The navigator on this vessel goes by the name of Zeppo. Not kidding. No idea whether that's his real name - you can't always be sure around here. Anyway, we were bored yesterday on his evening off, and after we had exhausted the potential for active discussion of spherical trigonometry, he suggested we play a traditional game called Double Blind. This ominous title put me immediately on my guard, and I was neither surprised nor comfortable when he explained the rules. Basically, the idea is that you each mix a drink in secret using your choice of ingredients, making up a total of half a litre. Then you drink them both. The first part involves downing exactly half of your own drink, and for the second part you swap glasses and drink half of the other one. If you are both still standing upright, you play another round with different ingredients, and continue in this fashion until one of you falls over. DON'T try this at home, kids!
I suggested that we each keep notes of what ingredients we used in each round, and leave them in our pockets in case we didn't make it through the night and needed medical attention. I was half-serious: this sounded pretty extreme. Zeppo ducked into the officers' bar and emerged two minutes later holding a glass of faintly purple liquid with a red froth on top. Grim-faced, I followed suit. Of course it was all an act: I was confident that I was going to win this one. After all, I once visited Frexigg and spent a while attempting to forget a messy relationship disaster involving both swordplay and semantics, by drinking the local Flicsh'kmarrg (loosely translated as 'oil of volcano snake'), which has been known to cause even the locals to tear off their own flesh and throw it behind them as they flee, rather than be devoured by the large three-headed Grrugglil they firmly believe is chasing them down Main Street.
I won when Zeppo dropped like a stone halfway through the second round. I confess that his concoctions were terrifyingly potent, and judging by the apparent fairground-ride motion of the ship today, most of which is certainly not due to the ocean, I believe that he might have used something from the infirmary - and perhaps even the engine room - as well as the usual liquors. He is still asleep in his cabin, and I covered for him by telling the captain that he was up all night dealing with a loose bracket on the deck.
His reaction to the two empty glasses I produced during the game was mixed. He couldn't work out whether I was being stupid or just trying to cheat. However, I don't think he'll be challenging me to another game any time soon. Here is a list of my ingredients in total:
Round One
* A non-Riemannian Hypersquare
* Two counts of arson, sentence suspended
* The feeling of anxiety prompted by seeing an old enemy in the supermarket
* Some qualia from the id
Round Two
* The essence of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem
* An explanation of how double-entry book-keeping works
* Several memories of seeing an actual Grrugglil in a zoo on Frexigg
* My great-grandmother's opinion about water-skiing (I think this is probably what finished him)
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