Vanity, Vanity

Bad news on Del I'm afraid.

Yes, we've all had a snigger at Del behind his back over the years. Yes, he should admit he's losing - or, frankly, near lost - his hair. Yes, it's the most implausible comb-over haircut we've ever seen. One that had Shredded Wheat suing for patent infringement. Yes, we've all wanted to tell him that - but never dared. But it's still a shame it had to end like this.

They came back from the Snorbens Abbey pilgrimage. Del was sitting up by the driver, chatting at the front of the coach. The door opened, the wind blew in and Del's hairstyle was blown from its "arrangement" on his head and flicked back across the aisle of the coach.

Normally everyone would have just pretended nothing had happened, and allowed Del to retain his dignity. But on this occasion it's hit Burton in the eye. There's no covering the whole messy business up any more. And Del has an appointment with Mr Shears in the morning.

Burton is recovered

Thank goodness, we've got Burton Dasset back.
When an accountant goes missing like that you start to worry. They could be almost anywhere - adding up columns of numbers on discarded supermarket receipts, decoding the check-digits in EAN-13 barcodes - their interest in controlling the world through the power of numbers is unlimited.
But on this occasion we've recovered Burton from Ridgmont station. We should have thought of looking there first, of course.
Initially I thought he'd made the old mistake of trying to collect engine numbers. He's done that before, you know. Stood there for hours and forgotten the limited variety of numbers available on the Marston Vale line. But on this occasion he'd spent all day correlating the timetable to make sure the timings between stations were consistent.

Anyway, we've got him back now  but he's a bit blue from the cold.  I suggested it was British Rail blue, but Burton says it's more like a GER livery.

Twitterati

Much concern among the Community's social networking community today after Young Keith threw a sheep at poor Marston Moretaine.  If they'd both been on Facebook at the time it wouldn't have been so bad.

However, the incessant twittering around the place is getting me down.  Updates such as "Edith is on Twitter", for example.  That is a message that can be read from the meta-data of another tweet, if you follow me.
Also, "I'm Spartacus" can get very wearing when retweeted too many times.

Meanwhile Elois is now impossible to drag away from her laptop.  She's missed six sunrises in succession, and on each occasion her tweets have consisted of "missed another sunrise due to being on Twitter :( ".

Likewise the Facebook status of Drayton Parslow - "Drayton should be the Archdruid" is getting a bit monotonous after nine months.  As are the 52 "Likes" after it.  Don't forget, I know who you are.

Burton, always a stickler for details, is definitely driving us all to distraction, with his consistent updates on the frequency, size and - heaven help me - texture of his bowel movements.  That would be bad enough, but why some freak has taken to retweeting them is beyond me.

I feel the need to stress the Community Rule #42 of the Beaker Folk at this point - "Use of internet social networking is permissible, and indeed encouraged, if it leads to the increased weal of the persons of the community."  However it must be modified by Rule #43, "In most cases, your opinions are tedious, predicatable and fatuous.  They are a waste of the electrons that carry them and the energy required to encode the magnetic dipoles that store them."

I'm ever so pleased we've got as far as Rule #43.  When we started we only had the one, and that was "Don't be evil".  And we had to give that one back.

Meanwhile, bad news about the Moot House in Second Life.  It's burnt down.