My Pa disappeared somewhere in the wilds of 1975, when I was just fourteen years old. He was the Ambassador to 1975, but back home in 1898, in New Jerusalem, Utah, they all thought he was Ambassador to France. When he disappeared, Mama and I came back through the triple-bolted door that led from our apt in 1975 to our horsebarn in 1898. We returned to the dusty streets of New Jerusalem, and I had to keep on reminding myself that I was supposed to have been in France, and 'polly-voo' for my chums, and tell whoppers about the Eiffel Tower and the fancy bread and the snails and frogs we'd eaten. I was born in New Jerusalem, and raised there till I was ten. Then, one summer's day, my Pa sat me on his knee and told me we'd be going away for a while, that he had a new job. 'But what about the store?' I said, scandalised. My Pa's wonderful store, the only General Store in town not run by the Saints, was my second home. I'd spent my whole life crawling and then walking on the dusty wooden floors, checking stock and unpacking crates with waybills from exotic places like Salt Lake City and even San Francisco. Pa looked uncomfortable. 'Mr Johnstone is buying it.' My mouth dropped. James H Johnstone was as dandified a city-slicker as you'd ever hope to meet. He'd blown into town on the weekly Zephyr Speedball, and skinny Tommy Benson had hauled his three huge steamer trunks to the cowboy hotel. He'd tipped Tommy two dollars, in Wells-Fargo notes, and later, in the empty lot behind the smithy, all the kids in New Jerusalem had gathered 'round Tommy to goggle at the small fortune in queer, never-seen bills. 'Pa, no!' I said, without thinking. I knew that if my chums ordered their fathers around like that, they'd get a whipping, but my Pa almost never whipped me. where was I born? Pick the correct answer from the following options: A. France B. not enough information C. China D. New jerusalem
D

If you turned on the TV towards the end of 2002 you could have been forgiven for thinking that Britain had gone absolutely horseshit mental. Every week, it seemed, another pretty young girl from a nice family, who was happy and popular and always did well at school, was being kidnapped or murdered by what the Sun newspaper cheerfully termed 'evil paedo scum'. Naming and shaming was as popular a feature in the Murdoch press as Page Three girls and discounted holidays to Butlin's. Of course you can't blame parents for wanting to keep their children safe; that's pretty much the job description of a parent. And, on the face of it, the tabloids were doing a public service in warning us about the paedophile menace lurking in our midst. The problem came when it turned out that a huge number of these concerned tabloid-reading parents were also absolute fucking morons. For every story of an actual sex offender being driven from their house by a baying mob there was one like that of Dr Yvette Cloete, a doctor at the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, South Wales, who returned home from work to find that a group of 'concerned parents' had daubed the word 'paedo' on her front door in bright red paint. Dr Cloete was a consultant paediatrician. Easy mistake. If you're an absolute fucking moron. And so it was that one hung-over morning, after reading yet another story about vigilantes who had threatened to stone Maxine Carr, the girlfriend of Soham killer Ian Huntley, to death during her high-profile trial for perverting the course of justice, I decided to set up a website parodying this collective national madness. The result of two or three hours of hung-over labour was thinkofthechildren.co.uk, a spoof campaign site which claimed to offer a handy online guide for crazy vigilantes of all stripes to co-ordinate their crazy vigilante efforts. Although there are a few parts of the site I'm still a bit proud of, the majority of it was, I freely admit, satire of the lowest order. What color paint did the vandals use? Pick the correct answer from the following options: A. Red B. Blue C. not enough information D. Yellow
A

Following up from my recent blog post explaining why dietary supplements offer few benefits for most people, new research has found that people who take a mineral supplement actually consume more minerals from their normal diet than non-supplement users. The notion of the 'worried well' is certainly alive and kicking. Vitamin and mineral supplements are big business. Reported figures in Australia suggest that 27% of women and 15% of men take some form of supplement with vitamin C, B complex, multivitamins, vitamin E and calcium all being popular choices. Contrary to the rationale for needing supplements in the first place, people who take supplements are more likely to be healthier than people who don't take supplements. Supplement users also tend to be leaner, smoke less, exercise more, and eat more fruit and vegetables. While it may seem obvious that people who take supplements likely consume more nutrients from their regular diet to start with, this hasn't been well studied in large population groups. Using data from a nationally representative government health survey, researchers from the United States looked at the mineral intake from food and supplements of over 8000 men and women between 2003 and 2006. The results were clear cut: people taking mineral supplements were consuming more minerals from their normal diet than those who didn't take supplements. The observation was even stronger in women than in men. The eight most popular mineral supplements taken were calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc, phosphorus, copper, potassium and selenium. Proving that it is possible to have too much of a good thing, supplement users were more likely to be exceeding the recommended upper level of intake for magnesium, zinc, iron and calcium. For someone who believes that they are reasonably healthy and are conscious of what they eat most of the time, taking a mineral supplement 'just in case' offers little to no benefit. What are the minerals that supplement users are likely to be exceeding the upper limit? Pick the correct answer from the following options: A. magnesium, zinc, iron, and calcium B. selenium, calcium, iron, copper C. not enough information D. calcium, iron, phosphorus, copper
A