UK news sucks just as much as ours

Before my business trip to Albuquerque last week I was channel flipping and ended up catching the last bit of a segment on BBC. I don’t remember what it was but the story afterwards was a woman who lost a 370 pound shoe. Forgetting the monetary standard in the UK, I thought to myself, "What the hell is someone doing with a shoe that weighs 370 effing pounds?" After I realized the shoe cost £370 I wondered why someone would spend that much money on a pair of shoes and, more importantly, why this is news? "Real life Cinderella seeks lost shoe." Right. As dry as the British sense of humor is, I think that this is just their way of nicely saying, "Real life jackass loses a really ugly and really expensive shoe."

For some reason, I feel a certain amount of smugness when this kind of tragedy happens to someone, especially when the amount of the item increases in value. Serves them right for losing something so trivial that cost so much money. Now that I think about it, it might be borderline sour grapes if it not for the fact that I wouldn’t want to wear a $600 pair of shoes. What kind of an idiot loses a shoe that costs as much as the shipping on an authentic Captain James T. Kirk chair?

OK, it isn’t smugness or sour grapes. It is just good old fashioned schadenfreude. Does that make me a bad person?