(Thanks to legendary contributor and FIFA Golden Balls winner Pal Pito for this one.)

Listen very carefully - you will win it only once…. Spain manager Vicente del Bosque:

… and inexplicably-attractive-to-women hero of the resistance, Rene Artois…

Last week’s manhunt to catch killer Raoul Moat in Northumberland involved hundreds of regular police from 30 forces nationwide, 40 elite firearms officers from the Metropolitan Police, 20 armoured cars from Northern Ireland, plus scores of psychologists, hostage-situation-negotiators, public liaison officers and sniffer dogs. All on double time.

All told, it represents the highest public expenditure on a Moat since last year’s Tory expense claims were submitted…

1989: whilst mere mortals contemplate switching from their Spectrum or Commodore to an Amiga or some valve-and-sea-water-powered games console, madman Tim Berners-Lee is writing proposals for a network of hypertext protocol thingummies which will come to be called the World Wide Web and which, he dreams, will eventually come to dominate the industrialised world. At the same time, Prince (soon to become known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, later known as The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince), still glowing from the critical triumph of his brilliant 1987 “Sign of the Times” set, is touring his subsequent slightly flabby, self-indulgent “Lovesexy” album.

They were heady, portentous times indeed - in the following 5-10 years, the globe’s political landscape would change beyond recognition; suitably inspired by these epochal changes and all they portended, I would blaze a ground-breaking trail through a low 2:1 degree at college followed by a couple of meaningless jobs at which I failed; and, of course, the internet would indeed go on to dominate the economies of the industrialised world, largely through work-time lost to pornography. (Oh, and Prince and his alter-egos would release a series of increasingly flabby, self-indulgent albums.)

Now in “Twenty10″, however, it’s clear that this “World Wide Web” upstart has had its day; it is no longer relevant - Prince has said so. Eschewing all traditional portals, and expert on irrelevancy that he is, he’s chosen instead to release his latest not-at-all-flabby-or-self-indulgent album exclusively via the thrusting new upcoming exciting media platform of (da-da-da-da-da-da-DAAAAA) -  the Daily Mirror.

Sorry Princey-poo-poos; I know it’s easy to be cynical, and I was VERY much a fan of yours; I still remember fondly doing my paper-round in summer ‘88 with “Lovesexy” exclusively on my headphones; I still remember the crushing disappointment when you cancelled that London gig in ‘87, the one I’d saved* for ages to see; and of course, I still remember your best stuff very fondly - but for Christ’s sakes, when your biggest hit is out of date by 11 years, it’s time to shut up about what’s relevant and what isn’t. Act your age: marry an obvious gold digger; adopt a poor Tierra-del-Fuegian orphan-child with no limbs and incurable palsy of the arsehole; get religion (oh, you did); go on “I’m a Celebrity”; hook up with Kaja-frigging-Googoo on an acoustic pan-pipes “’80s greatest hits” tour; do SOME flipping thing - just don’t hector the rest of the world about the internet (or iTunes / Friends Reunited / binary code / whatever.)

(* - OK, nagged my parents for the money and never paid it back)

All work and no play makes Belgian tennis star Xavier Malisse look a little bit like Jack Nicholson…

Inspired by the rubbishiness of England (not to mention of my own Italian rabble), I give you a new low in crappy obviously self-penned jokes:

Q - Why are Holland like a three-wheeled car?
A - They’re both Robben-reliant

Q - Did you hear about the Spanish / Portuguese bloke who never bought anyone a drink?
A - He would never get Iberian

(A beer in? No? No, you’re probably right - that IS the worst one ever.)

High summer is upon us, and anyone who habitually bleats about not liking sport (women, nancy-boys and other net-non-contributors to the economy, mostly) had better hire themselves a field in Somerset, bugger off there and listen to some rubbishy music with like-minded idiots who are happy to pay £1000 for 3 days of sleeplessness and 50-deep queues for chemical toilets.

Wimbledon is now in full swing, and massively honourable mention must go to John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, who are deadlocked at an astonishing 59 games all in the final set of their second-round match. A regular best-of-five-set match should last around 2 and a half hours, maybe add an hour if it goes the distance. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal’s massive epic final in 2008 lasted 4 hours 47 minutes. The previous longest match in history lasted six and a half hours. Mahut and Isner are currently at the TEN hour mark, and are still going - that’s longer than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy (watching rather than reading), longer than Serena Williams took to play her entire winning Wimbledon CHAMPIONSHIP last year, and a whole bunch of other stats. The fact that this match is completely dominated by booming serves and thus (whisper it soft) actually quite boring is irrelevant; the titanicism (titanocity? titan-eousness?) of their efforts is incredible. (Mind you, I played table-tennis last night, and because I arrived late had to play two consecutive games. Twenty incredibly intensive lung-busting minutes of occasional small side-to-side movements later, I was shattered. AND I didn’t have free water / crowds applauding me / gimps picking up my discarded balls like those pampered tennis wussies do.)

On the minus side, it’s been another record-breakingly-shit week for British tennis hopes. Apart from Andy Murray, who doesn’t count as British because he hates Britain, isn’t English which everyone takes to mean British, speaks in a broad Glaswegio-transatlantic drawl and won’t bow to our queen or something (probably), ALL of our players in the men’s AND women’s draw were knocked out in the first round. £30 million a year is lavished on these cack-handed twots by the LTA; just to put that in context, the team behind the brilliant BBC Wild Night In programme on Sunday was ecstatic because, after months of fundraising effort, it had managed to raise £1 million for vital biodiversity projects around the world. SIX measly pounds is enough to make an acre of rainforest safe from the palm oil planters. FIFTY pounds is enough to buy food for an orphaned orang-utan for a year. And TWENTY pounds is enough to buy me a soap-box for standing on whilst hectoring you with irrelevant and utterly specious comparisons between sums of money involved in charities and sporting events. (Make it twenty-five, and I might even shut up.)

And then, of course, there’s the World Cup. Aaahhh, the World Cup. More on that later…

A brand new COSPJ (oh come on, it’s been at least a month) which has been viewed, vetted and approved by Technical Monkey and his colleagues. I wasn’t actually going to post this one, but he made me.

Q - What do you get when a posh person pours salt water over an ex-Prime Minister?
A - Gordon Brine

Another update from your super soaraway Kentish Express - this time, a “story” about a restaurant in Ashford. It goes as follows -

“To celebrate the May bank holiday, the French Connection Table Table [it is actually called that] restuarant in Ashford is offering everybody with a double name a free meal. If you’re [sic] first name matches your surname - you and a guest will eat absolutely free on bank holiday Monday (May 31). A valid form of photographic identification will be required.”

Right… so basically, unless Neville Neville (father of Gary and Phil), Bobby Kennedy’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan or fictional villain in 1960s psychedelic sci-fi “Barbarella” Duran Duran turn up, the restaurant’s money is probably safe. I’m 100% sure that they are running this offer to “celebrate the May bank holiday”, and NOT AT ALL because they fancied a bit of advertising on the cheap via a ridiculous promotion. There is also clearly no substance WHATSOEVER to any claim that the only recipient of a free meal may well have been Mr Lazy Sub-editor Lazy Sub-editor.

This story from a week or so ago managed to grab the fragile, dangling nutsack of the press’s attention and give it a good squeeze; Google, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, put up a playable version of the game on their homepage as its “doodle” and left it there for a day or so. So far, so not very interesting; all I really learned from Google’s stunt was a) that yes, my childhood is over 30 years ago, thanks for reminding me as if the mirror didn’t do that often enough already, and b) that for all the undoubted growth in my wisdom, experience, waistline and general stature as a human being, I’m still as fucking shit at Pac-Man as when the machines on Felixstowe pleasure beach used to swallow my pocket money in five desperately disappointing and malcoordinated minutes back in the early 1980s.

Then a company called “Rescue Time” reported that the Google Pac-Man had led to a staggering 4.82 million work hours being wasted - the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars, or enough money to employ all of Google’s staff (including its directors) for six weeks. It’s an interesting assertion based on very creative use of what you might call imaginitive statistics, and one which raises a whole new set of questions; chief amongst which is how many valuable work hours have subsequently been lost reading Rescue Time’s spurious-in-fact-let’s-not-beat-about-the-bush-utter-bollocks assertions and commenting on them as I’m doing now? (Time spent by me writing this post thus far - 27 minutes. My entirely self-fabricated and meaningless consultancy fee? £100 per hour. Entertainment / information value of said post? Well, let’s be honest, nil. You do the “math”.)

But then I realised how much free publicity Rescue Time had gained from all this, and, bearing in mind the well-known fact that 78.327% of statistics are made up on the spot, I thought I’d give it a try myself…. so here goes.

You know those stupid fucking St George flags which everyone seems to be hanging out of their cars to celebrate England’s impending loss in the World Cup (on penalties in the quarters to France on July 2nd - you heard it here first)? I’ve calculated* that, if you take cost of the diesel required to transport them over from China and then back again in a month or so when they head to the landfill site a couple of miles away from the factory where they were first made, then add on the cost of increased fuel / journey time man-hours caused by the reduction in the aerodynamic performance due to drag on every car which displays them, and finally factor in the man-hours required for every purchaser to go down to Netto to buy a new pair every time they fall off the back of Ford Mondeos and hit my fucking windscreen this morning nearly making me veer into a lorry because you were too thick to have secured them properly, you dull-witted moron - then the monetary equivalent would be enough to pay Sarah Ferguson to go away somewhere - anywhere - and to not come back for AT LEAST six weeks. Now THAT’S a statistic worth thinking about.

(* - From a huge list of big numbers in my imagination. Sorry, I didn’t keep the working-out.)

Being a green, wishy-washy namby-pamby immigrant-loving peacenik socialist Marxist Nazi liberal and all, I’m predictably keen on Freecycle. For those who aren’t familiar, Freecycle is a website on which people can offer items to / request items from other members of their local community (usually broken, cumbersome white goods or dog-piss-stained sofas in the former category, and unused iPhones or free money in the latter).

There are only two drawbacks with the site; firstly, as I’ve just mentioned, stuff offered tends to be too crappy even for landfill, and secondly, crappiness notwithstanding, there are semi-professional hawks waiting to snap up pretty much everything which is offered within minutes of it being posted on the site (seriously; I had five offers for a broken £40 printer within 10 minutes the other week.) However, many “offerers” are now getting wise to the hawks; this, in turn, has led to a preposterous rigmarole in which any wannabe taker of an item has to convince the offerer that it’s wanted for personal use and not for profit in any way, shape or form. Hence, when offering an item, despite just wanting rid of the fecking thing as soon as possible, you get messages along the lines of “PLEASE consider me for your broken £40 printer; my disabled terminally ill daughter has always wanted one like this, but we’ve never been able to afford it because my husband was killed in Afghanistan and I lost my job when my legs were amputated after a terrible car accident. I won’t sell it on eBay, honest.”

So in effect, I have very little interest in Freecycle other than to get rid of things (for which it remains useful). However, I still peruse the Folkestone daily digests in the vain hopes of free vinyl / CDs, and in doing so today, came across this announcement. It was posted under “Offered: SOME GOOD ADVICE”, and is well worth sharing….

“WHEN OFFERED AN ITEM FROM FRECYCLE BY ANOTHER PERSON, MEMBERS SHOULD REMEMBER TO CALL AT A REASONABL TIME OF THE DAY, I HAVE FOR THE SECOND TIME THIS WEEK HAD TO ANWSER THE PHONE BEFORE 8AM T AN OVER ZEALOUS PERSONAT THE OTHER END WHOM TAKES OFFENCE WHEN I IT IS POINTED OUT THAT  WAS ASLEEP UNTILL THEY RANG AND THAT IT IS NOT POLITE TO CALL AT THE CRACK OF DAWN, MEMBERS SHOULD NOT HAVBE TO DISCLOSE THEIR WORKING TIMES OR DETAILS OF THEIR LIVES IN ORDER TO ENSURE THAT THE FREECYCLER DOSE NOT RING AT STUPID O’CLOCK,

ALSO WHEN OFFERD AN ITEM YOU SHOULD NOT TAKE THE MICHEAL, LIKE THE
MEMBER WHOM LAGHTED RUDLY AT ME WHEN I HAD OFFERED HER A DOG CRATE WORTH OVER 200 POUNDS BECAUSE SHE DID NOT KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A PET CARRIER AND A CRATE, IT IS RUDE TO MOCK A PERSON WHOM IS OFFERING AN ITEM TO YOU GRATITUDE AND SERVILITY GO A LONG WAY,

QUICK GUIDE RINGING BEFORE 8.30 AM OR EVEN 9AM FOR THOSE WITH CHILDREN IS RUDE OR EVEN SIMPLY DAMMED INNCONVIETANT, ALSO FR THOSE PEOPLE WOM WORK SHIFTS IT DISRESPECTFUL RINGING AFTR 9.30PM IS ALSO THE HEIGHT OF RUDENESS IN FACT RINGING BEFORE A REASONABLE TIME OR AFTER GETS PEOPLE WORRIED THAT SOMTHING TERRIBLE MAY HAVE HAPPENED MAYBE I AM OLD FASHIONED AN MAYBE MY MOTHER ENSURED THAT I KNEW THE RESPECTFUL WAY TO BEHAVE OR SHE
SIMPLE GAVE ME SOME MORALS AN VAALUES SO MY OFFER TO FREECYCLERS IS THIS OOK AT THE CLOCK BEFORE RINGING A PERSON TO ENSURE IT IS ATA DECENT TIME REMEMBER TO THANK YOUR EMPOYER AND CHRISTMAS FOR THE YARS EMPLOYMENT RESPECT YOUR ELDERLY NEIGHBOURS WITH OUT THEM WE WOULD ALL BE GERMANS BY NOW OR THE WORLD WOUL CERTANILY BE A HORIBBL PLACE, ACTUALLY TRY TO RECYCLE EVERYTHING A ND NOT JUST JOIN FOR SOME THING THAT IS FREE, SAY PLEASE AND THANK YOU AND IF YOU BUGGER UP SORRY IS THE APROPREATE WORD NOT WELL SHOVE IT THEN”