HUMOR - Amazing tales from Planet Tabloid

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BBC Friday, 29 June, 2001, 16:35 GMT 17:35 UK

Amazing tales from Planet Tabloid

Legal, honest, decent

This week a glut of animal stories including a cat that orders food on the internet, a suicidal sex-maniac dog and yet more renegade birds. But first...

Burning Issue of the Week

Question: Is Lady Victoria Hervey an "It Girl" or merely a "Twit Girl"

Lady V, daughter of the late Marquis of Bristol agreed to pose in her underwear on the front page of the Mirror.

Readers were asked to phone in and vote to decide if the aristocrat turned "snooty lingerie shop-owner" was "It" or "Twit". She was quoted as saying: "It's all a bit of fun, isn't it?"

Answer: Lady V is a Twit, by a margin of 10 to 1.

PROOF THAT - DESPITE EVERYTHING - E-COMMERCE IS STILL ATTRACTING MORE CUSTOMERS

This week a cat ordered 450 cans of its favourite food on an internet shopping site while its owner wasn't looking, reports the Mirror.

Except that it didn't.

What happened, if the paper is to be believed, was that Cambridgeshire Cat Boris wandered across the computer and caught the number keys to turn six tins of chicken cat food into more than a year's supply.

Owner, Betty Richards, of Cambridgeshire, realised the mistake before sending the order after noticing her total bill would be £500.

Betty, of St Ives, said: "It was a fluke that his paws hit the right keys."

HORRIFIC ACCIDENT OF THE WEEK

Mum-of-three Jane Thompson, 21, was speared and run clean through by a snooker cue when the car she was travelling in was involved in a head-on crash.

The impact caused the cue, which was in the boot of the car, to shoot forward, piercing her through the back, emerging from her stomach and skewering her to her seat.

The cue missed her kidneys and other internal organs, the Sun reported, leaving her only slightly injured after surgery.

RENEGADE BIRDS - LATEST

The nation's obsession with guilty and/or renegade birds continues unabated.

The latest flap started when a woman who hates and fears birds woke up to find a barn owl perched on her arm.

The birdwoman, Patricia Pennack, from Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, screamed when she felt the owl.

It is believed that it had flown through her window.

PLANET LIFESTYLE

Read on for "Planet Lifestyle" our "section-within-a-section" bringing you the highlights of all the vital style news with which any properly vibed-up person needs to keep up.

Good news for dry cleaners.

This week the Sunday Telegraph magazine suggests that you decorate and furnish your home entirely in white.

Meanwhile the Independent on Sunday this week suggests that you dress entirely in white.

The only time you should not wear white, all the style sections agree, is when you are playing tennis, engaged in judo, working as a dentist, playing cricket or getting married.

GETTING VIBED

The Independent on Sunday's Style icon Janet Street-Porter has been busy this week. She has been to Vienna, New York and an architectural gathering in London.

She confesses that she cannot however use a Philippe Starck lemon squeezer and that she often splashes herself when she tries to use some sort of hotel wash-basin he has designed.

In a wide ranging review of style news she invents a new verb, "to vibe", as in "Philippe Starck can vibe up anything".

But she castigates modern town planners for not making cities more like 19th century Vienna.

"If the 19th century Hapsburgs could create an inner ring road and a traffic-free city centre, then surely our modern rulers can."

Possibly this is because mass production of motor cars did not begin until the 1920s, but Ms Street-Porter does not say.

-- Anonymous, June 30, 2001

Answers

As one who has spent many a happy hour with snooker cue in hand (Iowa Fats, they call me), I do not believe the story about the near-deadly snooker cue.

-- Anonymous, June 30, 2001

It could happen. Stranger things, have I seen.

-- Anonymous, June 30, 2001

Barefoot, oh Barefoot! A fairly light object with a flat felt tip?

-- Anonymous, June 30, 2001

A flat felt tip that is what, 1/4" thick? On the end of a solid wood pole?

Ever see a picture of a piece of straw that was put through a telephone pole by high winds like in a tornado or hurricane?

-- Anonymous, June 30, 2001


I did see a news report in the Electronic Telegraph, so it must be true. :)

-- Anonymous, June 30, 2001


Damn it, OG, I wouldn't believe that story if I read it in the Weekly World News!

-- Anonymous, June 30, 2001

Electronic Telegraph

Cue pierces woman in crash

A WOMAN survived when a snooker cue passed through her in a car crash. The cue had been in the boot of the car in which the woman was a back seat passenger. Police said it had pierced the back seat, entered the woman near her kidneys and re-emerged through her thigh.

She was pinned to the seat and it took firemen two hours to free her. They removed part of the cue with a saw. They then cut off the car's roof and lifted the woman from the wreckage. The 21-year-old woman, who has not been named, was taken to King's Mill Hospital, Sutton-in-Ashfield, Notts, where doctors operated to remove the rest of the cue. She was discharged yesterday.

[BTW, Sutton-in-Ashfield DOES exist!]

-- Anonymous, June 30, 2001


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