We are all in this together – but some more so than others.
Here at How Inappropriate we like nothing more than a legendary bit of oration. Few modern speakers come close to the man we present to you today. As a Parliamentarian he is up there with Winston Churchill and Aneurin Bevan; ladies and gentlemen we give you the Shadow Chancellor - George Osborne at the Autumn 2009 Conservative Party Conference.
You talkin' to me?
"Friends, I come to you in a time of crisis. The referee's common-in-law wife has blown the final whistle on the game that has been New Labour economic policy, the last upper-lip pansy has been spatchcocked and we are well into extra-fisting time. I tell you now, I will put a stop to pensions for civil servants. In an economy where bankers go for a whole year without a £1m bonus, hedge fund managers have to sell their third Tuscan holiday home and Tory peers are forced to tell us whether they actually pay tax or not, it is madness to expect those earning less than £18,000 a year not to suffer horribly. Make no mistake, we are all in this together, and the public sector cannot be expected to be immune to the hardships faced by my Lithuanian housemaid Natasha who I was forced to sack without severance pay or notice just the other day.
As I asked my wife to do my laundry my only thought was of those council employees comfortable and secure in the knowledge that streets will always need sweeping - well not under a Conservative government! There is nothing more important than cutting the grotesque deficit that this Labour government leaves us with. It lies there quivering like flabby buttocks of loneliness and cannot be ignored any longer! If swingeing cuts to public sector services are what it takes to drag this country out of the chasm of debt Gordon Brown has left us with then rest assured, I will make those cuts.
Natasha - out on her ear.
And if those cuts turn out to be massively unpopular come election time, if the thought of frontline public services being slashed makes the voter think twice about voting Conservative, if it starts to look like those cuts will be as popular as the poll tax, then I tell you this: we won't do it! So for those waiting with baited breath for that favourite media catchphrase, "the u-turn", I have only one thing to say - you turn if you want to, and if the focus groups suggest you're headed in the right direction I'm right behind you like Speedy Gonzales on a bullet train.
My friends, we face difficult times. There are those who would tell you that a Conservative government will balance the budget on the backs of the poorest. Well I tell you this: it worked in the 80s, so why the hell not?"
Martin Luther King Had A Dream
Now here at How Inappropriate we are obviously not so crass as to make fun of Reverend Doctor Saint Lord Martin Luther King, that wouldn't be funny at all, but I'm sure we've all spent at least a little time pondering what his speeches would have been like if he'd just outlined his ACTUAL dreams. It might sound something like this...
I had a dream
How Inappropriate at the South freaking Pole!!
Staying with the theme of great men making great speeches this week, we bring you a true tale of fearless discovery. On December 14, 1911, Roald Amundsen and his party became the first men to reach 90 degrees south, the furthermost southern point of the planet, in one of the coldest climates on earth. The South Pole. It was an awe inspiring moment of human exploration across the face of this brutal planet.
Sadly this moment wasn't captured quite as Amundsen intended...
Screw this place, we're going ski-ing!
Muhammad Ali – The World’s Greatest (probably)
Ali prepares to flee the ring as he suffers another brutal battering at the hands of the lean, mean grilling machine.
Here at HI, we like to ensure that you are, in the parlance of our times, down with all the new shit. It was us of course that exclusively revealed an actual recording of the real moon landing, and this week we are as delighted as a paedophile in a playground to expose a draft transcript of Muhammad Ali's 1967 pre-fight speech before he took on George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire.
Everyone knows that Ali's real name was Cassius Clay before he discovered Allah and changed it to Moo-hammad, but not a lot of people know that he was a great big pussy, and that the speech had to be "sexed up" a record 16 times before it was delivered for the cameras in the form we all know today. We're publishing the original version here, for your delictation, with the rather-less-than-pugilistic tone Ali originally intended.
Last night, I had a dream, when I got to Africa, I had one helluva rumble, I met Tarzan and he was this great big fella, and I tells ya, just seeing him on thie vines I became quite yella. For this fight, I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale, and the alligator bit me real hard actually, and what they don't tell you about whales is that they is pretty massive fish. Man, are whales fish?
I'm so bad, only last week I kicked a rock, and it really hurt my little toe, I was hobbling around for quite a while I can tell ya. I'm so mad I even hospitalized a brick. I mean, that is crazy, why do bricks need hospitals? I'm so sick, I had to take a whole lotta medicine before this fight, and downed a whole bottle of Nitol just to make it through the night. I'm so scared, I ran right through that jungle, and when I meet George Foreman, I bet I'll feel the butterflies in my tummy rumble.
I'd like people to think I am the greatest, 'cuz I’m Muhammad Ali. Fact is, I've got a pretty face, and I'm a little bit unfcomfortable in large groups, I think everyone in the room's staring at me. I'm quite a humble man, I fight like a fairy, and so in awe of my opponents it's scary. Archie Moore was a helluva fella, but I wanted Liston more, so since he's so great, I took him out on a date, yeah I'm a sweet man, to be sure. I'm 22 years old and still finding myself to be fair.
I'd kill for a large glass of water now, my throat's really quite dry, I'm really not sure I want to meet George in the ring, reckon this bird's gotta fly. 'Cuz I float like a great big jessie, evade punches like a lilly-livered gazelle, his hands can't hit Ol' Muhammad Ali, when I'm running away from him really, really fast.
How Inappropriate – on the fricking moon!!
Our modern world is littered with momentous events. They are the punctuation of our media-focused lives, the signposts on our multi-media pathway, the chocolate flakes in the Mr Wippy of our news-centric existences. We can all remember where we were when we heard the news of JFK's assassination. I for one, distinctly remember being a large, pregnant woman urinating for the 15th time that morning when my 3rd daughter banged on the bathroom door to give me the bad news (this was a previous life obviously, I wasn't born in my present corporeal form until 1977). And I don't think any of us will forget what we were doing the moment we heard of the death of Jade Goody's cat.
Occasionally events, dear boy, are marked with words that serve to magnify the occasion. Who could forget Neil Armstrong marking the significance of humanity's first steps on the moon. Of course anyone in the know laughs at the naivete of those who believe he actually was stepping onto the moon. Of course it was all done in Hollywood on a set, in fact, much of it was photoshopped, you can tell by the pixels. No, the real moon landing was actually first achieved by a British man, who sounds uncannily like Jovian. Here's what happened.