A MESSAGE FROM THE QUEEN
A MESSAGE FROM THE QUEEN
To the citizens of the United States of America from Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
"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 North Dakota,and Utah, which she does not fancy).
Our new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, 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:
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1. The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as 'colour,' 'favour,' 'labour' 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').
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2. 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 U.S. English. We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take into account the reinstated letter 'u' and the elimination of '-ize.'
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3. July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday.
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4. 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 quite ready to be independent. Guns should only be used for shooting grouse. If you can't sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist, then you're not ready to shoot grouse.
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5. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous than a vegetable peeler. Although a permit will be required if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.
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6. All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will start driving on the left side 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.
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7. The former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol (which you have been calling gasoline) of roughly $10/US gallon. Get used to it.
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8. 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.
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9. 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 the British Commonwealth - see what it did for them. American brands will be referred to as Near-Frozen Gnat's Urine, so that all can be sold without risk of further confusion.
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10. 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 Macdowell attempt English dialect in Four Weddings and a Funeral was an experience akin to having one's ears removed with a cheese grater.
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11. 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).
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12. 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 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.
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13. You must tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us mad.
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14. 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).
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15. Daily Tea Time begins promptly at 4 p.m. with proper cups, with saucers, and never mugs, with high quality biscuits (cookies) and cakes; plus strawberries (with cream) when in season.God Save Greater Canada
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Someone needs to inform Her Majesty that American baseball has already been played in the British Commonwealth of Nations - the Toronto Blue Jays defeated the best America has to offer (as the Brits and Canadians did in 1812) twice to achieve the Crown of Baseball Success - the World Series.
this should be an interesting one for you,
good luck....
It was - I enjoyed it - thought it was funny.
It is funny but if Liz thinks I'm giving up my beer and fireworks on the 4th of July she is sadly mistaken
My beer is imported from Mexico.
Can't stand Bud.
I hate Bud, too. I'm a Miller Lite fan (don't give me any grief, ANYBODY) but I do like Corona a lot, it just messes up my stomach terribly the next day
Budweiser sucks!
Miller is my favorite beer.
My all time favorite is a beer made by a small brewery in St Mary's, PA. It's called Straub.
I could probably have some shipped to Arkansas but I want bottles not cans
I take that back. My favorite now is Leinenkuegel Summer Shandy. It's a lager (?) with a dash of lemon. I like to mix that up with their grapefruit shandy. First one, then the other
You wouldn't get grief around here, it is on of the more popular choices.
Either see a cooler of Bud light or a cooler of Miller Lite.
It's the atmosphere.
Guinness here.
Lol Guinness isn't a beer, it's a meal
LOL. I always preferred Heinekins,
LOL
As a member of the [removed] Circle, you’re up on all these laws. Will we have to throw away all the toothbrushes, too?
Why? If you don't have any, you can have my old ones.
By the way, my Q.C. stands for Queen's Counsel, not Queen's Circle.
I thought that you were a Queen's Solicitor.
I was appointed "One of Her Majesty's Counsel, Learned in the Law", known as a "Queen's Counsel", enabling me to add the initials "Q.C." after my name.
Isn't that roughly the Canadian equivalent of a Deputy US Attorney or does it have the same significance as an advanced degree?
I don't think it has a US equivalent. It's not a degree, it's an honour given for extreme competence. What bothers me is that when we graduate from law school we get a Bachelor of Laws degree (LL.B), but two more years of study can earn a Master of Laws degree (LL.M.) but I don't know anyone who ever went on to get a doctorate. It is necessary to have a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree in order to enter law school. What makes me shake my head is that American lawyers, without going anywhere near the requirements for a doctorate degree, get a D.Juris or J.D. degree with only the minimal stuidy similar to our LL.B. degree, yet can appear to have doctorates in law. And then they get more respect by people who don't know that they're just any ordinary lawyer.
Spelling error? Seriously?
I'm confused too. I didn't flag it.
I'm in deep shit if we're about to be graded on our spelling and grammar
I think we're all in trouble for this one.
Hold on now, the word soccer comes from Britain to begin with. Blame the sports pages in 19th century British newspapers. To save space, they shortened association football and rugby football to soccer and rugger, respectively.
It's their own fault that we say soccer. It's their word!
I'm surprised the Queen doesn't also want us to say maths instead of math, sport instead of sports, and series instead of season for TV shows.
Funny stuff, Buzz.
I'm pretty ok with metric, roundabouts, and putting the "u" back in "colour".
You can pry my ketchup for my fries out of my cold, dead fingers.
British men, in particular, make excellent movie villains. Think Alan Rickman or Jeremy Irons. Trust me, this is a compliment. Americans love a good villain. The only American actor I can think of who can compare is Christopher Walken.
As soon as I saw that HRH alluded to British actors being depicted as villians, Alan Rckman as Hans Gruber in Die Hard and the Sheriff of Nottingham in one of the Robin Hood movies was pictured in my mind. I always used vinegar on my fries until I was influenced by the American habit.
I have always spelled it that way.
Here they have started putting roundabouts at a couple of intersections.
There are a few in shopping plazas near here. When my son and I go to Williamsburg, we go through some there, again in shopping plazas. Colonial influence, maybe?
What is odd is they put them at intersections for on and off ramps for the interstate.
We also have a fairly new diamond intersection. Freaks some people out going to the other side of the road.
I've got some more follow-up commentary to the list as well.
1. Her Royal Highness forgot to mention that you had removed the second "l" from words like travelling, cancelling, etc.
6. Driving on the left and encountering a roundabout that joins a 4-lane divided highway to other roads is quite a challenge. When I drove in England, I had to go round one three times before I could figure it out where to get off to continue along my journey.
As well, Canada changed to metric AFTER I had finished school which led to my endless confusion between the two systems.
9. I'm sure most Americans would agree that Canadian beer is superior to American beer.
10. There are actually lots of good English actors who act in Hollywood movies and are good guys - Cary Grant, Anthony Hopkins, Michael Caine, Colin Firth, etc.
15. What about "Crumpets and Tea"? There is an English-style private boys school in Toronto called Upper Canada College, and their cheer was "Crumpets and tea, crumpets and tea. We're the boys from U.C.C. Oxford, pip!"
The only roundabout I had trouble with was in the middle of Cork, Ireland. Actually, my sis was driving, and I was attempting to navigate. But there were something like 8 exits and 4 or 5 lanes, and you couldn't tell what lane corresponded with an exit until you'd already passed it. I think we circled around about 3 times. Got off at the wrong exit, came back to the same roundabout, and circled 3 more times. It was enough to make us dizzy.
Driving on the left was not so bad, but the roundabout....!!! I also almost got creamed in London when I started to J-walk across the road in the middle of a block to go to Harridges, looked to my left as I had always done in my life when I almost got wiped out by a car coming from my right.
"Look kids, there's Big Ben", "look kids, there's Big Ben"
comes to mind. Were you drivin a Chevy ? As you Chased that exit,'stage right
I can't remember what we were driving. We did stay in a really old castle with a very "antique" bathroom, but not so antique that it had chamber pots.
That was such a fun movie.
BOTH WAYS, the correct method is to look both ways. Come on Buzz, I learned that in the 1st Grade.
Don't you have to take a separate driving test in order to be licensed in countries with left hand driving? I know that we did when I was in Japan back in the 70's. I passed on that opportunity and stuck to military vehicles which didn't require a separate license; not so much because of the test requirement but because I had seen what an insane asylum experience the traffic in Tokyo was. It makes Los Angeles or Chicago expressways look like country roads.
Oh, and, pertaining to the photo of the Queen, that lady looks like she gets around pretty well for a 95 year old.
If you have a valid US driver's license, you can drive in the UK and Ireland.
i was down the US Virgin Islands, St John to be exact, and about 3 am my first day there, i had a head on with a local. I may, have had a few, but thats not why, as i was doing well all day driving on the OPPOSITE side of the road, but had missed my turn and was lost with a passed out navigation officer riding shotgun. It was pitch dark and extremely steep hills where we were. i turned around and instinctively went to right side of the road, the first curve i encountered, actually had a Native driving on his Right side of the road with which caused his bumper to explode. I didn;t know if the laws for US Virginislands carried over to the states, so i offered my jousting opponent a $1,ooo from my pocket. They weren't buying it, but of course they weren't, i was attempting to buy their vehicles repair costs. So we haggled for a few minutes and after my $2,000.00 dollar offer was still not enough, i said call the authorities. It wound upfor the best, as i had rented my Jeeep with my Platinum Am Ex Business card, and it wound up costing me $0 dollars as opposed to possibly over two G's and we had NO hassels from Police as we were tourists spending MONEY, and it happens often there, as many are not accostomed to driving on the left side of the road.
I;m off to work for a change, but there is much more to my Virgin Island AdventureS that i'd like to share, but maybe without blowin up Buzz's seed.
.
Moral of the story for my detractors is,
being on the Left, isn't always Right, just as being on the Right is often very Wrong
We actually didn't have any accidents related to driving on the left. I think most people would be surprised how easily they can adapt to that. But we had paid for a GPS in our rental car in Ireland, because our smart phones wouldn't have service there. And that GPS was worthless. We turned it off, because it got us lost so many times.
In Scotland, the group I was with had the bright idea that one car would have the GPS, and the other would follow. We got separated right out of the airport after landing in Edinburgh, and I swore that never again would I be the one stuck with no navigator except my mom, who can't find her way out of a paper bag, and no GPS except the one in the car ahead of me, driven by my sister like a bat out of hell.
It was easy to get an International Drivers Licence in Toronto in the early 1970s when we went to England and Wales for Christmas holidays.
I forgot to head up my seed with a request not to get political - LOL
Tell your Virgin Islands story on the Discovery group, with photos.
ig,
If you have any pictures, definitely bring them to the Thur/Fri photography/art article. I think that they would be very interesting.
i will try and find them
The year after I moved to The Town of Warrenton in No Virginia, they put in a roundabout in the busiest intersection in town, and it created the worst traffic chaos you can imagine. The intersection is where two major highways cross in the middle of town. Rush hour in the morning and in the evening was nothing but a traffic nightmare. There were always fender benders from people trying to move to one side or the other in order to exit the roundabout, and that led to traffic backed up for miles in all directions.
Two years later they took out the roundabout and put in signal lights which ended the nightmares and was a far better traffic control system that allowed the traffic to flow much smoother during the high traffic times.
I hated the roundabout and drove out of my way to a less congested intersection.
If it was two highways crossing each other a more efficient system might have been a cloverleaf, but that would have taken up a lot more space than a stoplight-controlled intersection.
There are two large housing projects just outside Warrenton in three directions, so in the morning people from those housing projects used the hwys to get to work, and then coming home from work. So there was a lot of traffic in all directions.
If it had been a smaller intersection with less traffic the roundabout would likely have worked well. But, they made the mistake of not counting the amount of traffic and the traffic jams caused buy multiple accidents when they decided to put in the roundabout in.
Like many small towns in Virginia, Warrenton didn't generate a lot of traffic on its own. But, the large housing projects nearby and large corporations and business operations just outside of town that generated the majority of the traffic.
Some of the more congested roundabouts in Scotland are controlled by traffic lights, which helps give you time to figure out which lane you need and get in it.
I still think roundabouts are a better form of traffic control than traffic lights. I really seldom saw a non-moving traffic jam in large cities of the type we have here in the States during rush hour, since roundabouts are designed to keep cars moving.
One of the reasons I won't drive in China...
Is there a reason for that kind of chaos like no marked roads or traffic lights/signs?
It's a stock photo - actually I've never seen that happen here. The traffic lights are great - perfectly timed for traffic conditions, a countdown to calm impatience, pedestrian safety.
I bet that's a photo from India. I've seen video of Indian traffic and it's bad....
A couple of years back, somebody posted pictures and video of an intersection like that one but in Saigon. Worst traffic jam I've ever seen and I've driven in both LA and Chicago where the traffic is horrendous. Also in Detroit where the traffic isn't that thick but where the system of one way streets is really inefficient.
That intersection is much better with traffic lights.
Last fall, I did map checking for the Census and after I got my area done they sent me to Warrenton and up in the hills around there, very nice area
12. 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.
This is a list of countries where baseball is not only played, but played well enough to have sent teams to play in the world baseball tournament known as the World Baseball Classic.
The United States
Mexico
The Dominican Republic
Cuba
Venezuela
Colombia
Brazil
Panama
Spain
Italy
The Netherlands
Israel
South Africa
China
South Korea
Japan
The Phillipines
Australia
Spoil Sport!!! LOL
The Blue Jays don't count? The Montreal Expos never made the grade.
of roughly $10/US gallon
Actually dear Queen, it's $10/US liter - not gallon.
That's another spelling difference - litre, not liter. centre, not center, etc. I'm constantly being redlined on the computer for my correct British spelling.
I know it seems taboo but I think we should have switched to metric a long time ago.
Definitely we should have. The math is soooo much easier. Metric just makes more sense.
The only thing I can think is football players might get confused.
Yards are close enough to meters. They can adapt. Track and field did.
It is! I hate converting from pound-foot to the metric system. And I know how to covert grams into kilograms...something every pot head college student learns quickly
The Queen might be OK, but I don't care for Prince Charles. I have read Prince Harry might move here,
I don't pay much attention to the royals but I'm pretty sure I read he already has
At first I thought he was going to move to Canada, but I believe they have now settled in Los Angeles.
Nor do I. I hope he abdicates in favour of William when the time comes. His grand-uncle abdicated because of a desired marriage. Princess Diana deserved a lot better, and I'm sure most Brits feel the same way as I do about that.