I am sitting at my desk nursing a splitting headache. To describe it in terms slighty more erudite and less visceral than “AAAGH GOD MMF OWWW”, I would say that it feels like my left frontal lobe is attempting to chew through my skull just above the eyebrow. I’ve never been so thankful for the invention of rolling office chairs; gliding on casters between cubicles, I avoid the pounding throb that accompanies each plodding footstep.

Even the gentle chime of my mail client, softly informing me of further nuisances freshly sluiced through the bowels of the Exchange server, sends a twinge through my head that felt, earlier this morning, like a hatpin, but now is more like a 10d nail. It doesn’t help that my occasional hacking cough, the legacy of last week’s illness, explodes into an ephemeral agony with every diaphragmic spasm.

Ow.

I’m looking down into my trashcan, staring at the bottom of an upturned yogurt container. Fifteen minutes ago, I devoured its contents with gusto, savoring every spoonful. Now I’m looking at it. I cannot turn away.

It is empty; I have ingested its semiviscous innards. Discarded, it should be of no further concern, but it speaks to me with words that are, at a single stroke, both silent and thunderous. I am reading the words Best by May 17, 2008.

Maybe it’s just me, or maybe people care less about festive days in general, but it seems like people used to make a much bigger deal out of St. Patrick’s day than they do now. Maybe they still do, and I’m basing my opinion on hazy grade-school-era memories of everybody attending classroom shindigs wearing construction-paper shamrocks, guzzling punch, and mercilessly pinching the poor bastard whose mother forgot to dress him in green that day.

I don’t know why this is occupying so much of my tiny brain. It’s not like I’m even partially Irish; I guess I’m just being randomly quasi-melancholic for no reason at all.

If you watch the Daily Show, you’ve already seen this. If you don’t watch the Daily Show because, like me, you’re too cheap to subscribe to Comedy Central, you may have missed Jon Stewart’s scathing, if measured, condemnation of financial punditry as a gaggle of cynical hucksters.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer bore the brunt of Stewart’s populist but eminently reasonable indignation like a champ, but make no mistake: Stewart destroyed Cramer’s—and, by inference, many journalists’—credibility.

If only we still had journalists as fearless as some of our comedians.

One can quibble about the exact birthdate of the Web, but it is surely inarguable that today is the 20th anniversary of itsconception. The Web has brought us an unprecedented wealth of instant information and fantastic treasures like Amazon, Flickr, blogs, clever Flash animation, and YouTube. Of course, it’s also responsible for the proliferation of horrors like swap.avi, Conservapedia, Dragonball Z/Star Trek crossover slash fiction, 4chan, and YouTube comments.

So thank you, Mr. Berners-Lee. And fuck you, too.

I would just like to say that that Daylight Savings Time is complete bullshit. That is all.

UPDATE: (…And lo! There is published research that supports my independent findings.)