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NOTICE OF REVOCATION OF INDEPENDENCE

To the citizens of the United States of America: In the light of your failure to elect a President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today. Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchial duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories. Except Utah, which she does not fancy. Your new Prime Minister (The rt. hon. Tony Blair, MP for the 97.85% of you who have until now been unaware that there is a world outside your borders) will appoint a minister for America without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire will 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: 1. You should look up "revocation" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then look up "aluminum." Check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it. Generally, you should raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. Look up "vocabulary." Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises such as "like" and "you know" is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. Look up "interspersed." 2. There is no such thing as "US English." We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. 3. You should learn to distinguish the English and Australian accents. It really isn't that hard. 4. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as the good guys. 5. You should relearn your original national anthem, "God Save The Queen," but only after fully carrying out task 1. We would not want you to get confused and give up half way through. 6. You should stop playing American "football." There is only one kind of football. What you refer to as American "football" is not a very good game. The 2.15% of you who are aware that there is a world outside your borders may have noticed that no one else plays "American" football. You will no longer be allowed to play it, and should instead play proper football. Initially, it would be best if you played with the girls. It is a difficult game. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which is similar to American "football," but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armor (like nancies). We are hoping to get together at least a US rugby sevens side by 2005. 7. You should declare war on Quebec and France, using nuclear weapons if they give you any merde. The 98.85% of you who were not aware that there is a world outside your borders should count yourselves lucky. The Russians have never been the bad guys. "Merde" is French for "shit." 8. July 4th is no longer a public holiday. November 8th will be a new national holiday, but only in England. It will be called "Indecisive Day." 9. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and it is for your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean. 10. Please tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us crazy. Thank you for your cooperation.

Proposed Rule Change: A revision to the rules of golf is being sought which will replace the traditional call of "fore." Once a player has hit an errant shot he will be allowed to call "Gore" while the ball is still in flight. He can then replace the ball in the same spot and hit it again. The player can do this until he is satisfied that the ball is going where he intended to hit it in the first place. This will cause the time of play to be extended until such time the player can claim the hole. This revision is causing some consternation to the PGA but proponents say it is only fair. A recent test of this new rule was recently played out in an exclusive club in Palm Beach Fla. and the first hole only took 7 days to complete!

Imagine That

A history professor from Uppsala Universitet in Sweden called to tell me about an article she had read in which a Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should study this event (the U.S. Presidential election) closely for it shows that election fraud is not only a third world phenomena. 1. Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister, and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret police (CIA). 2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some old colonial holdover (electoral college) from the nation's pre-democracy past. 3. Imagine that the self-declared winner's "victory" turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother! 4. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate. 5. Imagine that members of that nation's most despised caste, fearing for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy. 6. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother. 7. Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and that the self-declared winner's 'lead' was only 327 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines' margin of error. 8. Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district. 9. Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor of a major province, had the worst human rights record of any province in his nation and actually led the nation in executions. 10. Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation. None of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared winner's will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere."