The Indifferent

credit: Darwin Bell

LONDON. The avocado has continued its unwarranted advance on dinnerplates across the globe, new research published today has revealed.

The squishy, tastless fruit has long been a staple of guacamole and bland salads but has recently also been making significant advances in side-salads, sandwiches and burgers. Read the rest of this entry »

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SHROPSHIRE. The sell-by dates on food products can be safely extended by around two weeks, a student claimed today. Liam Madden, 20, who is studying Astrophysics with Golf Course Management at the University of Shropshire, insisted that the suggested dates were “proper cautious” and that other factors could be used to determine food edibility.

“Those dates really don’t mean anything”, Madden explained to flatmates earlier today, while tucking into a sandwich of week old bacon on two-week old bread, topped off with two-year old ketchup. “They’re just being proper cautious because they can’t cut it fine. In reality, you can just add a couple of weeks on and you’ll probably be fine. Sometimes more than that, sometimes less. It’s a judgement call.”

When challenged by disgusted flatmate Anna Jones, 19, if he was then simply planning to leave food festering in the fridge forever, Madden suggested that other proofing methods can be employed to determine if food is safe to eat. “Furriness is the obvious one”, Madden explained. “Most food that doesn’t start out furry shouldn’t become furry with time. Watch out too for things that randomly change colour, texture, start soft and get hard, start hard and get soft, or just generally smell unpleasant. ”

Madden did concede, however, that some food simply has to be thrown away. “Even in these tough economic times, a line has to be drawn somewhere. It’s up to each man to determine where that line is for himself.”

MANCHESTER. A bored office worker today set a new timewasting record after he read 231 articles on Wikipedia in one eight hour working day. Tom Marsh, 26, estimates the feat took in the region of six and a half hours, and smashed his own record of 157 pages, set last November.

“The key to wasting that amount of time is to not be afraid of just reading about things you actually aren’t that interested in,” Marsh explained. “Just start with something you have a passing interest in, and then take something related to that, and then something related to that, and so on, and so on – until you’re reading about the Scandanavian Welface Model and you can’t remember why.”
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SHROPSHIRE. When people start a sentence with “I’m not racist, but…”, they generally tend to follow it up with something a little bit racist, it was revealed today.

“It stands to reason, when you think about it”, explained Dr. Nero Sparboom, Professor of Linguistics at Shropshire, who has spent the last ten years studying what people say right after they say I’m not racist, but. “You don’t often hear people say ‘I’m not racist, but I’m just off to the shops to get a pint of milk’. There’s really no need to qualify your lack of racism there. Compare that with‘I’m not racist, but the bloody foreigners are ruining this country’ – clearly a more appropriate use of the phrase, as it helps to deflect the subsequent casual racism.”

The new research will certainly be a blow to casual racists across the country, who had until now been successfully disguising their intolerant xenophonic opinions with the simple four word phrase. “It’s getting harder to be a little bit racist without anyone noticing”, said Bob, 48, a simple minded bigot from Surrey. “I’m thinking of starting more sentences with ‘you people’ or ‘the trouble with this country is’ instead.”

credit: cubicgarden

LONDON. A valiant but short lived attempt to save money and eat more healthily came to an end today when a local man officially ended his stint of preparing healthy lunches, returning instead to his customary ritual of selecting a packaged sandwich at random from the supermarket across the street from his office.

John Lahm, 27, from East Dulwich, South London, made the dramatic U-Turn only five days after telling friends and colleagues that he was going to make nutritious packed lunches “every day from now on”. While the extract reason for the humilating climbdown is still shrouded in mystery, sources closes to Lahm suggest that that laziness, a lack of inspiration, an absence of good ingredients in the house and a stonking hangover may all contributed to his decision.
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