Ban the Mind Reader

Sometimes you come across a website which has a premise just so off-kilter and bizarre that reading it makes you suspect that you have fallen through the space-time continuum into some strange parallel universe. Ban the Mind Reader is one such site. I was first introduced to it when its webmaster requested a link exchange. Now, I get many such requests, which are often turned down because when I visit the requesting site I find it to be dull, poorly put together or just plain crap. Imagine my delight when I visited Ban the Mind Reader and found that, behind its conventional appearance, lurked a true repository of lunacy. Taking as its starting point some enigmatic graffiti which has been appearing various Kent towns since the 1960s, it weaves an intricate web of insanity, taking in mind control experiments, smoking ban conspiracies, Boncey Ballbag the Medway comic and his trans-universal adventures, the Secret Judo Club and some weird and wonderful Kentish superheroes.

Whilst I can't even begin to describe the site, I can tell you that it inspired me to write Ban the Mind Reader, a new story over at The Sleaze. As I say, this story is only inspired by the site of the same name, and goes off on its own tangents, and provides its own, highly plausible (I think) explanation for that graffiti. But getting back to the site itself, it is really refreshing, in an age when sites are increasingly identikit and geared solely to being props for advertisements, to find a website as gleefully original and idiosyncratic as Ban the Mind Reader. It truly is uncategorisable - it certainly isn't a conventional satire site, for instance, but hugely enjoyable. For all I know, the whole thing could be an elaborate hoax - did the graffiti which supposedly inspired the site ever exist? I don't know and, frankly, don't care! I really do urge any of you who like be beguiled to visit it!