Gaussian Eliminators\{Dave} play trivia again. Did we win? Read to find out. Or alternately you could just scan the bolded text. Your call, buddy.

I should probably open this with a few brief notes. Firstly, that there have been two trivias since my last post. Some of you, such individuals being distinguishable from the general populace by virtue of being BASTARDS, know about the first such trivia but chose not to attend. I'm not bitter or anything, but be warned that my friends in the Russian mafia may have misconstrued certain .......remarks......... I made in the heat of the moment and may remove your spleen. I have it on good authority¹, however, that you can live without one - so hey, what's a spleen between friends? Feel free to come next week, assuming you're over the surgery by then. I didn't blog monday's trivia as seems to have become customary for these things as I have had various other things on my mind in the interem - one of which being that I have now aquired a proper maths-type job (this is to say a job attained because of, rather than in spite of a first class honours in mathematics - yay me). Also, my potential supervisor for next year looks an awful lot like John Bunnett. As the reader can imagine, this has caused me some angst.

A few things of note in Monday's trivia that I will mention are as follows. Martin may remember a "nerd-off" we had about who'd kick the other's arse in a Tolkein round². Well, apparently the question "to which mountain were Frodo and Sam taking the one ring"? was, based on wrong answers, the hardest question in round three. Talk about dufuses. We kind of missed having anyone who knew or cared anything about sport questions, though, giving the answer 10³⁸⁶:1 in disgust when asked for the results to some sporting match no-one could be expected to care about. Oh, actually, this question's kind of interesting: What was strange/special/of note about the Australian national cricket team that toured England in 1868? We wrote "they were all English". This was wrong, but the correct answer is along these lines. As a test to see whether or not anyone actually pores over the mindless trash I spit out into the great void of the WWW, I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

Now, on to last night's trivia at the Red Room. We felt, in many ways, short-changed last night. For one thing, recent recruit Tim defected to some random team we'll just refer to as the Judas Turn-coats. For another, Rupert, declared that there'd only be three rounds this week. Helping us swallow these bitter pills, however, were the following two happenstances: 1. Chris turned out to be marking Tim's Phys2100 assignment at the time - so Tim, if you're out there buddy, imagine I'm talking like a crusty English gangster from Snatch when I say: "It's a shame what can happen to a Phys2100 assignment when the marker isn't too careful, my son". Oh, and 2. As it happened, we were ahead at the end of round three anyways, so We won, bitches!!!!! It must have been pretty close, though, because there were two teams 1/2 a point ahead of us and one team 1 point ahead of us just prior to this round - and we scored a perfect 10 when two other teams tied for 9. Anyways, we don't have to pay for beer next week either.

Possibly the reason for Rupert's cutting trivia short was because he knew there would be a mock-wedding between a representative of King's college and a woman's college a comin' to the read room. This mock-wedding differed from a real one in as much as A) it wasn't legally binding, B) there was even more alcohol involved, and C) it was basically a frat party. Someone had gone to the trouble of making matching tight-fitting white shirts for, I guess the bridesmaids (of which there were, oh I don't know, 100) on which they were writing such witty aphorisms as Tits out for the drought³, Huck me Fard and I am a cum hungry slut. We joked as to what we, being witty maths-nerds, would have written on said shirts instead. Geoff's response involved the petersen graph. Mine involved the pigeon-hole principle. Man, we're funny. Anyways, notable questions and suchlike........

Notable correct answers:

1. What movie, in 1985, represented Madonna's screen debut? I gained us a point here, but lost the respect of the table.
2. What is a Haboob? O.K. so, a clue is that this was in the Weather and Climate round in which we scored a perfect 10. We originally thought the point was down to Rupert's thinking the answer "a boob only 1/3 as funny as a hahahaboob" as funny as only we could have, assisted as we were by a largish amount of beer. Actually, it was down to the fact that I scribbled a footnote saying "or maybe a/an X" - where X is the correct answer - proving once again that teams who don't have the word "Gaussian" in their team name suck balls.

Notable incorrect answers

1. What city held the world cup in 1986 after being devastated by an earth-quake?
2. What musician's birth-name was 'Decland McManus'?
3. Who sang the 1980 hit 'I am a woman in love'? and for bonus marks, perhaps you could compile a brief list of who the fuck cares, anyway.

¹An episode of Doc Martin. It was a good episode, though, so I think we're in the clear.

²The answer to that question was "me", incidentally. I'm not proud.

³While we commended the young lady's commitment to help out in this national emergency, we were divided as to whether or not this represented an effective response.