Leeds Stoopid was an attempt at satire directed towards the student newspaper at Leeds University, Leeds Student. At the time it was filled with typos, grammar errors, unfinished articles and, on one memorable occasion, the prize crossword was printed with that weeks answers. The cartoons were unamusing, and it did seem to be wallowing in its own success in the National Student Newspaper Awards. So, we brought it up short - or attempted to, unfortunately the editor at the time made a comment about "plagarism being the sincerest form of flattery" thus showing he had not, in fact, read his own paper - and produced our own version (for the value of "we", please see page 13). This herculean effort on the part of the authors was completed on the 15th December 1995, where 320 copies were given away in 20 minutes or so, and the limited feedback obtained was very positive (especially by the members of Exec who found themselves satirised in its pages).

It all started with Dr. Adie Rankin, a top bloke (who gave me 2 free games of 10-pin on my "stag" afternoon!) saying:

"I spent Sunday afternoon making a mock up copy of 'The Stoop' containing all those articles [written on leeds.misc] (duly credited, of course). I've done the crossword and the cartoon strip, but I don't have a sports page yet... Would anyone mind if I printed off and copied a six page issue and passed it around to any miscers who are interested, especially to those people who actually wrote the stuff? I guess I'm asking permission from the authors to print their work. Any objections?"

2 weeks later, we had it.

The pages are listed below (and at the side, for those of you with frames) in the order they appeared in the magazine - although the credits were printed off a few weeks later. Don`t forget, the middle 4 pages were the "pull out & throw away BLOP!!!" section. Any and all typos, grammar errors, misnumbered pages, unfinished sentences and duplicated articles are intentional. The KQ listed in the credits is not King Queen! The cartoon at the time was called "Elvis Lives Fat", or somesuch, and was really not funny. The webpage doesn`t exist anymore, but then I guess you are reading this on the web, so who cares? Oh, and the Jolly Brewer was a pub on Hyde Park Road that was burned down a few years ago. The Central Leeds Library has back issues of the YEP going back at least that long if you want to find out more.

In order, then:

Page 1.
Page 2.
Page 3.
Page 4.
Page 5.
Page 6.
Page 7.
Page 8.
Page 9.
Page 10.
Page 11.
Page 12.
Page 13.

"Leeds student is Dead
Long live Leeds Stoopid:
The dawn of a new ear!"

The success of this moved a group of people to create a "LEMSIP" soc, which stood for something or other. We did a few other things, but not much.

I find this incredible, but as of 13:47 GMT on 31/05/00 (page went live at 20:25 GMT 23/05/00) we've had 107 unique visitors - that's 107 unique IP addresses, which doesn`t count repeat visits - 81 of which came straight to this page. In terms of the amount of downloads from jeamland.org, this heirarchy has had 4440 downloads, at a maximum of 34 downloads per visit (there are 4 pages of html and 30 images to download - the scans of the pages are hosted on a different site and I don`t have access to those logs). Admittedly a few of those were from JANET caches, so as this page is now in the national cache we may have had many more visitors. And I've had three email messages about how good this page is! Three! I mean, can no-one type these days? Oh. Yes. Well, if I count the authors who sent comments then I have had... umm... seven. Even so, that's a response rate of 6.54%, which is frankly abysmal. Come on, feedback. Use the link below. If it's funny, I`ll put it on the page (but I`ll ask if it's ok first!).

We hope you enjoy having a look around this bit of nostalgia. The good old days, eh?
Please make any comments regarding these pages to mike@jeamland.org.

PRIVACY STATEMENT: I promise not to make any information about you public, unless you want me to. I'll even make sure your name is changed (to protect the innocent) if I publish feedback commentary. I won`t sell any info about you to any organisations, because then I'd have to subscribe to the DPA and frankly I couldn`t be arsed. Trust the computer. The computer is your friend.