WARNING: For the benefit of all persons of limited intelligence, including petty officials everywhere, especially all assistant attorneys general of the United States of America (more especially, Colorado – you know who you are), this item may contain non-serious information of a crashingly obvious nature.

The Heart Attack Grill, a hospital-theme burger bar in Arizona, was founded in 2005 by “Dr.” Jon Basso, who offers his customers “nutritional pornography”. He describes the food as: “so bad for you, it’s shocking”. He caters for “patients”, rather than customers. and his “nurses” (waitresses) deliver “prescriptions” selected from his “Single”, “Double”, “Triple” and “Quadruple Bypass” hamburgers. The side dishes include “Flatliner Fries”, which are cooked in pure lard. He also sells cigarettes, booze and soft drinks. [More below]

The Quadruple Bypass burger supplies 8,000 calories and any customer who is able finish a Triple or Quadruple Bypass (and there are lots of them) gets a free ride back to his/her car in a wheelchair. The waitresses wear the sort of nurse’s uniform you’d expect to see in a Carry On film. Only an idiot would confuse them with a real nurse. At the beginning of September 2006, Daniel Christl, an assistant attorney general representing the Arizona State Board of Nursing, wrote to Mr. Basso to tell him that his staff couldn’t call themselves nurses unless they held a licence issued by the state. Mr. Basso added the disclaimer: The Government Requires Us To Inform You That Our “Nurses” Do Not Actually Have Any Accredited Medical Training to his website and added a link to a copy of Mr. Christl’s letter. http://www.heartattackgrill.com/AZStateBoardOfNursing.pdf with the tag lines: “Have you ever wondered why your taxes are so high? Have you ever wondered how government workers waste all of your hard earned money?” The disclaimer satisfied the AG’s office but someone else who didn’t get the Heart Attack Grill, Sandy Summers, who runs the Center for Nursing Advocacy of Baltimore, started an independent campaign to stop the HAG from using comic opera nurses as the serving staff. Mr. Summers claimed that the HAG was contributing to a global public health crisis caused by a shortage of real nurses. Mr. Summers started a letter-writing campaign and tried to persuade real nurses to hand out protest fliers at the HAG. All he managed to achieve was A) persuade real people what he was a humorless slave to politically correctness and B) do Dr. Jon’s business a lot of good. This touching story strikes a particular note of sympathy here in Britain, where we are overrum by politically correct idiots after 11 years’ encouragement from the New Labour Project.