Chip's Place

(Nod to Dom here for the partial theft of his post title - when are you going to start up blogging again?! Surely events have occurred!)

They came to visit over the weekend, to see the St Nicholas Market in town and to help with a few bits and pieces round the house and with my holiday.

I've got a shelf in my lounge above the fireplace that's been slightly wobbly since I moved in. Has never caused me any problems - the only things I keep on it are my battery-operated giraffe, Galileo thermometer and (surprisingly still-extant) inflatable poodle. Dad mentioned it could do with some work within about 5 minutes of me moving in, and I knew even then I was destined to be writing this blogpost (or at least relating this tale somehow) at some point!

A bit of background may now be in order. My dad, being my dad, can't leave things alone. His motto appears to be "If it ain't broke, pull it apart to find out why not." He's also very good at starting DIY jobs, very poor at finishing them (at least successfully). It took him 2 years to tile our 8ft square bathroom at home (at a rough estimate, that's about 1.5 tiles per week). Some years after this, when he and my mum had finally agreed on a bathroom cabinet they both liked, he put it up, a job of approximately 5 hours, plumb lines, spirit levels, theodolites, planning permission, etc.. The next time I went to visit them, I walked into the bathroom, glanced at the new cabinet, and instantly noticed he'd put it on the wall upside down.

I could tell when he arrived that he wanted to have a go at it. I've managed to stop him doing on at least 2 other occasions, once by dint of nicking and hiding his screwdriver, then "finding" it again just before they were leaving. However, this time despite much protestation, I failed to get up early enough on Sunday morning to stop him, and I arose to find the shelf lying on the floor, plaster dust all around, and dad sat there muttering.

And that's where the shelf still is. Unsurprisingly, he couldn't put it back up, despite 3 or 4 goes at putting things into the ever-enlarging holes left by the original, fully-functional wall plugs. And I've got 2 gaping holes in the wall, no shelf and a giraffe sat in front of the fire.

This displeases me.
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So long, in fact, that I had to look up what the HTML code for the £ sign was ("£" for those who are interested).

We won. The quiz. Finally. After 6 months! (I think - had a look back through my old blog posts, and either it's been a lot longer than that, or I haven't bothered to mention some victories. I'm pretty sure I've not won since Badfriend left though.)

Two things stand out in our victory :

1. Lint's better guessing in the tiebreak. Two teams, Spinach and Evil Bert had 15 million and 15, so for a tiebreaker (with 18 cans of Carling and what turned out to be £37 (yay HTML escape sequences!) in prize money) he got closer to the answer for "In what year was Madonna born?"
2. My getting of the 4 million pointer halfway through the question, entirely from nowhere. I'm still not sure how I got this! "JB, LR, JW. Name the three people and the telly programme." I managed to get it before he'd even got to JW.

Since Lint and I have had quite a heated ongoing argument about giving people the answers to puzzles before they've had a go, I've come up with a way around it.

Answers can be found below this line - select the "blank" area to see them.

Q1 - Madonna was born in 1958, Lint guessed 1960 and Evil Bert guessed 1963.
Q2 - Jeremy Beadle, Lisa Riley and Johnathan Wilkes have all presented You've Been Framed.

And £6.15 the richer, we all left happy.
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(Return of my iBook to the Net, that is.)

Hmmm. An enforced abstinence, this one, as opposed to having nothing to write about, which for once is definitely not the case. I'll leave the explanation to item 4 below. Here's the fortnightly round-up. Perhaps these things will become a little more frequent in the next few weeks. Perhaps not.

1. Finally booked my flights! Now I've just got people nagging me about not being here in January and February (and in two cases, about not having selected appropriate dates for my going-away party, which I didn't know I was supposed to be holding until they complained).
2. I know this is the same as point 1, but I'm going skiing while I'm in Canada. Lake Louise - looking forward to it lots. Can't wait to strap the planks on again - it's been a bit too long...
3. Relatedly, I have a new job finally on the horizon - I'm going to be stuck in the office till my birthday each year, unfortunately (and hence, unlikely to be going skiing much!), but at least I won't have to talk to the gnomish one any more.
4. Net withdrawal symptoms. I went over to my parents' house 2 weeks ago, and when I came back, the Net wasn't there any more. Long story short - after over an hour of calls spread over 4 days to my ISP's helpline, they finally tracked down the cause to "an error on the radius server record on the rack I connect to". (I'm reasonably up on IT terminology, but I have no idea what that means!) And as of an hour or so ago, I'm back. So I can order my going-away stuff online now, instead of having to tramp round shops.
5. Having a 6-hour bitching session till closing time in the Ackhorne, when most of us had intended to be home and in bed by 6 pm!
6. Starting to finally relax a little on the work front. Partly because of no. 4, but partly because (and in no little part because of the assistance of Sarum) we're finally on top of everything. And I think people may have noticed.
7. Spending an hour and a half in 3 different pubs on the PTH thinking Lint was an awful lot more fiendish at setting puzzles than he actually is. Between us, Jenny and I covered about 6 sheets of paper with all kinds of variations on Caesar Square ciphers, anagrams, Roman substitution ciphers, everything we could think of. We should have realised...
8. Discussing various methods of buying a house for GeeDee and a car for Jimbobjo with the criminal mastermind and ever-reliable fount of bizarre conversational directions, Iasonas.
9. (and the final one for now) They've put the coloured lights back up on the Minster! Yay! This is one of the best light displays I've seen (and I grew up near Blackpool) because it seems to fit so well with the Minster itself. I might have to pay a few more visits than usual to Colm's desk over the coming days. One hope is that it lasts a bit longer than the 3 days they managed last year. Well, I'll just have to get my fill in over the weekend, just in case.

OK, not quite the final one, but this doesn't merit a number. Congrats in particular to Newbury (6th time's the charm!), but also to everyone else who's just passed any actuarial exams.
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This was probably the best thing about Ethan Daniel Davidson, who led one of the bands I saw at Fibbers this evening - the title of one of his songs. The rendition of it wasn't too bad either - Ethan carefully informed us that it was a fair and balanced song which wasn't derogatory to women, and to prove it the song had both a male and a female part, with Ethan singing the male and a moustachioed man named Charlie singing the female part.

Unfortunately, there wasn't an awful lot else to recommend him/them (except his pre-empting of Lint and me heckling him for being the nearest American available to complain about the election to, by telling anyone who supported the Republicans to fuck off and do their own gig).

Still, that wasn't what we went for. The aforementioned Motu One were tail-lining (if that's a word), and as they are very good, and this was their last appearance together in their current form, it was a must-see. And as usual, they were excellent. I've now also purchased their "Shuttered Away" EP, which Drew was carrying around 30 copies of in an Asda bag trying to sell. He does not work in Marketing.

Also up were the ever-reliable Four Day Hombre, who are coming up fast on the heels of Puressence for the band I've seen most often live (I think they're trailing 7-5 at the moment, but they play in York a lot more frequently). Nice to see the return of the live version of "The First Word is The Hardest" with the Hounds of Love ending. The Ginger Buffoon won the competition we were holding for how many times they'd complain to the sound guy during the set, with an on-the-nose guess of 5. I also bought one of their CDs, which differed from Motu One's in (at least) three important ways :

1. It hadn't had the covers printed in one of the band's offices the previous week.
2. It had 3 tracks, compared to Motu One's 6, thus making it exactly half as good value.
3. It was being sold by a guy who could obviously afford the finer things in life - he'd invested in a 30-CD-sized cardboard box, rather than picking up his CD receptacle with his last purchase of milk and three-ply toilet tissue from the local supermarket.
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I wanted to do 31 of these, but in the end I couldn't come up with that many. What an event-filled life I lead...

In no particular order, this was my October :

1. Not losing my job
2. Aussie Open tickets
3. Halloween Party at Tsuki & Dom's
4. Miserable failure at the OWS quiz
5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
6. Another miserable failure at the OWS quiz
7. Beating Stevie 15-8 at badminton
8. GTA San Andreas
9. Working out how the big puzzle in Planetarium works
10. Air
11. Fuffee
12. Air again
13. Deus Ex (at last!)
14. HHGTTG Phase 3
15. 175 - second-best (give or take) bowling score ever
16. Badfriend, Bertie and Goodlife all popping up, down and down (respectively) to York
17. Having the end in sight for my Greek Goddess
18. Auntie Mabel and her inflatable poodle
19. Sitting in work for 3 hours listening to my iPod (it's OK, it was a Saturday)
20. Having reached a count of 31 (OK I worked it in somehow!) people asking me if I'd booked my flights yet
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You may recall I've been doing this Planetarium puzzle over the last few months (scarily, since 17th August!), and I finally received the final chapter at midnight last night.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, I have spent the last 2.5 hours filling in all the gaps with the bits and pieces of the puzzles I'd not finished (and in one case, had got so spectacularly and obviously wrong that I'm still kicking myself!), and I'm left with two final gaps.

1. The answer to the following riddle.

"I am a person you can make

By design or by mistake;



First found in grudge and also hater,

Next seen in tyrant, not in traitor,

Third stands in battle, where you'll see

Who, in the end, belongs to me:



So often in our fights and wars

You'll be mine if I am yours."

2. A topological puzzle (at which I'm always rubbish). Taking out all the fantasy elements from the puzzle :

You have a closed ring and two pieces of wire (the wire being infinitely bendy and the ring being unbreakable).

You are not allowed to pass only one end of a wire through a hoop at a time - only both ends at the same time or neither.

You must (eventually) join the ends of each wire together (i.e. closing each wire into a ring, but not joining one end from each wire together).

Once the ends of a wire are joined, you are not allowed to break them again.

You are not allowed to join the wire ends together if the wire contains any coils, kinks or twists - only if it is shaped like a ring already.

The question is, is it possible to end up with all three rings interlinked?

I've got reasonably certain answers to both of these (and Badfriend kind of agrees with me on the first one, haven't asked him about the second yet), but from looking at the whole thing, at least one (and more likely both) must be wrong.

So I'm stuck - help!

posted by Chip : 22:06

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