Once upon a time curiosity may well have killed the cat, but that time has long passed and curiosity won’t get you any closer to the promised land when you are a feline in the cybertronic age. Indeed the 4-footed present from long dead alien cultures are now pitting their paws against the spreading fat cats of China. And it would appear they are winning. Admittedly they are having to put themselves in Chinese cat stew to accomplish their mission, but that is just a footnote.

The fat cat in question is Chinese billionaire Long Liyuan who died on the 23rd December in Guandong Province after he himself ate a cat. As with anything in China, the news does not leave the country with feline speed but more details are slowly coming to light. Mr Liyuan made his mega fortune in forests. Now, judging by the cost of Christmas trees, it is quite easy to see how such a fortune could be amassed, but since the Chinese don’t celebrate Christmas or, indeed the trees that frequent this most unholy of holy celebrations, how do you make a billion from a tree? Ship them around the world stuffed with cocaine in an elaborate bark-coated smuggling organisation? Who knows? And one supposes we never will as Mr Liyuan is now lying in a box made of trees. How ironic.

What really happened to Long Liyuan is being investigated by Chinese police in Quandong Province and although there was a cat involved, the story is much more fishy. It would appear that Long Liyuan was having dinner with Huang Guang when he, one imagines, went a bit red in the cheeks, fell dizzy and took himself off to hospital where he promptly died of heart failure. He had fallen prey to the poison that Huang Guang had allegedly slipped into the local cat delicacy they were eating.

Huang Guang, an agricultural official, was advising Mr Liyuan on a lease that he was seeking to take out on a piece of forest in the province, when things turned sinister in a way that would have had Miss Marpel and Poirot fighting over the deduction process.

“Huang, who was helping Long take a lease on a forest, had himself used funds provided by Long. This led to an economic dispute and gave Huang the idea to kill Long with poison.”

Chinese fat cat is killed by cat

The plot, like the stew at the heart of it, thickens with some sleuth like detective work. It turns out that Long Liyuan was no saint himself, using Huang Guang to get planning permission in exchange for bribes amounting to anywhere between 0 and 400,000 US dollars. Meanwhile Huang was running up debts elsewhere and hit Long up for some more funds. When a project they were working on together began to stall the two parties showed their true colours with Long threatening to expose Huang. At some point in the whole murky timeline, Huang decided to Kill Long.

According to reports the two men, along with a third interested party, were eating at a local restaurant when Huang Guang excused himself from the table, slipped into the kitchen and sent the chef on a decoy errand and slipped the local suicide plant Gelsemium Elegans into the bubbling pot. A pot he himself was set to eat from. On returning to the table he commented that the food tasted a bit unusual (cat?) and pushed his plate aside. Mr Liyuan wolfed his down with deathly consequences. The cat got his tongue.

The futures bright. Hopefully not mushroom cloud orange.

In February 2005 Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez accused America of entertaining ideas of political assasination whilst he himself was entertaining the Venezuelan people with his weekly radio and TV show. Now, 7 years on, he has upped the ante and brought nuclear war into the equation by blaming the United States for possible nuclear war in the Middle East.

Once again using his weekly TV and radio broadcasts he has pointed his big chubby finger at the United States, accusing them of inciting War, and this time there could be reason to his madness. Tensions between Tehran and the West have been increasing by the hour as more evidence of Iran’s determination to produce its own nuclear arsenal unsettles the (extremely temperamental) status quo. Only last week the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released a report on the Iranian nuclear program highlighting its fears and concerns about the military connotations of its program.

“The Agency has serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme….. (The IAEA encourages Iran) to engage substantively with the agency without delay for the purpose of providing clarifications regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.” Worrying.  The report in its entirety is available here.

So there is concern in the West that The Republic of Iran is gearing up for weapons capabilities. What that capability represents in terms of stability in the Middle East is a hornets nest, and a nest that Hugo Chavez believes the Americans are going to possibly eradicate with a big red button. To make matters worse the rhetoric coming out of Tehran is not exactly passive. Ahmadinejad is not known for bowing to pressure. During last years rounds of political pressure and sanctions he had this to say.

“They know that there is a sleeping lion in Iran which is waking up and if she wakes up all the relationships in the world will change. Their (The West) pathetic acts show they know what a great human power is hidden in Iran.”

With Iran being provocative in its flaunting of increased nuclear capabilities and The United States adamant on preventing nuclear proliferation proliferating further, then perhaps Chavez, although delusional with his cries of nuclear war, is not so far off the mark with his war prediction. Britain has already stepped up its military plans for Iranian (specific, nuclear targets) attack by examining where best to deploy Royal Navy ships and tomahawk laden submarines. And then there is America and Israel.

Whether Israel has the capabilities to destroy the nuclear facilities of Iran sufficiently enough to put back the nuclear program, or indeed stop it all together or not, talk of attack is already advanced. As recently as early November the Israeli cabinet was discussing attacks on Iranian facilities in the immediate future; a strategy that has been met with both support (by Iranian Prime minister and Defence secretary Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak respectively) and opposition. Any attack from Israel would be, as Iran has often stated, see retaliation against America.

And what of America? With an election looming and a population, for all their patriotism, which must be growing tired of war after war – four and counting – Americas current administration must fear another invasion, and that’s without even bringing the cost of war during a possible double dip recession into question. The population would be against it, parts of Capital Hill would be against it, the battle weary would be against it and with every escalation of war, the stakes are rising. Should Iran be invaded then the outcome is earth shattering. China and Russia have been supplying weapons for years and China is Irans biggest buyer of Oil, indeed most of China’s imported oil comes from Iran. So whose side are they on? For any security council sanctions to come to fruition then full council support is needed. With China and Russia holding vetos, there is… oh, about Fat Chance of anything coming to pass there.

Should Iran get the bomb then The West could see a cataclysmic shift in oil distribution from the Middle East, especially, as many commentators point out, the real victims of Iran obtaining fully functional nuclear weapons would not be Israel but Iran’s other close neighbours: UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The picture is bleak. But not as bleak as the one below.

Alledged American military prescence. Iran is surrounded.

Europe maybe collapsing around the very foundations of the monetary mechanism that was imagined and constructed to unite, unify and catapult the EuroZone to the very head of the financial world table, but we don’t have time for that at the moment. First we have to trawl our way through the weeks blame game.

We have coffee, Guns n’ Roses, The X-factor, basketball, serial killers and the President of The United States of America. What do they all have in common? Well, they have all been seduced and bedded by the Italian media, political, womaniser, seducer, bringer of chaos, football club owner, sex addicted megalomaniac and now, thank the Italian food Gods, EX-prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and they all have been pointing and taking the blame this week.

Blame is engulfing Obama, now its lazy people and foreign investment

In order of importance, lets start with coffee. OK, the US president, he is probably more important than coffee. Reading between the lines and creating something amusing out of what, in reality, was a meandering piece of sleep inducing sedativity we are left with the cold-hard reality that the one-term President has blamed lazy, good-for-nothing Americans for the financial maelstrom which is sweeping the modernised world into the proverbial shit-tank. Kind of.

“We’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades”

Really Mr President? Who has been a bit lazy? The people? Way to win a vote contest sir. As the rest of America sat around watching TV, drinking beers, smoking joints, sleeping, lying in bed all day and generally being lazy, the President was in Hawaii (alright for some) having a “scripted” conversation with Boeing CEO James McNerney. Is a scripted conversation what it sounds like? Two men reading a conversation to each other which has already been scripted. How wonderful it would be if that were true.

During the scripted conversation Mr Obama, aside from blaming laziness, was addressing the real problem, as he sees it, for the current lack of foreign investment in the United States. After actually physically arriving on American soil and passing the I’m a celebrity get me out of here bush tucker challenge styled,  jump, I say how high, give me your blood, your boots, your clothes and your motorcycle ivestment screening test, foreign investors then have to counter additional challenges to be given the US seal of approval to merely sell a few wicker arm chairs.

“Because of our federalist system, sometimes a foreign investor comes in and they’ve got to navigate not only federal rules, but they’ve also got to navigate state and local governments that may have their own sets of interests……Being able to create, if not a one-stop shop, then at least no more than a couple of stops for people to be able to come into the United States and make investments, that’s something that we want to encourage”

This isn’t the first time that Obama has blames economic problems on the obscure, only earlier this year he blamed ATM cash machines for the growing and uncontrollable unemployment rates currently afflicting the United States. This time he has at least but the blame on humans.

The evidence is wishy-washy as the current American governmental system is hardly a new one (by American standards). It’s a mixture of lazy people and difficult foreign investment administrative hoop jumping? Then why was the 1990s boom time? Between 1990 and 2001 foreign investment topped out at $300 billion, only to fall 66% in the following 2 years. A sudden case of weekday lie-ins?  Or just cyclical? US foreign investment climbed healthily again during the second term of Bush, only to plummet back down to $150 billion in the early days of the Obama administration. Ups and downs, swings and roundabouts.

Unfortunately for the President, when you call somebody lazy at the start of what you are saying, it doesn’t matter how economically or politically sound or weak your proceeding arguments may be, people stop listening after the word “lazy”. Did you?

Carlo Giovanardi blames cocaine for the instability in the Italian markets

As trading in shares of France-Belgium bank Dexia tumble 36% as news of a £3.4bn bailout by French, Belgian and Luxembourg governments emerge, one Italian man has some ideas about what is causing the continued market volatility that we are regularly witnessing. Cocaine ladies and gentlemen.

Carlo Giovanardi is Undersecretary to Italian playboy/media-mogul/adulterer/sometimes President and master of all he purveys, Silvio Berlusconi, and as such he has been witness and heir apparent to some pretty monstrous ineptitude in his time. Now, after witnessing so much from his leader, he has thrown his own hat into the ring by blaming cocaine use amongst traders for the volatility affecting the Italian (and one supposes, global) markets.

On September 28th Italy extended a ban on short selling of financial shares until the 11th November. Short selling is far too complicated a financial concept for Take The Blame to understand, yet alone explain, but basically it is a concept which falls, almost perfectly, into the deranged hands of the cocaine freak. Because the cocaine freak is just that; a freak. A liar and a cheat who will prostitute the markets for their own gain leaving nothing but instability, volatility and confusion; the mirror image of the night before.

Short selling is the buying and selling of stock that the seller doesn’t own. Its like selling drugs that you don’t own on the promise that they will be there should your client actually want to get mashed. The stock is lent by the broker to the seller from a collection of his clients stocks. The stock is then sold and the money credited to the account of the seller. Now the crux of short selling is that at some point, as the stocks are not actually owned by either the seller or broker, the stocks have to be replenished back into the original account from where they were borrowed by the broker originally. Now, market drops and the seller can buy back the original stocks at a decreased price, thus making a profit on the difference of price. You borrow and sell at $10  then buy back at $6  and make $4 on every initial $10 investment and never actually owned any of it. By that end it is investing on the market falling, an investment in failure. Awesome. Rack up some lines and watch the market destabilise itself.

It is this availability of gambling with other peoples stocks that probably leads Mr. Giovarndi to his theory that there is a worrisome link between substance abuse and market flux. In a telephone call to Italian media, the undersecretary went on to say that Italians are trusting their money to people who are “not capable of making decisions”.

The idea is sound enough. Cocaine makes you confident, reckless, brave and full of your own ability to be a complete tool. Trading on the market gives you the opportunity to unleash these negative personality traits on peoples unsuspecting bank accounts. The problem is that, as almost every single financial institute has demonstrated over the last 5 years, you don’t need cocaine to royally screw things up.

Nogent-Sur-Marne has made looking in bins for food a criminal offence

Nogent-Sur-Marne is a French town in the eastern suburbs of Paris and it has introduced a law banning people from looking in bins. In a bid to clear up the town centre, the Mayor of the French suburb, Jacques Jean-Paul Martin, has made it a public offence to delve, rummage, fish, forage or in any other way look in the rubbish bins of the town. The guilty culprits will be handed a 38 euro fine and repeat offenders could find themselves at the local Gendarmerie facing even sterner punishments.

Obviously some people are not happy at what they see as a piece of cowardice from the city Mayor as he tries to oust the increasing number of poor and homeless who frequent the Parisian streets. William Geib, chief of the opposition sees the new law as nothing more than an outright and blatant attack on the poor of Nogent.

“We see that there is a form of escalation from the mayor. The only thing that remains to do would be to ban the poverty stricken of Nogent.”

What beggars believe, to use a badly worded pun, is the reasoning behind the decision of the UMP (the ruling party of President Nicolas Sarkozy) Mayor Jacques Jean-Paul Martin. In a pathetic attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the common man he has blamed gangs of youths who operate in the streets of Nogent ransacking bins and looking for technology that they can then sell on at a later date: iPhone, mp3 players, laptops, coffee machines? The bins of Nogent-Sur-Marne, if the Mayor is to be believed, are a treasure trove of electronic goods; a Dixons, an electronics store, a Christmas stocking where everything is free and just waiting to be found in a bin near you. Speaking to someone the Mayor obviously thinks is a gullible sucker, he said that,

“For several months, some people search the containers and spill on the road in search of objects that could be marketed. These are not people looking for food.”

Really Mayor? The streets of Nogent are awash with gangs of bin looters and opportunistic bin searchers? Obviously this is bullshit. The streets of Nogent-Sur-Marne are no more full of people looking in bins for iPhones than anywhere else. It is a blatant attack on the homeless and poor wrapped in the pathetic, inept ramblings of an out of touch Town Hall. The 38 Euro fine which accompanies the new law is also as inept as the law itself. What people are looking in bins for food who have 38 Euros burning a hole in their pocket? These people have no pockets to have holes burnt in; their trousers are frayed and worn and falling apart at the seams. It is why they are looking in bins for food you arrogant brandisher of power.

This is not the first time that the Mayor and politicians of Nogent-Sur-Marne have tried to oust the poor. Every winter since 2007 the Mayor’ office has banned begging in the streets. Every Winter! Numbers are hard to come by and ever-increasing but it is thought that over 100,000 homeless people “live”in France with hundreds dying every winter on the hard, concrete streets of Paris. When begging is most vital, they ban it. Class act.

The US government has paid out over 600 million dollars to dead people. Sometimes it pays to be 6-feet under

What a curiosity. It turns out that the best way to earn tax payers money these days is to be dead. In a tale of ineptitude that can be seen from the outer reaches of space, the US government has given out over $600 million to people who have been classified as having left this planet. Dead. Bereft of Life, bloodless, erased, expired, pushing up daises. They’ve met their maker, kicked the bucket. They are taking a dirt nap. They are toast, they are ice and they are rich people. Richer than you and me and they are D. E. A. D dead.

According to a report by the United States Office of Personal Management, over the past five years over $600 million in benefit payments have been paid to the aforementioned dead people by the federal government. The benefit payments are normally destined for retired or disabled federal workers but now dead federal workers can be added to that list.

Although the $600 million only covers the past five years, one case of incalculable ineptitude was unearthed that highlights the complete ludicrous incompetence of the benefit payment system. The case in point involved over $500,000 of payments to the son of a man who had died 37 years previously. That is not even close. The bungling impotence only came to light when the son died! Had the father still been alive to enjoy his payments, he would have been 138.

In a system of government which is currently sitting at $14.7 trillion in debt, $600 million accounts for a tiny fraction of the ineptitude. It takes a mighty fine amount of concentration to blow 15 trillion, so what’s a few hundred million between dead friends? But the problem is that this blundering hole in the distribution of federal payments was made aware to the government in 2005. 6 years ago. Have they managed to fill the hole? Having given away 600 million in 5 years, the answer would seem to be a resounding NO. Not only are the federal government made aware of a festering wound in the distribution of benefit payments, they fail to do anything about it. Take The Blame™ would like to point the finger at some pretty fearsome ineptitude.

Once upon a time the bank was the place for cash withdrawals. Now your money is safer here.

In all 6 attempts have been made to rectify the problem since an inspector general’s report revealed defects in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund in 2005, and not one of them has found a way to figure out the, one would have thought, fairly obvious singularity between death and life. Apparently it is too difficult to connect the death records with the benefit records. “Is he dead? yes, stop payment. Is he alive? yes, continue payment.” Mark Zuckerberg has connected 700 million computers, why can’t the federal government connect two?

***** ***** *****

What can $600 million buy you these days? How about Foursquare? No, bit boring? OK, How about 1 week of intervention in the Libya crisis? Thats how much the first week cost. It is what Nokia received from Apple for patent litigation. It’s what a botox maker paid for illegal marketing.

How much could possibly go wrong in the search for a cold beer after a long days’ work? You wouldn’t have thought much, but then you wouldn’t really be thinking, because one hell of a lot can go wrong if you are blessed with the ineptitude gene, reside in Covina, Los Angeles and have the mental abilities of a rotting carcass. Unbelievably there were three such blessed on Wednesday.

The mugshot says it all. INEPT

Andy Huynh, Nicholas Kalscheuer and Nicholas Fiumetto (check out the mugshots) managed to screw up getting a beer so incredibly well that they now sit in a Los Angeles prison cell, awaiting a court hearing on $50 000 bail. So just how did they manage such a feet? It wasn’t easy. At every step in the evenings proceedings it would have been infinitely times easier to not end up in prison.

Step 1. Don’t buy the beer, steal the beer.

Baja Ranch Market, 3pm. Andy Huynh remains in the car whilst his comrades enter the shop. So far so good. Getaway driver, check.

Step 2. Cock things up royally. Avoid stealth. Avoid cunning.

Fiumetto grabs a 30-pack of beer. Decides not to look cagey and hide said beer up his jumper but just bolts from the shop, Kalscheur at his heels.

Step 3. Get chased by shop workers.

Forgetting 21000 episodes of Cops which end in bullets being sprayed and bloodshed, shop workers run after culprits with complete disregard for well-being. Capture 19-year old Kalscheur and detain until police arrive.

Step 4. Up the stakes.

Realising that things have taken a dramatic turn for the worst Fiumetto jumps in the car and Huynh – the getaway driver! His job was to get away, lets not forget – drives straight at a shop worker who jumps on the bonnet of the car. Genius. The shop workers have now entered the battleground of ineptitude. Without even exiting the car park, the car hits a curb and the two remaining assailants run off. Only they don’t get far.

Step 5. Leave you wallet and identification in the car.

Andy Huynh actually managed to escape the scene of the crime – Quite a feet of ingenuity considering what had come before – only to find the police knocking at his door a few minutes later with his wallet and ID in hand. Nice work sir.

Step 6. Run into a car wash, get wet, get caught.

Whilst Mr. Huynh was busy forgetting his wallet, Fiumetto was busy getting wet. He jumped over the retaining wall into the neighbouring car wash, hotly pursued by two police officers. Perhaps hoping to hide amongst the rollers and soap of the mechanical car wash, he darted straight inside. Yep, pincer manoeuvre by the police saw the suspect quite easily apprehended when he exited the car wash, soaking wet and foam on his head.

The Japanese blame the Chinese for a recent outbreak of computer hacking and espionage

Ah China. They must have the worst Internet hackers ever to write code. They just cannot seem to hack without being caught. Not a week goes idly past without a mega-corporation or Sovereign state bemoaning some Internet intrusion by the Worlds biggest toy manufacturer. If it is not China itself complaining of cyber espionage by the Chinese, then it is America. If not America then it is South Korea and if not Google then Yahoo. Twitter is hacked, Facebook is sent into privacy setting meltdown and confusion and little old Myspace is left enjoying the traffic that a bit of Chinese covert hacking can bring. Next up to the cyber intrusion plate is Japan.

Never the best of friends, China and Japan sit within Internet throwing code of each other geographically and historically they share a treasure trove of minefields, war, invasion, battles and that most eastern of doctrines, feuding. Suffice to say, they don’t always see eye to eye. And in this year 2011, the 80th anniversary of the Japanese invasion of northern China, things have taken to the cyber playground – Attacking your neighbours 80 years ago only to see them rise to the top of the Sovereign food chain and sit on the brink of world domination must be akin to bullying the wimpy kid at school, only to see him become a cage fighter with blood lust and get a job working alongside you in your twenties. Now China is the bully and Japan are not best pleased.

The land of the rising sun has pointed the finger squarely at China for a plethora of denial of service (DOL) attacks on both government and Mitsubishi - the largest of the Japanese defence contractors – websites. The bombardment saw major security breaches in the military web-space of Japan. Mitsubishi admitted that its computers and servers had been affected with viruses and tracking bugs, allowing information to be stolen from the network. Perhaps worse than this was the discovery that computers connected to the Japanese submarine fleets were hacked allowing the hackers to remotely control computers (whether remote control submarines were on the menu is unknown, but what fun that would be) and even use the built in microphones of the computers  as listening devices.

According to pro-hackin tricks.com, Mistubishi had “experienced hacking across 10 of its sites in Japan, including its submarine manufacturing plant in Kobe and a facility in Nagoya which makes engine parts for missiles. In total 45 network servers and 38 PCs became infected with eight strains of malware, including Trojan horse programs.”

According to Japanese Police Agency(NPA) 90% of the attacks were born in China, thus, in their eyes, making it the likeliest point of origin.

Take the blame would like to point to the ineptitude of the Chinese hacking department who can’t seem to do their cyber spying in anything approaching secrecy and to the Japanese. Buy a goddamn firewall. Even Norton.

This is something that the staff at Take The Blame™ never thought they would have to do. Point the finger at their own ineptitude.

Take the Blame™ was offline for over 5 days last week due to some highly inept Internet programming. The ineptitude resulted in visitors being shown a Fatal error message and not the usual Take the Blame™ toast logo and breaking news, blame and ineptitude. We would like to take the blame™ for our blinding ineptitude and offer an apology to all those that came to the site expecting something wonderful, something profound, something entertaining or something utterly disturbing.

Ineptitude even reaches the highest echelons of the Blame network. Early warnings were not heeded and subsequent flashing lights and imminent meltdown sirens ignored. The result was catastrophic.

In a bid to speed up the site and keep abreast of the ever-increasing level of media and news flooding into the site on a daily basis, a small piece of Internet housekeeping was called for. The only problem, according to our relatively inexperienced programming department, was that in actual fact, no housekeeping was required; the site was running smoothly, efficiently and at lightning speed.

The problem was rectified by some very astute Internet code writers who quickly got to the bottom of some very reckless ineptitude.

The entire Take the Blame foundations were put in jeopardy by our own doings. Sorry.

This year New York has been pummelled by ice-storms, heatwaves, earthquakes and hurricanes but is about to face its biggest natural disaster of the year. Come Halloween, the city will be facing an extreme pumpkin shortage.

New York is facing a pumpkin shortage at Halloween as Hurricane Irena destroyed so many pumpkin plantatation

When Hurricane Irene blew and howled its way across New York state last month, it not only left a city reeling from a generation defining storm but also wiped out hundreds of pumpkin plantations across the state. As a result wholesale prices of the big orange vegetable have already doubled and are expected to rise further before the pagan Irish festival of death comes knocking.

With prices in dollars already higher than the Halloween film franchise is in sequels, children across the New York state are going to be left devastated on the 31st October when the cold hard realisation that making a scary lamp from the fruit known in France as a citrouille is going to be off the agenda.

As the Autumn begins to take its chilling grip and the daylight starts to lose its blinding heat, farmers in New York are preparing for the worst.

“I think there’s going to be an extreme shortage of pumpkins this year. I’ve tried buying from people down in the Pennsylvania area, I’ve tried locally here and I’ve tried reaching across the border to some farmers over in the Quebec area. There’s just none around.”

Denver Colorado is home to more professional sports teams than any other state in America. Denver Colorado, humble gold-mining town turned winter wonderland, has more parks than any other city in The United States – over 250 of them. Denver Colorado or The Mile High City, as it is known to many, sits 5280 feet above sea level, making its moniker mathematically perfect. Denver Colorado lays claim to 300 days of sunshine every year, boasts one of the most perfect mountain locations in mainland America and is full of the healthiest population in America. To put it bluntly, Denver Colorado is one mighty fine place to live. So why, if the city is so idyllic, so perfect, so steeped in everything that is good in life, does it harbour such callous ineptitude as was unearthed this week when two of its delinquent patrons took it upon themselves to drive one of their ‘friends’ to the pub? Oh yeah, when he was dead.

Denver. Some say that come the Second Coming, Denver will be the place to be. It is really that great.

Whether Robert Jeffrey Young (43) and Mark Rubinson (25) had been watching the 1989 film Weekend at Bernies before they undertook their mission of ineptitude is unclear, what is clear is that their crime bares an uncanny resemblance to the plot line of the cult film. In the film two men discover their boss has been killed by The Mafia and, to enjoy the fruits of his multi-million dollar beach-house, pretend he hasn’t actually died. What follows next, as the two protagonists try to convince an unsuspecting world -via strings and sunglasses – that their host is not dead, is a comedy of errors. In real life however, such Hollywood lunacy is not funny, not clever but dark and quite sick and being replicated in Denver Colorado.

The story unfolded when Rubinson received a call from his friend Young telling him that their friend Jeffrey Jarrett was, how shall we put this, unresponsive, not moving… dead. Rubinsons first response was not what you would think: going to the police or hospital was far from his mind. No, what these two needed was some beer, tequila, a nice little drinking binge, maybe some strippers and a helping of dinner in a fine restaurant. All on their dead friends credit card of course.

After discovering their dead friend the three men’s first port of call was Teddys T-bar and grill. Whilst Rubinson and Young chowed down on some lovely rump steak, their friend sat motionless in the back seat of Rubinson’s Lincoln Navigator, the blacked out windows masking the true, oxygen starved, already decomposing corpse. The next stop was a drink at Sam’s No. 3 before heading onto the nights showcase event. After dropping the long dead body of Jarrett at his home, some naked ladies were on the menu for these pair of Denver’s finest gutter juice. But first another meal. This time at Viva Burrito, their dining habits obviously as classy as their moralistic code of honour. After withdrawing 400 dollars from the Jarrett account, the pair headed to Glendale strip club where they remained until closing. They eventually hailed a police man at around 4am and alerted the authorities to their dead friend.

These two wined and dined themselves whilst their dead friend sat in their car

Take the Blame would like to highlight the ineptitude of two morally empty shells of vermin who have cast an unwanted, dirty, evil and dark cloud over one of the worlds most appealing cities. To the people of Denver, we are sorry that such people live in your midst.

This is a clam. It is not for smuggling drugs

This is a clam. If ever something was designed for not smuggling drugs in, then this was probably it. It is small. It is a mollusc. In what world would you fill these with cocaine and attempt to smuggle them into America? Oh yes, this world. This one which is full of ineptitude.

Top 10 global drug smugglers? None of them; not Escobar, not Marks, not Fuentes, not Loera, not even your local dope peddler, would think to smuggle drugs into The United States of America in a bag of clams. Even Birds Eye wouldn’t do it. So why did David Pocasangre Vaquiz from Venuezela do it? The reason is probably his ineptitude and why he is not a global drug lord but a small time crook smuggling a poultry 5 ounces of Cocaine into Dulles airport.

After arriving at the Virginia airport on a flight from Panama Mr Vaquiz passed through airport security and set some noses wagging. Initially it could well have been the smell. Most good cooks and Jamie Oliver advise you to keep clams thoroughly chilled during transportation and to eat as quickly as possible on removal from the sea. They also recommend not eating them if they are warm, dead or refuse to open when boiled. There is nothing about what you should do if they have been glued shut, stuffed in a handbag and carried half away across the United States of America.

Sea food tends to perish when exposed to high aeroplane cargo hold temperatures and with this comes a putrid smell. Perhaps it was this stench which first lead the airport staff to X-ray the hand baggage of the passenger who smelled of rotting fish. The X-ray showed clams full of cocaine.

The end result of such incompetence is obviously going to be a prison sentence where Mr Vaquiz will have plenty of time to concoct some more ingenious smuggling concepts.