NOW that York police are taking to the streets with Taser stun guns, it can't be long before a new game sweeps our city - Taser Tag.

This was invented by Randy Sarafan, a student at the Parsons School of Design in Greenwich Village, New York.

Players don headbands connected to battery packs. Once the wearer gets within about 30 feet of another player, they can shock them by pressing buttons on their headband.

The recipient gets a jolt of between 80 and 120 volts, depending on their distance from the button-presser.

"It is built on the working hypothesis that people will forego their own safety to inflict harm upon others," says Randy. "This is a project that thoroughly explores the darker side of human nature and social progress through the familiar medium of game play.

"Basically, you go around shocking the other players until they give up or die. Yes, people can potentially die playing Taser Tag. It is this little bonus feature that makes Taser Tag so unique amongst its peers.

"With an approach different from contemporary games that emulate warfare such as paintball, Taser Tag seeks not to eliminate, but to reintroduce the very real threat of pain and death into game play."

Randy has tried out the game in Union Square, New York. "People will continue to risk their own safety to continue hurting other people, and that's pretty scary," he reports.

He also told a website that he was forced to buy the Taser apparatus from England, because "it's not really legal here in the United States".

YORK has been overwhelmed by indifference since the Diary's exclusive yesterday about the exploits of the York Apathy Party.

In order to whip the city into an even more frenzied state of utter disinterest, we can now reveal who is bankrolling the party.

"I haven't needed to work since I married my multi-millionaire reclusive wife Agnes Kludd," the party's chief procrastinator Sydney Couch Potato explained. She made her money as head of an international cat neutering corporation, but has never been seen in daylight.

Meanwhile, rumour has it that a top York political name has already defected to the Apathy Party.

Has anyone heard from Steve Galloway lately?

THE inventor of curry-flavoured gin, Phil Roe of Stamford Bridge, is puzzled.

"You seem to be a bit of a man-of-the-world so you may be able to shed a little light on the following," he writes.

"On Tuesday you ran a story about a young lady called Charlotte Lewis getting clobbered with a lump of wood which had

blown off a trailer.

"The caption, under the photo of the unfortunate Charlotte, says, 'Charlotte Lewis, of Poppleton Park, York, with the plank of wood which was blown off a vehicle and hit her on the ring road'.

"Now not being much of a medically-minded person I wondered if you, being the above-mentioned man-of-the-world, could possibly help me and tell me what part of the female anatomy forms the 'ring road' where poor Charlotte was hit?"

Alas I am less a man-of-the-world, more a man-who-gets-lost-in-the-Evening-Press-bike-shed.

This calls for medical intervention.

Is there a doctor in the house?

Updated: 08:29 Thursday, September 22, 2005