Cheer up, you won't feel a thing

I do have some things to be cheerful about.
I'm not a lion as depicted by ancient civilisations, for example.

There's a huge bas-relief in the British Museum showing a lion hunt.  Or rather, lots of lions running around, and then men with amusing beards shooting them full of arrows.  The lions look alternately cross, alarmed, or just a bit narked off and wanting twenty minutes' kip.  I hope this selection of pictures demonstrates this point:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stopadoodledoo/tags/thatbloodywellhurts/


Not that it's just lions being killed or wanting a cup of tea and a bit of a break.  The assiduous amongst you will notice that I've also photographed a man and a centaur having a weird leg-wrestling contest, and if your day wasn't already bad because you had got in a bit of argy-bargy with a mythical creature, then the icing on the cake was probably when your penis got chiselled off.  It really was a hard life growing up in the old days.

Whereas now we have Youtube, and Gmail, and mobile telephones, and - and hang on, what have we got now that we didn't have five years ago?

That's the worrying thing about the future.  I think it might have happened while we weren't looking, and now we can't remember what things used to be like.  And what's maybe worse, we also can't remember if anything good happened recently, or five years ago.  New stuff hasn't got old, and there's no new new stuff to push it out the way. Ten years ago the Nasdaq was about to melt down, and nobody had even heard of an ipod.  And it's five years since myspace was bought by Rupert Murdoch - so when did the revolution stop?  I'm now struggling and scratching my head to think of something really exciting that was new and fresh and only appeared in the last five years, and iPhones and Facebook really don't count.

What to do?

Luckily, I'm a soulless automaton and worry not for these things.  But I really need to go get myself a burger.