a convenient truth

This was my first thought too, but Andy beat me to it.

Yes it was me, not Silver Birch. I made £32.50! I thought i’d lost too, but Liberthine came in 5th, which apparently still wins each way. Which I knew of course, being an expert gambler.

So [apparently](http://listics.com/) a whole [load of yank bloggers](http://technorati.com/search/http%3A%2F%2Fallied.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F03%2Ffor-record.html?sub=jscosmos) who know each other have just had some sort of public row, and some [trolls]() got involved, and now they’re all [taking their ball and going home](http://www.vecosys.com/2007/03/27/robert-scoble-and-kathy-sierra-stop-blogging/). Or something. Apparently some of them are [scared]( http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/as_i_type_this_.html) that the evil trolls from the internet are going to come and hang them. Or something.

Mostly what they seem to be doing is blogging about it, which I guess isn’t surprising. They seem to be feeling most self-righteous about it though, which I guess makes it more fun.

Just don’t feed the trolls.

So, [Julian](http://limeandpink.blogspot.com/index.html) has been disputing my [Monopoly Rules post](http://adju.st/2007/03/monopoly_rules_not_what_you_th.html). I happily admit I never checked the [rules]( http://www.monopoly.co.uk/pdf/instructions.pdf) when I wrote it, and it transpires that some of the previous post was incorrect.

So, current status of rules:

Collecting rent in Jail

You DO collect rent in jail

Auctioning properties that are not bought

You DO auction properties that are not bought

More news as it comes from this exciting story!

So it appears Monopoly does not last forever because [the rules are completely different from what you thought they were](http://wmwms.blogspot.com/2007/03/you-have-won-second-prize-in-beauty.html). Amongst the rules that are in fact not rules:

Collect fines, and hand them to people who land on Free Parking.

Now I knew this one wasn’t real, but collecting the fines and handing them over when you land on Free Parking is an almost universal practice.

If a player lands on an unowned property and does not buy it, it is to be auctioned.

Apparently this is made up

The bank never runs out of money, but the bank does run out of houses and hotels.

So if all the houses are in play, you can’t even build from 3 houses to a hotel, since you can’t build the intervening houses!!!

you do collect rent while in jail

!!!

no you don’t have to go around the board once before buying property

!!!!!

So what the hell game have we been playing all these years?

No, not a Native American porn name, but some [weird footware](http://vibramfivefingers.com/). I can’t decide whether they are great or hilarious. Or even both.

[Marvellous Wikipedia entry](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_Sting_Pain_Index), courtesy of BoingBoing and Kottke.

The pain descriptions are fantastic. Pain is weird, in that you can’t really remember it (go on, try). I suspect it’s important not to be able to remember it, or you’d never even risk anything that might cause pain. However, his descriptions are weirdly inspiring.

A photo from, oddly, Esther Dyson’s Flickr photostream:

The Lloyds building is a bit like this anyway, but it seems really, really weird that they just went and did this. Click the photo to go through to the flickr page.

I’ve been blog tagged by [Andy](http://www.offmessage.com), so here’s five things you don’t know about me:

The Blues Brothers

I’ve seen [The Blues Brothers](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080455/) 53 times.

You’ve Been Framed

While at University, and very skint, myself, Kevin Tansley and Tim Hughes decided to try and get a video on [You've Been Framed](http://www.itv.com/page.asp?partid=2799). We spent the best part of a week coming up with ideas for things to send in, and we discovered that staging accidents is actually really difficult. For some reason, Kev was the fall guy and he spent the week being run over, falling off things and being amusingly hit in the testicles.

We finally tried a scene where Kev leans out of a first floor window to catch something being thrown up to him, and falls out to land on the small flat roof just below the window. Ha ha. However, when we did it, he fell on the flat roof, rolled off it and fell another 14ft onto concrete, breaking his arm. We won the £250, and gave it all to Kev, whose sense of humour had been sorely tested.

Nightmare

My wife is a Chelsea fan, and we happened to watch a [documentary](http://macintyre.com/content/view/62/105/) on the [Chelsea Headhunters](http://nominated.homestead.com/MAIN.html), a bunch of particularly pernicious football hooligans. It was an undercover documentary, so the actual hoolies got quite a lot of coverage. One of them had the nickname “Nightmare”, and he was a really nasty piece of work. He was very violent, but clearly a cut above the rest as well. He was intelligent and led a whole bunch of these guys, choosing when they would fight and with whom. Quite a scary man. You can see a photo of him on the [headhunters website](http://nominated.homestead.com/FANSFUNNIES.html).

A month or so later I was back in Reading for Christmas, and I went out with some old mates from school, and who did I see in the boozer but Nightmare himself. Since I was utterly bladdered, I went up and had a long conversation with him about Chelsea, just so I could tell my wife that I’d met Nightmare. She didn’t believe me. Bah.

The Finance Minister of Burundi

I met the Finance Minister of Burundi, who came to our office on some sort of jolly. I was one of the programmers for their national lottery, which is why he was there. He wore an azure blue fez, which I have to say he carried off rather well.

Cyclone Tracy

Our house, at least the one we were living in at the time, was destroyed by [Cyclone Tracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_tracy) on Christmas day 1974, when I was nearly two. The cyclone totalled Darwin, destroying everything. We were out of Darwin for Christmas, so we never experienced the cyclone itself. We had to up sticks and settle elsewhere. My dad went back to find what he could of our possessions, which wasn’t much, but he did find our car, which had been blown more than two miles from where he’d parked it.

Now I get to tag other people. Unfortunately almost everyone I know has been tagged, but I’ll try with [Mark](http://www.monoman.com/), [Julian](http://limeandpink.blogspot.com/index.html), [Richard](http://davidsonhouston.spaces.live.com/), [Rowan](http://www.akester.net/index.html) and [Chris](http://deceptivelystupid.blogspot.com/index.html). If you’ve been tagged already and I forgot or didn’t notice, then I apologise