Citizen Linus

We regret ever having given up on New Amsterdam. We may want it back, so we can enforce world peace by requiring our citizens to wear wooden shoes at all times, except indoors. This should drastically reduce the desire to go run around in the desert with heavy artillery.

We will proceed to kindly ask the citizens of New New Amsterdam to spend a certain amount of time per day watching tulips grow, or, if they prefer this, windmills turn. Offenders will be supplied with hallucinatory sedatives. This should suppress even the slightest inclination for going on missions to spread sociopolitical views that will later be found somewhat lacking in substance and coherence, to random foreign nations sitting on large quantities of materials possessing shiny or oily qualities.

We will also require that citizens drop the affected, nasal tone and start getting used to grunting. We feel that the sensation of a properly pronounced 'g' helps improve the quality of our communication by keeping it to a minimum. And frankly, it is getting on our nerves.

Lastly, we would like to stress the importance of a decent paper atlas for looking up places such as "Myanmar" so as to prevent the Google Maps induced class of mistakes that lands unsuspecting citizens in the Mohawk River rather than Amsterdam, Holland.

We recognize that the local powers may not be immediately favourable to our intentions without further encouragement, so as soon as we have hoisted the sails, we will again raid the Medway to get rid of those pesky Britons.