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Old 10-10-2008, 11:57 AM   #1
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A message from John Cleese to the citizens of the United States of America:

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 Kansas and Texas), which she does not fancy).

Your new prime minister, Gordon Brown, 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:

You should look up 'revocation' in the Oxford English Dictionary.

1. Then look up aluminium, and check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it.

2. The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as 'favour' 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').

3. 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 US English. We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter 'u' and the elimination of -ize. You will relearn your original national anthem, God Save The Queen.

4. July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday.

5. 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 adult enough to be independent. Guns should only be handled by adults. If you're not adult enough to sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist then you're not grown up enough to handle a gun.

6. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous than a vegetable peeler. A permit will be required if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.

7. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and this is for your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean.

8. All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will start driving on the left 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.

9. The Former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol (which you have been calling gasoline) -roughly $6/US gallon. Get used to it.

10. 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.

11. 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. Australian 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 British commonwealth - see what it did for them.

12. 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 McDowell attempt English dialogue in Four Weddings and a Funeral was an experience akin to having one's ears removed with a cheese grater.

13. 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). Don't try -the Australians and Kiwis will thrash you, like they regularly thrash us.

14. 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 that 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.

15. You must tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us mad.

16 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).

17. Daily Tea Time begins promptly at 4 pm with proper cups, never mugs, with high quality biscuits (cookies) and cakes; strawberries in season.

God save the Queen. Only He can.

John Cleese
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Old 10-10-2008, 12:08 PM   #2
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Old 10-10-2008, 05:00 PM   #3
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You can have the Senate and Congress, do with them what you want. Oh yea, and you can have my guns too.....After you pry them "from my cold dead hands"!
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Old 10-11-2008, 09:32 PM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by islandseeker View Post
Oh yea, and you can have my guns too.....After you pry them "from my cold dead hands"!
Well that can be arranged !!!
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Old 10-12-2008, 04:01 PM   #5
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Well, since an American invented aluminum...we will pronounce it however we like ;-)

Even so, Britain never gave-up ownership of the US. We were simply made Britains military branch. If anyone has any doubt, just take a look at who "owns" the Federal Reserve.
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Old 10-12-2008, 05:01 PM   #6
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Quote:
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Well, since an American invented aluminum...we will pronounce it however we like ;-)
Ouch guys, time to re-think your history as well as the pronunceation.

Scientists suspected than an unknown metal existed in alum as early as 1787, but they did not have a way to extract it until 1825. Hans Christian Oersted, a Danish chemist, was the first to produce tiny amounts of aluminium. Two years later, Friedrich Wöhler, a German chemist, developed a different way to obtain the metal. By 1845, he was able to produce samples large enough to determine some of aluminium's basic properties. Wöhler's method was improved in 1854 by Henri Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville, a French chemist.

It was not before 1889 that an American came on the scene when Charles Martin Hall patented an inexpensive way to produce the metal.

Regarding the pronunciation and spelling of the word, aluminium was coined in 1812 by Englishman Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) of "Davy Lamp" fame, from L. alumen "alum". Davy originally called it alumium (1808), then amended this to aluminum, which remains the U.S. word, but British editors in 1812 further amended it to aluminium, the modern preferred British form, to better harmonise with other element names (sodium, potassium, etc.).

Sorry again guys, not only is the invention not yours but neither is the word for it. On the other hand, on top of all the bad news from Wall Street, this hardly matters does it?
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Old 10-12-2008, 05:42 PM   #7
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Notice I said "Invented" ...discovering it (or predicting it's existence) and inventing the method for making it are hugely different. The arguement is the same for C60 fullerenes, Smalley vs. IBM.
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Old 10-12-2008, 05:52 PM   #8
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Well, the bit I left out was that Deville's process allowed for the commercial production of aluminium. As a result, the price of the metal dropped from around $1200 per kilogram in 1852 to around $40 per kilogram in 1859. Unfortunately, the metal remained too expensive to be widely used.

Charles Martin Hall invented an inexpensive method for the production of aluminium, which brought the metal into wide commercial use.

// Stephen
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Old 10-12-2008, 06:29 PM   #9
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Ah...and more

Wohler is generally credited with having isolated the metal in 1827, although an impure form was prepared by Oersted two years earlier. In 1807, Davy proposed the name aluminum for the metal, undiscovered at that time, and later agreed to change it to aluminium. Shortly thereafter, the name aluminium was adopted to conform with the "ium" ending of most elements, and this spelling is now in use elsewhere in the world.

Aluminium was also the accepted spelling in the U.S. until 1925, at which time the American Chemical Society officially decided to use the name aluminum thereafter in their publications.

The method of obtaining aluminum metal by the electrolysis of alumina dissolved in cryolite was discovered in 1886 by Hall in the U.S. and at about the same time by Heroult in France. Cryolite, a natural ore found in Greenland, is no longer widely used in commercial production, but has been replaced by an artificial mixture of sodium, aluminum, and calcium fluorides.

Bottomline is, it was Hall's process that enabled the production of aircraft which saved the ars of those Brits in WWII.

We will call it "aluminum"....yes?
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Old 10-12-2008, 06:37 PM   #10
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I say let's just call it potaato.
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Old 10-12-2008, 06:46 PM   #11
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Quote:
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I say let's just call it potaato.
Potaatium it is!

It is funny how this single subject on how to pronounce Aluminum becomes the center of discussion whenever American engineers get together with Brits for beers...it is almost guaranteed to come-up. All in fun of course!
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Old 10-12-2008, 06:48 PM   #12
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Call it whatever you like. In Swedish we use the British spelling but frequently call it lättmetal which translates to "light metal"

Aye // Stephen
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Old 10-13-2008, 04:32 AM   #13
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It was an Englishman who discovered aluminum, and he named it aluminum. However, Britain at the time had a policy of naming new metals with "ium" at the end, and thus aluminum became aluminium.

silly.
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