It has come as no surprise that this year's coveted Nobel Prize for Flaps has been awarded to Mr Michael Leverage, the current director of lids and sundry coverings at JPL. The Nobel Flap Award was initiated in 1901, since which time the Institute has done much to publicise the exciting and challenging work being done in the field of flap research and design. Previous winners have included Karl Spokken who devised the flap for the tape slot in the world's first home video recorder. And many people will also remember Brian Harris, whose precision engineering skills made the Pez dispenser a viable prospect. The contribution made by this year's winner follows in this fine tradition, and it is only right that Mr Leverage should get the recognition he deserves for his inspirational work in designing the robotic flaps for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit.
They said it couldn't be done, but professional sex worker Tracy Sludge from Essex has become Europe's first fully-licensed rotary slapper. Patent pneumatic technology means that the 32-year-old whore can now service up to twenty clients an hour, and can keep going for at least three days on a single cylinder of compressed hydrogen. Business has never been better for Tracy, who hopes to float herself on the stock exchange some time in the near future.
"The human body is a wonderful thing, but what would really make my job a lot easier was if people had some sort of inspection hatch." So says consultant surgeon Michael Reakes, who is trying to persuade the government to let him install inspection hatches in fifty of his patients. Reakes believes that if his scheme was extended to the whole population, it would enable previously complex operations such as liver transplants and heart bypasses to be carried out in an outpatients clinic. The potential savings for the health service would be enormous, Reakes argues.
"And while we're at it," he adds, "I think some kind of arse-sump would come in handy."
People looking for love now have a much better chance of finding their perfect partner, thanks to the latest craze of 'Speed Dating'. The new phenomenon currently sweeping the country involves men and women who are each introduced to a number of potential partners at speeds in excess of over 150 miles per hour. At these sorts of velocities most relationships progress at a greatly increased rate. The practical upshot of this is that couples can meet, get to know each other, argue, fall out and end up bitterly despising each other all in the space of approximately three minutes. The practice is an off-shoot of the slightly less romantic 'Pressure Dating' in which couples are trussed up in diving suits, thrown out of a motor launch and allowed to plummet to depths of over fifty fathoms as a test to see if they're really serious about this whole relationship business.