"Oh the humanity", or what I remember of wine and cheese

Well, first of all, I was reminded last night that I haven't blogged the last Red Room Trivia, so lets just warm my wine-pickled brain up by recalling that to you now. This was the last red-room trivia for the year and it was (and let's be fair to it) completely crap. This is more than mere sour grapes on account of the fact that we didn't win. Anyone failing to notice, by virtue of Rupert's novelty sombrero, that there was to be a theme should probably have cottoned on when they got their answer sheet. This was a photocopy of a hand-scrawled job with "Gringo Trivia" written on the top, two columns and "horizontal" lines about as straight as Molly Meldrum. Rupert, however, feeling that the point had not been sufficiently well made announced that it was to be a Spanish-themed trivia. This was unfortunate for me given that, when it became apparent we had put the wrong nationality for South American Paulo Coelho, the night's theme lent me sufficient confidence to bet Geoff $10 that we could at least be sure that the answer wasn't Brazillian. This was not a wise investment ladies and gentlemen. So not only is this son of a bitch responsible for The Alchemist, he went and lost me $10. Anyways, Two rounds of ten questions became two rounds of 5 instead¹ . So, how do we sum up this, the last Red Room trivia for the year? I'm inclined to paraphrase T.S. Eliot myself: This, my friends, is the way trivia ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. Were the comic book guy from the Simpsons present, we might instead say WORST. TRIVIA. EVER. Perhaps we said it best, though, with our answer to the question "What is the English translation of 'Naranja'?". We wrote the following:

Naranja: "So, this is the way trivia dies. To thunderous applause...."

Which, I feel, also gets across our nerd credentials.

Anyways...... to get back to the original post title. Wine and cheese. Why oh why, dear reader, do we look forward so to this event? A mathematics department wine and cheese night sounds superficially so very civilised. "Sure," we seem to be saying "like many departments we see fit to hold an end-of-semester get-together. However, unlike yours, ours is no mere seedy booze-up. No Sir. We hold a wine and cheese night at which members of an intellectual elite sample fine wine and cheeses whilst discussing sundry philosophical difficulties with the axiom of choice." In fact, it is of course the case that the MSS wine and cheese night differs from your average seedy booze-up only in as much as there's more cheese involved, and in that probability of hearing the phrase "mathematician celebrity head" is significantly higher.

Attendance seemed lower than last semester to me, and we were a little worried that it wasn't going to be a real wine and cheese night anyway on account of how....... hmmm.... a small digression is in order here. So as to avoid naming too many names un-necessarily I'm going to institute a coding system and the lecturer in question here shall be code named "Mrs Robinson". Most of you will know who I'm talking about. Anyways we were a little worried that it wasn't going to be a real wine and cheese night on account of how Mrs Robinson took a while to show up and at first didn't appear to be drinking. Luckily, this state of affairs did not persist. It was, to be certain, something of a shame that "Dustin Hoffman" had at this point left, but before too long Mrs R. was crawling around, throwing a tennis ball at people and throwing water all over Claire - so there was a happy ending on that front at least. I remember the night finishing with a group of us climbing onto the roof of the maths building and, rather predictably I suppose, urinating over the side². I also remember sundry trips into the strange, strange mind of Mary Waterhouse. Apart from that the reader can probably fill in most of the remaining blanks themselves from the last booze-up they attended. I'm just going to go and lie down now......

¹ My cries of "why not one round of ten with two prizes given out Rupert? Can't we end this farce now?" went sadly unheeded.

²you'd be amazed how far you can reach