inulro | Now that is a weird feeling

The last few days, I've had a rotten stinking head cold. This isn't as bad as it sounds. The only time I feel like a regular person is when I have a cold (the down side being I get to feel like a regular person with a cold, and thus my brain function isn't an awful lot improved). This is the reason I finally had to admit that my primary problem is with my immune system rather than a sleep disorder, despite the fact that my blood work says otherwise. Flu-like viruses knock me out completely - it's only colds that have this effect. I even got to feel like a normal person for two days after a cold had gone once, about 4 years ago. I got all excited that I was better and - erm - I wasn't.

I haven't exactly gone to town with my new found feeling good, unless you count dealing with a lot of stuff I'd been putting off at work and going to the library. Not very rock and roll of me, but I still have to worry about the consequences later.

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Last night Radio 4's current events programme, The World Tonight had a piece on the latest reality TV show - filming sleep-deprived people attempting to do stuff. The person who was speaking against it was someone who works with victims of torture - and countries who don't want to admit to using torture use sleep deprivation. She therefore finds it offensive to use it as entertainment. While I think she went a bit far, the producer defending it was entirely lame.

As a lifetime insomniac, I'm not entirely sure where I stand on the issue, but I think it's along the lines of "why would anybody voluntarily do that?" Except, of course, that they get their moment on TV and then get to go back to sleeping normally.

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I don't know why I'm still shocked and outraged at stuff like this. Guess I'm not as jaded and cynical as I like to pretend.

Keeping with stuff I found in today's Guardian, this looks like a really successful project until you see the sample size. Come on people, this is medicine, not sociology.