Every now and again comes a day when nothing much happens. Such occasions are a nightmare for serious newsblogs but and absolute gift for Boggart Blog as they throw up lots of bizarre little items.

Today for example we have a surfeit of riches. Our favourite paper led on the headline “ Schools may be judged on teenage pregnancies and drug problems.
What is all that about? Are they planning to start handing out GCSEs in getting up the duff and stonerology?

Meanwhile down at the Jobcentre staff are quite comfortable with the business aspects of debauching young women. Jobseekers can now respond to vacancies on display for women to work as strippers, pole dancers and “chat line operatives.” The ads specify a minimum age of 17 and list “good looks, an attractive figure and ability to discuss sexual fantasies” as desirable qualities.
Employers seeking to fill these vacancies specify female applicants only.
On one hand it shows The Government are at last taking a more enlightened line on the sex trade. On the other, we must ask should Jobcentres be encouraging such blatant sexism?

On the political front it is revealed that Gordon Brown, shaken by recent PR disasters is to respond to charges of being aloof, elitist and out of touch by instigating a new policy advisory body that will work with with grassroots Labour activists.
Boggart Blog welcomes this move, it is high time The Government did something about Lawn Order.

And finally our old friends the scientists, in their never ending quest to spend ever greater amounts of money on finding out what is glaringly obvious to everybody except scientists have one again surpassed themselves. A report out today announces that arsenic in baby rice is a very very bad idea. ’nuff said?

TODAY WE COMMENTED ON:

Labour exploit tributes to Gwyneth Dunwoody
How cynical can the Labour party get, how much lower can they go in their quest to hold onto power than exploiting the Gwynteth Dunwoody tribute website.

Mr. Eugenides praises the late Gwyneth Dunwoody
http://mreugenides.blogspot.com/2008/04/no-flowers-please.html
See the full post on this over at Little Nicky Machievelli or jump straight to the Eugenides blog

Great Britain: mocked by the New York Times

House prices drop for the first time since 1996

Off Target - counting teenage pregnancy when judging schoolsThe governments plan to look at social indicators such as teenage pregnancy, alcohol and drug abuse seems just another cynical attempt to blame parents fro the failings of the education system

Book People Tonight Amanda Marcotte of Pandangon writes in praise of independent bookshops which are still plentiful in her hometown of Austin, Texas, but even there are being driven towards extinction by corporate chain outlets.

Breaking news from the Antipodes. A man has been accused of assault, using a hedgehog as a weapon. Police say William Singalargh, 27, threw the hedgehog at a 15 year old boy in the New Zealand town of Whakatane. “It hit the victim in the leg, causing a large, red welt and several puncture marks,” said a police spokesman. The hedgehog was dead when it was found, but it is unclear if it was alive when thrown. Mr Singalargh denies the allegations. No charges have yetbeen laid against Singlalargh yet, nobody is sure if throwing hedgehogs (dead or alive) is actually a crime.

A strange way to settle a dispute. Still, when you remember N.Z. is the country that invented bungee jumping and other shit-your-pants things to do for fun on a Sunday afternoon, perhaps a hedgehog throwing duel is not so strange after all.

TODAY WE COMMENTED ON:
Salon.com - Eating The Amazon

First Post: Sweet and Sour, The Miracle Berry

The world recoils in horror at the story of the Austrian woman kept prisoner in a cellar for 25 years by her father, who regularly abused her and sired 7 children with her.

Think ourselves lucky it didn't happen in England, given this governments fondness for knee-jerk reaction anyone who had a cellar would have to be vetted by the Criminal Records Bureau gestapo, placed on the sex offenders register until such time as they could prove they did not deserve to be there, have to apply for a licence to make use of cellar for any purpose... setting up the model railway or having prolonged sado-masochistic orgies with consenting adults...not be allowed access unless they had I.D. with a photo less than three months old and they most certainly would not be able to smoke down there.
Oh and any breaches would result in being held in police custody for 42 days without charge.

This is one of the rare occasions Boggart Network News proprietor and CEO Jenny Greenteeth insists on writing the day’s post herself. On this occasion however, managing editor Ian has edited Jenny’s text as her grammar is not improving with time.

Regulators are increasingly concerned about the availability of cheap, unlicensed drugs from websites. Anyone who has an e-mail account will be sick of sales pitches for cheap off-prescription viagra replicas (which, we are reliably informed, taste like blue Tic Tac mints) and bigger dick pills.

These are harmless enough. The latest worry concerns the appearance in spam campaigns of ads for a miracle drugs, the makers of which claim it will cure cancer, Delhi belly, athlete’s foot, tennis elbow and any inclinations to vote for John McCain or Boris Johnson.
“Self medication should not be encouraged in any circumstances,” a spokesperson told Boggart Blog.

We disagree. Web pharmacists may have hit on a way to cure not only the aforementioned diseases plus preventing random attacks of nurdling, prestadigitation of the hypophothomus and addiction to Rick Astley, but also all the ills of the NHS.

Allowing patients to self medicate is a stroke of genius even though unlicensed drugs may trigger a stroke of another kind. Self medication will reduce the workload, achieve instant cost cuts and if enough patients manage to give themselves lethal overdoses, enable hospitals to hit their targets on shortening waiting lists.

Compare to that the medical objections seem like self interest. Millions of people have been self medicating for years and they are not dead.
What do doctors have against death anyway? They behave as if dying is some kind of crime yet if we consider a future of rising inflation, an increasingly hostile climate, food shortages, house repossessions, old age, decrepitude and higher taxes, death starts to look like an attractive lifestyle option.

Governments of the market forces tendency come to power by promising freedom of choice yet in recent years they have taken away our freedom to smoke ourselves to death, made it more expensive to drink ourselves to death, lectured us on the irresponsibility of eating ourselves to death or starving ourselves to death and now they want to deny us the right to self medicate ourselves with unlicensed and untested drugs.
What kind of democracy is that eh? Where is the freedom of choice?

TODAY WE COMMENTED ON
Beyond The Pleasure Principle The credit crunch, rising food prices, oil prices through the roof; is this the end for hedonism?

Orwell Turns In His Grave Emily Bell asks can a media degree ever make a decent journalist or is experience more important?

Time To Bring Back Campbell Daily Mail politics blogs throws Gordon Brown a lifeline

BBC rewrites political history Lib Dem blogger appreciates the blogger who started the rumour that Harriet Harman had joined the Tories.

Boxing Brides sounds like an episode from Shameless but it really happened in America (where else?)

Gordon Brown, according to the popular consensus, is up shit creek without a paddle.
In the London mayoral election his party could suffer the embarrassment of being beaten by Tory buffoon Boris Johnson while in the local council elections the Tories will do well in the suburbs, the Lib Dems will do well in rural areas but worse, Labour could see its traditional hardcore vote crumble in the “they’d-vote-for-a-dog-turd-if-you-stuck-a-Labour-rosette-on-it” industrial heartland’s of the North and Midlands.
At such times a man needs to know he has friends he can rely on.
Gordie ought to be able to rely on the loyalty of former best mate Tony Blair, after all Blair did promise undying loyalty to his successor. But Tone has a new best mate now, Lord Levy, a man so sycophantic it is rumoured he does not fart without getting approval from the former P.M.
So we must ask is it any coincidence Lord Levy has published his memoirs which contain some damning revelations about Blair’s true opinion of Gordon (Gordon is a moron) a week before these crucial elections take place.
Blair has categorically denied ever calling Brown “a liar” or saying Labour could not possibly win the next election under Gordie’s leadership.
Can we believe Blair?
Well if we did it would require that Lord Levy had developed the ability to think for himself. And that is just stretching our credulity too far.

TODAY WE COMMENTED ON:
Crooks and Liars. Bill Maher on sustainability.

Balloon Juice - the true cost of outsourcing

A moose’s antlers may act as large hearing aids, scientists have said. The large flat antlers of male moose could boost their hearing by almost a fifth, the researchers George and Peter Bubenik suggested. Writing in the European Journal of Wildlife, the Canadian father and son team said their findings strongly indicate that the palm of moose antlers may serve as an effective parabolic reflector.

An interesting piece of research but not really great news for the deaf so we can't see the idea catching on. Modern digital hearing aids fit inside the ear and so are invisible, compared with which the wearing of a set of moose antlers around town would look distinctly uncool.

A little contest going on acroos a couple of right wing U.S. Websites where I occasionally dump comments for the links is promising the punters increasingly naked photos in return for donations to Charity.

While Girl_on_the_right at Conservative Girls Are Hot is posting some pretty but noticeable not naked pictures of her bra harnessed boobs, over at the much funnier The Nose On Your Face, Islamic Rage Boy is doing well with his more naked but more photoshopped posing pouch shots.

From A Cheever Loophole, Boggart Network News legal affairs correspondent:

A Macedonian court convicted a bear for stealing honey from a beekeeper, who tried to protect his property with Serbian "turbo-folk" music. "I tried to distract him with lights and music because I heard bears were afraid of that," said Zoran Kiseloski. As the bear is a protected species, the state was ordered to pay £1,800 damages. The bear did not appear in court.

The Boggart Blog team took a quick vote and decided against publishing an item advising bee-keepers to protect their honey if future by playing Girls Aloud records. We felt this could result in their being prosecuted under a law against animal abuse.

TODAY WE COMMENTED ON:

feasting on famine
Mission Impossible - pop star priests

Our desperation to reduce pollution and cut the amount of carbon pollutants we pump into the atmosphere is leading to the development of some highly creative, even bizarre solutions.
Home insulation materials made with baby poo for example.
Canadian recycling specialist Knowaste is to open the UK’s first disposable nappy recycling facility near Birmingham. The plant will recycle about 30,000 tonnes of shitty, well soaked disposable nappies per year. This represents approximatelt 4% of the total nappy filling capacity of the UK baby population.
The initiative will help Britain meet an E.U. imposed target for reducing the amount of waste sent to landfill sites. While Government scientists have praised the venture, independent environmentalists express reservations.
Removing nappyfill from landfill is a step forward said a spokesman for Greenpoo, but it is not a long term solution. The real answer is to produce less waste and with luck the global food crunch will help towards that.
Undaunted, Knowaste has announce pland to extend its recycling operation to take in adult incontinence products too.
Poo based insulation panels and lagging will be available by the end of the year but their use in the building of new homes has met a distict lack of enthusiasm from the construction industry.
Speaking on behalf of property developers, Mr. S. Melly-Holmes CEO of Construction Redevelopment And Projects Ltd. asked “do these tossers not think the housing market is in enough shit already?”

WHY WOMEN HATE GORDON BROWN

This trailer for an inside story was on the front page of one of our national newspapers, but I can't for the life of me remember which one, could have been the Mail, I think the Express is still too busy gloating that it is now 10 pence cheaper than the Mail and "ten times better!" Might even have been T'Yorkshire Post...you'd think some marketing man would have come up with that by now but hey...

Anyway, I think this is a biased, sexist piece of reporting.

Men hate Gordon Brown too.

People who have just had their income tax liability doubled hate GB, especially those who were sharp enough to cotton on to the impact of abolishing the 10p rate of income tax when it was announced, because they've had a whole year to stew in their resentment.

MPs hate Gordie, because he's indecisive, unsubtle, bad tempered and a control freak.

Blairites hate Brown because he's not Tony.

Cherie hates Gordon, no doubt she'll get around to telling us why in her autobigraphy, part 2.

But perhaps Gordie shoudn't be too upset, after all Tony was held by many to be the most loathesome creature ever to slither through Westminster, whilst Ian, and many, many more still turn incandescant with rage at the mere mention of Thatcher.

I have been feeling rather despondent of late about the dire straits British politis is itself in.
Then last night I saw a profile of the three Presidential candidates in America,
And suddenly our lot, including Boris Johnson, seem a little less scary.

TODAY WE COMMENTED ON:

Democratic Party Candidate

Same Old Stuff from the Labour left

The Real Effect Of The Teachers Strike

Is Religion The Biggest Threat To Rationality

Belligerent Bulimic Labour Lardball John Prescott (beat that you tabloid headline writers :-) has publicly admitted that he suffered from a serious eating disorder while holding a high office in government.
In confessional moood, Prezza told the press of how he would go a Chinese Restaurant in his constiuency and order every dish on the menu (all on expenses you can be sure.)
While on an assignment based in Hull in the late 1980s I often visited that restaurant and have seen Two Shags in action. He did not just eat his way through the menu, he would also eat the menu, the table linen, the cutlery, the furniture and any waiters not nimble enough to get out of the way.
Then on the way home he would call at the chippy for steak pudding, chips and peas with a fish on top.

Hull City football fans would never sing “who ate all the pies?” The entire town knew the answer.

TODAY WE COMMENTED ON:
'Tisn't the season - airfreighted food
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/leo_hickman/2008/04/tisnt_the_season.html
Rekindle the fire - the malaise in politics

The first beef from cloned cattle will be hitting supermarket shelves in the U.S.A within the next few months according to today's news.
Inevitably the arrival of clone tissue in the food chain with spark ethical protests and we will be asked by organisations of the right and left, “would you eat mean from a cloned cow?”
Personally, I would not give a hoot, a steak is a steak and we should remember the first animals ever farmed for food were snails and as they are hermaphrodites they clone themselves in a manner of speaking.
Archaeological evidence traces snail farming back to 10,500BC and in all that time the question of whether it is ethical to eat animals that have shagged themselves has never arisen. Whatever snails get up to in the privacy of their shells is their own business.
I would not eat snails but for aesthetic rather than ethical reasons. If I don’t like the look of something there is no way it is going in my mouth. This probably goes a long way towards explaining why I’m 100% straight.

Having said all that, it is unlikely I shall ever eat cloned beef, though not in my view unethical, it is bad for the planet.
Prime quality beef from grain fed cattle has an enormous carbon footprint and is a huge drain on food stocks. About seven pounds of grain is needed to produce one pound of edible meat. With a global food crunch lurking in the shadow of the credit crunch, meat eating is economic madness.
In the case of cloned beef the adverse energy balance is even worse. I recently read a description of how many scientists are involved in producing beef this way. Add up the cost of feeding them, keeping them in warm, comfortable sheds and providing enough electronic gadgets to keep them amused and cloning is totally unfeasible.
The question we must ask then is how much arm are we willing to do to the planet just so scientists can prove their ability to do in the laboratory what animals have been doing in the wild for millions of years without any fuss.

Democratic Party Apostacy
Are the Democrats grass roots supporters the biggest force working against their candidates?

Faith No more
If 54% of Britions claim to be Christians how come only 6% go to church?

McCain in 2008 = Clinton in 2012
As Barak Obama get closer to the Democratic nomination he looks increasingly less capable of winning the big one in November. So is Hillary playing a long game?

Creating a Client State
Is the abolition of the 10p tax band a betrayal of Labour's core voters?

50 Billion Pound Mortgage
Are the government ripping us off to bail out the banks

Alternative Medicine
Should Alternative Medicine be funded by the NHS

It must be nine months or so since the smoking ban came in and I'm sure we all appreciate the government's deep concern for our health and longevity,except perhaps the thousands upon thousands of smokers who are now forced to stand outside in the cold, rain, sleet and snow, risking colds, flu, hypothermia or even pneumonia to have their 5 minute fix.
On the downside it has opened up our nostrils to the many foul odours that have previously lurked beneath the haze of smoke; body odour, fartgas, stale beer, that school dinner smell one often comes across in otherwise innocuous places, some people's choice of aftershave or perfume, bad breath... the list goes on.
However there is one smell which is becoming more prevalent and it must be bad for one's health, probably more damaging than passive smoking as it could induce such rage that it would surely lead to hypertension and the risk of a cardiac.
I am, of course, talking about the all pervading stench of Doritos. How can one small packet release enough odour to fill a whole train carriage in the time it takes the consumer to eat just one of the flourescent corn squares?
And why does the smell linger so long on the eater's breath that even hours after they have eaten this vile snack the whiff can still make polite conversationists recoil?
Even when the chips have been eaten and the packet sensibly placed in a rubbish bin, still the all pervading pong manages to smother all the other items of rotting food and spread out into the surrounding atmosphere.
My god, if Saddam had had a box of Doritos ready to be deployed in 45 minutes the allies would never have got past the border. These things are grossly offensive to any sane person. They need to be banned from consumption in public places, or make that anywhere a human being may possibly visit in the next twenty five years.

A headline shreiks from one of the penny dreadfuls,

"Russell Brand Bedded Me Six Times... In One Hour!"

This equates to once every ten minutes.
Feeling jealous fellahs at such superb stamina and recovery powers?
Don't be, the optimum duration time for the actual act of intercourse is three to thirteen minutes, according to a survey of sex therapists, so really he's just average!
And think what your spouse would say if you cut out the foreplay just to concentrate on banging away like 'autistic woodpeckers', as Caitlin Moran termed it in an article in The Times.
However perhaps the female in question is hoping she might get invited to Man United Christmas party or maybe Max Mosley's Chelsea love dungeon.

TODAY BOGGART BLOG COMMENTED ON:

So Change Gordon Brown and all is well

John McCain Anger Issues

Yo Barak

The Governments plan to bail out the Banks by buying the dodgy mortgage portfolios off them with taxpayers money looks very like a scam I once dreamed up in a comic fiction. A city whizz kid type devised a scheme to sell people their own houses.

Now in the Government's plan we taxpayers are going to buy our own houses so how about a referendum on writing off the interst?

Just a few years ago there was a big thing about fathers being present at the birth of their children, and not just present but involved. For readers of the Guardian and Independent it was de rigeur to be at the beside administering gas and air while reminding wifey to push and pant while burbling happily to anyone who would listen about what an absolutely life enhancing experience it all was. (Fortunately our baby making days were long gone or I might have had to change my paper to the Currant Bun which adheres to the tradition that while Mum id giving birth Dad’s proper place is down the pub with mates and male relatives, wetting the baby’s head.
Fashions change and now leaders of health service midwife services say that Dads just get in the way and should be kep out of the maternity suite. Quite right too.
Once upon a time the father’s presence in the birthing room was taboo. Childbirth was women’s business and the only time the father needed to be present was if the baby was born in the back seat of the car on the way to hospital.
Childbirth is physically exhausting and not pretty to watch so its understandable that a woman would not be at the top of her game and the second last thing she wants is the worry of what will happen if hubby passes out at the sight of blood. The last thing she wants of course is to have the silly prat prancing around trying to stick a camcorder up her chuff to record the event for posterity.
Other than that there is the possibility that the sight of her distended vagina might put him of women so much he joins the homosexuals.
The real reason men should only be present at birth is very special circumstances is of course once the guys are let in they make the whole business about them.
I was at the birth of our second, a shortage of staff on night shift meant I was drafted in as a temporary nurse. On balance I have to say the birth of our first, when I was down the pub, was a better experience from my p.o.v.

Today we commented on:

Superheads fail to improve failing schools

One Fundamental difference between Clinton and Obama

Do you all remember that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the plague men are collecting the dead and one corpse (Wilfred Brambell) complains as he is about the be dumped in the tumbril, “I’m not dead, I’ getting better.”
You don’t? Oh well perhaps I’m more of a Python geek than I admit to myself.
Anyway, as if to confirm the truth of Oscar Wilde’s assertion that “life copies art,” todays news told us a very similar thing happened to Zack Dunlap of Oaklahoma (where the wind comes whistling down the plain.) Zack had been declared brain dead by a hospital Intensive Care team, the organ harvesters were being helicoptered in to descend like harpies on the corpse and “harvest” the usable organs when Zack did not actually sit up and say, “I’m not dead, I’m getting better”, but he did move and open his eyes.

Good thing the organ harvesting harpies were not standing by in the same hospital.

Hands up who thought when our blogging chum Little Nicky Machiavelli (Blog: Brown the Body Snatcher) blogged against Gordon Brown’s plan to turn us all into organ donors by default, he was being a tad hysterical?

Today I commented on:
Infamy, they've all got it in for me

Existing as fiction

A 17th century violin worth £180,000 has gone missing after its owner inadvertently left it on the luggage rack of a train when he disembarked. Realising his mistake he phoned the British Transport Police but they could find no sign of it. The train had stopped at two or three stations before officials were able to search for it, so it looks like someone has helped themselves.

I wonder where GB was at the time, given the current state of the economy, the credit crunch, the housing market in freefall along with Gordies opinion poll ratings, it could be the perfect time to start playing the violin.