Here's a particularly nasty puzzle, which my brother posed to me on the coach on the way to Alpe d'Huez, and which took me at least an hour and three false starts to work out. See if you can do it. Try it without pen and paper, and no sneaky looking it up on the Internet!

1. There are eight people who need to cross a lake. There is a father and mother, two sons, two daughters, a maid, and a dog.
2. There is only one boat, which can hold two individuals at most at any time.
3. The father cannot be on the same side of the lake with either or both of the daughters, as they will argue, unless the mother is present.
4. The mother cannot be on the same side of the lake with either or both of the sons, as they will argue, unless the father is present.
5. The dog cannot be on the same side of the lake as anyone unless the maid is present, as it will bite.
6. "On the same side of the lake" applies even if some of the individuals are in the boat, on the same side as others on the shore.
7. Only the father, mother and maid can pilot the boat.

How do you get everyone across?

It's that delightful time of year again, when all the happy little employees of our happy little company sit down, chin on fist, and rack their brains desperately to try and come up with "personal business commitments" for the coming year. This is usually an occasion for increased hair loss through random tearing, raised blood pressure, undue wailing and a general gnashing of teeth. The main reason for all the gnashing is that our personal goals have to be "challenging, yet achievable", which is a shorthand way of saying "your bonus will be sod-all when review time arrives". In other words, any goal which is sufficiently achievable is insufficiently challenging; any goal which is challenging enough to meet the arbitrary criteria of challengingness is, de facto, impossible to achieve. Beautiful, isn't it?

I look forward to writing three pages of utter waffle this evening.

The glands in the sides of my neck are about the size and consistency of tennis balls. If any kind person fancies extracting them for me, I would be much obliged.

Giving some thought to the possibility of getting a proper hosted domain, i.e. spending some actual cash for a bit of disk space. Not too fussed about having my own domain name, although that would be nice; I just want something with, say, 50 - 100 MB of space, FTP access and PHP or ASP hosting capabilities. Can anyone suggest any possible hosts? I'd prefer something UK-based but it's not essential. Thanks.

Let's all sing together:

Happy birthday to blog
Happy birthday to blog
Happy birthday Linguini
Happy birthday to blog

Yes, the Daily Linguini is exactly one year old today. An awful lot has happened since I picked up my trusty keyboard and began banging out drivel 12 months ago. In recognition of so much intermittent effort and dubious content, I will be holding a bloggiversary contest, with a difference; there's not much writing to be done with this one. All you have to do, if you fancy entering, is:

1. Find an amusing website of your choice. Points will be awarded on the basis of quirkiness, surrealism and non-linear humour. You can even submit your own site, if it's funny.
2. Write an equally amusing description of the site in no more than 50 words. (Yes, fifty. Told you there wouldn't be much writing.)
3. Post the blurb and site link in a comment. Submit as many as you like.
4. Get 'em in by, oh, let's say April 26th. I hate short deadlines.
5. The winner will be selected by a panel of judges of questionable competence, including a ten-month-old child, and will be presented with a jar of choicest baby food in recognition of their efforts.

Away, my pretties! Fly! Fly!! Ahahahahaha!!!

If all hell breaks loose, what was it tied to?

(Large amounts of the aforesaid hell are currently being rapidly detached from their moorings over here; apparently nobody in the world can send email to anybody else in the world, or at least you would think that was the case if you listened to the panicked-lemming-in-a-bag noises coming from the Helpdesk chappies, and guess who's the only one who can fix it? That's right, Archpope Dave the Hirsute! No, actually, it's me. Fuck fuckety fuck fuck bollocks. I am stressed. Can you tell?)

My nose is peeling dramatically, like overbaked baklava. This is happening because I foolishly ignored the eminently sensible warnings of my co-boarders on the first day of the holiday, who suspected I might get a bit burnt if I didn't use strong enough sun-cream. Nonsense, cried I, there is nary a ray of sunshine in them thar hills and nothing more than Factor 8 will be required for my protection, no indeed! This will teach me to check the weather report; it turned out to be a balmy 10 degrees Celsius above freezing (which is practically tropical, at that season and altitude), gloriously sunny, and with plenty of snow-glare to boot, with the result that my face looked like the back end of a boiled lobster by 3pm, and I was forced to shell out an exorbitant 15 euros for a minuscule tube of Factor 60 from the nice gentlemen at the ski shop. Lovely. My brother, by contrast, had cunningly plastered his face with something which claimed to be Factor 90 (I didn't realise such things existed - I presume they're generally for use by people who are actually allergic to sunshine, and vampires) and which had a greyish-white chalky look to it; it left him looking like he belonged to one of those hidden tribes of Papua New Guinea who paint their faces with guano to make them look like ghosts and have a nasty habit of spitting poisonous blowdarts at one before eating one's brains. So he didn't get burnt at all. Hmph. He has this annoying habit of looking smug without actually changing expression.

On the plus side, I am now back in a country which prides itself, generally, on the cleanliness and usability of its toilets. I feel positively beatific about British loos, having spent a week trudging from place to place in order to find that rarest of conveniences, a French toilet which has an actual seat and is not befouled in some unspeakable way by its previous patrons. On one particular occasion, upon encountering one such smelly hole in the floor, I began muttering audibly to myself in Basil Fawlty-esque fashion to the effect that this was absolutely disgusting, that no country which aims to call itself civilised would have public bogs like this, and that it wasn't good enough for an animal. It was at this point that I realised that the cubicles on either side were occupied, and by English speakers judging from the poorly-suppressed sniggers coming through the thin partitions. I left, sharpish. Oh, well. I suppose at least I can feel empowered by having exercised my right to vent my spleen at random members of the public.

What a week! I could do with another holiday just to recover from this one (but that would be greedy, now, wouldn't it?) I'd just like to say that I am now officially indestructible, as I have this week survived:

• being hit repeatedly in the lower vertebrae by vengeful psychotic chairlifts
• being run over by a 300-pound German wearing sharp snowblades
• partly sliding (but mostly falling) several hundred feet down a 70-degree slope covered in icy lumps roughly the size and consistency of Volkswagen Beetles
• eating steak sufficiently rare that it was still running around the plate and going "moo"
• the fumes emanating from the enormous quantities of goat's cheese plastered on top of every dish which wasn't going "moo"
• having to use French toilets, or as they say over there, "hole in ze floor"
• the cat-strangling voices of my fellow travellers at an 80s karaoke evening
• the pungent, greenish-yellow liqueur being served at the 80s karaoke evening
• the hangover following the 80s karaoke evening

...all without any broken bones or major diseases. Photographic evidence to be provided as soon as the camera gets back from having the goat's cheese scraped off it.

Three inches of snow greeted my unsuspecting feet on the treacherously slippery path outside the house this morning. I have a large and attractively-coloured bruise developing on my bum.

Speaking of the powdery white stuff, the Daily Linguini will be closed for the next week, as I will be sliding down mountainfuls (mountainsful?) of it on my trusty steed snowboard, waving in nonchalant fashion at passing trees/crevasses/mountain lions, clearing tall moguls in a single bound, leaping off icy cliffs, and generally tweaking the nose of terror, as the great E. Blackadder put it. Stories and possibly pictures upon my return. Have a good week, all, and wrap up warm.

Trying out a slightly modified blog template. Pretty simple to start with, will almost certainly tinker with it a bit later. Let me know if you think it's crap. (Obviously, if you feel the need to praise its Spartan ingenuity, feel free also.)

Am typing this in a 30-second break in between eardrum-oppressingly loud bouts of baby yelling. Sarah is teething - again - and has decided that everything is going to piss her off this evening, including going to sleep, not going to sleep, lying down, sitting down, standing up, and of course me trying to calm her down by the traditional soothing-voice method. I have therefore taken to leaping around the room excitedly making a noise like an enraged piglet, which normally makes her overstimulated and therefore impossible to manage; oddly, it seems to be working. Oh, wait, there she goes again.

She's nine months old tomorrow. I have at least seventeen-and-a-quarter years of this to go.

Always wondered what the words to this were. Now I know. And they're pretty fucked up.

O Fortuna (Chorus) from Carmina Burana by Carl Orff

O Fortuna		O Fortune,
velut luna		like the moon
statu variabilis,		you are changeable,
semper crescis		ever waxing
aut decrescis;		and waning;
vita detestabilis		hateful life
nunc obdurat		first oppresses
et tunc curat		and then soothes
ludo mentis aciem,		as fancy takes it;
egestatem,		poverty
potestatem		and power
dissolvit ut glaciem.		it melts them like ice.
Sors immanis		Fate - monstrous
et inanis,		and empty,
rota tu volubilis,		you whirling wheel,
status malus,		you are malevolent,
vana salus		well-being is vain
semper dissolubilis,		and always fades to nothing,
obumbrata		shadowed
et velata		and veiled
michi quoque niteris;		you plague me too;
nunc per ludum		now through the game
dorsum nudum		I bring my bare back
fero tui sceleris.		to your villainy.
Sors salutis		Fate is against me
et virtutis		in health
michi nunc contraria,		and virtue,
est affectus		driven on
et defectus		and weighted down,
semper in angaria.		always enslaved.
Hac in hora		So at this hour
sine mora		without delay
corde pulsum tangite;		pluck the vibrating strings;
quod per sortem		since Fate
sternit fortem,		strikes down the string man,
mecum omnes plangite!		everyone weep with me!

Bloody hell. Information via Lisa.

Go on, you know you want to.

Have noticed an increase in readership again recently, after a bit of a slack period (by myself, obviously; no-one else can be blamed for my paucity of output, except possibly the small milk-based person who occupies most of my time, who can be easily forgiven). I am unashamedly pleased by this. I like it when people read my blog and leave comments. I make no apologies. I dislike the epithet "comments whore", because it is derogatory and also rude, so I will resign myself to being described as a "comments lady of the night", and leave it at that. Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who pops in here, regularly or otherwise, and contributes their tuppence to the upkeep of the Daily Linguini. The Management thanks you for your custom.

Whilst eating a reasonably-edible curry from the office canteen yesterday, I spotted a cardamom pod in the mix and remarked in passing to my colleagues that ground cardamom was rather nice in coffee, which revelation caused them to look at me as though I had just suggested that they should perform kinky sex acts with gerbils. Nevertheless, cardamom (in moderation, of course) is a delicious addition to filter coffee; generally I crack open a pod and pop in two or three grains per person along with the coffee grounds. It's something I picked up in a really good Lebanese restaurant in London - apparently it is de rigueur in Beirut. Does anyone else enjoy this? I'm aware that a large section of the population of the Middle East will probably like it, but I'm curious to see whether people from other parts of the world have tried this concoction. If you haven't, I recommend it highly.

To be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound would be cool. However, I recognise my limitations, and therefore restrict my aspirations in the superpower department to:

• being able to leap tall teddy bears in a single bound (when Sarah has left them in tripworthy locations, as she does with increasingly humorous frequency)
• being faster than a speeding Ford Mondeo (that bastard from Lighthorne Heath who cuts me up at the M40 roundabout every bloody day)
• being able to survive as a functionally sane human on four hours' sleep per night
• being able to change lightbulbs whilst perched on a rickety chair at the top of the staircase
• being able to swap a flat tyre on the hard shoulder of the M6 (not recommended for the faint of heart)
• being able to cook a Thai stir-fry with my feet whilst making a cuppa for The Missus with one hand and entertaining a nine-month-old baby with the other encased in a glove shaped like an amusing cow

These I can manage.

The Missus is having some difficulties at work. To put it discreetly, her boss is trying to make her take on some work which she doesn't particularly want to take on (due to the extra stress it will undoubtedly involve) but is willing to do for the good of the community, as it were; however, her reasonable requests to have other aspects of her workload reduced, in order to make way for the new stuff, are being met with hostility and even insults. To complicate matters further, said boss is herself under major stress, as her husband is extremely ill; plus she has a personality-clash problem with The Missus, who (unlike the rest of the staff) is not the type of person to knuckle under meekly when large quantities of crap are dropped upon her, i.e. she is bolshy as hell.

Dilemma is therefore: make complaint against boss, resulting in more stress to boss, Missus and other staff, but possibly resolving the issue; or, sit tight and wait for storm to blow over, and re-open the question when increased workload really starts to bite?

I hate office politics.

New toy!!!

Only eleven days to go until I hit the slopes! Having used up about a year's worth of brownie points I have convinced The Missus that it would be a good thing for me to have a week away snowboarding in France with my brother and a bunch of mates. Therefore, I will soon be spending my hard-earned free time careening down an Alp with a large plank strapped rigidly to my feet, and my equally hard-earned cash on expensive French drinks with names like 'Salopard' and 'Pisse de Grenouille'.

The time is fast approaching. My work productivity has dropped to almost nil. I'm starting to get that faraway look in my eye during lulls in conversation. I feel itchy, witchy and twitchy. Fantastic!

Is holiday anticipation almost as good as the holiday itself? Discuss.

Snow is wonderful! Everywhere is draped in the sparkly white stuff. I feel like a six-year-old kid with a tea tray. Whee!