Back in 2008 a Florida couple running a small business that throws children's parties bought two costumes that looked like Tigger and Eeyore on eBay from a firm in Peru for $500. When Walt Disney saw the characters advertised online, it threatened legal action for an infringement of copyright laws and presented the couple with a seven-point demand to cease and desist.

Before a lunch of pigs’ feet and pickled eggs in Montgomery, Alabama, I was asked to bless the table. The request had come after my hostess’s passionate plea to put more God in the schools and her praise for Britain, where an established church ensured that everybody got some kind of religious education. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that although those lessons were compulsory, they were also considered something of a joke and that I now consider myself a lapsed agnostic (I used to not know, but then I just stopped caring), so I smiled and nodded. But when the call for a blessing received no response my cover was blown.

The recently elected Republican governor of Maine, Paul LePage, is no art critic. Indeed subtlety and nuance seem to elude him at almost every turn. While campaigning he promised a group of fishermen he'd tell Barack Obama "to go to hell", and responded to one reporter's questions with a demand to "stop the bullshit". When LePage, a Tea Party candidate, heard that the country's oldest civil rights organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, had complained about his refusal to attend their Martin Luther King Day function, he told them to "kiss my butt".