Some interesting entries for the Guess the Cast competition. You don't get a point for me, but you get a point for each of the grandparents, which means at the moment the leader is Barry Shapiro who has 5 out of 7, which is going to be tough to beat. In fact if anyone does better than that I will assume that they have insider knowledge. I am slightly suspciious of Barry's excellent guesses I have to say and will be investigating him and his life before any prize is presented. But you can still have a go at beating that score if you haven't already for the next few days. Full answers on Monday (I think).
Sony Vaio, not content with providing me with this shitty, increasingly malfunctioning computer have been in touch to tell me that the battery I am using is in danger of bursting into flames at any minute. They will be sending me a new one later in the week, but good to know that one of the only parts I have had no trouble with so far is also faulty. I have now been paid for my Channel 4 script so can probably afford to splash out. But will I go for a Mac or a PC? I still haven't quite decided, but the scales are slightly weighed in the favour of the Mac at the moment. My desperate begging pleas for a free laptop have fallen on deaf ears... or more likely blind eyes, given I haven't spoken them out loud.
I was walking down the street this evening idly wondering what proportion of people might recognise me these days. I think it is a fairly small number of people, though strangely recently it has felt like it's happening more than it did a few years ago, though I don't really know why that would be. Anyway, with these self-obsessed thoughts going on I looked at a couple walking towards me and thought, "I wonder, for instance, if they would know who I was." And bizarrely as they went by the man turned to his girlfriend and whispered loudly "Richard Herring".
That seemed so unlikely that I can only assume that a) I am the star of a Truman Show style fake world in which the producers have access to my thoughts and have decided to fuck with me.
b) I am mentally ill and have begun imagining that people are whispering my name to each other.
I think those are the only two possibilities.
I am going on Big Brother's Little Brother tomorrow and so have been thinking about the Celebrity Big Brother thing a lot and watching it, though this is a rare Big Brother that I have been watching since the start (I was obsessed with the original series, but none of the others have quite grabbed me as much).
But one of the paradoxes I have been thinking about this week is the way racism is seen (rightly in my opinion, you may disagree) as a bad thing. Someone deciding they don't like anyone from India, for example would be viewed as an awful person. And I think they would be seen as worse than a person who hated all humanity. It seems a little unbalanced that a misanthrope is not as bad a person as a racist.
A racist hates a select group of people, whilst a misanthrope hates everyone, includng that select group. You'd think the person who hated, say all Indians and everyone else in the world would be worse than someone who just hates Indians. But that's not the case is it? Because in most people's minds the misanthrope is indiscriminate, whilst the racist has deliberately selected one group of people to be disdainful towards.
I don't think it's wrong to prefer a misanthrope to a racist. I just think it's interesting. I am at time a misanthrope as you may have noticed, disgusted by all humanity without prejudice and I am not a racist (apart from I don't like the Dutch).
I probably won't discuss this with Dermot tomorrow. Though I am tempted to try and get myself on the front page of the Sun (because I think the show might be live) by making some unacceptable racist comments about everyone in the house. Emma Kennedy has dared me to do it. But I probably won't. But isn't that "probably" an enticing prospect. I could change my whole life in a second. No such thing as bad publicity, right?
