Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

Hmm.. Didn't sleep so well last night: I think it must have been the alcohol and late dinner that did it - I kept waking up hot and bothered with some half-remembered (but now not even partailly remembered) dream kicking around in my head. I recall just enough to know that it was rthe same dream all night, so waking up was like having advert breaks, I guess.

I think Furtle must have had a similar night, judging by the amount of tossing and turning going on. I had to shove back quite stridently at one point, waking up to find myself teetering on the edge of the bed and a comatose Furtle attempting a further territorial grab that would have seen me and the duvet on the floor had it succeeded.

The quiz last night didn't go so well. I'm not sure why. We stalled on 21 points behind a whole swathe of people on 23 and three teams on 24, so we were not even close to making a hat trick of wins. Shame, but on the other hand, if the same team wins week in amnd week out, it takes the fun out of it for the other teams. Been there, done that. The jackpot is still untouched, the 80% chance of not selecting the correct envelope seems to be occurring 100% of the time. It is months since anyone guessed correctly. At this rate, buy the time the grand is claimed there will be enough in the kitty to go straight to another grand!

One of the reasons we dropped points (though we still wouldn't have won) was that it turns out that my mental map of the Middle East is not what I thought it was. Particularly annoying when you think how much Afghanistan has been in the news in the past five years. I was convinced that Iran was south of the place and Pakistan to the east, but no, I have just checked and am rather glad that I kept my ire in check last night. Pakistan is quite definitely south of the place; south and east in a long line, with Iran to the west and a whole heap of ex-Soviet towelhead nations to the north.

I blame the curvature of the earth. Stupid Mercator projections.

My legs need oiling. My hips and knees feel gravelly today and would benefit from a dash of WD-40 applied liberally to the joints. At least they don't squeak like a rusty gate in the wind, but they feel as though they ought to.

We won the quiz again last night and sent Furtle instead of me to pick the envelope that may contain the £1,000 jackpot. It didn’t, as usual. We do not have a good record of taking our 20% chance and if there’s ever a lesson that odds have no memory, this is it. We have, over a period of 18 months, come first about 5 or 6 times and never picked the winning envelope. On average, you would expect to pick it once in every five, but we all know what averages are like, don’t we? (The average number of legs per person in the world is less than two). Still, we have another £25 tab for next week, so it’s not a complete loss!

I rather expected a flood of emails awaiting my attention this morning, after my (if I do say so myself) restrained response to accounts yesterday. So far there have been none. I can only assume that they are reeling in the face of irrefutable logic: they have been Spocked, and there’s no coming back from that.

This morning is passing so far in soft focus. Even wearing my glasses I can only just focus on the computer. I’m pretty sure that we overindulged at the pub last night, but as hangovers go, this is all rather warm and fluffy. I just wish it was warm and fluffy with me still in bed, getting a couple more hours of the old dreamless.

Unexpectedly I received a text from colonel_maxim, who is back in the country (I thought it was last week he was back, but I’ve been doing that a lot recently) and he turned up to the weekly quiz with motorpickle and Chris sans LJ in tow. We had a grand time involving rather too much alcohol and won handsomely, with 28 points from a possible 30. Nobody in the pub knew the name of the first pop star to sing for the Pope¹ and not one of us on the team can recall ever watching the movie Jerry Maguire so knowing the name of a character in it was not going to happen. Still, we won! Sadly the old 20% curse hit and once again I picked the wrong envelope, so the jackpot, now at a cool £1,000 rolls over to next week. Again. The pub manager has decided to peg the jackpot at £1,000 and all further monies coming into the quiz are being held to build up a second prize fund so that when the current one is finally won, it will not re-set to about £50 as it has done in the past.

Not a complete bust, however as we still have a £25 bar tab for next week and it looks as though Furtle and I will have the pleasure of motorpickle and Chris’ company for a second week in succession.

The past two mornings a new and strange entity has been haunting my Tube journey. I do not yet have a name for him, but yesterday he was listening to a portable CD player and alternately singing tunelessly to it and tapping his feet loudly in the sort of rhythm more suited to avoiding the attentions of Giant Sandworms on Dune rather than providing a beat to any sort of earthly music. Today he was muttering to himself and indulging in periodic exclamations of surprise or delight. Something is clearly poorly wired in the melon, but he seems harmless enough. I have been very English about the whole thing on each occasion and pretended to be asleep. Let other people deal with the nutter, I say.

¹Gloria Estefan, apparently.

I wasn’t aware that I over indulged last night at the quiz. We had a good night; Furtle and myself were joined in the pub shortly after the start of the quiz by colonel_maxim, maisiecat and Hayden (sans LJ). In quiz terms we seem to be losing our edge, getting 20 from a possible 30 for the second week in a row and falling around three points short of hitting the prize placings, but it’s all good fun and we don’t really care.

It is our practice to have a meal with the drinks – almost invariably in my case, the Cajun chicken burger with bacon and cheese and we did so again last night. I also had 4 pints of San Miguel to wash it down. Four pints is hardly excessive (said he, flying in the face of current medical Nazism) and I hardly drink otherwise nowadays, unlike days of yore.

Anyway, when I got home again afterward, I was feeling a little full and probably didn’t help matters by having a restorative coffee before bed. The upshot is that I woke up this morning feeling a little squiffy. Not hung-over; I’m not so out of practice that four pints of lager will get me, but definitely ready to light a votive candle at the shrine of St Eno the Bilious. A bowl of Rice Krispies, a cup of coffee and a doze on the train seem to have me largely back to normal, but I confess to be looking forward to the end of today and the coming of the weekend (a weekend to be foreshortened by an hour as the clocks go forward!). Despite it only having been a three-day week for me, I am unaccountably tired and as I type, I feel the stirrings of the return of slight gastric distress in contradiction to previous assurances that I had recovered.

More coffee.

I think I shall apply to have that as my motto on a coat of arms.

I shall have to pop out to Boots in a bit and stock up on paracetamol and codeine. I broke a tooth last night whilst scoffing dinner, and then the filling fell out of what was left. It is just about tolerable provided the temperature doesn’t vary by more than a degree or so. I think that might be a degree or so Fahrenheit rather than Celsius. As you can probably imagine, maintaining this delicate balance has made eating and drinking somewhat exciting, and seeing as I am a little short of money at the moment, wandering in to visit a random dentist is equally problematic.

I must confess that I am somewhat afeared of those madmen with their torture implements, and I think that I may have to keep going on the painkillers for some time while both backbone and bank balance grow to the point where I can drum up the courage to see the sadist.

And anyone who says dentists are not sadists should look at the piece of recycled Napoleonic cannon that passed as a filling before it dropped out last night

In other, and less painful news, tonight is the last game of the quiz season. Actually, it's the first of our defence of the cup we won last year, the quiz season proper finished a couple of weeks ago, with the Accies resoundingly last in the league. Normally as cup holders, we would not get a handicap in our favour, but the league have taken pity on us after another dismal season and given us a handicap of 12, which is about half of what it would have been had we not won the cup last season.

I am hopeful that a 12 point bonus will not be enough to extend the agony beyond this week, and that we can walk this season out into the backyard, fondly feed it a cube of sugar and put a bullet through its head.

Anyway. That's the pain talking. I'm off to buy painkillers. Further entries may or may not appear today, and if they do, they may or may not be intelligible.

No change there, then.

Tuesday night and it’s quiz time again.

This is our last game before Christmas, and quite frankly I would prefer not to go. I am finding it harder and harder to drum up the necessary enthusiasm. Tonight I would rather go home, get something to eat, put my feet up and watch Chelsea and Liverpool grind out the inevitable 0-0 draw in the European Cup (It’s a meaningless fixture as both have already qualified for the knock-out stage), or maybe listen to some music, or watch the double bill of CSI Miami and CSI New York on Channel 5.

Going to the quiz, on the other hand, involves sitting in the office until around 7.30 or 7.40, wandering across the city to Borough and then losing a game (I don’t mind the losing so much, but since the league changed the company who set the questions, I am on a completely different wave length, and barely ever manage a reasonable score. It’s demoralising). Assuming I get to play, of course; I might end up reading the questions, not that that is so bad. No, it’s wet, chilly and dark. I want to go home now, not at 10.00 or later, knowing that it will be a long journey home of at least an hour and given the late evening proclivities of the Northern Line, not unlikely that I shall wash up at the Athenaeum Club around midnight if I am not careful.

Ah well.

Later: I was right on both counts: We lost, and Chelsea v Liverpool ground out a meaningless 0-0 draw. Pass me the Lotto form, I'm on a roll.

Well, if anyone cares, other than the boastful Von Twine, there are still several unidentified songs on this mornings quiz.

I have learnt two things today:

Firstly, Grand gesture quizzing is a pain in the arse. Keeping up with all the answers is not all it's cracked up to be. If I ever do such a thing again, there will be significantly fewer than 150 songs...

Secondly, and most importantly, several people who poo-poo my musical tastes have no room to talk, knowing the answers to some of those lyrics. I researched the buggers ages ago; there's only a handful I actually know.

So nyah, nyah. ;-p

In a sad effort to show that I can be a cool and groovy hipster daddy-o just like those other cats out there, here is my take on the lyric quiz, which I am doing now before it becomes a meme. I don’t do memes, see.

Some of the songs are older than others; I have gone for a wide range regarding both time span and musical style. Appearance of a lyric fragment on this page does not necessarily mean that I endorse the song or the artist.

See how far you get. Or not. To quote the once and future smittumi, ’S all good.
( 150 lyric fragments. Enough to keep you from working all day )

Added:
Thus far caffeine_fairy is well ahead, but needs to rethink some of her answers slightly. As for oldnick, repeating the lyric and then telling me who dunnit isn't the same as giving the answer!

I'll fill in more this evening, but right now I need to eat and then do some work. Bugger..