Ethel the Frog Goes Down.

It occurs to me upon writing the above that I've just hit upon a wonderful title for that woefully under-represented genre of literature: porn for children. Sadly, such an opus must wait for other hands more capable than mine. This post is about trivia on monday instead. Those of you who find themselves now too disappointed with life to go on may excuse themselves quietly.

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Some portion of those of you who have not leapt out the nearest available window are perhaps wondering why I have not done this before, given my prior role as Red Room Trivia correspondent for Team Gauss - as relinquished by Dave for reasons of difficulties in commuting¹. But what, dear reader, would I have said? In all preceding weeks, we've done alright. Not brilliantly, not appallingly - just alright. Unfortunately, this blog is exclusively reserved for tales of mediocrity I can get completely and irrationally incensed about - and in the case of a mediocre trivia performance....... I'm sorry, I just can't do it. NO², my friends, when it comes to trivia there are but two reasons to blog about it:

1. You kick arse.
2. You suck balls.

Have a guess, given the following hint, which one occurred to us on monday. Our team name was Ethel the Frog. 

Being a team of 2 1/2 members³, no-one could have really been expecting great things from us, exactly, it's true. Given that we've never done so before, however, I at least felt just that little bit disappointed when we came in stone, cold motherless last on 63 points.

What really let us down here were the big fat juicy points we missed out on from the puzzle page and the bonus section. On the former, we correctly named an octagon, a dodecagon and found the only English anagram for noiseless. We kicked ourselves⁴, however, for missing the only english anagram for aspirant. The bonus round (each worth 5 points) went as follows:

1. What country, out of China, Brazil and South Africa, makes 70% of the world's light-bulbs? Our thought process: South Africa: too stupid, China: too obvious, Brazil: just right. I even went into a long, drawn-out justification: what country surely uses more light-bulbs than any other? The U.S.A. - hence a major manufacturing centre in Brazil makes a hell of a lot of sense........ bzzzzzzt China was correct.
2. In what U.S. state is Fort Knox? This one was the question Harry had posted on-line, which I'd neglected to check like a big fat dufus. My thought process: In Goldfinger, they rob Fort Knox. I distinctly remember James Bond drinking Mint Juleps whilst being held captive. The Mint Julep is the signature drink of the Kentucky Derby. Let's answer Kentucky. Hmmm.... why would you put a big gold-filled fort in Kentucky? Let's go with a big state.... like Texas. O.K. Texas it is....... the answer was Kentucky!!!!!!!
3. What element, once common in hat-making, was responsible for inducing madness: hence the phrase "as mad as a hatter"? This one we got right.
4. Who successfully covered the song "Up-town Girl" in 2000 and something? I feel we should have gotten full marks for our answer: "trick question - this song cannot be successfully covered". Harry felt otherwise.

In other news, I was kind of impressed with my recognition of song and title: The Gambler by Kenny Rogers in the music round. I got this not out of any special love of country music, which I assure you I lack, but because they play it ad-nauseam at every fucking poker final I've ever been to⁵. It's nights like these that seriously cause me to question my status as a trivia god. You, and you only, dear reader, can prevent a repeat of this ignominy by coming to monday trivia..... and maybe reminding me to check Harry's web-site for that damn bonus question.

¹By virtue of his being in France.

² I like big letters. I also like shiny objects, and footnotes.

³ We had a 3rd member who stayed for 1/2 the night.

⁴Hmmm... or rather Adriana kicked me.

⁵ Actually, me and a friend of mine are in the habit of standing up from our allocated tables in a hands-on-heart salute. This is a lie. Actually, we meant to do so, but what actually ended up happening was as followed: I stood up, looked for my friend, who didn't, then made like I was stretching my legs or something and sat down like a pansy.

Kevin 07

November 24, 2007. The day on which the Australian people collectively said of the previous decade:

WHAT THE FUCK WERE WE THINKING?

Ode to a Nondescript Bird.

Every now and then we can have our lives drastically affected by outwardly minor events. Tiny happenstances, chance meetings or non-meetings which incrementally adjust the lens through which we see the world - taking a hazy, chaotic mess and leaving our sight clear if only for a precious fleeting moment. It could be a small, nondescript bird that flies into the cell of some prisoner locked in solitary confinement in some black pit of a dungeon somewhere that reminds him of a greater world that still exists outside his own torment. It could be a trusted friend informing us that it really isn't as socially acceptable as we had heretofore assumed to wear our underwear on our head. I am here today to inform you, dear reader, that I, too, was touched in such a way over the weekend. At precisely 19:35 on friday night I recieved the following text message from an unknown sender:

Are you fuckers coming or what?

The profundity of these words I have even now, quite frankly, failed to adequately come to terms with. There is, I feel, something in them for all of us as we sit here awaiting the outcome of today's pivotal federal election. Are we fuckers coming........ or what? or what, you fools? Only once before now have I been so affected by a mis-sent text message. This occured to me a little under a year ago when I recieved the following two messages involving three individuals who, in order that their identitys be left protected, I shall refer to as Scrotum, Wench and Slapper. The first went as follows:

Hey there scrotum im slapper younger sister. WENCH IM 20 N I HEAR YOU LOOKIN 4 A
GIRL FRIEND. GIVE ME A CALL TONIGHT. HOPE YOU DIDNT MIND SR¹ GIVING
ME UR NUMBER.

It was shortly followed by the following message:

Scrotum its sr¹ sis wench, id like to meet u my sister says ur a
really nice guy! send me a txt..

Needless to say, it has to this day been a great source of sadness and regret to me that I could not, at the time, think of a suitably pithy way to tell the hapless Scrotum, Wench and Slapper just how much their situation had touched my life and, of course, to inform Wench that she had the wrong fucking number². I do not wish, dear reader, to live with such regrets as regards Senor Are you fuckers coming or what? His or her words were simply too deep and world changing to go unheeded and unthanked. Should anyone reading this feel the need to thank this person³, just let me know and I'll send you their number.

¹This is intended to be a 2-word abbreviation of Slapper. A fact more apparent when real names are being used.

² I briefly considered pretending to be Scrotum, but this seemed kind of cruel, even by my standards ....... and also more than a little creepy.

³ Preferrably in a cryptic, non-sensical manner.

On Why The Dentist Must Die

O.K. So, it's occured to me that my blog has essentially become the blog about nothing. I've eased off adding to it of late, perhaps hoping to have something meaty, deep and profound to add. Instead, all I really have to report is that over the last two weeks or so I have developed a messianic hatred of the dentist on the other side of the wall from my desk. This is perhaps a lie. Not the hatred bit - that's perfectly true¹- but I suppose I could be reporting other things also. There is, as it happens for instance, a very good hole-in-the-wall cafe just down the road I discovered in the last week which completely invalidates my previous post². This has left me happy that I can now purchase a hot liquid that leaves me convinced, upon tasting it, that it was derived originally from coffee beans and not the testicles of a diseased rodent. This has also made me a bit annoyed that I've lost a perfectly good topic to rant about³.

Another important milestone in my life I feel I should tell you all about is my discovery of the curried prawn pie, which can be purchased from a dodgy-looking pie⁴ shop a few metres away from the office. The curried prawn pie is, I feel, an invention of genious⁵ to rival that of the wheel, sliced bread and the baby's dummy⁶. I mean, seriously, think about it. Firstly, prawn meat is a hell of a lot tastier than the usual pie-filling fare. But the real kicker is the curried nature of the pie. A major problem with your standard meat pie is that they are expected to be an in-expensive food-stuff and are yet also expected to be filled with beef which is, nowadays, not actually that cheap. So how does the vendor make a profit? By filling the pie with those portions of the cow that John West Rejected, that's how. The curried prawn pie on the other hand is filled with a few prawns and a cheap, presumably vegetable-based curry-sauce type filling infused with a prawny flavour. I mean, seriousy people - GENIOUS⁷. You get your cheap much tastier pie safe in the knowledge that you're not eating intestine and hoof.

Anyways, back to the dentist. I am convinced that it has become his purpose in life to drive me insane⁸. The man's waiting room lies, as I have previously mentioned, just on the other side of the wall against which the monitor I spend my rather dreary day staring at sits. He plays really loud music into this waiting room. Music which is generally of such a calibre as I am convinced he does it to convince his patients that the experience of their scheduled root-canal is actually downright pleasant by comparison. The patients, however, get to leave⁹. I, on the other hand, have to stay there all fucking day. I ask you, dear reader, is there a jury in the land that would convict me for his long, drawn-out murder? Well, O.K. so yes, yes there is. Probably all of them, come to that. Since I may be forced to do it anyway, I'd just like to put in a request to any interested party that they act as a character witness at my trial. Thanks.

¹I'm actually considering arranging subtle hints to Lorenz that it was the dentist in question, and not I, who ate his noodles then letting nature take its course. Well that, or bursting into his office with an axe yelling "here's Johnny!". Helena should take this as a subtle hint to re-send the Stanley Kubrick quiz link on facebook, as I've just decided I'll give it a try. She should take the previous sentence as an explicit request to that end.

² Though not all of it, in as much as statistics didn't suddenly get interesting overnight. Actually, there is a rather interesting post to be had in elaborating on just what exactly I've come to realise the purpose of my current post is. I'll leave this as a 'Gabbo is coming' style teaser to hide the fact that the revelation in question, when it comes, would have otherwise not really been all that interesting if you were to sit down and think about it for too long.

³I've actually considered, in my idle moments (of which there are many) whether or not it might be a good idea to burn this cafe to the ground. I'm also just now considering whether or not I should shoot for a post in which most of the content is to be found in the footnotes. As to the former consideration, I rather think my motivation may be a little difficult to adequately communicate in a court of law. As to the latter..... we'll see how it goes, yeah?

⁴ I say this, of course, not to denigrate the pie shop. Decent pies cannot, in my experience, be purchased from non-dodgy-looking pie shops. Note the gratuitous attempt here to get footnote text to over-take main text.

⁵This misspelling has been deliberately left uncorrected to allow me to place another footnote.

⁶ The ultimate in a win-win situation. You want the baby to shut the fuck up, and the baby wants to suck something. Seriously, the dummy is a work of genius. And why the fuck am I trying so hard here, anyways? The footnotes are clearly ahead.

⁷ This time I've purposefully misspelled the word for the same reasons the last instance of it was left uncorrected.

⁸ I rather think he's not the only person I know who's adopted this goal either, lately.

⁹ Luck bastards. This probably really should have been placed in the main text, hey? Also, the previous sentence was clearly unnecessary. As was the last one. Oh, and that one too. Maybe I'm taking this footnote thing too far......

Coffee and Statistics

People seem to spend an awful lot of their lives looking for stuff. For the most part, you might say people are looking for love, power or distraction. I, on the other hand, perhaps deciding that the first two items on this list will forever elude me¹ ...... actually, fuck ....... hang on. If I'm going to include such a big, pervasive category as 'distraction' I may as well forget the other two, hey? More importantly, the completion of the sentence "I, on the other hand,..." becomes stupid and banal because whatever the fuck follows is almost certainly a member of the "distraction" category² and hence my poignant little opening just collapses under its own weight. Ah, Shit. Oh, well, so accepting that the last few moments spent reading this post represent time wasted you'll never get back (sorry), let's just proceed with more of the let-down and say that much of my free time in the last week has been spent in a search for coffee.

Now that, I'm sure you're thinking, is a pretty stupid thing to spend too much time looking for. They sell the stuff in every supermarket in the country, it's one of the most widely consumed beverages on the planet and it's difficult to be placed at random in any moderately inhabited locale in the country without being within a few hundred metres of some cafe or eaterie claiming to be able to sell you an espresso. The problem is, dear reader, that when it comes to the set of cafes and eateries within walking distance of my current place of work these claims are lies!!!! Ask for a long black³ at any such establishment near me and what you get is this brackish liquid that smells vaguely like coffee but tastes like really bad tea - and frankly if black coffee doesn't induce a slight pain behind my left eye, well I'd say the vendor has failed in their contract with me, the consumer. And I mean it's not as though espresso machines are cheap, so how hard can it be to hire one fucking person who knows how to use the thing? Hmm? I mean I could bloody well do it if they'd just see fit to set up a coin-operated do-it-yourself machine..... actually, that's a really good idea..... I'll squirrel that away along with my plans to manufacture party tooter thingies⁴ that sound like an elephant and have an extension that looks like an elephant's trunk......... O.K. so, maybe this isn't the wisest thing to be worried about at present what with global warming and an imminent federal election and all, but I think we've all established by now that I'm a terribly petty person who gets rather worked up over small things. That, or possibly this is a lie and I just do it for effect. Who can say?

Anyways, on the statistics half of things (what I seem to be spending most of my non-free time on at the moment....). Does it strike anyone else as terribly odd that statistics is generally so very boring? I mean, take probability theory to start with. I mean, this is basically measure theory and analysis, right? Nothing wrong with those, and in any case I've gone and done courses in probability theory and I've found it to be a perfectly interesting subject. So now consider the idea of applying probability theory to the independent world around you. This is, philosophically, really rather interesting too. This is kind of foundational meta-science type stuff in the same way as set theory and logic can be thought of as meta-mathematics. And yet, when you move on to the class of stuff taken as falling under the umbrella category of 'statistics' which is, essentially, just applied probability theory, well, it all seems so dull and I'm buggered if I can work out why this should be so.

¹go on, cue the violins you bastards

²And, in point of fact, it will be

³ I've never been game to ask for a short one.

⁴ You know the ones I'm talking about. You blow on them and get a 'toot' sound, while pneumatically extending this colourful paper thing.