Lest we forget...

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

- Martin Niemöller

References

• US Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
• BBC (in Pictures)

I'm a long time fan of Scott Adams Dilbert Comic strip, as are millions of cubicle farm workers in the ranks of the oppressed and downtrodden. But I've always taken note of Adams' willingness to shamelessly exploit his creation to make a few trainloads of cash in the vast world of merchandising and his apparent willingness to play both sides of the employee/employer war against each other, if there was a buck in it for him.

And that's cool. I've even bought the odd Dilbert item or two myself and been given the occassional desktop calendar or book as a gift. And when I visit the Dilbert website, I expect to see a fairly hefty amount of advertising...even for non-dilbert products. Adams' motto certainly seems to be: I'll flog it, if you pay me.

And that's fair enough too. After all, if he's developed a brand that brings in hordes of gullible punters into the shearing pens where they can be swiftly and painlessly separated from their hard-earned wonga, in a style that would make the pointy haired boss proud, then fair play to him.

But the latest storyline in the daily dilbert series has taken the Dilbert advertising monolith one step further...by building advertising directly into the strip itself.

A while ago, Adams announced the launch of a new file sharing service called dilbertfiles.com, designed to allow subscribers to send and share large files over the web.

And suddenly, a few weeks later, the latest story lines are featuring Dilbert creating the service and incurring the wrath of the Boss,Catbert et all in the process.

All I can read into this, is that the service is not perhaps doing as well as predicted - why else would Adams have to stoop to this level, in order to flog it?

And what's next? Alice and Wally wearing sandwich boards advertising gawd knows what, as they move from meeting to meeting? The pointy haired boss having a banner hanging over his desk, advertising gawd knows what else? Dogbert doing monologues on the shopping channel?

It's a pity really, because I used to enjoy my daily dose of Dilbert. But I don't think I'll bother visiting again for awhile...

The long awaited day has finally arrived.

An estimated crowd of over 2 million people has turned out to witness Barrack Obama's inauguration and (hopefully) welcome in a new era of relative political honesty, integrity and accountability.

Many people were also there to do the honourable thing: which is of course to hurl abuse at George Bush and his outgoing entourage. Ahhhhh.....Few sights in the last eight years have made my happy heart do a little Pulp Fiction dance more than the sight of hundreds of people pointing at Bush and chanting: "na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, Good BYE!". Bliss!

In a brilliant related story, a Shoe manufacturing plant in Turkey has seen a huge upturn in demand for the same shoes that were hurled at Bush a couple of weeks back. And you can even play the video game.

Watching the inauguration, I spotted one rather depressed (and seriously overweight) looking Bush fan, bravely waving a Texas flag:-

...when I suddenly had a small epiphany.

Look closely at the Texas flag - for all intents and purposes, it's a highly simplified, "big picture" version of the US flag. If it was a book, it would be a story about a dog called ben, have 5 cardboard pages (with lift-up flaps) and come with a guarantee that it was waterproof and chewable.

Suddenly, the last eight years makes more sense!

Still, as the Rolling Stones once said: "but, it's all over now". So welcome to the real world President Obama. Nice to have you with us.

After 3 days of battling a particularly nasty flu virus, I reluctantly emerged bleary-eyed and bunged up, from a mountain of sweaty bed linen, tissues and nasal spray bottles, after my fever broke (and the hot water bottle sprung a leak).

After cursing the second-rate nature of all British domestic goods, I managed to drag my carcass downstairs and park it on the couch. Su was watching some episodes of the original 1967 series of Mission: Impossible so I tried to take my mind off my spiralling temperature and wet socks (the hot water bottle was across my feet when it leaked) and tried to tune in to the episode plots.

And a number of questions popped into my mind...

1. Why does the IMF team leader Jim Phelps not seem to understand the concept of security? He goes to all the trouble of driving bloody miles to pick up a dossier and listen to a taped message (which then self-destructs), only to return home and browse through an operatives dossier which is forever lying open on his coffee table?
2. On a related point, why does he need to browse the dossier of IMF members at all? He picks the same ones every week!
3. Why are the soldiers and police in every eastern-bloc country dressed like SS officers with red insignia?
4. Why does all eastern European architechure look like shots from a Bavarian tourist brochure?
5. Why are all the road and signs in english with funny foreign accents? (e.g. a warehouse in east Germany was signposted "Warehouz". The same Warehouse in a south American country was signposted: "el Warehouso")
6. Where did the producers find so many blue-eyed Arabs?
7. Why does Jim Phelps - a supposed master of disguise - think that a brown goatee beard (which clashes violently with his grey/silver hair) makes him unrecognisable?

and while I was pondering these, I also thought:-

• Does Barney the technical guy ever get tired of being stuffed into cramped, sweaty, airless craw spaces, in order to work some technical magic in totally unreasonable timescales?
• How come the bodybuilding dude can fool the villians by simply changing costume (e.g. from soldier to telephone engineer) and nobody notices?

...which led me to the big one:-

How do the IMF team manage to avoid life's X-factor?

In their world the roads are always clear of traffic, the phone is always manned (and answered after the 1st ring), the bar is always open and the chef is always in the kitchen. No-one gets an unexpected cold or dose of the flu, or gets food poisoning. They never get radio signal interference or run out of gas. Barney never drops the critical piece of glass he's pulled off the wall in order to drill holes or install something clever. The Femme Fatale never forgets where she left her knickers the night before.

If anyone out there can figure these out, I'd sure like to hear from ya...

Recently, my girlfriend's parents very kindly gave us a board-game version of the World of Warcraft. It looked interesting and we decided to give it a go over the Christmas break.

Jaysus! It took us almost 2 hours to set the damn thing up and an hour or so later, I was mightily relieved to be eliminated from the game as my last hero bit the dust. I'm the first to admit that I'm hardly Mr Patient and the game is obviously complex, which means that it takes a while to get used to, but even so...

WoW is no doubt a great computer game, but I've resolved never to go near the board game version again if I can possibly avoid it!

On the plus side...

Thanks to StumbleUpon, I found a great website called www.xkcd.com, which has a brilliant collection of weird and surreal comic strips...and this one reminded me of the WoW board game.

There are plenty of other laugh-out-loud strips (and not a few: "eh?" strips too). Why not check it out for yourself and post a few links to your favs.

Well, that's 2008 finished. For many folks it's not been a good one and I suspect that they are glad to put it behind them.

Beyond the impact of the credit crunch, the Russians and Georgians scrapping and the inevitable Christmas kickoff between Israel and Hamas, 2008 did have a few highlights. The election of Barrack Obama heralded the end of the Bush era and there's not many of us outside the US who are sorry to see THAT happen. Closer to home, the UK olympic team performed amazingly well at the Beijing olympics and Terry Pratchett was knighted in the honours list.

For me, 2008 has had a few memorable highlights; The Hyde Park gig in July was pretty good and an off-the-cuff trip to the Hawk Conservancy proved to be a grand day out. I also managed to get away for a long weekend with my two best pals; a few beers and lots of laughs is always a prescription for happiness. It's also been a pretty good year for work and for the first time in a few years, I've found my skills to be in unusually high demand.

I'm not sure what 2009 will bring us, and I get the feeling it will be a landmark year for many people, myself included.

Here's hoping it will prove to be memorable for all the right reasons...