I like the Internet as much the next person

but it still doesn't cut it for some things. On Sundays, I like to go to a local coffee shop with friends to sit and read the paper for most of the morning. I like that I can come home and post links to some the interesting things that I have read, but I will be sad if the day comes when everything we do "together" is done in isolation on some flavour of "personal information device". I speak from experience : for many years, [U.S.] Thanksgiving in my family found five or six people sitting around the table playing Solitaire. That was already strange enough, but then the laptop craze hit and I would come down to the kitchen in the afternoon and see a table surrounded by grown adults all playing "card games" on their portable computers.

On that note, I leave you today with the Wisdom of Bendypig (passed along by mapgirl), which says : "Try drinking coffee through a bendy straw, you can never take yourself too seriously doing that."