Saturday's Games

Well the games day went well. Brett and I spent the morning clearing up the flat to make it a bit presentable and people showed up around three. Rod, Rosie & Andy, Ping and Mark & Chris all came along and over the course of six hours we got through a game of Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit and a couple of games of Cluedo, oh, and shed-load of food and drink. It was all pretty amiable (although Brett got decidedly lucky at Monopoly and so there were certain alliances formed…) and fun. It was a good idea to have it start in the afternoon, as there was plenty of time to do as much as everyone wanted and no worries about getting home afterwards.

We hadn’t seen Rod, Mark or Chris for sometime. Mark and Chris aren’t singing with the Chorus this season because Chris is travelling a lot with work and Mark is trying to find his next role. (He works for the Foreign Office, so he moves jobs every few years and his next one could well be overseas.) Rod we just haven’t seen I think since we had dinner in March, so there was some catching up to do. With the recent Cabinet reshuffle, Jess’ workload has gone through the roof and, despite only officially working three days a week, she is putting in seven-day weeks at the moment, so she didn’t join us today. However they are starting riding lessons at the Wimbledon Stables, so we will likely be seeing them more often as they will be around the Village for lunch on Saturdays.

Brett cooked us a lovely breakfast in bed this morning and then we spent a couple of hours on the sofa watching the Musicality marathon on More4 last night.

In amongst all that, I’ve been enjoying a minor tizz on one of the American blogs about the National Security Agency’s programme of bulk downloading everyone’s phone bills into a giant database to look for patterns leading to terrorists. While most of the current argument is about privacy (or rather the invasion of), it is, in my opinion another example of a disturbing trend in the Bush administration; claiming to be above the law in any matter related to National Security. I’d say that’s only a point-of-view away from being a police state.

On a lighter note, though, the issue has provided plenty of humour, especially as today is Mothering Sunday in the States. Hence:

“The NSA would like to remind everyone to call their mothers this Sunday. They need to calibrate their system.” (from Bruce Schneier),

“The NSA offers exciting and interesting work for recent college graduates in mathematics and computer science. Pick up the phone, call your mom, and ask for an application.” (a comment on the above), and an amusing take on the AT&T logo and slogan here, from BoingBoing.

Speaking of which, I need to call my parents who are having yet more difficulty with their email…