Pun Watch Extra

IT’S exactly 160 years since Karl Marx established the Communist Correspondence Committee (and most of their letters still haven’t arrived, due to industrial action).

What better way to celebrate than by Googling on ‘You have nothing to lose but your…’?

Among the stragglers, Danes, drains, grains, Janes and sprains are all wholly pathetic, with one hit each. Rains and trains clock up two, manes three, reins four, and gains five, but this isn’t the sort of showing we expect from a crew of brawny young unfunny puns who’ve always had a good diet and a supportive home.

Stains does better with ten, canes is finding its length with eleven, veins getting into its stride with thirteen and pains going for the burn with fourteen.

But alas, alas, we all knew how this was going to end, didn’t we? Way out in front – leaving every rival panting in the dust – protruding like the proverbial luminous sore thumb with rigor mortis – is the inevitable BRAINS.

Ha flipping pigging chiselling ha. No wonder everything’s being overrun by militant Islam.

As for such non-runners as cranes, Hussains, lanes, mains, McLeans, panes, plains, planes, refrains, reigns, skeins, Staines, strains, thanes, Twains, vanes, wains, Waynes and Zanes, I don’t know whether to be glad we don’t have to put up with them or sad that there’s so little originality left that people can’t even come up with puns that are merely halfway obvious.

Perhaps this barrel of absinthe will help me decide.
_________________
EDINBURGH NEWSWHINGE
PLANS to develop student flats just a spliff’s throw from the popular nightclub Studio 24 have been given the go-ahead.

I think this is disgraceful.

The poor nightclub won’t be able to get a wink of sleep.

Pointing Percy at the Oubliette

These fourteen months have been cruelly lonely.

It’s a sad business when you’re the only blogger on Blogger whose interests include the xylophone.

That’s what I was when I started out. And that’s what I thought I remained.

Silly me!

If instead of wallowing under this duvet with three (dead) chorus girls and a signed photograph of Freddie ‘Parrot Face’ Davies for the past year-and-a-bit I had spent my time obsessively checking the Blogger listings like the rest of you, I would have known my isolation ended after just two months, when Percy Chanel came on the scene.

Percy is a 104-year-old male Virgo (oo-er, missis) located in Babooda, Honkoo Tonkoo, Bouvet Island. Among his other interests are ‘destroying piccolos and other wind instruments’, trainspotting and counting marbles.

Why, we’re practically soulmates.

Or so I thought before reading this brutally dismissive, Rhett-Butler-like avowal:

i am EVERYTHING YOU R NOT, INCLUDING SMART, HOT AND DESIRABLE.

Well, as Larkin said, useful to get that learnt.

If we’re going to be all frank & harsh & candid, may I point out to Mister Chanel that I’ve written one hundred more postings than he has, and 700% more people have read my profile?

In fact, he’s written precisely ONE POSTING, whereas I’ve been sitting here at all hours, churning out deathless prose in industrial quantities while seldom pausing to eat, shave, or renew my subscription to the Illustrated Journal of Early Eye-Gouging Equipment.

But he must have something I haven’t, because look, Edward Gibson of Tip Top Equities has left him a 425-word comment, and he’s never posted so much as an epigram at Toasty’s Futon, despite my constantly emailing him and hanging around outside his house with boxes of chocolates and electric prods.

You must now imagine me pouting, and kicking a trash can.

Today’s Clues

(3) Botulism causes Nagasaki – deprave your cladding

{€} Earls’ tricycles occlude Paganini, one might hypothecate

]‰[ Lindy whistles a chocolate Valentine, Your Honour

$$$ The bonus has now risen to nineteen saveloys!!! $$$
_________________

(REAL) DEATHS IN APRIL 2006
12 April: The Dowager Lady Hesketh, former rugby correspondent of The Spectator, sacked by Boris Johnson in 1999. 15 April: Lord Eliot, surfer, busker and nude escapologist. 17 April: Peter Cadbury, test pilot, Nuremberg prosecutor and Rwandan gorilla owner, whose sole reason for pig-keeping was allegedly to annoy his neighbours, and who armed himself with a crossbow after burglars stole the gun he kept by his bed for shooting burglars.