How's This For Dopey?

In June 2008 two French bio-chemistry students were tortured, stabbed and set on fire in their flat in Deptford, South London. A few days after the bodies were discovered a petty criminal walked into a police station and confessed to the crime. Yesterday, 17/4/09, the trial of this man and his alleged accomplice began. In the reporting of the case the media went into lurid detail of how the two victims were bound, burnt, beaten and stabbed in an attempt to torture their PIN numbers out of them. This got me thinking, firstly that the term PIN number is a useless redundancy, but then I thought that if someone was robbing you you wouldn't automatically give up your PIN. Instead you'd make up a fake one to give them to make them go away so if your PIN was 3401 you would tell the torturer that it was 1752. But then I thought that an experienced torturer would probably work out that you were trying to trick them and 1752 was a fake so they'd just carry on with the torture. Then I though it would be a really good idea if you had a second fake PIN like 2440. That way they could beat you for a little bit and you could reveal you PIN to be 1752. They'd refuse to believe that 1752 was a genuine PIN and would start to slash you with razor's and burn you with cigarettes. At this point you could "break" under the pain and give away the fact your PIN was really 2440. Having being lied too once already the abuser would probably not believe you straight away and continue to bring the pain. If you kept apologising for giving 1752 as a fake and insisting that 2440 was genuine the inquisitor would probably believe that they were really good at torture, give up and walk away with the fake 2440 feeling really proud of themselves. It was somewhere through this thought process that I managed to unlearn my own PIN and now I can't get access to my own cash. I'm tempted to see if I can do a deal with a local hypnotherapist to see if they can regress my memory and reveal the lost PIN on the understanding that if they can't make this work then I can't pay them. Alternatively I could just phone my bank.

While I was contemplating this conundrum the Tamil protesters who had been demonstrating outside the Houses of Parliament did something unexpected. They expanded their protests to the Indian Embassy and the Sri Lankan High Commission. This resulted in both buildings being closed for the day, windows were smashed and a number of people were arrested. Details are a little sketchy because the MSM, especially the BBC's reporting of the events seemed to centre around sticking their fingers in their ears and pretending that nothing was happening. The media had probably already used up their daily protest quota by reporting an incident inside the House of Commons where three women and a man super glued themselves to a statue in protest over plans to build a new generation of coal fuelled power stations. The activists from the recently formed Climate Rush wore red sashes and targeted the statue of Viscount Falkland to mark the 100th anniversary of the Suffragettes and to highlight the importance of non-violent protest. This could mean that Climate Rush are a highly organised group who managed to avoid Special Branch surveillance and smuggled super-glue, period costume and red sashes past the House of Commons security perimeter. Either that or the police knew exactly what they were up to but couldn't decide if Britain is facing the worst flu pandemic since 1968 or 1918 so just decided to let them get on with causing chaos and confusion.