Just keep taking the pills. I found them in a Parisian pharmacy alongside these:

Which (at a quick glance) appeared to have remarkable powers – they could help with “baisse de moral” – low morals? (Actually low morale…)

I’m not a big believer in the way blogs are supposed to enable the voice of the little guy to be heard but in this case I have to say the blogosphere has come up trumps. It’s taken 11 years for this superb comic mix of Reservoir Dogs and Greek philosophy by Nathaniel Daw to be once more unearthed. Brad DeLong found it but I heard it from BoingBoing via Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden. And now you’re hearing about it from me (though I imagine a lot of you read BoingBoing anyway). To read an excerpt, click on “page 2” (hidden because of hilarious but copious bad language).

I have been involved with many discussions about rules for participation in virtual communities – Speaking to Me: Terms and Conditions does a great job of making fun of the kinds of “community rules” documents that result.

On a slightly serious note it does suggest some of the actual issues that may arise when increasing numbers of people blog their daily lives – eg:

6. By speaking to Tom Peyer, you grant the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, unrestricted worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display the material (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, including in any parallel universes.

Thank you Alex Gregory of the New Yorker this week for bringing us this cartoon – a lineal descendant of the justly famed (if somewhat inaccurate) 1993 “on the Internet nobody knows you are a dog“.

Visiting the Edinburgh Festival,
originally uploaded by D & D.

This packed schedule gives you an idea of the richness of this amazing event. Of course we won’t be able to see even a fraction of the tens of thousands of performances at this the world’s biggest arts festival. The advent of the Internet has been a godsend in helping to arrange our upcoming visit. Not only can we listen to interviews with the artists and read several blogs by performers and critics but we can access the invaluable reviews by the Scotsman and others mixed in with the comprehensive listings for all five of the currently-running festivals, and read comments by fringe festival-goers as well on the Fringe Festival’s own site. The latter even offers SMS voting for shows. The Stage also has a pretty comprehensive Edinburgh review festival and fringe reviews and listings site. This way we can get some idea of the ‘buzz’ around shows before we take the sleeper up and book what we are interested in – which is just as well since I’m sure a lot of the best stuff will already be sold out for the rest of its run…

overpackaging,
originally uploaded by D & D.

So I opened a courier package and found it had a courier package inside it containing a box containing a package containing (I trust) a plastic cartridge containing the toner that I need!

If a picture is worth 1000 words how many words is an animated GIF worth?

Update: Images by ‘Stargazer‘ and words by ‘jslayeruk‘.

Two similar humorous exercises in jargon juxtaposition made me smile recently – excerpts follow. First, The War on Terror as viewed from the Bourne shell:
$ cd /middle_east/Iraq/Democracy
$ ./install
Install Error: Install failed. See install_log for details.
$ more install_log
Installed failed!
Prerequisite packages missing
Conflicting package Wahhabism found in /midde_east/Saudi_Arabia
Packages Church and State must be installed separately
File System /PeakOil nearing capacity
Please read the install guide to properly plan your installation.

And If World War II was a realtime strategy game this is what would be going on in the chat during the game (warning – lots of profanity – as you might expect):
benny-tow: hey ur losing ur guys in africa im gonna need help in italy soon sum1
T0J0: o **** i cant help u i got my hands full
Hitler[AoE]: im 2 busy 2 help
Roosevelt: yah thats right ***** im comin for ya
Stalin: church help me
Churchill: like u helped me before? sure ill just sit here
Stalin: dont be an arss
Churchill: dont be a commie. oops too late
Eisenhower: LOL

(Or any other book-fanciers). In last week’s News Quiz (a radio comedy programme that features humorous newspaper and other cuttings alongside topical comedy) they read out this gem from an exhibition programme at University Library in Cambridge:

“Never leave books near mice, pigeons, children and other vermin that are likely to damage them.”

My wife just took delivery of her new Dell notebook. She is rightfully afraid that because it is a PC I will be tempted to spend lots of time on it playing games… But when we started filling in the XP setup stuff one of the two example texts given for the computer’s “friendly description” on the network was “David’s Game Machine”. She hadn’t typed my name in… How did they know?! 😉