News of the News

WEST PEER, Skidrow-On-Sea, Tuesday (NNN) — Gordon Brown has given a rousing speech at the Labour conference promising the loyal Party members exciting new policies, a Labour victory and other unearthly and supernatural manifestations.

The carefully-vetted Party members, who had been checked for rotten tomatoes and cabbages at the door, spontaneously applauded for five minutes after each sentence, under the loving but watchful eye of Lord Mandelson, who spent the speech idly toying with the safety catch of a laser disintegrator that was trained upon the crowd. Mr Brown undertook that:

• Bankers will be asked very nicely not to pay themselves too much of the taxpayer’s money, or at least to do it quietly.

• Identity cards will be only slightly mandatory, and hardly absolutely required for doing anything whatsoever at all, really. Honest. Smiley faces will be put on all CCTV cameras to cheer up the populace. “Think of them as a loving elder sibling, looking out for your welfare.”
• Teenage mothers will be sent to Re-Education and Enlightenment Camps as a gateway to a network of Productivity Homes, where they can be inculcated with the true British spirit.
• ASBOs will be strictly enforced by the same team responsible for bankers’ bonuses and teenage mothers.
• J. K. Rowling will write a second series of Harry Potter books to revive the British economy. “EDS Capita Goatse have kindly offered to take on the support contract for this work. Apparently they have a very talented fellow called Kevin J. Anderson on the task already.” Kings Cross Station will be completely remodelled to match its depiction in the films.
• The venomous radioactive fanged bats, rotting zombie vultures crying “Nevermore!” and demonic naked sirens swooping around the room apparently tearing bodies apart and blinking in and out of existence are mere Tory propaganda attempting to wear our spirits down.
• Labour will soundly defeat the Liberal Democrats to become the next Opposition.

An election manual, Protect and Survive, was circulated to all members, including useful advice such as “duck and cover.”

“Now is not the time to give in, but to reach inside ourselves for the strength of our convictions!” he finished, at which point Lord Mandelson stopped the speech and led Mr Brown off the stage before he could actually attempt to put his hand down his own throat.

Lord Mandelson indicated the party’s outrage with the unspeakable rudeness of Andrew Marr’s earlier questions as to whether Mr Brown was on medication. “The implication that Gordon’s deeply sincere words were due to the influence of stupendous quantities of powerful hallucinogens lends entirely undue credence to the outrageous fabrications of right-wing bloggers,” said Lord Mandelson. “He’s actually just like that naturally.”

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DACRE, Moron Piers, Tuesday (NNN) — Associated Newspapers today suspended all injections of scaremongering bollocks after a reader seemed to die of stupidity hours after reading the Daily Mail.

Boris Busybody, 77 (IQ), of East Cheam, was found dead in his armchair after reading the UK Daily Mail’s campaign against cervical cancer vaccines and the Irish Daily Mail’s campaign for them in the same hour. “The doctor said his brain function had ceased six months before,” said his grieving wife Brenda, “shortly before he started getting the Mail home delivered. It was about then he started smelling funny, too. But only yesterday he was talking about asylum-seeking Poles and house prices!”

Critics of the Daily Mail have said it will encourage promiscuous idiocy, with reports of outbreaks of Richard Littlejohn. “Big Publishing is abusing our grandparents for memetic experiments. It’s all about money for them. A hundred-year-old criminal enterprise targeting our loved ones!”

Associated Newspapers has refused to say whether it would still allow tens of thousands of grumpy old gits across the country to receive the paper in the months ahead. But there were calls for the entire Daily Mail distribution programme to be suspended in the interests of sanity and good taste.

A number of Busybody’s mates down the pub have reported similar side-effects after our reporter paid them for their kind participation in this story.

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TOO FAR DOWN UNDER, Marketers At Work, Saturday (NNN) — In the quarter-final ad break of the Australian Football League grand final, Kraft has revealed the winning entry in the competition to name its new spreadable Vegemite cream cheese mix: Axle Grease Shit 2.0.

The winning name was submitted by Dean Robbins, 27, of 129 Cowle Street, West Perth, Western Australia 6005. “What? Won? Fuck off. Really? Oh Jesus. I just thought it was funny. Look, we were really fuckin’ stoned, right? The big jars make great bongs. It gets really dull in Perth. Just don’t print my name or where I live, all right?”

Acclaim for the new name has been universal. “Lean customer engagement value justification social media benchmarking personalized interconnected sincere voice user-directed market identity,” said Kraft marketing marketer Simon Talbot. “Strategic promotainment visibility ‘wow’-factor network actionable content optimisation wiki analytics B2E brandstorming corporate DNA semantic mapping please dear Lord stop me before I kill again Obama effect synergy ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn research embedding. We even have the theme song:”

I said, do you spikka my language?
He just smiled and chundered Axle Grease Shit 2.0 all over me.

Colin Hay from Men At Work has reprised his most famous song for the commercial, but did want it noted that it was only because he was desperate for the cash and that he would be ritually killing himself immediately after the recording. “I might throw myself into a vat of Axle Grease Shit 2.0. There’s nothing like it!™”

Later ads have licenced an old Shell Oil jingle:

When the going’s hard
Don’t retard
Remember your lubrication.

“Actually, I might wait for Axle Grease Shit 2.0.1,” said Hay. “Dot-zero releases never work right.”

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CASHIER’S DESK, Parliament.co.uk, Friday (NNN) — Conservatives indicated disquiet today with a candidate who was not working as a lobbyist with a public relations firm on the side.

With its new emphasis on the necessity of more efficient government in these straitened times, the party has 140 prospective Tory candidates likely to be elected who work as lobbyists, many having started in the job after their selection. “Greater transparency is needed to help ensure high standards in public life,” said David Cameron, himself a former public relations person. “So we’ll be making a standard price list openly available.”

When so much of the Conservative manifesto remains unwritten, many seek to shape it. But so many Tory candidates working in PR poses a particularly awkward problem for Mr Cameron. “Public relations people aren’t noted for coherent thought, ability to write in a way that doesn’t immediately hit spam filters or, indeed, just not making you want to strangle them,” he said today. “That said, I do believe we could run a dog turd in a suit and tie against Labour and win. So we’re running several.”

Gordon Brown said this was typical of the “Bullingdonian running dogs” of the Conservative Party. “People want deep knowledge and appreciate honesty. It’s not all a shiny smiling face and telly sincerity. Just look at my ratings against those of Cameron or Tony Blair … arse.”

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YESLER WAY, Seattle, Friday (NNGadget) — Office supply company Microsoft has reassured consumers and industry analysts that its decline will continue with the new video on how to run a Windows 7 house party, whose “viral” nature goes beyond “herpes” or “swine flu” to “SARS.”

Originally thought to be a devastating satirical spoof before being confirmed as genuine, the video features Stepford wives and husbands reading lines off the autocues in each others’ blank eyes on how to hold a party. The digital clock on the cooker in the background jumps around at random. The black guy and the MILF go off to fuck. Finally, everyone drinks the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid and looks forward to being one with Steve Jobs in the next world, before discovering that they have been judged unworthy and will spend eternity with Steve Ballmer instead.

The video was produced by the same team that advertised Vista with comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, working again with abnormal psychology researchers from the University of Washington. “Count the headlines!” shouted one of the marketing department’s several thousand monkeys with video cameras. “Count the YouTube views! It’s clear that my work gets the brand out, and if I don’t get appropriate compensation in my annual review I’ll be suing.” The Polish version of the video features a white face crudely cut-and-pasted over the black guy’s head.

“Windows 7 was getting great reviews,” said completely independent ZDnet marketing marketer Mary Jo Enderle, “even the geeks loved the preview versions, everyone was amazed that Microsoft appeared to have successfully grown past the Vista disaster. But the mind-sodomising cluelessness of thinking this video was actually a good idea has firmly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, blessed Windows 7 with the stench of death, confirmed that it really is just Vista with a coat of paint and set everyone’s mind at rest.

“That’s why my column this week talks about all the great stuff coming in Windows 8. Windows 8, that’s the one to beat! It’ll work on netbooks! It’ll be secure! It’ll have a database filesystem! Snow Leopard can’t touch it! Businesses should definitely move from XP!”

Microsoft has previously shown its deft ability to drop the ball two yards from the end of the field with the XBox 360, in which a powerful and popular game console was manufactured so shoddily that over 50% of machines turned out defective, and the Zune, in which an MP3 player of decent hardware capabilities at a good price point was crippled with bad firmware and unusable software and sold in a package the color of baby shit. “In a stroke of genius, they put in wifi but not a web browser, so the iPod Touch could steal their thunder six months later. You don’t get brilliance like that for free.”

The new, abbreviated Windows 7 house party instructions have been sent to marketing: “Here is a Windows 7 DVD. Here is a bottle of vodka. Here is a gun with one bullet.”

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HECK, Pennsylvania, Friday (NNN) — Leaders of the world’s biggest economies have announced that they have won the financial crisis fight. “It worked,” declared the Group of 20, “and will keep us in power long enough.”

The April G20 meeting declared that the world economy was “facing its greatest challenge in our generation. We must do whatever it takes to shore up the system that has worked so well for our donors and very good friends. And get re-elected.”

Today’s draft statement says that “our forceful response helped stop the dangerous, sharp decline in our credibility and that of the financial markets. The people are still living under bridges and eating boiled shoe leather, but they think we’ve got a plan to get them out of it. God bless ’em and their cute little dreams!”

But there is much to be done. “A sense of normalcy should not lead to complacency. There are 2010 mid-terms to think of as well as the 2012 Presidential election.”

The programme is expected to continue. “As we face the current global and economic crisis, the G20 has proven its effectiveness and usefulness by bringing together leaders of both developed and developing countries in the quest to save their own skins. Gordon’s still totally screwed, of course.”

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THE NIGHT GARDEN, Television Outskirts, Thursday (NNeebies) — Parents’ welfare groups begged for mercy as the full horror of Justin Fletcher’s new CBeebies show Gigglebiz became apparent.

“It’s vitally important,” said Mr Fletcher, recipient of an MBE for services to children’s broadcasting, “that I use the full range of my ability as an actor — funny accents, pantomime drag and more funny accents — to educate and enlighten the children of Britain to their very first encounters with tired comedy tropes and decades-old clichés. I’ve also notified the BBC Trust that I’m fine with CBeebies being renamed the Justin Fletcher Network. And a knighthood next January.”

Forthcoming shows include:

• Charlie and Justin — with Charlie (Mark Thompson) patiently putting up with the incessant babbling of his high-rating sister.
• Tumblemory — in which Justin does his bad Scottish accent in six different wigs.
• In The Night Justin — in which Justin runs around with a red blanket and sproingy hair shouting through a megaphone that it’s time for bed. The original title, In The Night Tumble, would have led to the show being rated N for “nightmare fuel.”
• Waybuloo — “I’m sorry,” said Mr Fletcher, “even I can’t take enough drugs for this one.”

The dangerous expansion of Britain’s arsenal of intercontinental ballistic Justin Fletcher shows was made possible by the revelation that middle-aged suburban fathers are not covered by the provisions of the Geneva Convention. “As if Cerrie wasn’t bad enough. The bargain is, we put up with having this crap on all day, you give us eye candy. No, it’s not the gimp hand, that’s fine, it’s that fucking grin. What happened to Pui? At least we have her old topless shots. Lesbian punks wahey! I’ll put up with Cerrie for some gimp-on-girl action. Deal?”

Attempts to wrench toddlers away from the screen were futile, resulting only in the Makaton for “my cult masters will wreak their revenge upon your puny race.”

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ABBEY NORMAL, London Lite, Wednesday (N! News) — Major British recording artists will meet to try to hammer out a truce on their views on the Mandelson-Geffen “three strikes” proposal to cut off filesharers.

Radiohead, Pink Floyd and Blur have said the proposals are unworkable and will only alienate people. However, Lily Allen has come out strongly in favour of the proposals, saying that “the fackin’ slags need a good fackin’ kickin’. It’s fine for the rich fackers, but it’s all a bit of a rum do for the starving artistes like me, what? Er, I mean, fack the fackin’ fackers. Innit. Blud.” She then accidentally exposed one of her nipples.

Lily Allen came to popularity from filesharers pointing to her MySpace page. “Fackin’ fans, fackin’ fack the fackers,” she wrote in a blog post plagiarised without attribution from TechDirt. If she copies two more blog posts, or if anyone notices the mixtapes of other artists’ music on her website, her Internet will be cut off.

James Blunt has backed Ms Allen’s position strongly. Respecting his stance, filesharers across Britain have sworn never to download a James Blunt song again if they can possibly avoid it, several taking out insurance against such an event.

Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group has put forward a proposal for a small mandatory licence percentage for copyright holders, as on radio and television. “We plead with the music industry not to throw us into the mandatory licence briar patch,” said Mr Killock, “in which no-one ever buys a record again otherwise as they’ve already paid for it. Please.”

“Punk Floyd … weren’t it them what did ‘Beatlearchy In The UK’? Hippy crap,” said 14-year-old music fan KT Myspce, loading up another Lady Gaga song to play in the background from YouTube.

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DO AS YOU PLEASE, Faraway Tree, Sunday (NNN) — A three-year-old boy is the youngest known suspect in a British criminal inquiry.

“Little Johnny” Pleb, 3¼, who cannot be named, is the centre of a vast criminal enterprise in Strathclyde. He started his underworld network aged two and a half, gathering a gang of toddlers excluded from shops when their parents accidentally took them in wearing “hoodies” (a Class A drug, only available on doctor’s prescription to Olympic boxers and suicide bombers). They would whistle to signal to their daycare friends, who would rush in with the “bluds” from their “crew” and ransack all the sweets in sight. Being under the age of eight, they could not be prosecuted.

“This is a clear sign of the failure of Labour policy,” said Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling. “Broken Britain! Of course it’s broken, we’re not in power. The socialist propaganda inherent in CBeebies broadcasts such as Teletubbies and In The Night Garden manifests as festering aimlessless in our youth, bubbling up in a surge of criminality and moral decay. And Waybuloo — what in God’s name is that about? Does anyone understand that show? Including the writers? I know good childrens’ TV should look like it was produced on drugs, but that looks like it was made by an acid casualty who’d tried and failed to find Jesus. What on earth.”

“Little Johnny” Pleb is now under maximum security on the HMP Peterhead Naughty Step. “That’s life,” commented Esther Rantzen.

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SEVENTH HEAVEN, London WC2, Saturday (NNN) — The first London tourist office specifically for LGBT (which stands for “Young, White, Gay, Male and Middle-Class”) tourist needs will be opening later this year.

The idea is the brainchild of a gay bar owner, who plans to run it out of the ground floor of the bar in question. “All people of all sexual orientations, cultures and diversity should be able to come to London and know where to go to feel fully free to be their young, white, gay, male and middle-class selves. We take diversity seriously in the gay scene. And, er, B, L, T. We do serve sandwiches. Yep.”

The service will provide young white middle-class gay men of all colours, ages, gender identities and backgrounds with the important nuances of local information: which bar in Soho playing deafening techno has selfish, two-timing prick tease bastards, which bar in Soho playing deafening techno has miserable, bitchy queens and which bar in Soho playing deafening techno will leave you feeling generally depressed, fucked over and ripped off. It hopes to expand to bars in Vauxhall playing deafening techno by early next year.

“We will of course take the ‘L,’ ‘T’ and ‘B’ seriously. Lesbians are welcome in the bars as long as they don’t try to get in on Fridays or Saturdays, and those trannies are welcome provided they have the proper paperwork certifying their claimed gender. We’d happily cater for bisexuals if they existed and weren’t just fooling themselves.”

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PAGE 3, Channel 5, Sunday (NNN) — The British Association of Aesthetic and Plastic Surgeons (BOOBIES) has put out a concerned press release claiming to be about competition from overseas surgeons in an attempt to market man-boob reductions.

“Unethical clinics in other countries continue to offer obscenely superfluous surgery cheaper than we do in Britain,” said the press release, “and it remains legal for people to give them money instead of us. This is unacceptable to patient, and particularly surgeon, welfare. Also, did you know that your unsightly and disgusting man-boobs can be discreetly removed surgically?”

Shocking results include:

• 100% of clinics surveyed did not offer refunds via BUPA.

• 100% of overseas clinics failed to be based in Britain.
• 100% of overseas clinic surgeons did not also consult for the NHS.
• BOOBIES members can do you a great deal on man-boob reduction.
• Over 90% charged more than British surgeons did for equally superfluous surgery. Did we mention that bit?

“In addition,” said the press release, “we’re doing better business in man-boob reduction surgery. It is vitally necessary to patient, and, as we mentioned, surgeon, welfare to issue a piece of press release journalism advertising the availability of authentic British man-boob reductions.”

BOOBIES stressed that they offered the finest value in man-boob reductions and hardly any of them would accidentally install DD silicone inserts instead. “But if we did, it would certainly get the chicks. Probably.”

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PRIORY OF SION, All The Way To The Bank, Friday (NNN) — International best-seling author Dan Brown is in tears over the critical reception to his latest book, The Last Symbol.

“Renowned author Dan Vinci staggered through the pile of reviews,” said Mr Brown, snapping his fingers to signal one of his several oiled and naked houseboys to refill his cognac, “smelt burning flesh, and knew it was his own. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters.”

Critics have reviled Brown’s books, famed for their implausible plots, flat characters, bogus exposition and talking down to the reader. And the squillions of copies they sell.

“Vinci was heartbroken,” said Mr Brown. “The critics’ snobbish jealousy was like a splinter in his soul. A line of italics appeared in this conversation.”

The latest book deals with a Freemason conspiracy to control what appears on the review pages of major newspapers. A heroic author, Dan Vinci, attempts to break through the conspiracy through sheer force, detailed italic exposition and a battering ram made of pulp.

“It was so hard to cope with the hatred,” said Mr Brown, sobbing into his Dom Perignon and staining his bank statement with tears. “Didn’t the critics know how bad things could be? People could have been reading Jeffrey Archer.”

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WELL I NEVER, See I Told You, Friday (NNN) — Low-level shitkickers at a crappy public relations agency knowingly and with malice aforethought abusing the title “researcher” have found, on the spec sheet listing the official desired outcome for their “research,” that women — all women — are overcome by a burning desire to share gossip as soon as they hear it, particularly when plastered on the fine Chilean plonk being promoted by the agency’s client.

They will spill the beans to at least one other person within (precisely) 47 hours and 15 minutes, typically in between declaring the recipient their best mate ever and emphasising how they really should keep in touch better.

The study of 3,000 women aged between 18 and 65, some of whom were not fictional, shocked and appalled public relations staff and free newspaper journalists by openly naming the client who had paid for the puff-piece to be inserted into the paper, accompanied by a stock photo of one woman saying something into another woman’s ear while both were wearing low-cut cocktail dresses and leaning slightly forward to emphasise eye-catching cleavage.

Michael Cox, seller of a cheap petrol-flavoured substance apparently intended for near-human consumption which occasionally comes with a plastic cork instead of a screw-top, said: “It’s official — disgusting drunken slatternly trollops can’t keep secrets, as any reader of [INSERT NEWSPAPER NAME HERE] would realise about the subhuman distaff species after their daily commuter-time scientific revelation concerning female inferiority.

“We were really keen to find out with this survey how many secrets people are told, particularly after a refreshing glass or six of our unsurpassed products. No matter how precious the information, it’s often out in the public domain within 48 hours. Thankfully they’re usually too pissed to remember it the next morning when they’re cleaning their own puke out of their knickers. Filthy fucking whores, the lot of them.”

Men were adjudged vastly more able to keep a secret than women, mostly by virtue of not knowing what constituted one and not caring.

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MONDAY MORNING, In A Human Face Forever, Monday (NNGadget) — Millions of British workers are to be made redundant as companies install robotic Facebook readers, with F5-clicking robot arms, in the workplace to save human time interacting with social networks.

“Computers are in the workplace to improve our economic efficiency,” said killjoy researcher Chris MacKenzie. “We thought companies would really go for something that would give an actual reason to lay off complete wastes of space without all that tedious waiting for them to post their tits or publicly slag off their boss.”

Additional functionality includes posting to Twitter through that page someone made that looks like a spreadsheet and looking up the anatomy photos on Wikipedia so IT won’t flag it trying to go to porn sites at work.

“The next model is showing great promise — it talks about football and last night’s telly in the breakroom with the other computers, automatically drinks tea and never tells Facilties about the tea bags running out, and nips off to the bogs for a sly tug over porn on its iPhone when things are quiet. And do you think you’ll get a drop of work out of it on Friday afternoon after it’s been down the pub drowning its peripherals with the other ’bots? I don’t bloody think so.”

The only barrier to adoption may be the threat of redundancy for large swathes of senior management should the software be adapted to 19″ Sony Vaio laptops. However, many workers who actually work at work were clamouring for a version that would automatically translate scientific papers from English to Faeces-Flinging Monkey and back and find funny videos on YouTube, thus enabling it to both write and read Metro and London Lite and saving everyone else the trouble.

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OVER 60 MILLION GOT SERVED, Just Over The Border, Wednesday (NNN) — Biotechnology companies banking on a severe swine flu pandemic were shocked this week when US health officials approved four H1N1 vaccines, triggering a selloff in the sector.

“This is outrageous fiscal irresponsibility from the Democrat Party,” said analyst Brian Adams. “A lot of these companies have basically been trading on pandemic concerns. How can the United States possibly lead in the biotech revolution without serious damage from the pandemic? They’re destroying business value!”

The World Health Organization said it could infect as many as one-third of the world’s population, or 2 billion people. “Most of these are in the Third World, of course. If they got all their drugs cheap — or, God forbid, free — that would cut our gross takings by as much as five percent. Just what the hell do they think they’re doing in there? We’ve spent quite enough time and money on onerous intellectual monopoly laws. That money is our right as creative individuals, as the true creators of objective value!”

Businesses in the US will give the swine flu vaccine to their workers, on an “as needed” basis — those being the ones whose insurance they are paying for. “At least the illegals won’t get health care, so they’ll still be a good breeding ground for new and profitable bugs. Thank God.”

Adams said there was still a chance that H1N1 would mutate, rendering vaccines less effective. “Failing that, we’ll just have to see what we can do to push it along. You didn’t write that down? Good, good.”

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COLORING SECTION, Bush Presidential Library, Monday (NNN) — President George W. Bush’s former speechwriter Matt Latimer reveals all in a new book, Speech-Less: Tales of a White House Apologist, about what George W. Bush was really like in power.

“His perception and ability were truly amazing,” said Latimer. “He got so much stuff so right:”

• Sarah Palin, August 2008: “She’s not remotely prepared. I bet you she’ll mess up the VP debate, scare people stupid, lose us the election and then spring a weird and embarrassing surprise resignation on us six months later.”

• Hilary Clinton, January 2008: “She won’t get the nomination. That Obama guy from Chicago will. But he’ll give her and Bill good jobs to make up for it if he gets in.”
• Hank Paulson, May 2006: “You sure we should have him in Treasury? He’s good, but if there’s a real crisis he’ll help his Goldman Sachs buds along and I bet he can’t wait to screw Lehman Brothers over.”
• Kanye West, February 2004, playing his advance copy of The College Dropout: “I’m really happy for him, I’ll let him finish, but Melle Mel was one of the best rappers of all time. One of the best rappers of all time!”
• Osama bin Laden, August 2001: “Hey, the bin Ladens are old family friends. But that Osama. Man, I was never sure about him. Weird guy. We should keep an eye on him.”

The Bush administration was famously fixated on loyalty and message control, and past tell-alls have been severely critical of Mr Bush and his team. “But I haven’t got a bad word to say,” said Mr Latimer. “Not one. And it’s absolutely not the case that Karl Rove called at three in the morning to discuss my entire family and where they live, and it certainly isn’t true that Dick Cheney called at four in the morning offering to take me hunting with him. Absolutely not.”

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WHAT’S ON THE SLAB, Steampunk Seattle, Monday (NNGadget) — Microsoft is improving its stratospherically successful “decision engine,” Bob Hope, with a feature that allows you to “visual search” on “web” “sites.”

“This is what happens at the cutting edge of research, y’know,” said marketing marketer Yusuf Mehdi at the Tech Crunch 50 conference yesterday. “You can use Microsoft Search™ to ’search’ for any page on the Information Superhighway! And it’s really quite amazing what’s out there. Man. That’s actually our slogan — ‘Microsoft Search™: It’s Really Quite Amazing What’s Out There. Man.’”

The “search” feature is part of technology acquired in the deal with Yahoo! “We bought this fantastic thing they were working on. It’s a directory of links to web pages. People put stuff into classifications. You can ‘crowd-source’ it, you know! You visualise what you’re looking for, type it in words and this stuff shows up. Amazing! I don’t know how anyone never thought of it before. We have about fifty precomputed ’searches’ in there at the moment, with more to come. Windows 7! The ‘wow’ starts now! You know, sometimes I wonder how people even managed to use computers before Windows 7.”

Search™ requires installing Microsoft Silverlight, .NET 3.5, the latest service packs and Windows Genuine Advantage. Office 2007 is also recommended. It runs best in Internet Explorer 8 on a Windows 7 computer. “We don’t see how Goog— that other company can possibly compete. Theirs doesn’t use anything extra. How the hell are you supposed to get people hooked like that? They just don’t have a business model.”

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BLETCHEROUS PARK, Milton Springsteen, Sunday (NNGadget) — Today, on Programmer’s Day — September 13th, the two hundred and fifty-sixth day of the year — it is time for deep reflection on who we are and how we reached the current state of things.

After breaking the German Enigma Machine codes during the second World War and inventing computer science as we know it, I started work on my next and greatest project: to build the ultimate politician. We would put together a force of bright and shining intellects, prominent academics of brilliance and perspicacity, but adept in the rough and tumble of practical day-to-day politics. A simulated “Max Headroom” smiling face as the frontman, and only a small amount of unearthly, unspeakable eldritch horror as the directing node behind the cluster.

It’s hard to say what I was thinking at the time. A thriving, computer-mediated economy, where machines would do the hard work and hard thinking for the benefit of all humanity. The prospect of a chancellor-bot singing “Daisy, daisy” as I removed his competence boards one by one to turn him into a Prime Minister. The sheer epic spectacle of huge mecha-politicians fighting it out with laser cannons over the smoking ruins of London. At least we got that one.

So on behalf of British technologists, and to all those who live under the CCTV’s watchful eye thanks to my work, I am now free to say: I am so very, very sorry. You deserved so much better.

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OOMPA LOOMPA VILLAGE, Silicone Valley, Friday (N! News) — Katie Price has reportedly sent Peter Andre late-night texts claiming that she is still in love with the publicity she got with him, telling him the magazine covers were her “farytaele” in one message and that “I <3 ur pblicty & wnt 1 mr chnce” in another. A third message referred to the custody battles over the pair’s paparazzi.

She sent the messages two weeks before the pair’s quickie divorce, as covered in all papers on Tuesday. The Sun ran a cover shot of Ms Price in her finest orange, the Daily Star ran an old topless shot, George Monbiot in the Guardian praised the ecological soundness of her idea-recycling (though Hadley Freeman fatuously compared her and Andre to people with actual talent) and the Economist reported on the value of ghostwritten novels, autobiographies and autobiographical novels as mass-produced commodities, with its Intelligent Life supplement detailing the advances in computerised text generation.

The news is sure to devastate Ms Price’s cagefighter side of beef Alex Reid. “There is no way she would be sending those kind of messages with Alex in the room with her,” said an unnamed source at her public relations agency, “and I doubt he’ll be pleased. Until she explains to him in grunted monosyllables and a few pokes of the cattle prod the whys and wherefores of getting on front covers.”

Meanwhile, the now-uncovered news areas of politics, health care, world news and financial news have been swooped upon by the gossip magazines. The cover of Closer features the bags under Gordon Brown’s eyes over time, while Heat features the lesbian Icelandic prime minister’s old bikini shots. Both magazines said they were continuing to turn down paparazzi shots of Tony Blair, no matter how many he sent in.

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WHITEHOUSE, Whitehall, Friday (NNN) — The Government has announced that Criminal Records Bureau checking will be extended to every resident of the UK, for the urgent protection of the children and the relief of the national budget deficit.

“Statistically, the overwhelming majority of harm visited upon children is because of a relative,” said Ed Balls, Minister for Thinking of the Children. “But admitting that’s not electorally viable, so we have to blame unnamed predators. Preferably brown ones.”

The latest stage of NonceCheck™ will lead to 11 million people needing a certification that they have not, for example, been booked by a policeman for urinating in public or being gay or something. Giving children lifts to sport will also require certification.

“If the vetting and barring scheme stops just one child ending up a victim of a paedophile, then it will be worth it,” said Mr Balls. “Every council worker in the country being able to look up every detail of your life at their convenience and a general atmosphere of paranoia are just bonuses.”

The scheme will be extended into other areas. Obtaining a bank account will first require paying £64 to the CRB to prove that you are not and have not in the past been a bank robber, with only three to six months’ delay. Going to the supermarket will require a CRB certification that you do not inflict perversions upon vegetables. Buying a computer will require a CRB certification that you have never even heard of 4chan.

Further planned innovations include requiring a CRB check for breeding, with uncertified children to be put into care, and sex to be deemed consensual only upon the filing of a CRB check before each act of intercourse.

“We fully subscribe to the doctrine of ‘innocent until proven guilty,’” said Mr Balls. “We’ve just made it mandatory for you to buy certification of your innocence in advance.”

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