The Latest Quiz

Yes, it's Wednesday here in beautiful downtown Adelaide, and Wednesday means quizzes. But unfortunately this week's quiz is not quite ready due to me somehow managing to lose all the files. Thus it will be delayed by as much as twelve hours, while I get home from work and start again.
While you're waiting, though, here's an example of the sort of thing that we'll be dealing with. The quiz is a series of strings of flags, like a virtual parade-route, and each string of flags represents a historical progression of events, with the top flag being the oldest in the string, and the bottom flag being the most recent in the string.

Let me remind you at this point that there is a code of honour amongst gentlemen which precludes the use of references and collaboration of any kind when participating in high-stakes competitions such as Leaflocker quizzes. Let us match wits, you and I.

STRING 0: (considerably harder than the quiz itself)
What does this string of flags represent?


If you're still looking for something to do, everyone in Monday's post, as well as James, whose bidding weaknesses I have not been made aware of, has made their first steps in the August Blagofest, so there's plenty of new stuff out here on the internet.

Content With My Failure / Read: A Dance With Dragons

If you're one of my irregular readers, and I must assume that you are, you may be aware that some months ago I embarked on my reading project, an attempt to curb my rampant expediture in the vicinity of bookstores. The idea, for those of you with short memories, was that I would refrain from buying any new books until I had disposed of all the books on my list, and this noble aim lasted about as long as the next time I passed by my local newsagent.
Well, a little while ago, while rearranging funiture and going through my collection and realising that the problem was more serious than I'd previously realised (to the tune of some fifty volumes), I devised a more realistic system that I have since managed to keep to.


These are my shelves of unread books. All the volumes here are part of my library, but for various reasons are yet to be read. The new system is simple, I may not exceed the free space on the unread shelves with any new purchases. Thus, I must read in order to expand my library. Books that I have begun but not finished are in the top left, and it is my intention to finish these and then begin working left to right. This will allow me some choice, as I can pick from any of the three shelves, but should ensure that no volumes will be left to rot. In the interests of full disclosure I feel compelled to mention the disclaimer that reference books are immune to these conditions, and may be purchased with impunity, and that gift books that overfill the bookshelf are allowed, but must be added to the shelves before new aquisitions can be made (the idea of virtual shelves seemed to me to be a cunning little loophole, for a while). This system has the tentative approval of certain other parties concerned in the expenditure and mass in my reading material, which is a tactical victory, I assure you.

I will seek to continue the reading project (there's quite the backlog of read books to share with you, dear readers), and give you regular updates on the state of the shelves.


One of those books that I have read during my absence from the internet is the ridiculously long-awaited Dance of Dragons. It has a long and chequered history, but is basically the other half of a book published way back in 2005. In 2005 I was still in high school, which makes me feel like it was a very long time ago. I'm tempted to enter into a long whining missive on the unreliability and even downright meanness of the man to keep me waiting this long, but I won't. Firstly because I am aware that George R.R. Martin is not my bitch, and secondly because I have way too much respect for the guy that brought me back to fantasy fiction when I thought for a long time that it had died with Tolkien.

For those of you not familiar with the story, A Song of Ice and Fire is an epic fantasy series that began as a trilogy and has so far spanned five books. It tracks the land of Westeros, where great houses vie for power between themselves in mostly devious and downright nasty ways, and honourable people (and dishounourable ones too, let's admit it) have an unfortunate way of up and dying just as soon as the reader gets attached to them. Over the course of the last four books, two kings and four pretenders to the throne of the Seven Kingdoms have died in various mean and terible ways, a scion of the old royal family has made her absurdly ponderously way home, and many, many, many thousands of people have died. Honourable men turn out to be less than honourable, villains get redeemed, and absolutely nothing, nothing, is what it seems. It's actually rather good.

Page 123:

They found the lord alone in the gloom of his hall, making a supper of bread and beer and sister's stew. Twenty iron sconces were mounted along his thick stone walls, but only four held torches, and none of them was lit. Two fat tallow candles gave a meagre, flickering light.

I'll stop there, because any more could be considered spoilers for those of you who are eagerly awaiting news on this particular POV character... :p But it does give you an example of the style. I actually tried reading some of this book aloud to a captive audience, but had to abandon the attempt when I couldn't stop giggling at the ridiculous pomposity of the dialogue. That's fantasy for you, no wonder the other genres don't take us seriously.

Although I found the book itself to be slow and even comparatively uninteresting (I actually slept between the time I acquired it and I finished reading it, the first time that I can say that for the series), it was good to get some of the rest of the story. It still felt like nothing happened, because almost everything significant had already occured in the last book (it takes an awful lot of nothing to fill about 1000 pages, let me tell you), but it was still good enough that I'll be eagerly waiting in line for the next one when it comes out too, provided I am still capable of standing and moving around by that point.

The best thing about it was that I got an excuse to re-read the rest of the series again just to make sure that I wasn't missing anything. There sure are some badasses in Westeros, and I am partial to a badass. It took up a bunch of my designated reading time, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, unless he's a badass, in which case he can do whatever the hell he wants.

Reading List Progress:
Number of Books read: 3 (ok, there's more, but hopefully we'll get to them this month)
Australian quotient: 1.045
Fantasy quotient: 2
Biography quotient: 1
Next Up: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

Testing

The Augustinians

It’s been a long time between drinks here at the Leaflocker, but now that one major distraction is out of the way and the other is about to flee the country after some traumatising experiences, I figure that it’s time for a more regular diet of miscellanea to keep me occupied in the twilight hours.

To such an end, beginning today, the first of August, the Leaflocker will be take up a blag chollenge of producing new content at a rate of at least five posts a week. To aid me in this task, goad me on to new heights, and heckle continuously, allow me to introduce you to my three fellow participants, who just happen to be my regular late-night cards opponents (whether they’re playing on my team or not) and also happen to have blogs almost as irregularly updated as mine.

John , aside from his unfortunate tendency to bid no trumps instead of real suits, keeps a writing blog that puts my meandering prose to shame. If his work for an upcoming Advance Wars hack that makes my fanboy senses tingle isn’t enough for you, he apparently does some other writing that’s pretty good, or something. Anyway, he’s also aiming for five posts a week, but unlike here at the Leaflocker, they’ll be five inventive, intelligent and interesting pieces of quality prose. That won’t prevent me heckling him mercilessly if he fails to reach this ambitious target, however.

Ale , despite suffering from a chronic disease that causes her to bid misère at any and every perceived oppportunity, keeps an art blog that occasionally even has art on it. Suprising, right? Speaking for the artless, it's generally a pretty informative and interesting little number, much like the lady herself. She's going for three posts a week, which is a steep ask if you ask me. Then a again, any updates at all is a steep ask if you look through the archives here at the Leaflocker.

Jimmy, though he couldn't make an indication bid to save his life, is a pretty competent programmer, or at least he's good enough to fool a neophyte. He comes home from coding all day and then makes code for fun, which he shares with the rest of us. Or would, if he could ever be bothered actually posting. I'm pretty sure that most of the jokes go over my head. Jimmy isn't so sure about this blogging thing ,so we'll wait and see whether we can goad him into actually doing anything.

And I, aside from hypocritically complaining about bidding styles, will be restarting on the "jack of all trades, master of none" routine, with ramblings, quizzes, crosswords, pope jokes and assorted miscellania made up of half thought out content and mind-numbing filler like this little number until all seven of you are heartily sick of me. In other words, I might manage about a week if I'm really well behaved.

If you'd care to join us, get writing, or drawing, or coding, or whatever it is that you people do, and drop us a line in the comments so that we can heckle to our hearts content. It promises to be a lot of fun.

Counting Things

37: Number of minutes spent on commute to work
1 : Number of sharp objects encountered in carpark
13: Number of staples currently holding together trousers

On Returning to the Workforce

Ten little reminders that I've been off work for six months.

1. I keep typing the date as "2010"
2. Someone else is using my "reserved" mug
3. My shirts are still nicely pressed
4. My data filing system is utterly kaphooft
5. People I already know reintroduce themselves
6. I don't know where they keep the spare teabags
7. My keyboard lacks a familiar layers of grime (and still has most of the letters)
8. People that were at my level are now my superiors
9. The office has a deficit of masticated pens
10. I'm actually enjoying data entry

I'm back.

Crossword Time: More Anagrams

Enthusiastic and inspired by your successful navigation of that first anagram, you go searching the grid for others, but identifying an anagram indicator, it turns out, is not as easy as you might think. Thankfully, the setter is hovering over your shoulder and points out two more anagram clues, just to stop you having to think too much. This is supposed to be fun, after all. First up, the erstwhile setter points to 15 down...



Flourished to rivet HD tuner (7)

I'll admit it, it's an ugly clue, because the surface meaning if just a bit too much of a stretch. If I wanted to grammatically correct, it would probably be more like "Flourished to rivet a HD tuner" or something (still ugly, but better), so the odd sounding sentence structure is your first clue that something fishy is going on. Combine this with the fact that 'rivet HD' has 7 letters and 'tuner' has some vibes of static and change associated with it, and you can be pretty confident that here you have another 7 letter anagram that means 'flourished', and you can understand why I've let my prized grammatical correctness slip for a little while.

Also on our little list of anagram clues is 6 down:

Philosopher is all about tea hour (7)

Tea time, yes, tea break, even, but tea hour? No-one takes a whole hour to drink a cuppa. Again "all about" is looking an awful lot like an anagram indicator, so we're on the lookout with a philosopher who shares his letters with 'teahour'. This is not to say that anagrams are always able to be found by looking for gramatical weridness, but it certainly gives us a nudge in the right direction.

In this case, the philosopher in question is Mr. THOREAU, whose theories have THRIVED greatly since his death. Not being a philosopher myself, I can't say I've read any of Mr. Thoreau's work, but if the letters fit the letters fit, and I couldn't really resist chucking him in, philosophers are classy and erudite, after all.