I should not smile at the misfortune at others but the goings on between the England RFU and Saracens. You have the RFU trying to tell the team which position to play him so he is ready for the national side. Someone payed a kings ransom for Andy Farrell as an instant fix, but is quickly turning into a farce.

Good morning everyone. Good weekend?

[pen] Not bad, thanks, except my team lost twice, including a shut-out on Sunday. re - what you were saying about job prospects... I'm now following up an internal vacancy as a junior press officer.

[pen] Weekend was tolerable considering I had to work from 11am till midnight friday, saturday and sunday. Thankfully have today off to recover/revise. How was yours, pen?

[pen] Owwww, my head hurts - hence, yes I had a great weekend, thanks.

[Lib] Full, thanks! Thursday night = new salsa class (made my legs ache - a good thing); Friday night - party in a bar in Soho to celebrate west end transfer of a play directed by a 'friend' of mine (pay £6 on the door to buy expensive drinks in a room full of people all trying to work out who's famous); Saturday - Tennyson Society service in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, followed by lunch and a visit to the Dickens (yawn) museum on Doughty Street; then out for a chinese meal with the Bloke; Sunday - light shopping in Ealing, and my second parking ticket of the week :o(. I am not going out this week!

[pen] Going out just causes more problems than it solves, in my experience. And oddly, I've just remembered we have nothing defrosted for dinner. Curses.

[nights] I have a blog called : "So What Are you Having For Tea Tonight?" which is meant to address that problem, but I haven't written enough of it yet.

[nights] Can't you just stick something in the microwave? Or get a takeaway.

[penelope] Was the Ealing trip to seek out/purchase a light? Or do you have varying degrees of shopping gravitas? And you should avoid parking illegally, IMHO.

[Phil] We didn't KNOW we were parking illegally! The sign was tiny, high up and camouflaged against adjacent scaffolding. And I have various degrees of shopping gravitas. In fact, I bought a test-piece of cookware - a black Columbian earthenware pot that can be used on the hob or in the oven. I have to 'season' (or do I mean 'temper'?) it tonight by boiling water in it for half an hour in the oven, to stop it being so porous. Lord knows how that works.

[pen] I do sincerely hope you didn't get the two parking tickets at the same place ;-) Seriously though, aren't there yellow lines and so on in your area?

Phil, I'm not daft. I got one last weekend in Notting Hill due to lying naked on a couch still having a very expensive facial at the time the parking ticket ran out, and another in Ealing on Sunday due to parking on a single yellow line on a Sunday afternoon. Anywhere other than London, Sunday afternoons on a single yellow would be OK, wouldn't they?

Do I spy candles on the MC⁵ logo? *brings out a cake *

Since the parking came under the council here the interpretations have become very strict and a lucrative income stream. The FM manager of our office is going to bring in a clamping policy for unauthorised parking in allocated staff areas, I can see trouble ahead. Our council members tend to see themselves above such policies, no smoking in Civic Buildings inc meeting rooms and private offices seems not to apply to them only officers and members of the public.

The number of candles may be misleading - the site doesn't celebrate its 4th birthday until Jan 16th.

I, on the other hand, ...

I think someone has vandalised your menora rab. :o) MHROTD.

Drat - just missed saying it on the day itself

[Sierra, Chalky] Thanks.

More flat-based excitement this morning. The electricity went off during Mrs-rab-to-be's shower, which I thought was just a generic power cut since no fuses had tripped in our fusebox. A note of warning was sounded by the fact that our neighbour across the way wasn't experiencing any trouble, nor had anyone else called Scottish Power when I phoned them. The chap's been out and I'm told that the supply cable from the distribution box in the stairwell to our fuse box exploded as a result of too much load imposed on it by our shower (of all things - I would have thought the oven were more power-hungry). We were lucky it didn't cause a fire or disrupt the whole street's supply. Apparently it's all due to the fact that the previous owners (or their electrician) didn't inform Scottish Power that extra capacity would be needed when they did up the bathroom. There's quite a lot of things they didn't seem to do well, humph.

[Rab] Happy Belated Birthday... and commis for your water/electricity woes. You'll just have to boil up a few pans of water and take a bath together :o)

(rab) I think showers take 10 kW, or about 40 amps, which is a lot. With a 10-kW oven you could start a cottage indusry smelting iron ore.

[rab] They didn't find the homonculus you made from bits of dead bodies in the cellar or the high-voltage equipment needed to reanimate it then?
Good to see that the legendary Scottish parsimony extends to the current carrying capacity of domestic wiring. "Just enough and nae morrrrrrre, d'ye ken?".

[Rosie] Yes, 40A would cause quite a glow...

[SMike] Nice theory, but I suspect it has more to do with the fact that the electrics probably haven't been upgraded since they were installed. I estimate that this would have been around about the time that electricity was invented, given that the block was erected in 1897.

Presumably the wiring spec was predicated on the widespread use of the household Wimshurst Machine to make up the difference for those high-current spinning wheels and so forth.

In America the current per watt would be at least twice what it is here and the said shower would take nearly 90 amps. The wires would need to have four times the cross-sectional area. I suppose they know this. It does have the advantage of being safer, at least in one aspect.

Brief and forced hiatus there. Nothing to worry about, moving up to university for my second year. All very exciting. Now living in the delightful town of Royal Leamington Spa, and after around a month there's finally internet in our household.

[Tuj]Good to see you back, and good luck and enjoy your second year

If I wanted to find out about Nail Fungus, I can't think of a better place to go.

Tuj] Welcome back too. Whereabouts in Leam? I grew up in Warwick and went to school in Leam. One of the first places outside the big cities to have curry houses back in the early 70s, doncherknow.

I hope this won't offend, but I would like to know how to pronounce the names "Tuj" and "Irouléguy" properly. Please excuse if this breaks etiquette in some way.

[Sierra] ih-RULE-eh-GEE (hard G, primary stress on RULE). I'm not sure about Tuj but most people at pilgs say "Tudge" (thus revealing that we talk about you non-attendees behind your backs).

[SM] Yes, I'd go "tudge", though oddly most people I'd talk to who've seen the name have the first instinct "toozh" (vowel like "smooth" consonant like "pleasure". Irouléguy's a good one to learn - daft as I am I initially thought it was a bizarre variation on naming himself "I rule" Guy.
[Darren] Oh dear oh dear. I'd hate to think what.
[Irouléguy] South Leam, Brunswick Street. Lovely part of the world, though I haven't tested any curries yet.
[Inkers] Thanks very much!

SM] Mine's from a French appelation controllée.
Tuj] It wasn't daft. A lot of people thought that until I got the chance to explain it at a pilg.
There's a number of decent pubs on the Radford Road, but I don't know south Leam otherwise - I did most of my drinking in town and north Leam. If you get over to Warwick, the Zetland in Church Street is a lovely boozer.

[Irouléguy] I may have been the only person to recognize the AC, and guess the pronunciation :-) I'd be interested to know if anyone else did.

What I did at the weekend. Recording thanks to Pave's cameraphone.

[Phil, Irouléguy] I didn't spot the appelation controllée; I don't even know what one is.

[Knobbly] It's a system the French use for wines which ensures that only wine made in a particular place (or in a particular way) can bear a particular name. The most famous example is Champagne.

[Tuj] I would automatically say Toozh, although there's a vague sense in my head that it could be a to-eye (but not quite like that, sort of using the Russian "bI" sound, where the "j" implies palatisation.

Er, in fact like the second person in Russian.)

[Phil] I based an AVMA on I's AC quite a while ago. I'm quite sure INJ knows it as well.

[tuj] Toodge, in my head.

I read 'tuj' as tudge. But then again everyone knows I talk funny.

Iroul's AC I vaguely recognised, though I don't think I've ever drunk it. 'Tuj' is 'tudge' for me (unless it's 'tüy')

[flerdle] You talk funny? This is how I pronounce "Tuj". (Sorry about the format. I tried converting it to mp3 but then it turned into scratchy silence.)

(Néa) Real Player comes up but just sits there, doing nothing. Any ideas? (flerdle) No funnier than me because that's how I say it.

[Tuj, Irouléguy] Thanks. Sorry if that seemed dense. I had been hearing them as "Toy" and "I rule a gye". Thank Jod we didn't meet yet.

[Rosie] No, I don't know - I opened that file in Quicktime. Does this work?

[Néa] It works for me :-)

Crikey, three arbitrary letters and so many different pronunciations! And is it just me who thinks Néa's sounds like someone spitting?

(Néa) It does. I'm going to play it all night. You are the Scandinavian Charlotte Green. (I hope that means something to you). :-)

(Tuj) Arbitrary? You mean your real name is Herbert?

[Rosie] As in Spotty Herbert? Not Herbert but yes to the arbitrary. If you sift some of the conversations we've had about name anagramming I'm sure you could find what it is.

[Rosie] It does, and I'm deeply touched :-)

(Tuj) There's a difference between being a herbert and being a Herbert. Fain would I suggest you were the former, or now, the latter, even. Where are these conversations? Are they in Another Place, or Mc-Eye-oss, as I call it?

Nice to see MC5 back!

[Darren] Indeed!
[Rosie, belatedly] I believe somewhere far up this very page, though probably on the Scots Ios also.

Sorry for the outages. The server suffers mysterious reboots, up to two a day, and for no reason we can discern. Usually it comes back up again automatically, but sometimes it doesn't - usually when the person with the reboot password is on holiday or something. That's what happened this weekend. We're trying to arrange a test of the hardware (which we don't physically have access to - in fact, I'm not even sure I know where it is) to see what's going on.

That was me, by the way.

[rab] I think we knew that - and I had thought to myself rab wouldn't be so careless as to name himself 'rat' so it must be some sort of subtle post-modern ironic thingy equating to that saying 'the first rat to desert the sinking ship' - not that MC5 is, or even was, a sinking ship, I hasten to add, but it just might have seemed like that to you and others who expend their valuable time keeping it all afloat so when it went down, so to speak, you may have imagined that it looked as though you were sort of deserting it, in a manner of speaking ... Is that too too much? Perhaps I ought to shut up now ....

(Chalky) Do you realise that you have just posted the longest sentence in the Morniverse? Would it be indelicate to suggest a degree of insobriety?

[Rosie] I'd venture, before we make any such suggestion regarding Chalky, to suggest that we first need to establish beyond what I can only call a reasonable level of doubt that she has indeed posted what you have called the very longest sentence that has been seen in the Morniverse, or whether, by virtue of an insufficiency of time, you have been unable to research for yourself the quite startlingly good game we played quite some time ago now - but there it is: the history of the great game as played online becomes lengthier by the day - of a variant of MC, which is most commonly referred to as Long-Winded Crescent, having established which, and assuming our conclusion to be the latter, I could do no better, I feel, than to refer you to that most masterly achievement - in particular the contributions made by the much-missed Watty - and perhaps even, were it not for a want of time on my own part, suggest a new round of the same.

[Rosie] Not so m'dear - just a feeble attempt at stream-of-consciousness-posting. Silly stuff really :-)
[Projoy] Excellent idea

(Projoy) Brilliant Victoriana! L-WC must be before my timeI'll believe you.:-) here - I'll look it up. (Chalky) Mm, no spelling mistakes, so

What happened there? "I'll believe you. :-)" should be at the end, not stuck in the middle. Do you believe me?

Maybe it just jumpsTuj

[Projoy]LWMC came to an end before I can across !York but was still much talked about, and would welcome a revival the only black cloud on the horizon is I feel that such a game that requires forethought and patience to create the moves I wonder whether todays players have the stamina. The games that appear to be popular are those that can be played with a quick visit play a short one liner or couple of games then off elsewhere. Games that require thought are few, I hazard the when AVMA clue disappears off the page and goes off the page into the second page involvement drops off to one or two plus the setter. I would very much like to be wrong and for LWMC to be a success played by more than three players after the first week. "MC Works on the Tracks" can be killed off to make way.

Anyone got a link into the archives for it, then?

here
Yes? Looking at it reminded me of the DaveK Massacre. Dark days.

You can post links on this site, you know.

You meant here and its continuation here, I think. Or go to the Yorkives from the front page of mc5, sort by game names, and go to L. They're the ones with the obvious titles. I think there were only the two bits, but am happy to be corrected on that.

How curious; Tuj's link didn't work and after I posted mine it did. Anyway, them's the ones.

Hmmm. Might I suggest this game be revived after NaNoWriMo finishes, since some of us will be directing our wordiness in that direction for the month of November?

[flerdle] You must have caught Tuj's link in the few seconds I was converting it from just being written as plain text to a proper link, and getting it wrong in the process...

[rab] ahhhhh, i see...