As a game of Trivial Pursuit continues, the probability of a player accusing another of getting “all the easy questions” approaches 1.

(With apologies to Mike Godwin, author of Godwin’s Law.)

By popular request, I have a new poll related to Prejudicial Guess Who. Again, I’ll hide my own thoughts on the matter so as to avoid bias.

I had a difference of opinion with H, the girl I’ve been going out with for almost nine months, over the age and tastes of Anita, the wide-eyed blonde of the Guess Who line-up. I asked whether she would prefer The X-Factor or Strictly Come Dancing. H said that she would like both, but would lean towards one of them. I think she would have a clear preference for one of them, and it is not the same one that H suggested.

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Cast your votes, and I’ll let you know what I think in a week or two.

The results to the Prejudice Guess Who poll are in, and I’m happy to report that the results vindicate my view in all three cases, although not necessarily by the margin I expected.

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Charles, by a majority of 54 per cent, would confront a burglar rather than hide and wait for the police.

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Albert, by a majority of 80 per cent, prefers vinyl to digital as a medium for listening to music.

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And Sally, by a majority of  76 per cent, says “Byeee!” in a high-pitched voice at the end of phone calls.

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The result for Albert is jolly heartening, and the one for Sally far more clear cut than I dared hope, but my moment of trousers-down-buttock-slapping triumph has been marred by a gallingly narrow victory for Charles.

Not only would he confront a burglar, I maintain, he would do so with a walking stick and a shout of: “I didn’t down five Messerschmitts to have my house burgled by the likes of you.” He would beat the hapless burglar, possibly to death, and the local press would run a picture of him with his medals under the headline: “War hero gives youth stick.”

Some friends have claimed that his sad eyes suggest a pensioner too weary to put up a fight, but I would contend that this is more than offset by his moustache, and that any antipathy towards violence would be immediately quashed upon sight of his quasi-antique carriage clock in the hands of some hoodie.

Still, the people have spoken, and I accept the result because to reject it would turn the game from Prejudicial Guess Who into Bigoted Guess Who. And, besides, the majority still agreed with me. Hah.

I may have mistranscribed some of this, but here is what was written as the second story on the front of today’s Evening Standard:

Gordon Brown today vowed to “get tough” on equestrianism as he insisted the Government was right to sack a scientist who said horse riding was as dangerous as ecstasy. The Prime Minister warned against the danger of giving “mixed messages” to young people targeted by dealers. Mr Brown said: “A tough policy on equestrianism is essential and it is what the public want. I’ve seen the damage that equestriansim can do and people can see it in estates in London.”

This is almost exactly what it said, although I may have mixed up the word “drugs” with “equestrianism”. Still, they’re as dangerous as each other, statistcially, so it probably doesn’t make any difference.

On a more serious note, does Brown really think that the public is too thick to take on board that some drugs are dangerous (and can lead to dependency and crime) while others are not? Certainly, it is a marginally more sophisticated idea than the message “all drugs are bad”, but it’s not exactly Fermat’s Last Theorem, is it?*

The message that heroin and crack cocaine are very dangerous but cannabis and ecstasy are not is mixed, but it does at least have the virtue of being true. Furthermore, we have a multi-level drugs classification system. If anyone is giving out mixed messages it is the Prime Minister, who insists that ecstasy should remain in the same category as crack and that cannabis should revert to being in the same category as speed.

Brown says that “everybody knows lives that have been ruined because of drugs”, which may or may not be true, but it is no more valid than saying “everybody knows lives that have been ruined because of alcohol”. He’s got to do better than that, else he’s giving a far more potent message to the public, namely that he thinks we’re stupid.

*I’ve checked. Fermat’s Last Theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than two.

About 25 years ago I was watching an episode of the children’s television programme Bod when my older sister walked through the room. It was the Alberto Frog section of the show, in which an amphibious orchestra leader and his Amazing Animal Band performed favours for distressed creatures who, overcome with gratitude, would offer him a reward. (Alberto Frog, it occurs to me now, was a cartoon version of Hannibal from the A-Team, or Don Corleone from The Godfather. I digress.)

Alberto would always respond to such offers with the line: “I wouldn’t say no to a milkshake.”

The grateful citizen would say: “Any particular flavour?”

And the Amazing Animal Band would ponder aloud, listing a series of flavours that, to my recollection, were usually chocolate, strawberry or vanilla, but perhaps I am just confusing his choices with the flavours one used to get in “Neapolitan” ice cream tubs.

My sister, who is eight years older than me and who was something of an antagonist during my childhood,  said: “It’ll be chocolate.”

I disagreed, naturally, and insisted that it must be strawberry, or one of the other flavours. She was right, and it wasn’t just luck. This happened on several occasions, and her predictions always rang true.

I never knew how she did it until I brought it up about two decades later. I assumed that there must have been a subtle clue in the way he spoke that gave away the answer, or a mildly complicated algorithm. Would she at last tell me the secret?

“Oh,” she said. “It was always chocolate.”

A worthwhile variant on Guess Who, the venerable board game that involves asking questions to determine which of 24 people’s faces your opponent has in front of him, is the unofficial Prejudicial Guess Who, in which questions must be about personality rather than appearance.

The challenge is to come up with questions that, based solely on players’ prejudices about the characters, allow you to whittle down the field with confidence. For example:

1. Has this person ever rung a sex chatline late at night?

2. When this person sees a plane, does he or she stop and point at it?

3. Does this person use, without irony, the exclamation: “Poppycock”?

The trick is to be sufficiently decisive to eliminate people rapidly without generalising so much that one accidentally excludes the actual candidate.

The other important thing, I discovered today, is not to play with someone who has wildly different prejudices. It was impossible to win against my friend T, for example, because he made judgements that I don’t think anyone else would. To see if I’m right or not, I’d like to conduct a little survey. It won’t be very scientific, I imagine, because unless my fanbase magically increases then the sample size will be too small. Furthermore, T is one of the few people who does read this blog, and so he may try to influence it, but let’s have a go.

I’ll post again in a week or two to say what answers I expected.

There is no need to take seriously any country that has a fish* on its currency.

*unless it is a sturgeon, in which case respect is due (see China and Russia)

That is to say:

Armenia (salmon)

Aruba (seahorse)

Australia (white shark)

Bahamas (bonefish, blue marlin)

Bangladesh (rohu)

Barbados (four-winged flying fish)

Belize (moorish idol)

Bermuda (blue angel fish)

Brazil (acara)

British Virgin Islands (butterfly fish, blue marlin)

Cabinda (an enclave in Angola) (remora, butterfly fish)

Canada (mackerel)

Cape Verde (sea bream, bluefin tuna)

China (Yangtzee sturgeon)

Comoros (coelacanth)

Congo (imperial fish, crown triggerfish, butterfly fish)

Cook Islands (bonito)

Croatia (bluefin tuna)

Cuba (spotted eagle ray, yellow perch, yellow sea bass, blue cowfish, giant gar, swordfish)

Cyprus (swordfish)

Democratic Republic of Congo (mooney, jewel fish, black-banded butterfly fish)

Easter Islands (smooth-headed hammerhead)

Falkland Islands (salmon)

Fiji (grouper)

Finland (herring)

Hungary (unidentified fish)

Iceland (skate, lumpfish, Atlantic cod, capelin)

Ireland (salmon)

Isle of Man (herring)

Laos (unidentified fish)

Latvia (salmon)

Liberia (cylcid fish)

Macedonia (huchen)

Malawi (tilapia)

Malaysia (whale shark)

Maldives (bonito, bluefin tuna)

Mozambique (moorish idol)

Namibia (horse mackerel)

Palau (manta ray, stingray,  sea horse, lion fish, butterfly fish, emperor angelfish, blue-faced angelfish, barracuda, moorish idol, scorpion fish, hawk fish, surgeon fish, box fish, parrot fish, clown fish, blowfish, swordfish, puffer fish)

Papua New Guinea (ornate butterfly cod)

Philippines (goby)

Poland (flounder, catfish, European eels)

Portugal (cod)

Russia (red sturgeon)

San Marino (herring)

Seychelles (squirrelfish, yellow-fin tuna)

Sierra Leone (bonga fish)

Singapore (lion fish, pomfret, yellow seahorse, swordfish)

Slovenia (brown trout)

South Africa (white shark, knysna seahorse)

St Helena (yellow-fin tuna)

St Thomas and Prince (seahorse and crab)

Tanzania (sailfish)

Turks and Caicos (marlin)

Tuvalu (flying fish)

Uganda (hammerhead shark, seahorses, moorish idols, cyclid fish)

Uruguay (meruza)

Zambia (seahorse, coelacanth)

(source: coinlode.com)

It’s a somewhat minor personal triumph, but I have just shattered my personal best in the bat-and-ball game that comes free on a BlackBerry. Did I want to upload my score to the overall rankings, it asked. Hell, yes, I said, quietly, to myself. What if I’m some sort of bat-and-ball prodigy? What if, by a chain of unlikely events, proficiency in bat-and-ball games equates to some urgently needed skill, such as repelling an invading force of alien spacecraft? I’ve seen The Last Starfighter. (For anyone who hasn’t, it concerns a teenager who is selected to save the earth from extra-terrestrial hostility after achieving the highest score on a Government-monitored arcade game.)

It turns out I am about 682,000th.

I’m having trouble interpreting this. How many people are there behind me? And does it matter? After all, those who haven’t played the game probably aren’t going to be very good, so presumably I’m 682,000th out of the world population of 6.7 billion (ie in the top one hundredth of a per cent).

If skill at bat and ball is closely aligned to alien repulsion, will I still be needed? I imagine that in the event of attack it will be all hands to the pump, but how many pumps will there be?

So, to summarise, I am left with a list of questions:
a) What crossover is there between bat and ball, on the one hand, and world-saving duties, on the other?
b) Are there more than 682,000 places for planetary defenders in the event of an attack?
c) Will defenders have to be suicidally brave?

If the answers to these are “none”, “no” and “yes”, then I may have to devote my time to doing something more useful.

Ornithology is for amateurs.

The unexpurgated version of Winston Churchill’s “The End of the Beginning” speech at the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon, Mansion House, on November 10, 1942:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.
It is not the middle of the end, nor the end of the end.
It is not the beginning of the middle, nor the end of the middle, nor the middle of the middle.
It is not the middle of the beginning, and certainly not the beginning of the beginning, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.