Go figure!

Current mood: Boggled
Current music: Aaaagh! Guys with megaphones have invaded again!

Howdy folks, how was your weekend? These days I spend my Saturdays learning how to dance the salsa, though it will be some time before I start to look real swish and flashy, as opposed to looking like a complete dolt which I (probably) currently do. My latest Thing To Do on a Sunday is sudoku, which is not the Japanese art of chopping wooden boards with my bare hands, nor the Japanese art of moving in mysterious ways to put someone in agony, nor even the Japanese art of contorting a piece of paper into strange and interesting shapes. Nope - sudoku is a logic puzzle involving numbers. Happily, knowledge of calculus, algebra or even arithmetic is not required. You only need to know what numbers there are from 1 to 9. Simple, eh?

Let me explain. You get a large 9-by-9 grid, which is in turn divided into nine 3-by-3 boxes. You just have to remember that:

- Each of the 3-by-3 boxes must contain all of the digits from 1 to 9
- Each of the rows in the 9-by-9 grid must contain all of the digits from 1 to 9
- Each of the columns in the 9-by-9 grid must contain all of the digits from 1 to 9

The sudoku grid already contains a few digits to start you off. Your job is to fill in the rest of the grid by logical deduction, following the rules above.

I've added a Daily Sudoku puzzle - kindly supplied by the folks at Sudokufun.com - to my blog as an added attraction. Unfortunately it isn't interactive, so the most you could do is right-click the grid, select 'View image', print it out and fill it in the old-fashioned, pencil-and-paper way. If you insist on an online interactive version, check out the Sudoku-san link I've added. They've got four daily puzzles; I managed to do the 'Delicious' and 'Pernicious' levels (where do they get these names?!), but got a bit stuck and fed up by the time I reached the 'Malicious' level (for malicious it truly is), which is why I'm taking a break from those ruddy numbers and exercising my literary brain instead.

One more new addition - I've just added a hit counter so I can see how many people have been visiting my site. However I have a sneaking suspicion that most of the hits will be from me, as I keep checking and re-checking my blog with every update, to ensure its absolute perfection...

I was just thinking about the time one of my London friends came over for a visit. We were walking around a shopping centre when he spotted a clothes store called 'Mook', which he found quite amusing. I asked him why, and he explained that 'mook' was a mild insult, and one might say 'You mook!' in much the same way as one might say 'You plonker!'

I got the gist of it, but I thought I'd look up 'mook' on Dictionary.com anyway, and came up with the following:

mook (n) (Slang) - An insignificant or contemptible person.
[Probably alteration of 'moke']

I looked up 'moke':

moke (n) (Slang) - A dull or boring person.

While I was at it, I tried for 'plonker':

PLONKER (Acronym) - Person with Little Or No Knowledge

...Oops! I felt a bit of a plonker myself on reading that...

Oh well, I could go on about funny shop names, but 'round here, you could find worse names than 'Mook'. There's a chain of clothes shops called 'Wanko'...