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The Big Bristol Reunion

So somehow I’ve ended up on some kind of official mailing list for former University of Bristol students. From time to time they email me with desperately dull missives about recent events at the university.

When they’re not doing that, they’re spamming me with promotional bumf about “The Big Bristol Reunion”, which they like to pretend is something organised by a few ex-students who fancied a get-together.

Thing is, I’ve looked at the website for The Big Bristol Reunion and I can’t help thinking that it looks rather familiar…

Oh yeah, that’s because there’s also The Big Birmingham Reunion, The Big Durham Renuion, The Big Bath Reunion, and The Big Reading Reunion. I wonder how many other unique reunion events these people are also organising?

Anyway. The latest email tells me that they’ll be recreating Wedgies. I can’t think of a worse way to spend my time.

The best thing about these events, though, is that their website has a sign-up form for you to register your interest. If you fill it in, then your details will be automatically added to the list of who’s coming that appears on the site (linked from the bottom right corner of the main page). Let’s ignore for a second the fact that this is probably a breach of the Data Protection Act (and isn’t something that they bother to mention in their privacy statement) and just think about the fact that the names are automatically added to the list: there’s no attempt to verify the specified email address, for example. If you have a look at the list then you can see that there are some interesting names on there: “Adolf Hitler”, “Joseph Stalin”, and “Anne Widdecombe” are all planning to attend, apparently. (Actually, that sounds like one hell of a party–maybe I will pop along after all.)

They weren’t even all mine. Perhaps you know a few people who might be going too…

[Oh, and it looks like they’ve forgotten to strip out any HTML tags that might happen to appear in your “name”…]