And all that.

And given it's the new year tomorrow, why not have a change? I thus present the new Oxford website. Much better. Happy New Year everybody.

I have the most fantastic Christmas presents (also the bestest brushed hair, as OJ is brushing mine as I type). Anyway. Pressie from OJ include:
a) £40 voucher for the Hat Shop in the Covered Market (Oxford) so I can finally buy a hat. I always insist on trying them on and staring through the window.
b) A hole punch. Industrial strength. This will i) withstand being thrown against the wall ii) hopefully not chuck “holes” all over the floor and iii) will stop me stealing OJ’s (and Anthony’s)
c) A MeatLoaf album – along with Power Ballads, I am now all set for the long hours of work required in preparation for Schools. Excellent.
And, from S+G, a fantastic purple suede-esque stress-relief cushion (also, excellent preparation for Schools) and some socks (to keep my feet warm in bed). Yay.
Thank you!

Sounds familiar.

Bad Luck: Going into a newsagents (in BlueWater) on the search for stamps. Newsagent doesn't sell stamps.

Good luck: Have £2 in hand so decide to blow it on two scratch cards. Win £50. :)

Apparently BlueWater - where my Mother and I went shopping today - had approximately 150,000 shoppers today. That's a lot of people.

My uncle is down for a birthday lunch, and we've had a variety of discussions encompassing the problems of taxing people who don't have things to give, as well as Franklin importing pre-revolutionary thought into the Constitutional Convention from France. Women and wine and the like. However, the highlight has been the invention of a new niche of historical exploration - food history. As a food historian it would be my job to eat the greatest meals in history, and place them in context, e.g. "I think Cromwell would have had more stuffing." Naturally there would be a comparative aspect as well: "This is not quite as nice as the meal I had last week." Giles Coren beware.

"Our Christmas sacks said 'From Santa' on them, but it was written in daddy's handwriting..."

My sister Lucy, aged seven, criminologist in the making.

Also, thank you to OJ and Amy for my Christmas present. I think I'm missing something because it's actually quite nice and funny and a welcome addition to my room - I can't see any innuendo or sarcasm, which means I must be losing my touch. But thank you all the same.

In other news, I had an amazing experience on Boxing Day: a conversation with a pheasant. For those interested in seeing the pheasant, and other photos, head on over to http://carruforth.deviantart.com.

God works in mysterious ways.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I know I will, because I have a 2005 Johnny Depp Calendar. The pressure is also now off me, since my anticipated event shall be at the beginning of the month… turning over for the new picture! (sorry OJ – I’m sure Ollie is with me on this one :p)

Merry Christmas, and have a wonderful 2005. I know I will, because Kate Bush is releasing a new album next year apparently. The pressure is now off me, since Finals are no longer my most anticipated event of the year.

I've just relaunched the website of one of our companies, if anyone is interested. Not content with simply dissecting every single move that Google makes, I've incorporated Google SiteSearch into the layout (in a relatively neat and understated way, I personally feel). That said, the results aren't as yet much use owing to the old way in which we constructed sets of lot descriptions for our auctions, but hopefully that will change.

Also of note is that there are only six images powering the entire site. The rest is done using CSS, making this the most CSS-reliant site I've built to date (just pipping the FD site, which was unique enough since it was almost all designed in Blogger using code alone).

Anyway, if you get a chance please check it out, and be particularly vigilant for major errors, typos, pages crashing and burning, etc. Several pages may take a long time to load, but that is expected since they contain a *lot* of information. Cheers.

Unless Ollie can magic one up, this is a long shot given the people who come to this site, but does anyone have a spare GMail invite I could have? Just want to see what it's like...

One of the things of being at home is that I get to watch TV, which is something I've not done for 3 months. I've just had the embarassment of watching Strictly Come Dancing, and even staying up to watch the results. Oh how the mighty are fallen.

OJ may be bored and tired of ironing (8 washloads or something), but I am thoroughly fed up with work. Boring. Go away work. Last day today until the New Year, but even so I've had enough.

HMV are issuing booklets of money-off vouchers, valid from 29th December until 31st March, as part of their Christmas campaign. The idea, of course, is that customers are driven to HMV as soon as the New Year sales begin.

The vouchers take the form of:
£2 off on a CD/DVD/game purchase worth £13.99 or more
£3 off when you spend £20 or more at HMV
£5 off when you spend £35 or more at HMV
£10 off when you spend £60 or more at HMV
£15 off when you spend £80 or more at HMV
£20 off when you spend £100 or more at HMV
£5 off when you spend £35 or more at Waterstone's
£5 off when you spend £35 or more at hmv.co.uk

There are a number of duplicate vouchers, and the total, as advertised on the front of the booklet, is £100 in money-off vouchers. What the booklet doesn't tell you is that you would need to spend at least £683.94 to get the full £100 back. And you would need to do it before April. And you can't use more than one voucher in the same transaction. So what HMV are really asking is do you have £580 or so to spare?

Finally, on the 29th December, oooooooooomkjjjjjjjjjj (input from the kitten, apologies) broadband will come to Lenham! My father has finally given in - no more crashing half-way through a down-load, no more endless failed dial-ups, no more waiting ages for emails to come through because they have a single word file attached to them and no longer will I have to get OJ to upload my Dayorama posts because this connection is too slow (and actually, in reality, it isn't really that slow - it's just distinctly different to broadband). Yay!

Some time I will expand upong the wonder of the George Foreman Mean Lean Grilling Machine. Just not tonight. On the other hand, at least someone's posted.

Following on from OJ's post in November, viewable here, the hunter who shot a llama when he mistook it for a deer has been charged with trespassing and a misdemeanor count of mistreatment of animals. Apparently, the trespassing charge carries a fine of up to $1,000 and the other count carries a fine of up to $10,000 and a nine-month jail term. Rather harsh if you ask me, but clearly it is a lesson to all hunters that they should have a better ideer of what they are shooting before they fire.

She's still amazingly cute and is called Daisy. Its a lovely, elegant name... and as the kitten is black and white... and every black and white cow is called Daisy... somehow it seemed appropriate!

(We didn't know that had OJ been a girl he would have been called Daisy until after we had decided on the name)

Finally after 16 weeks or whatever it is, I am going home. I just need to pack everything up by 11.30 now...

You know what, Google has its own press centre. It has done for a long time. Lots of major news organisations pick up on the media releases doled out there, and create features based on them. Will that stop us mentioning every new Google feature (or for that matter every off-the-wall BBC article) the moment we see it? Nope.

And so it is that Google Groups relaunched earlier this month. If you read the press release, Google talks about the concept of 'starring' items - not items whose names appear above the title of the page movie poster-style, but a means of bookmarking items for future reference. Each post in a group, or each email in a GMail account come to that, has a little white star next to it. If you click that star, it turns yellow and that item becomes in Google terminology 'starred'.

I predict that in a couple of years, this will lead to a change in the definition of 'star' in major dictionaries. Currently the only entry for 'star' with reference to highlighting something is the use of 'star' as in 'to mark with an asterisk'. The ubiquity of Google and its introduction of the concept of 'starring' to both email and groups means that in a few years' time, the idea of 'starring' things for later use is likely to have become commonplace, so that definition will have to change: 'star', to bookmark for monitoring or future reference.

A statement by Oxford on the Oxford-Google digitisation agreement is now online. Looks really cool; just a shame that copyright restrictions means that only pre 1920 literature is going to be done. My life would have been much easier had I been able to Google "tax" in the secondary literature for this extended essay.

Problem: Mice + house without a cat (wrong)

Solution: Buy a kitten! So cute. A black and white bundle of mischief and fluffiness. Yet to be named though, so I shall update. Christmas could be interesting... we bought the 6' tree before we bought the cat...

One last thing, as I sit here in a Princeton t-shirt and write to a friend about it - a year to the day since my return. Boy, time flies quickly.

First of all a lie in. Second of all, a hair cut in a new place - the Barbers in the Covered Market. Took 12 minutes and I did not have to talk to the hairdresser. Fantastic. I know where I'll be going in the future. Third, (breakfast and) lunch from Ricardo's. A roast pork ciabatta, with sage and onion stuffing and apple sauce. Delicious, and best of all they throw in crackling for free :D

Two years later (well, only one if you consider the fact that I am at University for at least half of the year), and I have finally completed my cross-stitch. I estimate that it's probably taken around 200-250hours of work. Pretty impressive really. However, I'm not sure what I'll do with my evenings now. Buy another one? We'll have to see.

Blunkett has resigned, and not before time. Quick thoughts - Robin Cook or Alan Milburn for home secretary, Labour to win the next election with a reasonable majority, Tories to win in a landslide in the one after that with an embitterd Gordon Brown wondering where it all went wrong.

Update: Meh, Clarke to Home, Kelly to Education and Miliband to Cabinet Office. First ministerial position for the later and he's what, 39?

There's a mouse in my house. More specifically, there is a whole colony of mice, living under the floorboards in my bedroom. I smelt a funny mouse-like smell the other day, but earlier on, suspicions were confirmed. In the early hours of this morning, the scene in my room was like something out of the children’s novel where soft-toys come to life. (Magic Toyshop? Or is that the weird but wonderful Angela Carter novel?). Anyway, there I was, all tucked up asleep in my bed and I woke to loud scratching and scuffling. I turned on my light, and there were about three mice attacking part of OJ’s Christmas present! He won’t be getting it now. The item in question was a penguin made from icing. There is a long story behind this, but just think Pingu. Anyway, in the travels back from Oxford the head fell off the penguin, rather masochistic I know, so the present sat unwrapped on my floor (next to all other, wrapped presents; now safely moved onto my desk). The mice got into the packaging, and when I awoke, the head had rolled across my bedroom floor, and the mice were tucking into the body of the penguin. Great. It is now full of mice teeth marks. We had this situation about 11 years ago when my Mother and I painstakingly made two Christmas puddings, left them in the cool of the cellar in foil and a biscuit tin, and the mice got in and ate the pudding. We discovered the half-eaten puddings (plus some very well-fed mice) on Christmas Eve and consequently ended up with a Delia-in-five-minutes pudding that year. Due to the mice in my room, I haven’t had much sleep. I am not scared of mice, our cat used to bring them in all the time, but I object to them taking sanctuary under my bed and scrabbling around when I am trying to sleep.

And the moral of the story? We need a new cat.

More Google news - apparently they're digitizing university library holdings and putting them on the web. Usually this is only for the US universities, but it's good to see that Oxford is taking part as well. I think this is awesome - much as I love telnet, Google would be much easier to search for books with, but better than that, imagine being able to search the content using Google. Awesome.

Never read the ending of a really good novel, in which the lead character/narrator gets shot, dies, is brought back to life and then marries in the space of ten pages, in the middle of a university library.

By the time we got to the wedding, I couldn't help it and I had to slide down the chair and raise the book up to hide the fact that I was weeping. I'd been reading the book all the way back to Oxford from Minehead on the train and only had fifty or so pages left by the time I got to the library, so I could hardly stop there; thus, in amongst people poring over textbooks and treatises, I was wiping the tears from my eyes as Daniel Sempere and Beatriz Aguilar got married.

I do know one thing for sure though: it's by far and away the best book in this library. I've kind of given away the plot so I don't want to name it - look up the character names above if you must know - but it has made me think long and hard about a lot of things since I've been reading it, and it's one of the first books to have given me a proper, rounded role model for the way I want people to see me and the way I want to see myself. The last book to do that was Watership Down...

We're praised Google before. Now, as if life wasn't easy enough, they present Google Suggest. Very cool.

Two things of note. With mid length essays, talking in percentages makes you sound as do you've done more work than talking in words does. Thus, I've done 20%, or I've done 1200 words. Second, you know you're at Oxford when...it's Sunday, two weeks before Christmas, and there are eight finalists in your library. Oh yes.

Sometimes in life, others around us lend little clues as to our personal appearance.

For instance, I went to the Golden House Chinese restaurant in Minehead early yesterday evening to order a takeaway. On entering, I told a rather short Chinese waitress standing next to a Christmas tree by the door that I'd like to place a takeaway order.
"Next door," she said, gesturing round the corner to a small door leading to what turned out to be the takeaway desk.
I smiled and started to say "Thanks", but was interrupted:
"What happen to your hair? Someone frighten you?"

Time for a cut, then.

Having caned it in the library this week, I spent this afternoon doing Christmas Shopping. It was successful too - only have three more presents to get. Two weeks ago, HSBC (who I couldn't recommend more highly for quality of customer service and their Student Account in general) sent me a new debit card with a pin in it, in order to allow me to use Chip and Pin. Although they're pretty late in doing this - I know Amy has had such a card for months now - one the advantages of this is that Chip and Pin is far more widespread. Out of seven transactions, six were conducted this way. This even included Walters, not regarded as a shop at the cutting edge. It was much quicker than the usual method of signing, and felt pretty cool too. Just don't ask me what my Credit Card Pin Number is...I wouldn't have a clue.

A yuletide song of hatred, with apologies to Bacharach, David & The Carpenters.

Why do bears suddenly appear
Every time you are near?
Just like me, they long to be
Toasting you.

Why do cars fall down from the sky
Every time you walk by?
Just like me, God longs to be
Toasting you.

On the day that you were born
The devil got a cauldron
And decided to create a loathsome stew
But he sprinkled too much rat instead of toad
And so instead out came you

That is why all the girls in town
Chase you with
Packs of hounds
Just like me, they long to be
Toasting you.

Wahhhhhhhhhhh, toasting you.
Wahhhhhhhhhhh, roasting you.
Hahhhhhhhhhhh, poaching you.
Lahhhhhhhhhhh,
Toasting
You.

Apparently even llamas have fun at Christmas.

I know I'm not male, but I don't think I've ever used my laptop on my lap. Its always on a table, floor or train ledge/table thing. The BBC article today explains how, if you are male, using your laptop on your lap could increase the temperature of the scrotum, which can then effect sperm production, thus reducing fertility etc. Rather like the "tight y-front" theory. Anyway, I urge you to look at the photo of the laptop user, alongside the BBC article - surely that's a woman?

[Yes, really, revision is that dull that I'd rather decide whether the photo of someone using a laptop is male or female]

Many Oxford colleges make a habit of keeping a 'college cat' somewhere on the premises, ostensibly as some kind of guardian/bird killer but far more importantly as a boost to student morale. Exeter's cat, Stevie, arrived in September of this year and has been cooed over ever since, most notably by many, many pigeons, of which he has failed to wound or remotely harass even one.

Oxford University Computing Services, or OUCS for short, must have felt considerably left out, since they have introduced Daisy to proceedings. Daisy is the cat of Grazyna Cooper, IT Learning Programme Manager at OUCS and whose job it is to oversee the OUCS mailing lists, which deal with news about new courses at the centre. And so I present to you three emails she issued to the course mailing list this afternoon:

From: Grazyna Cooper
Time: 1:16pm
Subject: Cat Problem (not Car Problem)
Body: My very mischievous Burmese cat Daisy, chews all my electric wires at home.
She has not been electrocuted yet, however she is coming close to be strangled by her owner. I have just spend a fortune repairing wires on our central heating boiler. I am sure there are lots of cat lovers out there.
Has anybody else had a similar problem with a cat?

1. Getting rid of her is not an option.
2. Employing the services of a cat psychiatrist is not an option.
3. Covering every wire in my house with steel tubing is not an option either.

Any other suggestions?

Grazyna

-----

From: Grazyna Cooper
Time: 1:28pm
Subject: Sorry!
Body: Apologies for sending my cat message to this list. It was meant for another list.

Grazyna

-----

From: Grazyna Cooper
Time: 1:29pm
Subject: Thank You
Body: I have already been flooded with wonderful suggestions.

Many thanks.

Grazyna

-----

It is somehow comforting to know that of all the students signed up to the OUCS Course Information mailing list - which must, I would suggest, consist mainly of mathematicians and scientists with a technological bent - many of them found the time to immediately dispense cat advice on a Wednesday lunchtime.

According to a report in scientific journal Proceedings B, left-handedness as a concept in humans might have survived so long, against the odds, because it makes for a better fighter: other people don't expect to be attacked from the left (apart from Margaret Thatcher, one assumes).

Given that I've never punched anyone, or even tried to, in my life - short of once at the age of nine trying to kick the crap out of James Birkett, but then he was doing the same back - I guess I'm not giving much back to the legacy of leftness which spawned me. But then, I do most things right-handed, if not almost all things bar writing and a couple of other exceptions. Golf, tennis, cricket, snooker, even scissors, are all done right-handed for me; only writing puts the left to any use. So perhaps I'm that absolute runt of society, the delinquent right-hander with not even a good left hook to show for my dalliance with the left.

About 15 years ago, work began on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link in Kent. It was completed last year, when the Eurostar was removed from the mainline and now has its own high-seed line from the coast to London. Obviously, the creation of the new train line brought much controversy to Kent – where would the line go, how much countryside/farmland/hedgerow would be destroyed, which homes would be effected etc. We didn’t live in Kent at the time, so our only concern was making sure we did not move somewhere close to the line. Anyway, the point is that when plans for the new line were in place, Railtrack or CTRL or whoever owned/built/is still in debt for the line, purchased many houses that were close to the proposed route of the railway. Compensation was given to homeowners who lived within (100m – I think) of the railway line. Even driving through Kent, there are several abandoned houses close to the new line, which were obviously bought by the CTRL and have since been desolate. The irony of this fat is that now, developers are building houses next to the line. A few miles away from where I live, the motorway and the new railway line cross. On the top of a cutting, so perhaps a 10m vertical drop from the line, if that, they have built a new housing development. In another area, a new housing develop faces the new line, certainly closer than 100m. Several hundreds of people moved out of their homes, were paid great sums of compensation, and now people are choosing to live right next to the line. That’s what you call ironic.

Top of the BBC news cycle at the moment is still the report on the proposed closing of some fishing areas, in order to protect the sealife. (Funnily enough, this has knocked the report on the loss of 3,000 jobs at the BBC off the top spot. Funny that.) Anyway, listening to the news on Radio 2 this morning, they had a soundbite from some scientific bod. What he said made me crease, and I repeat verbatim. The context was the fact that we hardly know anything about the life in the sea (less than the moon, in fact), and that we are only just beginning to explore in depth. There are some magical creatures down there, and quote "we've it in the Blue Planet, we've seen it in Finding Nemo." Of course, there's really no way that talking fish could not be magical, really.

I've got a very traditional advent calendar this year; traditional nativity scene, no chocolate (much to the disappointment of OJ). Since the start of December, each window has, in sequence, told a part of the Christmas Story e.g. Joseph as a carpenter, then the Angel Gabrielle speaking to Mary etc. Could someone please explain the significance today’s window - a cow looking at a star?!

It's been a long old day of travelling.

I started off on the bus from Stokenchurch to Reading at 9am, then got the 10:40 service from Reading to Exeter St Davids, which got in a little late at around 1:20pm. It was delayed because of a points failure just outside Reading, which was a little unnerving given recent events, especially when, in order to get round the problem, the train executed an elaborate reversing manoeuvre. The train manager kept us all exceptionally well updated over the tannoy, to the extent that he explained several times over how those of us currently facing the direction of travel would have their backs to the direction of travel once the manoeuvre was complete - and that we should not therefore be alarmed. It's that kind of attention to detail, or more likely that recognition of the numbing inevitability that some old dear will complain that the train is going the wrong way, which makes First Great Western that little bit special.

I had to go to Exeter to collect some goods from an auction house for SportingMem. I picked up the stuff then walked the mile and a half or so back to Exeter St Davids, before getting a train back up to Taunton (without a ticket, but shh). Then the hour-long bus trip to Minehead. I finally got in to the Minehead at 4:30pm, seven and a half hours after setting off.

All of this is pretty inconsequential really. The best news of the day was that my mp3 player is only halfway down its battery meter after a good eight or so hours' continual play (if I need to talk to someone or shut it up for a few minutes, I unplug the jack rather than turn it off because that involves turning off the lock first and I can't be bothered, it's easier to leave it in my pocket and decouple the jack). I'm now sat on the couch in my mum's brand new flat (or at least new to us), which has the kind of delightful open plan that I'd love in my first flat. We're going to set up a wireless network in a sec, once we're done drinking wine and writing things on our respective computers. Aye, it's a happy old existence back here in the sticks.

Been meaning to do this for a while. Not getting very much done with my applications in my room, because despite its brightness, it's a bit boring. Solution - take the laptop, with wireless card, to Starbucks, and get more work done with a coffee and wireless internet provided by T-Mobile. Now, Ollie I know has done this for years with his GPRS card, but this is slightly different. And it works, and it's enjoyable. You can understand why public wireless access is such a big thing for some people. £7.50 for 3 hours is a little much, I guess, especially once the novelty has worn off, but still, this is still pretty damn cool.

The fuse has been switched! I can see again! Huzzah!

It's half four in the evening in Oxford. My lights have just gone. A new bulb doesn't work, meaning that there's a fuse somewhere in the Mitre which needs fixing. And it's Saturday. Bugger.

...even more so than when the end was nigh a few months ago. Just to depress, or enlighten everyone before the Christmas Vac, it is approximately 27 weeks to the end of our Finals or Schools. I have been instructed to refer to them as Schools now, rather than Finals (micro, macro tutor). Apparently Finals equates to stress, anxiety and fear whereas calling them Schools should make them a challenge, something unique to Oxford, and something to aspire towards and enjoy. Schools it is then. Let's see if that description works!

P.S. Two small nags. First, I had a lecture at 9am this morning. A lawyer, having a lecture on Friday of 8th week of MT? What's the world coming to. Second, I have a Rector's Collection at 5.10pm. Second to last! Great. Just as I wanted to leave for home about 2pm. London rush-hour traffic for me!

I had a fun time getting my MMR injection this morning. In all occasions such as this, I develop a bit of a roguish attitude to proceedings, which usually has hilarious consequences and occasionally has earth-shatteringly humiliating ones. Of the latter category is the time that I went for physiotherapy and told the nurse, as she massaged my back, that she spoke English very well and where was she from, only to be told South Africa and it was her first language.

Happily, though today didn't qualify under 'hilarious' it certainly wasn't that painful either. Questionnaires are always good for this defiant roguishness, which only comes out into the open as a defence mechanism - if in mortal danger, act like fool. It is my eleventh commandment. Asking me if I am pregnant or not is just too easy to be arsey about, so I skipped a pun there, but Amy had to suffer me trying to put, in a box next to "General Practice:", the word "Required". I then had a bit of jousting with administrative lady number one because she told me to fill in a consent form.
"What with? Have you got a pen?"
"No, you should have brought one."
"But no one told me to."
"You're a student."
What's that supposed to mean? I'm a student so I'm inherently organised? I'm a student and can thus summon pens at will? Luckily the ever-useful Amy had one buried in her handbag, so a crisis was averted.

My crowning moment of roguishness came during the actual injection procedure. Nice little old ladies sat in a ten by twenty block, wafting their becardiganned arms in the air to attract the attention of their next victim, waiting in line at the edge. Having ambled along past Amy to get to my old lady of choice, she sat me down and pleasantly took me through the questionnaire again. I mentioned that I was on antibiotics, and would this be a problem: "Ooh no dear, you feel well today, don't you?" She places her hand on my forehead. "No temperature there, and you certainly look very well."

Goodness! Never one to reject a compliment, I accepted with a gracious "Why thank you!", but even my roguish grin wasn't enough to stop her rolling up my sleeve and prepping a needle. She told me to "relax", and when she realised that my version of relaxation was declenching my buttocks but remaining braced for an imaginary impact, she calmly suggested I lean back a little. Then she told me to hold a small piece of cotton wool next to my arm - hang on! She'd done it!
"Is that it? Have you done it?" I inquired.
"Yes, all done dear," she replied, lobbing the needle into a box for disposal with the consummate ease of someone who has vaccinated a million roguish students.
"Well that was very well done. Do I get to give you marks out of ten?"
"Haha!" She exclaimed. "Why not? What would you give me?"
"Eleven."

At this point, the nurse in front of us, who had been conducting the last rites over her latest captive, leant back and said that no one ever paid her such kind remarks. Clearly us roguish folk are in all too short supply. I hastily departed, and the moment I was out the door my roguishness, sensing imminent danger to have been averted, disappeared in its entirety.

So, that's the introduction to what I was going to talk about, but since the introduction is bloomin' long and roguish, I'm not sure how long I need spend on the actual main body of this post. In a nutshell, I spent most of the morning before and after my injection humming the appropriate line "It's sick, the price of medicine", from the Psychedelic Furs track President Gas. I'd heard it on the radio a few days ago, but by the time I went out for some food at 5:30, I had to own a copy of President Gas, so I went into Virgin and bought their 1982 album Forever Now. It's damn good. I'm reliably informed that my ex-stepdad-who-wasn't-really-but-I-call-him-that-for-reasons-of-brevity, Steve, very much liked the Psychedelic Furs. This is promising, since he was the one who got me into Thunder as well; if nothing else, that man had a very keen eye for good music.

The album, which is a 2002 re-issue with bonus tracks, has a live version of President Gas at the end which is going to sound fantastic on my mp3 player as my official pep-talk tune before football matches. See, I listen to music for about twenty minutes before getting to a game I'm about to play in, and my consequent success always, so my superstition has it, depends on the playlist. Sometimes I let the mp3 player handle this at random so it's pot luck; other times I specify a track that I know will get me all focused, like Battle Without Honor Or Humanity from the Kill Bill 1 soundtrack. The live version of President Gas is going to serve this purpose very well indeed.

This is probably undeserving of the music category, being as it is one part music to five parts self-indulgent waffle. Ah well.

I can write about Su Doku. Attempted it for the first time today... completed it (accurately) in 10mins. Beginners luck I hear you cry? We shall have to see how I do tomorrow.

Yeah, OK, this is just a filler to keep the run going. Last Sunday saw numbers going mad in Ohio, and it wasn't just about the counting of provisional ballots. (Remember them? They're still not all in yet.) Actually, the Bengals beat the Browns by 58-48, the second highest combined score in NFL history. And that will have to do until I can write something about Su Doku.