Brown courts crosshairs

PR firm tells PM to keep enemies closer

A PR firm, charged with improving Gordon Brown’s public image in time for the next general election, has proposed to make him more “assassinatable”. ProScope Media, which represents the successful hate figures Simon Cowell and Peaches Geldoff, has recommended that the prime minister work harder to antagonise demographics with proven track records in political murder, including Islamic terrorists, anarchists and ambidextrous American actors of the 19th century.

Brown has a lot of work to do: the Killodex, a biannual league table of the world’s top 50 candidates for assassination, currently features him at number 44. This is the weakest showing by a British premier in the publication's history, and bookmakers are offering 4-1 odds that the next instalment, due in April, will see him slip from the rankings altogether. A recent Al Jazeera poll of nearly 1000 Mujahideen found that 73% of respondents either failed to identify Brown or mistook him for the American writer Susan Sontag, who is at number 36 in the table, despite having died in 2004.

According to Lee Hammerstein, a researcher for the Killodex, “Gordon Brown is just too dour to appeal to international assassins. He doesn’t have the knack for exciting people that Tony Blair had, for better or worse.” (Blair peaked at two in the table, during the run up to the invasion of Iraq.) “Another thing is that he’s a slow-moving target. The fashion for the modern assassin is to use a sniper rifle or bomb, and that’s just no challenge with someone who moves as slowly as Brown. It’d be like shooting an elephant in a milk float.”

Although the reasoning behind the proposed strategy is still unclear, there is an implication that it is intended to generate sympathy for the embattled prime minister. A junior member of the consultancy team is reported as saying that “if there was an attempt on his life it’d be good if he can sustain an injury of some kind. Go for a Reagan-type deal…is it possible to get the guy who shot him?”

Lee strikes back with a new hope for black cinema

Controversial director takes on "space racists"

The filmmaker Spike Lee has announced that his next project will be a new Star Wars movie. Speaking at a press screening for his latest release, Miracle at St. Anna, he described the popular sci-fi series as “one of the most deleterious cultural artefacts in the American minority ethnic experience” and likened its creator, George Lucas, to the Nazi director Leni Riefenstahl. “We got our president,” he said, “now it’s time to take down the real hate machine.”

Lee's film, provisionally entitled Buffalo Jedi, will focus on the experiences of the first black man to be inducted into the mystical order of Jedi Knights. Following him from his childhood on a ghetto planet to his enlistment as an agent of the Republic (the intergalactic government), it will examine the conflicts he faces as he attempts to advance without abandoning his cultural identity.

“He’s going to shine a light on the brutality and indifference that the Star Wars powers-that-be heap on the racial underclass,” explained the director. “His lightsaber is going to be black, they got the technology for that now, and it’s going to cleave one hell of a lot of freedom-hating gnarly white ass.”

Clint Eastwood, who clashed with Lee last year after his film Flags of Our Fathers came under attack for not featuring African American characters, has also declared an interest in the series. In a recent interview he indicated that he would like “to do something with Koreans, just Koreans. A whole planet-full of f***ing Koreans, waving flags and just having a great time.”

If the two filmmakers decide to pursue these projects, they will be going head-to-head with a selection of Hollywood big-hitters, including Martin Scorsese, Baz Luhrmann and David Lynch, all of whom have outlined distinctive personal visions for the Star Wars universe.

Is the Bible true? Scientists say ‘amen’

Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have released the findings of an extraordinary study into literary truthfulness. Using a groundbreaking piece of textual-diagnostic software, Dr. Sara Hauffman and Dr. Hisham Klein have assessed the factual content of more than 1000 documents, including religious texts, poetry and technical writing. Their results show that the content of the Bible is 91% accurate, with the individual Testaments scoring 80% (OT) and 94% (NT) respectively. The equivalent holy books of the other Abrahamic religions also fared well, with the Tanakh scoring 74% and the Qur’an 68%.

At a heavily attended press conference yesterday, Dr. Klein spoke modestly about the team’s achievements, attempting to downplay the significance of the study. “Our findings are certainly interesting,” he said, “and I hope that they constitute a legitimate contribution to mankind. However, I urge people not to read too much into this study. We must all try to interpret its meaning for ourselves.”

Subsequent statements from other parties have been more dramatic, with Christian leaders taking the opportunity to attack the secular values of the Western world. Pope Benedict XVI described the revelation as “a divine mandate for Christians to redouble their efforts in realising the world that God demands.” He called for an immediate reappraisal of political and social structures, with the aim of “ending the division of Church and State that has blighted our culture for so long.”

Other organisations have been even more forthright. “What we are seeing now,” said Bob Haldinger of the United Church of Christians for the Holy Light of Christ the Saviour, “is the groundwork for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. He will soon return to banish the spectres of Islam, Europeanism and all the other faces of the Devil’s blight, delivering the True Believers into a new Eden. God has taken the tool of the Devil, so-called scientific inquiry, and transformed it into a holy hammer of truth.”

Throughout this vibrant flurry of rhetoric there has been little mention of the book that topped the chart: Sacred Hoops by Phil Jackson, celebrated coach of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, is apparently 96% true, meaning that it contains more truth per page than any holy book or philosophical treatise. So far, Jackson has declined to comment about this honour, but a close associate has indicated that the basketball legend feels “totally pumped about the news – he’s put a plaque in his trophy cabinet, just under his eleven NBA championship rings.”

CROSS-SECTION OF DOCUMENTS AND THEIR SCORES IN THE TEST

Sacred Hoops by Phil Jackson 96%
The Bible (Today’s New International Version) 91%
The Tanakh 74%
The Qur’an 68%
The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine 36%
The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss 29%
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin 18%
DCR-DVD-106E Manual (Sony camcorder documentation) 2%