University Challenge
Strivers and Skivers: 5
SKIVERS
CONFECTIONARY CUISINE: When a kid carefully chooses three flavours of Fruit Pastille, squashes them together and pops this new Pastille Pie into their mouth, it is their first taste of cuisine. Other favourites in the canon include hula hoops worn like a ring then chewed off, adding vinegar to a pack of Ready Salted Crisps (tried once, quite disgusting) and Idler favourite, The Rolo Kebab:
1. Insert skewer through the centre of an entire pack
2. Remove wrapper
3. Serve.
(more…)
Strivers and Skivers: 4
SKIVERS
HACKNEY CITY FARM: Claims to be a working inner city farm, but is just six children standing round a pig. Their rooster has been observed pecking at a packet of Lambert and Butler, and at night you can hear the sheep bleating “fahhhk offf, fahhk offf”. For being marvellously incongrous, we salute it.
(more…)
Strivers and Skivers: 3
SKIVERS
ZX SPECTRUM EMULATORS: Turn off your 1000Mhz PC into a 48k joyfest with these nifty pieces of software that allow you to play all those old classic games like Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, and the punishing Daley Thompsion’s Decathlon. Access priceless childhood memories rendered in blocky graphics with authentic colour clash. There is even a tribute website to your Spectrum magazine, allowing you to catch up on what its bygone contributors are up to now. Sometimes you can take retro a little too far.
(more…)
Strivers and Skivers: 2
SKIVERS
GOD: As Paul Lafargue noted, Jehovah gave the world the ultimate example of slack: he worked for six days and then rested for all eternity.
(more…)
URI GELLER SOLVES HISTORY’S GREATEST MYSTERIES: 5
What happened to the White Fiat in the Diana car crash?
(more…)
Stewart Enquiry: 3
Part 3: And he’s off…
The third instalment of Jock Scot’s tale of Stewart Enquiry, the most outrageous racing fan in the country, kicks off with Enquiry setting fire to the Union Jack at the Cheltenham Festival
(more…)
Stewart Enquiry: 2
Part 2: RACING DEMON
Jock Scot continues the shocking tale of racing’s most debauched acolyte, Stewart Enquiry
(more…)
FAT AND POOR
MAX CARLISH on life as a slightly effeminate version of Giant Haystacks at the crusty fag end of the twentieth century.
Taken from Idler 25, Winter 1999
(more…)
KICK BACK
Robert Newman went to Seattle for the protests against the World Trade Organisation
(more…)
Strivers and Skivers: 1
STRIVERS
KEEPING IT REAL: What an idiotic thing to say. What is one actually doing when one is ‘keeping it real’? It’s our feeling that the ‘real’ is a slippery and increasingly unpleasant place to be, if indeed it exists at all. Really, keeping it unreal is the only realistic thing to do.
(more…)
Grey Panthers
As the young embrace materialism, it is left to the old to voice dissent, says Will Hodgkinson
(more…)
Mr Lazy
Greg Rowland writes in praise of the great Idler, sleeper and revolutionary inactivist
It is long overdue, but let us now celebrate the most famous narcoleptic in all of children’s literature - the astonishingly slack Mr Lazy.
(more…)
"I do nothing and then I do something. But it's taken years of investigating idleness in all its forms to be able to achieve this. My discipline is borne out of concerted study of idleness."