Bad things

1. The "Lucifer Box" books by Mark Gatiss. I read the first one and thought it was rubbish, and then the second one got tons of good reviews and was half price in Borders, so I read that one too. It is also rubbish. Making a character camp and prone to seducing young men is no substitute for giving him an actual personality. They're just a cut-price rip-off of the Kyril Bonfiglioli "Charlie Mortdecai" books. I can't imagine why so many people claim to have enjoyed them so much. It's another example of the many ways in which Stephen Fry has lost it since he became happy. It's nice for him, but the rest of us have to pay the cost.
2. Facebook. It brings out the naff in anyone who uses it; there is nothing genuinely funny on it, and vast amounts of weak humour. Enough now! This is a modern complex world; it is quite appropriate to have different faces you show to different people, however much that concept gets booed down on Big Brother as hypocrisy. I behave differently to my friends, my colleagues, and my students, and that's called being a proper adult. Facebook should go back to being just undergraduates and the tutors who are keeping an eye on them.
3. How we behave towards people being rather complex. When I was about sixteen I had my hair cut from longish to a sort of Hugh Grant look, which being skinny in those days I could get away with. This had a strange impact on my behaviour; I used to go to school by train, which meant a lot of waiting around for trains that didn't turn up, and I suddenly found that I was asking guards when the train was due in a straight-forward business-like way, instead of a curly-haired, helpless, poor-little-me sort of way which I hadn't even noticed I was doing before. Today I am annoyed with myself for having in the past been similarly pointlessly conciliatory to my vet, who has given me the wrong medicine for my rats. They are sitting about looking miserable because he diluted it without telling me, and actually directed me to continue with the same dosage. I am feeling immensely patronised by this, and very guilty because I haven't cared for my rats properly. The thing is that he's patronised me before, but I just took it because I assumed I had accidentally been annoying, and I assumed my rats would get the best care if I wasn't annoying.