Sunday 25 October 2009

Splitting the Crotchet...


When this article was written in 2005, the idea of harnessing the lethal power of jazz was a new and terrifying concept. Since then it has emerged that many Western nations have experimented with jazz weaponry, with frightening results. It has recently been revealed that the French government exposed its service personnel to harmful jazz rays during jazz tests carried out in the South Pacific during the fifties. Alain Deneuve is the lawyer who has been fighting for compensation for the victims, but he admits that it hasn't been easy.

"It can be difficult to persuade those affected that legal action is in their best interests," he admits. "When you explain the situation to them, they tend to just shrug, mutter c'est la vie and wander off to buy a baguette. This laissez-faire attitude is fairly typical of people affected by jazz, and you might think that it strengthens our case. Unfortunately, it's also fairly typical of being French."

Jazz Bomb

Vegetable Avionics


Few people have ever seriously considered the true military potential of the common or garden carrot. It takes an unusually vivid imagination to look upon what most people would consider to be merely a harmless vegetable, and see it as a weapon of war. Admittedly, if it was a particularly pointy specimen, you might observe that you could have someone's eye out, but other than that its offensive capabilities are not readily apparent. Nevertheless, as Garth Poke explains in this 2005 article, military leaders did fritter away extraordinary quantities of your cash in a fruitless attempt to develop a vegetable weapon...

Teaching Carrots to Fly

Thursday 22 October 2009

Deadly Ball Games and Other Pursuits...

"There's no doubt that bare-knuckle snooker is gaining in influence, especially amongst impressionable youngsters. In inner city areas, it already accounts for ten percent of violent crimes, and by this time next year it could rank alongside all-in darts, unarmed scuba diving and kamikaze table tennis as one of the biggest threats to law and order since badminton."

Four more from 2000 for Archive 1:

Tuesday 20 October 2009

Squirrels, Sharks and Exotic Cheeses...


Added four articles which originally kicked off the site in 2000, and kind of set the tone. In fact, at least two pre-date the site - one previously appearing in Deadpan, the other being the only bit worth saving from a script that was quite rightly passed over by BBC Radio. We live and learn.

Flying Squirrels
Shark Fishing
Cheese Genome
&
Know Your Birds