Windows users may regularly rejoice in the minimalist beauty of the built-in Microsoft Notepad, but who would have thought it was part of a US Republican Conspiracy to hide the truth behind the Bush administration's actions?

Sceptics - try this:

1. Open a new Notepad document
2. Type in the following sentence without the quotes "Bush hid all the facts"
3. Save and close
4. Reopen the file in Notepad. Notice how yet again there has been a cover-up to hid the dirty political truth.

(If you really want to know how Notepad has been owned by the Bush cabal, read on for the disappointing truth.)

Actually, to add geek-truth, it must be said that Notepad isn't purely a Bush administration saver. What the above plays on is a bug in a function that Notepad uses called IsTextUnicode.

Maybe it's not intuitive, but there are several different ways of representing text on a computer. This is necessary because different human-languages have different characters, there are characters that don't have an obvious visible equivalent (e.g. backspace), and so on. There have been huge numbers of different types of computer hardware developed throughout the ages, and even bigger numbers of different programs to run on them.

Notepad can open various different types of files, including Unicode. However the function IsTextUnicode comes back saying yes even if the text is actually not encoded as Unicode if you open many files in Notepad that are in the following format: xxxx xxx xxx xxxxx

This means that phrases like "bite the old bread" and "your red hat sucks" are also messed up.

To counteract this slur on its good character, let it be stated that Notepad has previously been hailed as "the world's most versatile HTML editing tool".