Slippery When Wet

By Londonist Last edited 212 months ago
Slippery When Wet
225px-Super_soaker.jpg

Whilst driving through London's banlieu on Sunday, an item on Radio Five Live caught Londonist's attention. In between news from the test match and the awful opinions of that rank Scotsman Nicky Campbell, a cheerful broadcaster spoke of a three week contest taking place upon the streets of our own fair city, in which the contestants are tasked with hunting each other down and opening fire with water pistols. It sounded rather entertaining and conjured up all sorts of daring visions of masked assassins prowling around the dark Victorian streets where the Thames does flow, armed only with their wits and one of those squirty flowers that clowns use. Upon returning to Londonist headquarters, we fired up our interweb machine to find out more. The Grauniad told us this....

The 250 who paid a fee to sign up for London's Street Wars on streetwars.net will receive an envelope containing a picture of their intended target, their home and work addresses, name and contact details. They will have the whole of London to track them down and shoot them with a water pistol - only bars, buses, bus stops and inside places of work are out of bounds - and they must make at least one hit a week. Whoever shoots a target inherits their target, and so on until one survivor gets the £500 prize

Good clean fun we thought. Until we had a look at The Super Soaraway Sun's version of events, which wasn't so positive...

PRANKSTERS planning a sick game of “assassin” during the first anniversary of the 7/7 attacks risk being shot DEAD by cops.

Jiminy! Being dead is one thing, but being DEAD sounds a much more beastly affliction. What were these PRANKSTERS up to? Maybe it's not such a clever little game after all. And then....the penny dropped. We recalled one of the lesser inhabitants of the dungeon, a chap called Alex, strange fellow - thought we'd got rid of him during that soccer world cup but apparently he's still skulking about, murmuring on at us about some water pistol contest and could we please pay for his entry fee sir please sir. Turns out he's entered into this 'sick' game! Ha! Silly bugger. Oh...here he is now....

Alex...

The game starts on Sunday, or Monday, when I'm due to pick up the details of my first 'target' and quite frankly I'm feeling rather nervous about the whole thing. Mainly because Mike has convinced me that the there is a real chance that I will be gunned down by our not-at-all over-zealous police force but also due to the fact that even if I manage to avoid becoming DEAD, there is still a high probablity that a random geek who's been overdosing on DOOM will be waiting outside my office with two 'super-soakers' and I'll be forced to return from my lunch hour soaking wet and then have to explain to my manager why I am a sad loser.

On a more practical note, I don't have my own weapon as yet. Any suggestions would be most gratefully recieved. I'm after something more subtle than a super-soaker, that looks nothing at all like a gun...or a chair-leg.

Alex will be updating us on his progress in the Street Wars competition. Unless he becomes DEAD.

Last Updated 20 July 2006