Things my girlfriend and I have argued about (online version)

92

Do you watch CSI at all? No? Well, in a nutshell, it's this: William L. Petersen does the wonderful Manhunter in 1986, has a miserable run for the next fourteen years, and then returns as the head of a Vegas-based Crime Scene Investigation unit with very watchable results. (One imagines his agent weeping tears of frustration throughout the latter part of the 80s and the whole of the 90s before leaping into the air in 2000, phoning his client at 2am and whooping, 'Bill! Bill! It's forensics, Bill! That's what we've been missing. I'm calling Jerry Bruckheimer right now.')

So anyway, in CSI you are presented with the aftermath of an incident and you have to identify the guilty party or parties. Are you up for trying this yourself? Now? OK, then.

Suppose there are three people in your house: your partner (urbane, sophisticated — think 'David Niven in a Banana Splits T-shirt') and two smallish children (blond, elusive, cunning). Your partner is sitting in the dining room reading a book, your children are in the living room playing a game called 'Scatter every single toy we possess across the floor and then go upstairs to jump on the bed'. After a few minutes, you wander into the dining room, sigh at the chaos and tidy up. You then go off to do something else. When you return to the living room a short time later you discover that the children have strewn the place with toys yet again.

You are William L. Petersen and you must apportion blame. Do you:

A) Get the children downstairs and tell them that if they haven't tidied up the living room within the next ten minutes then you're sending them to be raised on a farm in Iowa.

B) Go into the dining room, stand in front of your partner with your arms threateningly akimbo and roar, 'The children have messed up the dining room — again… and you're sitting there reading a book!'

Eh? What is it to be, William?

If you chose 'A' award yourself two points. If you chose 'B', award yourself 'insane'.

Now, the thing is — and, if you'll forgive me, I'll relate this to Margret a little here — one might easily put this kind of thing down to 'poor targeting'. One might think that the discrepancy between whoever is responsible for something and the person she's actually shouting at about it is merely the artifact of some kind of loss of footing on her mental walk from the crime to the culprit. The flaw in that notion, however, is that she always ends up shouting at me . If it were poor targeting, then — occasionally — it'd hit someone else, right? But, nope, that's not the case. If Margret had been in charge of the invasion of Iraq, every single missile would have struck me in the face. In fact, Margret is probably the only person to have attended both pro and anti-war rallies in the run up to the conflict. If you examine press photographs, you can sometimes pick her out — off to one side, holding a banner that reads 'Bomb Mil'.

The irony being, of course, that this still makes her policy less ill-considered and asinine than the one that actually advised the invasion of Iraq.

Ack — just lost the whole of the Midwest there. And I was doing so well up to that point, wasn't I?

OK, I'm off on holiday, shortly. Well, I say 'on holiday', but we're going to the west coast of Ireland, so I probably mean 'to get thoroughly soaking wet and wind-blasted'. In any case, do not expect an update until I return. You'll all just have to do some work, I'm afraid.

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