[GCFL-discuss] UK chooses 'most ludicrous laws'

[Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List]

These are funny Lance, but in my usual way, I'm going to get serious on a
couple of them.

Cromwell would naturally have banned eating mincemeat pies on Christmas
Day, because as a devout Puritan, he opposed celebrating the day as a
holiday at all. The Puritans and Separatists who settled Massachusetts
kept laws on the books for decades forbidding observance of Christmas in
any way. The holiday was considered papist idolatry.

Driving cattle through the streets of London was an important thing to
prohibit by law, because it used to be common, and it made a major
contribution to the unsanitary nature of life in the city. (The
population of London grew only because migration from rural areas
exceeded the gap between deaths and live births -- there were far more
deaths each year.) A related note: although air pollution from
automobiles has become a serious health hazard, autos came along on a
mass scale just in time to phase out a much more obnoxious and infective
health hazard: the droppings from hundreds, or thousands, of horses all
over the streets of every city. Can you imagine how many feet deep that
would be today?

It is obvious why France made it illegal to name a pig Napoleon. After
all, there were plenty of royalists who would gladly have done so, being
partial to the Bourbon kings rather than the republican emperors. This
reminds me of an Ethiopian immigrant who I rented a roome from, who kept
expecting the FBI to come crashing in the doors when I made disparaging
remarks about the president. I finally said, in American, telling jokes
about the president is our national past-time. It doesn't matter what
party he belongs to, what his program is, we crack jokes about the
president for as long as he is in office. (A healthier approach -- Diane
Sawyer had a conversation about that with Hussein al-Takriti while he was
still President of Iraq.)

Siarlys