Many of you will be aware of recent research performed by top scientists that allows them to detect fat people (bottom scientists, of course, have a much easier time of it). It involves 3D scanners, hospitals and men in white coats standing around saying, “indeed.” You, like me, will be gladdened by this remarkable breakthrough, but will want to know how you yourself can take advantage of this development. Fortunately, I am here to help. I have developed a low-cost version of the fattie detector, or “FATScan”, and I share it with you now, unpatented for the greater good:

“How does this work?” I hear you cry. Simple: print the above picture at A4 size, and cut where indicated by the dotted lines. Discard the central section (environmentalists may want to recycle it, or use it for the concealment of endangered ferrets). Once you have constructed your FATScan, its use is simple. Here it is in action, demonstrating that my colleague is not fat:

As shown, the idea is to locate your suspected fat person, and convince them to remain stationary (the ease or otherwise of this task provides an early indicator of fatness). Hold up your FATScan at arm’s length, and observe the subject through the hole. A normal person, viewed through a FATScan, will have a roughly even gap all around him, as shown. A fat person will come dangerously close to the latitudinal margins of the viewport, causing clipping. Secondary symptoms may also be apparent; the fat person may be clutching a chocolate eclair, being unwarrantedly jolly, or even visibly sweating. A word of warning: make sure your subject is fully upright. Early FATScan practitioners were forced to recall a number of patients after it was suggested that they were not in fact fat, but merely lying down.


The glory of the FATScan is not only its affordability and portability, but its eminent adaptability. The accompanying prototypes, for example (shown left, right), are believed to reliably detect scientists and clowns respectively (the latter doubles as a handy screening device for genital deformity).
The government is being petitioned to provide the scientist detector to all fat people, so that they can determine whether the person scanning them is in fact a scientist, or merely a nutter with some paper.

I think they have OCD. It’s the only explanation. Why else would they reject bags of perfectly good rubbish based solely on the colour of the bag? As I type this, there rests outside our front door one forlorn sack of onion cuttings, Pots (ex-Noodle) and furry formerly-decorative fruit (only slightly used). Its crime? Being blue. Our binmen apparently didn’t know how to deal with this outrageous violation of the sacred norms of binmanning (or “The Job”, as they call it). So they left it.
Yep, it’s that time at last. There comes a point in every young man’s life when he decides to fly the coop; usually about the same time that the young man realises he’s living in a coop, not a house. This is why coops are constructed at ground level, as the young man will shortly make a second horrible discovery, and no-one wants him to fall too far.
You’ve probably already heard of our escalating prisons crisis here in the omnibenevolent UK. What you won’t have heard is the reason, which I discovered today: prison is vastly preferable to a large amount of housing in our major cities. Far from being incorrigible scallies, most of the inhabitants of our penal system are in fact middle managers unable to get urban accomodation without perpetrating some minor felony.