Booooooooo

We didn’t get ANY of the Olympic tickets we applied for.

Resorting to Plan B… watch this space…

Posted in sport, Vancouver | 8 Comments

Hey, sports fans!

A friend of mine came up with a fun quiz in the pub on Saturday. As originally stated: how many professional sports teams have a name that does NOT end in the letter S? (i.e. no CanuckS, OilerS, PatriotS, DolphinS etc).

After I started to list Newcastle United, Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, and showed no signs of stopping, the quiz was restricted to North American teams only.

After I started to list the LA Galaxy, Columbus Crew and New England Revolution, MLS teams were also excluded as being atypical of North American naming conventions.

We came up with eight, across the NHL, NBA and whatever initials you give your baseball league – not bad considering that none of us watch any basketball or baseball! A brief scan of Wikipedia indicates that we missed at least one… can you do any better?

Posted in silliness, sport | 8 Comments

12 Months of VWXYNot?

In the absence of any real blogging, here’s my version of DrugMonkey’s meme: the first sentence of the first post of each month in 2008.

January
Please don’t expect any coherent blogging for a while…

February
Last week’s party featured two similar stories that stirred up some very different (and slightly ambivalent) feelings.

March
I’m more often silly than not

April
So I had this crazy hilarious dream last week, but decided to keep it for April Fool’s day.

May
Yes, I finally managed to get a music night going.

June
The Euro championships are about to kick off in Austria and Switzerland this weekend.

July
In truly appropriate fashion, I am spending today finalising and signing my citizenship application.

August
I’m sure you’ve all noticed the new additions to my blog roll (because you all watch this page like a hawk, instantly noticing every minor alteration and waiting on the edge of your seats for an explanation, right?).

September
It was Mr E Man’s birthday yesterday – he is now officially old (37).

October
My goodness, tidying your computer room certainly does bring a lot of junk to the surface!

November
I came across this book through a rather unusual channel – the author, Raymond Clark Lutz, emailed me after reading one of my blog posts and deciding that I reminded him of one of the characters in his new novel.

December
The Science Canada blog has directed me to some very interesting articles recently, and as a result I had a whole post planned on how the new US government might impact on Canadian environmental policies.

Posted in meme, meta | 4 Comments

Shuffle time

I wonder if my tunes are easier to identify than my books?
Here are the first few lines of 20 songs that came up on Shuffle on my iPod. I cheated a wee bit by skipping any album tracks, duplicated artists, or any artist I thought would be too Canadian obscure to be easily identified. If the title of the song, or a variant on the title, is included in the lyrics, I’ve removed the actual words but indicated why.
Here we go!

Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 38 Comments

SUPERBAD

OK Mr Harper, so it’s UNDEMOCRATIC for elected MPs to form a coalition to defeat your government, but it’s somehow perfectly fine to get your boss to suspend Parliament so you can avoid a vote that you’re sure to lose?

Man, I am gonna fail my citizenship test soooo badly if the above statement is actually true. How could anyone pick that option as the correct answer?

Disgraceful.

Maybe I should emigrate to Obamaland.

Posted in bad people, Canada, politics | 9 Comments

Note to self: Real life is not like the blogosphere

1) Bathroom walls do not come with comment moderation

Graffiti seen in a bar recently:

“Ladies: is it OK to think that your guy is not The One, if you don’t believe in The One?”

The replies indicate that the answer might depend on certain aspects of his anatomy. Some comments were off-topic, and almost all of them were very rude indeed. I suspect that, in the absence of moderation privileges, the owner of this group blog might choose to delete the post entirely.

2) The conversation at the next table does not have comments enabled at all

Well, not in Vancouver anyway. In some bars in some of my former cities it would have been perfectly acceptable to lean over and join the very interesting conversation that our neighbours were having about English grammar. But in this particular bar, I had to almost physically hold myself back from commenting.

3) It is not possible to label outgoing Microsoft Outlook (i.e. work) emails with my “silliness” tag.

I therefore have to compose the body of the message a wee bit more carefully.

New mantra: “Real life is not like the blogosphere. Repeat. Retain. Restrain yourself, woman”.

—————

Also: does anyone want to come and play a “guess the book by a random quote” meme over at Nature Network? If you don’t want to register there, you can leave your guesses here.

Posted in meta, silliness | 3 Comments

5:56 UPDATED

Tagged by Bob.
Listed below are the 5th complete sentences from the 56th pages of 10 different books… with 5 hints.
Edited to add: I’ve now included the authors’ first names, and an indication of fiction (F) or non-fiction (NF).
1) He should look out what William James wrote on forgetting a word or name; a tantalizing, empty shape remains, almost but not quite defining the idea it once contained.
(F: Ian)
2) ‘Bremerton water, on the other hand, is very dirty – you know, harbor stuff, oil and algae, decayed fish and even some human residue’.
(NF: John)
3) Jackson thought it would be vivisection – the usual paranoid belief of cat lovers, but no, according to Binky they took them to make gloves out of them. (Sorry, Bob and Beast).
(F: Kate)
Case Histories by Kate Atkinson – guessed by Joanna and Bob
4) So much effort to get to the side of the bed, so much to push the red, thin, scaly legs and feet into the slippers which Nick places ready for him.
(F: Pat)
5) Once the town of Diss was behind us, the Austin’s engine note and the unmarked lanes created the pleasing illusion of a mild and dusty Dornford Yates England.
(F: Stephen)
The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry – guessed by a combined Eva-Bob effort and (allegedly) by Henry
6) But instead of sympathy or even outrage, Arouet encountered only laughter.
(NF: David)
7) He sounded like an auctioneer as he made his way down the fresh fruit counter, yelling the prices.
(F: Paul)
8) We have already seen that the valid literature goes back into the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, so it is not uncommon to find that a species has already been described somewhere else.
(NF: Richard)
Dry Store Room Number 1 by Richard Fortey – guessed by Bob
9) You must of done something to make a passle of enemies here in this place, buddy, because it seems there’s sure a passle got it in for you.”
(F: Ken)
10) We dined on these occasions in the kitchen, and adjourned, for the nuts and oranges and apples, to the parlour; which was a change very like Joe’s change from his working clothes to his Sunday dress.
(F: Charles)
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens – guessed by Bob
Hints
1) There are three non-fiction books, listed in order of first publication.
2) One of the non-fiction quotes is actually from page 57 because page 56 is taken up by photographs.
3) The non-fiction books are interspersed with seven novels, which are listed in reverse chronological order of first publication.
4) Publication dates for the entire list span 148 years.
5) Five of the novels are set primarily in the UK, and one primarily in the US.
Have at it – but NO GOOGLING! At least, not for 24 hours.

Posted in Uncategorized | 31 Comments

Current view…

…from the 15th floor lunch room in my building.

Unfortunately I did not learn my lesson from Monday, and once again had to resort to using my camera phone. And I couldn’t get outside – the door to the “top deck” is locked for the winter.

But still, eh? Not bad…

Looking North-West

Looking North
Posted in photos, Vancouver | 25 Comments

Courtroom sketches

I don’t want to make light of what is clearly a terrible case, but are these some of the worst courtroom sketches you’ve ever seen, or what?!


Reminds me of some other sketches – from Glaswegian comedy show “Chewin’ the Fat”. These two clips really nailed the BBC’s local news reporting style:

and

Aaaah, memories of living in Glasgow when this show came out – apparently even some people in Edinburgh couldn’t understand some of the sketches!

Posted in silliness, videos | 9 Comments

One of those days

My neural circuits just will not engage today. In fact it feels like my brain might have gone on an early Christmas holiday, and asked a big lump of modelling clay to fill in for it.
But a colleague just brought a ray of sunshine (and a great big belly laugh) into my day.

Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on One of those days