Spent a lovely afternoon/evening in Glasgow on Saturday with various fellow Scottish bloggers (yes, I know I’m not Scottish; neither were most of they). Having stopped in at an easyInternertcafé on the way to do a spot of blogging (and to explain the use of word spacing and capitalisation), I arrived at a pub called Babbity Bowster around 3pm. If you like a pub filled with an ever-expanding group of folk musicians playing in the corner and regular interruptions for a cappella* songs – and the pub really was silenced – then this is the pub for you. If you do.

Despite occasionally being distracted out by fiddling (stop sniggering at the back), I had a great time drinking with these complete strangers. There was organiser Gordon (hurrah for Gordon); fellow geek Richard; Gunnella, who taught us Icelandic pronunciation; Chameleon, who taught me the useful German phrase for "My friend will pay" and who, it turned out, I’d seen on University Challenge but a few weeks earlier; Peter of Naked Blog fame, who offered me what purported to be a vitamin C tablet which I gratefully accepted despite having met him ten minutes earlier; Neil, of Neil Writes the World, and Corrinne of Little Blue Teacup. Judging from the match report, I missed Steve and Svetlana, who arrived shortly after I headed off for a Chinese.

Neil has written about Saturday in his Daily Record column. Now, who could have brought up the subject of Doctor Who?

[* spelling corrected via]

Kakuro is the most recent puzzle to be described by the cliché "the latest craze in Japan is now sweeping the UK." It has similarities with sudoku as far as numbers have to be slotted into rows and columns based on which numbers occupy other squares, but there is one significant difference: kakuro does involve some maths.

Take a look at kakuro.info‘s daily puzzle to see what a whole puzzle looks like.

How it works

Given a grid, the aim is to ensure that every block adds up to the number at its beginning, using the digits 1-9 a maximum of once each. The numbers in the grid below indicate that the top row must add up to 4, the second row to 7, the first column must add up to 5, the second column to 3 and the third to 4.

The key with kakuro is to know some of the most common patterns of numbers that add up to certain targets. For example, 3, as in the second column of the grid, can only ever be the total of two digits: 1 and 2. Just knowing this tells us that the second column has a 1 and a 2, but we don’t yet know in which order.

more…

I dropped theguardian a line yesterday and today I’m on the obituaries page!

(The odd quotation marks in the first paragraph aren’t mine although the slightly garbled first sentence of the second paragraph is.)

From Popbitch:

Tom Chaplin from Keane, on the train going to his parents’ house last weekend, drinking Ribena, doing the Daily Telegraph Book of Sudoku. Rock’n roll.

And where does that elusive 9 go? Somewhere only we knooooow…