Plus Ca Change*........

As I settled in for my morning coffee whilst perusing the latest offers of cheap viagra, new & improved penis enlargement techniques and an exciting new (and mysterious, unless I click on the kindly supplied link) product guaranteed to keep my woman satisfied in bed¹ that I receive like clockwork in my Mac email account², I ruminated upon possible titles for this post.

This is a trivia post, incidentally. 

I had initially considered something like: Name Changes, Ball-Sucking Continues. Not a very witty or brilliant one to be sure, but it's inclusion can only help people cotton on to the general class of performance we achieved last night more quickly than they otherwise would. Also, it helps google direct people looking for specialty porn to my site, so I just thought I'd add it³. The above title was settled upon instead to further my ongoing attempts to come across as a debonaire, witty, Oscar Wilde-type man of the world. I think we can all agree that this cause progresses nicely.

Anyhuckus, our night begins with your hero⁴ doing just that little bit of nail-biting. This owed itself to the fact that Sam and Geoff were, in order to get me to engage in such nail-biting, waiting around the corner until precisely 7:30 before entering the trivia-dome. Possibly that last was a lie, but that's how things seemed from my end. And if it's going to be me, Georff and Sam this week, I thought to myself, we're going to be the Gaussian Eliminators again, damn it. As it transpired, oh my brothers⁵, we did not bathe this name in glory. Adriana showed up slightly later, which made for a team four times the strength of last week's debacle. Unfortunately, this corresponded to a single goat-blighting point extra for fuck's sake. What, I am forced to ask myself, is the fucking point of it all?

So why, I hear you ask, did we suck so badly? Well, for one thing the puzzle page was harder this week and not just 4 easily recognisable characters/individuals . We got only 11/16. What really hurt us, though, was....... well, let me put it as follows. There was a real advantage to having Dave instead of me as el-capitano: Dave doesn't drink. This means that towards the end of the night his judgement doesn't get so appalling that the following scene might take place. You're given, as a five point bonus question, What Broadway Musical was based upon Puccini's  La Boheme?. Fitz agonises as follows: "Look, it's going to be something like Rent. Something like Rent..... shit what could it be....... I'm thinking of a musical like Rent...... Fuck ! Think people! Like Rent, OK!!!" .... and so on. We ended up not being able to think of such a musical, and the space was left sadly blank. The correct answer was Rent.

Other Notable Fuck-ups:

1. Which singer was placed in the boot of a car in an Eminem clip? Also a bonus question. Our thinking: "Dido", since she wrote the music he was rapping over in the clip. Our entered answer: Christina Aguilera. Our reasoning: "When you absolutely, positively have to have a skanky ho in your boot: accept no substitutes." I maintain we would not have found such reasoning persuasive sober. Dido was the fucking answer. 
2. Name the cocktail made of rum, lime juice and sugar named after a Cuban town? I immediately wrote "Daiquiri", knowing damn well that it is an originally Cuban cocktail the original ingredients of which are precisely: (white) rum, lime juice, sugar. We changed it to "Mojito". Why? Fucked if I know. Daiquiri was right.
3. What does a milliner make? My gut feeling "hats". Our answer: "linen". Same reasoning as in the last one. Hats was right.
4. Who wrote the Album Pet Sounds? I wrote down "The Pet Shop Boys", thinking it a good guess. Georff knew the correct answer to be the Beach Boys. It would have been nice, in hind-sight, if he'd fucking told me!!!!!

Notable Gets:

1. What is Mitch Buchannen's son's name in Baywatch? I'm not proud.....
2. What is the name of the mythical city of gold after which the spaniards lusted? Thank you Cities of Gold.
3. In what famous video series are college girls asked to take their tops off in exchange for cash? Thank you, Sam, for not only knowing the answer, but treating us to a long, drawn-out pre-amble of umm-ing and ah-ing that fooled no-one.

Notable questions we got wrong by virtue of just not knowing, the answers to which I'm sure some of you will get with laughable ease.... go on, you bastards, have a laugh

1. In what city will the next winter olympics be held? Go on, Dave/Martin. Laugh at the sports illiterate.
2. Name Othello's Wife One of those "shit, now people will realise I know a lot less Shakespeare than I'd like to pretend" moments, there. A bonus question, too.
3. Who will captain Australia in (I think) the next 20-20 match? Yeah, same commentary as before.....

Have fun. Over and out.

* I would just like to take this moment to voice my disgust at the terribly un-cultured status of Australian keyboards. Their failure to allow me to place the required cedilla on the "c" here fills me with a deep and abiding sense of shame in my countrymen.

¹Statistically speaking, I am informed, it is almost certain I'm just not doing it for her. I suspect the real reason here is that she doesn't exist.

²Seriously, though, I have to take my hat off to these spam-meisters. It took them ten minutes to discover this account had just been created, zero in on it and engage it in the email equivalent of carpet bombing. Bravo!

³ You probably don't want to read this footnote. I just thought I'd get some more google-whoring out of the way in an out of the way way, if you follow me. Ahem. titty fuck arse horny blow job donkey sex well-hung she-male goats on heat college girls who will do anything for a peanut nuts scrotum midgets midget sex porn porn star porn actress porn producer porn camera-man porn afficionado porn consumer porn distributor anti-porn protestor bondage S&M mistress whip who's been a naughty boy then bollocks right bollocking give the dog a bone wink wink.

⁴That would be me, just to forestall your smart-arsery. Smart-arsery being a word, incidentally, I would very much like to think found its way into a Dr Seuss book.

⁵Someone's been watching A Clock-work Orange recently...... by which I mean me. I'm not just parroting an obvious statistical near certainty.

I'd Like to Buy Some Tabouli (touch nose)

It has come to my attention that, on a regular basis, unknown individuals contact my place of work to place orders for large quantities of tabouli. I can only assume, since I work for a geostatistics consultancy, that this is an error on their part. I bring this up because it seems , to me, a little odd that tabouli is the only foodstuff they ever order. Never anything else. Never even any other type of salad. Just tabouli. Large quantities of tabouli.

This has led me to the inescapable conclusion that somewhere there exists a warehouse in which there is a phone manned by a tall unwashed hippy named Leon. Leon's associates, following (almost?) having their fingers burned over that unfortunate Schapelle Corby affair have happily discovered an alternate means by which to both package their goods and cloak telephone conversations with an air of legitimacy. They now deal in crates the top section of which contains a thin layer of tabouli. Beneath this layer, however, the crate is packed densely with ..... "tabouli".

In any case, if anyone out there is looking to score a large quantity of "tabouli", it may be fruitful to try a few likely mis-dialings of the number of my employer. You should be warned, however, that your efforts may in fact end in your possession of far more of an arabic salad dish than you could possibly hope to eat.

Ethel the Frog Rides Alone

I think we'll just draw a discrete veil over the double-entendre action in the title this time and just focus on the team name: Ethel the Frog. I had been of a mind yesterday that, whatever else we¹ might choose to name ourselves, Ethel the Frog was definitely out - carrying, as it does, a green, froggy curse. In this vein, other names I might well have chosen had been suggested to me. I thought of a few myself. There were a few factors which swayed my decision here, however. The first was an ominous silence in response to my last post, in addition to some cancellations from some of the more ...... reliable members of the team. As for the second, well, let's put it this way. Nothing, in the trivia world says "bend over, drop your pants and prepare to be boned" quite like the following 2 pieces of information:

1. This is grand final night you've walked into. Any team not in the top 5 could be drawn as the wild card to compete for the $1000 prize at the end. Hence every side brings both their A-team and as many warm bodies as they can muster.
2. You, on the other hand, came alone.

And if I'm going to be boned anyway, I thought to myself, I'm going to do it in style². I'm going to draw a big fat target on my arse and yell "Bring it on, Harry!" at the top of my lungs. I am, in short, going to call myself Ethel the Frog again, and damn the torpedos, sir.

In addition to the message of bonage, I felt that there were other little coded messages to be found in each round. The first round said, to everyone, "Sure, round one is usually a bit of a cake-walk, because in the event of a tie the prize-money jack-pots - which brings joe public back in search of that cheese. Tonight, however, is finals night. That jack-pot is going off, baby. This round is going to be hard". I came, I thought, rather respectably last on 10/16.

The second round, I felt, had a message specifically for me. The second round, for the uninitiated is always a music round. It is entirely song/artist recognition from fairly short sound-bytes. It is traditionally the lowest scoring round for most teams and, believe me sister, it's the lowest scoring round for us, too. Now, while round two hurts at the best of times, last night it was partitioned into three themed sections: B105, Triple M and 4BH Easy Listening. Harry was, I felt, sending a message exclusively to me, here. That message, dear reader, was as follows: "May God have mercy on your soul, little frog". I got 5/16 which, thanks to Harry's mercy rule, translated to 8/16. Two other teams got 8/16, too. God knows what they had originally.

Third round? Did O.K. here. Got 12/16 and beat 3 teams. I beat four teams in round four on a princely 10/16. This was a music-themed round and, frankly, I'm proud of not knowing some of the trashy answers I got wrong here. I got a perfect 16 on the puzzle page .... but so did every other team in the room. Of the four five-point bonus questions, however, I can't have beaten anybody. I got one right, for a score of 5/20 .... and that was the question Harry put up on the web. 61/100, people. Dead last. Did I get wild-card entry into the prize round? No. Would I have come even close to winning if I had? ....... no.

Notable Correct Answers:

1. What is the French word for cheese? Thank you, television.
2. The contestant from what country took out the Miss Universe title? Thank you ..... actually, how the fuck did I know that?
3. What airport corresponds to the initials LHR? Thank you wild guess.
4. What famous stunt-cyclist died recently at the age of sixty-something? Thank you person X for being the only famous stunt cyclist I could think of.
5. What West-End Musical is a re-modelling of the Puccini opera, Madame Butterfly? Thank you Leesa, for taking me to Madame Butterfly, meaning I knew the story well enough to guess the correct answer.

Notable Wrong Answers (of which there were many):

1. Insert random motor racing question here Christ, there were a lot of these.
2. Insert random crap musical sound-byte Oh, dear god, how this round hurt me.
3. In what sport do we get the quadruple Selchow (sic ?) Throw? This was a bonus question, too. I'll be impressed if you guess it correctly.
4. Where did the Spice Girls hold their first re-union concert? You're breaking my balls, here, Harry.
5. Who sang a cover version of "I got you babe" with UB40? Hint: It wasn't Cher.

Anyways, the thought has occurred to me that a lack of attendance was, in light of disclosures on my previous Ethel the Frog post, a bald-faced attempt by people to get me blogging trivia again. Bastards.

¹An odd choice of pronoun, as it happens.

²Also probably not quite the right word.....

Random Thoughts

Hello, and welCOME to this latest instalment of my blog. This current post is destined TO be, I think, probably the winner in that most competitive of categories: pointless, TRIVIAl posts to be found on my blog.

This state of affairs owes itself either to the fact that I feel I have nothing much to write about, or to the fact that I feel I should be writing something ON this blog at the MOment rather than actually feeling like writiNgtoDAY, as such. I haven't decided which yet. Anyways, currently in the news we do have, of course, the story about that poor little teddy bear named Muhammed who's gone and caused such a lot of trouble in the Sudan. While I almost feel duty-bound to write on such a silly story¹, I rather feel that its ridiculousness sells itself a little too easily. It doesn't need my help, and the only thing I can think to add are the following two suggestions:

1. That the class in question correct this hienous act of blasphemy by re-naming the bear "Satan".
2. That the peoples of the rest of the world (this includes YOU, dear reader) henceforward adopt the custom of naming all stuffed toys after some prominent religious figure chosen at random.

Also making the news is Brendan Nelson's newfound status as leader of the Liberal (note use of capitals) party. On this I would say the following: to date, I have actually rather liked Kevin Rudd for precisely the reasons a number of conservatives have dis-liked him: I suspect that he may actually be the wolf-in-sheep's clothing they make him out to be (I knowingly I await my eventual dis-illusionment and slide to dependancy on the bottle and crack-cocaine on this front). Well, actually, that and because he beat John Howard .... and frankly, there were times there when, were I offered the choice between voting for John Winston Howard or Adolf Hitler, well, this would have been a serious moral dilemma for me². Anyways, Brendan, on the other hand, seems more of a BASTARD in warm-and-fuzzy-pillock'S clothing to me. In all honesty, this commentary has only really been inserted as the easiest way I could think of to throw in a use of the word "bastard".... but I do more OR less stand by it.
Hmmm.... possibly I'm stretching this out a bit too much now..... so fuck it: WILL CLAIM YOUR FIRST-BORN.

¹Which seems perhaps a little less silly if you happen to be either the British teacher caught up in the furore .... or one of those frighteningly large number of people in the Sudan who actually give a fuck about what a small class of children calls their teddy bear. Human history would be considerably less bloody if more people had a well-developed sense of the ridiculous. Ah, well.
² "Dilemma" is not really the right word here..... I know of a better word, but I just can't remember it. It can be found in Douglas Adams' Deeper Meaning of Liff and has the following meaning: "A situation in which you have only one choice, but you can't take it".

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.

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

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.