The music world was rocked this week by the news that talented Fairlight grinder and producer Trevor Horn had actually turned into a double bass in the middle of a sightseeing flight around Frankie's off-shore money-dump. Trevor had no complaints and didn't feel bitter that after all his efforts to emulate real instruments, one of them had pulled the same trick on him. "I always said acoustic instruments were best," he twanged, "and I should know, because I am one." Look out for the next ZTT release — 'Frankie Goes to the Corner Shop for a Resined Bow and another Bruce Springsteen Song.'

Shirt-sleeved holiday crowds watched in amazement this week as Jimmi 'Heads-up' Schoolpencil reached the fourth day of his attempt to break the world Cardboard Lampost Playing record.

Jimmi's plan is to play the cardboard street lamp for two weeks to a constant background of Motorhead, Saxon and Granite Anvil tracks, with only a minute's break every hour to clear away dead bystanders. Jimmi's previous effort in June was abandoned when the weight of onlookers killed by their own headbanging, crushed the base of the cardboard pillar.

Mr Schoolpencil's corrugated career began when he started playing cardboard guitar at the local youth club, but by the age of five he'd already perfected the use of a cardboard bicycle, paper knife and fork, and was living in a house made entirely from the insides of toilet rolls left out in the sun. It's even rumoured that the stories of Jimmi's orphanage upbringing were merely to cover the dreadful death of his mother when she was caught in the rain and went so wiggly that no one could get the flaps back on her head.

Plucky Greta Binliner explains how the great meatloaf con was pulled. "There never was a Meat," she told a stunned audience of reporters and cameramen. "It was me, my Dad's woodworking table with some wheels on, and a size 84 suit."

On a rooftop overlooking downtown Manhattan, Greta recreated the pose she and the woodworking table had assumed to fill out the massive pinstripe tent responsible for so many hit albums. "Funny thing, we never got around to putting a head on," she lisped to seasoned hacks, "but no one ever seemed to notice."

Police take a cheerful hand in constructing the latest budget travel attraction — the Virgin Atlantic Hot Air Balloon. Available from all of the leading chain-store's outlets, it will be the cheapest way of crossing to the States and promises the best views. In-flight food will be the freshest in the history of commercial air travel, vow the hot-air line, but the menu will depend on what you catch when you stick your hand over the side of the basket. Virgin will also guarantee to supply as much of the all-essential fuel as you could possibly require...

And the synth-drum explosion continues as another Japanese manufacturer sketches out his plans for a five-sided kit. Mini-sized, microchip wizard, Yatama Ibanearl had the harrowing problem of research and development in this field — in fact, a half acre of old shrubland behind the Ibanearl factory. Just what new shapes can you make with straight lines that don't add up to six or look like Bubble Bear and the Dodecahedron Go To The Ironmongers.

The solution — 5th dimensional Physics. And so, Yatama found a willing fifth former with the right dimensions and splashed out with the pastels. As you can see from Yatama's design, the drummer sits at the centre of a circle of pentagonal pads all with special softened surfaces to help stick bounce. Great work Yatama but could be problems with the drum stool.

Traffic lurched to a standstill yesterday during a joint demonstration by civil rights and animal liberation protestors. The two forces had combined following a shock discovery by animal campaigners who had accidentally broken into a record company office, thinking it was the cosmetics firm next door.

In the basement they found cages containing the mewling remnants of once whole human beings — early experiments in the attempt to produce Pete Murphy of Bauhaus.

It had taken the record company six attempts at chiselling the high cheekbones in order to perfect Murphy. The animal agitators released the captives and displayed them to horrified passers-by who stared aghast at the disastrous efforts to create the ideal rock star — early examples had guitars grafted to their arms, and megaphones to their mouths, to save on PA hire costs. It's thought that the record company's marketing department abandoned such genetic experiments realising neither reasonable guitar playing nor singing were necessary if even desirable in the archetypal pop hero.

The Japanese government today admitted that for the last 15 years, all male born children in the Empire have been fitted with MIDI sockets. Here we see the result of a system exclusive instruction concerning patches. The MIDI-ee is being told to imagine he has a patch over his left eye, the better to be able to play the part of Long John Silver in the school panto. For some time Japanese scientists have been stressing how important MIDI will be in education, and now we see why.