Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Anyone who’s familiar with magic (or Buffy, or possibly in some way, an interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics*) will be well aware that good things have a price. Case in point: For the time I spent off work yesterday due to a power cut, I now needed to make up an equal amount of effort at work today. This meant that I had to utterly bust my ass working frantically for the whole day with nary a moment to even glance over the BBC headlines.

Which is a pity, because I got home and noticed they’ve added this great new feature (though it’d be greater still if it was available on RSS.) You can now get a list of the most e-mailed stories, usually a combination of a few quirkies, stories about freaks and stories about cuteness, of the kind people like to e-mail to other people. Current example:
Tabby cat terror for black bear

And to counterbalance the wackiness, you can also get a list of the most read stories. Current example:
Raid police apologise for ‘hurt’

Actually, that’s pretty wacky in itself. I wonder if the visionaries and futurists writing Judge Dredd back in the 80s realised how close to the truth they got it. So far the Metropolitan Bacon have managed to shoot and/or murder a handful of suspected terrorists who turn out to be innocent, but so far, no reports of actually shooting any terrorists. If they keep it up at this rate, though, pure unfeeling statistics means they’re going to puncture someone with a murky enough past that it’ll be considered a success.

Yesterday in the evening, we went to see Dave Gorman record another episode of Genius, this time with Armando Iannucci. The man is a legend, but I’m not sure the format allowed him to shine fully. I feel he works best when satirising rather than ad-libbing, and he was actually a little overshadowed by Dave Gorman’s far more exuberant personality. Definitely worth the money though. Because it was free! The best suggestion: “How about a film version of Tetris?” Fucking genius, as the name of the show suggests. They got the guy to play Tetris and had the crowd treat it as a spectator sport. After my brain has stopped thinking “It should be me up there!” (after all, I was damn well PLAYING Tetris on the tube when travelling to the recording) I felt as if I was actually getting a taste of what the world would be like if I was running things. I liked it.

*The First rule of Thermodynamics is: Do not talk about Thermodynamics.
“The Second rule of Thermodynamics is: Do not talk about Thermodynamics.

Oh, sorry, wait. The second rule is “No Smoking.”