Chuckles Review Of 2009, Part 4a

October

Something's happened, although we can't tell you what it is, or even why we can't tell you, but it doesn't really matter because you all know what it is anyway.

This is what the Guardian was reduced to in October after Carter-Ruck, the legal firm representing oil company Trafigura, firmly planted the term 'super-injunction' in the national vocabulary.

In 2006, Trafigura paid a local entrepreneur to dump what looked an awful lot like toxic waste in the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan. The company claimed the material was harmless "slops": grime and soap scum from the deck of their tanker. But as the Guardian revealed in 2009, the company's own internal emails were saying different, as were the numerous disfigurements, miscarriages and deaths that followed the dumping. The "slops" turned out, in fact, to be extremely poisonous residue from the purification of dirt-cheap crude oil.

The horse had already bolted by October, but Trafigura decided to brick the door up anyway. To stop the Guardian revealing the existence of an incriminating scientific report that had been commissioned by the company itself in 2006, Carter-Ruck slapped a gagging order on the paper, stopping it not only from reporting the existence of the report, but also from reporting that it had been forbidden to report the existence of the report.

Unfortunately for Trafigura, Carter-Ruck's influence didn't extend to the internet, which caught wind of the super-injunction and blew the whole thing wide open. The saga continues.

And what a busy month for the internet it was. When lovely Jan Moir wrote a piece in the lovely Daily Mail positing that Boyzone's Stephen Gately had died of gayness, a grassroots swell of electronic fury reared up and swallowed the article whole. Advertisers demanded to be disassociated from it, the piece was soon pulled from the Mail's website, and in the space of three days the internet had proved itself twice to be an actual, genuinely effective means of protest.*

When heemasexes weren't being attacked by thick rightwing columnists, they were causing rifts in God's dysfunctional family.

That crazy Pope - who you may remember claimed back in March that condoms actually exacerbate the spread of HIV (which, stupidly, I neglected to mention way back in Part 1) - was up to his tricks again, this time trying to poach Anglicans alienated by their church's insistence on ordaining gay priests. "Come, join us," I paraphrase his letter to them.

"Now, none of us is prejudiced. I'm not, and neither are you. That nice, helpful lad who works in Tesco is a dirty faggot arsecocker, and we still talk to him, don't we? We try very hard not to think about what he gets up to. And we don't always succeed, do we? Eee, hours we've spent lying awake at night, tossing and turning with his heaving great sweaty meatstick penetrating our thoughts. It's not easy. But we still find it in our hearts to give him the time of day, being very careful not to send out the wrong signals. And we think it's good that his type can now find gainful employment, where once he'd have had to resort to prostitution, petty theft and Benzedrine.

"But stacking shelves is one thing. Representing the Holy Spirit on earth quite another. Ye gods, just imagine him standing there before the congregation with that... thing between his legs! And when the menfolk kneel before him to take Communion... well, that'll just confuse the poor lad. I know you think the same. We see sense on this matter, you and I. Come on, you. Leave those dirty Proddies. Join the Catholics."

Other creepy bigots standing blinking in the full glare of the spotlight were Nick Griffin - who appeared on BBC Question Time - and Radovan Karadžić - the man behind the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which over 7,500 Muslims were killed, and very probably a wank fantasy for Griffin - who failed to appear at the start of his trial in The Hague, desperately trying every trick in the Big Book Of International Law to get himself off the hook. What a shining example of human nature at its finest! :)

But as one poor little mass-murderer was reduced to hiding in his cell, fruitlessly claiming immunity from prosecution and whining about conspiracies, aw diddums, another man with thousands of deaths on his conscience was announced as the winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

It's not often that winning the world's most prestigious award could feasibly be construed as a PR disaster, but for Barack Obama it was a moment akin to Christ's anointment by Mary, the Messiah brought down by his own vanity. Not that he noticed. No, he just strolled on up in front of a frowning world with his big, shit-eating grin, muttering something about being humbled while trying to conceal an erection that could punch holes in tarmac. It was like watching a middle-aged dad open an email entitled 'Hi! I'm a fit 20-year-old girl with massive tits and I've been after shagging you for ages!'.

And a bunch of other shit happened, but life is short and time too precious for you to waste reading about things that aren't even happening anymore. Look out of your window, look! The majesty of Creation. All of it waiting to be experienced. Why not go outside and point at a squirrel?



* At the time of writing, the Facebook page 'I hate it when you're with MC Hammer and he doesn't let you touch anything' has almost 373,000 fans. Sleep tight.