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A graph of the first day of my little poll investigation of astrological elements... the proportions of deviants in these is here...




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Sometimes things seem to have a sad inevitabillity... His daughter refused to go to the wedding because she saw what Heather Mills was like... her ex-husband in Canada said any man should regret the day he met the nightmare woman... he was a rich older man, obvious prey for gold-diggers, who should have his eyes wide open... and yet, maybe on the rebound form a wonderful wife who had passed away, somehow or other he put on the blinkers and headed for the start.

He married her.

Four years later they are separated and she has $50million (and the whole world thinks she's mad and bad, but hell when did bad publicity stop people bouncing back?). It will be hard for her to get a charity to put her on their sponsors list now I guess! Though when the judge pointed out there was no evidence in her tax return of all this charity she's meant to have given, she said it was only her accountant not ticking the right box (and we've all filled in tax returns, so we have to give her that).

So why do we do it?

The world and his great-aunt are saying "don't do it". Even a little part of your head is saying "mmm this might be something you should think about". Your enemies are openly gloating and smiling at each other and whispering "you know what, the idiot is actually going ahead!" Your nicer foes are even quietly wishing you would stop, because they wouldn't wish such a fate on their worst enemy.

And yet you do it. You ignore everyone, all the evidence, and you go right on ahead.

And a few years later your name is dragged through the mud, (though you get out looking fairly clean as most people see it's kinda obvious she's a serial fantasist); you have lost millions, probably gone through hell, had your family life disrupted, and you have to see your little daughter being brought up by a woman who wants to give her 24-7 bodyguards and will probably be whispering nasty lies against you to her at bed time for the next 10 years. Or that's what you expect anyway.

I've been there, I'm sure we all have. Those martyrs about to be burned at the stake, how many of them had a thought like "dammit, all I had to say was 'oh well yes maybe you're right' and I wouldn't be here now". Why do we sometimes see a slippery slope leading down to a horrible chasm, and with everyone shouting warnings and trying to grab us, we just jump right on it and slide to our doom?


OK maybe I can't get too worked up about the travails of a guy with so many homes you need two hands to count them, and a fortune somewhere around a billion dollars, a fabulous musical legacy, and a pretty universal image as a fairly nice guy with a successful articulate daughter making an independent name for herself in fashion, whose previous wife's vegetarian food range is still successful...

But can you imagine how awful it must have been living 4 years with a woman who, for example, poured a full jug of water on her husband's lawyer in court before going out to rant to the press that everyone including the judge was an idiot and she should have actually got $250million?