…the girls start showing off their belly buttons.

Thanks to DanAbel Flammable for this contender for horrible picture of the year

Or does he…
“Even a C student can become President of the United States.”
~ George W Bush to assembled Yale students.
C’mon dubyah. ‘C’?

As intrepid superheroes, we often spend quite a bit of time hanging aorund shopping centres (don’t ask). Recently we were in one that had large sculptures of fruit hanging from the ceiling. Irony Boy pointed to one and said “Dusty grapes!”
So I used one of the many patented Sarcasmoquip lines designed to make people laugh.
“Dusty Grapes? That’s my porn star name!”
[Well, Irony Boy laughed]

Always one to bring you news of new superheroes on the scene, Sarcasmo and Irony Boy alert you to the latest addition to the pantheon of contemporary mythological heroes: the Flying Friar, a real life 16th-century monk who now has his own comic book. Joseph of Copertino, a Franciscan priest renowned for his ability to levitate, will star in a new graphic novel, published next week in Britain and America.

The Flying Friar, by Rich Johnston and Thomas Nachlik, is based on one of the Church’s most extraordinary saints, canonised for his extreme modesty and patience, who also possessed supernatural strength and an apparent ability to fly.

St Joseph was initially an outcast, born in 1603 in a shed. He seemed to be a simpleton and was nicknamed ‘The Gaper’ because of his habit of wandering around open mouthed. He was thrown out of his first monastery after eight months because of his vacant attitude and habit of dropping crockery. Only after being admitted as a novice to a Franciscan order in Grottella did he begin to display his powers, which were witnessed by people of unchallenged integrity, according to the Vatican.

Joseph’s most spectacular feats were his ability to soar high over the chapel’s altars and, on one occasion, to help workmen to erect a Calvary Cross 36ft high by levitating himself and lifting the heavy cross “as if it were straw???. Until now he has found fame as the patron saint of pilots and air stewards, but next week The Flying Friar will arrive in comic bookshops across Britain.

Mr Johnston, a British author of graphic novels, attempted to keep his character faithful to the saint, but has embellished his adventures by creating a fictional adversary in the style of Superman’s enemy, Lex Luthor. The story involves Joseph’s struggle with Lux Luther, a fictitious childhood friend and great nephew of Martin Luther, the founder of Protestant Reformation. In the final act, Joseph must use his special powers to avert Luther’s plan to rain fiery death on Copertino, his home town.

Whether the Flying Friar will emulate Batman’s penchant for using the word ‘holy’ as a prefix to any statement of awe, has not been confirmed.

Reported in The Times, 23rd January 2006

A woman who survived brutal Nazi and Communist regimes has been killed by an unexpected assailant: a banana. 73-year-old old Australian Ivanka Perko, who escaped from Slovenia when it was still part of communist Yugoslvia, died in hospital last week in bizarre circumstances - she suffered complications after she dropped a banana on her leg.

After escaping Slovenia with nothing but the clothes on her back and a pocket full of black pepper to ward off the guard dogs, she made her home in Australia. Apparently her last words to friends and family while on her deathbed were: “I can’t believe after all this time it was a bloody banana that killed me.”

Police hunt killer

A family friend told Australian paper, The Saturday Daily Telegraph, that Ms Perko had been ill for several months with a condition that made her skin delicate and fine.

“She had tried to open a banana and dropped it,” the friend said. “The pointy end scraped down her leg and she died from complications. It was an appropriate end to a unique and fruitful life???.

Full story

Star Trek actor William Shatner has sold his kidney stone for $25,000 (£14,000) to GoldenPalace.com, an online casino, to raise money for Habitat for Humanity, a housing charity.
“This takes organ donors to a new height, to a new low, maybe. How much is a piece of me worth?” said Shatner, who passed the stone last autumn. The process is said to be excruciatingly painful, and the auction price includes the surgical stint and string used to permit passage of the stone. The whole thing gives a new resonance to the phrase ‘to boldly go’ which Shatner made famous.
The stone was so big, Shatner said, “you’d want to wear it on your finger. If you subjected it to extreme heat, it might turn out to be a diamond.”
“This is a bold new addition to our fleet,” Richard Rowe, GoldenPalace.com chief executive officer said in a statement. GoldenPalace already own a partially eaten cheese sandwich containing the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a Cheeto cheese snack in the shape of Baby Jesus and a VW Beetle once owned by Pope Benedict XVI. Now with the ‘Shatner Stone’ added to this pantheon of holy relics, it would seem the online casino has cornered the market in 20th century cultic items.
Buy more normal stuff (if you can call Star Trek things normal) related to William Shatner here.
[News source: BBC]
See what other stuff GoldenPalace spends its money on here.

So, this chap owns a parrot and one day said parrot tells him that his bird is carrying on behind his back. It sounds like a bad joke, but it happened to Leeds man, Chris Taylor. He found out about his girlfriend’s little secret when his talkative pet, Ziggy, squawked “I love you Gary”.
Suzy Collins had been meeting “Gary” for four months in the Leeds flat she shared with both Chris and Ziggy.
Chris apparently became suspicious after Ziggy croaked “Hiya Gary” when Ms Collins answered her mobile phone and because the parrot also made “smooching sounds” whenever the name Gary was mentioned on telly.
Sadly, it wasn’t just Suzy who moved out - Ziggy had to go too because he wouldn’t stop mimicking Suzy’s voice saying Gary’s name. “I wasn’t sorry to see the back of Suzy after what she did, but it really broke my heart to let Ziggy go,” said Chris. It all goes to show you can’t live with two birds at the same time.
(source: BBC)

Sick as a…

Spotted in Cardiff City centre by an eagle-eyed Welsh speaker:

If you’re an English speaker you’re told to look right, but if you’re a Welsh speaker, you’re told to look left! Wait a minute. Is this a plot to rid the world of the last few polyglot Welsh (in which case Cardiff, the most English city in Wales, probably isn’t the place to perpetrate such a foul deed), or, more likely, is this a cunning case of Welsh language fascists finding the perfect scheme to ‘accidentally’ maim the saes?
Or is it just that someone, somewhere screwed up?

New research (coincidentally by a sports bra manufacturer) says that women should wear a sports bra (really?) when they’re jogging or exercising so as not to develop “saggy” breasts.

Apparently breasts bounce in a figure-of-8 rotation, placing stress on fragile tissue ligaments, causing them to stretch. Shockingly, the study suggested that as a woman runs a mile, her breasts bounced a total of 135 metres. This seems to be an average - whether you get more bounce per ounce isn’t discussed. Further research is obviously going to have to take place, as long as there’s funding… and men who want to look at bouncing breasts all day.

Read the full story here . Never ones to miss a trick, our pals at the BBC have included a gratuitous (but nice) picture of Anna Kournikova’s cleavage too. Although, judging by the pic, she doesn’t have much to worry about in the sag department.

Glow in the dark bacon!