Hmm. Playing Go is bad for my health, it appears.

At least, I gave Colin a basic introduction to the game at post-pizza last night, and now I have a sore throat. That's what I get for talking solidly for an hour or so without a drink of water, I suppose. And then I dreamed of Go and slept poorly, so I'm not going to be doing anything terribly profound today I suspect.

I'm never quite sure whether to write Go with the capital G or not. It looks somehow more mature in lower case - capital letters feel as if they're used for modern games with made-up names, whereas incredibly old games with history behind them tend to be in lower case because they're part of the basic vocabulary of the language and you're allowed to use their names in Scrabble. But since "go" in particular is a common English word which has plenty of meanings already, I think writing it with a capital G helps reduce ambiguity. So I do that, at least for the moment. If serious players yell at me because I'm offending their sense of dignity, I might have to change my habits :-)

Recently I seem to have been going through one of my compulsive-misreading phases.

In the bathroom at someone else's house the other day, I saw a bottle of smelly stuff labelled "FOREVER IN BLOOM". I saw it initially from one side, so I could only see the first half of each line of text, and my subconscious was convinced it said "FORGED IN BLOOD", which is a little worrying given that I've always claimed not to be a goth.

Back at work, there's a bottle of whiteboard-cleaning fluid on my desk, containing the usual sorts of health warnings ("EYE IRRITANT", "HARMFUL IF SWALLOWED" and so on). My eyes managed to shift between two lines of text at just the wrong moment in that passage, leading me to wonder what on earth would be meant by "FLAMMABLE IF SWALLOWED"! Perhaps it's a warning that applies to Christmas puddings.