When George Faggot became a vegetarian six months ago - for tax reasons - he wasn't quite prepared for the level of self-discipline his change of lifestyle would demand. For fifty-eight year old Faggot - a man who has virtually lived his entire life on a diet of burgers and chops - the constant temptation has proven to be simply too much. Steak and kidney pies are now out of the question, kebabs are a thing of the past, and even sausages are a no-no, because of the remote yet very real possibility of there being some vestige of meat in them. Now George Faggot is looking for a loophole, and he is currently trying to persuade the powers-that-be to reclassify donkeys as vegetables. In the meantime he is trying to satisfy his cravings for meat as best he can by going down to a nearby farm in the dead of night and sucking on a pig.
Disgraced former cabinet minister Donovan Carstairs has just completed a degree in Farmyard Noises and is now a fully fledged Professor of Chickens. Despite his previous indiscretions, he is set to take up a junior post at the Ministry of Agriculture next month.
Police in Cambridgeshire have called off a full scale search for the market town of Wisbech after reports of it being stolen were revealed to be a hoax. "We got a call around lunchtime from a person identifying himself as 'The Hawk' and claiming that he was holding it prisoner at a secret location," said Chief Inspector Placeholder of the Cambridgeshire constabulary. "Mr Hawk went on to explain that unless he received the sum of two million pounds in used banknotes by midnight, we would never see the town again."
At first the police were unconvinced of the reality of this mystery man's claim, bless 'em, but when a constable sent to check up on the town reported that he was unable to find it, they started to take the matter seriously. Shortly afterwards, a plain brown envelope was delivered to the divisional headquarters containing various photographs of a masked man pointing a gun at a post office, threatening a phone box and standing outside a branch of Boots, hands on hips, apparently 'laughing maniacally'.
"It was at this point that we realised we were dealing with a professional," admitted Chief Inspector Placeholder. "This Hawk person clearly had access to a camera, and so we knew we couldn't take any chances. I ordered an immediate full scale search: helicopters, dog teams, miniature hovercraft and even a submarine, but to no avail. In desperation we sought the services of a psychic, but despite telling me that I was about to make a long journey and be reunited with a long lost acquaintance, she was of very little assistance. Help eventually came from a resident of Wisbech itself, who phoned us to say that she had seen the story on the evening news and wondered what all the fuss was about, since the town was exactly where it was supposed to be, and had been all day. It seems that we were the unwitting victims of a scam, and the reason our man had missed it earlier was because he had taken a wrong turn off the A47. Ooops! Never mind, it turned out alright in the end - and we certainly won't be falling for that one again, I can tell you."
Brainiacs in Japan have announced that that are one step closer to producing a feasible system of teleportation: a form of instantaneous travel that works by breaking up a person into his or her component atoms, beaming them through the air and then reassembling them at their destination. Obviously, this technology is still a long way off, but the Japanese team have had some success in dismembering volunteers, stuffing their limbs into poster tubes and then sending them through the mail. Work still needs to be done on assembling the bits at the other end, and the limitations of the local postal service means that it's usually a good deal quicker to just get on a bus. Nevertheless, the team think that they are heading in the right direction, and in future experiments they plan to chop the bodies up into smaller bits so that they can fit them into padded envelopes.
Apprentice tool setter, Marcus Toll is the first person to successfully train a bacon sandwich. Whilst many sandwiches can be trained to perform rudimentary tasks, such as jumping through hoops or rolling over and playing dead, bacon sandwiches are notoriously obstinate and refuse to respond to traditional training methods. Nevertheless, Mr Toll has persevered for many years, and eventually managed to persuade his sandwich to co-operate using a combination of basic hypnotic suggestion and sodium pentathol. He now claims it is capable of operating a telephone switchboard and hopes to secure it a job at a circus - as a receptionist. If he is successful, it will be the first time anyone has ever successfully domesticated a bacon sandwich, although for a while it was popularly believed that Alexander the Great had a bacon sandwich that could handle basic carpentry. Historians now believe it was most likely ham, or some sort of pressed meat substitute.