Bad Karma, Snail Murder And The Warped Web-Fu Of My Brother In Law.

So yes. To back track a little, The Beautiful Man and I are staying at my sister and my brother-in-law's flat (where the Hand Incident happened) and we find a pot in the garden with a wooden lid on it. So we lift the lid and inside we find about 20 live snails.

So we ponder this snail prison which my sister and her husband (who shall henceforth be known as The Snail Torturers) have created, and then The Beautiful Man goes and gets a marker pen and writes Camp X-Ray on the top of the lid. And we snicker for a bit and we think no more of it.

Then The Snail Torturers come back from their honeymoon and are obviously doing a bit of gardening because I get a text message from Snail Torturer A (my sister) saying, "I can't believe you wrote Camp X-Ray on the snails!" Which makes The Beautiful Man and me laugh quite a lot, because we had forgotten he did it.

So then, a week or so passes and we get an email from Snail Torturer B, (my brother-in-law) saying this: "Its not just me! I'm going to send them a picture of Camp X-Ray..." And he links us to Snailhausen.

Snailhausen!

I mean, Snailhausen!

Apparently, there is a couple (Mr and Mrs Wheatley) who are so upset by garden snail invasion that they have set up Snailhausen. And made a website about it. They've named the snails - currently the population of Snailhausen is only two (Miguel and Shaun) but worse than that is that Mr and Mrs Wheatley are asking the public to vote on which snail should be executed first.

And people are voting!

So I try to place a vote for 'neither', but it will not allow me to choose 'neither', I have to choose one or the other. Either Miguel dies, or Shaun does. Which is slightly upsetting.

I mean it's funny for a bit, but then it's not because I start to lose it, and my head starts to get all 'Big-Brother-Gone-Wrong' and 'The-Slow-Decline-Into-Public-Murder-Games-Begins.'-ish.

Because alright, it's only snails we're voting on now, but what about next year? Will it be people next year? I mean it could be, couldn't it? Where do you start? You start with snails right? I mean next year Mr and Mrs Wheatley could be running a production company which makes a TV show whereby people who have done something wrong are entered into a nationwide public vote in order that we may all decide which one of them should be executed.

Maybe you think I'm exaggerating, over-reacting, but how do you know that Mr and Mrs Wheatley won't have developed a taste for power by then, and won't have created a monster out of their little Snailhausen joke-ette?

Hmmm?

Hmmm??

***

*Breathes.*

So that's somewhat scary.

***

And then I start to think about how Snail Torturer B managed to find a website which would back up his case for torturing snails and I begin to wonder how long it took him to find something that would justify their actions, and I really start to think about what the Sam Hill he typed into Google in order to find it...

This? - 'Snail Torture'?
This? - 'Other people who torture snails like me'?
This? - 'Snail Camp X-Ray'?

THIS? - 'The snails must DIE, DIE I say KEEL them, KEEL them NOW'?!

I mean first there was 'Camberwell Camp X-Ray' and now there is Snailhausen.

It's all very worrying indeed.