Friday, August 25, 2006

Friday funday

The lighter side of local government.

For the birds
Councils are certainly into the business of love (as I posted last week) - what else is a Registry office for? But now they're doing it for the birds.

Gloucester City Council has been matchmaking for a lonely turkey.


Staff at the council-run Robinswood Hill Country Park and Rare Breeds Centre in Gloucester made an appeal after the female turkey became depressed because she had no companion. The search for a pal for Roger even made national newspapers and has led to another farm in the county coming forward with a young stag – the name for a male turkey. Now workers at the park are looking to arrange a date for the meeting and hope the two will hit it off.

I think I know a cure for Roger's empty feeling inside - it's called stuffing.

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Legislative time

You know they say that tasks expand to fill the allotted time. Well, I guess that's true for parliamentary tasks, too. I can't resist a story that makes the link between UK administration and my home state of Tennessee. And this one's a corker.

There's been a national legislative conference in Nashville over the past week and a representative from Scotland attended. He was struck more by the similarities than the differences.


But the one thing that did strike Kellet as weird is that a state like Tennessee, with a population a few hundred thousand people larger than Scotland, could get by with a part-time legislature. He couldn't imagine Scotland doing the same.


...er, wait a minute. Scotland didn't even have a "state level" legislature until 1999 - before that it made do without one for almost 300 years. But maybe they're making up for lost time - after all Tennesseans have been passing laws since 1796.

(Via the US Governing Blog)

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Have a great bank holiday weekend!

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