Back Yard of the Universe

Some dolphins possess a high enough level of intelligence to play chess, though they much prefer Ker-Plunk.

Doctors are warning of an outbreak of Pralineism, where patients suffer from the delusion that they are John Cleese. The illness starts off subtly with victims spontaneously asking what the Romans ever did for us, but this soon progresses to silly walking and an obsession with cheese. As the syndrome takes hold, patients will find themselves unable to pass cars without the compulsion to attack them with branches, and will hallucinate pieces of game pie stuck up in the corners of rooms.

There is currently no known cure for the illness, though after the stage where the sufferer believes themselves to be a barrister having an affair with Jamie Lee Curtis, it stops being funny.

The earliest forms of double-glazing used to block specific radio frequencies. This had the bizarre effect that all homes with the thicker windows were unable to receive any radio programme hosted by bearded DJ Dave Lee Travis. Threatened legal action by the BBC led to the addition of tiny metallic filaments into the glass which negated the issue.

Early drafts of Shakespeare’s Macbeth discovered in Anne Hathaway’s garderobe show that originally the eponymous Scot was meant to be plagued by visions not of the ghost of Banquo, but by a giant rabbit called Harvey. The 1944 Mary Chase play and later film adaptation starring Jimmy Stewart are entirely unrelated and their existence is due solely to a great cosmic coincidence.

The Broville Crumbotron is the world’s most sophisticated toaster, containing in-built artificial intelligence that automatically works out how long to toast the bread for. The Crumbotron takes into account a vast number of factors, including time of day, your body temperature, the weight of the bread, and distance from the Equator, to name but a few. The calculations carried out are immensely complicated, and based on Schrodinger’s Laws of Quantum Toasting. Due to the complexity, the toaster is outfitted with several server-class multi-core processors, and requires fifteen large fans operating at a constant speed of 25,000RPM just to prevent it catching fire. The Crumbotron has an RRP of £750,000 and is available from Argos.

During the latter stages of World War II, the Nazis hatched a plan to invade Britain using clowns. Anachronistically codenamed Operation Charlie Chalk, the sinister plot involved dropping numerous Volkswagen Beetles from the air that would land in specially-targeted ’soft spots’. With each Beetle containing on average around 350 clowns, Nazi generals believed that they could overrun Britain in under a week using a terrible combination of slapstick, custard pies and big shoes.

Thankfully the plan was thwarted by the Enigma Code-breaking team at Bletchley Park, and the Germans went back to their traditional methods of shooting at us.

Zany staff members at the ‘Specs of Gold’ opticians in Walthamstow have created the world’s first varifocal aquarium. Mr Magoo, the tank’s resident goldfish, appears the size of a small piece of plankton whilst at the bottom, yet seems like a great white shark when at the top (apart from the fact that he’s a different colour, obviously). The tank was mistakenly put in for this year’s Turner Prize, and made it to the short-list before being dismissed as not stupid enough to win.

Surprisingly, the most popular REM song to commit suicide to is not Everybody Hurts, but rather Shiny Happy People, possibly because of the inclusion of that woman from the B52s. Even that pales in comparison to Rednex’s 1994 ‘classic’ Cotton Eye Joe, however, which was responsible for a mass suicide in the mid Welsh village of Llanwnnen.

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? 17 kilogrammes, though this does depend to an extent upon the size and physical state of the woodchuck, and the distribution of the weight over several separate pieces of wood.