We didn’t get ANY of the Olympic tickets we applied for.
Resorting to Plan B… watch this space…
We didn’t get ANY of the Olympic tickets we applied for.
Resorting to Plan B… watch this space…
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?
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!
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.
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.
…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

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!
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.