May Contain News

This first item was taken from an online version of an English newspaper...

An image captured in a baby scan has been claimed to be the 'double' of Michael Jackson.


Parents-to-be Dawn Kelley and William Hickman were looking at the ultrasound scan of their unborn baby when they “realised” it looked like the late pop singer.


Mr Hickman, 29,(why are journalists so fascinated with everyone’s age?) a window cleaner, (and their occupation?) said: “I showed my daughter Ami, who’s six, and she saw it straight away, so I thought 'well if she can see it too it’s not just me seeing things’.”


Mother-of-six Miss Kelley, 34, (see what I mean? Presumably given that she has so many weans she doesn’t have the time to work. Therefore no occupation to be mentioned. Wonder if the journo felt robbed?) went for her 20-week scan at Sunderland Royal as normal last month, but doctors could not see the foetus’s stomach or diaphragm. (Which is important because...)


A few weeks later she was sent to Grindon Lane Walk in Centre for a closer look. Which was when Jacko appeared.

A comment on the bottom of this online news summed up my reaction to this piece of “news”

It read: shutthefuckup.

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From the ridiculous to the downright sick and nasty....Russian police have arrested three homeless people (somewhere in Russia I expect) suspected of eating a 25-year-old man they had butchered and of selling (you’ve got to draw the line somewhere) other bits of the corpse to a local kebab house.


Suspicions were raised when dismembered parts of a human body were found near a bus stop (where else would you dump the unwanted parts?) in the outskirts of the Russian city of Perm (I wonder if they all have Kevin Keegan hairstyles circa 1975), 1,150 km (720 miles) east of Moscow.

Three homeless men (no ages were supplied, sadly – jobs, go without saying) with previous criminal records have been arrested on suspicion of setting upon a foe with knives and a hammer before chopping up his corpse to eat, local investigators said in a statement on their www.susk.perm.ru Web site.

"After carrying out the crime, the corpse was divided up: part was eaten and part was also sold to a kiosk selling kebabs and pies," the Prosecutor-General's main investigative unit for the Perm region said in a statement issued Friday.

It was not immediately clear from the statement if any of the corpse filled delicacies had been sold to customers. Mmmm. Yumm anyone?

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A woman in the US has found out the hard way that not all policemen are corruptible. This lady was pulled over for drink-driving, and tried to dance with the police officer in her attempt to get away without a caution. The dancing raised barely a flicker, so thinking that perhaps she needed to be a wee bit more obvious she started to rub her buttocks on his leg.

The woman's problems began when she pulled up close to where the wonderfully -named Sheriff's patrol deputy Randy Grob was doing some admin, in a church car park in Bayou George, Florida. The woman, whose eyes were red and weeping, rolled down her window and offered to survey Grob's home, and any other property he owned. (What else would you offer a policeman when you’re pissed?)

She then reversed into the road, forcing the traffic to stop, and drove off. Grob gave chase and pulled her over. At this point, the woman told Grob that she 'knew what he needed', and handed him a menu from a steak house. (I wonder if they were selling Russian meat?)

Grob then noticed a pint bottle of vodka on the passenger seat, and a wine glass on the floor. (This is clearly a lady with class.)

As other policemen arrived on the scene, the woman - identified as Verleen Anglin (what no age?) of Panama City – now in full flush, got out of the car and 'skipped' towards them.

Asked to stand on one leg as part of a sobriety test, Ms Anglin instead tried to dance with the officer. Grob wrote in his report that she 'began to 'dance with the stars,' grabbed me and twirled herself several times and attempted to rub on my legs using her butt.'

Sadly, she worked up a sweat for nothing. She was arrested and charged.

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This isn’t news but it made me smile...

10 Of the World's Worst Pick-Up Lines

Your eyes meet across a crowded bar... the atmosphere is charged with lust... you approach, composed and electric with determination... and entice this vision into your life with a line like...

1. Can I buy you a drink, or do you just want the money?

2. I'm new in town, could I have directions to your house?

3. You have to tell me your name, because last night in my dreams, I could only call you 'baby'...

4. I may not be Fred Flintstone, but I bet I can make your Bed Rock...

5. Do you believe in love at first sight or should I walk by again?

6. At the office copy machine "Reproducing eh? Can I help?"

7. Hi I'm conducting a feel test of how many women have pierced nipples...

8. Hi, the voices in my head told me to come and talk to you...

9. I may not be the best looking guy here, but I'm the only one talking to you...

10. Have you ever played naked leap frog?



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During a trial in a small Southern town in the US, the prosecuting attorney called his first witness. She was an elderly lady. The P.A. approached her at the stand.

- Do you know me, Mrs Jones

- Why yes I do, she answered. I’ve known you since you were a boy, and frankly you’ve been a big disappointment to me. You lie, you cheat on your wife and you manipulate people and talk behind their backs. You think you’re a big shot when you haven’t the brains to realise you’ll never amount to anything more than a two-bit paper pusher.

The lawyer was open-mouthed. At a loss as to what to do next he pointed across the room and asked.

- Do you know the defence attorney?

- Why yes, I do, she answered. I’ve known Mr Smith since he was a youngster too. He’s lazy, bigoted and he has a drink problem. He can’t build a normal relationship with anyone and his law practise is the worst in the state. Not to mention he cheated on his wife with 3 different women. One of them was your wife.

The judge asked both lawyers to approach the bench. In a quiet voice he said...

- If either of you idiots asks this woman if she knows me, I’m sending you both to the electric chair.



Laters,

M

Nutty News

Relatives of Brazilian Ademir Jorge Goncalves, I.D.’d him as the victim of a Sunday night car crash. The funeral was organised for the very next day. Hot country. Need to bury body fast, is my guess.

What family members did not know was that Mr Goncalves had spent the night at a lorry park talking to friends over drinks of a sugarcane liquor known as cachaca – and was nowhere near the accident. He was quick to sober up the next morning when he got word about his own funeral. The bricklayer rushed to the ceremony to let his loved ones know that the reports of his death were somewhat premature. He had his sleeves rolled up in case anyone wanted to check his pulse (ok, I made that bit up).

"The corpse was badly disfigured, but dressed in similar clothing," said the police spokesman.


‘Holy fuck,’ said his father when Ademir walked/ ran/ skidded into the church.

Wouldn’t you have loved to have been a fly on that wall? I’m guessing a few tooth cavities and tonsils were in clear view that day.

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An American couple are looking into other methods of having children after they discovered that she was allergic to his sperm. This potential relationship-breaking discovery was made... on their wedding night.


Mike and Julie Boyde of Ambridge, Pennsylvania, went out for two years after meeting at university. Before their wedding, the couple say they always used protection, (because of course everybody wanted to know how this had not become apparent) but once they got hitched and subsequently ditched the condoms, things started to go badly wrong.

We’re not talking just a slight itch here. We’re talking blisters and burning in her most tender of parts.

Bet that put a dampener on the honeymoon.

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A 70-year-old shoplifter in Germany tried to evade capture by biting his arresting officer. Knives, guns and any amount of weaponry must have been discounted by pensioner Gustav Ernegger when he went werewolf, after he was caught stealing a shirt.


However, his cunning plan went somewhat awry when instead of sinking his teeth into the officer's arm, he was only able to leave a wet mark from his gums.

He’d left his falsies at home.

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Want to talk about your toilet experiences? Fancy downloading your thoughts about what happens when you go for a ....how do I put this delicately...not even gonna try...a dump? Well soon you will have your shot for it seems that Proctor and Gamble are going to have a special toilet installed in Times Square, NY during the holiday season, as a promo for Charmin tissue. There will also be 5 bloggers on hand to help thousands of the newly empty-bowelled share their experience across the web. Because that – clearly - is what the world is desperate to know. This will include photos. Of the “family friendly” variety, apparently. (There’s a relief).


Regulars will know how shy I am of sharing my own life experiences, but I feel like flying over to add my comments. Cos here’s the problem: the fecking paper is TOO soft. You’re sat there doing your thing, after you’ve done your thing and...the paper gives way. Last time this happened made me realise I needed to cut my fingernails. Not nice.

Doing it Wrong

The fall-out from Jan Moir’s despicable article in the Daily Mail on Friday continues with the Press Complaints Commission announcing that they will be asking the newspaper concerned for a response. It seems that the PCC is unable to act unless someone directly affected makes a complaint (21,000 complaints received – which is a nice neat number – more in one weekend than they’ve received in the last 5 years).

I’m thinking that Stephen Gately’s family will have more to concern themselves with than a journalist who’s so desperate for something to write about that she’ll attempt to trash a young man’s memory on the eve of his funeral.


For those of you who might have missed this, in her column, Moir called Gately's death "strange, lonely and troubling".

"Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one. Let us be absolutely clear about this," she wrote.

Later, she concluded: "As a gay rights champion, I am sure he would want to set an example to any impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine.

"For once again, under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see."


Reads to me like what she was saying is that Stephen Gates died of Being Gay. Clearly whatever qualifications Miss Moir has accumulated in her life they include some kind of forensic science and far-sight because she knew better than the coroner and his verdict of "natural causes" (who was, lest we forget actually in the presence of the body) and that certainty drove her to share that knowledge with the public.

Advertisers asked that they be removed from the online version of the article, which I’m thinking may be what prompted Miss Moir to publish her “apology”. That she made any effort to apologise at all is down to the power of Twitter and Facebook. Thousands upon thousands of people showed their outrage at what this “journalist” had to say by tweeting etc and I was there to watch it unfold. Fascinating. Every couple of hours I went in to Twitter to see that hundreds more people had been on. Much spleen was being vented.

Back to her “apology”. It was risible. Nowhere in her statement did she actually apologise instead she alluded to a mischievous orchestration on Twitter.

Her final sentence read: ‘In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.”

She went on to say that most people who complained hadn’t read it and they were gay themselves. “Your arse”, I say to both of these assertions.



I was part of this so-called ‘heavily orchestrated’ campaign – and what happened was this... Miss Moir wrote an article for a newspaper which is read by thousands of people. The article is posted on the internet by that paper. People read it. They become offended; irate even. They post links to it on Twitter. People like me who don’t read the Daily Mail become aware of the article. We (being intelligent and able to think for ourselves) go online and read it. We – regardless of our sexual preference – read her inference and wonder how in this day and age people with these views weren’t made extinct by a giant meteor. We post on Facebook. Our friends read it. They tell their friends to read it. We Twitter. We blog.

There was no orchestration, it was all about reaction and a channel in which that reaction could be aired rather than simply turning to the person beside you and asking, ‘Who the fuck is this woman?’

Watching Matthew Wright on Ch5 today I was impressed with the summation of the entire situation by one of his guests. She remarked on how touching the media coverage of Stephen Gately’s funeral service had been. What particularly moved her was that when Stephen’s mum got upset at the thought of her son lying in his coffin, cold and alone, all night in the church the other members of Boyzone brought their sleeping bags with them and spent the night with him. This guest then asked the question....

‘This is what the members of Boyzone did for Stephen’s mother on the eve of her son’s funeral. What did you do, Jan Moir?’

‘Nuff said.

Mind Munchies

125,000 euros is not to shabby for a book prize, is it? This is what Scottish author Philip Kerr won the other night for his novel If The Dead Rise Not. This is the latest book that features his Berlin detective Bernie Gunther. Gunther is a great invention and Philip Kerr is a writer on my must-buy list. Do yourself a favour and check him out.

Here’s some good news for those of us of large proportions. Large thighs apparently lower your risk of heart disease. The magic figure is 60 cm or in old-english, 23.6 ins. For an effective measure place the tape around your thigh just below the gluteal fold. Or in English, the crease where your arse meets your thigh. If it’s below the magic 60 cm, prepare to get those skinny thighs of yours exercised. Or, you could eat half a dozen doughnuts before you go to bed. Simply brush off the sugar coating if you are worried about your teeth. Do I, or do I not provide a public service here on May Contain Nuts?

This next one is with thanks to E...
What’s the difference between Bird Flu and Swine Flu? For Bird Flu you get tweetment and for Swine Flu you take some oinkment.

I’m toying with the idea of getting an e-reader. Anyone out there got one? What’s your experience? Is there anyone out there willing to give one away to a struggling writer? Anyone? Sony? Just think of the exposure May Contain Nuts can give you. Save a fortune on marketing, by the way.

Aleksandr Orlov, the aristocratic meerkat, a bizarre character dreamt up by Comparethemarket.com, the insurance price comparison website, has become a “star” in his own right with 555,000 Facebook fans and 25,000 Twitter followers. WTF? Are people so starved of entertainment? Get a life, people. Buy a book.
Hey. That could be my new slogan.

As my blog is chiefly about books and writing, I thought it was about time that I spent some blog inches on some of the issues important to me in the world of writing. One such issue close to my heart is that of sentence structure. If your syntax can be misconstrued it could lead you or your characters into some serious trouble. Lemme give you an example, cos I’m a sharing kinda guy.
Read carefully and see where you could have your character improve on his dialogue…

“The boss had to fire somebody, and he narrowed it down to one of two people, Debra or Jack. It was an impossible decision because they were both super workers. Rather than flip a coin, he decided he would fire the first one who used the water cooler the next morning.
Debra came in the next morning with a horrible hangover after partying all night. She went to the cooler to take an aspirin. The boss approached her and said: "Debra, I've never done this before but I have to lay you or Jack off."

"Could you jack off?" she says. "I feel like shit." “

Nut News

An Aberdeen man had his day in court this week for wasting police time. It seems that he presented himself at a local police station covered in cuts and bruises saying he had been mugged on the way to work.

After further questioning the chump broke down and admitted that he had inflicted the cuts on himself with a small knife and the bruises by bashing himself with a brick. The reason for this clever subterfuge? He couldn’t be arsed going in to work.

WTF fella? There’s a lot of that swine flu going about. Why didn’t he call in and say he had a sore throat, a runny tummy and he could fill a bucket with phlegm? Works every time.

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A report just published says that the NHS needs to look after its staff better. Apparently throughout Britain there are on average 45,000 of their staff off sick each day. Now, I’m not going to jump on the Let’s Slag the NHS bandwagon...as it happens I’ve had excellent service any time I’ve been in their care. Apart from the superbug I caught after my nose job. And the swab they left in after the vasectomy. In any case the swab doesn’t hurt and it gives me a fetching lobsided look.

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May Contain Nuts can’t help but feel sorry for the South African athlete, Caster Semenya. The poor woman won a gold medal at the World Athletics competition only to have a queue of people claiming she was more male than female. Envy is a terrible thing.

An IAAF spokesman, explained yesterday that “the extremely difficult, complex” gender-verification process involved “an endocrinologist, a gynaecologist, an internal medicine expert, an expert on gender and a psychologist” and would take a matter of weeks.

Apparently, there are between 20 and 30 different types of “intersex” conditions, each of them affecting the body in different ways, and it is for the medics to decide whether, if Semenya is found to have one of them, the resulting hormonal balance gives her an unfair advantage.

Now the whole world is waiting while the scientists check out this poor 18 year old’s “package”.

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A man was working on his motorcycle on the patio, his wife nearby in the kitchen. While racing the engine, the motorcycle accidentally slipped into gear. The man, still holding onto the handlebars, was dragged along as it burst through the glass patio doors.

His wife, hearing the crash, ran in the room to find the motorcycle, the shattered patio door and her husband cut and bleeding. She called for an ambulance and, because the house sat on a fairly large hill, went down the several flights of stairs to meet the paramedics and escort them to her husband.

While the attendants were loading her husband, the wife managed to right the motorcycle and push it outside. She also quickly blotted up the spilled gasoline with some paper towels and tossed them into the toilet.

Some hours later, after being treated and released, the man returned home, looked at the shattered patio door and the damage done to his motorcycle. He went into the bathroom and consoled himself with a cigarette while attending to his business.

About to stand, he flipped the cigarette butt between his legs.

The wife, who was in the kitchen, heard a loud explosion and her husband screaming. Finding him lying on the bathroom floor with his trousers blown away and burns on his buttocks, legs and groin, she once again phoned for an ambulance. The same paramedic crew was dispatched.

As the paramedics carried the man down the stairs to the ambulance they asked the wife how he had come to burn himself. She told them... they started laughing so hard, one slipped, and dropped the stretcher...The husband fell down the remaining stairs, breaking his arm in the process.

He has apparently given up cycling and now sells lucky white heather.

I'll Be Back

I’m off first thing tomorrow morning to Aberdeen, the sunshine coast, to appear at the Wordfringe Festival and then to spend a couple of days at my favourite spot. Cliff Cottage, where the words flow honeyed and exact and where the hospitality is legendary.

70,000 words down on the current work in progress and I’m in the home strait. So I will be concentrating on that for a few days. In fact I need to have a rest from this blogging malarkey. I really enjoy the chance to be a bit irreverent, but it diznae pay the mortgage.
This novel is based on fact and set on a prison colony during the middle of the last century. It’s a story of a young man who was sent to the worst prison on the planet. His crime? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If I tell you any more, I’ll have to kill you. With a sharpened teaspoon. While you’re sleeping. You’ll just have to lie very still so I can get some purchase on your jugular. So maybe I’ll tie you up first. With barbed wire. So I might need to waken you up first. And I’ve just taken this too far, haven’t I?

So, thank you for reading my blogging efforts so far and for those who can be arsed commenting, thank you for your comments – I love receiving them, makes me feel less like I’m indulging in a literary form of masturbation. Writing is like sex, much better when there is more than one person involved. To those who don’t leave a message, this is me with my tongue sticking out blowing a raspberry.

I’m having a few days off. But dinnae worry, as the heavily muscled man with the face paint and the Austrian accent said, I’ll be back.
Michael

Ps. Weren’t Barcelona worthy winners tonight? Apart from the first ten minutes, Man Utd were barely in it. Iniesta and Zavi were awesome.

Ps. Watching the news with another apologetic MP tonight reminds me of the quote by Aristotle that says something along the lines of...the amount of shame the sinner feels is in line with the number of people who have become aware of the sin. (This isn’t the exact quote, but it’s close enough, ok?)

Ps. The saddest thing I’ve heard recently was Susan Boyle saying that she hopes she makes the final of BGT because that will show she is a worthwhile person. Bless. And shame on Lily whatsername, going for an easy target.

Right, that’s me done with ps’s. Honest. I mean it. For real. See ya.