Da Vinci Code of Terror

Anti-terror mediums are to question the phantom of Leonardo da Vinci tonight in the basement of London Police Station over blueprints for a 500 year-old plot of terror.

The polymath’s spirit stands accused of designing Weapons of Mass Destruction more centuries before their time than is proper, and of having the mental capacity to imagine many more. Plans include a terror submarine – in the form of a small boy armed with bombadilloes and an incredibly fragile, giant, tin umbrella – plus a plot to ride hijacked horses into a castle wall with the intention of weakening a bastion.

The quirky sketches, which art historians had till now dismissed as joie de vivre, were long known to be annotated in a secret code of fiendish complexity. But when the cipher was cracked this week by monkeys, who hit on the idea of moving each letter one place forward in the alphabet, it revealed a deadly scheme.

The monkeys, whose bungled circus escape led them, by chance, to the Accademia dell’Arte, Florence, are said to have run riot after the discovery, trashing masterpieces and pooing on important cultural treasures, actions which police claim “only go to emphasise the seriousness of the threat.”

But it wasn’t till Suspect X, a captive of the CIA, confessed to guessing the meaning of the monkeys’ fevered screams as they were played back to him on a loop every night for the past decade, that the full extent of the plot emerged. According sources, 3 000 hijacked shire horses, with the combined horsepower of one megaton of TNT, were to be ridden full tilt at the masonry, consecutively, over the course of 20 years, effectively grinding it to dust.

“Imagine the damage this could do to an Abrams tank,” said General Sir Dennis Raffles simultaneously with his Siamese twin and wife, Dame Mary Raffles (who has to be put to sleep during classified briefings because she is not a general), “or a Mark 6 Saracen Armoured Personal Carrier if one of those were to be left behind in a terrorist quarter by absentminded soldiers, distracted from battle by their love of country.”

The gentle genius’s arrest is only the latest in a series of Renaissance busts. Last month, Dutch artist Rubens Varicello was sent down for possession of mental images of “landscapes of an adult nature,” even though he was merely a minor painter at the time of the offence. And the aberrant watercolorist’s demise was followed hotly on its own heels by the discovery of Shakespeare’s 155th sonnet, in which the Swan of Avon likens or appears to liken the human condition to a depraved act.

The name of the act, if it has one, has not been made public.

“It’s that extreme,” said Ministry of Justice spokesdroid 6EQUJ5 who refused to elaborate, saying simply, “It’s just a very extreme metaphor, okay? That’s all you need to know to form a mob.”

The disgraced Bard’s spectre is currently being held at an undisclosed location on the north bank of the Thames – in the extreme western portion of the borough of Tower Hamlets, on the border with the central City of London – along with twelve hundred English teachers who possess or appear to posses, or stand accused of appearing possess the intent to think they possess, memories of the graphic figure of speech.

Heavens Silent on “Botched” Apocalypse

(Megiddo Hill, reportedly quiet today after the suspected Day of Reckoning.)

The heavenly authorities have yet to comment on rumours that “end-times-like” events which came to pass yesterday were meant to be Doomsday.

Although there is still no word from Paradise concerning yesterday, some faithful maintain that the portents, which included half a dozen resurrections and a small rain of blood, were Armageddon.

“The leaves on the palm trees in Megiddo were blown about quite a bit,” roared Father Aughly Stare in his nightly shortwave sermon. “We saw it on the News. There is no doubt in my mind that this sinful cosmos has been swept away.”

But many are sceptical.

“That was the End of the World already?” said Megiddo resident Aaron Gilor, summing up the mood of many eyewitnesses. “I mean, that was it? I get more rapture from a good bowel movement.”

“Admit it: there were some rumbles of thunder,” said his neighbour Batya Farhan. “Granted, that’s not unusual for this time of year, but then God’s temple in heaven did open up, didn’t it? If that’s what it was... And our Yoni reckons he might have spotted the Ark of the Covenant therein, which made me think, yeah, this is the big one! The Apocalypse of the Goyim. But there were no devils or any of those scorpion-headed horse things. So I don’t know...”

“And wasn’t there meant to be an Antichrist?” her sister Rebecca chipped in. “Unless it was Danny from the Supersol? I wouldn’t put it past him: that suit he had on was woven of one dodgy-looking blend of fibres. Or maybe he was the Messiah, because he can be quite judicious.”

They weren’t the only locals to notice something. Tamar Sheva and Rachel Horowitz were visiting friends in Megiddo Kibbutz, and had just popped down to the shops for shlishkes when the alleged Last Judgment was enacted.

“Saw this one angel, right?” said Rachel. “He gave me a scroll. He said to eat it, yeah? It tasted sweet as honey in my mouth. But after I swallowed it, it turned sour in my stomach. Not as good as shlishkes. Do you think they do refunds?”

“It was probably just a warm front moving in from the Aegean,” her mate Tamar shrugged.

The resurrected are reported to have wandered aimlessly. Most passed away again of their own accord after a few minutes, although one or two made it to Megiddo Bus Terminal where they were dispatched by the IDF. As far as is known, the wonders were limited to a two mile radius of Megiddo itself. The rest of the world is said to be “no worse than usual.”

A spokesman for the Israeli military described the suspected Armageddon as “actually one of our better days.”

Meanwhile the Vatican has appealed for calm after the impatience evident throughout Christendom spilt over into ugly scenes at worship last night, and bishops threatened to admonish anyone who gets out of hand.

“Oh, but come on!” protested Howell Baxter, one of a group of rowdy congregants who upturned pews and trashed cruets in Saint Uncumber’s Church, Boston, during a lull in mass. “Can’t they just tell us? Just so’s we know whether to keep up all this praise stuff, or get on with the rest of our lives. Am I wrong?”

“At the moment, we just aren’t sure,” insisted papal nuncio Fra Bartolomeo Rompetutto. “Certainly the occurrences were of an apocalyptic nature, and accord well with the predictions of Saint John of Patmos. And yet the scale was somewhat at odds with what we expected. His Holiness has assured us that the matter will all be cleared up soon though. Till then, we’re advising members of the public to pray like they’ve never prayed before, and hope for the best.”

Wave of Secret Strikes Hits Public Sector

Prison officers, police and teachers are among the public-sector workers alleged to have carried out surreptitious industrial action this year.

The clandestine walkouts, which only came to light as ministers were sorting through old bills to see what to put in the manila bin for recycling tomorrow, are believed to have occurred over the course of several months, and to have cost the British economy an undisclosed amount.

According to some pundits, the true losses may be incalculable.

Prime Minister David Brown called the covert stoppages “unacceptable” and “unacceptably mysterious,” insisting that settlements could have been reached “if only we’d known.”

Leader of the Opposition, the Shadow Figure, Gordon Campbell spoke of pupils’ distress on discovering that they may have learnt nothing at all last term, and the anger of thieves and innocent foreigners at the revelation that, for a whole season, they’d effectively been disciplining themselves.

But unions were adamant that employers had left them with no choice.

“Besides,” said an anonymous note, “with current labour laws, and the media as it is, we daren’t make too much of a fuss.”

Do-Good Workers “Played God” with Billionaire

(Get back in your place! Workers cautioned not to think too far ahead.)

Billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, Chairman, CEO and main shareholder of the third largest privately owned chemical firm in the world, has accused staff at Grangemouth Refinery, Scotland, of “playing God with me” for not accepting his offer of pension cuts for children and children’s children.

A spokes-wraith for INEOS, whose core values include empowering employees and excellence, added that the inconvenient show of fellow-feeling was tantamount to “terrorism of the worst kind,” declaring that the customer-focused company’s plan was to “close down Scotland” in the event of industrial action by the altruistic scum, as part of its commitment to total quality and reliability, and to “close down the economy of Scotland completely” to ensure complete customer satisfaction.

“We’ll see who wants to negotiate then,” the informative PR-Nazgûl hissed.

MPs too have admonished staff for their unwarranted foresight.

“I would accept pension cuts for future generations of MPs,” averred wealthy socialite, the Conservative leader David Cameron to a soirrée of reporters in the belvedere of his country mansion. “I don’t see why everyone else can’t be as flexible as me when it comes to helping billionaires.”

And Prime Minister Gordon Brown called the solidarity “unacceptable,” and “not modern. No, not modern at all,” although aides later excused the remarks, insisting that the high-flying premier was just trying to work off some pent-up agression caused by voting to up his own pay by 15%, but that he was really quite nice.

According to the BBC, Scotland has plenty of oil stores and will cope so long as drivers avoid panic buying. The BBC advised drivers to panic now before the pumps run dry.

Bloke Refutes Studies

Research consisting of literally hundreds of detailed studies from the 1930s to the present has been refuted today by a bloke.

According to the bloke, who is a normal bloke, the findings, amassed by researchers at the forefront of their fields in some of the world’s leading institutes and universities, and published in the most highly regarded peer-review journals of their day, are codswallop.

Experiments carried out over 74 years, including several long-term studies into the metabolisms of humans, rhesus monkeys, mice and rats and a range of invertebrates, were dismissed by the bloke as “bloody typical,” while the careful elimination of biases in much of the boffins’ work was felt to be so irrelevant that the bloke didn’t bother to mention it.

“Who are they kidding?” wrote the bloke in the comments section of his favourite news-outlet’s website. “If it’s not this, it’s something else.”

In fact, the bloke, who is understood to have only just heard of the data, and to have been unaware of the wealth of anecdotal evidence it appears to confirm, considered the whole lot so far-fetched that he didn’t even consult Wikipedia, or look for actual papers online to skim the abstracts of, before posting his damning verdict. It seems he could see the research for what it was just by reading a journalist’s confused witterings about it.

Speaking passionately about the need to inject a modicum of common sense into the debate, the bloke said: “Next they’ll be telling us that breathing is bad,” and added, “I could get run over by a bus tomorrow.”

It is unclear, at this stage, what the bloke’s criticism of the data is exactly.

“But we’d love it if he could get in touch,” said Doctor Mary McCready of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California. “This bloke clearly knows something we don’t.”

“It’s so important that he contacts the scientific community and shares his insight,” agreed Professor Jo Vogelein of Cornell University. “It’s obvious the bloke has found some sort of methodological flaw in all of this work conducted by the world’s experts over the better part of a century. I can’t for the life of me guess what it is, but it’ll surely be a scientific revolution when he tells us.”

Asylum Timebomb

Lorries in the Cambridge area are being searched this morning in a co-ordinated hunt for refugees from a benighted era. According to police, a large group of Jews, sodomites and women were seen near the village of Great Shelton, Cambridgeshire, apparently fleeing the Middle Ages.

“It’s imperative that we track them down and that villagers do not attempt to succour them,” cautioned constabulary spokesdog Django Breeder. “Members of the public are advised not to approach the wayworn wretches as they are believed to be heavily vexed, and some may be piteous.

“If you see them hiding, let us know. If they seek refuge in your outhouse, burn them. That’s the best way to help them, in the long run.

“There’s a pernicious rumour doing the rounds that these persons may be your own flesh and blood, and that acts of cruelty towards them could redound in a paradoxical way, but we urge locals not to pay much heed to that.”

In particular, police are advising parents of Scouts and Guides to keep their children safely indoors in case one mistakes the needy folk for human beings and does them a good turn. A bite of bread or a sup of ale may seem harmless enough, but the editor of the Daily Mail newspaper is currently in intensive care suffering from apoplexy. It’s feared that acts of mercy will only make him worse.

“Any more earthquakes in the late thirteen hundreds,” he told nurses from those days, “and I shan’t be responsible for what I do!”

Rights groups have called for an overhaul of the temporal asylum system, and politicians agree, although the sort of reforms they have in mind are different. But Lin Homer, head of the Borders and Immigration Agency, is in no doubt that getting soft on women, sodomites and Jews from the past would set a dangerous president.

“While there’s obviously nothing wrong with gayness, womanhood or Jewry nowadays,” the firm official said, “in some epochs, these are quite bad sins.”

“The real risk though,” warned Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, “is that the wicked of our day will make copycat flights to a time when their crimes are no longer self-evident. It would be a terrible blow to us all if folk whose libidos happen to respond to some of the sensory cues that define infancy, Muslim ladies who prefer to dress in the traditional garb of their own people, foreigners, drug minorities and animals were to escape justice in a kinder future.”

Billions Lost to Good Health

(Tra-la-li-lallie: scientists frolic in a moonlit clearing to celebrate the approach of a deadline.)

Millions of man-hours, and billions of man-pounds, are lost each week in Britain due to good health, shocking statistics in a report out today reveal.

“When employees wake up of a morning to find themselves feeling pretty much okay, they often feel obliged not to call in sick,” said the report’s author, Professor Elspeth Martlet.

“That’s right,” agreed inker Eddy Vortex, who did the colouring in on the report. “Wellness is costing us bigtime. It may be peer pressure or a misplaced sense of duty. Some may just sense that they’ve run out of credible excuses and are in danger of losing their income. Whatever, it can be very hard to make that crucial call.”

The study paints a grim picture of the consequences. When workers feel unable to “pull a sickie”, the waking hours they have to hand are drastically cut. Then there are the lost earnings: while toiling at one job, employees have limited opportunities for doing others, effectively costing the British economy a further £19 billion.

“And it’s not just the hours wasted at work,” Martlet explained. “Many jobs leave you worn out by the time you clock off, and in no mood to explore the manifold wonders of this world.”

“Next thing you know, you’re dead,” said Ed.

Their colleague, Professor Hamish Twiceblind, was not available for comment, as he is skiving this year, but a group of travelling scientists, who were bunking off from another job helped out with the typesetting and graphs, as well as furnishing ethanol from their mobile lab, and experimental tryptamine derivatives, for the end-of-report revelries.

Their raucous songs about the cosmos are not recorded.

The study is published in the peer-review journal Working Sound, but you will not find a link to it so as to judge for yourself because, by the time you read this, your search engine will be full of mangled “news” versions, Chinese-whispering back and forth off each other – fact-from-fact, true-news-from-true-news – as they evolve towards a more clickable meme.