Nobody's Business

Food Fascists Gone Wild

In England, you'll apparently get in the trouble with the law if you sell angel cake or lady fingers — unless the ingredients include actual angel bits and women's digits, respectively.

Consider what happened to the baker who offered cutesy pink pastries in the shape of pigs' faces:

A baker has been forced to rename her novelty pig tarts — because they don't contain any pork. Val Temple, who runs Sgt Bun Bakery, Weymouth, says officers from Dorset's trading standards department also told her she must swap the name of robin tarts as they are not made from robins. And she claims she was instructed to rename her paradise slice because ... it's not from paradise.

Mrs Temple has made the novelty cakes in the shape of pigs and robins as a treat for her customers for years. She said: "It's a joke. The officers came in and said they had had a complaint and I must change the names because they didn't contain pork, robin or paradise." ...

Ivan Hancock, the county's trading standards manager, said: "The fact is that piece of food needs to be properly described so that the consumer can tell what it is."

I fear for the future of shepherd's pie (which contains no actual shepherds) and sticky buns (which contain no actual buns).

Actually, no matter what's in those tarts of Ms. Temple's, it's an outrage that she is allowed to bake anything in the shape of a piggie at all. Doesn't she know that such products may offend pious pig haters?

Honest, there ought to be a law.

I Laughed Till I Cried

If you stood to gain 40,000 Euros, would you photograph your own penis again and again at the insistence of an amorous Englishwoman you've never met?

Patrick would. Patrick is one of the many African 419 scammers who send unsolicited e-mails to try to bilk naive westerners out of their life's savings. Some people, hip to the ruse, love turning the tables on the shysters. When one of these avenging angels, Cap'n Pugwash (posing as 'Patricia Heliotrope Kearney') began exchanging mail messages with Patrick, endless hilarity ensued — at the swindler's expense, natch.

My only regret is that when 'Patricia' demanded e-mailed proof of Patrick's circumcision, he'd already had the procedure done, presumably at birth. How sweet it would have been if he'd actually snipped off his foreskin in desperate pursuit of his mark's money (40,000 clams buys a lot of painkillers and gauze!).

Other than that, the whole story is absolutely perfect. Patrick must have spent weeks if not months trying to get his grubby hands on the dough (time he couldn't spend on victimizing others), and all he has to show for it is a string of very funny webpages that mercilessly, er, expose him.

So three cheers for Cap'n Pugwash. Take a look — if your sense of humor is anything like mine, your jaw will hurt from all the laughing. And if you'd rather curl up with an equally hilarious book by Mike Berry, who is perhaps the world's number-one scambaiter, search no further.

Chicago School Punishes Thought Crime

Hard to know what to make of this without knowing exactly what the student wrote:

Told to express emotion for a creative-writing class, high school senior Allen Lee penned an essay so disturbing to his teacher, school administrators and police that he was charged with disorderly conduct, officials said Wednesday. Lee, 18, a straight-A student at Cary-Grove High School, was arrested Tuesday near his home and charged with the misdemeanor for an essay police described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location. ...

Some legal experts said the charge is troubling because it was over an essay that even police admit contained no direct threats against anyone at the school.

We'll see. Maybe I'm just getting into semantics here, but a straight-A's student who follows the Creative Writing teacher's instructions and quietly hands in an essay on the assigned topic — "communicating ideas and emotions through writing" — can hardly be said to be guilty of "disorderly conduct."

Whether he's a threat to anyone is not for me to say, but I'll venture a wild guess and say that the whole thing smacks of an idiotic overreaction.

And the charges against Lee wouldn't have anything to do with the fact he's Asian-American, would they — just like you know who?

Interesting parallel: the Virginia Tech shooter had creeped out his Creative Writing teacher, too (with good reason, as it turns out). Are writing teachers becoming the first line of defense against real and imagined mass murderers?

 [Thanks, Nicky and Erik!]

When Holly Kisses Bolly

Hold the gerbil jokes.

An Indian court issued an arrest warrant for Richard Gere today, accusing the Hollywood actor of kissing Shilpa Shetty, the Bollywood actress, in a manner that "transgressed all limits of vulgarity". ... Crowds in several Indian cities burned effigies of Gere, 57, after he embraced 31-year-old Shetty and planted several kisses on her cheek in front of thousands of onlookers at the Aids awareness function in the Indian capital New Delhi earlier this month.

If I'm laughing, it's not because I'm amused by Hindu fundamentalists throwing hissy fits over a playful kiss on a woman's cheek. It's just that I'm picturing U.S. State and Justice Department officials collapsing in convulsions of mirth after receiving an extradition order for Gere.

It could be the best document that the Smoking Gun ever lays its hands on.

More Indian crackdowns on affection here and here.

Maine Lawmakers to Voters: 'Drop Dead'

What do you do if you're a member of the political class and you're enamored with a tax that voters have decisively nixed in a referendum? No sweat — you bide your time for a while after the tax is democratically abolished, and then you simply bring it back.

That's what Maine lawmakers intend to do with the hated snack tax, which Mainers, after a multi-year fight, managed to repeal in April 2000. Local politicians' shameless efforts at reinstatement are just part of why I find this a baffling — and admittedly, infuriating — little episode.

Consider that there seems to be no reason for the tax other than Maine's budget squeeze. I mean, why tax snacks? Why not place a tax levy on — I don't know — rainwater? (Oops, I forgot, Maine legislators already did that.)

I'll tell you why politicians believe it's O.K. to tax snacks: because they know better what's good for you than you do. Because they believe they have the right to control what you put into your body. Because snack foods are supposedly 'unhealthy' (never mind, apparently, that even water, when not consumed in moderation, can wreck your health). In short, the snack tax is really a sin tax, and if our masters in Augusta can tax the hell out of tobacco, hey, why wouldn't they tax the hell out of apple strudels and Hershey bars (even after we've explicitly told them, in a democratic referendum, not to)?

Not that this brand of social engineering, while sure to fatten the state's coffers, is likely to reduce actual waistlines. When researchers at Texas State University looked for a positive correlation between Maine's snack tax and the populace's obesity rate, they came up empty.

[T]he findings did not provide any significant results for independent variables that could help identify and interpret a relationship between the snack tax and obesity rates for Maine.

In other words, if there was an effect, it could not be detected, much less measured. That's despite the fact that the snack tax had been in effect for almost a decade, and that with a population of more than a million, there should have been a wealth of data proving that the tax led to slimmer, healthier people.

If the snack tax returns, Mainers are sure to find themselves baffled by the same fiscal requirements that understandably confused them all through the 90's. Take a look at that picture. Can you guess which of these two products will again be subject to taxation? If the new law is like the old one, it's the product on the right. That's right: regular raisins won't be taxed, but yogurt-covered raisins will be. An English muffin won't be taxed either, but a blueberry muffin will be. Potatoes? Not taxed, but if they're going to be used to make potato chips, strike that, they're getting taxed after all.

Is it not a disservice to logic to reintroduce such a mockery of a law?

And another thing: Lawmakers ought to remind themselves that there is a lot of quiet poverty in rural Maine. As is the case with special taxes levied on another public-health bugaboo, fast food, a snack tax will disproportionately affect the people who are economically hanging on by their fingernails.

"No one in Maine should do one thing that would increase the cost of food, period," said Brenda Davis of the Crossroads Food Pantry in Old Town.

Seems elementary enough — just not for the tax-anything, totalitarian-minded obstructionists and saboteurs who somehow fancy themselves our 'representatives.'

Sign of the Times

I love absurd signs, especially ones that either reveal or make fun of officials' fondness for unnecessary rules. My all-time favorite remains this one, but the one pictured over on the right isn't half bad.

Any others? Send 'em my way, please, and I'll cacklingly share them with my vast audience.

U.K. Liberty Update

1. Those hidden cameras that monitor whether people put out their trash at the designated times? That was just the beginning. Now there are plainclothes, $60,000-a-year garbage cops to go along with the spy cams.

2. England has nothing resembling a Fourth Amendment. And so:

There are no fewer than 266 powers under which state officials can enter an individual's home, according to the centre-right thinktank, the Centre for Policy Studies. These range from the right of Revenue and Customs officers to enter homes with a writ to seize suspected smuggled goods to the power of entry available to Environment Department officials under the Bees Act 1980. The pamphlet entitled "Crossing the Threshold: 266 Ways the State Can Enter Your Home", says the bulk of the powers have been created by Parliament over the past two decades.

3. Planting a few flowers to beautify your village doesn't seem very dangerous, perhaps, but thankfully the Brits have officials to tell know-nothing citizens just how risky, irresponsible, illegal, and subversive the cultivation of such blooms may be:

To the residents of Everton in Nottinghamshire, the blooms added a splash of colour to an already picturesque corner of rural England. But to county council officials, they represented a health and safety risk which had to be licensed and regulated. The confrontation began when the village's parish council decided to plant flowerbeds by a main road. It was swiftly informed that a "licence to cultivate" was required.

Thankfully, after the dastardly flower lovers obtained the license, locals and tourists enjoyed the floral splendor happily ever after.

Just kidding.

Villagers were then told to submit a health and safety questionnaire and a risk assessment for carrying out the work. Once these had been granted, the plans had to be approved by Nottinghamshire county council's landscape team. The accident investigation department also had to be consulted in case the flower beds caused a motoring hazard. Even then, the display couldn't be planted, because utility companies needed to be formally consulted in case the planting caused them a problem. And, of course, public liability insurance — with cover for at least £5million — had to be taken out.

Thanks, Anita

Anita Bartholomew performed most excellently as a Nobody's Business guestblogger. I'm sending kudos and felicitations, and an open invitation to do it again.

Traveling With a Weapon

Yesterday, on my way home, I went through security at Virginia's Charlottesville airport. One of the TSA guys searched my Swiss Army backpack (a contraption that has as many pockets and velcro loops and zippers and compartments as you might expect from that brand), and pulled out what was conceivably the catch of the day: an X-Acto knife, which some people call a box cutter.

I blanched. The knife was indubitably mine: I recognized it from yards away by the piece of tape that kept the poorly constructed tool from falling apart. No idea what it was doing in my backpack, though. Apparently, my absent-mindedness is sometimes more worrisome than I allow myself to admit.

To the security officer's credit, he didn't make a big deal of it. Instead of having me hauled away in handcuffs to the plaintive pleading of my wife and the soul-piercing cries of my two poor children (one imagines), he asked me politely if I wanted to go back out and put the knife in my car. I declined, saying it was fine if he just threw it away, along with the illegal item that my wife had unthinkingly stashed in her carry-on luggage — a half-empty, six-ounce bottle of baby shampoo.

Thus relieved of a couple of supposedly high-risk but definitely low-value belongings, we proceeded to the gate, while I reminisced on the effectiveness of TSA personnel. Especially this tidbit: That utility knife had been in my backpack at least since the beginning of our trip, eight days earlier, through two domestic flights, wholly undetected.

Fits the pattern, of course.

Searching the Searchers

Google News, Google searches, Gmail — for millions of us, these are our morning newspaper, local library and post office. Even George W. claims to have used “the Google.”  But how is “the Google” using what you feed it?

Somebody decided to check out Google’s patent application and discovered this:

Google has the ability to trawl your e-mail and chat transcripts--in other words, Gmail and Google Talk--in order to figure out which blogs and blog posts are being talked about the most.

Here's what it says in the patent application: "References to the blog document by other sources may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. For example, content of e-mails or chat transcripts can contain URLs of blog documents. E-mail or chat discussions that include references to the blog document is [sic] a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document."

Now, the patent doesn’t say that any human at Google is checking you out, just shows that some human associated with the web behemoth could.