Sometimes I see things that really depress me. This is an item about a truly imbecilic couple who wanted to be famous. A young man, a father, persuaded his girlfriend to shoot him in the chest at point-blank range in the hope of breaking through with a YouTube video. For protection, he held an encyclopaedia in front of him.

If the gun had been a .22, or maybe even something a little more powerful, he might have got away with it. He did practice first, and the gun he used, unspecified, did not penetrate even one book. But the gun he used this time was a .50 calibre, for F*** sake, famed for its ability to penetrate all the way through an engine block. The book didn’t even slow the bullet down.

So the young guy is dead and his girlfriend, pregnant with his child, has been charged with manslaughter. He probably deserves his Darwin Award. His idiot girlfriend probably deserves whatever happens to her. But their babies surely don’t deserve to have such people as parents.

I’m not sure why this story depresses me. Not so much the tragic waste, because these people clearly didn’t have all their lights on. Not even the tragicomic aspect of it, because it certainly doesn’t make me laugh. Maybe just the knowledge that there really are people like that in the world. Not bad people, Not evil people. Just people with no sense who want to be famous. I guess what depresses me is they succeeded.