Poop sloths!

Bwahahahahaha!
This stunning post at Tetrapod Zoology reveals that the two-toed sloths of Peru are climbing into toilets and eating human urine, faeces and soggy toilet paper.

A poster at Tet Zoo reckons poop sloths are just begging for LOLcat-style memery. I couldn't agree more.

Coprolicious!

Saudi king rockets onto approved dictators list

WASHINGTON, DAY EFFAY, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

IT WILL be a happy Eid al-Adha holiday for Saudi kingpin King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud after his rocket-propelled entry to the White House's official approved dictators list following the death of Turkmenistan's nutcase President for Life Saparmurat Niyazov.

The widely celebrated death of the murderous crackpot Niyazov, a long-time Washington favourite who renamed the days of the week and months of the year after his family and made his mother's name the word for bread, opened up a coveted spot on the White House top 10, which bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud was only too happy to fill.

The king slips neatly into the number five spot vacated by Niyazov, behind military strongmen Pervez Musharraf (Pakistan) and Hosni Mubarak (Egypt), sadistic ex-KGB man Vladimir Putin (Russia) and Uzbekistan's relatively unknown Islam Karimov.
White House spokesman Tony Snow, who remains an administration mouthpiece despite having left Fox News, said he was pleased to welcome bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud to the list.

"A thousand greetings, salutations and felicitations to Mis Most Excellent Royal Mightiness and Magnificence, King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, Defender of Islam, Custodian of Mecca and Medina, Slayer of the Infidel, Chosen by Allah to Establish The Forty-Thousand-Year Caliphate," Snow said in an off-the-cuff comment in the White House Rose Garden, where he was vigorously fellating a Saudi diplomat.

Bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud follows a family tradition in being top of the pops with the White House -- for decades, his father, King Fahd, jostled with such legends as Augusto Pinochet, Manuel Noreiga, Saddam Hussein, Anastasio Somoza Garcia and the Argentinian Junta for top spot on the list. His sudden removal from the list on September 11, 2001, is widely considered to have contributed to his death in 2005.
Snow said Fahd's removal from the list had nothing to do with Saudi Arabia's human rights record.

"It wasn't because, for instance, you can have various parts of your body chopped off for the heinous and abominable crime of homosexuality," Snow said, popping a breath mint. "You know President Bush's position on homosexuals -- no pun intended. Oh, hang on, (Vice-President Dick) Cheney's daughter is into clam chowder, isn't she? I'll have to check on that and get back to you."

Also released yesterday was the White House's inaugural Non-Approved Democracies List, which was topped by Nicaragua (they elected that ex-Sandinista bloke again), Palestine (Hamas), Lebanon (Hezbollah), and France.

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."

"Stingray" skate skates at ray-sting arraignment

FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK) -- BROWARD County Sheriffs were left with egg in their moustaches yesterday when they were forced to drop all charges against the "only suspect" in the high-profile stingray attack on that 81-year-old bloke in his boat a little while back.

The suspect, Skately "Skeeter" Skaterman, a self-employed forager from the continental shelf off of Newfoundland, Canadia, was released shortly before his arraignment on one charge of Inflicting Grevious Bodily Harm on One of Your Elders and Betters, Boy, after a rather uncomfortable examination by county veterinary examiner Filet Gumbo revealed that he was not a stingray at all, but rather a barn-door skate (dipturis laevis).

Outside the court, Mr Skaterman said he had been brutally treated during his arrest and interrogation.

"I was just doon here on vacation wandering aboot and sampling some of the local seafood -- I'd heard good things aboot Florida crustaceans -- when these great big knuckle-dragging gorillas harpooned me and just aboot dragged me doon to the precinct," Mr Skaterman said in a prepared statement.

"Once at the station I was repeatedly beaten aboot the head with a Recording King RK-80. My lawyer told me that the Dade County firearms instructor once told him, quote, 'Them Broward County hicks couldn't hit a barn door with a banjo.' I'm sorry to say that these bruises prove him wrong. No doubt aboot it."

When Mr Skaterman was asked whether he intended to take legal action against the Broward County Sheriff's Department, his overworked court-appointed attorney, Mr Cuba Libre, intervened.

"These pinche puto policias are gon' need a damn oil tanker to carry all the shrimp my client is going to buy with his payout," Mr Libre said. "It just shows that in Florida there is one law for cartilaginous flatfish and another law for everyone else.

"Pendejos," he added.

"Thees press conference ees over," he added.

Veterinary Examiner Gumbo said he failed to see how the arresting officers had failed to see that Mr Skaterman was a skate rather than a ray.

"Although the two have similar anatomical structures and evolutionary histories, stingrays have a long, thin tail, typically tipped by a sting, whereas skates, such as Mr Skaterman typically have broad, flat tails."

Mr Gumbo refused to comment on whether his protracted cavity search for species-differentiating egg sacs was entirely necessary, given that Mr Skaterman was quite prodigiously male.

Broward County Sheriff's spokesman Phineas Flatfoot would not comment on the pending civil suit, but hinted heavily that Mr Skaterman was not in Florida for a holiday.

"That perp is a real bottom-feeder," he said. "And skate wings taste something like scallops."

Goanna wins top journalism award

JUST 15 years or so after taking out a much-coveted journalism award (it was the Australia Day Committee award for best promotional story, I think), your humble correspondent is back in a headline -- albeit his own.

This time he has snaffled the Foolitzer Prize (pictured) for excellence in journalism or something, as voted by his peerless peers at Uncyclopedia. (The handsome bust on the Foolitzer is of Oscar Wilde, for some reason).

He trousered it for the sort of "satirical" garbage he writes here. So he guesses he should pull the finger out and write some more, eh?

White House releases approved dictators list

WASHINGTON, Day Effay, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

EGYPTIAN military strongman Hosni Mubarak (pictured) and Pakistan's late-night US talk-show mainstay Pervez Musharraf topped the list of acceptable non-democratic autocrats in this week's official White House rankings.

Mubarak leapt to number one (with a bullet for each apprehended member of the Muslim Brotherhood) after fellow military man Musharraf relinquished his top spot on account of his appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart having drawn too much attention to Afghanistan for the US administration's liking.

Holding steady at No. 3 on the list was KGB heavyweight turned Russian president Vladimir Putin, with Uzbekistani kingpin Islam Karimov at No. 4 because he doesn't rock the boat and nobody even remembers that massacre in Andijan last year. No. 5 was Turkmenistan's President for Life Saparmurat Niyazov, because nobody even knows where that nightmarish little shithole is.

White House spokesman Tony Snow, who remains an administration mouthpiece despite having left Fox News, said that in the wake of the apparent low-rent nuclear test by dumpy androgynous North Korean nutbag Kim Jong-il, US President George Bush felt that it was important to make abundantly clear who's hot and who's not.

"Pervez -- or the Pervmeister, as we like to call him -- has been a favourite of ours for a long time, but this week Hosni has hit No. 1 for the simple reason that he knows how to keep his mouth shut," Snow said.

Snow left the door ajar for Syrian President Bashar Assad to rejoin the hit parade, provided he "stop being such a pussy about Lebanon and open the bloodgates, I mean floodgates, for extraordinary rendition flights again."
US De Facto Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said today's chart-toppers were a pale shadow of the seminal acts that topped the charts in his heyday.

"Ngo Dinh Diem -- now there was a Viet you could take to the bank," he said. "(Anastasio) Somoza (Garcia)? Like FDR said: 'He may be a son of a bitch but he's our son of a bitch.' Never been a Nicaraguan like him since.

"And (General Augusto) Pinochet? When that guy said he was going to get his secret police to wedge the trade unionists' heads under the fire-escape steps at the soccer stadium and jump on their backs to break their necks, you could sleep like a baby knowing that he'd do it."

National Piss in the Sink Week Launched

BALLARAT, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

WITH great swaths of Australia in the tightening grip of tightening water restrictions, the nation's first official Piss in The Sink Week was officially launched by potato farmer and former AFL footballer Danny Frawley at his property near Ballarat yesterday.

"Just have a look at this bloody place, wouldya?" said the former St Kilda full-back (pictured) as he kicked up a photogenic cloud of dust in a dessicated paddock that as recently as last year supplied potatoes to 15 local fish'n'chip shops. "It looks like bloody Darfur."

With dams in the Ballarat district currently less than .04 per cent full -- slightly less than the legal blood-alcohol limit and significantly less full than the average local driver -- Frawley said the time had come to stop wasting Australia's most precious resource (children ran a distant second in recent polls) and "bite the bullet and piss in the sink".

"Let's face it," Frawley said. "Once you break the seal (urinate for the first time during a heavy drinking session) you're going for a slash every five minutes. And if you're flushing the dunny every five minutes you may as well be flushing the whole bloody country down the septic tank as far as I'm concerned.

"The only way out, if you ask me, is to piss in the sink. It's usually closer to the fridge anyway."

Frawley dismissed as "half-cocked" traditional Australian water conservation tactics such as putting a housebrick in the toilet cistern and re-routing water from the washing machine onto the garden.

"You might as well be farting into Cyclone Tracy if that's all you're going to do," he said.
Frawley, who played at least 200 and probably 300 games for St Kilda during a predictably doomed couple of decades for the club, said he had not been discouraged by the failure of his last water-saving venture, last year's Only Flush for Henry Month.

"Now that was a sound idea," he said. "The science behind it couldn't be faulted. If you give the flush a miss when you're only pointing Percy at the porcelain, and you only flush when you've dropped a Henry the Third (turd), you're bound to save water, no worries about that.

"Only problem was that the missus didn't like it."

Virgin Kalimdor announces one-copper flights to Ogrimmar

OGRIMMAR, Kalimdor, GNN. (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

GIMMICK-HAPPY budget airline Virgin Kalimdor today attempted to muscle in on the lucrative Eastern Kingdoms air routes by announcing one-copper airfares to the Orcish capital of Ogrimmar.

But the airline walked face-first into a polearm of controversy when leaked company documents revealed that the board of directors had mandated the racial profiling of Orcs, Trolls, Taurens (pictured) and the Undead as possible terrorist risks.

Outraged Orc chieftan Thrall immediately decreed an Orc boycott of Virgin Kalimdor, saying that "this kind of atavistic racism should have died back in the Age of the Old Gods".

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," he said.

"It's not easy being green," he added, casually polishing a varnished Elf skull.

Virgin Kalimdor spokesbeard Richard Branson attempted to hose down the controversy, saying: "The important point here is that Virgin has the newest, most comfortable fleet of zeppelins in the realm. And what can one copper piece buy you these days? It doesn't even go half-way towards a single slice of Dalaran sharp."

Hin Denburg, a spokesgoblin for rival airline Venture Co. Airways, said that Virgin Kalimdor had "stuck its foot in its mouth and bitten it off".

"Venture Co. is proud to provide world-class services to characters of all races, classes and trade specialities," he said. "And we don't cut corners by making our Undead brethren travel in the cargo hold just because they don't feel the cold.

"It's also worth reiterating that our zeppelins are actually free. You'd be an idiot to yourself to spend even a quarter of a copper flying Virgin."

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.

Hezbollah scores own goal, says murdered Colombian footballer

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA, JULY 30, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

HEZBOLLAH had scored an own goal by taking a baseball bat to the hornet's nest that is Israel, murdered Colombian footballer Andres Escobar said at a seance in Melbourne today.

Escobar, speaking from beyond the grave at a seance held by 14-year-old schoolgirl Portia Cumberland and friends in her parent's basement in the leafy inner-eastern suburb of Kew, said that even Blind Freddy could see what was going to happen once the Shi'ite crackpots started firing their Baba Ganousha rockets at the Israeli port city and party capital of Haifa.

"You just have to look at what's happened today in (the southern Lebanese village of) Qana," Escobar said. "There were 65 people killed, including 21 children, when one Israeli warplane dropped one American-made smart bomb.

"In one instant, the Israelis have killed more or less the number of Arabs that Hezbollah has been able to kill of Israelis in the past fortnight. You don't need to be all that smart to work out that this isn't working out for Hezbollah. Or for the people who are being killed."

Escobar, who knows a thing or two about own goals, having been famously murdered on his return to Colombia after scoring the own goal that knocked his country out of the 1994 World Cup, said that if Hezbollah really wanted to win it had to get back to basics, play a 4-4-2 formation, set out its stall early doors and look for a head inside the box.

"Better still," said Escobar, "maybe they could look at rebuilding in a lower division. They have lost many of their top players in the past week and so perhaps they would have a better chance of success in the civil strife in the Solomon Islands. For me, Hezbollah v Israel is like Cardiff City v Real Madrid. It ain't gonna happen."

The birds! The birds!

Avian influenza my tailfeather! Seems the biggest bird-related health hazard around these parts is our feathered friends in Fawkner Park.

In a fit of public-liability anxiety, the Melbourne City Council has put up a bunch of signs on rather rough-hewn and splintery stakes warning that it cannot guarantee your safety vis-a-vis the park's allegedy divebomb-happy birds. Never mind that I haven't seen a magpie or a Willy wagtail (pictured) in the park for ages (my guess is the Indian mynahs killed them), the more bleedingly obvious issue is that these unilluminated stakes are exceedingly likely to impale any number of night-time joggers (not that that would necessarily be a bad thing).

Still, what can you expect from a council whose phone number is 9658 9658, so that when you call them you're already going backwards and around in circles before you even get to the automated menu? If feelgood mayoral type John So ("He's my bro!") & Co want to do something constructive, they could: a) ban leaf blowers; and b) shell out for a spot of Indian mynah eradication.

This whole sorry episode put me in mind of an even sorrier one. Back in the day, when I was kicking it tabloid-style, the Herald-Sun (it had a hyphen then) played an Aussie rules match against the Tele-Mirror (as it was then) and The Oz in Wagga Wagga.

Somehow I managed to find myself in a paddock, scooped up the pill and set off on a lightning-fast Justin Madden-style trundle down the wing. But just as I was taking possibly my second bounce, a magpie swooped down out of a light tower and bit me on the head. I went "WAAAAGHHH!" and lost the ball, which was promptly picked up by the other side and booted down the other end. I'd been trying to repress that memory for years. Thanks, John.

Dozens killed in Habbo Hotel bombing

BEIRUT, JULY 28, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

AS many as 100 Habbos are feared dead after an Israeli warplane bombed the Habbo Hotel in Beirut.

An air-to-surface missile ripped through the cosmopolitan meeting place, which is popular among young, educated Lebanese with far too much time on their hands, as hundreds of Habbos were admiring each other's taste in music, trading furniture and wondering if they could ever get laid at the online venue.

The scene outside the Habbo Hotel was one of carnage, with stray Habbo dogs feeding on bloody pixels that had been scattered across the street.

British Habbo ManUnitedRulez-764 (pictured), who was in Beirut on a cheap last-minute package holiday, said he was "gutted" and "sick as a parrot".

"It's bang out of order, innit?" ManUnitedRulez-764 said. "The travel agent told me Beirut was the new Paris of Asia or summat like that. And now look at the joint. It's a bleedin' joke. They're havin' a laugh, mate."

ManUnitedRulez-764 said that losing a "dead classy" sofa he had just acquired from a local Habbo just added to the pain of seeing the rest of his five-a-side football team shredded in a firestorm of white-hot metal.

Israeli Air Force spokesman Moshe ben Moshe apologised for the carnage, saying that intelligence reports had indicated that Hezbollah leader Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan was debating the merits of house music and gamma-hydroxy-butinol in the lobby.

In Australian reaction to the tragedy, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said that the government had given Australian Habbos plenty of opportunity to take a chartered ferry to Cyprus. Conservative columnists and radio hosts said that Habbos with dual Australian and Lebanese citizenship had to work out whose side they were really on.

Syrian torturer disappointed by suspension of US rendition flights

DAMASCUS, JULY 25, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

Syrian torturer Adar al-Ashur today expressed disappointment that the crisis in Lebanon has brought a temporary halt to CIA "extraordinary rendition" flights to Syria, which deliver suspected terrorists into his custody for what the US government describes as "vigorous interrogation".

"It is very sad for me to be here today," al-Ashur said, taking a GNN correspondent on a tour of his torture facilities in the basement of a building at the Baba Ghanoush detention camp outside Damascus.

"Look how lonely my meat hooks appear with nobody hanging from them by their shackles. Look at the sponge I use to wet their genitals for electrocution -- it is dried out completely!"

Al-Ashur said he had learned much from his American counterparts since a temporary thaw in relations between Damascus and Washington enabled Syria to begin playing its part in the US rendition program.

"Before, I never even heard of waterboarding," he said. "Now I can make a man feel like he is drowning for hours at a time. It is hilarious!

Al-Ashur said he enjoyed the globalised nature of the rendition program.

"Thanks to the Americans I have been able to torture a student from England, a bank manager from Canada and a man from Pakistan who I think was a carpet salesman but I could not really understand him because his teeth were broken and his tongue was swollen up for some reason. How else could I meet such people?

"The Americans have helped me to become more professional in my occupation too. Often when I am watching (Syrian soap opera) Khalf al-Qudban I would forget to keep the prisoners awake. Now I make sure to throw a bucket of cold water on them at every advertisement.

"I now have two wishes. Number one is, inshallah, that the Zionist entity be destroyed completely. If I cannot have this wish, then I wish that the Americans will come back soon so I can meet some more new people.

"Ehud Olmert is a pig. I slap his head with my shoe!"

Call for help in clearing region's ethical minefields

MELBOURNE, JULY 21, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

AUSTRALIAN ethicists have called for greater international assistance in clearing the world's ethical minefields.

Professor Porfiry Zyuganov, of the Australia-Asia University in Melbourne, said that in the Asia-Pacific region alone, the area covered by ethical minefields had increased more than 5000 per cent in the past 25 years.

"When I was a young ethicist, Australia - and the whole region, for that matter - was a very different place," Zyuganov said while sipping a Fairtrade coffee sweetened with certified slavery-free sugar.

"Today, anyone who steps even slightly off the well-trodden path of public discourse is likely to have their leg blown off, in a metaphorical sense."

Professor Zyuganov said that mainstream media coverage of minefield-related issues was generally confined to the traditional high-explosive anti-personnel landmines of the sort found by the millions in places such as Vietnam, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, Somaliland, Sri Lanka and Nagorno Karabakh. Little attention, he said, was given to the ethical minefields of "so-called protected" academic enclaves such as Carlton and Parkville.

Professor Zyuganov raised the hypothetical example of whether an ethically aware university professor should allow his wife to purchase a large four-wheel-drive vehicle in order to drive their child to school.

"That scenario really opens up Pandora's floodgate of worms," Professor Zyuganov said. "For instance, a smaller car would use less fuel, causing less pollution and less depletion of natural resources. Also, the lower profile of the car would mean that the wife is less likely to kill another motorist should she T-bone them at an intersection. A better situation still would be if the child walked to school on his own, yet this puts the father at risk of life-long guilt should the child be taken by a pedophile or run over by a different woman in a four-wheel-drive. But then if the professor forbids his wife from buying a four-wheel-drive is that not perpetuating the subjugation and oppression of women as institutionalised by the notoriously misogynist Western patriarchy?

"Even the traditional high-explosive landmines open up an ethical minefield. For instance, is it now ethical to use a Motorola mobile phone because the company no longer makes components for landmines, or is it better to boycott the firm in perpetuity? And is it ethical to trick monkeys and dolphins into detonating mines and so sacrifice their own lives to save the life of a hypothetical human? It's all too much."

New tsunami 'hardly worth getting out of bed for'

MELBOURNE, JULY 19, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

THE tsunami that hit the Indonesian island of Java on Monday was "hardly worth getting out of bed for", an aid worker has complained.

"The last tsunami (on Boxing Day 2004) was huge, but this one only killed -- what is it now? About 330 people?" said Jeff Baker, of Regional Conscience International Australia, as he prepared to leave for the devastated area.

"I mean, you've seen one bloated, stinking body hanging from a tree you've seen them all."

Hurriedly throwing clothes into a battered backpack, Baker, whose job will be to oversee the distribution of emergency food supplies, said he was sick of having to go to Indonesia "every two fricking months".

"If it's not tsunamis or floods it's fires or earthquakes. These days I seem to be spending more time speaking Bahasa than I do speaking English. And I'm so sick of Indonesian food. Why can't they have a volcano erupt somewhere nice in the South Pacific for a change?

"Oh well, at least I don't have to go to Afghanistan again. That place really sucks."

Zizou gotta rattle them pots 'n' pans

MELBOURNE, JULY 16, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK).

Australian football supercoach Brent "Potato" Couchman has advised his former protege Zinedine Zidane to channel his aggression into cooking a week after the hotheaded Frenchman was sent off for headbutting Italian shit-stirrer Marco Materazzi in the World Cup final.

"Zizou is a dab hand in the kitchen," said Couchman, who appears little more than a sofa-bound PlayStation addict, but who was in fact Zidane's manager and mentor for 15 seasons during Cardiff City's unlikely transformation from English Third Division also-rans to overlords of European football.

"He makes a mean couscous. His secret is bulghur wheat, which has a delicious, nutty flavour. When I was running the show at Cardiff I often found that if Zidane was sent off on a Saturday, the best thing to do was go around to his place on the Sunday because the red card would focus his anger onto the stove.

"He is fantastic with pastry as well. And the things you've seen him do with a football aren't a patch on the things he can do with a bag of offal. If you ever see a sheep being gutted, hold a Tesco bag underneath it, then take it around to Zinedine's, whack it on the breakfast bar and half an hour later you won't be able to wipe the smile off your face."

Couchman said he understood Zidane's anger at Materazzi, who drew inspiration from the French wunderkind's Algerian heritage to reportedly call him "the son of a terrorist whore".

"After September 11 (2001), it was open season on the scarfies as far as those Eyetie rednecks were concerned," Couchman said. "If your dear old Mum enjoyed getting about in a hijab -- much less a burkha -- look out!

"I can understand Zizou laying a bit of a Glasgow kiss on the prick, but what I'm disappointed about is the fact that he only went for the chest. In all the drills we did at Cardiff I made sure that the players focused on the opponent's nose. If you're going to get sent off, you may as well make sure the other bloke's schnoz is spread all over his face like a half-cooked omelette and he's snorting back haemoglobin for a week.

"In any case, I've put the word about in Cardiff and Materazzi will be lucky to get a job washing dishes anywhere in Wales from here on in."

Couchman said his only regret from his time at Cardiff City - during which he took the one-time Welsh minnows to an unprecedented treble treble (scooping the English Premier League, FA Cup and European Champions' League three years running) - was the fact that he could never squeeze a fellow Australian into the side. And the fact that today's football manager video games are too complicated for him to get the hang of.

"I'd have loved to have Harry (Kewell) and Dooks (Mark Viduka) in the squad, but who was I going to drop? Didier Deschamps? Ronaldo? Ronaldinho? 'All-Night' Dwight (Yorke)? And I'd have loved to have got Mark Bosnich or Mark Schwarzer on board but we already had Peter Schmeichel and Fabien Barthez.

"Hell, I think at one stage Becks (David Beckham) only played three games for us in three years because Stefan Reuter and Steve McManaman had the right wing pinned down. But I'm glad he's kicked on at Real Madrid. Is he getting a game there?"