Fascinating story!

We don't want you in our country unless you marry for LUV!

Oh boy. I'm fundamentally and noisily a marriage-secularist; I am very angry when marrieds get special treatment or advantage. I'd rather it didn't exist as a status (ie as something separate from 'just' cohabiting), but at the very least it should be de-toothed.

Given that, I'm entirely in favour of people who decide to marry for financial advantage rather than being "genuinely in love".[*] If we insist on affording special privileges to people who recite a few stupid phrases in front of a registrar, then as many people as possible should be included in this scam. That means house-sharing platonic friends of same or differing sexes as well as non-heterosexuals.

In principle I ought to extend this to poly groupings too.

[*] I've been known to do reasonably daft things for reasons of said emotion (in its #3 meaning: fraternal, sororal or monastic), so I have to be very quiet in mocking it for a while. Because them's the rules.

Give it the old mitochondrial heave.

Man offers museum his own head

Oh, that silly Martian sand.

Arctic explorers hurrah!

My fingers seem the opposite way round every time I look at them. I'd say pretty even.

Nergye requests more mousies.

Woo... twirly.

I would like to call for the words "call for"/"called for" to be banned from journalism. It's a hideous, sloppy phrase. If an official has requested, demanded, set out a fatwa or done any other verbing, I want to know which it is!

Anyone can 'call for' something to happen. I just have, technically publically. If I am reading a news story that claims to be accurate and tells me someone significant has asked for, suggested or ordered something, I want to know what authority the asker has to make the request and how strong the request was. How else can we judge how significant the story is? (I mean, she might be minister of the interior, but in what capacity was she speaking and does she have the clout to make it happen? And, especially, how is she going to follow up? Talk's cheap.)

If, as I suspect, in most cases the answer is "no authority and we think he was just having a whinge", then it should not be included in the news piece. If the entire piece was based on this someone having a whinge outside their jurisdiction/area of expertise, send the writer back to hack school.

I would also like to call for religious officials to stop calling for stupid things in public.