James Avery’s blog

After our storming victory in the Moorgins Pub Quiz last night (the second in a row for the team, but I was in Manchester last time), I was wondering what we need to do to make it a hat-trick for next week.  We know that our quizmaster has a penchant for questions about Erasure, Deal or No Deal, horseracing and Monopoly.  Apart from latter, I don’t really fancy my chances at any of these topics, but last night’s question about the number of £20 notes handed out at the start of the game was highly controversial — we said that players just got one, but the so-called correct answer was six. 

It turns out that in the British version of the game, played to just get one £20 note, but in other get versions of the game, they get six.  So what other monopoly questions might we anticipate?  As Lewis and I are already ardent players of the game, we should do reasonably well on any subsequent questions, but one thing I was wondering about is just how many monopoly properties are actually within the boundaries of the city of London?

This question is not as easy to answer as it looks, as the boundaries of the city of London follow so many random twists and turns as they negotiate various different backstreets.  Motorway map.co.uk has attempted to show all of the London monopoly properties superimposed on a map of London, and combining this with the official City of London authority map suggests that Whitechapel Road (brown) and Strand (red) are just on the edges of the City of London, but they don’t really go inside the boundaries.  Fleet Street (also red) and the two stations of Liverpool Street and Fenchurch Street are certainly within the boundaries of the city of London, so I would guess that the correct answer is three. 

However, to be fully accurate, I’d have to go out and look for those City of London black bollards at the end of Fleet Street and Whitechapel Road — and however infinitely curious I might be, that would be taking my geekery just a little bit too far.  I think a far more interesting question would be to explain why the hell Fenchurch Street, which has to be the most irrelevant station* in London, made it onto the Monopoly board in the first place (again, Motorway map has a go at explaining) – as with last week, answers on a postcard please.

*Just to keep the good people of Essex happy, I mean irrelevant in the sense of number of passengers served, and the fact that Fenchurch Street has neither long-distance train services, nor its own underground station.  I have nothing against Essex people, and in fact, many of my friends come from Essex, blah blah blah.

Well, mainly due to my own lack of planning, I have a couple of hours to spend here on some worn out keyboard in a corner internet cafe in Granada, before trying to get into Alhambra for an evening visit (all day tickets were sold out). For any pedants reading this, I am talking about Granada´s Alhambra fort ‘ yes, “the” Alhambra, except that this is technically a misnomer, as Alhambra means “The Red One”, and I´m not going to visit “The The Red One”. Anyway, I digress - what was I saying about needing to kill some time?

Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia doesn´t have much to say on the matter. That great bastion of PC speak is probably quite happy with the concept of killing time, as so much of said activity is done on their own website! Well, at least you should learn something from each visit to Wikipedia, although if your name is Vernon Kay, then perhaps Wikipedia is one website you could do without!

A quick scan of Google for the phrase “killing time” (well, this is Spanish Google, so there might be better results in the UK) comes up with a hardcore band from New York, “Murder Consultants” (of the gaming variety, not hitmen - Dixon Jones of Receptional can sort anyone out in the UK looking for this kind of event in & around London), a Youtube spinoff and a book about Death Row in the USA.

No-one out there is giving much by way of definition or origin of the phrase (although according to Wikipedia, it has been used in the New York Times as far back as 1893), beyond the obvious. So in our 21st century society of re-branding and doublespeak, how should the phrase “killing time” be re-packaged to suggest a more productive use of such temporal luxuries?

Or would the PC brigade baulk at the suggestion that all time should be used constructively? After all, if exam failure in schools, sorry, learning communities, is now called “deferred success”, then sitting idle for a couple of hours is surely just “deferred activity”? Next time I´m sitting on the sofa watching another pointless squabble on Fox, I´ll think of that as my “deferred gym session” - but at least there are supposed to be a few feel good benefits from having a bit of a chuckle at some of the morons they get on that programme - everything in moderation as they say!

Well, that´s about 30 minutes so far of doing stuff which is mildly productive, and which has certainly managed to keep my attention going - so I certainly don´t think I need to go and turn myself in to the Time Police just yet! And if it means I´ve made my first non-political blog post in over 3 months, that can´t be too bad either.

But I´m still no closer to that definition. Answers on a PC please (that´s postcard, or comment sent from your Personal Computer - not reporting me to the Politically Correct Brigade or the local Police Constable).

Well, it has been about 10 weeks since I last made a post here, and I was going to try and find another subject to post on, but political rants are sometimes just too tempting.

If you saw Jack Straw’s interview on TV yesterday, or even just the highlights, you’ll see that he has now become a fully paid-up member of the Tony Blair waving hand gestures club.  Frankly, the main point he had to say, about Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling being experienced pilots, was rather laughable, considering the current state of both economy and Labour’s position in the polls, and the fact that any new leader is always going to start with no experience:

“Let me just use this analogy - For sure, We’re in a plane - sure, we face turbulence. The question for this country is - who is better to take us through this turbulent period? Is it an experienced pilot and co-pilot in Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, who’ve had the experience and proved that they have done better than the world situation over the last 11 years, or is it two people in David Cameron and George Osborne, who have had no experience of flying a large plane whatsoever”.

Jack Straw BBC Interview [4:50]

But behind the pointless hand movements (which might just qualify him to become an airport marshall), does Mr Straw still harbour loftier ambitions?

Now we all know that politicians say one thing when they mean another, and I just can’t help myself from thinking that what Jack Straw was really telling us yesterday is that he is itching inside for the top job.  We know that he can’t be seen to make any moves to depose the current leadership himself, but as soon as somebody else makes a move for him, what would stop Mr Straw from making a bid to take the controls? 

However tired most of the Cabinet might look, I’ll have to admit myself that Jack Straw is one of the few genuine heavyweights the Labour Party still have left, and he would certainly be more competent at seeing off David Cameron at the dispatch box than the lightweight David Milliband.