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Announcement for the People of Great Britain
(This is loosely based on a joke that went viral after the 2000 election.)
Dear people of Great Britain,
In light of your inability to decide whether to stay in the European Union, and thus to govern yourselves, you are being annexed into the United States, effective immediately. Your new President, Donald Trump, will arrive shortly to claim his new domain (except Yorkshire, which is full of low-energy losers. Sad!). We understand he already owns half of Scotland.
To ease the transition, the following rules are being implemented:
1. The Queen and Prince Philip will be the two U.S. Senators from the new State of Great Britain. We are particularly excited for this, as compared to the current membership of the Senate, they will bring much-needed youth and vitality. Prince Charles will be invited to run for President in the Democratic primaries, where he will have a good chance of winning.
2. All British food is hereby banned. It is too bland, and this is for your own good. When we show you Mexican food, you will understand what we mean. The full English breakfast will be allowed, but we’re replacing that weird grilled tomato with a donut.
3. The Scottish independence movement will be suppressed. We don’t want them giving Texas any ideas.
4. Fox hunting will be re-legalized, but it will be done by rednecks instead of people dressed in funny outfits whose ancestors were heroes in the Napoleonic Wars. Schools in rural areas will be closed the first day of “fox season” and half their male students will be mysteriously “sick” for a week afterwards.
4a. Any excess beagles not needed for fox hunting will be used for Internet memes.
5. You will get to keep the BBC, but instead of paying a tax for it, BBC broadcasts will be interrupted every 20 minutes to peddle overpriced tote bags and the ability to feel good about yourself. Ken Burns assures us that he will start a documentary on Henry VIII’s wives as soon as he has a musical hook picked out for it.
6. Your soccer players will be taught how to play American football. Anyone caught flopping will be sent to a high school in Alabama for remediation. We expect that your fans will get the hang of tailgating quickly, and you will be pleased to know there is a team called the “Fighting Irish” that loses all its playoff games by 40 points. If all goes well, Oxford and Cambridge will be in the SEC by 2030.
6a. Please stop being racist at sporting events, or we’ll never be able to award you an NBA franchise.
6b. Speaking of basketball, we have something called “March Madness” that your bookies will love.
7. Words such as “honor”, “color”, “check”, and “program”, which you insist on misspelling, will have the excess vowels stripped from them. The vowels thus collected will be sent to Wales, which seems to have a dire shortage of them. If we need any more vowels for Wales, we can get them from Hawaii and Spanish-speaking immigrant communities.
8. Once you have been dealing with the United States government for about a month, you will understand why we do not want it in charge of our health care, and you will be ready for privatized (notice the “z”) health insurance. Don’t worry about those horror stories about medical bills driving people into bankruptcy; you can declare bankruptcy and still be President someday.
9. You will have to learn how to drive on the right side of the road. All roundabouts will be replaced with regular intersections, as God intended. We can’t wait to introduce you to the concept of turning right on red.
10. Speaking of God, being Americanized (again, notice the “z”) means you will have to become religious again. To help this along, we will send every televangelist in America to Great Britain. After a couple months of exposure to them, the Church of England will seem sensible by comparison and you’ll all rejoin it.
10a. If you still need convincing, we’ll just give you back all those C.S. Lewis books you gave us and forgot about.
11. To protect your borders, we will build a wall along the White Cliffs of Dover and make France pay for it.
12. Marvel Comics will be put in charge of rebooting all British fantasy literature. Aslan will get a wacky sidekick, Sauron will get a tragic backstory, and we’ll figure out some way to make the Internet debate whether Harry Potter is an allegory for libertarian politics. Due to political correctness, we might have to make Winnie the Pooh transgender.
13. You get the British Empire back! You can have military bases in half the world’s countries, but you’ll have to pretend to feel bad about it occasionally. Don’t worry, that won’t affect anything. We may, however, offer the Falkland Islands to Argentina if they can get Pope Francis to shut up about capitalism.
14. Since no country using the metric system has ever made it to the moon, we will re-impose the Imperial system on you. Really, letting the Europeans talk you into using metric was the first sign this whole European Union thing was going to get out of hand- you give Brussels 2.54 centimeters and they’ll take 1.6093 kilometers.
15. Please tell us who built Stonehenge. It’s been driving us crazy.
Published in Humor
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/mick-jagger-to-undergo-heart-surgery-replace-valve-in-heart
Love the Wales gag.
Good god that was hilarious
Yes, very droll, wot?
Why? They don’t need (and many clearly don’t want) representation, so let’s provide them the benefits they provided us in the 18th century. Though we’ll call them a Territory, not a Colony.
Need also to keep fish and chips. (I like the grilled tomato, but I’ll let it go if we can keep the rest of the full English breakfast.)
I rather like roundabouts. They can be efficient at moving traffic through, and the larger ones allow a second chance when you’ve missed your turn.
Since I think most British people have ignored the metric system anyway, I doubt that re-imposing the Imperial system will be a difficult.
…okay, that might be a fair trade. I would also impose the condition that they would still be called the Falkland Islands. None of this “Malvinas” garbage.
Ditto. Or as they say in Wales, Dwihŵxw.
“Don’t you mean “Maldives?”
Barack Obama
They don’t need Mexican food. They have Indian food, which is both spicier, tastier and healthier.
I cannot endorse this of course, but I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes reading it. Scout’s honour.
LOL this was great. My one tiny addition (which I considered adding but I thought that would be overstepping) would be to note when they change the S to a Z that it’s not called a “zed” but a “zee”
I hate to quibble with such a fine list of improvements to Old Blighty, but I must insist we keep the grilled tomato. Ditch the disturbing blood sausage, instead.
I’m stealing that.
There are so many idiosyncratic differences. The extra “u”s, e.g., color vs. colour. The parts of a car, trunk vs. boot, hood vs. bonnet. My favorite though are zebra crossings instead of just pedestrian crossing. How pedestrian this Americanism is. I look for a herd of zebra every time, but have never seen a single one.
1a. The new state shall be known as “Britain” rather than Great Britain. We don’t admit to any states being greater or lesser than any others. Except Arkansas. Arkansas could be known as “Sort of Okay Arkansas”.
7a . You’ll have to learn to pronounce “schedule” correctly
That’s why they need to keep it the Falklands.
Good, because if you ever prove black is white it’ll get you killed.
I’ve never seen a “plant” crossing either, kept looking to see what kind of plant it would be, but all I saw was big trucks.
Thank you @thelostdutchman. That was a very fun read! So were the comments.
And “aluminum.” Where the heck do they get off adding an extra “i”?
I like the whole idea of reverse colonization, though. This has potential.
And “Lieutenant”. There is no “f” in that word.
We don’t do this to the denizens of Taxachusetts, so why should we impose dialect restrictions on Britain? Let local colour be local colour.
I see what you did there…
Shortly after we were married, we took Mrs. Tabby’s first trip east of the Mississippi to Boston (we met and were married in California). This was 1982, so transactions were by people, not by electronic devices. After we were in the rental car, Mrs. Tabby told me that she did not understand a single word spoken by the clerk at the rental counter.
Being a native Californian, I hit upper New York state just in time for my Sr. year in high school. I dropped out before the end of the semester as I could not understand that Neeu Yaark accent.