Fact: you have been told lies all your life.

From ‘why, your home cooking is delicious’ to ‘no, seriously, season four of The Upper Hand on DVD is exactly what I wanted for my birthday’, fibs and fabrications have a habit of springing up like poppies on an abandoned battlefield.

Want to know the worst lie ever, though? The time a kindly teacher told you to work hard at school, with the encouraging lines ‘if you study well and get good grades, you’ll be able to do whatever you like in the future! Like get a job you really enjoy!’

Well – guess what? That’s a big bag of monkey bollocks. Chances are that your forays into the world of employment will be depressing, unfulfilling and humiliating ordeals interspersed only with the nightly wolfing-down of TV dinners and the tearful doomed-to-repeat-forever collapse onto your lonely, lonely pillow.

Oh – unless you’re these guys, of course. They, like, totally bucked the system.

What true American heroes.

Kind of outside the hecklerspray remit, this, but a sizeable chunk of you seem like a literary bunch and might not have heard yet: writer David Foster Wallace has been found dead at his home in California.

Wallace was reportedly found by his wife on Friday evening. He had committed suicide.

He was best known for his sprawling 1996 epic Infinite Jest – an epic satirical panorama which simultaneously enthralls, infuriates and excites. It’s without doubt one of the most remarkable books published in … well, forever … and if you haven’t tackled it yet you should run out and buy yourself a copy.

Failing that, have a gander online for some of his journalistic efforts and check out his short stories. In an age in which Jordan’s ‘novels’ can outsell the combined Booker shortlist six-to-one, a gleaming beacon of intelligence such as DFW will be sorely missed.
Appreciation: David Foster Wallace 1962-2008 – TIME

R&B is sexier than any other musical genre.

Think about it – you ain’t gonna have much luck pulling the laydeez with your swept-haircut indie or your monocle-wearing classical or your no-one-really-likes-it-anyway jazz fusion. The most immediate way to make yourself attractive is to give yourself a smooth backing track full of ‘woah-oh’s and ‘mmmmm-baby-yeah’s.

This is something advertisers have been quick to latch onto. You can make virtually any product sleek and super-fine by associating it with a laid-back groove and harmonious vocalstylings. Right? Right? Eh? Are we right or are we right? We’re right. We always are.

Oh – apart from the commercial for Mr. Sprigg’s Barbeque.

This is … well … more just weird.

We’ll all been there.

You meet a girl, you get talking, have a few drinks … and everything seems to be going smoothly, until you head back to your place and reveal that you’re an Interdimensional Elf with magic future-seeing skin. Then she gets all scream-out-loudy and police-cally and the evening is ruined. Ruined.

Thank the pissing todger of Christ, then, for Otherkin Dating. Why? Because they’ve bravely stepped forward and broken new ground – providing a dating service for the ‘less normal’ inhabitants of society. By which they mean the Elves, Werewolves or general ‘Visitors From The Outside.’ Who all obviously exist. Obviously.

Any lonesome ladies out there might want to check out the profile of ShadowShifter, a 27-year-old wolfman from Washington who unfortunately ‘hasn’t had much luck’ with his shapeshifting as of yet. The primary characteristic he’s looking for in a girl? Pretty obvious, really – she must ‘believe in shapeshifting’.

Takes all sorts, eh? As the creators of Otherkin Dating put it:

“Where else would you find the “Changing Color” option in relation to the color of the eyes?”

Generally written in shit on an asylum wall, to be honest. But failing that, have a click here:

Otherkin Dating

Michael Phelps, eh?

He’s good at swimming, isn’t he? And – boy – does he ever have a lot of gold medals.

Sorry. We’re trying our hardest to think of something amusing to say about the record-breaking Olympic champion, but to be honest we just came up with a big list of puns like Phelp, I’m A Fish. And then slapped ourselves.

Instead of straining our imagination glands, then, we’re just going to show you a remarkable video. Many of you will have gawked in amazement at what Phelps eats for breakfast every day in order to keep his strength up … something in the region of sixty million billion calories (or a ‘Chris Moyles’, as it’s known in the business). No-one has ever tried eating the same amount in five minutes, though.

Apart from this man.

Literally everything is becoming a musical these days.

From the greatest hits of Take That assembled into one menopause-magnet stage show, to that Queen-based thing that’s been going on for about sixteen universe life-cycles now, it’s never been a better time to put a fresh slant on an old formula.

Still – no-one’s going to go near the Opera, are they? Surely no-one would be mad enough to combine that particular artform with, for example, a revamped version of a cult horror film about a giant talking insect?

Oh.

Reality TV is brilliant.

Seriously. Why, hecklerspray simply can’t wait for the Autumn season and the superb roster of new shows it’ll bring – from Celebrity Piss Drinking to Maggot Farm Teen Romance to Look At Me, Look At Me, I Lack Any Real Basic Talent Or Charm But Look At Me Anyway.

Of course, there are many that claim the genre to have a tired and rather predictable formula. We say: bah! Just take a look at this clip and treat yourself to the wide variety of cliche-free, independent-minded characters the wonderful world of the tellybox has to offer.

If we could only harness the power of stupidity, then the upcoming global energy crisis would be no cause for concern whatsoever.

In fact, given the level of lunacy collected on spEak You’re bRanes – a site named after the classic segment on The Day Today – the planet would have so much excess power whirring around that we’d be forced to jettison some of it into space, thereby knocking the moon out of orbit and upsetting UFO pilots.

All the comments on spEak You’re bRanes are taken directly from the ‘Have Your Say’ section of the BBC News website. It’s essentially a ‘best of the worst’ of amazingly misguided public opinion. Be warned, however – trawl these archives and you’ll find that the eternal laugh/cry dichotomy has never been so stark nor so fierce…

spEak You’re bRanes