h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Does anyone in the UK know who has a superinjunction to stop us finding out what is front page news in the US?

I.e. do you know who the "famous married couple" are, one of whom apparently cheated on the other by having a threesome?

And if you do know, could you furnish us with a name, as this farce seems unsustainable in the age of Twitter.

Still Standing..is one clue I was given..

Oh and you also provided the other alraedy..

already

This might help:

http://www.citypages.com/news/how-they-met-2014-6773780

I'm curious - when the last round of superinjunction nonsense was going down, Eddie Mair opened that day's edition of PM by just saying the words "Ryan Giggs" about five times in a row. AFTER that had happened, I posted on (the then BBC-owned) h2g2 something along the lines of "Righty ho, it's now out that it's Ryan Giggs."... and the moderators hid it.

Obviously I went bonkers at them and pointed out that THE BBC was EVEN AS TYPED broadcasting the news, and after a little while sanity prevailed. It was quite funny.

However - this ain't the BBC any more. What's the script? I'm guessing since Not Panicking Ltd. is a UK company, the injunction applies and I can't mention the names of the people involved or the American print publication that has broken the story, ludicrous and pointless as that restriction obviously is, given that anyone interested can find that information out from Twitter in about 30 seconds.

If I have to look on Twitter to find that information, I'm dubious about the necessity of knowing it. I take it that Frank and Amelia are not the couple in question?

In any event, we Yanks were on the other side of that one-way window in the late 1970s, when Iranian students pieced back together the shredded documents form the American Embassy and published them in much of the world, with the notable exception of the U.S.

As an aside, I've read that you can find more information about the American espionage presence by contacting the Russian embassy than you can by going through the American government channels.

It's a funny old world we live in, isn't it?

I think it's gonna be a long long time before we realise that these people actually want everyone to know about it. Better to have it as front page news tomorrow rather than some page 10 gossip today.

Are they using reverse psychology, then? Making it hard to get the information just makes the public more determined to get it.

Use a proxy server and check out National Enquirer.

However, I find myself in agreement with Ian Hyslop when he pointed out that when judges are making up privacy laws on the hoof and erring on the side of personal privacy against press freedom, it's fine when it's just celebrities shagging each other but those precedents they're setting can be used to stop important stuff coming out that actually matters.

I don't understand why this particular item is important. I really don't.

It's certainly not important to me. If they're celebrities, then I probably won't have heard of them.

I think you'll have heard of this one. There are "celebrities" and then there are celebrities.

If you appear on any show where the title includes the word "celebrity", then you need scare quotes around the word "celebrity" when it's used to describe you.

For example (and note, the examples I'm about to give have absolutely nothing to do with the subject of this conversation, by design):

- Spencer Matthews is a "celebrity". (I wiki'd the last cast of "I'm a Celebrity", and picked one of the nine names I didn't recognise.

- Paul McCartney is a celebrity. No scare quotes.

You've heard of Paul McCartney, right, Gnomon?

You're right - I've heard of Paul McCartney, but not heard of Spencer Matthews.

Paul McCartney had a three-in-a-bed, but only if you count legs.

My daughters used to play a game where you had to drop as many references to Queen songs into the conversation as possible without anyone noticing. It became a sort of family game. Daniel my brother was particularly good at it.

Oh very good

This is getting more and more absurd.

I hope you don't mind.

For messing the entire establishment around like this, would an apology really be that difficult?