Arrr!

Lint-roll yer eyepatch and sand yer pegleg. Tomorrow be International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

How to Dissuade Yourself from Becoming a Blogger

The New Irony (tm) virtually requires that The Elkridge Hollerer point you to this wikiHow article on why you shouldn't blog. Separate from such obligations, I would note:

a) Your reading of The Elkridge Hollerer indicates that you already are well underway with Step 1.

b) Their second, self-serving tip, that instead of a blog you write for a wiki (like oh, say, wikiHow) ruins the tone of the article.

Humor is a funny thing

Innumerable times over the past years (as Kerry would wearily confirm), I have quoted, in voice, Comic Book Guy saying to Bart, "No banging your head on the display case, please. It contains a very rare Mary Worth in which she has advised a friend to commit suicide. Thank you." It have always found it funny. And yet today, when it popped into my head for no apparent reason, I found it so funny that I couldn't even get through the line without laughing. I'm still chuckling now (though I must admit, not has hard as I was when blogging about The Economist).

The cable guys (almost) win me over

My favorite advertisers have a new message in their campaign, replacing the cable worker with twins. It's simple: "Cable delivers today."

And that's how they almost got me. If they had just finished off the obvious laugh-line - "Cable delivers today (sometime between 9AM and 5PM)." - then I would have admired their self-depricating chutzpah and immediately called to order the most expensive service package on offer.

A picture from Lagos

This was the morning view from my hotel in Lagos. Actually, it was also the midday and evening view, I suspect; the weather was persistently overcast.

I'm not really sure what's in the picture, except for the cell-phone towers. I think the big dusty square might be an elementary school. Under the big trees next to the road on the left one-third of the picture, someone was arc-welding in the morning. I know this because I could see the arc from my 8th-floor balcony. Have to imagine it was awfully bright for someone driving by, about 15 feet away.

(I have a higher-resolution (3496 x 948) version of this picture. Let me know if you're just dying to see it.)