A series dedicated to explaining Britain's manufactured celebrities to an American audience.

Accompany me, if you will, on a little thought experiment: let us imagine that a band of intrepid time travelers, or intelligent extra-terrestrials should that be more plausible in your Dawkinsian worldview, have happened upon contemporary Britain, and are puzzling out its customs.

The inhabitants of these cold, wet, verdant isles—they would report in their alienish (or distant-era) idiom—are in apparently helpless thrall to an orange-hued, dead-eyed, grotesquely-mammaried personage who, while outwardly conforming to a female gendered shape, does not seem fully human. We hazard a guess that this intimidating being is a robot [...]

I do not have the rights to reproduce this stunning, amazing photo of one Katie Price (formerly known as "Jordan," she is a model, novelist, UK reality star and, uh, "footballer enthusiast") wearing a swimsuit emblazoned with the cover of her own magazine about herself whilst holding that magazine in one hand whilst standing before a backdrop splattered in covers of that same magazine. My point is: ANDY WARHOL WOULD DIE. If he hadn't, you know, unfairly beaten us all to the grave. The reviews of the magazine are in from The Sun: "It's glossy and full of shite." (It also contains recipes however: "Cauliflower cheese: I buy [...]

"King Abdullah II of Jordan fired his government in a surprise move on Tuesday, in the face of a wave of demands of public accountability sweeping the Arab world and bringing throngs of demonstrators in the streets of Egypt…. Meanwhile, also in response to the mood sweeping the region, in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority announced it would hold local elections, postponed last year, 'as soon as possible.'" —You would have to know a whole lot more than I (or most other Americans) do about Jordanian politics to know what this means, but you know, it happened.