playful!Things here are broadly OK in the single-parent era. I've been back at work for the last four days and trying to concentrate on going forward rather than looking back. There have been some bad times, but I've drawn upon the resources of my wonderful and tirelessly, cheerfully ever-remotely-present girlfriend who makes things better. I have also been tidying, which reminds me of her and makes me happy. A tidy room would be a fine Meggity!legacy indeed.
Anyone here have good or bad word to say about http://www.1899.com/ ? It offers calls to landline telephones in the UK and the US for a connection charge of 3p plus a rate of zero pence per minute; There's apparently no maximum call duration, so a single call to a US fixed line would cost thruppence. Call rates to US and UK mobiles are less competitive: 3p connection fee plus 3p/minute to US mobiles and 2p/minute (weekends) or 10p/minute (weekdays) to UK mobiles. Telediscount may have stopped advertising their 08452 442 442 local-rate number to the US, but it still works for me and reigns supreme for off-peak calls to US mobiles.
I have discovered some souvenirs of passing interest during recent clearing. One of them is a speech written by
addedentry at 2am on Valentine's Day 1997 for me to read at the subsequent Members' Papers Evening held by the Invariant Society, Oxford's semi-recreational mathematics club. As a Z to A of mathematicians, it was rather a fine speech, even if the I was for imc who "has been at every Invariant speaker meeting since Pythagoras gave a talk on 'A Nifty Result with Triangles'"; alas, I can recall delivering it particularly poorly and attracting (almost?) nary a laugh. Ah well.One other artefact discovered were some records of the parlour game Consequences played by a similar but slightly different crowd; my annotations suggest the players would have been
jvvw, tkb, David Wallace, Tim Ricketts, myself, truecatachresis and beingjdc. Trying to back-solve to produce an occasion upon which the latter two hip cats would have been hanging out with us squares is a tricky one; perhaps it was the non-Worms half of a zorac Arco Building party? (I might guess at Election Night, but I'm sure beingjdc would've had better places to spend his Election Night than 008.)Consequences is a gentle pencil-and-paper parlour game which is a co-operative anonymised attempt at somewhere between communal storywriting and Mad Libs. Players contribute nouns and phrases to an ongoing story, not knowing what has preceded their contribution to each story, hoping to be amused by the way in which they interact with each other.
To give an example, each of the eight italicised phrases below was contributed by a different player, producing this story: Henry Braun (*) met Mother Theresa of Calcutta at the Invariant Society annual dinner. He said to her, "Why are you so full of jelly?" She said to him, "If only all men could be as cultured and refined as you, the world would ultimately be a far more pleasant place for women like me." The world said "Why did this come to pass?", the consequence was that there was a new series of Father Ted on Channel 4 and the moral of the story is that Life is like a sewer: you get out what you put in.
This has direct applications for LiveJournal. Let's play
Man's name:
Woman's name:
Where they met:
He said to her:
She said to him:
The world said:
The consequence was:
The moral of the story is:
