Report by Ms de Meaner
Super. Body-popping, eh? It doesn't bear thinking about. £20 to the winners, the best of whom (David Silverman) also gets the Tesco vouchers.
Gordon: Camila needs me
Fatherhood has certainly changed Gordon. He says so himself. Now he's decided to quit the premiership to work with Camila Batmanghelidjh. I can further reveal the underlying reason for this: he is obsessed by the funky hip-hop street dancing known as body-popping. Leroy, Camila's talented exponent, when shown recordings of Gordon seated on the green benches, noticed his distinctive repetitive angular movements, so unearthing his latent talent for the quasi-mechanistic art. So now, hour after hour, he practises his rhythmic jerks in front of a mirror. He will feature in some Kids Company videos this December, and hopes to raise £1m for the charity. He'll be gone by Christmas.
Anne Du Croz
Brown: I wanted to be cool
Rising sea waters finally flooded Downing Street in 2028, and global warming pushed the summer (March to October) average above 40°C. Brown kept his cool, and quit tropical Westminster for the rubber plantations and banana groves of the relatively temperate Highlands. The prudent face of government has already achieved record levels of reduced electoral turnout - below 9 per cent in 2020, with the public now more likely to vote in Big Brother, or cheer on Cherie Booth's The Weakest Link. Tony Blair's quizmaster role in Countdown keeps the over-thirties off politics; Brown's pursuit of low-interest government has proved an outstanding success. He always said he'd go out on a high, so the spring tides of 14 March 2029, predicted to wash away the remnants of Buckingham Palace, look a cert. It is also when he will beat his predecessor's spell in office.
D A Prince
GBRWN#UK1: faulty program
Gordon Brown is scheduled to cease functioning at 0052 hours on 5 May 2008. Programmed mainly for computational intelligence, GBRWN#UK1 functioned more than adequately for over ten years. But, in relation to muscle control, perception processing and reasoning, signs of malfunction became apparent between 2004 and 2006, particularly in self-monitoring of mental states with regard to ambition overload. The cognitive capabilities required to enable the building of complex environments using only computational resources was clearly too much for the neural network software. The news of GBRWN#UK1, coming so soon after the long-term terminal malfunction in GBSH#US1, raises fundamental questions not only regarding the program itself, but about political selection processes on both sides of the Atlantic.
David Silverman (New Scientist)
No 3953 History is bunk
Set by Ian Birchall
Historians now claim that Marie-Antoinette never said: "Let them eat cake." We want accounts of other falsely attributed quotations ("To be or not to be" or "Education, education, education", for example) explaining how this occurred.
Max 125 words by 26 October
E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk
