So the Foster family are all dead then.

I'd like to pretend it's a tragedy but to be honest I never liked them much anyway.

Yes that's right we're all having some fun with the Mansion Massacre Arson story. After a week where this human interest story has had us all gripped with tales of bankruptcy, conspiracy, kidnap plots, seized computers, dead horses, obstructed investigations and unidentified adult males it turns out all that happened was that Chris Foster, the father, had a bit of a moment killed the wife and daughter before setting fire to the house and turning the gun on himself.

Now the question that everybody will be trying to fathom is what possessed him to do such a horrific thing. On this point I can be of some use because there appears to be a clear David Kelly-esque sequence of events that led up to last Tuesday's fire.

Although already deeply in debt about two weeks ago Mr Foster had the added misfortune of having his credit card details cloned by a dangerous gang of fraudsters. This gang must have been very well organised fraudsters because they not only managed to bypass the normal banking controls designed to prevent credit card fraud they also managed to bypass the special court and liquidator controls on Mr Fosters accounts in order to run up an extra couple of hundreds of thousands of pounds of debt.

After an intense fortnight where he had to deal with this new stress on top of all his other problems Mr Foster was granted a unexpected chance to relax in the form of the long bank holiday weekend. This period of sudden and intense stress followed by an equally sudden drop in pressure clearly did something to Mr Fosters mind and he decided to slaughter his family for our television enjoyment.

Personally I think that along with the French and Chinese students that's one hell of death toll just so one little lesbian can pretend she's got a real life girlfriend all of her own. On the plus side though I suppose that now the performance is over the broken and burned bodies can now be returned to their legitimate families.

In other news today I finally got that long awaited medical report from my GP and sent it off to the dreaded DWP. I should warn whoever has the misfortune of reading it that I did get a little bit carried away with the covering letter. I have no idea how this will pan out and quite frankly I don't really care. I just hope the government are fully aware that their giving of an incorrect answer will not improve their situation anytime soon. After all I'd hate for them to waste more time running chasing fantasies as they have a tendency to do.

New Orleans appears to have had a lucky escape as Hurricane Gustav has dropped to a category 1 storm and made landfall someway west of the city. No doubt this will lead to some people to criticize the cities authorities for crying wolf by ordering the evacuation. Some will even accuse them of playing politics with the storm ahead of the Republican National Convention.

This is of course nonsense because when the evacuation order was given Gustav was entering the gilf of Mexico as category 3 storm, the same strentgh as Katrina when it made landfall. This meant that there were two possible outcomes. The hurricane could have turned to the east over warm water. This would have caused it to pick up windspeed, become more violent and destructive before punching News Orleans full in the face as a category 4 storm. Alternatively it could have turned to the west over cooler waters were it would have become less brutal making landfall as little more then a windy Tuesday evening.

In the event the latter situation occurred but with no way of predicting what would happen the decision to evacuate New Orleans was not one I would envy anyone having to make and as they say better a sitting piss then a standing shit.