BS: Britain Repossessing States

Subject: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Charley Noble
Date: 05 Feb 08 - 12:21 PM

This press advisory may have graced these pages a few years ago but it's been released and updated again:

Britain is Repossessing the U.S.A.

A Message from John Cleese

To the citizens of the United States of America:

In light of your failure to nominate competent candidates for President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths, and territories (except Kansas, which she does not fancy).

Your new prime minister, Gordon Brown, will appoint a governor for America without the need for further elections.

Congress and the Senate will be disbanded.

A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed.

To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:

You should look up "revocation" in the Oxford English Dictionary.

1. Then look up aluminium, and check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it.

2. The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as 'favour' and 'neighbour.' Likewise, you will learn to spell 'doughnut' without skipping half the letters, and the suffix -ize will be replaced by the suffix -ise.

Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. (look up 'vocabulary').

3. Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises such as "like" and "you know" is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. There is no such thing as US English. We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell- checker will be adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter 'u' and the elimination of -ize. You will relearn your original national anthem, "God Save The Queen."
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4. July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday.

5. You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns, lawyers, or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and therapists shows that you're not adult enough to be independent.

Guns should only be handled by adults. If you're not adult enough to sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist then you're not grown up enough to handle a gun.

6. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous than a vegetable peeler. A permit will be required if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.

7. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and this is for your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean.

8. All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will start driving on the left with immediate effect. At the same time, you will go metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of conversion tables. Both roundabouts and metrication will help you understand the British sense of humour.

9. The Former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol (which you have been calling gasoline)-roughly $6/US gallon. Get used to it.

10. You will learn to make real chips. Those things you call French fries are not real chips, and those things you insist on calling potato chips are properly called crisps. Real chips are thick cut, fried in animal fat, and dressed not with catsup but with vinegar.

11. The cold tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actually beer at all. Henceforth, only proper British Bitter will be referred to as beer, and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be referred to as Lager.

South African beer is also acceptable as they are pound for pound the greatest sporting Nation on earth and it can only be due to the beer. They are also part of British Commonwealth - see what it did for them.

12. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as good guys. Hollywood will also be required to cast English actors to play English characters.

Watching Andie McDowell attempt English dialogue in Four Weddings and a Funeral was an experience akin to having one's ears removed with a cheese grater.

13. You will cease playing American football. There is only one kind of proper football; you call it soccer. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which has some similarities to American football, but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like a bunch of nancies). Don't try Rugby - the South Africans and Kiwis will thrash you, like they regularly thrash us.

14. Further, you will stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to host an event called the World Series for a game which is not played outside of America. Since only 2.1% of you are aware that there is a world beyond your borders, your error is understandable. You will learn cricket, and we will let you face the South Africans first to take the sting out of their deliveries.

15. You must tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us mad.

16. An internal revenue agent (i.e. tax collector) from Her Majesty's Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all monies due (backdated to 1776).

17. Daily Tea Time begins promptly at 4 pm with proper cups, never mugs, with high quality biscuits (cookies) and cakes; strawberries in season.

God save the Queen.   

Only He can.

John Cleese

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Peace
Date: 05 Feb 08 - 12:24 PM

That is hilarious.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 05 Feb 08 - 12:29 PM

But do we want it?

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Wesley S
Date: 05 Feb 08 - 12:37 PM

I suggest we start with throwing all of the Monty Python DVD's into Boston harbor so they can see how we feel about this. We can call it the Boston DVD Party.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: katlaughing
Date: 05 Feb 08 - 12:44 PM

As long as it's not all of your BVDs!

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Bill D
Date: 05 Feb 08 - 12:44 PM

The only sane part of that is about 'getting rid of the guns'...and you expect us to do that BEFORE you try to implement the rest of those ideas? *grin*

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 05 Feb 08 - 12:47 PM

Would the whole of the US then be called New England?

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 05 Feb 08 - 01:01 PM

Sorry, but if anyone's going to repossess the US, it will be the Chinese. They hold the lien.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 05 Feb 08 - 01:16 PM

It's hard to take the country with Prince Charles seriously.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 05 Feb 08 - 01:27 PM

Listen Leenia, he's the most sensible of the lot of them.
G

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: David C. Carter
Date: 05 Feb 08 - 01:44 PM

How dare ye insult our National Treasure!

Just because he wears big ears,wears a skirt sometimes,talks to his plants a lot and happens to be shacked up with something that looks like she could win the Kentucky Derby....without a horse.....I mean,steady on!

Why do you think I left the country in the first place!
Although I must add that I er........agree with you.

David
Exiled in the wastes of Paris.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: RangerSteve
Date: 05 Feb 08 - 02:17 PM

We eliminated all the needless letters in donut, and the Brits have a problem with this. Yet they can't pronounce "Worcester" without leaving off a good part of it.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Charley Noble
Date: 05 Feb 08 - 04:37 PM

Paying all those back taxes really scares me. I could adapt to the weird spelling, which side of the road to drive on, and all the new holidays.

Charley Noble

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: JennieG
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 01:25 AM

Charley - with your name (Noble) you would be a shoe-in to join the British aristocracy.

Cheers
JennieG - I'm sure I'm related to royalty many generations ago, like about 378

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: TheSnail
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 04:28 AM

And learn to spell ARSE properly.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: GUEST,clockwatcher
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 08:31 AM

And write the dates the right way round.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Midchuck
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 08:51 AM

I believe violent crime, including gun crimes, in Britain has overtaken and passed the US level.

We need to send the British a shipment of "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" bumper stickers. But they'll probably miss the point.

Peter

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Charley Noble
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 08:52 AM

I suppose we'd also have to adapt to Greenwich Mean Time as well.

I'm rather fond of our less "mean" Eastern Standard Time. I like to see the sun in the morning.

Would this mean we'd have to eat (and learn to love) marmite and other such disgusting foods? I would much prefer our own varmint recipes, including those for road-kill.

Cheerily,
Charley Noble

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 09:01 AM

Lunch Charlie
G

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Grab
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 09:49 AM

Mr Cleese is making a fundamental mistake here - he's assuming we *want* them back. And that we could handle them if we did. Jeez, we've only just got our own radical Christian fuckwits to stop full-scale warfare, and there's only a few tens of thousand of them. How on earth would we cope with a few tens of million Bible-bashing inbreds? The mind boggles.

Mind you, we could always declare open season on them and send the fox-hunting yahoo-henrys over. Like a scorpion fighting a snake, it'd be a bonus for us whoever came out on top.

Graham.

(Removes tongue from cheek... ;-)

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 10:09 AM

I believe violent crime, including gun crimes, in Britain has overtaken and passed the US level.

Nowhere near it, I'm afraid. Guns were involved in 566 serious or fatal injuries in the UK in 2006/7, down on 645 the previous year. Scale that up to the US poulation figure and that'd be around 3,400.

I haven't got the figures for 2006/7 in the USA, but in 1999 there were 28,874 gun related fatalities, and in 2000 there were 75,685 non-fatal gunshot injuries.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: George Papavgeris
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 10:18 AM

Learning to use knife AND fork concurrently should become mandatory (that means you gotta do it. You gotta.)
False enthusiasm and bonhommie (along the lines of "missing you already") is only a mutation, so it should be banned and replaced by the UK original ("we must get together some time").
"Yo" is not a word. If it were, it would describe something that goes down and doesn't come up again.
And a "hoe" is a gardening tool and totally inappropriate in describing any human.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 10:20 AM

A country who elected Dubya Bush AKA Alfred E Newman as its president fer fucks sake, can't take the piss out of Prince [ wingnut ] Charles.

eric

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 11:35 AM

Quid me anxius sum?

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Trevor Thomas
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 12:22 PM

Gun crime, over a year, yes it's between 5 and 6 hundred in a country of over 60 million. It's still six hundred too many, but then some people will insist on having guns.

I'm no statistician, but I think there is a correlation between having a gun and shooting someone with it, and not having a gun and not shooting someone.

If guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns - er yes, that is the whole point, I think. That's why so few people get shot in the UK.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 12:38 PM

Did me sums wrong - scaled up to the USA population that 566 serious or fatal injuries involving guns would be equivalent to about 2,800.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: M.Ted
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 01:21 PM

It has been my observation that some in the UK avoid dealing with their crime problems by pointing to ours in the US--this recent BBC Article on Guns shows that you do have a serious and growing problem with gun crimes.

It also shows that the murder rate in England and Wales, though signficantly less than in the US, is actually about the highest in Europe (save the former Soviet states, who kill each other at 7-10 times the rate that we do).

Wake up and smell the coffee.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: The Walrus
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 01:23 PM

Trevor Thomas,

"...If guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns - er yes, that is the whole point, I think. That's why so few people get shot in the UK..."

In which case, why has gun crime in the UK gone up since the handgun ban of 1997?

The solution should be come down hard on gun using criminals and their suppliers, not legal gun owners/shooters.

Walrus

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 02:18 PM

"In which case, why has gun crime in the UK gone up since the handgun ban of 1997?"

Switch brain on Walrus - it's nothing to do with the 'handgun ban', that's a much-over-used red herring. It has much more to do with the way our borders were opened to Eastern Europeans. That's where many of the illegal weapons are coming from, now it's so easy to get in. That and the growth of the use of guns by drug-gangs etc.

But McGrath's right - you're still far, far less likely to be shot, or even see a gun, in the UK than in the USA.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 02:46 PM

The point of the statistics wasn't to say the there's anything to be proud of in having 466 shootings or so a year in the UK, but to correct Midchuck's misapprehension: "I believe violent crime, including gun crimes, in Britain has overtaken and passed the US level."

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: M.Ted
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 02:51 PM

You're actually more likely to be the victim of a crime at home in the UK than if you come here, and that includes gun-related crimes.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 02:59 PM

And the moon is made of green cheese.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: MarkS
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 04:23 PM

Forget about guns for the moment.

Does this mean we will need to learn about Morris Dancing?

Might trigger a brand new revolution.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 04:27 PM

No Black Face Molly Dancing mate.
G.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Rowan
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 05:19 PM

Charley's been conned!
It couldn't have been written by John Cleese; all the internal evidence suggests it was a put up job by a South African expat in London.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: M.Ted
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 05:19 PM

Your illustrious countrymen are rarely murdered here in the US, Kevin--even your Morris dancers are fairly safe. Most are killed right there in your own country, and often by either a friend or relative. You do have the highest murder rate in Western Europe, after all. Coffee time.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 05:37 PM

Still somewhat cheesy, I'm afraid:

Murder rate (per 100,000 people)

United States 8.40
Canada 5.45
Denmark 5.17
France 4.60
Portugal 4.50
Australia 4.48
Germany 4.20
Belgium 2.80
Spain 2.28
Switzerland 2.25
Italy 2.18
Norway 1.99
United Kingdom 1.97
Austria 1.80
Greece 1.76
Sweden 1.73
Japan 1.20
Ireland 0.96
Finland 0.70

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Mrrzy
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 06:03 PM

This really is hilarious. And it's gotten so serious about guns! Why isn't anybody defending therapy (*BG*)?!?

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 06:06 PM

We can't afford it!

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: TheSnail
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 06:11 PM

MarkS

Does this mean we will need to learn about Morris Dancing?

It's already there - http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/morris/ba.html

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: M.Ted
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 06:27 PM

Your own beloved BBC, in the link above, says you nay, Kevin. It claims the UK has 2.48 per 100k, Denmark at .098, the US slightly less than 6--you've quoted me numbers that are attributed to no particular source, and have been posted by someone only identified as "Paul" to a discussion forum--Funny, I seem to remember that you recently said that the BBC was a good source for information, or at least a better one than some guy named Paul.

A little tip for all of you: wear a long, dark, loose fitting coat when ever you go out. Shooters won't be able to target your heart. As to the head, well, folk musicians are a hard-headed lot, so no worries;-)

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 06:33 PM

One of the best morris sides I ever saw dance was a soi-disant street-dyke morris side from San Francisco. Some of the dancers left the dance area by cartwheels, and their underwear was, well, a bit like a scotsman's.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Bob Pacquin
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 08:49 PM

You can hobble together a passable defense for guns, and even Morris dancing, but therapy is pretty much indefensible;->

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: MarkS
Date: 06 Feb 08 - 09:37 PM

Snail - say it ain't so. At least many of the websites are down.

Just have to take up Change Ringing I guess. Anybody for a stirring round of Kent Trebel Bob?

(Just gotta stop reading Dorothy Sayers mysteries!)

Of course if you really want to introduce competitive sport, there is always lawn mower racing. Been described as the definitive British sport - a totally pointless activity usually taking place in the worst possible weather.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: alanabit
Date: 07 Feb 08 - 03:33 PM

No - that's cricket!

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: RangerSteve
Date: 07 Feb 08 - 05:50 PM

My local grocery store has a British section. Everytime I go down that aisle, I stop to look at the food and wonder what it is.   I might as well ask here. What is treacle, and what do you do with it? How about sponge pudding. And is the Heinz brand sponge pudding any good? And who was it that thought that pink bubble gum was a suitable flavor for soda pop?

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Donuel
Date: 07 Feb 08 - 06:14 PM

It is for our own good.

We indeed are now used to be treated like children, justWe have been treating everyone else like children.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Peace
Date: 07 Feb 08 - 06:22 PM

Treacle is corn syrup if I recall correctly.

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: TRUBRIT
Date: 07 Feb 08 - 06:26 PM

Treacle is light corn syrup - not dark like molasses. Tinned pudding is no good in any country.......but I defy you to do better than a good old fashioned (made from SCRATCH) treacle pudding or treacle tart served with thick double cream.....yum..

Subject: RE: BS: Britain Repossessing States
From: Donuel
Date: 07 Feb 08 - 08:53 PM

Opps... We are indeed treated like children already...just look at our TV programing.


The earlier post was interrupted by a fire alarm.