But, I must admit, equally fascinating to me during the video were the facial expressions and body language of the one female judge, Amanda Holden. I can’t help but think that the relationship between Simon Cowell and Amanda Holden reminds me of the conventional movie villain and his submissive lover — say, for instance, the relationship between Camille Montes and Dominic Greene in the most recent Bond film, “Quantum of Solace,” though the overlap is not perfect there.

I highly recommend watching the video: both to see Boyle’s performance — which is truly remarkable — and to wonder at the thoughts going through Holden’s head.

Nicholas Evans’ agent said the writer, his wife, her sister and the sister’s husband became sick after cooking and eating mushrooms they had picked in the woods on Aug. 23.

The A.P. Watt literary agency said tests established that the mushrooms included the highly toxic variety Cortinarius speciosissimus, which attacks the kidneys.¹

At the risk of sounding even colder than I usually do, I would like to ask if I am the only one surprised by this story’s details. I vividly remember being told literally hundreds of times as a small child that I should never eat anything that I found in the wild. I am therefore surprised that a famous novelist seems not to have ever learned a lesson I understood when I was five years old. Are British children encouraged to eat unidentified plant life?

1. MSN : Mushrooms Poison “Horse Whisperer” Author

• Exhibit A — The comments posted on the Wired article that reported Reiser’s conviction.
• Exhibit B — A recent article from the SF Gate reporting that Reiser has given police his dead wife’s body in exchange for a reduced sentence.

Let the criterion of reasonable doubt stand, and let us conclude not that our courts are unjust, but rather that many of Reiser’s defenders are too irrational to understand when justice has been done. Perhaps Aristotle would have commented on the whole ordeal, “hoi polloi alogoi.”

In closing, I cite the comment left at 3:50:20 P.M. on April 28th, 2008 on the Wired article featured as Exhibit A. It is, I think, a remarkable sample of the perversions of the human mind.

the last sentences sum up the American justice system.

“*You are rude,* he said. *You are arrogant. There are not enough words in the English language to describe the way you are.*

But the jurors found a word on Monday: guilty.”

The man was convicted for murder, not because he was guilty, but because he was “rude and arrogant”.

The man knows for sure he is more intelligent than most of those apes around him. And he has some disdain for them. And it shows – not openly, but enough for them to understand. And they choose to stick it to him.

This is not justice. This is mob rule. It is sick and perverted. Anmerica, the land of the lynch mob.

If you have so much disdain for your fellow men, it is reasonable to wonder if you might consider murdering one of them without regret. This by itself makes your case hard to sustain, and so much more so when other evidence also suggests that you murdered your own children’s mother.