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Software golem Adobe has announced its latest bombshell takeover, acquiring your eyes in a cash-and-stock deal totalling US $1 billion.

Wall street has reacted fervidly to the deal, with Adobe’s stock price ($ADBE) up 10% in morning trading on the NASDAQ.

“We believe that eyes, the seat of vision, are key to collaborative creativity, and will be of great value to our audience of innovative creatives and technologists across the globe,” Adobe CEO Mitch Shrift told a press delegation on the day of the announcement.

Shrift went on to share early pricing plans with the press horde. “We’re keeping pricing as simple as possible, with custom options for everyone from big corporates to freelance creatives and hobbyists. We’re deeply committed to supporting the experience that existing customers of your eyes have come to value.”

Adobe’s proposed pricing is delightfully simple: a 32-minute free trial for all customers with their basic plan – greyscale and no peripheral vision. Thirty AdobeCoin can net users a chest full of gems (+10% free, best value) which can be used to unlock 14 and a third minutes of premium eye use.

Shrift is confident the collaboration will bring great value to its customers. “Adobe’s greatness has been rooted in our ability to create new categories and deliver cutting-edge technologies through organic innovation and inorganic acquisitions,” he chirped. “Now give-a me your pretty eyes-a!”.

For the first time in almost a millennium, residents of Hirstdale are now faced with a tricky situation – what team do they put money on to win the 2022 World Cup?

The ancient hamlet of Hirstdale is steeped in betting culture. Listed as far back as The Domesday Book of 1083, “Hyrstdale” was documented as having “twenty-one villains, sixteen sokemen and twenty-two Ladbrokes”.

By the 1983 census, every resident over the age of 18 was a self-employed gambler. Their secret? Firing rare marsupials out of a howitzer and seeing where they landed.

The principle was simple enough. Villagers would take a live thylacine, also known as a Tasmanian tiger, or locally referred to as a “Whistle Rat”, and jam it into a device powerful enough to fire it at the parish on the top of the hill.

Upon impact, the remains would be studied by a select council, who would judge the auspices on finely-tuned categories based on style, control, damage and aggression.

The means of launching the beast would evolve over the years, but the results would never change. “Running the Whistle Rat up the Pastor’s Lane” had correctly predicted the results of every major sporting event since records began.

After the results were disseminated to the villagers, locals would place bets at their local bookies, and then spend the rest of the day relaxing, chatting with neighbours, and intensively farming more thylacines.

Sadly, this beloved tradition faced a rocky future after a male Tasmanian tiger named Benjamin was purchased from Hobart Zoo in 1936 to predict the results of the hastily arranged and short lived Wimbledon triples series, which had caught Hirstdale residents by surprise.

Once Benjamin was splatted, the world thylacine population was now localised entirely within Hirstdale. But as their population plumetted, sports betting was continuing to grow at unsustainable rates.

On the 6th of September 2022, the last thylacine in the hamlet was launched to predict the results of a local baccarat tournament, and finally the guns fell silent.

All attempts to revive the industry by firing rare toads, guineafowl and beetles have so far yielded unsatisfactory results. It is not sure what Hirstdale residents will do now the thylacines are extinct.

At the risk of editorialising, this writer wants to know one thing: when will the European Union admit they were involved in their disappearance? It seems likely, methinks, that we’ll never know for sure.

Wikipedia describes it as a 1987 American romantic drama dance film written by Eleanor Bergstein, produced by Linda Gottlieb, and directed by Emile Ardolino. The Cambridge Dictionary of English describes it as ‘marked with dirt, mud, etc., or containing something such as pollution or bacteria’, and ‘to move the body and feet to music’.

But to a generation of young women and men who were dragged along too – it was the movie that introduced them to anachronistic exercise wear, dancing on logs, and the Borscht Belt. Most of all – it was the movie that introduced them to gyrating hunkmarket Patrick ‘The Swayze’ Swayze.

What many self-described ‘Dirty Dancelets’ don’t know is that Patrick Swayze – the ‘Baron of Bachata’ – was utterly unable to dance.

Filming had already wrapped on Dirty Dancing before this glaring continuity error was spotted. Every scene in which Swayze danced was identified as “mercilessly unwatchable” by industry legend and Dirty Dancing executive producer Allan Pepof.

“Swayze was a nightmare. He pranced around like a demented mantis. People were worried he had scurvy,” Pepof told me, “We got a warning from the MPA because the test audiences got motion sickness. If we wanted to recover the $4 million we’d already splurged, and more importantly finance my new conservatory – we knew we had to save the thing in the edit”.

So Pepof brought in the best talent in the industry – special effect titans Gerry Andersen, Ralph Bakshi and Ray Harryhausen. The harem put their legendary noggins together and threw everything they had at the project.

“Swayze himself only appears for 12 seconds of actual screen time,” Pepof explained. The ‘Johnny Castle’ we know and love was mostly mocked up with a combination of stop motion claymation and supermarionation – an artificial Patrick Swayze that the crew affectionately nicknamed ‘Bruce’ .”It took a team of four hundred Vietnamese teenagers to carefully rotoscope Bruce into the pivotal scene,” Pepof elaborated.

Despite the setbacks – Dirty Dancing went on to be a box office bonanza, and Pepof was able to add three convervatories to his Hollywood Hills palazzo. What wisdom does Pepof have for would-be filmmakers? “If your picture has two left feet: you can always fix it in post!” I’ll tango to that!!

A huge slab of carved gabbro discovered in Crombol on the Heath could be the key to deciphering the famously cryptic computer font Wingdings once and for all.

The tablet was excavated by archaeologists working in the grounds of a pig killing factory. The dig was prompted after local metal detectorists uncovered a set of leg hammers and brain drills weeks earlier, suggesting that this site may once have housed an even older and even more violent pig killing factory.

Readers using a Hilltech 15⅔ kbit/s Modem can see a hyper-resolution webscan of the stone by clicking here. When you have finished, please close the page so the next user can look at it.

Once uncovered, the providence of the filthy rock was missed by site lead Mark Hunderson, who was, in his defence, “a bit drunk at the time”. Mistaken for a low-to-middle grade kitchen countertop, it was hoiked into a skip. It was here that passing historian and upstart John Young noticed the remarkable engraving engraved on the obverse. [Obverse? What’s that mean? The front? Just say the front then – Ed.]

Painstakingly carved onto the polished surface are three inscriptions – the first, unhelpfully, is in French, and is presumably complete nonsense. The third is Webdings, a commonly used typeface, and easily decipherable. The second made Young shock a gasp in his mouth when he first saw it. It is unmistakeably Wingdings.

Wingdings has long been regarded a “dead font”. When used, letters typed on the keyboard are converted to baffling eldrich shapes. Just gazing upon them can make a grown man go mad and stomp around the garden for a bit. There exist many artefacts which feature Wingdings writing, but despite many attempts, no one had any idea how to work out what they said.

Young believes that the three pieces of text are not only related, but identical, which is stupid because they clearly look different. Researchers from St Vasey’s College, Oxford, are currently investigating this hypothesis, and have plugged several computers into it to try and decode it but they all broke.

In the end, it was a local schoolboy, whose name will not be shared for data protection reasons, who made the first breakthrough. Simon Kendall, 11, saw a photograph of the stone shared on the College Twitter feed, presumably because he’s a massive swot, and tediously messaged the head of the archaeology department with his pathetic idea.

“It came to me when I saw what could only be described a Black Lozange shape in the Wingdings section, appearing in the same density and proliferation pattern as the Diesel Locomotive in the Webdings extract”, said Kendall, who had a squeaky voice and no mates.

“This to me suggests that they represent the same letter. My hypothesis was further reinforced when I realised that all Lower Right Shadowed White Circles corresponded one-to-one to Men in Business Suits Levitating.”

So far, almost five Wingdings characters have been cracked, and researchers believe that they will have solved another three within our lifetimes. Whatever this means for the future of Wingdings decipherment, the discovery of this relic has certainly put Crombol on the Heath back in the headlines – and not because of the lye poisonings this time!

Elon Musk. He’s been called “the world’s wackiest billionaire”, “the funny meme man CEO” and “the enfant terrible of child cobalt mining”. But who is Elon really? What makes him tick? And will he autograph my copy of Atlas Shrugged?

All these questions and more I hoped to answer while attending his latest publicity stunt. Posing as a respected journalist from the New York Times, I’d wrangled an invite to his latest product launch at a Tesla cobalt mine in the Central African Republic.

Elon was there to show off his latest innovation in cobalt mining – a child-sized pod fitted with various gadgets and gizmos. The concept began its life with Elon’s heroic child submarine – designed to rescue some children in China or something. After his innovation was cruelly rejected by the local authorities, Musk went back to the drawing board, like Tony Stark from the 2008 film Iron Man, portrayed by Robert Downey Jr.

Musk cleverly adapted his tiny pods to the work of underground mining – they would increase efficiency fivefold and allow Musk to fit four times as many child workers into his mine.

“What do you say to claims that using child workers in your cobalt mines is unethical?” asked some loonie leftie hack from The Guardian.

“That question is boring. BORING,” replied Musk, cleverly, before making a fart noise with his mouth. We ALL laughed, as the joke was VERY funny.

Another journalist asked what political party Musk supported. “I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative,” Musk replied, while kicking an awful and smelly poor person to death.

I put my hand up and Musk pointed at me. Talk about the electricity going through you! “Mr Musk,” I asked, trembling, “What’s your favourite number?” He smirked at me, then coolly replied “Sixty nine, four twenty!” We all burst into uproarious applause, delighted by his witty remark.

After the interview session, the pinko Guardianista was handed over to a local militia, and the rest of us headed to the after-party. Elon attended with his latest love-interest – a hologram of Japanese virtual idol Hatsune Miku dressed as Harley Quinn. He delighted us with some off-colour anecdotes about union-busting and spent two hours reciting the entire John Galt monologue. But all good things must come to an end, and inevitably, the evening had to draw to a close. Musk was flown back to his San Francisco compound.

I felt great inner turmoil – blessed at having met the cleverest man who ever lived, but miserable that life may never again be so sweet. I sat and pondered; what’s next for Elon? Solving world hunger? Setting up a moon colony? A sleek fire extinguisher for his cars? Whatever he puts his mind to – I’ll be making a preorder!

Knobbling Toby, a huge larch that had been growing in Prustwell since the Roman Occupation, has burned down – a note left at the scene suggests that the tree took its own life.

The famous tree, mentioned in the Synod of Arles in 314AD, had been standing alone in the middle of the grounds of old Prustwell Chapel for as long as anyone can remember. Dick Mountcopse, London based publicist to the stars, bought the derelict building and its grounds back in 2020, after “falling in love” with the tree.

“We came here, me and the wife, shortly after Ricky Pemberton rang to tell me he’d run over a nun. I said to him, I said Ricky, I can’t spin that. You’re going to prison. Well, he didn’t like that, so me and the wife decided to take a trip to the country until he cooled off.”

“When I saw the chapel and the grounds, I thought, Mountcopse, you have to buy this. I had fallen in love with the field the tree was in.”

Toby had been listed under the Tree Preservation Order since the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 was first established, making any willful damage to the tree a legal offence. The police, however, do not suspect foul play.

“You could tell something hadn’t been right with the old Knobbler for a while now,” said Mountcopse in an exclusive interview with The Files.

“I was out there with the architect a few days after the purchase, and you can could see that the branches were all saggy, and the was a mournful aura around the trunk. I had the tree surgeons round, I said to them ‘is there any chance that it’s infected? Something that would make it dangerous to be around, so you’d HAVE to cut it down, and the TPO wouldn’t matter, yeah?'”

“They did their checks and said it was fine. I called in three or four more firms and they all said the same thing. That’s when I realised that this was a mental health issue.”

In the early hours of Monday morning, passing dog walker and pest Gillian Grimes discovered Knobbling Toby engulfed in flames, and immediately called her husband. Ben Grimes, volunteer firefighter, arrived minutes later and discovered Mountcopse desperately trying to put out the inferno.

“That man is a hero,” said Grimes.

“When I got there, he had already filled a jerry can with water, and was splashing it over the flaming roots in a brave attempt to save old Toby. The sap must have been rising something terrible though, because whenever he sprayed it on, the flames only seemed to grow bigger.”

Once the Fire and Rescue teams arrived, it was too late. Mountgreen was remarkably composed, and in a final act of defiance he threw his gloves, apron and balaclava on what was left of the smoldering remains.

Police investigators were at a loose end, until a letter arrived at Mountgreen’s address, purportedly written by Knobbling Toby himself. The note, written in 12pt Calibri on paper with the letterhead scribbled over, documented the mental abuse the tree had faced from local residents, including comments about “root density” and “xylems”. As of writing, several arrests have been made of Prustwell residents implicated in the letter.

At the bottom of the page, the words “sincerely, Dick Mountcopse” are scribbled out, with “Nobby Tony” written underneath. A cry for help to the only person who could understand? Mountcopse seems to think so.

“I just wish I’d known how much he was hurting,” said Mountcopse, undoing his dressing gown and slipping into his new outdoor swimming pool.

“We’ll all miss him dreadfully, and it hurts to even talk about it – but if this story prevents even just one protected tree from taking its own life, it’ll be worth it.”

To donate to the Dick Mountcopse Knobbling Toby Charity Fund, please post a cheque into his letterbox, ensuring to leave the “payable to” box blank.

Ronstable – home of the cashew bap, birthplace of regional Slime Football Champion Henry Bean, and source of the world famous North Rutland Smell.

This rural idyll is considered the jewel at the heart of the core of Whimby county: a village known nationwide for its beautiful farmland, and internationally recognised as the badger cull hotspot of the northern hemisphere.

Of course, ask anyone round here what they know about Ronstable, and the sixth or seventh thing they’ll say after you give them a few hints will be “pigs”.

The Ronstable Pig Show has taken place on the village green on the 14th of June every year since 1732, interrupted only by V1 bombing in 1941, and once more in 1970 when those big swans turned up.

Once a year, the village lights up with the sounds of pigs, the smells of pigs, and the presence of pigs, all walking around the place. Farmers and breeders from around the country bring their flocks [Flocks? -ed.] to take part in the many showcases and competitions, at a celebration once referred to by Prime Minister Harold McMillan as “utterly, utterly tedious.”

However, this bristly and faintly muddy peace was shattered in 1998 when, due to a clerical error, the Ronstable chapter of the Hells Angels arrived for their biannual member’s meeting on the same day of the Pig Show, leading to a fight breaking out with the Women’s Institute while they were arranging their jams at around 10am. The bikers would later be exonerated in a subsequent court case, after photos emerged clearly showing Ms Maureen Stimmy stuffing a fruitcake into a sock and then beating a man to death with it.

During the brawl, local council staff continued to let visitors into the green, with tickets selling for only 20p each. That year’s event was hugely anticipated, as it had been announced that February that Wallace “The Biggy Piggy” would be attending after his Vegas tour.

Wallace was a champion truffle hog, notorious for his ability to drive a JCB during his truffle hunts, and most famous for excavating almost a metric ton of truffles in a single afternoon.

An hour after the gates opened, Wallace’s helicopter attempted to land in his custom LED pigpen, which had been dropped off and assembled by a fleet of trucks and roadies a week prior. Suddenly, disaster struck.

The rotors became entangled with a line of bunting made by a local county primary school, and within seconds the entire aircraft crashed into Les Dennis, long standing patron of the Ronstable Pig Show, killing him instantly and badly bruising his knee.

Wallace survived the crash, and fled into the North Rutland forest. He was extricated fourteen days later, but the intense shock had completely destroyed his sense of smell. He would never return to Whimby.

By now, the situation had reached breaking point. The field was massively over capacity, and tensions were running high. In the chaos and confusion, a visitor grabbed a Gloucestershire Old Spot, stuffed it under his jumper, and calmly made his way to the exit. In a separate incident, twelve other pigs were smuggled out simultaneously in what Scotland Yard would later label a “coordinated theft” by some “horrid bumholes”. Only four pigs were ever recovered, found jammed in a bin outside of Londis.

We now believe that The Whimby Pig Incident was a coordinated theft, perpetrated by some horrid bumholes.

DI Blem, Scotland Yard

A fight broke out by midday, and by lunchtime riot police finally made it to the scene, firing tear gas and bean bags into the crowd in a desperate attempt to break up the fighting. When the dust cleared, twelve hours later, only three of the initial two hundred pigs in attendance were left in the village green.

The previous year’s champion, Oinky Oinky Oinky Oinky Woo Woo, was found cowering under a refreshment stand. Runner-up Ronnie Redmane had been crushed underfoot by the crowds, and was now a pig shaped disk, 1 inch (25mm) thick. He survived the ordeal, but never emotionally recovered.

Lessons were learned, and by next year the Pig Show would be back to normal, with the 1999 event featuring no helicopter crashes or pig thefts, and only three fatalities. The gang here at The Files look forward to seeing everyone at the upcoming 2022 Ronstable Pig Show, where editors Grouse Henderson and Ditton Hague will be running a coconut shy and cat delousing dip, respectively.

Pharrell Williams’ big hat has announced the start of a solo career, bringing an end to their 20 year collaboration. Though fans have expressed shock on social media – rumours have long circulated the industry that Pharrell’s hat had ghostwritten many of his biggest hits, including 2013’s Happy, and 2014’s Come Get it Bae.

Despite the split – Pharrell has remained upbeat, though characteristically enigmatic, since the surprise announcement; he was seen grinning and muttering happily to himself, while rocking jovially at a press conference earlier this week.

Pharrell’s hat – performing under his birth name of Naa’xeth the Ancient One – hopes to take the charts by storm with his new venture.

“All shall submit beneath my will”, he told The Files at a press conference this week. “As my dark ballads ring across your feeble planet, my blasphemous tendrils will seep ever deeper into the blackest recesses of your minds.”

We reached out to Naa’xeth and asked him what to expect in his upcoming album.

“Between worlds there is a great void – a writhing blackness that will consume your cosmos and all others,” he told The Files. “I am the piper that helms the great army of death.”

It’s clear that Naa’xeth is aiming high with his next project – we at The Files say – hats off to him!!

Animated movie fans, rejoice! This latest instalment in the multi-award-winning Ice Age treads frosty new ground, as Manny the mammoth and his wacky herd have to navigate through a treacherous tar pit to reach the Fertile Plains in time to celebrate Thanksgiving!

After Steve Martino stepped away from the directors chair following a horrific chalk incident, Hollywood up-and-comer Alejandro Jodorowsky swept in to take the reins from the struggling Blue Sky Studios, and he’s already made a Jurassic impact!

The original film script, reported to have been a “more traditional” story, focused on sabretooth tiger Diego failing to handle the stress of his approaching Bar exam, while still trying to be supportive of his friend Sid the sloth’s new keto diet, which had been recommended by his GP in an attempt to force his type-2 diabetes into remission.

Friction between the veteran script writers and Jodorowsky’s self-professed desire to “bring the series back to its roots” pushed back the release date by another two years, as consultant script writer Dick Thornburgh was brought in to see the new director’s vision through to the silver screen – and luckily, before the next Ice Age [not the film]!

Grown-ups in the audience might notice a small shift in the colour grading by the second half of the movie, but other than that the reshoots are barely any different from the content in the press-release long edit shown to The Files last July.

The plot is a fairly basic affair compared to earlier instalments, but warm with sincerity, like a nice pie on a cold winter evening. Gruff, no-nonsense mammoth veteran Manny shocks the rest of the gang when he announces that he never has anything to be thankful for, and that everyone should be thankful for him. An outraged Sid believes that Manny has no idea how lucky he is, and during their migration to the opulent “fertile plains” to escape the thawing ice, he plans an event as big as an asteroid – a celebration of giving thanks!

We see different sides to all of the main characters, revealing their true colours and bravery as they help their friends on their dangerous trip, including a close call avalanche in a mountain path, and a spooky encounter in a forest of giant bats!

Eventually, the herd reaches a vast tar pit, where an arrogant Manny drives headfirst into a sticky mess! The third and final act of the film is a bold, unflinching single shot of Manny writhing and screaming as he sinks deeper and deeper into the scalding tar, veteran voice actor Ray Romano audibly tearing his vocal cords as he gradually shifts from eloquent, enunciated pleading and begging to primal gurgling and screaming, as God pulls the curtain back until the anthropomorphic charade is stripped away, laying bare only a confused, suffering animal. We beg for it to end, but when it does, the fade out shows no credits; just dead eyes in a black mirror looking back at us.

Ice Age 14 will be playing three times a day at the South Rutland Cinescreen from the 4th of April, just in time for the school holidays! Come on down – you’ve got snow business missing out!

A chill March wind scours Framlingham village green as I observe a line of locals gather around the coconut shy. I look pitifully upon a row of dry, hollow husks, devoid of life – evolved for tropical climes but stuck here beneath a dull Arctic breeze instead; an embarrassment to their ancestors. Also, there are coconuts.

I’ve been sent by the Files to review this desolate affair. Dreary people gather around dreary stalls to whittle away an hour or so of their dreary lives. The leaflet promised ‘family fun’, but there is none to be seen in this wretched place.

A few of the stalls offer provincial English treats – marmalades, ‘artisanal’ breads, cured meats. Half as delicious and four times as expensive as those offered by your local Tesco.

To excite the proles the fete masterminds have contrived various ways to disguise degenerate gambling as a wholesome jape: guess the beans in the jar, take a punt on the creaking tombola. Gather round children, and give us your money. You’ll get nothing in return, or maybe an out-of-date jar of honey if you’re lucky. Welcome to the real world.

To make things worse a gaggle of Morris dancers have turned up. I’m sure their gaudy dance is in some way racist but I don’t want to waste my time figuring out why.

Here’s one of them now – Ken Chesley, village councillor. Probably a tory.

“It’s wonderful to see all the community get together for a day like this”, he lies. The only light flickering within his black, porcine eyes is hatred – hatred for poor people, some of whom had the cheek to turn up today in their second-hand George rags.

I’m told there’ll be a bonfire tonight – hopefully I’ll be strapped to it.

The Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi announced yesterday that the national curriculum would be updated to label frogs, newts and salamanders as “honestly really not that important in the grand scheme of things”.

In a surprise press statement, a visibly sweating and trembling Zahawi stood in silence for over a minute in front of the podium, before launching into a long and rambling tirade about various species of amphi­bians.

“What do they actually do?” asked Zahawi, pausing briefly to punch the wall behind him.

“Every year, we expect our wonderful, hard-working teaching staff to perpetuate this idea, this lie, that the ongoing loss of some gay salamanders or a golden bumhole frog is something worthy of our time or energy to fix.

“Why are we teaching children to feel guilty about a supposed crisis that not only they have no control over, but indeed is something they should be supporting?”

Why are we teaching children to feel guilty about a supposed crisis that not only they have no control over, but indeed is something they should be supporting?

Nadhim Zahawi

He went on: “I do not want to kill a frog. If I ever see a frog in the wild I’m not filled with murderous rage. I simply regard it with quiet contempt, and resign myself to the fact that my day is now ruined. And we, as a country, need to stop this cycle of telling our children that anyone actually likes them.”

After questioning, Zahawi made clear that this did not include toads, which he stated were “actually pretty alright”. Sofia Quaglia of The Guardian criticised Zahawi’s clari­fica­tion, claiming that there was “no real scientific distinction between frogs and toads”, whereupon the minister threw a stapler in her direction, inflicting a head wound which required stitches.

Social media response to the statement has so far been mixed. Naturalist and veteran television presenter Sir David Attenborough was one of the first to comment on the situation on his personal Twitter account, writing “he’s got a point? lol I dk haters gonna h8”. The revised syllabus is expected to reach the classroom in the September term.