How to make some sense of all this lunacyMost of the stuff you'll see on The Joking Cousins of Xanadu-du is to do with There is no money in Xanadu-du – we all live a kind of mystical tribal life. The one thing that counts is age. Age is hugely venerated. So your rewards and punishments are measured in days. You can read the various goings-on in Xanadu-du in a number of ways.
At the bottom of the site's home page there are two or three stories that have been hand-chosen for their literary brilliance, verbal dexterity or just plain stupidity. Click the ‘more>>' link to read the whole thing.
The registration form for new Cousins is fairly straightforward, but we do realise that they will not yet be as super-intelligent as the rest of us, so there are a few points that may need clarification. The first thing you have to do is prove to us that you are not a machine. To do this we ask you to type in the last two words of the sentence above the form.
Your real name, email address, city and country are required, but they will not be shown on the website unless you explicitly say so when you edit your profile. We need your birthday so we can give you presents. The final thing to do is to choose a tribal name. First you tell us your gender, and then you will see a list of male or female names (this can sometimes take a little while to appear depending on the speed of your internet connection, so please be patient).
Membership of the Joking Cousins of Xanadu-du is free, but we encourage you to make a donation to the Malian charities that we support. You can pay for donations by PayPal or by cheque drawn on a UK bank.
There is a security code on the contact page. You must type in the words before your comment can be sent.
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Clicking this link on the top navigation bar takes you to a page that displays a bit of the most recent stories. You can click the ‘FULL STORY >>' link to see the full thing.
On the right-hand side of most pages there is a list of the eight most recent stories. Eight is a very significant number in Xanadu-du – there are eight days in a week and if you multiply 8 by 5.25 you get 42.
The right-hand sidebar lists the top six tribes by the combined age of all their members. If you click on a tribe you will see a list of the members of that tribe, along with a summary of their contributions and a link to their stories. 
The final part of the sidebar lists the five most recent members that have migrated to Xanadu-du. Click on their names to visit their hut page. 
Each Cousin has a 'Hut Page' where you can view their picture, age, occupation, etc. Also on this page is a list of links to their eight most recent stories (that number again!). Beneath that is their archive section. 
The archive listing shows the month and year, and the number in brackets beside that indicates the number of stories for that month. 
