'See Venice and die', is an injunction still taken very seriously, as this floating procession of tourist mausoleums in Venice would seem to indicate. Read more about that and other pressing concerns in Dick's Toolbox.

Mike's Pith & Wind - Self flagellation
I was looking in my rhyming dictionary (yes, I finally bought one last year – on special naturally) to see if any one word might leap out and spark a subject for this P&W. I’m sure I had something in mind for this column a few days ago, but it went away, and as I’ve never actually used the rhyming dictionary for writing a song (or a poem for that matter), I thought, why not?
For a start, I immediately noticed that the ‘-ation’ words seem to have the most entries. Isn’t that interesting? It would seem entirely possible you could write a song using nothing but words ending in ‘-ation’. Actually, I’m not sure it hasn’t been done already, but I think an entire P&W might get a little tedious. Try deliberation, consideration - followed in quick succession by procrastination, elimination, and back to frustration. Go to jail and do not pass go.
On reflection, it might be better to have a crack at one of the topics that’s passed in and out of my consciousness for a while now without my actually being able to drum up the energy or enthusiasm to nail it down. I speak of capitalism, that dark satanic millowner of the free world.
Maybe we should start right there – for the very same reasons that there is no such thing as a free lunch, there really is no such thing as the ‘free world’. And the reason for that is one of the basic premises of capitalism.
I don’t know if you saw a doco recently.. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - Too Many People
Whilst I was romantically embellishing some travel notes entitled “24 Years later in Paris” it struck home that on nearly every page, no matter where we were in Europe, I was complaining that we were not alone. We were inundated in a sea of other people, many of whom were tourists like ourselves. Now one of my foibles is that I am no lover of humanity en masse, in my lexicon two people constitute a threatening crowd, so I put this down to just normal grumpiness made worse by flying to Europe with Air France, an airline I can only recommend to legless dwarfs with a desire to observe Gallic indifference at its most sublime.
France was tolerable, Spain bearable, but Italy was unseemly but it was apparent that by the time we reached Venice, things were out of hand people-wise as indicated by what I wrote.
”We discovered the reason for the deluge of humanity as we gazed over to Giudecca canal as, like some vast white spaceship, the.. read more