Fresh from the file marked ‘Haven’t you twats got something better to do?’ comes this latest sorry tale of bureaucratic stupidity…

Name warning for dragon sausages

A food company has been warned it could face legal action over the name of its Welsh Dragon Sausages.

Trading standards said Black Mountains Smokery in Powys must also include the type of meat used in the sausages – pork – to meet labelling regulations.

Okay, fair play to the company in question for getting in the obvious wise-ase response:

Jon Carthew said: “I don’t think any of our customers actually believe that we use dragon meat in our sausages.”

But then, a little later in the article we find the reasoning behind why Trading Standards are getting all uppity…

A spokesman for Powys Council said: “The product Welsh Dragon Sausage was not sufficiently precise to inform a purchaser of the true nature of the food.

“I don’t think anyone would imagine that dragon meat was being used but we would not want vegetarians to buy the sausages believing they were meat free.”

You fucking what..?

Look, I’ve been a vegetarian for more than 20 years and in that time, and entirely without the assistance of Trading Standards, I’ve worked out for myself a basic rule of thumb that happily ensures that I don’t accidentally buy the wrong kind of sausages…

Rule 1. Don’t buy your sausages from a fucking butcher’s shop.

Call me ‘Mr Observant’ if you like, but I’ve always found that the big fuck-off slabs of animal carcass all over the place are a bit of giveaway when it comes to figuring out that a butcher’s shop is not the place to go for fucking vegetarian sausages, never mind the fact that your local health food shop is hardly the kind of place that you’d expect to find a big ruddy-faced bloke wearing a blood-stained apron standing behind the counter.

And even better, we get this…

The warning letter from Powys council’s trading standards department, who analysed the sausages, read: “The public analyst has stated that the name Welsh Dragon Sausage is not sufficiently precise to inform a purchaser of the true nature of the food.”

Look, it’s a fucking sausage you half-wit. Even us vegetarians understand perfectly well that traditional sausages, as sold by butchers, come in two basic varieties; Pork or Beef, which is precisely why vegetarian sausages tend to be labelled either ‘vegetarian’ or ‘meat-free’.

You might be an illiterate fuckwit, I’m not.

My only quibble with Jon Carthew’s comments in all this is his suggestion that this is ‘bureacracy gone mad’ and I disagree with him only because his statement suggests that at some time in the dim and distant past bureacracy had something more than a casual acquaintance with sanity.

Else, Tim Worstall is musing briefly on the question of whether a cheap method of refining shale oil would make the Peak Oil hypothesis disappear, to which I can only suggest that were someone to find a way to harness the power of bureaucratic stupidity then not only could we forget about Peak Oil but we would rapidly find our energy demands satisfied by an inexhaustible supply based on a infinitely renewable source.