Just standard questions, imam

Eh, I've been meaning to put up this masterpiece from the good folks at Salam Cafe for ages.

Freddie Flintoff: "Smoke 'em if you got 'em"

PERTH, Australia, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)
ENGLAND cricket star Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff yesterday revealed the secret of his cricketing success -- sucking down on a great big stogie every chance he gets.

All-rounder Flintoff, 42, who took to the Australian Test team with both bat and ball during last year's Ashes series, making them look every inch the brittle-egoed suburban yobbos they are, said that cigar smoke helped clear his mind and reinvigorate his lungs.

"There's nothing like a hearty drag on a big, plump Cohiba to get you thinking straight," Flintoff said, chopping the end off a fat one with a solid gold cigar clipper. "Only a churl would bite end off one of these," he added.

"It's great for your aerobic fitness too. Scientific studies have shown that smoking increases your blood pressure and heart rate, just like jogging, only smoking is easier and you're less likely to spill your pint."

The strapping Lancastrian said he had tried to interest his teammates in smoking, with little success.

"Kevin (skunk-headed South African batsman Kevin Pietersen) smokes a bit, but usually from a little glass pipe, which is just a bit too fiddly for me," Flintoff said.

Flintoff said England was confident of retaining the Ashes, despite having been thrashed yesterday by a team of superannuated fatties and 16-year-old unknowns selected by Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

"No worries, as you antipodeans say," Flintoff said, expelling a wad of phlegm that made the English team's spitoon ring like Bow Bells. "She'll be right."

Chris Isaak not sure about all this talk about "San Francisco values"

SAN FRANCISCO, California, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

LONG-TIME San Francisco resident Chris Isaak (pictured) today said he wasn't sure about all this talk about "San Francisco values" in the wake of the Democrats having picked up a few seats in some election or other.

"After the gig last night, me and Kenny Dale (drummer Kenny Dale Johnson) came back to my pad and we were so plumb tuckered out that I sat right down on the remote control and it turned the TV on and switched the station," Isaak said. "And there was (Fox News host) Bill O'Reilly saying that San Francisco values were all about persons of the homosexual persuasion dressing up as Jesus and other religious performing lewd acts together in public.

"Now I don't cast nasturtiums on persons of any kind of sexual or political persuasion, but I personally have too much respect for great gospel singers such as Mahalia Jackson and great Roman Catholics such as Carlos Santana to ever relieve myself on a Bible, for instance."

Isaak, whose hits include Wicked Game, Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing and San Francisco Days (San Francisco Nights), went on to make a statement of his own "San Fransico values".

"My values are all about bein' sad, lonely and blue," said the smashed-nosed songsmith-cum-sitcom-star. "Also, playin' a little rock'n'roll with my friends, maybe a little blues, a little country, maybe a Roy Orbison cover once in a while.

"And after that, I'd like to go get some Thai food or maybe go down to the docks for some crab claws and a couple of brews and then go home and make sweet, fragile, fleeting, doomed love to a beautiful woman."

The Republican Party's San Francisco city councilmen could not be contacted for comment.

Prince Charles: "I say! Pakistan's a bit of a rum show, wot?"

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

HIS Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales, Duke of Rothesay and Duke of Cornwall, has expressed his displeasure at circumstances having made it incumbent upon him to reconsider a holiday sojourn to Pakistan's troubled North-West Frontier Province (pictured).

The province, part of Afghanistan that was annexed with much difficulty by the British during the "Great Game" with Russia back in the day, is pretty much going beserk after a helicopter strike by Pakistan's US-backed military junta, acting on a tip from US intelligence agencies, killed 80 people -- that's right, it killed 80 people -- at an Islamic school, just in case there were some kind of al-Qaeda kind of characters hanging about.

"I say!" said the prince, in an uncharacteristically caddish turn of phrase. "Pakistan's a bit of a rum show, wot?

"It's all a jot rather uncouth, if one asks one. Honestly, one would think that the place had never been part of British India at all. One's country has given these chaps the railways and cricket and spotted dick, and what is one's reward? One's average Pakistani appears to be no more grateful than one's average Irishman.

"That said, one knows that Pakistan has had its problems, most recently with that entirely unseemly Shoaib affair."

The Prince, more (and rather) commonly known to his adoring, cheeky, chirpy Cockney readers of the London Sun as "Prince Charles", "Charlie" or "Chas", was referring to the recent kerfuffle about broken-down nightclub habitue and now-former Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Akhtar having been turfed out of some Mickey Mouse one-day tournament in India for having taken non-recreational drugs.

Australia will probably win the tournament, though it will be quite funny if they don't. Unless South Africa wins.

"Jolly hockey sticks!" the prince continued. "Where shall Camilla and I go now?"

The prince was referring to his new wife, Camilla Parker-Bowles, who he had been shagging behind Lady Di's back the whole time.

A spokesman for St James Palace, which is where the Prince lives -- just follow your nose to the rotting bouquets people keep leaving for Lady Di -- said that the royal couple was now thinking about visiting the Jaffna Peninsula in Sri Lanka.

In an ironic twist, St James is known in the Spanish language as "Santiago Matamoros" ("St James the Moor Slayer").

In an even more ironic twist (in the Alanis Morissette sense, at least), the Jaffna Peninsula is something of an epicentre of the bloody civil war that has fucked Sri Lanka for decades, what with it being a heartland of the ethnic Tamil people, who were imported from India by the British to work the tea plantations and who have since been engaged in a death struggle with the majority indigenous Sinhalese.

In other cricket news, England has somehow arranged to field 17 players in its upcoming pre-Ashes game against New South Wales. Second-string Australian leg-spinner Stuart MacGill responded to the development by saying "That's fucked."