Go cast your votes for Canada's best/worst stamp designs and most/least relevant stamps in the year 2000 with Canadian Stamp News' stamp poll. The American stamp polls have all closed, so you can stick it to the Canucks if you wish.

Well, based on this article in today's Guardian, I may very well be on my way toward being a Mason. The gist of the article is that the Masons in England are having PR problems. They're perceived as being "bored middle-aged men engaged in undemanding jobs who hanker for a faintly exotic social life," and they're sick and tired of it.

What does this all have to do with philately, though? I hear you ask.

I'm glad you asked. Buried way, way, WAY down in the article is this paragraph:

I also scanned the small ads in The Square for sinister cabals looking for masons to join their ranks. The Logic Ritual Association, the Goose and Gridiron Society, the London Lunchtimers, the International Masonic Poetry Society . . . bodies to make the flesh creep. And, scariest of all, the Masonic Philatelic Club, based in Cleveland, "open only to masons in good standing of the English Constitution and recognised Grand Lodges". There is an article in The Square about the stamps of Belgium (remarkably, it is part four in a series on Belgian stamps). I assume that encoded within these apparently innocent words on Belgian politician-freemasons is a sinister message to the philatelists of Cleveland. You have been warned.

All right, maybe freemasonry isn't for me after all. Oi.

Tom found it first.

Neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night ... etc. etc. Have they added turkeys to that list yet?