March, and Ken Bobbins from New Jersey is sitting at home in front of the TV with a beer and a cigarette. The year started off so promisingly – he had stopped smoking and drinking for several hours back in January. He had even put on his running shoes. But it was to go no further.

“I think I can probably resign to the fact that I’ve failed.” said Mr Bobbins. “I planned to stop smoking and drinking and get more exercise, but that pretty much went out the window early in January.”

Mr Bobbins plans to make more optimistic resolutions next year.

An escalator broke down today at a local shopping mall. The patrons of the mall were forced to walk down the stationary steps. The incident didn’t cause too many problems.

Sketchy spoke to Bob Stepford, who just happened to be out buying a new stepladder.

“It didn’t cause too many problems.” he said. The great thing about escalators is that when they break down, they just become stairs.”

In other news, a sea plane broke down off the Santa Monica coast. This didn’t cause too many problems, as the plane just became a boat.

Even the best writers struggle sometimes. Sketchy staff set out this morning to write a satirical story about Lady Gaga, but it seems that over the weekend we were beaten to the punch by her latest exploits.

“She’s just too freaking weird.” said one writer. “We couldn’t even come close to competing with her level of ridiculousness. No matter how much we exaggerate, or how obscure we think, she’s always one step ahead of us.”

Gaga lives in Los Angeles in a house made out of live goats. The controversial singer continues to baffle and confuse the general public with her bizarre antics. Last week she was spotted trying to set fire to a cabbage while wearing nothing but army boots.

Another Earthquake, another military occupation. But Sunday’s quake in Chile is set to push the American military to its limits.

The quake sent the U.S. military into a preparation frenzy. Tanks and planes are being loaded up with ammunition and soldiers are receiving intensive training on shooting tear gas at children, gaining control of oil fields, and waving bags of rice at hungry families.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Defence Department said: “I can’t believe this. We were just starting to get on top of oppressing the people of Haiti and then another earthquake comes along.. If we invade Chile as well I fear our forces will be too thinly spread.”

Today a ruling in the high court means that Google will now be responsible for ensuring that no bad things happen on the internet. Following on from a case where they failed to delete material put online by someone else, they now have to make sure that there is nothing else on the internet that may incriminate any Google staff.

Google are now looking on all forums and discussion boards to make sure that nobody is swearing or being mean to other users. All web searches for anything sex-related are to be reported to the FBI and the perpetrators will have their email address put on the sex offenders register. Nobody will be allowed to use the internet after 11pm.

“It’s better to be safe than sorry!” exclaimed one staff member. “We must seek out anything that may be deemed offensive and delete it from the internet.” He pondered this for a moment. “It’s a big job. It might be easier just to wipe the whole internet and start again.”

The news was welcomed by the Iranian government. A spokesperson said: “As Google have lots of information about people who use the internet, they must use it to stop these infidels committing crimes against God. It is their God-given obligation to protect our eyes from this evil filth! They must delete all material that causes people to be tempted by those hot beach sluts that I’ve never seen.”

Kids today are not being taught the skills they need to cope in the real world, according to a report from an international think tank.

In the report, it details how schools are not equipping young people with essential life skills such as drinking in public, swearing at other drivers, and pushing in at cash registers. From a survey taken of over 500 young people, large majorities were unable to identify a bong, and many were unable to come up with adequate excuses as to “why that report is late”. Nearly half those questioned did not know how to hot-wire a car.

Government officials are said to be worried. “If our children grow up without knowing the best time of day to take a dump while at work, it doesn’t look like there is much hope for our future.” remarked one civil servant.

The new Gilmore Girls complete Blu Ray Box set, released on Monday, is the first Blu Ray release to include a “Slow down to normal people speed” setting. The new feature was added in the interests of public sanity.

For those viewers who missed everything that was ever said on the Gilmore Girls, which is all of us, you will now be able to follow along by slowing their speech down to a level audible by the human ear.

“Think of it as an ‘anti-verbal-diarrhoea tablet’, allowing you to digest their dialogue easier.” said the producer.

Other publishers have been inspired to add interesting features to future releases. For example, the Ugly Betty box set will include a feature to turn down the pretentiousness, while Lost is set to include an actual plot as a bonus feature.

Michael Bay is about to release his latest movie, titled “Boom” which aims to break the record for the biggest explosion ever in a movie. The movie, which is just over 4 hours long, is simply one long explosion that lasts the entire duration.

“It’s a story of love, life, and how they come together to give the meaning of destiny in one climatic piece”. says Bay, who seems to have completely lost the plot, literally.

When asked what was the cause of the explosion, Bay told us to “just go and watch it” as he didn’t want to give away the ending.

The movie is released at IMAX and 3D cinemas this week. We recommend you take a book, or at least some beer.

Mark Windsor, a brick layer from down the road, logged onto his MySpace account today for the first time in 3 years, only to find that he had no friends in his friends list. Upon further investigation, it became apparent to Mr Windsor that everyone in the world had actually left MySpace, around the same time that people stopped “poking” each other on Facebook.

A stunned Mr Windsor, who still uses Windows ME, explained “I thought at first that nobody liked me any more. Then I realised that in fact, all my friends had just left MySpace, along with everyone else on the planet. I was a little bit disappointed, as I had just found a really good glittery ‘Thanks for the add’ picture of a cat that I wanted to post in peoples’ comments.”

He is currently trying to adapt to all the new social networking services. However, so far his only tweets have been of random html code.