Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Only decency in reading:

From an associated new release:
Rep. Jonsemil Barkentof of TexArkana introduced a bill today to apply
sensible standards of decency to all printed material. "Let's get this
law passed," he says, "and then let's see what we can do about all those
books!"

The new law would require all printed matter to avoid prurient and
indecent words according to local community standards. Authors,
book-owners and publishers would be fined $500,000 for a first offense,
and also forced to erase all the offending words from every available
copy. Asked whether digital words should be counted as printed material,
Rep. Barkentof said "We'll get to that next!" Experts estimate that a
typical local library might be fined upwards of $680 million as
soon as the law passes.

This reporter asked the Representative for a list of words likely to be ruled
offensive. Remarkably almost all of them have appeared in this newspaper. We would list those words here, but the newspaper seems to
have adopted a new policy today...

I'm being ridiculous of course, but not as ridiculous as I'd like.

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