hum

In one year
some people spend
what others earn
in a lifetime

Which would you prefer, a piece of chocolate or a book?

It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament.

It is an act of treason to place a postage stamp bearing the British king or queen’s image upside-down.

It is illegal for a woman to be topless in Liverpool except as a clerk in a tropical fish store.

Eating mince pies on Christmas Day is banned.

If someone knocks on your door in Scotland and requires the use of your toilet, you are required to let them enter.

In the UK a pregnant woman can legally relieve herself anywhere she wants, including in a policeman’s helmet.

The head of any dead whale found on the British coast automatically becomes the property of the King, and the tail of the Queen.

It is illegal not to tell the tax man anything you do not want him to know, but legal not to tell him information you do not mind him knowing.

It is illegal to enter the Houses of Parliament wearing a suit of armour.

It is legal to murder a Scotsman within the ancient city walls of York, but only if he is carrying a bow and arrow.

In Ohio, it is illegal to get a fish drunk.

In Indonesia, the penalty for masturbation is decapitation.

A male doctor in Bahrain can only examine the genitals of a woman in the reflection of a mirror.

In Switzerland, a man may not relieve himself standing up after 10pm.

It is illegal to be blindfolded while driving a vehicle in Alabama.

In Florida, unmarried women who parachute on a Sunday could be jailed.

Women in Vermont must obtain written permission from their husbands to wear false teeth.

In Milan, it is a legal requirement to smile at all times, except during funerals or hospital visits.

In France, it is illegal to name a pig Napoleon.

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere.

Charles Dickens
Bleak House