Setting fire to Paris Hilton and invading Iraq: Phobias for fun and profit

(”Let’s get those evil mothersuckers…!”)

Damn, this is silly – yet it is hard not to sympathize with the guy, Especially, if you, like me (and him) have this thing about spiders:

“A man had to be rescued after setting the front of his house on fire while trying to kill a spider with a lighter. Firefighters say the man, in his 40s, had been trying to set fire to the spider as it crawled up the front of the semi-detached property But sparks reached material behind the cladding and caused a fire within the walls, shortly before midnight. Three fire engines raced to the scene in Portsmouth, Hants, and found the man trying to put out the flames with a garden hose.”

Phobias can be so weird.

I mean, if you are in Australia, it’s perfectly normal to be wary of spiders. Hell, if you’re an Australian it would be insane not to worry about the local fauna – since about everything that swims, crawls, burrows or flies there seems to be Hell-bent on killing as many human in as many painful ways as possible.

Here in Europe though, the fear of spiders is a bit silly. If you compare the size and weight of your average house spider to that of our most anorexic of celebs, we are still, more or less, talking about Mount Everest having this thing about humans.

Of course, phobias aren’t logical. That’s the whole point of them. To ask that poor guy who set his house on fire what he got against that blameless spider wouldn’t make much sense.

Or about as much sense as asking our young George what he had against Iraq, I guess.

Which would explain quite a lot about recent history, come to think of it – and it would make a great B movie too, with John Goodman playing Bush.

Yes, it does have a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

‘Iraqnophobia…’

(If only Hitchcock could have done the younger Bush…)