Another wet and windy day. Brrr…
Worky work work work.
Read today that K-9 is returning to Dr Who. For those of you who don’t know, his character is a robot dog. Dogs are cool and robots are cool, so some kind of robot dog is ultra cool. However, K-9 isn’t quite as cool as the Sony AIBO but he was the granddaddy of all mechanical mutts. Unfortunately, time hasn’t been kind to K-9 and he’s all rusty and battered.
Poor old K-9!
Last night, I watched a TV documentary about how a boy orchestrated his own attempted murder on the Internet. It was interesting to me because in 1997 I wrote a novel about the Internet called “Moofed” and one of the story strangs in it features a character that seeks out someone to kill them. I realise that I was ahead of my time. Here’s a review/explanation of the case snipped from the Guardian website:
Oh my God, did you see Kill Me If You Can (Channel 4) last night? That’s how many workplace conversations will be starting this morning, I reckon. Watercooler TV, I think it’s called, though I don’t like the phrase. If you missed it, it went something like this.
Boy goes on internet, meets girl in chatroom. They chat, flirt, do cybersexing, fall in love. They never meet, even though they both live in Manchester (it’s a chatroom for Manchester young people).
New people come into chatroom. A 14-year-old boy (first boy is 16), an evil stalker and Janet Dobinson. Evil stalker kidnaps the first boy’s girlfriend and kills her. The boy is very upset, but new boy is there for him and they become best friends. Soon boy is over his kidnapped, dead girlfriend. Boy and best friend actually meet, hang out together, go to Trafford Centre in their hoodies. Janet Dobinson sounds interesting – at 44, much older, but attractive still. She turns out to be the third most powerful woman in Britain – she works for MI5 as a spy mistress and is in the chatroom to recruit new agents. She recruits boy. Boy is told he will meet the Queen and Tony Blair, earn £80m and have lots of sex with sexy Janet Dobinson. Boy is very excited, especially by the last bit. Kidnapped, dead girlfriend now totally forgotten.
Boy is given a very important job: to protect a VIP called James Bell who’s worth £568bn to Britain. James Bell, happily, turns out to be best friend. So boy protects best friend for good of country, but also because he wants to meet the Queen, earn £80m and have lots of sex with spymistress Janet Dobinson. Then a new order comes in from Janet Dobinson: kill James Bell. Boy has to kill best friend. He buys a kitchen knife and sticks it deep into best friend’s stomach.
Best friend doesn’t die but is very badly injured, in intensive care for a month. Boy is arrested, and tells police he is an agent working for MI5. Police take the boy’s computer, find all the chatroom stuff. Police notice something funny: all the other people make the same spelling mistakes, so they’re all the same person. Only one of them is real: best friend. So best friend is also girlfriend, evil stalker and Janet Dobinson. He took his friend for big whopping ride, but also ordered his own murder…
It’s all a bit far fetched, I know: “Skilled writers of fiction could not have come up with this,” is what the judge at the trial said. That right: the judge, at the trial. Because this wasn’t drama, it was documentary. Those things REALLY HAPPENED to two young boys in Manchester, neither of whom could be named. It’s hard to know what to be more astonished at – the gullibility of the first boy, or the extraordinary plot cooked up by his 14-year-old best friend, a plot that was supposed to culminate in his own murder. I think at his age I was just getting into conkers.
They’re free now, and both doing well, we’re told. More important, they’re not allowed near computers unsupervised, which is good news for everyone really.
This film didn’t have much to make it visual – there were interviews with the boys’ solicitors, a couple of child actors walking around Manchester, shots of the Trafford Centre, a seductive Janet Dobinson, looking sultry on Vauxhall Bridge in front of the MI5 building. But it didn’t really matter, the whole thing was so utterly jaw-dropping, you hardly noticed.
The Internet is a strange place, populated by strange people. How do I know? Because I am one of them. No, seriously. The Internet is a place where you can take risks you wouldn’t normally take in real life, it is a place where you can be anyone you want, it is a place of fact and fiction. I’ve met a few people who aren’t what they seem via the Net and if I had children I certainly wouldn’t let them use it unsupervised. There are many people who want to exploit you on the net, either sexually, financially, emotionally or mentally. Luckily, these people make up on 1% of Webusers, but you still have to be careful.
Meanwhile, there’s some very interesting commentary going on at the Iron Maiden website. Apparently, at a Ozzfest gig at the weekend, the band were pelted on stage with bottles and eggs and had their PA cut off several times. The perpetrators? Well it was old ma Sharon “When they did the surgery they threw away the wrong bits” Osbourne and the Ozzfest stage crew. Read what Iron Maiden’s manager said about the event by clicking here.
Useless fact of the day: I went to the same school as Steve Harris, the bass player with Iron Maiden. Wow…what trivia… 🙂
And before I forget, Goldie Lookin’ Chain have a new single coming out called “Your Missus is a Nutter”. Well it made me laugh.
