Category Archives: United Kingdom

Review: Train operations deckchairs to be rearranged

WOLMAR, Beeching, Thursday (NTN) — A review has found that rail fares in Britain need to be brought down using a combination of magic beans, flying unicorns, farmyard fertiliser and, of course, cuts to services and wages.

The cost of running the network is 30% higher than other European railways. Stated reasons include the gross irresponsibility of continuing to provide wages and services, though massive and ongoing PFI subsidies to private railway operating companies for running networks into the ground was strangely not mentioned.

The report, sponsored by the previous government but to be ignored just as hard by this one, also recommends giving track maintenance back to the private companies who had done so well at Potter’s Bar and Paddington.

The railway franchise operating companies expressed concern at the report, and particularly for whether they were getting value for money from their donations to the Conservative Party. They also suggested new “capsule” carriages allowing peak-hour customers to be stacked in tubes on flat-bed trucks, with first-class passengers getting a tube to themselves.

Passenger advocacy groups gave up at this point, having worked out that sponsoring a charter helicopter flight for daily commuting was faster, cheaper and safer.

Clegg bounces back with wizard new plans for House of Lords

PARLIAMENT OF SLIGHTLY BRUISED DREAMS, Westminster, Tuesday (NTN) — The Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, has followed up his spectacular success in the alternative vote referendum with exciting reforms for the House of Lords that no-one will care about either.

Nick Clegg and crack pipeThe plan involves 300 members, 80% of whom are elected in a process involving, remarkably enough, an alternative vote, with the first vote to take place in 2015.

Mr Clegg presented his plan in such a manner as to alienate even those MPs who already thought Lords reform was a good idea, while David Cameron stood back and maintained a fixed smile of slight embarrassment for his colleague. A number of MPs, seeing their own prospects for a peerage fade away, suggested the proposal be put to death by referendum.

“All three parties backed Lords reform in their manifestos,” he said with a frustrated whine, as if manifestos had anything to do with what parties did once elected.

Mr Clegg showed some exasperation at his colleagues, and at the voters for not being educated and informed enough to care about how logical his plans were in the face of minor inconveniences such as a completely fucked economy occupying their attention.

Cameron to destroy the NHS in order to save it

OH FUCK NOT HEALTH, Bullingdon, Monday (NTN) — The Prime Minister, David Cameron, yesterday categorically denied every intention the Conservatives have had toward the NHS for the past sixty-three years.

“There will be no privatisation,” he declared, “no cherry-picking from private providers.” Other Tory dreams he denied included a US-style health insurance regime, the poor dying for lack of £200 antibiotics and A&E departments doing credit checks before treatment.

“Our changes are a logical extension of tried-and-tested policies initiated by governments of all parties in recent years,” he noted, alluding to Tony Blair’s previous attempts to sell off the NHS to American insurance companies.

Mr Cameron noted what a tremendous help the NHS had been to his own family, and that to let it carry on further beyond this apotheosis of perfection was a betrayal of its artistic potential. “Better to shoot it through the head now than let it linger on, touring into its seventies like the Rolling Stones. Let it be remembered for its best.”

The Daily Telegraph condemned Mr Cameron’s plans as hopelessly wishy-washy, noting that not publicly whipping accident victims for visiting A&E would constitute an insupportable moral hazard and make Britain excessively tempting to Eastern European people smugglers, and blaming Nick Clegg’s malign influence on Mr Cameron’s otherwise-pure Tory soul. Mr Clegg assured the press that he would agree with everything Mr Cameron suggested in a vigorous and muscular manner.

Pink Floyd sell actual bottom of barrel with scrapings

TIME, Dark side of the moan, Wednesday (N! News) — Both remaining members of Pink Floyd have announced the launch of the “Why Pink Floyd?” reissue campaign, wherein literally every tape containing a detectable grunt or squeak is pressed onto CD, SACD and 5.1-channel DVD-audio.

“This is the last chance for really nice packaging,” said drummer Nick Mason, “because even in 2011, it’s remarkable what you can charge for a physical object rather than a download. Even a FLAC. You could make the complete collection, which of course you’ll be wanting, into a ring of standing stones for the lounge. You’ll have to rebalance your speakers to compensate for the gravitational pull, of course.”

Dark Side Of The Moon will be reissued as a six-disc “Immersion” box set, disinterring the horse and hooking it to the remains of the carriage. A five-disc Wish You Were Here follows, with a seven-disc The Wall disinterring the coachman as well and arranging his bones on the remains of the carriage in a humorous fashion. And yet another best-of to follow.

In going through material for the additional CDs and DVDs, Mason found himself drawn to the tracks that emerged “from the very back of the cupboard,” material that is as far from marketable as possible except that it can just about legitimately be branded “Pink Floyd” and fills out a stupidly bloated box set nicely.

There are no plans for David Gilmour and Roger Waters to work further on music together, although Mason says conversations about money seem to go well.

John Lydon noted that these releases reiterated the essential argument in favour of punk rock much better than any mere words could, while glossing over the five times so far he has repackaged the exact same recordings from Never Mind The Bollocks.

Coffee cure found for Daily Mail readership

Scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have discovered that five cups of coffee a day can halve the risk of breast cancer in post-menopausal women, and have recommended the practice to the Daily Mail.

The study notes that the article the Mail ran was the usual fill-in-the-blanks cancer article, but that subscriptions were dropping off at a most gratifying rate, most from heart attacks, several from the strokes the Mail had written about coffee causing a few days earlier, and a few from spouting random rambling bigotry so fast their dentures melted.

People whose parents not only read the Mail but talk about it were shown to have a 57 per cent reduced risk of developing aneurysms from an excess of poisonous wretchedness.

Study co-author Per Hal has noted there is often conflicting information about the beneficial health effects of coffee. “However, the nagging old bat upstairs who gets her Daily Mail flown in every day and condemns me as a ‘foreigner’ and asks why I speak English with such a funny accent has been remarkably quiet of late. I wonder why that is. Not very hard, though.”

Tories rescue economy from workers’ “rights”

PRODUCTIVITY HOME, London EC1, Wednesday (NTN) — The Chancellor, George Osborne, will be “streamlining” employment regulation to revive the economy, having discovered that the recession was all the fault of the workers, rather than, e.g., the bankers.

New Waver’s office desk card “Current employment law contains too much bureaucracy,” said Mr Osborne. “Apparently you have to fill out paperwork before firing someone!”

Consumer confidence and willingness to spend will be hugely enhanced by consumers knowing they could be fired at five minutes’ notice for any reason or none. “Senior management are consumers too, you know.”

“Workplace relationships have changed dramatically over the last decade,” said the Confederation of British Industry, “with employees having become much more accustomed to eating shit for a living. It’s time the law reflected our donations to the Tories.”

With the abolition of the retirement age, workers will no longer require pensions, having been given the completely free choice, as empowered and independent participants in society, to keep slogging away until six months past the point of actual death.

The Liberal Democrats stressed that they would moderate the proposals in a “muscular and visible” manner, strictly rationing the number of children to become chimney sweeps to a mere 95% of Tory proposals.

Labour said the proposals would make working life less secure, but somehow having Ed Miliband plead the workers’ case didn’t give anyone a sense of reassurance.

Super-injunctions “your best publicity value”

WEB 0.1, Cyberspice, Monday (NTN) — Several tedious Z-list celebrities have demanded Twitter user @injunctionsuper post details of their tawdry and squalid lives too.

Danielle Lloyd[REDACTED] tweeted: “Rumur that I hv super-injunction preventing publication of ‘intimate’ photos of me n my bank account. NOT TRUE! Also, tits. FER FUXAKE PLS RT”

The revelation that decent British people can read things on Internet services that aren’t even based in the UK has left celebrities and politicians shocked, shocked that people actually have ways of gaining information that aren’t filtered through the hamstrung UK print press. “Clearly,” said minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries Ed Vaizey, “we need to protect our valuable pop music and football industries with a Great Firewall of Britain without delay.”

“In the modern world of the Internet, the secret or super-injunction may no longer be an effective tool in the administration of justice,” said BBC legal correspondent Clive Coleman, in an attempt on the world record for fatuity.

“We tried to bugger the Internet last year,” said Peter Mandelson, “but did you listen?”

A spokesman for Wikipedia suggested that journalists looking for space-filler stories just fuck off until August as usual.

Sex and coffee make strokes “the new cancer”

GOLDACRE, Moron Piers, Friday (NTN) — New results showing strokes could be caused by coffee, sex or blowing your nose were hailed by the tabloid media as the “new cancer.”

The study on 250 patients identified eight risk factors linked to bleeding on the brain: sex, coffee, nose-blowing, Nick Clegg, Tories, mind-buggering stupidity, the Daily Mail and being related to its readers.

Associated Newspapers have long worried at the decline in the market for things that could possibly cause cancer. Scare stories on strokes — starting at everyday things and progressing to everything — could make up the difference.

“For the general population our findings on strokes do not apply,” said the original researcher, Dr Monique Vlak, though that bit was inexplicably left out of any of the newspaper reports.

The Mail is now seeking out researchers at second-string universities in need of publicity for a mutually advantageous relationship establishing that strokes can be caused by homosexuals, swan-eating Eastern Europeans, declines in house prices and not buying the Daily Mail.

They feel their position is particularly strong with Richard Littlejohn on hand to give their readers’ brains a taste of what might befall them.

Ubuntu Vista 11.04 defies expectations

THAWTELESS, Star City, Monday (NNGadget) — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release of Ubuntu 11.04, “Venereal Vista,” based on the Unity Vista desktop, which only 5 out of 11 first-time users managed to crash in final testing two weeks ago.

Ubuntu Desktop BacksidesUnity is Canonical’s response to the GNOME 3 shell, which uses 1 gigabyte of RAM and four processor cores to exquisitely render a single button in the centre of the screen in beautifully anti-aliased text; when pressed, GNOME tells the user to switch off the computer and do something useful with their life, such as showering.

“This was just not up to the user expectations of Canonical’s vision of the desktop,” said Mark Shuttleworth, from his castle high on a crag in West London. “So we added a ‘minimise’ button too.”

Design is at the centre of Shuttleworth’s roadmap for Unity. “I woke up one day and thought, ‘Gosh, I’d really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I’m using a locked-down three-year-old half-smart phone through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can’t think of a better user experience.’ We’re not quite there yet, but this gets Unity a lot of the way.”

Shuttleworth foresees an exciting future for Linux for the general Internet user. “It’ll be a whole world of Linux devices, which millions of people will use all the time, everywhere! Of course, at the moment those are called ‘phones’ and run Android.”

Ed Miliband threatens to tell Scotland’s mum on it

MILISECOND, Hollyshite, Thursday (NTN) — Labour leader Ed Miliband has warned that Labour is “heading for disaster” if Alex Salmond and the SNP continue their charge towards victory in next week’s elections.

“The SNP will use a victory in Holyrood to press for Scottish independence, threaten the union, cause plagues of frogs and make everything just horrid,” said Mr Miliband. “The stakes are crucial for the whole United Kingdom, particularly the bit with a red rose logo.”

He denied Labour’s campaign was inept and slipshod. “I would characterise it as a good campaign in every possible regard, except the bit where people want to vote for us. Obviously we need better people.”

Addressing an audience at a question-and-answer session in Portobello, Mr Miliband told them their votes could make the difference between a Labour victory or an SNP victory, but stopped when the audience started laughing and cheering.

Alex Salmond’s campaign has revolved around promises of a Scottish economic revival, with the possibility of an economy based on oil, fish or perhaps magic beans. “If we play our cards right,” he said, “we could be the next Iceland! Er, don’t broadcast that bit.”