Happy Friday, dear readers! Let's not even mention Brexit this week and just enjoy some charity satire.
Dog photos and toilet humour
Regular readers may have noticed that Diary is partial to photos of puppies and also a bit of toilet humour, much like your average ten-year old, so you imagine the excitement at Civil Society HQ when we received a press release that combines the two.
Massive respect to PDSA for this absolute gem of a headline: "Oh s*** you’ve really done it this time! Dog undergoes surgery after swallowing poo emoji”.
Yes you read that correctly. Teddy the Lhasa Apso became unwell after swallowing a soft toy poo emoji. Welcome to 2019 people.
Fortunately it doesn’t seem as if we are dealing with an epidemic. Elly Brocklebank, PDSA senior vet, said: “You think you've seen it all, but this really was a new one for us!”
The offending item belonged to Teddy’s 13-year old owner, who has decided she doesn’t want the poo emoji back. Youth of today eh? First they insist on carrying around pretend poo, but as soon as it’s made a bit more realistic they don’t want to know. Diary blames the internet.
Dollars for grades
The one thing holding together the United Kingdom’s threadbare sense of unity in these politically divided times is looking in collective disgust at the United States.
Well, Diary can add some fuel to that fire with a story about a US charity that was this week exposed as providing a cover for a college admissions cheating scam.
The Key Worldwide Foundation's founder William “Rick” Singer, who looks like a cross between an Italian football coach and Jeremy Corbyn being doorstepped, is estimated to have taken a whopping $25m from wealthy parents to get their kids into elite schools by cheating and bribery.
Actresses Felicity Huffman (from Desperate Housewives) and Lori Loughlin (???) were the two most high-profile celebs to get caught up in the scandal.
Huffman allegedly paid $15,000 in a “charitable contribution” to have someone change the answers on her eldest daughter's SAT exam.
Her daughter took the test in a site separate to her own high school and scored a 400 point improvement from her PSAT results a year earlier.
While it is clearly illegal and immoral if the allegations are found to be true, Diary can’t help feeling moved by the (alleged) display of motherly love from Huffman to her daughter.
Diary is still scarred by its mother refusing to lend it £10 to buy a shiny Zapdos card to complete its Pokemon collection. And Diary had passed its exams.
Money (That’s What I Want)
A super-rare vinyl pressing of the debut single by the biggest pop group of all time was “accidentally” donated to charity.
Fellow '60s music nerds will be excited to learn that the seven-inch demo is particularly rare because it is one of the original pressings with a misspelling of Paul McCartney’s surname.
The record was never on sale and was one of just 250 sent to radio stations in 1962, before the single’s release.
It was donated to British Heart Foundation’s store in Midhurst, West Sussex, in a bag of 25 less-valuable records, suggesting the anonymous donor was unaware of its rarity.
The Fab Four record is thought to be worth £20,000 and was listed by the charity on eBay.
Diary will now spend the weekend searching through its parents’ old record collections in the hope of finding a similarly rare gem – with the obvious intention of donating it to a charity shop.
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