SUCH a fuss over Archer's perjury. What a headline: "Politician Tells Lies"! I've been doing some research and I've come across a few more examples of incredible stories.

WATER IS WET. Professor IP Green, author of Rubbing Noses Causes Global Warming and his colleague Dr E Moron-Bumsticker - winner of the Nogood Prize for his discovery in 1999 that hard things are harder than soft things - said today: "For many years, we scientists believed that water is wet. The problem was of setting up an experiment to prove it. The breakthrough came this morning when my wife, after taking a bath, came downstairs without her dressing gown and dripped water all over the carpet in the front room. I quickly realised that all the empirical criteria had now in fact been fulfilled for science to announce quite definitely that, under standard conditions, water is of the character of wetness."

ENGLAND CRICKETER SCORES ONE. Lord's was stunned into silence today and 25,000 spectators held their breath in disbelief when OI Mistit, England's opening batsman, scored a run. His previous 35 innings had all been ducks for a world record test match average of nothing. The Chairman of Selectors was jubilant: "This just shows the team has improved after it was decided that the pyjama trousers they play in should be held up by stronger elastic."

UP IS THE OPPOSITE OF DOWN. Professors I Boggle and AN Argy-Bargy of Skiningrove university's Department of Philosophy, Tautology and Pleonasm have jointly published a paper which proves beyond doubt that up is certainly the opposite of down. Professor Argy-Bargy, in a specially commissioned article for the sports page of The Northern Echo, writes: "The moment that clinched it for us was when we realised that the transcendental analytic (in all that rain last Tuesday) logically necessitated the application of the synthetic a priori to all statements of the type involving egocentric particulars. So once we had proved that down is the opposite of up, we were able to conclude - following Bertrand Russell's argument about an axiom of reducibility and a theory of types - that up is the opposite of down."

THE POPE IS A CATHOLIC. It has just been disclosed that MI6 and the CIA have at last completed a long-term covert surveillance of the Vatican. Morton J Obvious III and Inspector Sniffer of the Yard said: "Yes, it's true. We put microscopic cameras in the wall of the Sistine Chapel. Then all we had to do was wait for the old boy - sorry, I mean His Holiness - to give himself away. Sure enough, at six o'clock yesterday morning we got clear pictures of this elderly man in a white cassock and skullcap coming into the Chapel and actually kneeling down to say his prayers. Of course, this didn't immediately prove anything: he might have been a Buddhist or a Seventh Day Adventist. The proof came when he started saying Mass. We sent in the uniformed branch and arrested him at once. The Pope blessed us, smiled and said, 'Amen, it's a fair cop'."

GIRLS ARE NOT BOYS. The Department of Transsexual Epidemiology and Acute Shortsightedness in the South Barnsley Hospital Trust has for years been trying to settle this vexed issue. Dr Igo Pussyfooting said: "It's been a political struggle as well as a medical one. We have made literally thousands of observations. We noticed that half the population goes around in skirts and blouses and the other half in trousers and shirts. Of course, as trained medical personnel, we did not regard this as convincing evidence for the fact that girls are not boys. The breakthrough came when we discovered that one sex is made of sugar and spice and all that's nice, and the other made of slugs and snails and puppy dogs' tails."

Published: Tuesday, July 24, 2001