a series of weeks to forage for nuts, berries, and Fry’s Turkish delight in the desks of the secretarial staff. Any doubts over him finding adequate shelter were dispelled when it was noted that he had spent most of the last eight weeks hiding behind piles of paper in the photocopy room and hadn’t been discovered once.

‘We hope it all goes well for him,’ said Nigel Prenderthorn, his former boss. ‘Although I worry about him, being out there all on his own without a mate. That girl Marjorie from accounts, the one who claimed I’d harassed her, she’s looked very anxious recently, worrying about her mortgage, her bills and all that. Perhaps it’s time we did the decent thing and set her free too…’