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Competition No 3926
Set by George Cowley, 10 April
Peter Wilby wrote of the "commentariat who express opinions that have no basis in knowledge". We were curious to see some examples of their outpourings.
Report by Ms de Meaner
Hmm. Harder than you thought. £20 to the winners. Ian Birchall also gets the Tesco vouchers for his "Milton and Keynes". Oh, and well done, Peter Thursfield, a winner at his first attempt.
Now it's strikes everywhere. Strikes at home and across the North Sea in France. Here it's civil servants working for local councils who want their pensions earlier. Don't they understand economics? Milton and Keynes must be turning in their graves. In the past 50 years we've had amazing technological change; millions of jobs are now done by machines. Isn't it obvious we're all going to have to work longer?
In France they seem to think they're still back in the 17th century, when Robespierre went to the guillotine, with thousands of students in towns from Bordeaux to Sorbonne marching on the streets. I thought this was the land of reason, the homeland of Spinoza and Kant. Don't they understand simple logic? If it's easier to sack people, more people will be in work. But President Berlusconi backs off. Typical French - just like Napoleon at the Battle of Euston. What they all forget is that this is the age of globalisation. They must be laughing at us in Kyoto and all those other Chinese cities.
Ian Birchall
"Any moment now we can give you the result of this election. Expect no surprises, as widespread intimidation at the voting stations will ensure the re-election of the president. Election rigging in this part of the world is quite normal. The surprise is that it is still so badly done, with open booths and overstuffed ballot boxes, instead of simply invalidating anti-regime votes.
"Victory to the Buddhist Democracy Party (BDP) candidate is just announced - no surprise in a pious rural economy. Reports say many voters were actually monks disguised as state police, which suggests widespread divine intervention.
"Of course that was a false translation of the official announcement. In the local language each noun has 16 cases, the ablative and the negative cases being almost indistinguishable. As predicted, the victory in this election goes to the Bourgeois Diehard Party (BDP) candidate, amid reports of widespread corruption. Inevitably, there will be a recount and a protracted investigation. But the outcome has become clearer now that the formalities of an election are over.
"This is Kermit Cruikshank returning you to the studio."
Peter Thursfield
With their blend of hip youth appeal and rigorously fashioned, clear-sighted policies, the Liberal Democrats are poised to take a major step forward at the next election, by which time, incidentally, neither Blair nor Brown will be prime minister. The hubbub about Europe will by that time have died away, as will the fashionable false alarm about global warming, actually no more than the product of defective science. By then, too, Iraq will have become the settled
democracy and popular holiday destination
which, beneath the cloud of rhetoric and propaganda, it is fast moving towards.
Till then, we should all relax and enjoy the hula-hoop revival, which is tipped to oust skateboarding as the urban teenies' favourite pastime. From Hoxton to Brixton, being "in the groove" means swivelling our hips, not hurtling through space with the near-certainty of a fatal encounter with concrete. The medical profession has welcomed the new craze, which will spare precious health resources, but I fear that the economic fallout is behind a recent spate of suicides among skateboard manufacturers.
G M Davis
No 3929 Set by Valerie Yule
Children of celebrities are sometimes given publicity-oriented (trans. embarrassing) names. We want a profile/obituary/interview of just such a person in later life (age 40 onwards) whose career choices have differed markedly from that of his/her parents.
Max 175 words by 11 May. E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk
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