The 21st Century is here at last!

Britain enters a new millennium of our calendar in a thoroughly frozen condition. Even the sea has been frozen in places. This is all happening a year after the government celebrated its "The Millennium" by wasting huge amounts of taxpayers' cash on idiocy like the Millennium dome. But hey! It's Labour in power. You can't expect any of them to know what they're doing.
   Tony Blair and other idiots have spent 2000 telling us that we left the 20th century behind last January – but only because they're idiots. And they're only marginally less of a waste of space are the hypocrites, like the Guardian correspondents who knew that the 21st century starts in 2001 but who went along with all the bogus celebrations last year because they didn't want to be 'pedantic'.

The Blair government's BIG IDEA for wasting money has closed its doors after blowing £800 million, which Blair promised the taxpayer would get back – something that ain't gonna happen.

Pet owners have been advised not to let their pets anywhere near aerosol cans after a dog in Willenhall, West Midlands, bit into a can of hair spray and caused a fire which burn the animal's home to the ground!

Did the first total lunar eclipse of the century really feature a blood-red moon? Only if the photographer was using filters and enhancement or the commentator was using a lot of imagination. Here's what a Romiley astronomer thought:
   "This one was a quality eclipse, which was so well arranged that I was able to watch the Earth's shadow start to creep across the Moon's face at about a quarter to seven from my place at the dinner table! Totality was totally uninterrupted by clouds. And we were nipping out to peer at the Moon through binocs at every commercial break during The Bill.
   "So did the Moon go blood red? Did it hell as like, no matter what the papers said the next day. [Some Romiley cynics were convinced that the 'reports' were written before the eclipse went off.] It went a dirty, dark yellowy, brass colour. And then the Earth's shadow moved on and it returned to its full brilliant whiteness with a fuzzy white halo some distance from it." Politics Clintons shambles on exit from White House

February

March weather News

Spring has been cancelled. Chilly winds from Russia have deluged the UK with snow and blizzards, causing the usual school closures and transport disruption.

April

The Williams Formula One team has painted a warning message saying: Keep your distance on their cars in an attempt to get them to the end of a race. Ralf Schumacher has been on the receiving end of two vehicular assaults by Reubens Barrichello's Ferrari and being rammed by Jos 'The Boss' Verstappen's Arrows cost Juan Montoya a win. Barrichello, who has also driven into Heinz-Harald Frentzen, is the team's biggest worry.

May

One part of the UK looks pretty like another to foreign visitors. When he was made an honorary freeman of the city of Leeds and had a garden renamed after him, sometime South African gaolbird and president Nelson Mandela thought he was in Liverpool. So his message of thanks to the people of Liverpool left his audience in Leeds looking baffled.

Believe it or what!

A woman from Kent took a wrong turning when she went to Calais on a booze cruise. When she missed the supermarket, she just kept going at no faster than 30 mph. She went right across France, crossed the Pyrenees and drove right down Spain as far as Gibraltar. Her story is that she was hoping to find somewhere to turn round and she couldn't call home to explain what had happened because the battery in her mobile phone had gone flat. Luckily she had some camping gear in the car because she had been planning a holiday on the English coast. It didn't occur to her to call her boyfriend from a public phone until she had been on the road for 2 weeks.

June

July

August

The council at Bury St. Edmonds has turned a park bench in the Abbey Gardens into an access point to the world wide web in an attempt to drag the town into the 21st century. The Internet Bench has modem sockets hidden in its arms and calls from the bench will be free for the first 3 months. The council has had the bench bolted down securely in the hope that this will make it vandalproof.
UPDATE The bench was put out of action on its first day by a pair of teenagers, who plugged a telephone into the socket, made some free calls, then plugged up the socket with chewing gum. The software for the socket has now been modified to reject phone calls.

German doctors are warning their countrymen not to have anything to do with euro coins. They contain a concentration of nickel high enough to cause an allergic reaction involving a severe rash and pain. The EU says there should be no problem because the coins contain nickel of high purity, which rather misses the point if you're allergic to nickel.

September

Prime monster Tony Blair's staff used the string 'bin laden' in a search for information on terrorism sponsor Osama Bin Laden, and included in their briefing a speech by sometime Ulster Sec. Patrick Mayhew. Who had been talking about a wheely bin laden with explosives. Which underlines the need to engage the brain while doing word searches in documents on a computer system.

Two tax inspectors having a spot of the extra maritals in the back of their car at Sale Waterpark ended up getting a free trip to Wales. They didn't lock the car and they left the key in the ignition, so a demented car-jacker had no trouble over borrowing the car to visit his brother in Wrexham. But he did have the decency to pay for the petrol when he abandoned his hosts.

October

The citizens of the United States of America have been warned not to over-react to a dangerous world. A woman in Medford, Pennsylvania, started a fire when she put her mail in the microwave in the hope that she would kill any anthrax spores on it.

November

The BBC tightened up security at its buildings in central London, then decided to hire another security company to test their defences. The infiltrators had no trouble getting in disguised as builders. So the BBC sacked the 7 security guards on duty that day. And they are now taking the Beeb to an industrial tribunal with claims of unfair dismissal.

December
   

It's Okay, It's Only Friendly Fire!

The Yanks are at it again, dropping bombs on their allies - on the Canadians in Afghanistan this time. No wonder George Bush had to get the Vice-Prez to send British troops into the tough bits to sort out the bad guys.
   "We don't do mountains," his own troops said.
   "Bollocks!" we say.
   What the US forces really meant to say was, "We don't want to be anywhere near our own air force when the blind bastards are carrying live bombs."
   Survival of the Chickenest rules, OK!

Italian headbanger crashes light plane into Milan's tallest building

What was he smoking and where do we get some? And aren't pilots supposed to look out of the window occasionally?

"We did it for a laugh," says French electorate.

Tedious left-winger Lionel Jospin comes third in the presidential election 1st round behind notorious right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen. That has to be the equivalent of the French nation telling the whole candidate list, "You're crap and you know it!"
   More of this political honesty everywhere, please!
So what is the choice for the French people? On the one hand, there's a bloke who's no more racialist than our beloved Vice-Prez - it must be true because he said so. On the other hand, there's a bloke who'd be in gaol for corruption if he wasn't in office - if the legal system were not as corrupt as any crooked politician.
   "Allez, Jean-Marie!"

Lor 'N' Orda In Greece

Looking at planes is illegal in Greece, apparently, and plane-spotting is worth 3 years in gaol. What next? Well, maybe we could adapt the idea for the UK. If just looking is a criminal offence, the justice system would have no problems over dealing with currently untouchable criminals. Picture the scene in your local courts:
   Prosecutor: "He was looking at a car, M'Lud."
   Prisoner: "I never!"
   Prosecutor: "And he has a history of it, M'Lud."
   Judge: "Twelve months. Next."
   Prosecutor: "He was looking at a house, M'Lud."
   Prisoner: "I never!"
   Prosecutor: "And he has a history of burgalries, M'Lud."
   Judge: "Three years. Next."
Another winner from the Cradle of Democracy!