If vampires did exist...

... where would they work? My colleagues and I were offered the afternoon off work last week if we went to the blood bank. I thought it was a pretty good deal. Turned out to be an absolute bargain. Two of them fainted and one (I'm not kidding) spraying a couple of jets of his precious life blood all over the sparklingly clean white shirt of the guy jabbing him. I really have to get one of those camera phones. I didn't faint, basically because I'm rock hard. The guy jabbing me kept on saying "You've got really tough skin, mate! You should be a boxer!" Thanks for the pep talk, mate. Anyway, I think that's pretty Christ-like especially at Easter. Here's the website. Go donate! ~~But try not to faint!~~

Tags: blood

This guy called Steve Price was performing magic tricks after church today. It was very good! To think it's already been a year since we couldn't get away from David Blaine (even though he was in a box). This was much better!

Related: magic, David Blaine

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Horses for quizzes

As I got into the office on Friday I was more or less mugged and made to enter the office Grand National pool. Unsurprisingly I drew a 50-to-1 shot out of the hat. How do you pronouce TyneandThynegain? I've nicknamed him FinethenThighstrain because he doesn't feature at all on the final results! The horses that finished and which fences all the other horses fell at are on there. I didn't watch the race but I'm thinking, if he didn't even make it to the first fence then he must have tripped over the start tape... ~~and then probably got shot~~.

Anyway, Amberleigh House was the winner. Always useful to remember these things, as I'm sure it'll come up in some pub quiz sooner or later. I'm actually setting the questions for a fundraiser pub-style quiz at church come summer. Maybe a question on the Grand National will come up... although, I was planning on it being a Socratic wonder... (especially the calculus round). We'll see!

Victory!

Cambridge win Boat Race. They call us "Tabs"... we don't even have a name for them.

Tags: Boat Race

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This is pretty freaky... but it's nothing compared to an evil fish that lives in the Amazon. There are around 3.7 trillion fish in the oceans and none of them are as scary as the Candiru.

Does this remind anyone of the first bit to There's Something About Mary?

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A couple of my very lucky colleagues have gone to Germany. The CeBit exhibition is on there and they're showing some things that are just plain cool.

Mahjongg

Mahjongg's a new game I learnt whilst in Taiwan. When I say Mahjongg I mean the 4-player version which is also a kind of Chinese rite of passage, not the solitaire kind. I'd hinted to my mum in the past that I wanted to learn how to play but had assumed that this had fallen on deaf ears. I was wrong. A trip last month to my aunt's place was, unbeknownst to me, all about an opportunity to teach David this essential life skill.

It was a pretty surreal experience. As soon as I'd got in my aunt's door, out came the mahjongg table and the chairs, the tiles were whipped out and I found myself sat down with granny on my left, my mum opposite and my aunt to my right, all three of them fully absorbed in counting their money ~~and no doubt psyching themselves up~~.
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Related: Mahjongg, Taiwan

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