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Brit officials irked over "zombie emergency" parody

Posted at 2004-07-30 00:01:14 by Declan McCullagh
in Politech category "freespeech"

Read on for what some humorless Brits think about a parody of their Official Government Exceptionally Important And Definitely Not To Be Mocked Emergency Preparedness site.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: PreparingForEmergencies.co.uk
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 13:46:22 +0100
From: Thomas Scott <thomas@thomasscott.net>
To: declan@well.com

Hi Declan,

Possibly one for politech. As you may or may not know, the UK .gov is
sending out leaflets on what to do in an emergency (read: terrorist
attack, not that we want you to panic, although if you panicked a bit
and voted for us again it'd be nice) to every household in the UK. As
part of this, they registered www.preparingforemergencies.gov.uk .

Pity they forgot to register www.preparingforemergencies.co.uk , really.

I managed to grab it, and hastily cobbled together a parody. (The
original's under Crown Copyright, and the parody is so ridiculous as to
have no chance of misleading those looking for the genuine info. It
includes information on coping with a zombie attack, for crying out
loud.) I got a few pleasant emails, including one saying that the site
had done the rounds of the top emergency planning civil servants. And
then, not twelve hours after the original site went up, I got this one...

I considered giving up, but heck -- it's a parody, it's obviously a
parody, and I'm damned if I'm going to be strongarmed into taking it
down. As a concession, I added a conspicuous "this is a parody" notice
to the bottom of the home page.

-- Thomas Scott
thomas@thomasscott.net

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Preparing For Emergencies
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 12:15:49 +0100
From: [removed]@gov.uk
To: 'thomas@thomasscott.net' <thomas@thomasscott.net>

Dear Mr Scott,

Regarding your website, www.preparingforemergencies.co.uk

We run the Government website for the Preparing for Emergencies public
information campaign, on www.preparingforemergencies.gov.uk, and are
very concerned that the material on your site will confuse people about
the sensitive advice and information that we are giving to the public.

This is a very is serious campaign that should not be trivialised.  In
the interests of helping people to cope in the event of a crisis or a
disaster we would ask that you to take down the site, immediately, and
not put it up again in another guise.

Sincerely,

[removed]
www.preparingforemergencies.gov.uk

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