Groucho Returns

I'm about to quit the evil tobacco weed (again - quitting smoking's a habit of mine), but how do people who've successfully managed it deal with the following?

1. Lack of concentration and focus, in the first couple of weeks at least.

2. The overwhelming compulsion to disembowel the next person that comes within ten meters of you with a pitchfork.

3. The overwhelming compulsion to disembowel Gordon Brown (the UK's tax-happy chancellor) with a pitchfork for having looted so much of your income over the years while still having the nerve to claim that smokers have been a financial drain on the health service?

...communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids?

Or is it fluoridiculous?

...with every single article you come across on any website you reach for the thumbs up/down buttons after reading it and feel disappointed when they're not there?

Am I soon going to start hallucinating them and start clicking mindlessly on a random blank area of the screen?

If so, would we get into trouble if we all swapped the T and the P in Top and started handing out spliffs?

I seem to have woken up wearing one of the SS Top Contributor's orange lifebuoys. Did we hit an iceberg? Where are the lifeboats?

For the record, here are my own thoughts on this matter:

Judging from what I've seen in the suggestion forums, a lot of people are of the opinion that it all started in P&S and that they would like the whole category scrapped "because it contributes nothing to the site anyway".

Personally, I think a lot of the questions and answers in this category are very creative, and some of the regulars here are among the wittiest in Y!A. For that reason I think the category does contribute to the site.

The problem is that this 'rebellion' is annoying a lot of people, and it's (rightly or wrongly) being identified with posters from P&S. I fear that if it goes on for much longer there's a risk that Y!A may just scrap this category.

...would they say a 'trio' of pants instead of a 'pair' of pants?

While looking through Yahoo!Answers you find an interesting question on a subject you have quite a bit of knowledge about. "Great", you think, "I have a bit of spare time so here's my chance to use my knowledge to help mankind by providing a good well-thought comprehensive answer!"

So you spend a good while writing up your response, researching things from various sources on the net as you go. Finally, after fine tuning your answer to make sure it's just right you hit the submit button and...

"The asker has deleted the question."

D'oh!!!

In the British satirical magazine Private Eye, there's a regular cartoon that features a made-up person whose name is a combination of the names of two famous personalities. The person's shown saying a quote from one of the personalities modified to reflect what the other personality might say. Can anyone remember the title of this cartoon?

...arrived at the pearly gates. To his dismay, there were thousands of people ahead of him in line to see St. Peter. To his surprise, St. Peter left his desk at the gate and came down the long line to where the laywer was, and greeted him warmly. Then St. Peter and one of his assistants took the lawyer by the hands and guided him up to the front of the line, and into a comfortable chair by his desk. The lawyer said, "I don't mind all this attention, but what makes me so special?"

St. Peter replied, "Well, I've added up all the hours for which you billed your clients, and by my calculation you must be about 193 years old!"

...the following happens?

You find an open question with a single answer which you know is wrong. You take some time to do some research to find the correct answer, post it and see it appear as the second answer under the wrong one. You come back to the question a while later and find that the first answer has been magically edited to match your correct answer, and is of course chosen as the best answer because it came "first". Happened to me a couple of times now. Ok, it's no big deal in the greater scheme of things, but still annoying...

Does anyone know if the question asker gets a notification mail every time someone edits their own answer? At least this way the asker knows about it.

...and noone's around to read it, does it still answer the question?

Anyone else find it ironic that England's Barmy Army (who regularly belt out stuff like "You all live in a convict colony" to the tune of Yellow Submarine) reacted to the Aussies' playing of a cover of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" with the "awimmaweh" chorus replaced by "they whinge away" by complaining about it and finally getting an apology from the Australian deputy PM?

I mean... they react to being accused of whingeing by... yes, that's right, more whingeing. And the song itself is no worse than what they sing themselves. Just a bit of silly banter.

Here's the song in full by the way:

See the convicts, the mighty convicts, defeat the poms again. See the pommies, the poor old pommies, complain of everything. They whinge away, they whinge away, they whinge away, they whinge away (etc)

Does anyone have any tips on curing Yahoo Answers Addiction?

I should be working yet somehow I always end up back on this site, sometimes without even realising it. Must... check... if one of my answers got a thumbs up... Must... look... for more questions. Etc. An Answerholics Anonymous kinda thing would be very handy!