remember: internet paedophiles make your children smell of hammers

There I was, just about to add a footnote to the previous post praising the Mail for slipping in a reference to the stoning scene from Life Of Brian ("A halibut big enough for Jehovah?") into one of the photo captions in the halibut article, when I stumble across (via Bad Science) this 24-carat classic Mail story about the RAF destroying a stash of drugs in Afghanistan.

There's so much to enjoy here, from the photo captions ("Smoke pours from a bombed trench full of drugs" - you need to imagine that being bellowed out by the Chris Morris newsreader guy from The Day Today and Brass Eye) to the bog-standard journalese units of measurement (the drugs weighed "more than 30 double-decker buses" and the trenches in which they were found occupied an area "the size of two football pitches") but most of all this frankly bizarre claim:

Officials believe the area - near to the Taliban stronghold of Quetta in Pakistan - was turning dried cannabis leaves into heroin.

Erm....what? That's a good trick if you can pull it off. Nice to see the armed forces bombed the area and then set fire to the trenches, just to be sure. And then went and stood downwind of the area and breathed in deeply. Don't expect any major military offensives from that particular division for a while; they'll be spending the next six months sitting around cross-legged listening to The Doors and staring at their hands.

Finally, in a pleasingly circular burst of cleansing synchronicity I note that The Day Today was the original source of the phrase Speak Your Brains for its take-the-piss-out-of-Joe-Public segment.