Hipsters Issue Beard Warning

The Hipster Council of Stoke (hCs) has advised that beards and tattoos are now too mainstream to be cool and should not be sported by its members.

"Literally every spaz you see has now got a beard and tats, it's time for us to move on," hCs spokesman Zachery Durden said. "And it's ok for me to use the word 'spaz', I'm using it an ironic way that no-one else will even understand for a year or two."

So what is going to be 'in' this coming winter?

"Dungarees, bow ties and lipstick for men," Monsieur Durden said. "We're looking at one or two other things as well. It's about time the centre parting/basin haircut combo had a revival and Clarks Shoes have been naff long enough now to be cool in an ironic way, but we've yet to decide on that definitively."

Stokecore Music

Stokecore is a broad fusion genre of music whereby any style of music is mixed with a Stoke sensibility and/or Stokie dialect to make something entirely new.

Pioneering Stokecore bands (included Baps Unlimited, The Fegg Gays and Hatecock) mixed heavy metal with Stoke. Later bands, such as Mr Peabodys Dinner, Bitches and The Derek Hulse Fan Club, mixed genres as wide as disco, reggae and mandopop (respectively) with Stoke to widen what Stokecore could be.

Local bands Pink Pole and Good Gravy are often credited with originating Stokecore in the underground scene before other bands took the idea on and made it mainstream. The Fegg Gays album 'Tar Duck' is cited as the first Stokecore album to hit number one in the local charts, and is often referred to as "the album that influenced a generation". Baps Unlimited (feat. Mick Bullock) scored the first Stokecore number one single with their anthem 'Slaughter at Boslem Gaol'.

Nowadays, as we all know, Stokecore is the dominant musical genre in the city. There is also an emerging Hardcore Stokecore scene, featuring artists who only record songs in the ancient Stoke language of Stokehili, that predates English by centuries, but is now only spoken by about 10% of Stokes population.

The Royal Wilkes Trail

The Royal Wilkes Trail is a hiking trail on the north rim of Knypersley reservoir, located at the very north of Stoke.

The paved trail begins in the car park at the southern end of Gracerock Road, better known as one of Knypersley's main dogging sites.

Knypersley Reservoir's northern shore

From the car park, the trail heads south west, along the reservoir, with signs describing the local flora and fauna, such as nettles and bulldogs. Viewpoints along the trail include The Whores Bath (a small pond), The Gay Window (a natural arch with flowers on it) and Bollock Pass (a path between two rocks).

Popular with tourists, the trail is around a mile in length, or about 894 Jonathan Wilkeses laid out in a line. Around 15 dead bodies were found dismembered along the route this morning, averaging about one every 107 metres. Police are not yet treating the deaths as suspicious, although this is subject to change according to the new Staffordshire Police terms and conditions announced yesterday.

Police Appeal For Witnesses

Barry The Clown

Police have appealed for witnesses after an incident yesterday that left a clown with a pie on his face.

Barry The Clown was entertaining at a children's garden party on Gash Road in Newstead when a cream pie was thrown into his face by one of the children, though by which one remains a mystery.

Staffordshire Police were called and detained the children for questioning. Under local laws, they can be held for 2 years without charge.

"We are determined to get to the bottom of this," police spokesman PC Barry Shanks said. "If any passers-by saw anything, now is the time to come forward. Clowns are people too and shouldn't be subject to these kind of calculated attacks. We are treating this as a hate crime."

Once the culprit is discovered, Barry The Clown plans on pressing criminal charges, and taking the case to a civil court to seek compensation.