Next time you’re stuck in a London hotel, with snow falling and few options for getting out on the town, order a little entertainment to your room. It will make you authentically British … if you take the latest survey by IllicitEncounter.com at face value. The website, which helps married people find a little action on the side, revealed that its traffic increased on Wednesday morning, as a winter storm tore through Hampshire, Berkshire and the West Country. To help people get a little secret sex, IllicitEncounters.com has even had to bring on temp staffers.
According to Sara Hartley, a spokesperson fro the site, “In light of these figures, I’d be interested to see how much work those ‘working from home’ have actually done.” She continues, “Perhaps these wives and husbands have just been waiting for a time when they could join, away from the eyes of their work colleagues and, most importantly, their partners…”
IllicitEncounters.com has more than 350,000 members in Britain, so if you’re lonely in London on a wintry day, maybe you should skip that walk by Buckingham Palace and enjoy a little takeout.
The visitors traveling the longest distances to Britain will find the phones shut off. Citing the high costs of operation, the British military has shut down its UFO hotline. So, not only will aliens not be welcomed personally, the messages reported via their crop circles will go unreported. This is the end of a half-century commitment in the United Kingdom to helping the nutty find an audience.
According to the Ministry of Defense, ditching the UFO office will translate to an annual savings of around $73,000 a year, money much better spent supporting the 9,500 soldiers the country has deployed to Afghanistan. No jobs were lost as a result of this decision, and the military isn’t taking a position on the existence of UFOs or alien life. More than 12,000 sightings were reported to the UFO office, some of which were accompanied by pictures drawn by those lucky enough to witness the arrival of little green men. None was interpreted as a threat to national security.
Many Britons are upset about the closing of the UFO hotline, which was accompanied by the deactivation of the UFO e-mail account. Roy Lake, founder of the London UFO Studies group, calls this “a threat to national security.” He tells The Associated Press, “We take this quite seriously. We know that sometimes things can be explained as natural phenomena but there could be that one thing that’s not. I think the government knows damn well what’s going on up there and they’re covering it up.”
Of course, any life form that could find its way to Earth would probably master Twitter pretty quickly, so the shuttering of the British UFO office probably isn’t a big deal. I can see it now: “Hey #Earth. Here from Mars. @Gadling reco place 2 stay? #herefromanotherplanet”
A spokesman for the Ministry of Defense counters Lake’s worries: “None of the thousands of UFO sightings reported over the years have ever provided substantiated proof of the existence of extraterrestrials.” He continued, “There is no defense value in investigating UFO reports.”
Nonetheless, Nick Pope sees a concern. He has helped the British military investigate UFOs and believes that the decision is “a great shame.” Pope says the program encouraged pilots and other experts to tip off the authorities to suspicious activity, saying, “That’s one thing we learned in the 9/11 attacks, the threat of incoming aircraft with transponders turned off.” Meanwhile, he seems to overlook the fact that these risks can be addressed through many other existing channels of communication.
More than a thousand Britons can’t be wrong, right? An online survey of 1,402 of them, by Zoover.co.uk, found France to be the least hospitable vacation destination. But, to be fair, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia weren’t included among the choices. So, it really wasn’t that bad for the folks across the channel. The Brits found that Thailand was the top spot, picking up 25 percent of the vote, with the United States good for 11 percent.
Chrit Blonden, a marketing executive at Zoover, told Reuters, “When you go to France they are not inviting you there, you are not feeling invited when you go to their country,” explaining why the country only picked up 2 percent of the vote in Britain. He continued, “I was in Thailand myself. When you go there you are treated very well…they show a real interest in you.”
The French Tourism Development Agency, of course, had a rejoinder at hand: 78 million tourists from around the world stopped in France last year. Eleven million of them were British. More than 350,000 Brits own a house in France. So, yeah, it looks like there can’t be too much beef.
But, the question the agency forgot to ask all those Brits: are they happy?
In anticipation of the Christmas Day release of the new Sherlock Holmes movie (starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law), Visit Britain has developed a microsite to help guide fans to the London locations used in the film. The site also offers possible itineraries for a Holmes-themed tour of London.
The list of London stops on the Holmes tour includes St. Paul’s Cathedral, Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, Freemason’s Hall, Brompton Cemetery, and the Sherlock Holmes Museum. The site also suggests a drink at the Sherlock Holmes Pub (decorated with Holmes memorabilia) or walking tour, “In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes”, offered by London Walks.
For those venturing out of London, there are additional filming locations in Manchester. Cheshire, Kent, Leeds and Suffolk in England, plus spots in Scotland and Wales.
Jessica Watson likes to travel, but she approaches the concept a bit differently. The 16-year-old Australian just left Sydney Harbor today, and she wants to take on the world. Her goal is to sail 23,600 miles alone — through some of the toughest waters in the world — and become the youngest person in history to do so.
The trek has kicked off some debate in Australia as to whether Watson’s parents are nuts for letting her attempt this (not a position that’s hard to imagine).The family claims that the kid is plenty salty and knows her way around a ship, and she’ll have radio and e-mail access. She’ll be blogging, too. In the Netherlands, a pair parents disagreed on whether to let their 13-year-old daughter, Laura Dekker, attempt the same feat. A Dutch court put Dekker in the custody of childcare authorities while the parents fought it out.
For Watson, just getting her pink, 34-foot yacht to the starting line has been difficult. Last week, she collided with a cargo ship while sailing to Sydney to make a few last preparations for her journey. And, strong winds last week prompted the sailor to push back her start date.
There are two ways to categorize these around-the-world trips: assisted and unassisted. Watson is gunning for the latter. The youngest person to do this so far is Jesse Martin, also an Australian, who was 18 when he circled the world in 1999. To qualify as “unassisted,’ the vessel can’t take any new supplies, materials or equipment on board once the trip starts. Repairs can be made, but they must use stuff already on the yacht.
The youngest circumnavigating sailor is Mike Perham, from Britain, who went 28,000 miles in nine months, but his trip counts as “assisted,” because he stopped for repairs. Zac Sunderland, from California, was a few months older than Perham when he completed the trip in 13 months, but his was also assisted.