Sniff Petrol

Thanks to everyone who has supported this site in the past year.

Have a very happy holidays.

Sniff Petrol will return in February.

(Yea, I know. Lazy lazy bastard)

Oh deary me yes, the bumper Christmas edition of Gareth Jones On Speed (including some stinky things from Sniff Petrol) is available to tickle the memory chips of your MP3 player now.

It’s a whopper this one, featuring a bit of chat, a massive quiz thing, the heartwarming tale of Bernard Ecclescrooge in A Christmas Car-ol and a big song to finish. What more do want, brandy sodding butter with that?

EFFECT A CLICKING ACTION UPON THESE WORDS to be in a place where some of this may become slightly clearererer.

CAR magazine launched its revamped website this week, and very smart it is too. Among the exciting new features is a panel which shows, in a slightly arty way, the most popular searches made by visitors to the site. Now clearly this is a new thing so someone at CAR had set the ball rolling by filling the space with the names of some interesting, expensive cars, the kind that a marketing nobber might say were appealing to the dynamic, affluent, ABC1 audience he was looking for. Unfortunately, precisely because this is a new thing, it wouldn’t take too many actual searches to change the popularity listing…

Yeeees, Vanquishes, TTs, all the kind of premium cars an upscale magazine would look for to create the right impression for its websi… hang on a sec… Daihatsu Applause? Sao Penza? Toyota Picnic? Someone’s filling the popular searches board with rubbish cars from the 1980s and ’90s! Either that or CAR’s readers are distinctly less affluent and considerably more mental then anyone might have thought. Still, this sub-minicab nonsense will go away in a second…

… and oh dear God look what’s replaced it. Unless CAR online really does aim to be a valuable source of information about ‘TWATS’ and ‘bum gravy’. In which case, EMAP must be relieved to have got out while the going was good. Still, this is just a momentary glitch. Refresh the page and all will be well…

…although when I said ‘well’ what I actually meant was ‘worse’. In fact the popular searches feature seems to be spinning out of control. Of course, it’s always a possibility that CAR readers really do want less on Lamborghinis and a lot more excellent features about ‘Dame Thora Hird’, ‘anal leakage’ and ‘prostitutes in the Ipswich area’. In which case, I wouldn’t want to work on their road test desk.

Suffice to say, the CAR online ‘most searched’ section has now been removed.

(It seems to be a sort of Belgian fruit juice by the way. Sniff Petrol once bought some French lemonade called Pschit leading us to believe that in general the French language is a cruel mistress when it comes to naming soft drinks)

There was huge embarrassment for the police this week as Meredydd Hughes’s conviction for speeding accidentally revealed that one of their senior officers might be a ‘normal person’.

As the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire received his 42 day driving ban for doing 90mph in a 60mph zone, many top police officers were said to be humiliated and furious that such a high ranking law enforcer might accidentally have allowed the general public to relate to him in some way.

“This matter is proceeding in an extremely difficult direction,” said one speaking policeman. “My colleagues and I are worried that Meredydd Hughes might have been experiencing puny human emotions like being able to assess road and traffic conditions and realising that you can go faster than 60mph on an A-road early on a Monday morning without killing anyone”.

“That’s not all,” our copper gob continued. “We are also extremely concerned that, whilst the Chief Constable clearly committed a crime, it is a crime that ‘the normals’ commit every day and this simply won’t do. How are we supposed to maintain a rabid, binary and unrealistic outlook on speeding when one of our own is behaving like the untermensch? The police simply cannot break the law in this way because it proves that the law is flawed. We must only break the law in ways the humans cannot relate to nor excuse at all. For example, murdering a man at a Tube station. We’re bloody good at that one”.

Oh good heavens yes. As Carly Simon once sang, the Gareth Jones On Speed podcast (including the heady vapours of Sniff Petrol) is Coming Around Again. Obviously Carly Simon didn’t actually sing about a car-based downloadable audio production recorded in the living room of that bloke off How 2 but, since we haven’t heard a lot from her recently and might presume that her career is on the wane, perhaps she bloody well should.

Anyway, this edition of the Podcast features a chat about weird police cars, a story about Sniff Petrol’s former colleague who was mistaken for a doctor, some good reasons why you shouldn’t use a pregnant lady as an excuse for speeding and a mysteriously incriminating story that Zog can’t tell.

CLICK THESE CAPITAL LETTERS to become more aware of what all this might be about an’ shit.