What do you call some of the most unlucky people in Britain? Justin Case, Barb Dwyer and Stan Still.

It sounds like a bad joke, but a study has revealed that there really are unfortunate people with those names in the UK.

Joining them on the list are Terry Bull, Paige Turner, Mary Christmas and Anna Sasin. And just imagine having to introduce yourself to a crowd as Doug Hole or Hazel Nutt.

The names were uncovered by researchers from parenting group TheBabyWebsite.com after trawling through online telephone records. Retired airman Stan Still, 76, from Cirencester, Gloucestershire, said his name had been “a blooming millstone around my neck my entire life”…

[continues at the BBC]

WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.

Calling it “basically no more than five rectangular strips of paper,” Fed chairman Ben Bernanke illustrates how much “$200″ is actually worth.

What began as a routine report before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday ended with Bernanke passionately disavowing the entire concept of currency, and negating in an instant the very foundation of the world’s largest economy.

“Though raising interest rates is unlikely at the moment, the Fed will of course act appropriately if we … if we …” said Bernanke, who then paused for a moment, looked down at his prepared statement, and shook his head in utter disbelief. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. None of this — this so-called ‘money’ — really matters at all.”

“It’s just an illusion,” a wide-eyed Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. “Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless.”

Read More in the Onion

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation.

The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith, apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith.

The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers.

The lines read out by the DJ included: “One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother.”

The presenter on Genesis TV, a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films.

[Read more at the Telegraph]

“Sarah Palin knows that it’s okay to call someone a retard if like Rush you clearly don’t mean it which is why we should all come to her defense and say: Sarah Palin is a fucking retard,” Colbert quipped.

Palin’s son, Trig, has Down Syndrome. She had criticized Obama chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel for telling liberal activists that a political strategy was “fucking retarded” during a private meeting in the White House. But when Rush Limbaugh used the same word, Palin declared that his usage was acceptable because it was satire.

[Read more at Alternet]

Ali G talks to religious wingnuts about their beliefs .. oddly, religious wingnuts don’t like talking about aspects of their own religion that offend them .. if their religion and its real-life applications are so offensive, why believe all that wingnuttery in the first place?

[Read more at ScienceBlogs]

Thomas Crapper is an elusive figure: Most people familiar with his name know him as acelebrated figure in Victorian England, an ingenious plumber who invented the modern flush toilet; others believe him to be nothing more than a hoax, the whimsical creation of a satirical writer. The truth lies somewhere in between.

Much of the confusion stems from a 1969 book by Wallace Reyburn, Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper. Reyburn’s “biography” of Crapper has often been dismissed as a complete fabrication, as some of his other works (most notably Bust-Up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling and the Development of the Bra) are obvious satirical fiction. Although Flushed with Pride is, like Bust-Up, a tongue-in-cheek work full of puns, jokes, and exaggerations, Reyburn did not invent the person of Thomas Crapper as he did Otto Titzling. In Flushed with Pride, Reyburn’s satire rests on the framework of a real man’s life. Thomas Crapper was not, as Reyburn wrote, the inventor of the flush toilet, a master plumber by appointment to the royals who was knighted by Queen Victoria, or an important figure whose achievements were written up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and one searches in vain for evidence that contemporary authorities took any notice of Thomas Crapper, for mention of him in biographical dictionaries, or for his obituary notice in the London Times.

Read More on Snopes.com

Authorities in Utah said a 7-year-old boy jumped behind the wheel of his family’s car and led police on a chase because he didn’t want to go to church.The Weber County Sheriff’s Office said they received a call about a child driving recklessly at about 9 a.m. Sunday in Plain City and two deputies pursued the vehicle as it drove through red lights and stop signs before stopping in the driveway of the boy’s family home, the Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner reported Wednesday.

Weber County Sheriff’s Capt. Klint Anderson said the boy ran inside the home and deputies followed only to discover the boy’s father had not realized the car was gone.

“They had to explain to him they had chased his car,” Anderson said. “The father confronted the kid, and the boy straight-up admitted he had driven it. When asked why he took the car, he said he didn’t want to go to church.”

[Read more at UPI]

LOUISVILLE, KY—At first glance, high school senior Lucas Faber, 18, seems like any ordinary gay teen. He’s a member of his school’s swing choir, enjoys shopping at the mall, and has sex with other males his age. But lately, a growing worry has begun to plague this young gay man. A gnawing feeling that, deep down, he may be a fundamentalist, right-wing Christian.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” Faber admitted to reporters Monday. “It’s like I get these weird urges sometimes, and suddenly I’m tempted to go behind my friends’ backs and attend a megachurch service, or censor books in the school library in some way. Even just the thought of organizing a CD-burning turns me on.”

Added Faber, “I feel so confused.”

The openly gay teen, who came out to his parents at age 14 and has had a steady boyfriend for the past seven months, said he first began to suspect he might be different last year, when he started feeling an odd stirring within himself every time he passed a church. The more conservative the church, Faber claimed, the stronger his desire was to enter it.

Read More in the Onion

TWO bank robbers who blew themselves up trying to make a sizable withdrawal from an ATM have been declared the 2009 winners of the Darwin Awards.

Organisers say the annual “prize” is given to “those doing the most to improve the human gene pool … by removing themselves from it”.

This year the dubious first place went to the pair of bungling thieves in Belgium who wildly overestimated the amount of dynamite they needed to rob a bank.

They both were killed when the blast demolished the entire building the ATM was housed in.

Police only found the body of the second robber some twelve hours after digging through the debris. They had initially assumed he had made a getaway.

Read More on the Courier-Mail

Our favorite exposition of Saturnalia has long been the Electric Sheep comic strip, no longer easily available on the web, but we dug in the crates and are pleased to bring it to you. We did find it here and in a video created from the original website posted to Funny or Die:

Most of us don’t know much about what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) actually does. Without some degree of mystery, after all, it can’t carry out its purpose to covertly collect information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals for American policymakers. So when we do learn anything about a specific CIA program, it’s usually after the fact, and usually because it was a big enough failure to garner media attention. With the understanding that all details about the agency’s dealings are sketchy, unconfirmed, and, well, secret, here are four of the twentieth century’s biggest CIA flops.

1. Operation Acoustic Kitty: The Cold War era of the 1960s was the CIA’s heyday. Americans were so worried about what the Communists were doing and whether they had nuclear weapons that we would have done just about anything to find out.

And the secret agents, glorified in spy novels and movies, who did get the dirt on the Reds were our heroes. The CIA’s carte blanche in chasing Communists led to rumors of some pretty bizarre ideas, like Operation Acoustic Kitty, which supposedly ran from 1961 to 1967, and involved the CIA’s surgically implanting cats with audio equipment to use them as bugging devices.

Though the basic idea for the plot — that a cat would go unnoticed and could easily eavesdrop on Soviet conversations — was certainly innovative, former CIA officer Victor Marchetti recalls many problems with Acoustic Kitty:

They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that. Finally, they’re ready. They took it out to a park bench and said, ‘Listen to those two guys. Don’t listen to anything else — not the birds, no cat or dog — just those two guys!’

Read more from Molly Mann on divine caroline

A Chinese monkey trainer who trained his animals to do martial arts reportedly got the shock of his life when his proteges suddenly turned on him.

Entertainer Lo Wung was knocked to the ground in a vicious attack by his monkeys while entertaining a shopping crowd in eastern China’s Hubei province, The Sun newspaper reports, quoting a man who says he saw the attack and caught it on his camera.

The 42-year-old trainer had previously taught his monkeys basic taekwondo moves to amuse his audiences, but the monkeys had no qualms in using the skills against their master, Hu Luang told The Sun newspaper.

“I saw one punch him in the eye — he grabbed another by the ear and it responded by grabbing his nose,” the newspaper quoted Mr Luang as saying.

“They were leaping and jumping all over the place — it was better than a Bruce Lee film.”

The revolt apparently started when one monkey turned and kicked him kung-fu style in the head.

[Read more at MSN News]

Members of the earth’s earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.

According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization.

“I do not understand,” reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. “A booming voice is saying, ‘Let there be light,’ but there is already light. It is saying, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass,’ but I am already standing on grass.”

“Everything is here already,” the pictograph continues. “We do not need more stars.”

Historians believe that, immediately following the biblical event, Sumerian witnesses returned to the city of Eridu, a bustling metropolis built 1,500 years before God called for the appearance of dry land, to discuss the new development. According to records, Sumerian farmers, priests, and civic administrators were not only befuddled, but also took issue with the face of God moving across the water, saying that He scared away those who were traveling to Mesopotamia to participate in their vast and intricate trade system.

More on the The Onion

For twenty years, the cartoonist R. Sikoryak has been creating parody strips of literary masterpieces, casting familiar cartoon characters in classic roles — Little Lulu as Pearl Prynne, Little Nemo as Dorian Gray, Charlie Brown as Gregor Samsa. If you’re like me, and you sometimes like your serious literature with a side of Beavis and Butthead (see Sikoryak’s take on “Waiting for Godot”), you will probably laugh out loud over Masterpiece Comics, a collection of thirteen of these strips, just out from Drawn & Quarterly.

Here is R. Sikoryak’s take on an existentialist superhero:

Check out the The New Yorker link for a Kafkaesque Charlie Brown tale.

Are there aliens out there? And if there are, do they have their own Martian Jesus or do they all just automatically go to hell until they come to Earth and accept ours? I don’t know, but it’s nice to see the Catholic church is finally catching up with the Scientologists. Our operating thetans need all the help we can get in the battle against Xenu.

Here what we know:

• Jesus is in a can

• Jesus is bleeding

• There’s now 20% more Jesus.

Here’s what we don’t know:

• How Jesus got in the can.

• Whether or not Jesus appears when you spray this.

• Who handles Jesus’s PR. This seems like a horrible misstep in what seemed to be an otherwise promising career.

Whatever this is, it’s hilarious. A google translation of “Aerosol de Poder Atraccion” yields “Attraction Power Spray.” So there’s a chance that Jesus is changing the body-spray game. Hey Axe! Jesus is here, and the ladies can’t resist a man walking on water and smelling good. Check and mate.

Extra-terrestrials have today conceded that a decades-long programme of abduction to gather detailed knowledge of human society and biology might have produced better results had they looked beyond suggestible loners with a history of mental health problems.‘In hindsight, I suppose there was always going to be a limit to the intelligence we could get from a depressed farmer drink-driving his tractor at 2am,’ said an alien spokesbeing today. ‘We were disappointed to find that the majority of these people from isolated rural communities were not as well-connected to the planet’s major political powers as we’d hoped, and in truth they only confused our understanding of the human race. For a time we weren’t sure the species had a definitive stance on incest, or indeed what the correct number of fingers and toes was for a human. Perhaps we should have made better use of Wikipedia.’

Alien leaders have taken the opportunity to apologise formally to the ‘lost generation’ of socially awkward stay-at-homes they had previously targeted, expressing particular remorse that their routine examinations of human reproductive organs may have been seen as a come-on by the many abductees with limited sexual experience. They also apologised unreservedly to all their former guests for any damage to their credibility or social standing on earth caused by their failure to return and crown them Grand Master of Quadrant Z as promised.

‘If we could travel back in time and do it all again,’ continued the spokesbeing, ‘we’d probably choose to convey our message of constructive engagement with humans in writing or by just popping round to introduce ourselves in person, rather than relying solely on crop circles. And we’d certainly think twice before going with recreational drug users again as our preferred messengers for warnings of global apocalypse.’

Aliens had hoped that their apology would go some way to building bridges between human and extra-terrestrial civilisations and might attract more promising candidates for cranial and rectal probing, but their latest visitor appears to be no different to previous guests. ‘He talked passionately about a vision of the world as a giant theme park in which adults and children live in a harmonious condition of mutual love and respect unhampered by legal interference. By the time he tried to convince us it was normal to walk backwards while keeping both feet on the ground at all times, we knew he was taking the piss and we sent him packing with enough drugs in his system to forget the whole sorry episode.’

says Leahy: “For a while now I’ve been interested starting a blog, but I was never sure what I had to say was interesting enough. That, and there are countless blogs around about nothing and probably some blogs about those blogs. Where do we go from here then? Well, I go down the road that some say I’m best known for… Puns.”

“It’s got to the point now, where friends of mine (when on holiday, usually) might see shops adorned with elaborately painted puns on their facade, take a photo of them, pop them on Facebook and then tag ME in the photo! I’m hundreds of miles away watching Seinfeld in my pants. I’m certainly not infront of their camera(s).”

Well, It’s a dirty job, but punones got to do it (OK, I’ll stop now!!). If you have any snaps to send to Sean, drop him a line at sean@thepunningman.com and add the web’s most singular source of pun!

Ken Eakins