Travels to the pub and back

Sunday, April 03, 2005

I think this is a low point of my existence.

Two crushing hangovers in as many days, and today at three o' clock, when I felt human again, I dragged myself to work. Looks like I'll be here for a fucking age as well.

Fortunately, the causes of my pain were two good nights out, so it's (mostly) okay. On Friday, Dave and I went out for a few drinks. A few drinks became many drinks plus an explosively ill-advised smoked sausage supper, and resulted in an amusing inability to sign my own name with any degree of consistency. At one point, the barman (and not your common or garden variety friendly, helpful barman but instead a shaven-headed giant with a smile that said "I am going to throw you out unless you get your shit together and sign this properly, you drunken moron.") actually had me sign a Switch receipt twice. And all this when my photo - which does actually look like me - is laser-etched onto the back of my card next to my sober signature.

On Saturday I went for a meal with Michelle and her cronies (the Organizatsiya to our Mafia, perhaps?) for her sister's birthday, and it was good. Highlights included sitting opposite a guy called Zee who insisted I should be a newsreader and said: "You know what? I believe you," after I said anything. Top food, drink and chat.

It was Sam's birthday as well, so I headed over there after the meal and mingled with the usual suspects. By the time we caught a taxi home at 4 am, I was absolutely shattered. I'm steadily losing my BEAN-O! BEAN-O! stamina.

P.S: Well, turns out I was right. As of 9:20 pm, I've been here for 6 hours and counting. Oh dear.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Q. They always urge you to get out of the water when a thunderstorm
begins. Why doesn't lightning kill fish?

...The best answer to this question we found comes from Don
MacGorman, a physicist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in
Norman, Okla. When Sciencenetlinks.com asked him why fish don't get
fried by lightning, Don said it's probably because they're underwater.

"Basically lightning stays more on the surface of the water rather
than penetrating it. That's because water is a reasonably good
conductor, and a good conductor keeps most of the current on the
surface," he said. So, when lightning hits the water, the current zips
across the surface in all directions. And if you're swimming anywhere
in the vicinity, it'll probably zap you. But below the surface, most
of the electricity is neutralized, and the fish are generally spared.
Some fish underwater near the strike are probably hurt or killed by
electricity that penetrates to some extent...

Keith Houston said...

Ah - like the way charge sits only on the surface of a conducting sphere.

I learned why at uni. Unfortunately, I also learned that boozing is a lot of fun, and fact #2 seems to have accounted for the absence of fact #1 in my memory.