You heard the man

I’ll keep this brief.  We’re big fans of Apple hardware here in Sentinel Towers. Corns uses a Macbook Pro to organise cannibal deathmatches in Liberia. I myself cruise the information pornohighway from time-to-time using one, but never without a microwaved pomelo close by. We have faith in Apple’s ability to produce a great operating system in a great computer. It fills the gap better than anything else.

Steve Jobs recently said: “We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical and revolutionary new product”

Okay, great! Blow my fucking mind, Steve! Show me the magic! Knock my stripey socks off with the Che Guevaraness of it all!

What do we get? A super-sized iPhone?

No doubt the fat fuckers will be queuing up outside the Apple Store in New York, waving for the CNN cameras while their douchebaggery is broadcasted across every continent, forking over their hundreds of dollars for something they couldn’t possibly need.

But don’t worry. Thy God Steve still gets paid. He needs the money for the diamond encrusted toilet seat he sits on as he takes a truly magical and revolutionary new dump every morning.

Despite fulfilling his contract the Sunday World has tried to prevent Williams from taking up a job offer from the News of the World, going so far as to take out a court injunction last week. The Sunday World claims Williams is obliged to serve out a three-month notice period under the provisions of the National Union of Journalists’ house agreement. Legal sources say the situation could take months to resolve unless a financial settlement is made but in the meantime the villains of the nation are left floundering.

Paul "The Journalist" Williams

According to Brock the Gobbler, a semi-notorious Limerick hardshaw, the longer the discord continues, the worse it’s going to be for them. “This is intolerable! I demand justice for Paul Williams. What are the Sunday World thinking? What drives them to the point where they deny a man the right to make a living?”

He was supported by Anto “The Armadillo” O’Cahill, an inner-city drug dealer, gang leader, forger, occasional hitman and importer of stolen good and orphans. “It’s all well and good an’ all an’ anyway if the Sunday World stop Paul Williams from writin’ for the News of the World but nobody stops and thinks about us. Knowwarramean? We’re out there all day every day, so we are, doin’ a decent day’s criminalisin’ and if there’s nuttin in the bleedin’ paper on Sunday then you stop and ask yourself what’s the point? Knowwarramean?

And are the Sunday World thinkin’ about the young fellas? The up and comin’ lads who haven’t even got themselves a nickname yet? It’s all right for me, knowwarramean? It’s all right for ‘The Viper’, ‘The Ostrich’, ‘The Snow Leopard’, ‘The duck-billed platypus’ and ‘The Stegosaurus’ but how are these lads gonna get ahead if Williams isn’t around to give them a droll appellation? Knowwarramean? Get it sorted”.

Sources close to Williams say he is growing frustrated despite the fact his name is still appearing in headlines and he can remain more famous than the gangsters he writes about. However there are real fears that unless he finds himself gazing at the streets of Dublin from the side of a bus advertisment he may take up TV3’s offer as Mark Cagney’s sidekick on Ireland AM.

 “For Big Tobacco to stay profitable we need to start 500 teens smoking every day. It’s a tough challenge, but as long as it’s delivered in a tone of cuddly bonhomie, I think we can make the difference,” said O’Briain.

 The campaign, which is called ‘Don’t be so shit – light a cigarette and suffocate your inner dork, you fucking asshole’, aims to play on the obvious vulnerability of young teenagers and their well-documented need to be accepted by their peers. A spokesman for Marlboro explained the insight that informs the new campaign.

 “Marketing to a young audience is difficult, because you have to put yourself in the frame of mind of people who are gob-smackingly stupid and dumb. The idiocy of young teens in particular defies belief, so essentially we will brow-beat these greasy, pimply turds into smoking by telling them how shit they are if they don’t smoke.” 

O’Briain’s campaign, which will go to air next week, will first focus on the strong ties between smoking and sex. 

“Ah sure there’s nothing like the cigarette you have after sex! It’s only delicious as you lie there, easing your sated frame from right to left like a lion on the Serengheti. And it’s a good thing you smoke too, because if you didn’t smoke, you never would have met the goddess lying there beside you. Instead you would have been inside hoping that your crap chat up lines make up for the stench of your BO, you desperate loser. People who don’t smoke never have sex. Ever. So don’t be so shit – light a cigarette and suffocate your inner dork, you fucking asshole’ – Brought to you by a conglomerate of tobacco companies”. 

“We trade in misery at Ryanair, and no-one is going to come on one of my planes and stew in their own juices without paying me for the pleasure.”

The new charges will see recently broken-up people pay and extra €15 per seat, while all single men and women over 30 will have to pay an extra 10% in airport charges. Divorcees will be subject a €45 hike, while people who have been physically or sexually abused will have to charter their own plane at a cost of no less than €879 per passenger.

O’Leary will also introduce a blanket charge on all people with Polish passports.

“I have never seen a Polish person smile. Ever. They’re all miserable, and now they’re going to have to pay me extra to fly on my shitty planes.”

Meanwhile, having dispensed with in-person check-ins, Ryanair look set to axe their online check-in as well. A spokesman for this collection of irredeemable cocksuckers said:

“To check in, passengers will have to open the nearest window, look towards the airport and shout their reference number. There will be a charge of €75 for this service and if we don’t hear you the first time, the charge will be trebled.”

A customer satisfaction survey carried out by the Dublin Aviation Authority found that 20% of those polled said that Ryanair and Michael O’Leary were ‘outrageous’. A further 88% agreed, or strongly agreed with the statement that Michael O’Leary is ‘just a fucking asshole’, while 94% said that they ‘would definitely not piss on that child-molesting cunt if he, and his family and pets, were burning’. Coincidentally, the same percentage of people agreed that they would set O’Leary’s face on fire with specially engineered ‘flammable piss’ if given the opportunity.

Finally, 172% of people surveyed agreed that O’Leary was a thankless cock-gobbler who whined and moaned at the government to save his revolting airline from collapse by forcing Aer Lingus to allow him to fly from Dublin to London, a route without which, his evil and deplorable enterprise would never have come to symbolise everything that is wrong with greedy, grubby shithead Irishmen who feel they  are answerable to no-one because they have some cash.

Biting, humourous websites across the UK and Ireland slumped against their keyboards, some openly weeping.

“This is awful”, said an unnamed Daily Mash source. “I mean, coin slot airplane toilets from the cheapest airline on the planet. I had three hundred words written on that and now they’re bloody useless.

Damn you, Michael O’Leary. You’ve blurred the lines between real life and satire. I don’t know how we can go on”.

Ryanair is expected to take the wind out of further lampooning by introducing an ‘air charge’, a ’seatbelt depreciation levy’ and ‘No, really, the people who fly our planes are one-eyed, alcoholic, ex-Israeli fighter pilots open day’.

Such were the words of one senior Irish Life & Permanent executive after it emerged that Anglo Irish Bank and IL&P had been playing a game of ‘give me the lend of four to six billion euro, will you?’

Jessica Alba - hands down bikini shot fooled Financial Regulator

Anglo Irish Bank came in for further… well really what the fuck can you say about these guys? Apparently nothing they do leads to any consequences. Nevertheless, the shower of complete cunts who constitute our banking system decided to juggle some billions to make Anglo’s balance sheet ‘look good’ at the crucial moment last September. Know what else would make their balance sheet look good? A picture of Jessica Alba with her hand inside her bikini bottoms. Front or back, I’m easy.

The Minister for Finance defended the move, because apparently that’s what the Minister for Finance in Ireland does. He makes excuses for banks that have run themselves into the ground, and then he gives them a seven-billion-euro bailout, and asks them to take a pay cut and they say, ‘go fuck yourself’. If this doesn’t copper-fasten our credibility with international markets nothing will. Except, perhaps, ownership of a picture of Jessica Alba with her hand inside her bikini bottoms. Indeed experts agree that Jessica Alba’s fine ass may just be the solution to the unprecedented financial crisis we now find ourselves in.

Meanwhile, the Taoiseach was upbeat about the education cuts:

“The easiest thing for a government to do is attack a constituency that has no voice and that is potentially too uneducated to vote. From our point of view, it’s a no-brainer,” said Cowen, without irony. “Some of the 900 special needs kids literally cannot speak and their parents are usually too emotionally and financially drained to effectively organise themselves into a lobby to be reckoned with. So we’ll take the odd bit of abuse on Liveline and that will be that.”

Ending on a positive note, Brian Cowen said: “There’s a part to play for every member of Irish society, and as long as you’re not taught how to add, or pick up the phone, that part is called Financial Regulation.”

Former Financial Regulator, Pat ‘I’m not looking into it’ Neary, could not be reached for comment because the useless prick is unable to find a ringing telephone on the desk in front of him. Financial Regulation in Ireland is currently being supervised by several hungry chimpanzees until the special needs children have been sufficiently down-skilled for the role.

“We take fun seriously at Diageo. Using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research we first hope to identify the issues that drive our sense of humour in the company, and then the extent to which these themes are embedded across the matrix of our brands and corporate goals.”

Sounds hilarious. 

This reporter was made privy to the target audience profile, which ironically belonged to Diageo employees themselves. It read ‘a Diageo employee is an over-achiever. He or she is good-looking, in a relationship, the envy of family and friends, living in a fashionable area and genuinely worried about accusations of drinking too much’. In short, the Diageo employee is the dictionary definition of a pain in the arse.

In business news, Diageo has confirmed a controlling interest in the production of all Christian Bibles. Diageo’s head of marketing, Lula Bluscht, said: 

“God is very much a role model for this audience and we feel strongly that if God were alive today, he would drink Guinness, Carlsberg and a number of other Diageo products. We have already used focus groups to identify the key cross-over points between religion and alcohol and we hope to brand these and make them more modern and accessible to a cash-rich / time-poor public that is bombarded with cluttered messaging for up to 20 hours a day.”

“It is conceivable that with the right sponsorship package, God may well have opted to change water into Guinness at the Marriage at Cana,” she said. “We want to explore these possibilities with Christian groups and so far they have been very receptive.”

“If you look at the new mystery of faith, for example, you’ll see how the ancient and the modern coalesce perfectly to deliver our key message: Christ has died / Christ is risen / Christ will come again / Christ drinks responsibly / Christ enjoys the pub on a Tuesday. On the face of it, these are ridiculous, nonsensical and frequently contradictory things to say, but we feel the modern audience is well equipped to deal with the paradox and we look forward to their spending a disproportionate amount of their money on our products. Responsibly.”

When asked what the wisdom was in allowing an industry that sells alcohol – the single biggest contributing factor to Ireland’s social and health problems – to regulate itself, Ms. Bluscht replied: “Would you like to meet Bono?”

Aldi, not just for doleheads

Discount supermarket Aldi has emerged as a major stockmarket player having taken advantage of last week’s crash in Bank of Ireland shares.

From a yearly high of €18 shares fell to just €0.85c and millions were lost from stock and pension portfolios. This morning a sharp rise in the bank’s shares was reported on the ISEQ and in the last few minutes the Irish Sentinel has learned that the German supermarket chain was directly responsible.

“Buying in bulk at rock bottom prices allows us to pass on ze saving to ze consumers”, said Jens Heimenschlupper, marketing manager of Aldi Ireland. “Ve vill continue to scour ze world for ze best products with which to fill our popular weekly newsletter”.

The shares are being sold in prime in-store locations with packets of 100 shares available beside the mints and recordable CDs as you place your shopping on the checkout belt.

“This is great”, said Mary O’Brien of Drimnagh, “I come to Aldi to buy dog food to feed my family and now I can be a real life Gordon Gecko too. I know what my husband is getting for Christmas now, some Bank of Ireland shares and a wrench and allen key set. God bless Aldi”.

There are strong rumours that Aldi will introduce a new line of products in early 2009 but Heimenschlupper refused to confirm or deny reports that off-the-shelf human organs would be part of the the range.