All posts by David Gerard

Health, United Kingdom

NHS budget in parking-led recovery

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HOLDING PEN, Knacker’s Yard, Sunday (NTN) — The government has carefully balanced the NHS budget using parking fees. “The NHS remains free at the point of contact,” said health minister Simon Burns. “But we didn’t say anything about getting to the point of contact.”

In 2009, Labour health secretary Andy Burnham promised to scrap the fees. He also promised to eliminate MRSA, help alleviate the symptoms of cancer with regular use, fit anyone who asked with new robot limbs and a forehead-mounted laser cannon, square the circle and make Labour sound reelectable.

But Mr Burns said this was not a U-turn. “It’s more of a sideways shuffle, like the road sign where the car’s tracks actually cross. We practiced that manoeuvre for quite some time in opposition, so you could reap the benefit.”

NHS trusts will be able to decide individually whether to offer parking free or to continue the charges and make another £100 million that year. “I’m sure we can expect them to do the right thing.”

Mr Burns emphasised the role of the tax system in properly motivating people to health. “Parking fees are vital in keeping people away from clostridium difficile and the awful café snacks.” He also spoke of the “underappreciated” role of homeopathy in the NHS, particularly homeopathic quantities of funding.

Defence, Entertainment, Technology, United States

US military bans icky nasty game

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SLIGHT INDISPOSITION STAR, Communal States of America, Saturday (NTN) — Medal of Honor, a popular video game that lets you play as the unAmerican team, has been banned from US military bases as “insensitive.”

After moral panics, including from UK Defense Secretary Liam Fotherington-Thomas — who issued official condemnation of the game as “horrid” — US military officials decided not to stock the game in the nearly 300 base exchange shops.

“This game is disgusting and violent,” said Maj. Gen. Bruce Casella, “and gives the impression that our actions in Afghanistan involve dangerous weaponry and people getting hurt. We cannot risk such appalling propaganda reaching our lovely soldiers and their delicate psyches.”

General Casella announced a new version of America’s Army, in which US soldiers go to the fictional country of Wartornistan, and sing songs, dance to psychedelic rock and paint flowers on tanks. Usually opium poppies.

Electronic Arts, makers of Medal of Honor, responded with plans to make a version of America’s Army in which you can play either the hippies or the troops at Kent State.

Media, Religion, United Kingdom

Terry Jones burns Times paywall at Ground Zero

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DESOLATION BOULEVARDE, Whopping, Friday (Mediocre Grauniad) — Terry Jones has called off his plans to burn a copy of The Times at Ground Zero tomorrow, after the paywall caught alight for half an hour on Friday afternoon.

Rupert Murdoch as GollumJones had planned to burn The Times because, he claimed, Rupert Murdoch would not rest until he had paywalled all of Google, including the remarkably lucrative Monty Python channel on YouTube. However, he was “rethinking” his plans after approximately everyone in the whole world suggested that just because it was legal might not actually make it a very good idea.

“We have made a deal with the thirty-three journalists still trapped down in the newspaper,” he said. “They will come out and Caitlin Moran will publicly recant her idiot piece from a few months ago about what an excellent idea the paywall was and how enormously pleased she was to be stuck behind it. Oh, didn’t you read that?”

The journalists have been trapped down the shaft since the first of July, and are being dribbled readers through a straw to keep them alive and focused and make them think there’s a point to being there.

“Of course, failing a recantation there will be a paywall conflagration that reaches the skies. All those lovely theoretical readers disappearing in a cloud of soot and cement dust! But I’m sure it’ll hardly be noticed and no-one will be upset.”

The “newspaper” was an ancient form of information distribution using cellulose pulp from crunched-up trees. It was popular in the early days of Google, when users would send written requests to the company enclosing a stamped self-addressed envelope and receive a reading list to take to their library, with an advertising flyer also enclosed.

Entertainment, Europe

Plagiarism is not plagiarism, says plagiarist

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LA CARTE, Le territoire, Wednesday (Le Monde Petit) — Michel Houellebecq has angrily denounced as “incompetents” anyone noticing that large chunks of his latest novel Messieurs, démarrez vos photocopieurs were directly lifted from Wikipedia.

The book, published last week, was acclaimed as a “work of genius” by the newspaper Libération. “Specifically,” it noted, “other people’s genius.”

“If these people really think that passing off other people’s work as one’s own is ‘plagiarism,'” said Mr Houellebecq, “they haven’t got the first notion of what literature is. Taking other people’s stuff and making money from it is part of my method. It’s a form of beauty, money.”

Unlike his previous books, the new one contains no attacks on Islam and no overt misogyny, though it does note that BUSH IS GAY LOLOLOL.[citation nécessaire] However, its neutrality and notability have been questioned.

“Using a big word like ‘plagiarism’ always causes some damage,” he complained. “There will now be people who think I’m the sort of person who takes other people’s work uncredited, just because I take other people’s work uncredited.”

Mr Houellebecq has angrily withdrawn from publicity for the novel to concentrate on his next original work, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

Health, United Kingdom

Junior doctors inexplicably run screaming from medical hellholes

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SHIPMAN TEACHING HOSPITAL, University of Crippen, Monday (NTNHS) — Nearly a quarter of English junior doctors drop out of their NHS training after two years of shovelling twice the shit in half the time with no guidance or funding. The government blamed Europe.

The EU Working Time Directive means that junior doctors are no longer free, as independent individuals, to work any 120 hours a week they choose, with patients reaping the full benefit of being prescribed medication by someone who is hallucinating that they are a giant psychedelic rabbit carrying a watermelon gun.

Of those who did want to continue, 22 per cent were not accepted by NHS trusts, which was obviously their own faults for not getting out there and gathering one-on-one mentoring while they wandered deserted hospital corridors at 3am.

The British Medical Association said the issue was high workloads and no consultants available to supervise. The government said there was no evidence of this, because they had taken care not to gather it.

“It’s inexplicable that so many people who have wanted to be doctors since they were three get into a hospital after years of study and quit, just because they discover that every individual moment of the job is shit and the best they can look forward to is being glorified technical support and telling sick people they’re fat for the rest of their lives, and spending the other two-thirds of their time covering someone’s arse or doing paperwork,” said the Department of Health. “It’s definitely Brussels at fault.

“But I can assure you that there will be no return to tired doctors working excessive hours. Any doctor you encounter will be fully alert from working only the proper hours allowed by law, should you ever be so lucky as to find one.”

Religion, Science, United Kingdom

Hawking’s statement of the bloody obvious betrays lack of theological understanding

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THE RUPTURE, Tower of Art, Friday (NotScientist) — Stephen Hawking’s claims that no God was required to create the Earth six thousand years ago, and moreover that it is round, are trivially ignorant and heretical.

Large Hardon Black HoleHe betrays the shallowness of his theological understanding with the sentence: “Look, you drooling idiots, we can see across the universe and smaller than atoms, revealing unimaginable wonder and beauty over billions of years. Your superstitions have been irrelevant to actual science that works for four centuries now, and are a jawdropping waste of time for anyone with greater mental acuity than a rock. Haven’t you some altar boys to rape?” The logical ambiguity of this claim is trivially obvious: he fails to make clear what he means by the word “time” — deep time? Lunch time? Time, gentlemen? Such sloppy thinking reveals the essential frivolity of his notions and clearly demonstrates the flat nature of the Earth and that it is six thousand years old. He has also completely failed to specify the precise variety of rock in question.

Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explanation — that would be disprovable and might embarrass us later. Belief in God is belief in an intelligent living agent which everything depends on even though it’s undetectable. Which just goes to show how clever God is. He can make 2+2=5 and get away with putting advertising on the BBC as well. Thought Of The Day, don’t you know. The concept of non-overlapping magisteria clearly demonstrates that science has nothing to say about religion, and never mind that religion insists on saying things about science.

It is obvious to anyone with an idée fixe that physics claiming the universe is an entirely natural thing explainable by science is completely inadequate to satisfy the demands of upset monkeys for an answer which actually works in the real world but somehow does not conflict with their prejudices. It cannot answer why there is something rather than nothing, any more than it can explain why water makes the personal, volitional, moral decision to be wet. Also, you should come to church more. And take priests’ opinions on science seriously. And give us money. Hawking wouldn’t get away with this rubbish for a moment if the Inquisition was about, mark my words.

Politics, United Kingdom

Tony Blair confesses to bore crimes

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THE MEMORY WHOLE, London SW1A 1AA, Wednesday (NTN) — Tony Blair’s memoir, Seven Hundred Pages Of Tedious Equivocation, has caused mass outbreaks of violent ennui and destroyed the minds of the few remaining people who care.

The carnage has been truly numbing. Blair has expressed his “anguish” and “regret” at the millions who, having thought he was finally gone and they wouldn’t have to think about him or his party waddling about like a headless chicken that couldn’t really be bothered in any way whatsoever ever, ever again, had had their desire to evade his tree-killing atrocities thwarted by its serial rewriting in all newspapers, desperate to fill space in the silly season.

But he insists the 2010 publication was the right thing to do. “When I say I think about my awful book and Peter’s awful book and their consequences and their victims every day of my life, it is true; but more than that, I use that reflection to recommit to a sense of purpose in the bigger affair, a business yet unfinished: getting paid repeatedly for the same ghostwritten guff. I can’t say sorry in words; I can only hope to redeem something from the tragedy of stupefaction, something like continued public prominence and remarkably lucrative speakers’ fees.

“I deeply regret the British public’s failure to realise how right and justified I was in everything I did, all of which was absolutely correct. I am now beyond the mere expression of compassion. But you knew that.

“Also, Gordon is a moron. I know he’s a moron. Gordon is a moron. Gordon is a moron, Gordon is a moron.”

Sport, United Kingdom

England beats the colonies for once, really it does

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LARDS, Motley Cricket Club, Tuesday (NTN) — The cricket world has been rocked by suggestions that Pakistan may have deliberately thrown games and England might not actually be the geniuses of sport they consider themselves.

England captain Stuart Broad stoutly maintained that England’s victories had been every bit as much of a sporting achievement as the team claimed they had, even if the bit where the Pakistan team hadn’t bothered showing up for the match might have caused the churlish, suspicious and stunted of mind to suspect they were throwing the game.

“Believe me, the, er, throwing against us at Lord’s was of a very high standard. I don’t care if they were drop-kicking the … red … thing along the … patch between the … wooden things, and walking on their hands to get the catches. Our three-run victory is ours,” he sobbed, “and you won’t take it away, you rotter. I always believed I had a Test century in me, and now I are one.”

“The suggestion that cricket players could engage in corruption has horrified everyone,” said Professional Cricketers Association boss Angus Porter. “But people are most susceptible to bribes when they are in need. So we need to make sure the players on the field are adequately compensated.”

“Corruption must be dealt with promptly and effectively by those officiating,” said Nick Cousins of the Association of Cricket Officials. “Of course, you can’t put underpaid officials in charge of millionaire athletes and not expect problems. The umpires will, obviously, need to be adequately compensated.”

“A root and branch investigation of professional cricket is required,” said International Cricket Council chief executive Haroon Lorgat, “which will of course be costly in terms of making sure the right people are on hand to steer the process. But the best way to obtain the very highest quality of managerial effort is to ensure the executives in question are adequately compensated.”

Talk of corruption in international sport has even reached football, with Fabio Capello declining to comment on rumours that a shadowy group of businessmen called the “Football Association” had offered him substantial sums of money to cause England to break all expectations and win an international game.

Entertainment, United Kingdom

Wikileaks reveals that Snape killed Dumbledore

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WILD WEST END, Baker Street, Sunday (NTN) — The online encyclopedia Wikileaks stands accused of revealing the ending of The Mousetrap, recklessly endangering the income of Agatha Christie’s descendants.

Snape is not impressed“My grandmother always got upset if the plots of her books or plays were revealed in reviews,” said Matthew Prichard, who personally put in the years of hard-working effort one would expect it to take to accumulate the stream of income from the play when it was given to him as a ninth birthday present, “and I don’t think that a site whose purpose is supplying encyclopedic information just going and supplying encyclopedic information is any different as far as my money is concerned. They should go and get real jobs, like decent working people. But it’s not a question of money, or anything like that.”

The article on The Mousetrap reveals that Vader is Luke’s father, Rosebud was Kane’s sled, Kristin shot J.R. and Snape in turn was killed by John Seigenthaler. And something about a war in Afghanistan and shooting journalists.

The encyclopedia does, however, include a comprehensive spoiler warning, noting that they use the forward motion of a car to push it down, helping the tyres grip the road better — thus slowing the car down, rather than speeding it up. Barryboys across east London pointed out the unreliability of Wikileaks as a source and questioned the veracity of the references.

Health, United Kingdom

NHS Direct to be replaced with Internet chat sessions

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OH FUCK NOT HEALTH, It’s Grim Up Westminster, Saturday (NTN) — The NHS Direct telephone help service is to be scrapped and replaced with a recorded service, Internet chat sessions and a web page.

The 111 helpline, already in place in non-Tory parts of England, has been a “vast success” in cost-cutting, said health secretary Andrew Lansley. The service replaces a live operator telling you to ask your chemist or go to A&E, or a twenty-minute wait on hold for said operator, with a recorded message doing the same. Including the twenty-minute wait on hold.

Further innovations include live Internet chat sessions with an advanced artificial intelligence. “British computer scientists have developed a computerised artificial intelligence so advanced it gets annoyed at bad typing and spends half its time on Facebook chatting up instances of ELIZA. Truly remarkable. It’s not finished yet, of course, but we just cut all their funding so we’ll go with what we’ve got.”

Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham held that cutting funding to a famously useless non-service was “clear plans to dismantle the NHS. Leave it alone!” he cried, smearing his mascara. “You are lucky it even performed for you bastards! Anyone that has a problem with it you deal with me, because it is not well right now. Leave the NHS alone!

“Our drive for effectiveness will give a better health service to all,” said Mr Lansley, “certainly those with decent BUPA.”