survey monkey

My 5-year-old niece Annie drew today's Blatherpic (says her proud aunt).

And YAY, we just found out that our friend Christine's MRI came back normal!! :-) :-)

Thanks to those who posted or e-mailed about the Mamma Mia plot. Russell Martin had link to a pretty good synopsis. I'm still somewhat at a loss at how to explain to Sara (who is 7) about why the heroine doesn't know who her father is. Any suggestions (particularly from you parents out there) welcome!

I'm experimenting with a service called Survey Monkey (thanks to Jeff for telling me about it). I'd be grateful if some of you could try out one or both of the following brief surveys and let me know what you think.

Be warned, however, that if you have your cookies disabled, you might be sent into an endless redirection loop! (Thanks to Keris for pointing this out)

-- General Blatherings Survey

-- Terence Chua Domicile Survey

Great to hear from Martin Gordon-Kerr in Blatherchat. I didn't get a chance to properly say good-bye to Andy and Martin at FKO:

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Just catching up with everyone again - we had a great time in Canada! Nice to meet the people we had met before, and a good time to meet new people - I spent most of the first day of FKO tying email addresses to faces!

Just catching up on Blatherings - good luck with the guinea pigs. Just don't let them out of the run too much - we've only had to chase the rabbit round the garden two or three times, but one was 11am on the Friday of the UK Filkcon, where we were bringing the tech kit and the con was three hours drive away. Andy chased Scrumpy round the garden with a carrot while I turned the run into Castle Colditz 2 and muttered recipes for rabbit stew under my breath...

Just looking back at yesterday's blatherings - I'll agree with Dave. You are definitely insane! However, having had just a few days in the Algonquin National Park when we were in Canada (staying at a place called Bear Trail near Whitney) I am jealous of just about everything else apart from the swim! The scenery is absolutely gorgeous, and it was definitely the highlight of the trip. We tried cross-country falling (sorry, skiing) and had fun, even if we only covered a few miles, and hiked a couple of the trails off the road.

The first one went OK, but on the second one the snow was getting deeper, and the ice under the snow was getting steeper. And then we discovered the sheer cliff edge near by. At about the time we realised that we hadn't seen a waymark for a while. And that all the park rangers were on strike, so we weren't going to get any help for a while!

Fortunately, retracing your steps in snow is a fairly easy business. Annoying, because we must have been three-quarters of the way round. But if the alternative was slipping off the cliff into the lake, which would either have caused concussion or hypothermia (unless you are Debbie!) depending on the state of the ice, then I think going back was probably intelligent.

Wonderful area. We have been saying we will have to go back sometime. May well be a long way off, but it WILL happen.

All the best

Martin GK

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Thanks to Gary McGath for pointing out Mark Mandel's guinea pig filk.

And some predictions from Sherman, prompted by the Inkspot pens he received as a prize in the Oscar Poll...

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Debbie,

Thank you so much for the pens! They arrived yesterday, and it's definitely given me the motivation to go out and make more predictions. A sample:

1. Jean-Marie Le Pen will be defeated in France and move to Quebec. He will be arrested for speaking the wrong type of French, becoming one of the immigrant criminals he fears.

2. The Montreal Expos will win the World Series before a crowd of 3,416, counting the guinea pig in the pocket of Marie Floue, a 9-year-old who left home that day to attend her first curling match (before her dad took a wrong turn). The guinea pig is a Yankees fan.

3. The winner of the foreign-language film Oscar next year will be "Sartre in Toronto," about a confused amateur play and its leading actor who dies from too much Starbucks coffee in a tragic evening filled with miscommunication about the meaning of life and the TTC (he forgot to get off at the Sherboune station and later said in his caffeine-induced reverie that there was a sign there reading "No Exit"). The fact that it's in English is apparently no impediment to the Oscar, as the members of the Academy don't speak the language.

4. George W. Bush will land in Ottawa in late 2002, declaring "Ich bin ein Towotan," confusing everyone.

Sherman
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