S.A.S camp?
 

A few good ones this week:

No.1

A dozen members of the S.A.S. hiding in bracken on an exercise near Hereford, braced themselves for action as their 'enemy' approached. Then, when the voices were just feet away, they pounced...!

Ubfirtunately, the men they surrounded were not the enemy - but a stag party dressed as characters from Little Britain.

'It was a real hoot,' says groom Rob Hann, 38, of Torquay in Devon. 'The S.A.S. men must have wondered what thye had stumbled across but they were great blokes.' Rob was dressed as Daffyd Thomas, the only gay in the village, when he was leading his party up a mountain path.

Private portrait
 

No.2

An unusual portrait of the Australian prime minsiter, John Howard, has gone on show in Perth. The artist painted it with his penis. 'I'd seen "Puppetry of the Penis" and I suddenly thought of the idea,' says Tim Patch, who also has painted the opposition leader. 'I then started doing it as a gimmick at parties and people were fascinated.'

According to Patch, it's a demanding technique: he holds the canvas in one hand, and the 'brush' in the other!

Dirty writing
 

No. 3

An opinion poll has discovered the most popular insult written on dirty white vans. The survey for Asda Motor Insurance, says the most frequent jibe is: 'If only my wife was this dirty'. Also in the top 10 were: 'White, with a hint of M1' and 'Also available in white'.

Seems eBay bidders have had one of their stranger moments this week. The daughter of one John Clarke, aged 76, managed to sell her father's Marks and Spencer's 1969 string underpants - they went for £273... the winner could probably do with a new pair now!

Nick my name.... please!
 

Cedillo, a Spanish village, has published its own phone book, using nicknames. Thanks to the town's mayor, Antonio 'Booties' Gonzalez, villagers can use the guide tolook up characters like Johnny the Potato and Pedro the Whistle. Not everybody is happy though. According the The Guardian newspaper: 'A man known as 'Baldy' and another called' Peh-Leg' asked to beregistered under their proper surnames.

Mystery high notes
 

Odd enough to find a piano dumped near the top of Ben Nevis. Odd still to have two different people claiming they put it there. First, strongman Kenny Campbell who has made a career taking items up to and down from Ben Nevis the last 30-odd years for charity. He claimed it was the church organ he had carried up there in 1971 to play 'Scotland th Brave' at the peak. Now a group of removal men say that they took the piano up 20 years ago for a charity stunt. They had meant to bring it down again, but ran out of breath! Seems like climbers need to watch out for a variety of musical hazards when ascending the mountain as there's supposed to be brass instruments and even a drum kit up there as well, somewhere!

Cheeky apprehension
 

It's a bit obvious, but still worth a chuckle...

Ten nudists have been arrested on a public beach in southern Italy after practical jokers switched a sign pointing to a nudist beach.

Stone dry
 

Bridegroom Carl Smith arrived in Krakow, Poland forv a boozy stag weekend with 18 friends, only to find that alcohol sales had been banned because of a visit by the Pope.

'We were getting ready for 3 days of boozing and instead we've been playing chess in the market square,' says Carl, 23, of Bromley, Kent. 'I had coffee with some nuns this morning. They were very nice, but it's not exactly rock 'n' roll.'

The most famous British headline of all time is ' FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER ' , The Sun , 13th March 1986 .

After a night on the tiles in Manchester , Freddie Starr lurched home and demanded a sandwich . The sandwich was not forthcoming , so he put his hostess' hamster between two slices of bread ( probably Sunblest ready-sliced) and proceeded to masticate .

Starr denied that he ever did this in a later book ' I have never eaten or nibbled a live hamster , gerbil, guinea pig , mouse , shrew, vole or any other small mammal' .

I heard a piece on NPR about the piano. Must get pretty boring in the UK.

Yep! just one damn piano after another!

Yes indeed , one could put it like that . One piano after another in this green and unpleasant land .

Sexy Building

A few UK local authority planning departments have been getting into trouble. When planning applications for extensions and changes to domestic properties are rejected the applicants have right of appeal. Some of those who have appealed via email have seen their messages ignored, so when the appeal deadline has passed they have lost their chance to do anything about the council's decision.

That is until it was discovered that the council server was filtering out their emails. Seems it was all down to the word 'erection' which commonly appears in building matters but thought to be a good indicator of something unsavoury in another context and therefore being present in the councils' list of filter mechanism words....

I heard on the radio that a woman in Germany called out social services because she was worried about her daughter, who had a boyfriend she didn't approve of.


When social services turned up they discovered that the daughter was 68 years old. The mother was 92, by the way.

I had to detune the spam filters on our email servers once for trapping messages with the word "toilet" in the same circumstance, building construction.