Sunday Morning Terror Pt1

Can you guess which country I took this photo in?

.

I'm off for a stroll through town in a wee while. The skies are clear and there are a few things I want to check over, particularly the new 2m high protective barrier that's been put around New Scotland Yard to thwart suicide bombers.

.
Yup, Terror's been in the news big time this week and, even as I type, there's someone blathering on the radio about a news story that up to 200 Bin Laden trained terrorists are living here and planning '911 and Madrid style bombings in the UK'.

.
Would that be Bin Laden trained terrorists such as the fiendish shoe bomber, Richard Reid?
.

Funny, I always assumed that he had been trained by Wile E. Coyote.

.
Silly me. I think my error was something to do with the fact that the masterminds who had supplied him with his sophisticated exploding novelty baseball boots had neglected to fuse it properly. There's something about the image of a guy fumbling with a book of matches, trying to light his sneakers, whilst sitting next to other passengers that doesn’t quite gel properly. The least his handlers could have done is bought him a Zippo.

.
Curiously, even though my boots have been searched meticulously whenever I've flown since that episode, no airport security staff have ever had a problem with me flying with a cigarette lighter in my pocket. Having said that, I read last week that lighters and matches are finally to be banned from US flights from next month. Well, it only took a few years to get round to closing that tiny loophole. Clearly, the threat posed by key-ring mounted nail clippers was far greater and had to be dealt with first.
.

To be honest, I don’t know why I ever bother carry tobacco and a lighter when flying to the States. The anti-smoking thing is so severe now that even if there is a smoking area it's normally tucked far out of reach and comprises an unventilated, 1m square cubicle, jam-packed with really serious, and I mean serious smokers. The kind of wizened old people whose emaciated frames are only held together by an impressive collection of moles and skins cancers and whose every breath is a rasp. It's never very nice.

.
There's something exceptionally ironic about smokers in US airports being treated this way; surrounded as they are by the spectacle of representatives of fattest nation on earth feeding themselves to death in food courts the size of small cities. I guess the Surgeon General has established that a death from obesity or aspartame induced brain tumours is somehow kinder than lung cancer. Ah yes, the balanced All-American diet; one that includes refined sugar AND a toxic sugar substitute, all in one meal.

.
Maybe smoking is just the first item on a list. Maybe one day we can look forward to airports packed with row upon row of tiny unventilated cubicles, each dedicated to it own particular vice; hardened smokers withering in one, fatties breathing each others foetid bowel winds in another, car owners choking on their vehicle emissions in the next ...

.

... serves them right, the bastards.

.

Uniformity

.

Bumping into some kids coming home from school yesterday, I started thinking about a news story from earlier in the week. A Muslim girl took her school to court so that she would be allowed to wear a full length jilbab instead of the school uniform.

.
She won.

.
This is the kind of story that gets all sorts of different people in a froth for all sorts of different reasons. Hidden agendas were at work on both sides of the debate.

.
You could stand by the ruling and maintain that the rights of the individual are paramount and that people should be allowed to express their religious beliefs in a free country. You could disagree with the ruling and argue that state schools should be secular. You could go even further and maintain that if the girl and her family disagree so fundamentally with the culture of the school, or even the country they are in, they always have to option of pushing off to another school or another country. Choices were clearly open to her as she did move to another school and doesn’t intend to return to the one she took to court.

.
So, it was all a bit pathetic really. The school now has to employ one less teacher to offset its legal costs and a few lawyers have sponged a little bit more money to help pay-off their third homes in Tuscany. Few, if any, hearts and minds were won as a result of the verdict. Interestingly, the fact that the girl was represented by Tony Blair's wife wasn't that widely reported. I wonder why?

.
Fair enough, a decision has been made and we should respect it. Having said that, we could have done without some of the unpleasant rhetoric that followed the case; from both camps. Accusing a school of Islamophobia, even though it consulted with Muslim clerics before establishing its dress code is pathetic. Accusing a school of Islamophobia, when your husband is the single person most responsible for the spread of Islamophobia in this country is worse than pathetic.

.
As an aside, what is it with the language of political correctness? How is it that we are supposedly afraid of some groups yet hate others?

• Homophobia
• Islamophobia
• Anti-Semitism

Why aren’t there terms like Jewophobia or Anti-Homoism? I may seem to be trivialising serious issues just to come up with silly sounding expressions, and I am, but there is a serious point here as well about the subtle use, or misuse, of language that I will leave be for now.

.
Anyway, I like the concept of school uniforms and anyone who maintains that they are a fascistic control mechanism, designed to rob children of their individuality at an early age, is a nutcase. That, or they've never seen a group of South London school children in regulation dress. Outside of the Rio Carnival, I can’t think of any other groups that are less uniform. When I was at school you could distinguish each individual in a group of thirty kids just based on their tie knot alone; with the coolest dudes somehow managing to wear ties that were 90% knot, with no more than one inch of tie hanging off it. And as for the shoes ...

.
Plus points for the wearing of school uniforms include:

• Most importantly, there is much less pressure on the kids to acquire expensive 'designer-wear' clothing, making the local streets that little bit safer for old ladies shuffling home with their pension money
• Uniforms encourage an 'esprit de corps' and make it easier to distinguish friend from foe. Both factors are useful in the heat of battle during end of term fights with other schools. On the subject of fights, it really is time that school uniforms across London are updated to include short scabbards, knife proof vests and pouch-mounted field dressing kits.
• Unless the kids are organised enough to maintain a separate suit of clothing in a railway station locker somewhere, it's a lot harder to bunk off from school and spend the afternoon in a pub or titty bar if you're wearing a uniform. Harder but not impossible …
• A group of kids in uniforms looks great should your entire school ever break out into a spontaneous song and dance number, complete with swooping tracking shots taken from a helicopter flying low over the playground
• Speaking as someone who didn’t realise that he had crap dress sense until after he left school, it's great getting up in the morning and not worrying about what to put on. Plus, unless they're sitting next to you, people won’t notice that you've been wearing the same clothes for several weeks

It's also no accident that exactly the same benefits apply to wearing a suit to work. Shame most offices don't have adult playground facilities though ...
.

Obsession?

Speakers Corner

(Photofriday submission http://photofriday.com/ )

Arguably not the most reliable or sanest of London tour guides ...

St George's Circus; as yet unproven occult centre of London

Tracy's Brother and his girlfriend are over next week from New Zealand.

They never been to London before

Oooooooh exciting.

They're spending a few days with us and I had generously offered to work out a tour itinerary for their stay and to act as a guide. Tracy refused the offer point blank. She turned me down on the basis that she was concerned that her brother would spend a few days with me then go home with a warped and twisted view of London.

And there was me, already having gone to all the trouble of listing out the 'must see' places in town - Wood Green, Finsbury Park, the Holloway Road, East Ham, Lewisham, Stockwell; all that planning wasted.

It's long been a fantasy of mine to take a group of visitors around London and completely spoof them with bogus information. The challenge being to find credible alternatives for key London landmarks and remain completely convincing throughout. Sadly, this dream has yet to be realised and I usually have to content myself with less ambitious pleasures; pouring pints of superstrong lager and vicious chicken jalfrezis down the necks of unsuspecting visiting Italian relatives and their famously limp digestive systems, that sort of thing.

I think this all dates back to a school trip to Rome when I was about fourteen. On one particular day, and for some unknown reason, the teacher leading our group was totally hacked-off with the whole deal. He spent the entire day taking us around the city and solidly lying to us about what we were seeing throughout. 'That's the Trevi Fountain built by Harry Trevi in 1926. On Tuesdays the locals fill it with milk', 'This is the Parthenon (actually the Pantheon). Famous for being the place where the first Toblerones were made back in AD420', 'These are the Spanish steps, so named because they were made and imported from Germany. The Pope walks his ceremonial labradors up and down here three times every morning'. And so on. Whilst not of consistent high quality, the bullshit was sustained and entirely unscripted. At the end of the day the teacher handed us over to a colleague, got drunk and refused to speak to us any more. He was, and many ways still is, my hero.

Anyway, onto Plan B for our visitors next week. Under strict supervision from Tracy, in a controlled environment, I came up with five rough, themed itineraries:

1. Southbank walk from Lambeth Palace to Butlers Wharf (probably the best and most feature-packed city walk on Earth, if you’re a tourist that is)
2. Westminster / Buck House / Hyde Park
3. West End - Oxford Street / Soho / Leicester Square / Covent Garden / Trafalgar Square
4. Primrose Hill / Regents Park / Camden
5. St Pauls / Tower of London / Leadenhall Market / Brick Lane / Petticoat Lane
   

Yawn. We'll barely scratch Lambeth and Hackney hardly gets a look in. And as for Woolwich, forget it.

The only concession Tracy is planning is to allow me to point out the occult symbolism behind the shape, height and alignment of various structures that we see. That's not going to sustain me for very long. Maybe I'll be able to sneak some bullshit in when she's not looking …

Top occult/ esoteric features of London landmarks that I've already mentioned elsewhere in the past include …

• Big Ben is 316ft high - the same width as the outer circle at Stone Henge
• Nelson's Column and The Monument are both 202ft high and are actually sundials
• St Pauls Cathedral is 365ft high, a replica of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and aligned 8 degrees off East-West so that it points to Temple Church
• The occult centre of London is in St George's Circus, Lambeth (OK, I haven’t got round to proving that one conclusively yet).
  

Come to think of it, I haven't worked on my thesis about the hidden geometry of London for ages. Maybe I'll spend part of the weekend doing some research i.e. drinking scotch and staring at aerial photos of London until I hallucinate. It's a lot of fun I can tell you.

Lavatorial

I woke up in the middle of a seriously disturbing dream earlier this morning.

A couple of nights ago we watched a dramatisation of Guantanamo interrogation techniques on C4. Of all the horrors portrayed, one scene bothered me the most. A chunky guard, who looked uncannily like Tom Sizemore, cuddled up to a blindfolded Muslim prisoner, stroked his neck, and whispered into his ear promising to come round and 'look after' him later on when everyone else was asleep.

Tom Sizemore's a big bloke.

Disregarding the fact that I have met several people in my life who possibly would enjoy a few days in Guantanamo, I was affected by the show and dreamed about it last night.

My dream version of the scene featured me as the prisoner, being subject to various tortures and really having no information to give to my interrogators. Towards the end of the dream, instead of Tom Sizemore I was visited by Russell Crowe. He's an ever bigger bloke. On the plus side, he didn't force me to listen to his poetry.

One thing's for sure. Judging by my reaction to the scenario I can be pretty sure that I have a lot of sympathy with innocent victims of torture and that, not even in the darkest crevice of my subconscious, do I relish the prospect of being gang-banged by Tom Sizemore and Russell Crowe. Actually, it didn't get that far in the dream. Maybe it's just the neck stroking I objected to.

This put me in a strange frame of mind for the rest of the day. Later on for some reason, I daydreamed about a world without me in it. The dream wasn't an updated, South London version of It's a Wonderful Life, showing how much worse off everyone around me would be if I hadn’t been born. No, it was more along the lines of how quickly everyone around me would adapt if I just dropped down dead right now. The imagery was quite vivid and left me with no illusions. I wasn't actually depressed by this vision of the World after Me. That's life. But I did snap out of it with a conviction that I really should make my mark somehow and leave some tangible reminder for those I leave behind. The people around me better hope that I write something interesting and get published at some point. Otherwise there's a very distinct possibility they'll be woken some day by the steady tap tap of me practicing my amateur tatooing and stencilling skills on exposed parts of their bodies.

But these thoughts of torture and oblivion aren’t what vexed me the most today. No.

In response to a masterful tactical first strike made by me at one point in the evening, the subject of, how can I put it delicately, the relative unpleasantness of individual wind-breaking episodes came up in conversation. The Other Half admitted to me, for the first time in ten years, that she can never be too sure of the olfactory outcome of any particular incident and therefore operates on a principle of maximum caution and sneaks off somewhere private to do the do. I, on the other hand, can rate my own impending rip snorters on a sliding scale of severity, and volume, from 1 to 5, with something like 90% accuracy. Unless I'm drunk, under which circumstances, all bets are off.

What I couldn't figure out was, even after carrying out a few experimental runs on my own later in the evening, was how did I know what was coming through? Is it a subconscious prediction based on what I have eaten over the previous 24 hours? I don’t think so, as sometimes there are sequences - Not So Bad - Quite Bad - Not So Bad - Hades On Earth. No, there's some other process at work and I can’t quite put my finger on it.

This level of fascination in the tooting process is a boy thing isn’t it? It's got to be something to do with the fact that we don’t make babies.

The long Good Wednesday

.

I try to avoid commenting about current news stories in this blog. This is down partly to a fear of me relapsing into rant mode, partly because that's what everyone else does and partly because you can’t really trust most news stories, so why bother gassing about on something that isn’t true anyway?

.
The mainstream media has reached a pretty low ebb these recent years. The sad truth is that if you take time to research pretty much any news story you'll find that it has been misrepresented in some way or another. Liberal or reactionary, somebody will have twisted it to suit their view. News has always been this way, sure, but it just seems to have got progressively worse in this country, particularly since the rise of the media-savvy New Labour party and 9/11 after that.

.
You just can’t trust what you're told any more. We've got the Internet and satellites, yet all this technology seems to be used for it to distribute bullshit. Perversely, the more advanced the technology becomes the more reliant we have to be on our own eyes and common sense to understand what's going on around us.

.
However, today was so absolutely brimming with top news stories that I can’t resist reproducing a couple. I particularly enjoyed the following:

.
The story about five illegal Iraqi immigrants found hiding in a truck in NW London that had just arrived from Europe:

.
"Police opened the trailer. We could see five smiling faces, wrapped up and huddled together for warmth. Police arrested and handcuffed them. They spoke no English, but an interpreter was not called." Police phoned immigration officials, said Mr Ward Thomas, but "it was about 4pm and they said they had no one to send.

.
"Instead the men's handcuffs were removed and they were given a phone number for Croydon immigration centre. They were told if they went there, they would be given £200 in vouchers for housing and food. They then walked off."
.

Now, I could start ranting about how strange it is that my government permits this kind of nonsense to take place, yet is imposing identity cards and imprisonment without trial on the nation because of the supposed terrorist threat, but I won't. Loads of people will already be doing that. I just can’t help thinking how bizarre this all must have been for the guys in the truck. How did they spend the rest of the evening? What happened to them in the end? I guess we'll never know. There's scope for some very dark comedy here (one for my notebook methinks).

.
Then there was the news that the UK government is going to spend £200m on 14.6m doses of antivirals to fight a possible bird flu pandemic. I was particularly tickled by that one as Mission Impossible II was on tele last night, featuring a plot about a gang of baddies who plan to start a virus outbreak and make millions by selling the antidote. Sadly, in real life, Tom Cruise is a short-arse and those cool IM Force face masks don't really exist, so I guess we'll all just have to pay up instead.

.
But the best story today was this one in today's copy of Metro:

.
Gun Threat Halts Work at Wembley

.
Builders stayed away from the Wembley Stadium site yesterday, following death threats against crane operators.

.
They were reacting to warnings from Russian Mafia bosses, who said snipers would open fire on building sites across the world if Australian company Multiplex failed to hand over £20million.

.
Three of the five 91m cranes remained motionless above the £750million development yesterday.

.
'I wouldn’t want to be up there. It's like having a target painted on you,' said one worker.

.
Police are monitoring the situation to 'minimise any potential risk'.

.

I wonder if anyone has thought to send a clipping to the IOC team assessing London's 2012 Olympic bid.

.
One swallow does not make Spring, and I take issue with the use of capital M in mafia when describing non Sicilian-based organised crime, but if this story is true then it is certainly exciting and long overdue news.

.
You see, London has always been desperately short of serious organised criminals.

.
If there's one thing that gives New York the edge over London in the myth-making stakes it's organised crime. Even as a child I was conscious of London's deficiencies in this regard. Growing up with Italian parents, living over their small inner-city grocery store, I couldn’t help but noticing that no mysterious men would visit my father once a week to collect protection money. Not once throughout my entire childhood, were I or my brother threatened when my father refused to 'pay those (non existent) bloodsuckers one penny more'. Other children at school would joke with me that I must 'know a few people' and I would have to shamefully admit that I didn't, and refer them to the Irish kids instead. No men in white suits with Brylcreamed moustaches would pace around the neighbourhood. No-one got their legs broken for breaking codes of silence. It was all so f*cking dull.

.
Admittedly, London has always been home to more than its fair or criminals but it's always been relatively small-time stuff and the not the kind of material suitable for epic, Coppola-scale story telling.

.
So desperate has London been to fill this yawning gap in its image that even small time gangland figures such as the Kray Twins have been elevated to a mythical status far beyond reality. Let's be honest here, even at its height, the Kray criminal empire consisted of something like a couple of pubs, a fish and chip shop and a dry cleaners. For most of their career the Krays live at home with their mum and the pair were responsible for, at most, the murder of two or three people. Christ, there are packs of sliced ham in my local convenience store that will kill more people than that.

.
There's a scene in the film The Krays where the twins give a visiting Mafia representative a picture of them with their mum. That just about sums up the sorry state of organised crime in London nicely.

.
There are many reasons why organised crime never really flourished in London. In the past, and with some notable exceptions, the British did a fairly good job of assimilating immigrants. The whole concept of an isolated, alien group within British society in which vice could thrive and a code of omerta be maintained never really took hold. Our beat police were, in comparison with other places, relatively diligent and corruption free.

.
Boring boring boring.

.
The Americans got Las Vegas and Goodfellas. We got Blackpool and Minder.
.

But times they are a changing. Our government is doing its bit by trying to establish huge casinos around the country and it is also working hard overseas, in co-operation with our America allies, to facilitate the production and importation of sex slaves and hard drugs (more of that another time). Entire industries, legal and illegal, from construction to people trafficking, are being consolidated and run along more professional lines by ambitious criminals with big plans.

.
That's much more like it. What with the War on Terror thing and all, life's just getting more like living in a movie every day. Tony Soprano eat your bloody heart out.
.

They're not like us ...

Cave City, Kentucky

.

Tracy' started talking about us going on a holiday for a week or two in April. The tricky part is deciding where. We've been kicking the idea of South America around some time now, including a fantasy of featuring a couple of days on Easter Island somehow, but we haven't visited the US for a little while and I'm getting twitchy.

.
I miss America

.
(What a difference a lower case M can make)

.
I particularly miss the Southern States of America.

.
Whilst friends and acquaintances spent their affluent pre-parenthood years skipping off to exotic long-haul destinations in the Far East or Latin America, I was grabbing and manufacturing any opportunity that I could to get over to the US. I was never disappointed by what I found; shocked, amused, scared and impressed but never disappointed.

.
Europeans foolishly think they understand the place. We are deluged with American TV and consumer products. We believe that we are familiar with what America is all about. And with that familiarity comes contempt.

.
We haven’t a bloody clue. Judging America by its California-centric media industry in no fairer than assuming everyone in Britland speaks like Hugh Grant or with that really awful part Australian, part Cockney, part Mancunian British accent that crops up in 'export grade' British film-making. Americans don’t understand us and we don’t understand them. But we think we do. It's worse for the British compared to other Europeans because we share, well kind of, a common language and that fools us into believing that Americans are somehow less foreign than they really are.

.
The Iraq War hasn’t helped of course. I detest the whole thing but never, not for a minute, do I blame the American people, not even those who support their country's current course of action. They have been misled and manipulated on a huge scale. Given that an entirely similar process has taken place in my own country, how could I start making judgements or condone others who do? Maybe if we kicked that tool Blair out of office in a couple of months time we could get on some kind of moral high horse but it's looking like he'll get in again, in spite of all the lies and all the blood. What kind of idiots are we?

.
There's a long essay in me just dying to get out; one about the generosity and cruelty of America, its high and its lows, the folly of assuming that the actions of America's rulers reflect the nature of its people, the baffling contradictions present through the country, the sheer culture shock that a few days driving around some of its more eccentric States can bring. However, it's late and all I'm really after is an excuse to post a picture I took in Kentucky a couple of years ago. I came across it on my hard drive earlier today. The rest can wait for another time …

.

Spreading the joy of music

.

I've just been through one of my periodic MP3 player spring cleaning exercises. This is a slightly trickier business than it might first seem.
.
On an organised trip to Egypt a few years back I managed to wire my MP3 player into the antiquated boom box that served as our boat's entertainment system then set-up a playlist that managed to satisfy both the Egyptian crew (Bob Marley) and our tour leader (Crowded House), even though I didn't share their tastes. The moral being that it always pays to keep some rubbish records on your player should you ever help with an impromptu disco somewhere in the 3rd World.

Anyway, I have traditionally used my periodic MP3 player tidy-ups as an excuse to mouth-off about iPods.

.

I don't really have an axe to grind over iPods themselve per se, though there are better players around. Hey, some of my best friends use iPods and I once shared a flat with someone who was part iPod. No, it's the manipulative iPod marketing that really gets my goat. Particularly the image of 'fashionable' people jiggling around, completely cocooned from what's going on around them. Now there's a narcissistic icon for the 21st century. Stick a hood on the f*ckers and portray them jerking off and they'd have no need to interact with anyone else at all.
.
Ooops, and there was me implying that I wasn't going to launch into iPods this time. Naughty me.
.
No. This evening's spring clean left me pondering upon some of the more outre tracks on my player. So here is my top five recommended list of bizarre cover versions that shouldn't work but actually do, in a strange 'bad is good' kind of way

1. Common People, Pulp - covered by William Shatner and Joe Jackson on supporting vocals
   .
2. Gin and Juice, Snoop Doggy Dog - covered by The Gourds, bluegrass style
   .
3. Hey Joe/ Purple Haze, Jimi Hendrix - covered by Marc Almond/ Soft Cell
   .
4. Stairway to Heaven, Led Zeppelin - covered by Rolf Harris
   .
5. Don't You Want Somebody to Love, The Jefferson Airplane - covered by Jim Carey.

Naturally, if anyone bumping into this blog has additional items to add to this list I will welcome their input but only if their contributions are of equal quality to the tracks listed above. In particular, I am very keen to re-experience the eerie thrill that passed through my body the first time I listened to the William Shatner / Joe Jackson collaboration or a very young, and very camp, Marc Almond singing 'Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?'. Drugs don't even start to get me there.
.
Next time: Stef's list of covers, mostly by Johnny Cash, that sound better than the original versions, then Stef's top twenty five cover versions of Walking in Memphis complete with pictures of his other half, but no Muriel, sitting by a piano in the Hollywood Cafe on a Friday
.

Gas Holders for Dummies

.

Isn't it funny when you find out that you know something that lots of other people don't, but you always thought was common knowledge, or when YOU discover something for the first time that everyone else has known about for years?

.

I only mention this because, over the last few weeks, three separate people have confessed to me that they don't know what gas holders are. And they didn't even know they were called gas holders and had to refer to them as 'those big, brown, knackered looking, round things in your picture/ over there'.

.

You don't know what gas holders are!!? You losers.

.

Gas holders are of tremendous cultural importance because they are an essential ingredient for any British photographer wishing to capture the very essence of gritty, industrialised decay. From album covers to movies, you just have to feature a rusty old gas holder.

.

Just in case you don't know what a gas holder is /does, yes yes I know you do really, let me explain:

1. Gas holders (aka gasometers by some oldies) are used for storing gas (easy bit)
2. They consist of a rusty old tank, open at the bottom and kept in whack by a skeletal metal frame
3. A deep fluid-filled trench is dug around the frame and the tank plopped into the trench
4. As the tank is filled with gas, the pressure of the gas makes the tank rise out of the ground
5. When the gas is used, the tank drops back into the trench

This is why, when I was a kid, I was frequently and seriously perplexed at the magical disappearance and reapparance of bloody enormous, apparently solid structures on a semi-regular basis. Joy of joys, I wasn't really brain damaged, it was actually happening.

.

And no, I don't know what stops them flying into the air like huge champagne corks when filled to capacity. Maybe they do sometimes.

.

Maybe UK-based Al Qaeda operatives are buying tins of baked beans, plastic tubing and funnels wholesale as I type. Quick! Arrest all brownish people in possession of flatulence-inducing foodstuffs and garden hoses before it's too late.

.

Sadly, all gas holders are due to be phased out of service by 2009, so get snapping boys and girls

.

PS Apologies for the rubbish diagram. I'm a little bit shaky from a bout of insomnia (my loss your gain) plus my digitiser's brown bread (some slang to go with the gas holder) and I'm reduced to drawing with my mouse on a mat pitted with cigarette burns. I can't see this particular little number making its way into any text books.

.

Feeling Lonely?

.

And the prize for the most professionally produced fundamentalist web site of the week goes to ...

.

http://www.sistani.org/html/eng/

.

Now I'm not going to sit here and type anything defamatory or slanderous about this site, oh no not me. Partly, because I'm not looking for any personalised fatwas but mostly because there's nothing in there any more deranged or extreme than my own government comes out with.

.

I can think of at least three good reasons to browse this site:

• To learn a few things about the way other cultures think (worthy, but dull)
  .
• If you're feeling lonely, hitting this link will probably result in two years of round the clock Special Branch / NSA surveillance; culminating in your detention without trial for an additional three or four years, based on you possessing street maps of London or Washington and a handful of Chuck Norris videos clearly obtained for terror training purposes
  .
• The Q&A section (highly recommended) offers some handy insights into what is and isn't lawful; including surprising judgements on chess, sodomy and plastic surgery and a not so surprising statement on the position on alcohol.
  .