Halt! Who goes there? It’s just meee!
Cyber-thieves recently hacked the International Monetary Fund. They also successfully hacked Sony, Google and Lockheed. Malicious hackers also breached WordPress.com, potentially impacting Yahoo, Flickr, NASA and the New York Times. Other hacked sites include the U.S. Postal Service and Hyundai.

Meanwhile, I can’t remember my own passwords. I forget also the answers to password reminder questions like “Who was your first grade teacher?”
It was either Miss Canfield, Miss Landers or Mrs. Rayburn, but I’m not completely sure which…

Perhaps most frightening of all is the fact that these type of attacks could quite easily be directed towards Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) organizations, for example Energy and Water, where the impact of such a breach would have severe, immediate and potentially life-threatening consequences for everyday citizens.
Quotation from Mohan Koo, Dtex Systems

I saw mushrooms covered in leaves. I knelt and carefully removed some leaves. I discovered underneath the distinct impression of a leaf on the cap of a mushroom.

In the work of medieval Flemish painters, toadstools were often associated with Hell. Victorian illustrators in England took a more benign view and developed a popular style that linked fairies and toadstools.
Quotation from The Fungus Among Us (VirtualMuseum.ca)

She began gathering some of the fungi in her apron. I called to her, “Come back! Come back to me! They are poisonous, putrid. They are toadstools.” She only laughed more, and her merry laughter will forever ring in my ears. That evening, she seasoned the soup with fungi…
Quotation from George W. Hudler, Magical Mushrooms, Mischievous Molds

What can I say? I like screaming. It’s almost Christmas. I have always liked Christmas.

He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves.
Quotation from Harlan Ellison, I have No Mouth And I Must Scream

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Quotation from Iris Murdoch

I’m trying a new image format for today’s comic– a format that employs lossless data compression called png (portable network graphics) instead of my usual jpeg graphic. I think almost everyone can view the png format, unless you are using an obscure or very old browser. Let me know how you like it. Do you have any trouble seeing my comic? Does it take too long to load? Can you tell the difference?

PNG is considered a better choice than JPEG for storing images that contain text, line art, or other images with sharp transitions. Where an image contains both sharp transitions and photographic parts, a choice must be made between the large but sharp PNG and a small JPEG with artifacts around sharp transitions.
Quotation from Wikipedia.

Out of curiosity, I googled how many days old I am. Then I tried to remember as many of those days as I could. I found eureka moments, childhood memories, people, places, my wedding day, adventures, some Christmases. I remembered important days as well as insignificant days that were somehow important enough to be retained. I regretably confess I cannot remember all 14,368 days.
No, today isn’t my birthday, but I will nonetheless try to make it memorable.

Here is a “How Many Days Young Am I?” calculator. (Derbyshire Guide)

Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you’re alive, it isn’t.
Quotation from Richard Bach

Word of the Day: Contiguous. It means to have contact with, or to be adjacent. It is the opposite of being fragmented or scattered.
When all of your thoughts are touching, it is called Logic. The problem is thoughts jump all over; we don’t have contiguous thoughts. Therefore, we mentally reorder our thoughts until they begin to make sense. In this manner, we build a reasonable case for ourselves based on a kind of false logic. Tragically, the result is we don’t know how stupid, or average, we really are. We can only guess.
In a moment of clarity, everything (and nothing) is readily apparent.

The cathedral towers and the full gables of the quaint old houses were just beginning to blush in the sunrise. There had been no rest for her that night. She was still in her pretty ball-dress, her fair hair hanging somewhat out of curl on her neck, and the circles round her eyes dark with watching. “What a fright I seem,” she said, examining herself in the glass, “and how pale this pink makes one look!” So she divested herself of this pink raiment; in doing which a note fell out from her corsage, which she picked up with a smile, and locked into her dressing-box. And then she put her bouquet of the ball into a glass of water, and went to bed, and slept very comfortably.
Quotation from William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

The photo of Coco in today’s comic was taken by Elaine, who has an awesome photo page called Elaine Remains. Coco passed away last Saturday.

Every dog carries an ID in his back pocket, so to speak. On each side of the rectum is an anal sac, which contains a strong-smelling fluid. This fluid is the equivalent of a dog’s thumb-print. With a quick sniff, dogs can tell more about each other than we could determine by rifling through one another’s wallets. Dogs can tell the sex, age, health, reproductive status, diet, and mood from those smells. They get all the information they need to decide whether they want to associate with that dog and what kind of relationship they ought to have.
Quotation from Dog Behavior: When Dogs Lick & Sniff “Private” Places (BestBetPetSupplies.com)

Friends will arrive and friends will disappear. There are lifetime friendships, to be sure, but like great-grandmother’s diamond ring, nothing lasts forever.

I been meek, and hard like an oak.
I seen pretty people disappear like smoke.
Friends will arrive and friends will disappear,
If you want me, honey baby, I’ll be here.
Lyric from Vic Chesnutt, Buckets of Rain

[Vic Chesnutt, in a wheelchair since an auto accident at age 18, died on Christmas day from an overdose of muscle relaxants]

I sometimes can’t remember what I did yesterday, much less a week ago. Somebody in a crosswalk walked in front of me as I was driving- what was he wearing? What did I eat for lunch? Where did I lay my glasses? I don’t consider myself stupid, but why can’t I remember?

People are overly optimistic about the accuracy of their retrieved memories, probably because most errors have little practical consequence and go unnoticed. Given the confidence in their own memory accuracy, people have too much faith in the accuracy of eyewitnesses. Memory has a multitude of quirks and inaccuracies that creep into its everyday operation.
Quotation from Marc Green, Phd, Eyewitness Memory is Unreliable

Today is Remembrance Day, also called Veterans Day or Poppy Day. It’s a day to honor all of those who sacrifice during times of war.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Poem by Lt.-Col. John McCrae, In Flanders Fields