Tag: fun

I’m glad to see so many people took part in Dan’s Dingbats Challenge I; hope you all had fun. As promised, here are the results (and the answers). Don’t forget, the total time is the time taken plus a 30 second penalty for every wrong answer or skipped question. I did award a number of “half marks” for things, as explained further down, each costing only 15 seconds. Here we go:

Position	Player	Time Taken	Right Answers	Total Time
1	suz Slipped in at really, really the last minute.	3mins, 2secs	7	6mins, 32secs
2	andyr Slipped in at the last minute.	4mins, 26 secs	9	6mins, 56secs
3	The Pacifist Surprisingly, considering his negativity to it, almost won, ’til andyr slipped in while I was collating the scores.	3mins, 50secs	7.5	7mins, 5 secs
4	Statto & Chloe	4mins, 52 secs	9	7mins, 22secs
5	Ruth	3mins, 45secs	6	7mins, 45 secs
6	Dim	5mins, 46secs	7	9mins, 16secs
7	Jimmy	5mins, 37secs	6.5	9mins, 22secs
8	John K	4mins, 55secs	3	10mins, 45secs
9	Hagen	7mins, 10secs	6	11mins, 30secs
10	Sundeep	7mins, 53secs	5	12mins, 43secs
11	Matt In The Hat	9mins, 10secs	6 (two half-rights)	13mins, 30secs
12	Hayley	8mins, 39secs	4 (two half-rights)	13mins, 59secs
13	Knobcheese (Gareth@SD	11mins, 58secs	4.5	16mins, 8secs
14	Claire Disqualified because she saw some answers early	3mins, 28secs	14	3mins, 28secs

Here are the answers. Click on any of the dingbat thumbnails to see the full-size versions:

Pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and start all over again.
Only one person got this right, but, to be fair, it’s perhaps the toughest of the set. For those that need an explanation, the letters to the left read “pick your self” (upwards), the middle letters read “dust your self” (downwards), and finally there’s a picture of the word “again” with the word “start” all over it.

Looking back over my shoulder.
“Looking over my shoulder” isn’t good enough: there’s got to be an effort to point out that the word “looking” is spelt backwards. Most folks who didn’t fall into this little trap got this one right, though.

Beauty (is) in the eye of the beholder.
One of my favourites. “Beauty and the bees” scores no marks. Explanation: the word “beauty” is “in” the letter I (“eye”) of the word hive, which is, of course, a “bee holder”. Sickeningly kick-yourself-afterwards.

Little Italy
Almost everybody got this one.

An inside job.
Hideously difficult: I didn’t get this one when first I saw it. The word “an” appears within the word “job”, but it’s hard to see because they’re both very short words. Other dingbats in this style try phrases like “BOPUSSOTS” (puss in boots), which are longer, or use colour or case to differentiate between the words. Keep an eye out for ones like this, only a couple of people got it. Things about banjos aren’t even slightly right, but I can see where you’re coming from.

Just around the corner.
I accepted “Just on the corner.” and “Just in the corner.”, too. Pretty simple, afterwards, but a pain in the arse when you have to guess it.

Letters of the alphabet.
Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! I promise never to do one this bad ever again. Surprisingly, a few people got it, and not just ones to whom this phrase is an in-joke with me (for several days on end, I found the phrase “lettuce of the alphabet”, and the image it conjured, hilareously funny). “Alphabet lettuce” gets half a mark, ‘cos I was feeling nice, but “The sweedish alphabet” (what?) and “Cabbage with white letters on it” aren’t worth any. Sorry again.

Lioness.
It’s the word “lie”. On the letter “S”. Lie-on-S. Could it be any simpler? Apparently so, as only about half the people who participated got it.

Low Fat Milk.
Didn’t come out as well as I’ve have hoped, so I happily gave half-marks for “skimmed milk”, “condensed milk”, and “reduced milk”.

Blackout.
The word “out”. In black. Might have been easier if most of the word you’d seen weren’t in black, but what the hell.

Potatoes.
Another of my favourites. It’s a pot, followed by eight “O’s”. Incorrect answers included “A binary gardener gathers no moss” (what?) and “Planting seeds”.

Scrambled Eggs.
I’d also accept “Broken eggs” (‘cos it’s a better answer), “Eggs – beaten”, or a million and one other similar things. Lenient.

Just a tick.
You might have thought that the clue, “…hang on a minute…” might have been a giveaway here, but apparently it wasn’t. Anything even remotely similar to the phrase “just a tick” got through, and “one tick” got half-marks. “I should have said I was Sian” doesn’t get any, I’m afraid, Andy.

What goes up must come down.
In a similar vein to the first dingbat in the challenge, this one had the word “what” upwards and the word “must” downwards. “What must” definately didn’t get any points.

So, congratulations to Suz, who slipped in at the last, last second, while I was adding Andy‘s score to the board, who had slipped in at the last second, while I was collating the scores, prior to which, Paul was winning. I really hope nobody else is submitting results right now, ‘cos I’m sick of re-collating the table (checks). No, they haven’t: big thanks to whoever they aren’t. And sorry to Claire, who’ll take part next time. Now that I’ve seen the patterns in the results, I’ve realised that the penalty needs to be larger (to increase the time people spend on individual dingbats, and to reduce the problems caused by people who “pass” fast), but hey – there’s always next time.

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Think you can think laterally: think again!

Remember Dingbats, that board game with the cards with the phrases on them, expressed through cleverly laid-out words and pictures (a bit like Catch Phrase, that old TV show [is that still running]). Well, anyway, it involves pictures a bit like this:

The picture shows the word “somewhere” mysteriously suspended over a sylised rainbow. So what’s the phrase: “Rainbow under somewhere?” Not quite… it’s obviously “somewhere over the rainbow.”

So I’ve set up a challenge: 14 puzzles to challenge your lateral thinking. You’re against the clock, and you sacrifice 30 seconds for every wrong answer or passed question, so you’ve got to judge the challenge to suit you. I’ll publish the answers – and the high scorers – here in a day or two.

Go try Dan’s Dingbats Challenge I

Enjoy.

This is absolutely fantastic. Take a look.

Courtesy of Private Eye, here’s a quick summary of the main points from the three big players’ manifestoes:

Labour
We’re not Conservative.

Conservative
We’re not Labour.

Liberal Democrats
We’re not Labour or Conservative.

Seen this eBay auction?

Would you know it: there’s an “opposite number” to the Dewey Decimal System (introduction to the system [PDF]) – which for the most part of a centurey has been used to categorise books according to their topic and content – for categorising folk tales: the Aarne-Thompson Classification System.

It’s horrendously difficult to find information on it online – most of the resources are in German (Germany, apparently, being big fans of both fairy tales and classifying things) – particularly information about the system itself (rather than about given tales classified by it), but here’s what I’ve managed to glean – it consists of about 2500 categories, subcategories, and themes, broadly broken down in a pretty random way. An entire story can be defined by it’s key themes as a series of numbers, for example:

Little Red Riding Hood is a “The Glutton”-class tale in which an animal disguises itself as a human with the intention of killing a child (I. K2011) . It carries a “what makes your ears so big” theme (Z18.1), and a non-fatal swallowing by a person by an animal (F911.3) which leads to their eventual rescue from the animal’s belly (F913). In some variations of the story, the wolf is then sewn up again – having been filled with stones – such that he eventually drowns (Q426).

Here’s another you might be familiar with:

Rapunzel (“the Maiden in the Tower”) is a tale of type 310 (“Magic Tales”), with four key themes: (a) a man promises his unborn daughter to a witch in order to save himself from death (S222), leading to a girl in the service of a witch (G204), (b) the girl is imprisoned in a tower (R41.2) [also, potentially – T381 (“Imprisoned virgin to prevent knowledge of men (marriage, impregnation)”)], and “lets down her hair” to allow the captor to climb (F848.1); a desirable suitor (prince or king) follows this technique and becomes her lover (L162), (c) the witch discovers what the girl has done, cuts off her hair, and abandons her in the desert (S144 – abandonment in desert); the prince comes, saves himself from the witch, but in doing so is blinded (S165), (d) finally, the couple are reunited, and the woman’s tears restore sight to the blinded man (F952.1).

I find this system a little bit scary and overwhelming. As Andy R said to me, “Perhaps Aarne and Thompson should have spent their time… I don’t know… finding a cure for cancer or something.” They’ve certainly spent a lot of time developing this very deep, very complex system for classifying fairy tales.

There’s a good-looking – but expensive – book, “A Guide to Folk Tales in the English Language: Based on the Aarne-Thompson Classification System” by D. L. Ashliman, which, according to Voyager, can be found in the academic library at UWA. I’ve asked Paul to pick up a copy (Paul: it’s published by Greenwood Press in 1987 and can be found on the Arts and Humanities floor (Level F) of the Hugh Owen library – classmark Z5983.F17.A8). Could be interesting.

Anyway; sorry if that bored you. Here’s more information:

• An Aarne-Thompson analysis
• Another Aarne-Thompson analysis
• List of Aarne-Thompson types
• More Aarne-Thompson types

Is this actor real? Seymore Butts (say it out loud) is listed on the IMDb, director of such films as Anal Surprise Party, Female Ejaculation Review, and Tongue In Cheeks, as well as over 60 other films. Also performed in 50 films… most of which don’t have an IMDb score…

…so it’s an anonymous pornstar with a thing for doing it up the arse, big deal. But here’s the interesting thing: he was most recently in a film called Slaughter Party, which also starred… Lloyd Kaufman.

The world is a funny place.

In related news, you can read the full story of Will Keenan‘s appearance on the Troma Night bulletin board, including a video we sent back to him and Lloyd, thanking them, on a special thread we set up. Have fun!

You won’t find these from Crayola…

Thanks to Matt for the idea for this one – on the RockMonkey wiki, it’s now possible to play Scissors, Stone, Paper! For some reason, I keep losing, but it’s supposed to play fair! See for yourself.

The Revenge Of Zanatoth is a new WikiGame on the RockMonkey wiki. And for those of you who remember me publicising TromaNightAdventure, my first adventure-based WikiGame… well: The Revenge Of Zanatoth kicks it’s arse. It’s a wonderful little (heh) WikiGame that sends you on a quest to save Peter Hain from Zanatoth. During your travels, you’ll imitate oral sex in a gay bar, try to knit with goat’s wool, swap random items for all kinds of crap (hmm… very “Union Roof Scene” from TromaNightAdventure, there…) with Paul, buy beer from pet shop owners, eat fig rolls… the list goes on.

It’s an epic quest from the fevered imagination of Andy R. Go play it (you’ll need a [free] RockMonkey account – register here).

Promised various people I’d put these online, for their… enjoyment:

• VegPorn – Porn For Vegetarians, By Vegetarians – all their models are vegan, and they also sell “cruelty-free” toys and stuff. Weird.
• Overheard In The Office and Overheard In The Office and Overheard In New York – especially for Strokey Adam

Have a great weekend.