Posts

Showing posts from July, 2020

Never buy Mayfair! - How to win at Monopoly

To learn a new house rule to make the game more fun, scroll to the bottom of this post. DISCLAIMER: The title of this post is clickbait; it should actually read How to Not Lose at Monopoly If you want to actually  win at Monopoly, I highly recommend the book The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus by Drs Hannah Fry and Thomas Oléron Evans, which has an entire chapter devoted to the subject and was used as a source for some of this post. It also makes a great stocking filler. Having properly tested the techniques described in this post, I can confirm that they are no use in helping a player to win, especially in later stages of a game. The techniques described below are best used in what the official Rules call Speedy Monopoly . This is where instead of waiting until all but one of the players has gone bankrupt, the game just stops after a certain amount of time and a winner is decided by totalling each player's money and properties after selling their assets (prope

New Words

I've realised that I've been coming up with a lot of new words recently; some of them useful, some not so much. Anyway, I've decided to write them down in order to help get them in common lexicon. Each of the examples below will contain: The word The definition The history/etymology An example sentence Detangiblise (alt. Detangify, Abstrify, Abstralise) (v.) - make a tangible noun into an abstract noun. This came about because I watched the start of Amadeus on NT Live (depending on when you read this, that link (to the full play on YouTube) might not be active). What the story is about is irrelevant, but the point is that the play opens after all the events have taken place. The rest of the play happens before that. Afterwards, I discussed it with my Dad, who watched the whole thing. Me: I found that bit at the beginning very confusing. Dad: That's probably because it's set after the rest of the play. M: Ah, so they did a Blood Brothers on it? D: Ye

The answer

My bad. I forgot to post the answer to this riddle . Sorry. Chances are, you recognized half of those songs at most. The answer, of course, lies in some information I didn't include. See the songs again, this time with the artists. Strangers in the Night (1966) - Frank Sinatra All That Jazz (1972) - Chita Rivera I'm Too Sexy (1991) - Fred and Richard Fairbrass It Wasn't Me (1999) - Orville Richard Burrell CD OJ Rastafari (2016) - Njie Efunden Daphne Still too obscure? I don't blame you. Strangers in the Night (1966) - Frank Sinatra All That Jazz (1972) - Velma Kelly (Character in the musical Chicago , originally played by Chita Rivera) I'm Too Sexy (1991) - Right Said Fred It Wasn't Me (1999) - Shaggy Rastafari (2016) - Daphné I'll admit, Strangers in the Night is still a bit obscure. Here's why I included it . In case it's still not obvious, the answer is Scooby-Doo ( Velma Kelly; Right Said Fred ; Shaggy ; Daphné ). You have no id

Unusual Parties

In my house group (for non-Christian readers, this is a group of some of the members of my church, in this case ten when we all turn up) we do many activities: Our most common activities include: Doing some Bible study Singing some worship songs Discussing Christian book However, about every 3 weeks we have a social night, on which we do something a bit different, e.g. Have a shared meal Go bowling Go to a restaurant/pub/bar to eat Of course, since we've been in lockdown, meetings have been trickier. Using Zoom, we have all been able to meet, which is ok for Bible study and worship (tip: in order for everyone to hear the music well, one person should play the music from Spotify etc. through their PC using Share Screen and everyone else should mute). However, the social nights have been trickier to pull off. We managed a birthday party (bring your own cake), but a few weeks ago we decided to do things a little differently, something which seemed like a good idea

Fun Quick Quiz!

Very quick. Five songs; one question. Strangers in the Night (1966) All That Jazz (1975) I'm Too Sexy (1991) It Wasn't Me (1999) Rastafari (2016) What's The Link? The Answer