Found myself at an incredible difficult fund-raising-quiz last weekend. Which translates to "Paying your share to feel stupid all night." Go figure!

Anyways, among the load of those silly "Why can't I remember stupid facts" questions there was also the more interesting logic and riddle section. Here is one from that set:

Two ferry boats (A and B) operate on a river. Both boats have different (but constant) speeds. At a given time they start off together at opposite sides of the river and meet 155m from the side where B started. When they reach the other side both need to wait the reglementary 12 minutes before (each at their own time now) can start crossing over again. During this second crossing they meet at 85m from the side where B took it's second start.

Obvious question: How wide is the river?

Well. You know this embarrassing scene where you've been singing allong with some pop-song for years (practically screaming your heart out in fact) only to suddenly see the lyrics in print and realize...

Blush

While Steven is busy at boldly bringing daisy where no daisy-man has gone before, the rest of us kept to the standard Outerthought way of live. Which for some reason allowed company lunch to deteriorate into one of those spit out your famous geek-quotes. (Off record, and you might be surprised, but Bruno ran a lousy score!)

Anyway, silly me always thought the expression 'a horse of a different color' only made sense to people knowledgeable to 'Emerald City'. Me being impressed and all by a movie not only influencing modern language, but even creating the mini-cultural context in which one could deduct the etymological traces for the semantic novelties.

But to my surprise, the web proudly produces evidence that no one less then Shakespeare himself knew about the beast.
Boy, this sure doesn't look like Kansas any more!

Oh, and a late runner up this morning almost got us started again: "The blow blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds". (from the exploding whale)

Got out to Brugge, die skone this saturday to mingle with international tourists. (Incredible how many languages I heard speaking out on the streets there). The trip is only 20km for us but we got in full tourist mode (taking pictures like crazy et al) mostly to enjoy one of the last weekends that the missus is *NOT* in full tourist mode. Working on the family-run-campsite the term takes a different meaning from mid march to mid oktober.

Anyways, we had a splendid time and can recommend these ready made attractions in the city:

• Taking the Kabba (dutch only!) along: A booklet which provides 3 different search-walks for kids
• Visiting the Chocolate museum which was amusingly chauvinistic and pro-chocolate (two mild deficiencies I recognise within myself)

So yeah, the relation between overweight and chocolate is scientitifcally not proven, but the aphrodisiacal benefits of the productmight very well be just true :-). And belgian chocolate is just better then the rest (well, the swiss do a not too bad job) because of:

• Simply belgian law: All fat in chocolate over here needs to be chocolat-butter, any drop of different fat and you can't call it belgian chocolate.
• Chocolate grinding in Belgium goes down to a particle size of 20 microns (the rest of the world typically stops at 30-35, which is the scientific measured 'resolution' for the taste-awareness of the tongue anyway. Any automation engineer knowing Nyquist-Shannon will explain you why we got it right though :-)