PRIVATE EYE
One decent pisstake is worth a page of polemic...
Private Eye - 9 July - 22 July
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STRANGE TALES FROM THE INDEPENDENT
An extraordinary story in very small print was jammed into a corner of the estimable Independent today. It seems that a young Californian child, Brandon Maxfield, was shot by his babysitter who was trying to unload a gun. As a result he was left quadriplegic. Because the gun had a design fault, Brandon was awarded $51 million damages. In consequence of the payout, the firm, Bryco, was declared bankrupt & was put onto the open market. So far the highest bid for the discredited company has come from Brandon Maxfield, now 17, who has raised the money from a website set up expressly for this purpose. If his bid is successful, Brandon intends to melt down all remaining 70,000 guns & close the business.
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From the same corner come these nuggets:
- An injured Turkish seagull can walk again as a result of the fitting of a prosthetic leg made out of a Barbie doll.
- A Kenyan mayor has had 500 stray pigs shot because they’ve been mating with local dogs.
- An Iranian man had a change of heart when the suicide pact arranged with his wife was pre-empted by her hanging herself.
- A man swallowed $50,000 cash in an attempt to smuggle it out of Columbia. He failed.
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Finally, a return to Private Eye for a neat little coda to the Michael Moore shenanigans.
News that veteran novelist Ray Bradbury objected to filmmaker Michael Moore’s reference to his book Fahrenheit 451 in the title of his ;latest anti-Bush tirade, Fahrenheit 9/11 made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic.
“I could write a novel tomorrow called Gone With The Wind, couldn’t I? But I’m not going to do it ‘cause it would be dishonest,” raged the 83-year-old author of Beyond 1984 & Another Tale of Two Cities. “Michael Moore is a dishonest man & I want to have nothing to do with him.”
What Bradbury failed to mention is that a new film of Fahrenheit 451 is currently in production & that distributors may now be forced to change its title to avoid audience confusion.
Yuk-yuk…
10:21:12 PM 
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