Religion 1 Australia 0

Some sad news from South Africa today:

A South African man who wanted to watch a World Cup football match instead of a religious programme was beaten to death by his family in the north-eastern part of the country, police said. 

David Makoeya, a 61-year-old man from the small village of Makweya, in the Limpopo province, fought with his wife and two children for the remote control on Monday because he wanted to watch Australia play Germany in the World Cup.  

The others, however, wanted to watch a gospel show.

"He said, 'No, I want to watch soccer'," police spokesman Mothemane Malefo said.

"That is when the argument came about.

"In that argument, they started assaulting him."

This is an awful story but, on the upside, if the guy was a Soceroos fan he was at least spared the misery of watching Australia's humiliating defeat to Germany.

And if you're going to beat someone to death, make sure it's over something truly important. Not that I'm advocating any such thing. But I appreciate that most of my readers are mentally deranged and have severe psychological issues, so there's probably little I can do at this late stage to prevent your engaging in yet another murderous spree (they will catch up with you after last week's little "incident", you know). However, I can at least protect your reputation.

So if TV's the thing that sets you off into a murderous rage, choose your trigger wisely. After all, you don't want your legacy to be a reputation for slaughtering people over their refusal to let you watch Home and Away.

Clearly the people who killed this poor man over a gospel show weren't overly familiar with the teachings of the Bible. Well, the New Testament anyway. There probably is a passage somewhere in Leviticus that says something like: "and if he shall deny the word of the Lord by trying to hog the remote, let him be beaten unto death".

My trigger is House. Expect to pay dearly if you ever get in the way of my watching that show.