Are you bored at work? Alienated by your colleagues? Don’t know what to talk about apart from what you’re doing at the weekend (nothing).

Do modern issues mean nothing to you? Don’t know your Hamas from your hummus?

Fear not, all your problems are at an end. The Goblin Caption Competition provides the perfect solution of what to endlessly bore your colleagues with: child abuse. Below are the Goblin Caption top zillion recommended points to discuss. Simply open your mouth and let it all drop out like a turd.

• Speculate on whether you think Maddie’s still alive/ whether Josef Fritzl’s wife knew what was going on. Pause for a few minutes and say things like ‘I think she must still be alive, otherwise we would have felt a disturbance in the force.’ Remember, there are no relevant facts, therefore no one can disprove your asinine rambling.
• Say ‘it's their fault for leaving her on her own’ in an outraged voice, and add a sociological dimension by contending that ‘if they weren’t doctors they would have got done for neglect.’
• Add mysterious asides like ‘Apparently they were drugging their children to help them go to sleep.’
• Generally repeat the details endlessly in an elusive combination of voyeurism, sadness, outrage and scandalised fascination.

Et voila! You’re on the road to assured popularity.
Meantime, think up some tasteless captions for this little beaut.

by goblin, 04/05/08.

by goblin, 04/05/08.

Goblin caption quotations

It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us: the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil-Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

Give me the child for seven years, and I will give you the man.-St Ignatius of Loyola

Every day, the equivalent of a major earthquake killing over 30,000 young children occurs to a disturbingly muted response. They die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.-UNICEF Progress of nations 2000