The following pair of chestnuts (chest nuts. what a strange idea.), which I'd earlier neglected to put up here, are from my Expresso days. In no way are they intended to showcase my sound editorial judgement or sanity.
From the Unhinged archives:
Steven, with porpoise
Hollywood Unhinged, 8th October 2008
SOURCES close to actor Steven Seagal tell us that the fading action hero's home has been under siege, for a whole week now, by an angry horde of endangered Yangtze river dolphins. The dolphins were inspired to attack the Seagal home after watching, over a stray NDTV feed, the family of emperor penguins that had last month built a bridgeless moat around Barabanki farmer Amitabh Bachchan's Daulatpur property in protest of his "bloody self-important voiceovers".
The Baiji have increasingly become embittered by the Chinese government's refusal to abandon the Three Gorges project. The project's colossal dam has been choking up the Yangtze river, destroying habitats and making jiaozi taste like industrial effluent. In an unexpected combined application of chaos theory and Stanley Milgram's small world hypothesis, the baiji have logically come to the conclusion that Seagal's lush silk robes are a direct cause of the damming of at least one of the three Gorges. "In all fairness, Seagal's endorsement of His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso has been factored into the 'Seagal + Silk = 1/3 Gorge' equation as a big green tick in favour of the actor, but his long hair and inability to perform convincing high kicks tilted the scales once more towards an overall negative verdict," says Mr. Keyko, the official baiji spokesdolphin.
The disgruntled cetaceans, currently in the process of stationing a pair of mid-range trebuchets at the two main entrances to Seagal's home, have lately come under some criticism from veteran roundhouse-specialist Chuck Norris: "Their thinking and their strategy are flawed, if y'all ask me [even though no one did, in fact, ask him]. It's no wonder they're functionally extinct, I tell ya. If I were them -- and let's face it, they'll never be a burnin' urn of churnin' funk like me, even if they grew a beard and took advanced lessons in b**l-busting -- I'd forget the medieval battle plan and use my crunchin' and punchin' fists instead." Norris, however, also admits to a lack of familiarity with basic marine mammal anatomy. "Flippers? You mean floaters? You better get this straight, buddyboy. The Chuckathon only. ONLY. Wears steel-toed boots."
The sensex, meanwhile, has been steadily plummetting in response to the baiji aggression. Mr. Chidambaram is reportedly in the process of bribing Seagal -- with a fully-paid vacation to Bylakuppe -- to shave his head and switch to khadi.
Mixed Signals
Kollywood Unhinged, 6th October 2008
A large flightless bird we know in Chennai has been chirping to us about certain dark goings-on in the life of a veteran Tamil actor whose optimistic marketing tagline is 'Man of Many Skins' [Editor's note: our in-house naturalist would like to clarify that the average garden chameleon's ability to mimic its background is a myth propagated by travel journalists prone to Crazy Eye.] "K.," says the ostrich, "has a sudden phobia of salt-and-pepper hair. The other day, at a coming out party hosted by SRK at the Elliots Beach skating rink, a very unbalanced K. slipped and cracked his temple against Ms. Saran's left knee. When he came to, his pupils had turned a nasty shade of yellow and his whole body was shaking. Before any of us could react, he'd pounced on poor Rajdeep with a bottle of henna and a bloodcurdling warcry." 'Poor Rajdeep' was last seen on television, crowned by a tuft of flaming red hair, looking, the ostrich chortles, "rather like an affronted woodpecker."
Since his skating slip, K. has been caught loitering outside at least three different old age homes in north Chennai by alert night-duty constables. And then, last Thursday, an early mobile-tweeting jogger here on Sankey Road spotted him spraying graffiti all over the poster of a recent Amitabh Bachchan film. The Bangalore police have expressed apprehension at this hurried 140-character report: "It's absurd! We know for a fact that K. sir was in Dollars Colony at the time this man Scobleizer speaks of, at the album-release function of his next big cheesefest. And what kind of genius would think of posting news of a crime-in-progress to Twitter instead of calling us first?" But the police, it seems, have neglected to take it into account that the actor now has ten different avatars -- each with a distinct character flaw, a pale facemask constructed from badly-mixed atta and a talent for hamming it -- and any or all of them could well have been the cocklight vandal.
In related news, an inland courier company executive claims to have personally delivered 42 family packs of Godrej hair-dye and a 3-litre bottle of soy sauce to the home of Naseeruddin Shah. When asked to comment, Shah stuck his tongue through a V-sign and sang the first two verses of 'Morning has broken'.
Expresso, The New Indian Express, Bangalore. Read more from Unhinged (a parody feature that seems to have since been discontinued in the aforementioned newspaper) over here.
2 comments:
hello! funny, these pop-celebitchy bits... abt the 'verbiage' post, i found it and snuffed it out... it was some random halfformed thought i'd saved as a draft.. i had no idea it was floating out into the world and drawing people to an online cul-de-sac. 1000 apologies.
Glad you enjoyed them. I wish someone still paid me to write such drivel :O
As for your ghost post, cast your eyes eastward at my blogroll. Yes, there it is, haunting us even as we speak. Who you gonna call?
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