Google, Yahoo! join forces to combat "lol fraud"

SILICON VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

INTERNET giants Google and Yahoo! have formed an unprecedented alliance in a bid to stamp out lol fraud, which they believe has the potential to undermine public confidence in their internets, with potentially disastrous consequences for shareholders and Western civilisation in general.

Lol fraud occurs when an internet user types the "word" lol on an interweb message board or in a chatroom or email when he or she is not actually laughing out loud.

An ethnographic study commissioned by the search-engine leviathans and carried out by Sneaky Peak Surveillance Inc (a leading supplier of candid public-toilet footage to low-end pornographic websites) found that as many as 98% of lols are fraudulent, a figure that rises to 99.8% for lmaos.

The six-month video survey of 160,000 home computers and bathrooms recorded only a handful of instances of rofl and roflmao, and these were all teenagers who were stoned out of their gourds and who then went to the kitchen make Pop Tarts and so forgot to alert other users that they'd been rofling.

There was not one documented case of a roflcopter.

In a sign of an emerging trend, Blizzard Interactive, the maker of the massively multiplayer online time-wasting game World of Warcraft this week redeployed its crack squad of cyber sleuths from chasing gold farmers and free server providers to tracking down lol fraudsters.

A spokesman for Blizzard, Eddie Izzard, said the high volume of lols on the company's servers was suspicious, particularly given that the majority of players had been born without humour glands to judge by such inane chat as "going for a smoke brb lol!!!" and "i found 2 gold!!! ROFL!!!!"

"It is true that laughter is a psychological defence mechanism that helps people cope in times of war or violence," Izzard said. "You would expect to find a certain amount of gallows humour, for instance, in places such as Nazi death camps or in the Barrens, where you can find yourself being attacked simultaneously by a lion, a dinosaur and some sort of half-man, half-pig thing. Still, something clearly stinks."

Google spokesman Dougal MacDougall said via email that lol fraud was an infinitely bigger problem than click fraud.

"Let's face it, any business that is stupid enough to pay us for our shitty little ads deserves to be taken to the cleaners by their competitors' clickbots," he said. "LOL!!!"

Phone books are our cultural heritage, say police

PAKENHAM UPPER GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

VICTORIAN police today expressed anger at the top brass's decision to ban the use of telephone books as an interrogation aid.

The police union threatened industrial action in the wake of the wake of the shock decision, issuing a statement saying "This baffling decree by an increasingly out-of-touch force command doesn't just handcuff our members - it wraps them in a blanket and beats them with a footy sock full of cricket balls."

Former Ferret Squad detective Peter Ploddart said the decision to ban the use of phone books in forced confession was "a bloody disgrace".

"Giving a crook a proper flogging is part of the policeman's cultural heritage," he said. "Telling a copper that he can't use a telephone book for anything other than looking up phone numbers is akin to telling a Japanese he can't eat whale or an Aborigine he can't eat dugong.

"Coppering has changed a lot since my day - and not for the better, I'll give you the tip. It all started to go downhill when they split the Yellow Pages into A-K and L-Z. It's never been the same since."

But Ploddart, who played a key role in the investigation of the infamous Great Bookie Robbery and Ferret Gunk Heist, said that police were by nature both ingenious and disingenuous and would find ways to work around the ban, perhaps by beating suspects with a length of garden hose.

"Yep, just cut off a length of the old Nylex and bring it in to work and you'll be having those scrotes putting their hands up to whatever you want to lumber them with," he said. "Any other coppers reading this can get me on the blower (telephone) and I'll give 'em a few other pointers to be going on with. Don't you worry about that."

A Victoria Police spokeswoman said that the use of phone books had not been banned entirely, as detectives could still use them as a pillow when sleeping off a big night on the turps under their desks.

Moro Islamic Liberation Front needs new acronym

- COARSE LANGUAGE FOLLOWS -

Mindanao, Philippines, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

MORTIFIED leaders of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a militant separatist group seeking to establish an Islamic state in the southern Philippines, today admitted that they needed to think about getting a new acronym for their jihadist army.

MILF spiritual leader Sheikh Salamat Pagi said that while surfing the net for American pornography - solely as research for a sermon on the evils of the Great Satan, mind you - he became aware that his organisation's acronym also stands for "mothers I'd like to fuck".

"It is truly disgusting, but it just shows how decadent America - death be upon it - really is," he said.

"These so-called MILF women of America have damned themselves to everlasting torment by exposing their long, blonde, hair, their large, pendulous breasts and their shaven, dripping shame-holes to the world."

Sheikh Pagi said that he was considering several new names for his terrorist organisation, but was currently leaning towards TWINK (Total War Islamic Nation Karnage).

When asked for her reaction, Tiffany White, a spokeswoman for the California chapter of Mothers I'd Like to Fornicate With (which is not associatied with the Philippines MILFs), issued only this short statement: "Look, I can't really talk now because I have to get Timmy to soccer practice. TIMMY! GET IN THE CAR!"

Philippines Army spokesman Lieutenent-Colonel Rafael Gomez, however, said he believed that his country's MILF should stick with the name it has.

"It really suits them," he said. "This is one bunch of mothers I'd really like to fuck over."

Chinese blogger's death brings the gift of life

BEIJING, China, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

IN DEATH, Chinese blogger Toby Wong has given the gift of life to people on two continents and redeemed himself in the eyes of his country's leadership - two of those eyes now being his own.

Wong, 24, was executed last Friday a few minutes after being found guilty of treason for posting comments critical of the Chinese government on falungongninjas.sinoblob.com. His organs were immediately harvested, packed in dry ice and shipped around the world to those in need who had the ready cash.

Wong's heart proved a lifesaver for minor Saudi prince Faisal "Freddy" bin Wahhab bin Saud, whose long years of cigar-smoking and rich food had left him near death's door. Wong's liver was immediately flown to Italy to be transplanted into an alcoholic former fencing champion.

Closer to home, his eyes gave the gift of sight to senior Chinese Communist Party official Zhang Xiaopong, who was blinded in January when a bottle of Cristal exploded at a politburo lunch.

Unfortunately, Wong's kidneys were not fit for transplant, having been mashed to a pulp by wooden batons during his five-day interrogation.

Chinese government spokesman Li Wang said that Wong's eyes and the cash that the party had earned from selling his other organs had helped make up for the damage he had caused by posting such inflammatory lines as "I wish the government would just leave us alone so we can do our breathing exercises in peace".

Wong's family will still be billed for the bullet used to execute him.

On a lighter note, Wang said, "Although it shames me to say it, we would not be able to track down such reactionary subversive counterrevolutionaries without the help of the big American internet companies, even though they are capitalist pigs," he said, spitting on the ground for emphasis.

"Also, he had some nice buttons on his sock puppet. Granddaughter's teddy bear has lost his eye, so maybe we can get two pairs of eyes for the price of one! Oh, wait. We didn't have to pay at all."

Pastafarian uprising in Middle East

BINT JBAIL, LEBANON, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

AN UPRISING by zealous new converts to Pastafarianism has poured petrol on the burning man that is the Middle East, baffling Israeli soldiers, dismaying Hezbollah guerrillas and bringing about the imposition of martial law from Algeria to Iran.

The unexpected explosion of violence from the normally peaceful if somewhat smug followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was at its most intense in southern Lebanon, where berserk bands of Pastafarians in full pirate regalia (pictured) attacked both Israeli and Hezbollah combatants with cutlasses and flintlock pistols.

One of the first Israeli casualties of the Pastafarian assault was Corporal Irving Goldstein of the 44th Kvetching Brigade, who suffered a deep cutlass gash to his head from a Pastafarian he identified as an old school friend named Shlomo Gertz.

"I couldn't believe it," said a visibly shaken Goldstein. "My squad was having a shootout with these Hezbollah putzes when all of a sudden all these fakakte pirates came out of nowhere. I shot about six of them but they just kept coming.

"One of them cut my head open with a sword. I fell over backwards and had blood in my eyes and all I could hear was the pirate laughing. Then he said 'Mazel tov, motherfucker' and I recognised his voice.

"I said 'Shlomo, you shmendrick, what the hell do you think you're doing?' He said 'I'm Pastafarian now and all you Jew bastards are going to die. We're reclaiming Mount Sinai for the Spaghetti Monster.'

"I said, 'Shlomo, you schmuck, Mount Sinai is in Egypt, not Lebanon. Didn't you take geography? Oh, that's right, you kept cutting class to schtup that shikse from the kibbutz. You always did think with your schlong.'

"He just shrugged and said 'Whatever' and he was about to give me the coup de grace when he noticed the Hezbollah rocket launcher I'd been trying to get to in the first place and went running towards that, saying he had to protect the lives of his Bolognese Brothers in Haifa.

"Just wait 'til I tell my mother and she calls Mrs Gertz."

In Iraq, converts to Pastafarianism, which became an overnight sensation in the Middle East after being featured on al-Jazeera, fought pitched battles with American and Iraqi troops, Sunni insurgents, Shi'ite militias and Kurdish taxi drivers. The governments of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iran instituted martial law to try to bring an end to the gaily-clad carnage.

The Worldwide Communion of the Flying Spaghetti Monster issued a fatwah against the violence, saying Pastafarians must respect all faiths, especially intelligent design. And that martyrs don't get to shag their choice of Keira Knightley or Johnny Depp.

Stopping all stations to Rawalpindi

Tremendous yarn in the Daily Telegraph (Britain) about how a bunch of Pommie cricketers lost their bottle when they learned that broken-down nightclub habitue Shoaib Akhtar(pictured) was going to have a rehabilitation trundle in the creams of their park-league opponent.

Stiff upper lip, old bean. There's a good chap, wot?

"Where is the love?" asks stud stallion

PAKENHAM UPPER, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

PORTERHOUSE Stakes-winning stallion Hip Service (right) had been looking forward to being put out to stud after a long and decorated career on the world's racetracks, but two years on he is heartily sick of the daily bump and grind.

"I was buggered by the time I'd finished racing," Hip Service said yesterday. "My fetlocks were done in and I was getting a split hoof and I thought being put out in a good paddock with a few dirty mares would be a good payoff for it all."

Things changed once Hip Service realised what would be required of him - copulating with up to 10 mares a day six or seven days a week.

"It was fun at first, the whole dirty, anonymous thrill of it -- I usually don't know their names and often I don't even see their faces because they're tethered head-first in the shagging stall -- but after a while I began to feel really empty. And I'm not just talking about the old Jatz crackers.

"There's no nuzzling, no galloping through picturesque mountain streams together. Where is the love?"

And Hip Service's ordeal doesn't end with traditional intercourse.

"The worst part is when the humans masturbate me so they can send my semen overseas," he says. "I'm no prude, but I don't go in for that inter-species stuff. I think it's sick.

"Actually, the glue factory is starting to look pretty good these days."

Australia orders fleet of prison hulks

CANBERRA, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

The Australian government has approved the purchase of 15 state-of-the-art British prison hulks in a bid to slow the trickle of refugees seeking to enter the country.

The prison hulks, each of which can accommodate up to 16,000 Afghans, Iraqis, Somalis, Palestinians, West Papuans, illegal Indonesian fishermen and pregnant Chinese women marked for forced late-term abortion in their home country, will offer the latest in cramped, squalid, oppressive and unhygienic conditions, Australian Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said yesterday.

"We will decide who comes to this country and the conditions in which they're incarcerated for lengthy periods before being shipped back to the hell-holes they came from. At their own expense," said Ruddock, a vampire who is Australia's only openly undead cabinet minister.

Most of the Vanstone-class hulks, which will cost about $800 million each, will be built by defence contractor British Anachronism Systems PLC. The rest will be refitted after being raised from the silt at the bottom of the Thames in London.

Ruddock said that maintaining the fleet would not be expensive as the refugees would be expected to provide their own food, perhaps by dangling greasy scraps of cloth on fishhooks to catch albatrosses.

Jane's Defence Weekly editor Robert Hughes said that on the Vanstone-class hulk he inspected last week at a regional arms fair in Kuwait, "windows were replaced with rags, and in turn the rags had rotted away and turned into moist lumps of noisome impurity. The population seemed to be all outside, walking, standing, or sitting on steps. The tangled knot of children from whom childhood had been sucked out by the ascending steam of crime and disease."

Ruddock said such conditions were appropriate for refugees because they were, by definition, un-Australian.

Mark Webber is rubbish, says Australian Formula One champ

MELBOURNE, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

Four or five-time Formula One champion Brent "Potato" Couchman has described fellow Australian F1 driver Mark Webber (right) as "absolute rubbish" and suggested he "chuck in the F1 caper before he embarrasses himself any further".

Couchman, who appears little more than a sofa-bound PlayStation and Xbox addict, but who in fact thoroughly pantsed Michael Schumacher on his way to winning "four or five" Formula One championships for the McLaren team in the late1990s, said that Webber should "stand in front of the mirror and take a good, hard look at himself - he will see a dead-set goose."

Couchman said that he had never been particularly impressed by the lantern-jawed laughing stock, but had bitten his tongue "through to the bone" rather than say a bad word about him.

But, having watched Webber fail to finish nine of the 13 races so far this season - his second-lap exit at last weekend's Hungarian Grand Prix was his fourth "did not finish" result in as many races - Couchman decided to break his silence.

"Four DNFs on the trot is beyond a joke. And he can't keep blaming the car any more. My first car was a beat-up old XC Falcon with a dodgy water pump, a shitty starter motor and a ropey three-speed automatic transmission that leaked like a sieve, but I still drove the bastard to Sydney and Adelaide and back. He's got a Formula One car - what's his problem?"

Couchman, who quit Formula One on a high and went on to win "maybe two or three" World Rally Championships and several Australian V8 Supercars titles before focusing on touring-car competitions run by Polyphony Digital and Forza Motorsport, said he was amazed that Webber hadn't at least won the Brazilian Grand Prix.

"From what I remember, Brazil was the easiest because there was this part where you could go cross-country and overtake about 20 cars," he said. "Of course, you had to have the damage level set to 'cosmetic'. "

"In any case, I hate to say this, but I think Mark should go back to racing Honda Civics or go-karts or wherever the hell he came from."

Cthulhu severs ties with Miskatonic University

ARKHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

CTHULHU has severed his ties with Miskatonic University after being humiliated by frat boys at an unofficial keg party.

The nightmare from the Outer Gulfs, who had been at the university to deliver his much-anticipated annual lecture on cyclopean architecture, had been goaded into a drinking game by at least a dozen frat boys.

After consuming a large quantity of beer spiked with tequila, Cthulhu (pictured), the university's Professor Emeritus of Occult Studies, collapsed on the lawn in front of the Gabba Gabba Hey frat house, at which point the frat boys staged a photograph in which it appeared that he was being sodomised by a goat. The photograph was immediately posted on the internet.

"Old tentacle chops just can't hold his liquor," said occult studies undergraduate and Gabba Gabba Hey party president Randy "Kegmeister" Boogerman.

"He kept going on about how he'd drink us under the ping-pong table because he'd been drinking the fermented urine of He Who Must Not Be Named since before the Big Bang, so we got him to prove it by necking a 44-gallon drum of Budweiser. What he didn't know was that we'd spiked it with half a dozen cases of tequila before we gave it to him. Jose Cuervo, you're a friend of mine!"

Swigging from a bottle of Mickey's malt liquor, Boogerman said it was the best fun he'd had since spring break in Cancun, when he summoned up a shoggoth during a panty raid on the hotel where Gabba Gabba Hey's sister sorority was staying.

Cthulhu, who upon waking immediately withdrew his funding of the university's Herbert West Chair of Reanimation Studies, said that vengeance would be his.

"I shall consume their souls," he said. "Oh, my fucking head."

Goanna ordered to see optometrist

ALICE SPRINGS, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

A magistrate today placed a goanna on a three-month good-behaviour bond and ordered him to see an optometrist after he pleaded not guilty to one charge of assault occasioning actual bodily harm on a national park ranger.

"Dave", an eight-foot-long perentie from Uluru, 440km south-west of Alice Springs, was charged after an incident two weeks ago that left park ranger Sam "Scruffy" Thompson requiring several stitches to his legs, chest and face.

Dave (pictured), a self-employed forager, vigorously contested the charges before Magistrate Brian Beak.

"It's Scruffy's own bloody fault," Dave told the court. "I was just minding my own business poking about a tourist's Esky looking for bacon and eggs when Scruffy came up and startled me.

"Scruffy's known me for a long time and he knows full well that I'm nervous by disposition and extremely short-sighted, and that when I get frightened I run up trees.

"He scared the bejaysus out of me and since I couldn't see what was going on I thought I'd better get up a tree quick-smart. And to me Scruffy looked like a blurry kind of tree.

"I'm sorry that I ventilated his face, but Scruffy knows that when he sees me coming he should lie flat on the ground so this sort of thing doesn't happen."

Outside the court, Thompson said there were no hard feelings and emphasised that it was "that bloody over-zealous new copper we've got out there" who had pressed the charges.

"I'm still a bit pissed off with Dave, though," he said. "I keep telling him to stay away from the bloody campsite. There's plenty of perfectly good birds, insects and other lizards out there that he could be eating, but he insists on pinching the tourists' food.

"He's just a lazy bastard."

'Bugger that for a joke,' says Australian soldier

PUCKAPUNYAL, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

"Strewth! Fuck a duck! Fuck a dozen ducks!" That was the colourful reaction of Australian soldier Snowy "Bluey" Swagman (pictured) to the news that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had invited the Australian army to be part of a peackekeeping force in southern Lebanon yesterday.

"Christ on bike! Bugger that for a joke," continued Private Swagman. "In the last few years I've been sent to East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq, Indonesia (for tsunami relief), the Solomon Islands, and bloody East Timor again. I've been back here (Australia) for five minutes and now they expect me to go to bloody Lebanon? Get stuffed."

Private Swagman, who joined the army after finding himself unemployed when the Ettamogah wheat silo closed down, said he had thought the army would be "a bit of a bludge".

"I thought it'd be a bit of fun to run around the Outback, do a bit of pig shooting and blow some stuff up," he said. "But in the last few years I've been all over the world getting shot at. The last bloody bullet only missed me by a bee's dick.

"Still, if the Government decides I have to go, I guess I'll have to go. Doesn't mean I'll enjoy it, though.

"Sod this for a game of soldiers."

Police launch manhunt for beer burglar

-- CRASSNESS WARNING. MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR PURITANS --

BALLARAT, AUSTRALIA, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

POLICE in Ballarat have launched a manhunt for a beer burglar who is believed to have broken into the homes of the entire Ballarat Heights football team while they were sleeping, clubbed them over the head and taken all the money out of their wallets.

Detective-Sergeant Darrell Plonkerman said that he was "baffled and dismayed" by the extraordinary one-night crime spree, in which the beer burglar broke into the homes of 28 members of the Ballarat Heights Galahs club, in each case bludgeoning them with a blunt object while they slept before making off with their cash.

"What we're most concerned about is the apparently depraved sexual nature of these crimes," Det-Sgt Plonkerman said. "In many cases the victims reported that when they woke up it felt like someone had shat in their mouths, and in one case a player woke up to find that the beer burglar had stuck his own toothbrush up his arse."

The assaults occurred some time after 3am, which was when the players left the Ballarat Heights clubrooms after a fund-raising pie night and pornography screening.

"I'm absolutely spewing," said Galahs captain Walter "Garbo" Griffiths. "I had nearly 200 bucks in my wallet when I went out and now I've got nothing and my head feels like I went 15 rounds with Joe Bugner."

Galahs president Phil McCracken said he was distraught to hear of the burglaries and assaults, but said he hoped that the players would be consoled by the fact that the fund-raising night had been a success.

"The bar takings were through the roof," McCracken said. "Now we'll be able to afford a hot water system for the showers."

Police fear the beer burglar may be a copycat inspired by the Bacardi Breezer burglar, who last weekend did pretty much the same thing to the players' wives and girlfriends after a karaoke night at the Mumbler's Arms Hotel. Except instead of a toothbrush it was a carrot.