'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Today's ten-minute takeover went old-school again, in particular with Evanescence's Bring Me To Life which elemnar and I spent the next few minutes trying to guess when that first came out. elemnar came up with Year 9/start of GCSEs, which would be around 2002 - wiki says early 2003, so that's not far off. Certainly I remember hearing it a lot on the radio on the bus to/from school.

It's not the first time we've played that game and been fairly close with our guesses. A few weeks back, on the journey back we were listening to Radio 2, which started playing Keane's Everybody's Changing of all things. I came up with mid-late 2004 via a chain of random memories... I vaguely recall it being out around the same time as KT Tunstall's Eye to the Telescope album. That I remember seeing an advert for at Three Bridges train station once. The advert I remembered because myself, elemnar, and a few friends (including hunter22?) decided to go to Brighton one day by train, and one of us spotted the poster and commented how it was someone's favourite album. And that journey I think was in the holidays between school and university, which would make it summer 2004. Talk about convoluted! Anyway, the answer is... December 2004 for the KT Tunstall album. That's later than I thought - perhaps the journey was over the Christmas break (it must have been during a holiday otherwise I would have been on campus and so wouldn't be at Three Bridges for a day trip)? But the real question is Keane, and that album (Hopes and Fears) came out May 2004, so I wasn't that far off after all! elemnar had guessed GCSEs/6th form which again would be 2004.

Actually, you know what - having looked through friends' old LJ posts (couldn't find anything in my own blog - but that made me wonder if anyone else had posted something) I'm fairly sure the Brighton trip was 22nd December 2004.

It's funny the random memories that get strung together sometimes.

Anyway, pasta night. We had a full house today so ended up with two games: a large game of Machi Koro (which elemnar played) and a smaller game of Terraforming Mars (that I played). Last time I played Terraforming Mars I managed to eke out a win thanks to amongst other things managing to not only slam a giant ice asteroid into the planet, but gain corporate sponsorship for it. This time I drew both those cards again but at different times so I didn't manage the same hilarious combo. I did however get several "slam an asteroid into the planet" cards during the game, each one bigger than the one before... but ultimately it didn't work out, and I lost by quite a few points. I think I need to concentrate more on basic terraforming and the resulting immediate victory points (which also turn into increased money), instead of trying to set up a combo involving half-a-dozen cards that all ideally need to be played in order for best effect. The final game board had very few of my markers on it as a result.

Overheard on Radio 1 this evening:

"Have you ever used Microsoft Encarta for your homework?"
"I have no idea what that is"

This was on the Greg James show (1h22m in) which occasionally tries to guess the age of a random phone caller. You could do quite well with that question - if they answer yes, then they're a child of the eighties (as Encarta was the reference source in those pre-Wikipedia days). If the answer no, then they're older. If they haven't heard of it then they're part of the iGeneration.

And the answer for that caller's age? 19!