Ok, this was received in a chain letter. However I got it from a good lady friend who is staggeringly intelligent and possessed of enormous common sense. She gets a ton of e-mail every day and has never forwarded me one of these before. I have checked Snopes and the SDMB archive, and tried to check the UK Census Site, but their search function hasn’t been installed yet, and I have found nothing to rule out the possibility that this might just work.
I humbly apologise if, in fact, it is not true, but I believe that the final point in the email jusifies going along with it anyway.
That’s what I’m going to do, anyway.
up for the plan am i. powerful jedi will i be, fight against insidious senator palpatine…hang on…i mean hague. hmmmmm. portillo the hutt shall i topple from power.
It’s because it’s actually copied from another email, trying to do the same thing in (IIRC) New Zealand. Someone told me the other day that it wouldn’t work, though, as the census takers do take into account jokes and obvious things like this.
Hmmm. Somebody from Australia posted this on the Lonely Planet site a few days ago. IIRC, his message implied that this “census” was going on in his country.
Census bureaux aren’t obliged to mark down every made-up religion that people vote for. In the UK, “Jedi” would be counted as “Other” and not separated out:
I also know a few people from the Australian Bureau of Statistics who say that the census isn’t as simple as summarising results, but that interpretation does go on – if they suspect people of taking the mickey, they won’t put those results in, or they’ll count them as “Other” too.