Yet, is there a better way to liven things up around a monestary?

The question is, "would you 'use strict', even if no one told you to?"

The best 'Best Practices'(now that's getting painful) arise, NOT because they have become dogma, or are enforced by a bunch of anal control freaks but because THEY WORK.

Let's face it, some of us have 'worked without a net', left warnings and 'strict' off, telling ourselves, "we can get away with it, we 'cool', we 'good', we 'so well above average'. Only to have something end up in the code that takes us N hours to resolve that if we had used 'strict', warnings etc, would have been caught in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. And after a quick trip to local tatoo parlor to have 'use' put on the inside of one eyelid and 'strict' on the inside of the other, we never go without it again(almost never).

'use strict' isn't a best practice. It's a vaccination against hubris.