"Preparing for Emergencies" parody site

Mark Frauenfelder 8:44 am Tue Jul 27, 2004

Thomas Scott sez: 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 a rather different one from the UK .gov …

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. Link

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