It’s been a week and the devious minds that do their foul business in this office have been lying like politicians in order to meet the ‘Shite (talking) Club’ challenge.
Quite frankly some of the untruths that have been shared with me this week have left my faith in humanity stale and crumbled like the cheap Custard Creams at the bottom of our biscuit tin.
So with no further ado, lets dive in to that pit of propaganda that is ‘Shite (talking) Club’…
• In the spirit of international relations one unscrupulous chap has been telling unsuspecting Australians that the UK is actually twice as large in the summer as it is in the winter due to the powerful British tides, and that every year the River Thames dries up completely. It would not be surprising if these ‘facts’ were now being taught in every secondary school in Australia.
• The same gentlemen has also been informing people that Horse Fighting is a legitimate recognised sport, and is due to receive Olympic recognition in time for the 2012 games in London. Most worrying of all is that it now appears that Horse Fighting is, in fact, a popular combat sport in the Philippines (making us wonder: which came first, his lie or Philippino Horse Wrestling?)
• One young lady’s boyfriend has been conducting a campaign of lying that deserves commendation for his sheer commitment to the lie. He has maintained for many years that Ainsley Harriot is actually dead and the BBC, terrified at the prospect of falling viewing figures on ‘Ready, Steady Cook’, have been conducting an elaborate Weekend-at-Bernies-style scheme to maintain the illusion that he is still alive (and annoying). Even I’m half convinced by this.
• It seems that celebrity-death-lies are favoured amongst the more ghoulish members of our team, with one of our crafty colleagues claiming that 1980s film ‘legend’ Steve Guttenberg actually died in 1991. Rather than letting his back catalogue of epic cinematic masterpieces grow stagnant, Steve’s brother Rudy did what any sensible sibling would do and merely assumed the name and identity of his actor brother, thus allowing the Guttenberg thespian legacy to live on. Worryingly, the gent who is championing this most dubious of tales is a little bit too convincing and there are uncomfortable murmurs in the office that it might actually be true…
There have been other corkers put forward including the claim that Mr T is Ice T’s uncle; the explanation that it never snows at the seaside due to the salt in the air and the allegation that KFC Chicken is genetically modified so it has 8 wings.
My own effort for the week was when I successfully convinced a gullible friend that Swiss cheese contains holes because, in a bid to destabilise Switzerland’s position of neutrality during the Second World War, German spies had taken to planting grenades inside large cheeses in a bid to discourage the Swiss from offering shelter or support to the French Resistance.
The Swiss nation was gripped by fear as countless people lost their lives in cheese-bomb incidents, and historians have dubbed this period of the war as the ‘Yellow Death’.
In order to stop the increasing amount of exploding cheese fatalities the Swiss employed ‘Pousser Fromage’ officers (Cheese Pokers) whose job was to poke all Swiss cheese several times with long pipes, from behind a sandbag bunker, to check for explosives.
But the Swiss found that the improved aerodynamics of the holey, grenade-free cheese contributed positively to its flavour, texture (and calorie content) and adopted the device in their traditional cheese-making process. And thus it remains until this day.
Thanks to a sincere, authoritative delivery and the sheer elaborateness of the lie my friend was totally convinced and will only now realise, as he reads this blog, that he has been lampooned like a bomb-filled block of wartime cheese.
So, as he frantically backtracks to the many people he has undoubtedly shared his new historical ‘knowledge’ with, I feel that two lessons have been learnt by us all.
Firstly, believe nothing anyone tells you ever. And if your Swiss cheese has no holes in it, put your cracker down and run.
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