Find of the century last week at a local boot fair: a 7″ of “Rockin’ All Over the World” RECORDED IN LATIN! AND the guy only wanted £1!

You could say it was a quid pro Quo…

A fond farewell, then, to R.E.M., one of the most eminent bands of the last 30 years, whose work I always admired - but, to be honest, struggled to love. I’ve got most of their albums, but with a few exceptions, never really listened to them more than once or twice; it’s all a little bit too cerebral and civilised, and in need of a few more “volume up to 11″ moments (such as “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth”). TM puts it very well (via God’s great gift of irony) when describing their break-up:

“I knew it was too good to be true … all that ‘caring about the world’ and ‘eating tofu’ has finally got the better of them and they’ve broken down in a bilious display of acrimonious nastiness. Here’s some classic band break-up nastiness from Stipe: “I hope our fans realise this wasn’t an easy decision; but all things must end, and we wanted to do it right, to do it our way,” Stipe said as he announced the split. It’s like the Sex Pistols or Pixies all over again…”

R.E.M.’s “vegan break-up” was indeed emblematic of my struggles to really love them - and in order to completely contradict myself for no good reason, the tribute song I’ve chosen as TTOTDOWOHOHCBATCI is one of their most sensitive and tragic; even bordering on mawkish. It’s “The Wrong Child”, last track on side 1 of their breakthrough album “Green”, and it’s a fairly self-explanatory tale told from the point of view of a child struggling to gain acceptance from his peers. The lyrics are reasonably obvious (although they do a great job); the real genius is in the arrangement. The slightly off-key mandolin, the canon-style backing vocal and the stripped-down production make it a haunting, emotionally-piercing experience which is difficult to forget. (Some considerably more intelligent analysis of the song can be found here.)

(Apologies for temporary inability to upload song. I’m sure it’s all TM’s fault - the fact that I haven’t done any routine maintenance to the relevant software on my machine for MONTHS can have nothing whatsoever to do with it.)

Your latest monthly round-up of global science’s efforts to find the very cutting edge in new humour, you lucky people*…

Q - Which postprandial entertainment at the UN General Assembly was so bad that it had delegates walking out en masse?
A - After-dinner-jazz

Q - If Simon Cowell commissioned a Japanese director to make a horror film based on the grisly demise of the host of “Tiswas” and “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire”, what would it be called?
A - “Britons Garotte Tarrant”.

Q - Which share index is favoured by incredibly stale, old-fashioned people?
A - The Fusty 100

(* - actually, at least one of these is a variation on another very similar joke, and another is rephrased slightly, if not downright copied. The shittest one is all my own work, though.)

Q - Which star of the film “Cabaret” is actually 1,000 years old?
A - Liza Minnellium

Every time I go for a pee, I worry that I’ll end up having to clean some off the toilet seat. Maybe I’m just being piss-a-miss-tic?

This story piqued my interest today; not so much for the intelligent architectural and cultural analysis, more for the fact that it appears to have been concocted as the “perfect storm” for frothy-mouthed right-wing keyboard warriors. An “Eco-Mosque” which is designed to help combat global warming? All you’d need would be for it to be built by illegal immigrants on benefits and somehow funded by the BBC licence fee, and I believe that the brains of half a million Daily Mail readers would spontaneously combust…

Q - How did The Smiths encourage the diffident carp?
A - “Koi-ness is nice, but koi-ness can stop you / from doing all the things in life you’d like to”.

Two new COSPJs for your utter delectation - the first is from our self-appointed resident expert on humour, Technical Monkey, and, rather excitingly, the second respresents a brand new type of zany crazy wacky funster gag, the COSPJWIFOANE (or “Crappy Obviously Self-Penned Joke Which Is Fairly Obscure And Needs Explaining”). TM’s effort first:

Q - Which Star Wars animal is the best at good-natured raillery?
A - The Bantha.

He adds - “Geddit? Bantha / Banter … ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Aha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Haw haw haw haw haw. Ho Ho Heee he he he he (and so on)”. Indeed, TM - although thinking about it, isn’t the word “Bantha” in Star Wars pronounced as a voiceless dental fricative, rather than the hard “t” of “banter”? So it doesn’t really work, does it? Disappointing.

Anyway, onto my brand new COSPJWIFOANE (which is a REALLY cool abbreviation because it looks a bit like wi-fi, or i-phone, or something…) -

Q - What sort of new “wholebean instant” coffee do fans of intermittently funny Geordie comediennes prefer?
A - Millicano

(You see, because Kenco have recently released a revolutionary new “wholebean instant” coffee called Millicano, which is designed to replicate the taste of “proper” filter coffee in an soluble powder - and Kenco’s chosen nomenclature is fairly similar to the surname of the intermittently funny Geordie comedienne, Sarah Millican.)

THAT’S how you do it, TM.

Folkestone, capital of the Kentish riviera, sweetest rose in the Garden of England (where I live), is a classic WASP Tory heartland, typical “donkey with a blue rosette” country - it’s fair to say that immigrant communities are not widely represented here, and that there’s a degree of Daily Mail-fed concern about the increasing influence of Islam in the UK. Equally, the locals aren’t averse to the odd conspiracy theory; there was a lot of scepticism, for instance, about the veracity of the White House’s version of events over Bin Laden.

However, even taking these facts into account, surely this headline / picture in last week’s “Kentish Gazette” represents excessive scaremongering?

We all know that diamonds are a girl’s best friend. But this Italian jeweller in my home town of Imperia is being perhaps a little too blatant about what his male customers are expecting in return for a bit of bling…