A Week in Mild Amusement

Ex Lib-dem leader Tim Farron has stated that he regrets saying gay sex is not a sin during the run-up to last years general election. Farron expressed disappointment at how the media had seemed to only be interested in his Christian beliefs and less in the policies of the party. Apart from the fact that, quite frankly, most people are more interested in carpet samples than lib-dem policies, he seems baffled that members of the British community might have a vested interest in ensuring people in power don’t view their lives as evil. Hint: it’s the gay ones.  For a man who looks like a second-hand sex doll, he’s awfully tight-collared about issues that don’t concern him at all- but then I suppose that goes hand in hand with being a Lib-dem MP.

A small display that shows emojis is being pitched to drivers as an alternative to hand signals. The device uses images to display to other motorists your intentions and feelings. In essence, we’re being encouraged to take the same approach to road safety as we use for an amusing Vine. It’s perhaps just me but all I can picture is the sat-nav somehow gaining sentience and communicating through a cross faced emoji its intention to lock the brakes and drive you into a lake- but that’s maybe a result of watching too much Black Mirror. The emoji signal display is great news for shy members of the dogging community, who now will simply need to park up and alternately display images of a winky-face and an aubergine.

Japanese astronaut Norishige Kanai has apologised after wrongly stating he had grown 9cm since his arrival on the International Space Station. He had, in fact, only grown 2cm. Kanai overstating length was a force of habit after spending years on Omegle.com. His mistake was noticed when his Russian commander, Anton Shkaplerov, expressed scepticism. This element also made scientific headlines as the first observed instance of a Russian discouraging fake news.

A Birmingham surgeon has been fined £10,000 for branding his initials onto the livers of his patients, presumably as an artistic sign-off for his work. In the most extreme version ever of marking your work desk, Simon Bramhall used an argon beam machine to burn SB onto the livers of anaesthetised patients. Bramhall presumably originally wanted to sign on the dotted line but couldn’t reach the vertebrae from a frontal incision. The patients were said to be shocked and embarrassed, stating the worst thing was that when he’d written the date in the margin, he’d forgotten it was a new year. Similarly, my liver is also marked with the names of men who’ve damaged it, these being Jack Daniels, John Smith and Jim Beam.

Liam Neeson has described the Hollywood sexual assault scandal as ‘a bit of a witch hunt’ which was news to me because Roald Dahl assured me there were no male witches. Promoting his latest Guinness world record attempt for the most boring name for a feature film ever, The Commuter, Neeson made the comments on the show, that almost sounds like it’s about an unexpected pregnancy, The Late Late show. In a way, the description of a witch hunt does make sense, in that Harvey Weinsten looks like something that was produced from a toadstool, pulled out of a cauldron and sent to fight Aragorn.

In a characteristically unsmiling interview in which she looks like someone’s told her she may have to invite Jeremy Corbyn to the house at some point, the Queen has described how it feels to wear the coronation crown. She told a royal commentator that it was so heavy that ‘you can’t look down’ while wearing it. Her majesty then followed to promptly snatch the crown of the table and jam it on when he slid one of her tax returns across the table.

For last week’s roundup, click here.