Excelsis

 There's a great article here about Diarmuid Early, winner of the Microsoft Excel World Championship and a really nice guy all round!

Can I encourage you to join in next year's competition? I promise you it's a lot of fun! Full details pending, but this is the schedule of days to set aside half an hour for solving puzzles by means of spreadsheet formulas as quickly as possible.

You don't have to be weird to do this, but it helps.

Sic transit gloria mundi

 This meme I saw on the internet is rather sad, really.

I mean, there are a lot of things in here I used every day and to think that they're now museum pieces is downright depressing. I've never had an AOL address, though, so I win there. Mainly because I've had the same yahoo email address for 27 years now, but that doesn't show my age at all, right? And I think I've only ever slept on a waterbed once. And I'm not American, so I've never written in 'cursive' as the writer of this meme understands the word, probably. Does that mean I'm still young? Answers on a postcard.

Ridiculosa!

 The Sparky Book 1978 includes two adventures for "Ma Fia and her Mob". Not a regular strip in the weekly Sparky comic, or as far as I can tell, anywhere else.

I thought they might have been borrowed from somewhere else to fill space in the annual (the Sparky at this time did include The Circus of P. T. Bimbo, imported from America and similarly playing on old American stereotypes), but research on the internet draws a complete blank - a lone website cataloguing the contents of this Sparky Book is all Google turns up. The website in question describes it as "relying on cheap racial stereotyping for humour! Yet another case of scraping the barrels bottom again." - which, yes, is fair, but I always rather liked these two comics and hoped to see more of them!

Is there really no more than this? You could churn out a good few more strips along these lines before you run out of the stock of tired old clichés, and I know I at least would like to see them! Could they have appeared under a different name somewhere? I think Ma is due a revival, anyway.

I did put the second strip into Google's image search to see if anything would turn up, but all I got was Google's AI summarising the story in its own unique style:

No, thank you. Honestly, I can't help thinking they need to work a bit more on the whole AI thing before automatically forcing it on people who use Google to search for things. There are some very stupid people out there, after all, and I worry about what they're going to end up believing. I do like the way it's quite good at interpreting the dialogue, but spectacularly fails to pick up on what's actually happening in the story. It's reassuring to know computers are still so dimwitted, we can thwart their inevitable takeover of the world by asking them to define love.