[Rab] I trust that whatever celebrations caused you to chunder were well worth the consequences ;o)

[pen] Well... only just. I think it was largely due to some friends of a friend having just got back from Spain and insisting that I drink something that came out of a plastic container of the type you might use to package creosote. Maybe it was creosote. It certainly wasn't very drinkable. Nevertheless, I drank it... and when popping into my parents for coffee the next day, decided to stay not just for an hour but two days to recover. Yum. So if you see me on Saturday, remind me to avoid the noxious end of the beverage spectrum.

We missed you

*blushes*. Now go forth and get the dates changed on the front page!

Right, probably safe to come back in, then, and make again my suggestion for a new game that was lost the other day. Is anyone on for a round of Collective Consciousness Hangman, in which one person sets a conventional hangman problem, but only other players are allowed to reveal the letters or add lines to the scaffold.

Other players take guesses in turn as to which letters are in the word. The players who arbitrate over what letters are in the word are not allowed to confer. The shape of the word can only emerge through tacit mutual consent - via, in other words, the collective consciousness. Ask Kevan to explain more about this.

Playing it in Dan's chatroom the other day we realised it was a sort of metaphor for the designoid nature of evolution, akin to the passage from Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker where he uses "blind selection" to arrive at the Shakespearian phrase "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL". Possibly I had eaten too much chocolate cake at that point, however.