Quick, get them over to Glasgow. There's a wealth of soap-dodging nutters over here!

I assume your IT angle qwould be that a similar approach would be suitable for freshening up those Unix development teams found lurking in basements of larger organisations.

Appropriately, this article about lunatics in a capital city appears next to your item about Mayor Livingston's new buses. A coincidence?

PS. Where are the the Paris Hilton angles in either piece?

Of course there's an IT angle, roaming lunatics are what eventually happens to IT management who's jobs and livelihoods have been outsourced to a far flung country....

There's a Paris Hilton angle too, may I be the first to offer to spruce her up a bit next time she's pictured wandering in public... now where's the shaving foam.... !

Other countries also have 'Care in the Community'

"taking care of the city’s roaming lunatics".

What about the english ones who need a wash and a brush up too, often seen wandering all over the whole country, sticking things to windscreens of white vans........

At the bottom of the article it says: "Error: A thorough search of the Register database for "Sierra Leone" and "lunatics" returned [0] results. Please modify your search to contain at least one IT-related term."

This article will now serve to eliminate that error, and thus it is IT-related. :)

(Who would ever imagined that El Reg had never before covered Sierra Leone or lunatics?)

Washing is the way forward. In the future, everyone will wash for 15 minutes.

I spent 7 years living in West Africa and after a while even I didn't bat an eyelid when a naked man with a bucket on his head walked out in front of the taxi. They each had their own areas and individual quirks. Naked bucket man was the best though, and lived in the same neighbourhood as the President.

"...everyone will wash for 15 minutes."

yes, but just the once ;)

Was I the only one who read the title as 'Welsh Lunatics'?

I wondered if a bunch of sheep had gone missing in Sierra Leone.

So THAT'S where my dev team got to... Ah well, I'll save a fortune in air fresheners at the office after this.

...the use of the term "lunatic".

It's just so very NON-PC it makes the heart glow with nostalgia!

'At the bottom of the article it says: "Error: A thorough search of the Register database for "Sierra Leone" and "lunatics" returned [0] results. Please modify your search to contain at least one IT-related term." '

Indeed. Which leads to one (and only one) of 2 conclusions :

1- whoever coded the Register website knows that empty strings, badly built queries, null pointer exceptions and what have you will happen, knows to test for them and knows the value of a clean, userfriendly error message (instead of the traditional "what should never have happened, has happened. Sorry"). In which case, they should be rightly commanded.

2- in the original version of the article, the "related stories" paragraph was replaced by a crappy mySQL error message. Which quickly led to someone inserting a dirty hack to make it look as if the code had recovered gracefully from the lack of previous references to smelly african lunatics.

My money's on #2...

Did the lunatics in question voluntarily submit to said shaving and washing, or were they victims of other crazies with a cleanliness fetish?