Concerning the manner in which our most excellent frog acquired a dvd player, in addition to other events worth relating.

Was having coffee in the maths/comp-sci common room yesterday. Almost as though that alone wasn't enough to pique the interest of the discerning reader¹, I happened to overhear a conversation in which the man in the office next to me (who is uncannily like Peter Adams) was attempting to rid himself of a TV set. I volunteered my services. Is this really worth bearing in mind when I relate my brief trivia tale? Perhaps not.

Anyways, Ethel the Frog consisted of a team of but two last night. Myself and another who, for the purposes of our tale, we shall refer to only as Sancho. Actually, we won't be referring to them again at all .... but let's think of them as Sancho, shall we? I know I do.

The questions were substantially harder this week, even without a sports round, and we finished 6th of 11 on 61 /100. Do I remember enough questions for it to be worthwhile to submit a trivia post? Well, no. I did, however, win a draw for a dvd player. Ha ha HA!!!!! It appears that New Zealand, after first making attempts to reject me as a dangerous foreign body² was now signaling its acceptance by showering me with electrical appliances. So if you're reading this NZ, I've always rather wanted a death-ray and a small army of robot monkeys. Kthnx.

Questions I remember......

Notable gets I can remember:

1. Which Canadian car company manufactured the DMC-12? Yeah, I didn't think there were Canadian car companies either.....
   
2. What country owns the world's largest merchant fleet? Meh.
   
3. What land mammal can go for longer without water than the camel?
4. What fruit do you place in a buck-eye martini?
   
5. In poker, what is a hand consisting of both black aces and a pair of eights known as? It's a colloquial title, not the hand rank. I thought, I guess for obvious reasons, that this was a fairly easy question ...... but the room seemed to disagree with me.
   

Fuck-ups I remember:

1. What instrument is also known as the 'Cor Anglaise'? This was pretty funny. I don't want you to think I'm stupid for mis-translating the term ..... I inferred the correct translation just fine, thank you very much. I just thought it was a question with an ironic answer so I wrote down 'French Horn' instead.
2. Name the Rolling Stone who drowned. Sancho should have known this one. Oh, hey, I lied.
3. The Westinghouse company was founded to manufacture what device that drastically improved rail safety?
   

¹And seriously ..... it's about time that fucker started reading this blog.

²I was stung by unknown insects three times in the first two weeks of being here. I came from fucking Queensland, too.... I mean, I had thought to be leaving things that wanted to sting and bite me behind.

A Dog and a Duck perform the fish slapping dance..... the dog forgets his lines.

Ahem:

Stupid lyrics

Some people reading this entry of Chris' blog saw a funny post. I saw a challenge along the same lines as such previous titanic battles as The saddest man on the internet and Which country has the worst national anthem.

Now, I lost both of the above contests. The first because I couldn't find the stomach to go on. The second because Chris managed to bag Australia's right from the outset. Will I win this one? Well, probably not ...... but I'd like to at least add the following two honourable mentions. Ahem.

1. Sex in the Kitchen by R. Kelly. I like this live performance. It speaks to me. What I like most about it is the point when he says "I'm just makin' some shit up .... we're gon' do a remix" bit. This brought me to the dread realisation that he wasn't just making shit up before that. That shit was written down. I have to credit him with some sophistication, though, because frankly the stuff that followed his 'you're going to have to read between the lines' request ... well, it went completely over my head.
2. Drop kick me Jesus through the goal posts of life ..... about which there can be nothing to add.
   

In which Fitz has a rant on a topic about which he doesn't really care all that much.

Are there, dear reader, too many sports and events at the Olympics? I say yes.

I should probably hasten to add that I'm not saying 'yes' for the trivial reasons Chris or Sam would, either. I have trivial reasons of my own.

Michael Phelps, we are told, is the greatest Olympian of all time based solely upon his medal count, for instance, which is just plain stupid. Could, pray tell, a javelin thrower have possibly managed to get 8 gold medals based upon javelin throwing prowess alone I ask? Of course not. Michael Phelps, on the other hand, gets to enter 8 variations on much the same event and he's just instant Captain Fancy-pants. Is it coincidence that the previous record of 7 medals was also held by a swimmer? Are the Illuminati involved? It's not even as though swimming is all that interesting to watch anyways.

I propose, in future, that winning a swimming event be only worth 1/8 of a medal with each such winner having to compete in some manner of free-for all involving crocodiles and rotating blades. The first to manage to construct a complete gold medal gets to keep it. Then that sucker would be worth something.

Team sports, also, are for the most part kind of dodgey. Synchronized swimming? Bizarre floor routines involving a ribbon, ball and a bola hat filled with plum wine in which a single apple floats? Scrap them, I say. Walking shall stay, but only if snipers are placed at random positions around the track. Let's see the bastards maintain their silly "walk-not-run" discipline then, shall we?

In which our ingenius amphibian is confronted with an obnoxious American.

Trivia posts from me shall henceforth be titled, I have decided, as though they are chapters of Don Quixote. Various other difficulties shall, I feel, present themselves - not least of which being that you don't get to keep your answer sheets where I go (questioning and marking occur simultaneously .... efficient!). This means I have a hard time remembering questions. Which rather defeats the purpose of trivia posts.

Anyways, our evening begins somewhat inauspiciously with el capitano of team Ethel the Frog reserving for his fearless charges the one remaining table in view of the stage - which, as chance would have it, was the table immediately in front of the stage. This was, it turns out, very very bad. Before very long our hero was approached by a random American girl who, declaring team-less-ness, craved that most sought-after of boons: membership in our elite froggy cadre. To my lasting regret, I answered this request with the following fateful words: "yeah, sure, why not?". In a few further moments, the rest of the team arrived.

Said American, whose name shall remain anonymous lest a future news story of disappearance in mysterious circumstances be linked back to me, turned out to be pretty damn annoying when sober. When drunk .... well we settled into the following routine: Team Frog gets the points, Team Frog's drunken American mascot proclaims to all in the room how much more awesomely her team was doing as compared with everyone else's. The top 3 teams receive bar tabs. Prior to the third round we were comfortably in 3rd place. It began to dawn on us that winning a bar tab, however, meant sharing a bar tab.... which would be a badness of truly bad proportions¹. It was not without relief, then, that we learned that the last round involved matching television game shows with their hosts. We came a respectable 4th on 82/100.

Notable Gets that I remember getting:

1. In what sport are the dimensions of the pitch precisely those of the town square of the Iranian city in which it was originally played? Thank you, educated guess. We got 6/10 on a friggin' sport and leisure round. Yay team Frog.
2. What chemical element is archaically referred to as Brimstone? Notable because I hads to fight tooth and nail for this one.... otherwise not hard, I think/thought.
   
3. The dried leaves of which plant are used to dye leather? Probably there were other distinguishing features given in the question, there ... I just don't remember 'em.
   

Notable fuck-ups I remember fucking up:

1. Something about an Austrian formula-1 driver involved in a crash in 19 friggin 77. Sorry.
2. After a cover version of Roy Orbison's "Crying", who was dubbed the voice of the century by the big O? Not that we would have gotten it right otherwise, but our American ring-in somehow convinced us to write 'Steve Tyler' from Aerosmith. She was very convincing. Also very wrong. It was a little like sharing a table with Hazzy-K only not as funny.
   
3. Who made their name as the lead singer of a group called 'The Miracles' in the 1960s?
   

Probably there are better ones. I just don't remember 'em.

P.S. a big hello back to Anita, Sam, Geoff and Adriana. I were asleep. Sorry.

P.P.S. I'm a little curious to know the names of both individuals who voted for Full Metal Jacket.

P.P.P.S. Does having both P.S. s and footnotes seem odd to anyone else? Only it does to me.

¹My little tribute to Dave.......

Marking

To all those who think they know marking pain I would ask the following: Have you ever marked a first year linear algebra exam where they weren't allowed a calculator¹? If not, well let me just say that it's still full of the usual "hmm... I have no idea how to do this question, but if I waste the marker's time by asking them to painstakingly verify that this page of formal-looking statements is, in fact, gibberish .... well, this can only bode well for me"-type answers. In addition, you get people who write statements such as : "no calulator! ....1/52 ≈ 1/50, 1/50 ⋅ 102 = 2.04 ... so I'm going to write 1/52 ⋅ 102 as 2.04". Anyways, if ever you find yourself in such a situation I would advise you to do as I have. Print out a small pile of this comic, mark the offending answers down as harshly as your mood takes you, then staple a copy of said comic to their answer sheet.

¹Strictly this isn't true. They weren't allowed a graphics calculator, since they were being tested on (amongst other things) Gauss-Jordan elimination. Unfortunately, almost half the class in the exam I was supervising interpreted "not allowed a graphics calculator" to mean "allowed a graphics calculator", and so had to do the exam with no calculator at all. The questions weren't really such that you really needed one .... but there seems to have been an unfortunate correlation between those who owned only a graphics calculator and those who were scared of non-decimal fractions.

"This is Al-Harbi to all units. The people at number 47 Shara Jareer appear to be having a good time".....

........ in a nearby Riyadh street, the camera zooms in on an Arabic version of the Übermensch so rapidly that when it gets there time appears to stand still. Our hero is idly tossing around a toothpick in his mustachio-ed mouth sitting on a chiseled-featured, designer-stubbled face when the call goes out. He tosses aside his generic piece of Saudi take-away type food¹ and intones in a deep, purposeful manner: "Not on my watch......"

The opening credits play.

The next day we find ourselves looking in on a meeting with all the top brass (the Council of Senior Islamic Scholars), which is already in progress when we get there.

Learned Scholar 1: I ..... hear ..... that pretending to be gay .... can be quite effective.

An un-easy murmuring flows through the room....

Learned Scholar 2 (shrugging): Perhaps .... but actually being gay is already illegal, so...

The murmuring is replaced by a mixture of "ah"s and nods of agreement. There is now a long protracted silence broken only by the occasional cough and the sound accompanying the scratching of a learned chin. Eventually, our attention is drawn to a weaselly-looking scholar in one corner of the room who stares into the table as he speaks.

Weaselly Scholar 3: Well..... A .... friend of mine ..... informs me that walking a dog is how the "hip cats" do it....

A thoughtful silence overtakes the room.

The next shot is of a news headline.

......................................................................

Anyways ........ switching the channel, we catch an exciting arrest in an episode of the Saudi Arabian version of Cops:

¹Yeah .... there's only so much research I'm willing to do here......

LOL

A conversation from my office:

Adam: I've just made an infinite injury argument in which requirements injure themselves.

Me: So, that would be an infinite self-injury argument, then ....... Wow. Recursion theory goes emo.

In which I conduct an experiment.

Penis penis penis.

lol.