I’m in jury duty this week for the fine city of New York, or the fine county, or the fine state. I can’t tell. I’m proud to serve some government entity named New York.

All the jury waiting rooms have free wireless internet access. That might seem like a standard perk, but in the court buildings, which have all the modern styling of a ’65 Corvair, it was a surprise nonetheless.

Yet web content downloaded via said Wi-Fi is filtered according to capricious rules. One seemingly forbidden term is “games”: Almost any URL that contains the word “game” or might contain gaming content is redirects you to the New York Court System site without explanation. The Metacritic home page is fine, but click on the “Games” section and you’re right back to CourtHelp. Yesterday, I happened to have an urgent need to look at the video game industry’s release schedules for September, so this limitation proved very frustrating.

The only game-related page I was able to view was the Onion AV Club Games section. I have no idea why this is.

I wonder if this allergy to games is related to the 2006 incident in which Mayor Bloomberg fired a guy for playing solitaire while on the city’s clock. Or maybe employees don’t have any filtering at all, and this is just to keep potential jurors from letting Snood interfere with their important duties of sitting and waiting.

Also blocked for some reason: Daily Motion, and any embedded videos hosted by that site. Not blocked: every other video site on earth. New York Court System filtering goblin, is there any method to your madness?