We all have our weaknesses. We won't go into yours, but mine include the last 15 minutes of Bargain Hunt ( 'Pure Hunt', or 'Hunt Prime' to aficionados), passport-sized sketchbooks and romanticising public information services in drawing form. My biggest weakness, though, would have to be Not Thinking the Right Thoughts at the Right Time. That maybe seems like a frightening imposition on a rightly treasured liberty, but it's reasonable to assume that, at certain times, only certain thoughts are helpful, and as such your mind can be relied upon to only produce thoughts directly relative to that situation.
Not so. The other day, for example. I should've been considering possible alternatives to grouping and sending jpg worksheets via email, as a third of them failed to initiate properly upon receipt. Instead, I was considering a mildly irritating children's television show from when I was young(6 billion years ago).
You probobly remember "The Queen's Nose", the story of a young girl who was given (ugh) a magic 50 pence piece (I hate typing that)that could grant her wishes. Like most things, I didn't enjoy it, though largely because, like the majority of children's fiction in the young-people-randomly-gifted-with-deus-ex-machina artefacts-of-extraordinary-power genre, it didn't involve said young person having fun with the miraculous object of their amazing good fortune. Rather, they spent 90% of their time fretting over the ramifications of being so carefree and wishing for pleasant frivolities like 'as many sweets as you could eat' or 'magic horse'. If they DID have the temerity to foolishly enjoy themselves, said folly would be cicumstantionally demonstrated to them, usually via some traumatic family event caused by the wish which they would have to subsequently un-wish (with another wish).
I'm not one for enjoying myself without the appropriate checks being made and criteria fullfilled beforehand. But I wouldn't go on children's television and start lecturing kids on how their thoughtless idealistic whimsies might one day kill us all. That doesn't seem fair. Perhaps the aforementioned genre of fiction could be explained away as the renements of the 70's Cold War paranoia entertainment craze, where every piece of fiction had to include the human population decimated by something, and the survivors living in the country, crying and being chased by either monster plants or one another.
But if they wanted to be all down on the idea of a magic penny, why didn't they just go all out and impose (I'm getting excited!) proper real world conditions on the story? For instance, a girl running round Kensington with an omnipotent 50p can't possibly go unnoticed for long. In steps the government. The government could use the wishes for unimaginable gain, but it needs the girl to make those wishes for them. Luckily, the girl herself would only have wished for things like an ice cream factory, or her sister being turned into a pigeon - wishes which the state can more than provide her with (well, they'd just lock her sister up and catch a pigeon from somewhere, but it's definately do-able), and in abundance. Hence, the girl gets unlimited wishes (up from 10 or however many), while Great Britain gains an unimaginable superweapon.
Let's be realistic, though. It's not like the government would be happy just 'making 10 powerful wishes' and leaving it at that. They'd want to research the coin, discover the root of its power, harness or even duplicate it - all the better to guard against other child-activated super-relics (Bernard's Watch and Magic Grandad spring to mind). Inevitably, things in the research facility testing the coin would go wrong, it'd all end up like a cross between Jim'll Fix It and System Shock 2. But that's only if things happened realistically.
My other big weakness is not knowing when and how to end something properly, so I'll leave you to ponder the above while I try and send those jpgs. Again.
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