Finding gold in Japanese sewers, finding phones up prisoners’ arses and FINALLY finding a proper use for The Da Vinci Code

(Master of the bon mot)

First, let’s pay homage to Stephen Fry for his most succinct, yet profound critique of Dan Brown’s book, ‘The Da Vinci Code’. Fry described this magnus opus as “Arse gravy of the worst kind.”

Speaking of the Da Vinci Code - and crap: The following story shows that even the biggest pile of shit can make you a fortune, if you can lower yourself far enough and don’t mind to get your hands dirty:

“A sewage treatment facility in Nagano prefecture, north-west of Tokyo, has reported a yield of gold extracted from sludge to rival production levels at some of the best mines in the world. Tens of thousands of pounds worth of gold has been found at the Suwa treatment facility in the past year, with more than 1,890 grammes of gold per tonne of ash recorded from incinerated sludge.”

Obviously, digging for gold in sewers is a much nobler way of making money than writing The Da Vinci Code - if only because it’s done quite discreetly, out of most people’s view. Something you can’t say about that dreadful book and its movie offshoot, the latter of which gave a whole new dimension to the phrase, “I may be lying in the gutter but I’m looking at some fucking useless Hollywood stars.”

Anyway, enough of Japanese sewage treatment facilities and Dan Brown; back to the arse gravy. Okay, perhaps not gravy but it does involve arses - and stools:

“Prisons are set to introduce bottom scanners in an attempt to stop prisoners smuggling mobile phones into jail. The mobile Boss chairs have three sensitive sensors which can detect metal items as small as a pin.The £6,500 chairs are being put in 102 jails across Britain aimed to tackle a surge in phone smuggling. Prisoners will have to sit on the chairs, called Body Orifice Security Scanners (Boss), which bleep if they have a phone hidden inside them.”

Lovely.

I like the image of some hairy lard mount of a biker, sitting sheepishly on a Boss chair, with one of those slim line Nokias up his arse, waiting for that bleep of doom.

I mean, what can you say if the chair bleeps: “Sorry, that was NOT the chair; that was my phone”?

Anyway, it’s probably not just the prisoners who hope that these chairs will prove to be useless. Think of the prison officer who would have to remove said slim line Nokia from that fat biker’s arse…

Digging for gold in Japanese sewers would seem to be a sinecure compared to that.

Mind you, it is just another proof that mobile phones are the evil seeds, shot from Satan’s loins. You never had these problems with prisoners trying to smuggle in phones, when they were still made of old-fashioned bakelite.

They would have had as much chance of anally inserting one of those old monsters as they would have had stuffing the Da Vinci Code book up their arse, though that latter exercise would make a much more interesting movie - and I dare say it would still be more fun to do than actually read the damn thing.

(Mobile phones: Worse than a serial killing monk after your arse…)