Little things that you say

You overhear some odd conversations in queues – well I do anyway. Today I was standing in front of two young chaps (“ooh, Young Maaaan!”) who were moaning about what computerish things they had to do for their respective girlfriends’ families. One smugly recounted that when his GF dumped him he rubbished up her dad’s website that he’d been doing, while the other explained how he was conning his GF’s mother. Apparently he tells her what hardware and stuff’s needed, she gives him the money and he buys cheaper stuff instead, pocketing the difference (“She doesn’t need top stuff, but I’m not telling her that.”). What complete shits these two were.

This afternoon I heard Terri Schiavo has died in America. I’m not a believer in ‘Life at all costs’, but the way she was killed was inhumane. The deliberate withdrawal of the means of survival is killing, in any definition of the word. But to purposefully watch a creature starve and dehydrate to death is not the action of a civilised person, especially not when there are more humane methods of destruction available. If there’s no legal method of killing something which is humane then I don’t believe that makes an inhumane method acceptable instead. Mass murderers in the US can be given a lethal injection which kills them in minutes. What appalling crime had this poor woman committed, that justified her being tortured for two weeks? Surely not merely that it had become too expensive to keep her alive? That would be unforgivable.