A Challenging Year

Another one that makes me question the state of the authors today, as the book instructs me to revert to childhood. Which okay, mostly isn't too bad - the suggestions are things like draw with crayon, eat too much icecream, play videogames.

The problem is the rather large footnote at the bottom of the page, which suggests that maybe everything bad in one's life might come from the trauma of toilet training, and the dedicated might wish to reverse this. And just like that the book has made things weird and uncomfortable. Also I think we can agree this runs entirely counter to the spy training theory. No one wants an incontinent spy.

Alright, so I don't do that. Instead I opt for making a pile of cushions on the floor to sit on and play videogames (though unlike actual childhood instead of collecting gold rings I'm shooting a million pirates in the face and skinning endangered animals to make ammo pouches). I drink too many sodas and see if I can get a sugar rush. I would eat ice cream but there's only chocolate, which I don't like. So instead I indulge the childish impulse to look at some food and go "Blech, yucky" and refuse to eat it.

So that's my day long return to a childlike mentality. I guess some rich, high powered types spend a lot of money to have structured childhood days to legitimise doing this sort of thing and taking a break from their lifestyles? Or they develop weird fetishes. Either way.

This task sees me helping out with roadworks and public maintenance. Well, for a very, very broad definition of helping. Actually it's more like actively misleading people. So really not helping at all.

I have a bunch of signs provided by the book, to place on roadworks, lamposts, gas mains, etc. With the number of bits of this book I'm having to remove for these tasks whoever gets it at the end is going to find themselves with a very incomplete copy. That aside, here are some of my helpful signs for maintenance teams:

I hope this helps, maintenance guys!

Weekend catchup time!

Day 80: Prepare my home for a zombie invasion.

Step one obviously is to decide what kind of zombie invasion I'm preparing for. I'm politely informed that fast zombies are "stupid" and the Rage virus totally doesn't count as zombies. So setting aside any kind of cultural criticism of what zombies mean as a tool of horror or how to make them relevant and threatening for the modern day (rather than an endless source of parody and shitty nerd humour) I guess I'm going to be preparing for a regular Dawn of the Dead zombie invasion.

The house is pretty well made for that, I think. It's above an office and only has one entrance, which leads into the house via a narrow, defensible stairway. So unless the zombies learn to use tool and bring a ladder, or the mountain of corpses grows 12ft high, the windows aren't a likely source of undead ingress. Good, saves me boarding them up. I think the landlord would object if I did that now.

I dump all the large, heavy sofa cushions and some chairs at the bottom of the stairwell, a makeshift barrier against the door. Then I put it all back because Sean will be home soon and I don't want to have to explain that he can't get in the front door because of hypothetical zombies.

Food: We have enough dried noodles in this house to last out weeks of zombie infestation after the fresh food runs out.

Weaponry: I once dressed up as Frank West out of Dead Rising for a party and carried a blood splattered guitar as my zombie killing tool of choice. Since then the guitar has had various bits of heavy copper tubing bolted onto it, making it even more skull mashing. I think I'm sorted here.

So that's my zombie prep done. I'm still refusing to buy anything written by Max Brooks though, or to engage in that weird crypto-libertarian NRA-approved nerd fantasy of living in a zombie apocalypse.

Day 81:Speak the unspeakable.

Friday sees me tasked with saying things that should not be said. The book's examples include "The Virgin Mary wasn't a virgin", and "Adolf Hitler was a hero and a gentleman". So apparently by speak the unspeakable the book means be a low grade troll?

No wait, on further examination the book doesn't want me to actually say anything, it wants me to find a phrase I wouldn't actually be willing to say in public. No mention of whether or not I should actually say it. This is apparently meant to be a backlash against the verbal incontinence of the modern age. So I guess this is one of those introspective tasks, not one of the get out and act type tasks.

Alright, so what wouldn't I say where anyone can hear? This is a pretty wide field, since it doesn't have to also be something that is true. But to settle on one, non-comedy option, I'm not willing to publicly say anything involving racial/sexual/etc slurs. I will never thrive on Xbox Live is the takeaway from this task.

Day 82: Examine the cheese/dreams relationship.

Does cheese in fact cause bad dreams? Eat some before bed and find out. This is totally how science works. I've read Popper, I know what science is.

So for my totally serious scientific experiment into the effects of cheese on dreams I have a bit of cheddar before bed. I would have preferred a nice Pont-l'Évêque, but this was a short notice kind of thing.

That night I do indeed have a bad dream, involving someone close to me enumerating all my flaws, real and imagined, explaining that they were never talking to me again, and that they'd hated me for months and betrayed me in various ways. So that was rather unpleasant and left me out of sorts all morning.

Based on this sample of 1 cheese has a 100% chance of causing bad dreams. There were no other causative factors involved, no experimenter bias, and I am entirely representative of all humanity. I'll be publishing this in Nature soon. I might also put out a press release linking cheese dreams to cancer, so that the Daily Mail will run a story on my discovery. You read it here first, avoid cheese if you value the sanctity of your dreams.

Day 83: Tell everyone I've lost my home, done crime, etc.

The goal apparently is to see who still talks to me after I've lost all social status and who abandons me to hard times. This honestly would probably have worked better if I hadn't been sitting in my home with people when I told them. People who'd been around me the last couple of days and seen me not committing any sort of crime.

This is another of those tasks that would be interesting to do over a week or so, and might actually lead to some interesting experiences. I'm going to keep a note of it to do at some future juncture on my own time. Book into a hotel for a week, take a week off work, show up to talk to people at strange hours throughout the night and day, getting increasingly more disheveled, making it steadily more and more apparent that you're at rock bottom. See how people react.

The downside to that of course is that while it'd be interesting it'd also basically involve trolling one's social circle for a week just to see what happened, possibly making people genuinely worry for you. And that's honestly kind of a dick move. The sort of person who'd toy with people like that maybe deserves to be abandoned during tricky times (has anyone seen Escape from Hong Kong Island? It's a sort of related film and really good). So okay, I'll shelve that plan, I don't want to be That Guy.

This task was all about getting back to some old-school polytheist roots. Specifically by praying to "out of date" gods. The book lists Minerva, Loki, Thanatos, Nerthus, Poseidon, Ra, Moloch and Mars in particular. We'll ignore that Thanatos wasn't really a deity, because there is only so much mythological soundness you can expect from a comedy book.

The old religions certainly had better stories than most modern ones. Swan sex, dressing up as a lady to get your magic hammer back, turning people into stars, all kinds of hilarious japes. Norse and Greek pantheons seemed to have more in common with reality TV stars than anything else.

I'm a little hesitant to actually pray to any of them at first. One of Aesop's fables, the Frogs Who Wanted a King explains this: So there's these frogs, chilling in their pond, and for poorly specified reasons they desire a king. So they pray to Zeus for one and Zeus drops a great big log in the pond, freaking the frogs out. When it doesn't move they hop up on top and start laughing and making fun of the log. They still want a king so they pray again, like "Seriously though Zeus, can we get an actual monarch this time?"

This time Zeus sends a water snake down, which starts feasting on this fabulous fucking frog buffet. The frogs pray a third time, all "What the shit Zeus? Sort this the fuck out!" Zeus just replies with "Lol, nope" and leaves the frogs to die. The end.

So the moral of this fable is obviously don't pray to Zeus, the guy's a dick. Then I remember that none of these deities exist, so it's pretty risk free to offer up some prayers.

I don't feel quite on board with any of the book's examples though, so I send up my prayers to Bacchus. If ever there was a god who knew how to part it was that guy. Also how to drive people into terrible orgies of violence and disinhibition. Bacchus/Dionysus cults and myths got dark. But we'll gloss over that. Also, plays a key role in one of my favourite Tim Powers novels, Earthquake Weather.

So I pray for the miraculous appearance of some delicious wine, but it doesn't appear. Damn you Bacchus, you've let me down for the last time. No longer shall I pray to you.

A weird but also kinda fun one? I have to act as a freelance traffic warden and put tickets on cars. The book helpfully provides some of these on the page.

So I rip out a couple of tickets from the book (there was nothing important on the reverse, fortunately) and set to work.

Problem 1) I am not a traffic warden, nor have I ever had so much as a single driving lesson. This does not leave me best qualified to recognise parking offences. I guess things like expired meters or double parking? Or given the slightly silly nature of this task I can just make up things to ticket people for, I guess. I'm going with that one.

Problem 2) It feels weird walking up to someone's car to tuck a piece of paper under the wiper and then take a picture. What if someone sees me put a pretend ticket on their car and comes up to ask what the hell I'm doing? "Oh, sorry, I'm pretending to be a traffic warden because a book told me to, and I want to write about it on the internet."

Problem 3 you can see for yourself: My handwriting is fucking atrocious. But those of you can decipher it will note that Thelonious Blount has moved on from writing to governments and is now committing acts of fraud by masquerading as a traffic warden.

The primary lesson from this task is that I would make a pretty terrible traffic warden.

Sorry for the daily in updates, I was away slightly longer than planned over the weekend. (Protip: When you have the booking code for a journey in your inbox write it down on some paper, just in case your email service decides it would be fun to strand you somewhere by eating the booking.)

Let's catch up on what I've been doing the last few days.

Day 73: Threaten a foreign nation. This is, I guess, a logical continuation to the theme established by having me write to the military and the government. This time I don't get to actually pen the letter myself, I'm given a form letter to send to the foreign nation of my choice.

Since I advised the military to launch a preemptive strike on the US back in January I figure it makes sense to aim my threatening letter at them now. Have to be consistent with these things after all. The text of the letter reads as follows (text in <> denotes blanks in the form that I've filled in):

Dear Leader of <the USA>

I have so far tolerated your behaviour in the spirit of international forbearance, but enough is enough.

I am hereby issuing you with an ultimatum. Either you desist from your obnoxious course of action, or I shall be forced to invade. I have the full backing of my country's government and its armed forces, which are at the ready to give you a drubbing, should you prevaricate on this matter. You have until 11.59pm tonight to respond. Truly, you will rue the day you offended me.

Yours sincerely,

<Sir Thelonious Blount>, on behalf of <the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland>

So obviously I did not get a response from the president by midnight of last Thursday. I'm going to attribute this to the fact that international post is not magic and instantaneous, so obviously the letter didn't get read the day it was sent. Presumably my reply will be in the post any day now. Also, the authors of this book fucking love commas.

Day 74: Friday saw me having to follow my horoscope's advice to the letter for today. I'm not sure if there's a way to pick the least bullshit horoscope out of the vast platter of fresh hot bullshit presented to me by various online horoscopes so I just took the first one that google offered, courtesy of Mountain Democrat's website:

"LEO (July 23-Aug. 22). You’ll witness odd behavior and will be asked to interact outside of your comfort zone. Luckily, since all human beings have the same basic needs, it shouldn’t be too difficult to figure this one out."

Okay, so I was taking a train up to a gathering of hundreds of student geeks, odd behaviour is to be expected. Maybe there's something to this after all (spoiler: there isn't).

I spend the day being understanding. It's really not that hard, people are pretty much people, nothing too weird. I guess I'm lucky I got this and not something like "you will meet your true love, their name begins with L".

Honestly the weirdest thing I encounter all day is people wanting to drink in the substandard lower bar, and not the one with the good drinks. But I stick with it as the horoscope suggests and we end up playing a fun card game, so there's that?

Day 75: Listen to someone's inner workings. The book suggests reaching a new level of closeness with someone by putting your head to their chest, abdomen, etc, and studying the various gurgles their organs make until you really know the sounds of their innards.

That one is a bit weird and would probably lead to some slightly uncomfortable interactions with most people. I figured my Glamorous Assistant would be the least weird choice for this. Unfortunately, as we were all at a very well stocked union bar for most of the day my assistant ended up on the wrong side of a lot of cider and became far too drunk to help with this one. So that's a failure, but one I don't really feel that bad about missing out on.

Day 76: Insure my best feature. Citing the example of various Hollywood types the book suggests I call Lloyds of London and attempt to insure my best feature against harm.

I didn't expect to have any success with this, it being a Sunday, but apparently Lloyds is sufficiently fancy as to have people manning its general inquiries line (the book provides a number) on the weekends.

This is of limited help though, because as someone with no real discretionary income and no famous features it's not really practical for me to ensure a feature. I'm not even sure what my most valuable feature is. I have some quite nice tattoos I suppose? Let's go with that.

I'm counting this as a success anyway, since the book told me to try insuring my best feature, not succeed. And at least the task got me to think about what that is.

Day 77: Finally, Monday saw me solving all my problems with the implications of violence. While waiting at the information counter to ask where my bus back to London went from I consistently cracked my knuckles. I don't know if anyone noticed but I certainly got a swift and accurate answer. Though that might have been because I asked an incredibly simple and straightforward question.

I was on a coach most of the day, which limited my chances to threaten violence. I had a set of seats to myself, so didn't really have to scare people away. I did make sure to that dramatic neck cracking thing if anyone looked like they might want to sit next to me. Maybe that helped to keep the seats free? It's hard to tell.

A task for the eschatologically inclined perhaps, as this one asks me to prepare for an imminent divine apocalypse by self-assessing my likelihood of going to heaven/hell/other.

To this end I'm given three lists of things I may have done in the past, asked to see which list I've done the most from, and then to consign myself to ending up in the corresponding post-life place. Or start doing things off one particular list to get where I want, I guess. So here's what I've done off each list:

Good Shit:

Comforted crying child

Gave to charity

Fed the hungry

Did a good turn

Helped the aged

Forgave an enemy

Went to church (not sure if this counts since I didn't really go willingly, and stopped as soon as I could aged 10)

Have been a good listener

Dried the dishes without being asked

Alright, so that gives me a total of 9 good deeds out of a possible 21. I guess I'm not that great a person? Or the list was biased against me. (Rewound videotapes before returning them, for example. When was the last time anyone rented a VHS tape?)

Bad Shit:

Fornicated with strangers

Lied to my mother

Engaged in sodomy

Talked behind backs

"Borrowed" library books forever (My highschool library's copies of the Lord of the Rings books)

Okay, only 5 things off the evil list, so I guess I'm not hellbound. Again though, this list is full of particularly specific things like "Told orphan they were ugly" and "Chronically undertipped hookers".

Other shit:

Kept CDs in alphabetical order

Preferred pepper to salt

Never really had a favourite movie

And only 3 off the other things list. Well damn, when I got 9/21 to start with I thought I was doomed, but it turns out to be more off the good list than the other two combined. Go me! Or maybe, since I've got a total of 17/63 I just haven't done enough stuff in general? I'm not sure this list is the right place to start though, containing as it does such highlights as "Painted a spare room fuschia" or "Secretly resented my children".

Day 71, much like the writing to the military or the government, is one of those tasks that involves sending off a letter to little or no likely result. Maybe this book's secret goal isn't to produce super spies after all, it's to keep the postal service going by encouraging the sale of stamps.

Anyway, today's thing to post out is an entry form to Mister World. I didn't realise that was really still a thing, but okay. I poked around on the internet to find out where to send the form and found that A) there's a whole bunch of categories, like Mr. World Extreme Sport, and B) That this guy was last year's winner of the main event:

So I don't exactly rate my chances here. Maybe I can get in one of the minor side categories? Mr World Glowing Personality?

Also, in the process of looking this stuff up I discovered that Miss Curaçaois some kind of badass bird themed superhero.

Look at that, that outfit has goddamn talons. I've never actually watched a Miss Universe, are they all secretly trying out for the Justice League?

Anyway, my application form has been sent off, so that's this task complete.

Okay, my keyboard appears to have mostly recovered from its unplanned encounter with some cranberry juice (the right shift doesn't work and the up arrow sometimes presses itself, but hey) so let's catch up with what we missed.

Day 67: Draw someone on public transport, see how they react. Alright so I am not an amazing artist and have never claimed to be (I guess I am somewhere in the wide swathe of territory between my one housemate who is very good, and my other who claims not to be able to draw a straight line). Two things in particular at which I am bad are sketches from life and faces.So sketching someone's face from life was never going to result in a masterpiece.

That said, I think the result came out okay for something drawn quickly and furtively with a slightly blunt pencil? Y'all can be the judge:

I rushed it a bit, because I had no idea when he might get off the train (for the record it turned out to be after about 10 minutes, at Camden). The book said to see how they reacted, but either I drew too subtly or this guy just didn't care, because there was basically no reaction.

I guess doing this on a regular basis would improve my quick sketching and transform the tube into a free life drawing class? Maybe a bit weird though to end up with a book full of stranger's faces.

Day 68: Evaluate my father. The timing on this one seems a little weird, falling as it does the day before mother's day. Then again there have already been some weird timing quirks with this book, owing to tasks falling on different days of the week than they did when originally published.

The book provides a few questions to answer on the topic, so I'll go through those and add any extra comment where needed.

Age: I want to say maybe 52? I guess I am straight up failing as a son here by not knowing the exact answer.

Age when he had me: If my previous answer was right, then I guess 25.

What I call him: Dad. This one was a list of options to choose from, and also included Father, Papa, Pop, and Bastard.

General questions:

Has provided me with a sense of stability: Y

Has provided me with a sense of security: Y

His relationship with my mother has made me believe loving relationships are: The norm (the other choices here were 'hard work' and 'a bitter illusion'.)

My father's relationship with me: has been that of a positive role model which has enabled me to identify with him and develop as a balanced person. (The other two choice here were basically "he's an evil tyrant who puts me down" and "he's absent, leaving me confused and unresolved".)

So that was the whole survey. I guess he came out with a pretty solid result there. With the book's emphasis on awful parenting in some of the available choices, and some of the previous weird tasks around children I'm really starting to have my concerns about the authors.

Day 69: Scare myself shitless. Just sit there and think all about bad things. The book helpfully provides a long list of horrible things. Terrorism, serial killers, cancer, nuclear war, global warming, child abuse and ebola get prime page space in big text, with dozens of others scattered around smaller.

Some of these smaller ones are a little peculiar: Kyoto, playground, appeal, innocence, doctor, stay positive, local community. Not entirely sure what about those is meant to instill a sense of terror. Traumatic memories of falling off the swing as a child? A fear of being trapped in a creepy local community like the one in Hot Fuzz? A rampant phobia of the Japanese.

But so I do it, and I sit there thinking about the inevitability of mortality, and how the odds are in favour of spending a lot of life alone and scared or sad, and I feel bad. And well, that's about it? The tasks makes me feel bad for a while. So that sucked.

Day 70: Confuse future historians by incorrectly dating things. I do rather wish I had one of those label makers that everyone ends up playing with at some point in their childhood. You know, the ones where you laboriously stamp the letters into some adhesive plastic, then chop that plastic off the reel and affix it to stuff. I think date labels made with one of those would go nicely with this task.

I have to settle for a chunky black marker instead. I have an old mp3 player, an iRiver model from around 2005 which gets 1263AD written on the back. A slightly broken old firewire harddrive has 2047 scratched into the inside of the casing. Perhaps someday this will mildly confuse an archaeologist. I think Calvin and Hobbes once had a bit about alien museum curators reassembling his skeleton all wrong and being confused. This isn't on quite the same scale, but hey.

So there you go, backlog dealt with and four successes in a row.

One of those weird "This is silly and nothing will happen" type tasks for day 66. The book wants me to activate my appendix and see whether or not instead of being a useless little organ it actually holds great power. I'm going to go ahead and spoiler the rest of the post: it doesn't.

The book has a few suggestions on how to go about activating the appendix, ranging from the silly to the harmful. At the milder end there's wearing a heat pack or cold pack over it for the day, or keeping a mobile phone in a pocket over it. At the opposite end of the scale there is jabbing needles into it. Now I'm not a medical professional, but I don't think stabbing a needle into one's appendix (or really any other organ) is a good thing to try at home of an evening.

I take one of the less invasive options and keep my phone roughly situated over my appendix throughout a large part of the day. By the end though I haven't gained any new functionality. Possibly the magical super-appendix won't respond because I went into the task as a bitter cynic, expecting failure. Possibly it's that I didn't go far enough and should have taken the needles route after all. Or possibly it's that the whole idea is silly.

Given that this book is a collected best of for several years of publications, they presumably had at least a handful of challenges they could have set for any given day. Why couldn't they have picked more interesting things like day 65, and fewer silly nonsense tasks? I'll have to get all the other books next year, go through them and make my own selection of best days, and do those.

I found this one quite fun, probably the best of March so far. The aim of the day was to strengthen a friendship by trusting someone with my life.

Finding a way to actually put my life in any degree of risk, but in a manner that could be managed and made safe by someone else was a slight challenge. If there'd been more time to prep for this (as with previous tasks, making this a one week challenge or something might have had more interesting results) I could perhaps have arranged to go parachuting or mountain climbing or something.

That's not an option though, so instead we have to find something a little more feasible at short notice. Simon volunteers to help, and our first thought is to have him lead my blindfolded onto a train, and trust him that there is actually a train there and I'm not just about to step onto the tracks. There are a few logistical problems with the idea though, and it ends up being scrapped (which turns out to be fortunate, as all the trains from Waterloo were cancelled so we'd have been shit out of luck with that one).

Plan B, sticking with the blindfold theme, is to have me led across the road in a high traffic area, with me not knowing whether the cars have stopped or not. We look around, find a crossing where the lights don't beep when it's safe to cross, and I don the improvised blindfold. We stand and wait for a few minutes, so that I lose track of the patterns of traffic (it was also right next to a big roundabout, so there's enough traffic noise from all directions that I can't really tell what cars are moving where.)

To add a little extra complication to things I spin round in circles a few times. Remember on the blind day task I said my sense of where I was facing wasn't as good as I thought, and I ended up 90 degrees off from where I aimed? Same thing here. I was fairly sure I was keeping track of how many rotations I'd done, and that I'd ended up just a few degrees off where I started. Simon asked if I knew where the road was and I gestured with some confidence towards where I thought it was. Apparently I wasn't even close, and when I was sent out across the road a few seconds later I found out I was crossing one in entirely the opposite direction to the one I'd started facing.

So I tottered out across the road, hoping not to get hit by a bus, and was profoundly glad a few long seconds later to feel the textured pavement under my feet indicating I'd made it to the other side. I was safe, my trust had not been misplaced.

So thank you Simon for not taking this chance to lead me to my death. Please continue not killing me.

Okay, a recap of the last few days. Didn't post them as they happened because I was super busy, but I was doing them. So here they are.

Day 62: Send my suggestions to the government. Well I suppose I've already written to the military, so advising the government on public policy is just the next step. And certainly our government needs a lot of advice. Though I rather suspect their current course isn't so much from lack of good advice as from having a specific agenda that runs contrary to the sort of thing I might advise. Still, the book bids me send suggestions, so send I did.

"Dear The Government1

Please find below a list of ideas on how you might be more effective.

1) The NHS. It is quite nice. Granted it may occasionally lie about death rates, hire specialist clinical coders from US insurance firms to massage the stats, and gag whistleblowers, but whose fault is that? Mostly yours really, and those who came before you.

In spite of those failings though, it's pretty good. Free healthcare, generally ensuring most of the nation isn't sick. That's something I think most of us can get on board with, people not being sick. Being sick is awful. So possibly, and I'm just throwing this out there, but possibly rather than dismantling it and moving to a more American style private model (a model enjoyed by no one except perhaps the health insurance industry), possibly it might be an idea to focus on areas in which the system is lacking and making those better. Long term care and chronic conditions, mental health, etc.

2) Welfare and housing. Look, not to be a bother but the whole workfare thing is morally bankrupt and more than a little illogical, isn't it? Not only are you reducing the number of jobs available by creating a pool of unpaid labour, you're also reducing the amount of time jobseekers have to look for actual work. The sort of work that gets them off benefits. It's pretty much a fulltime activity applying for things. So stop that, I guess?

Lastly, that whole austerity thing. It isn't really working. Stop it.

Yours,

Dr. Theophilius Blount2"

I'm going to be honest, as persuasive as my arguments were I don't rate my chances of Cameron and pals actually putting them into practice. But ah well.

Day 63: Make a non-obscene phonecall to a random number. Okay, so the book lists a few examples and while not obscene they're still pretty weird and creepy things to say to strangers? For example "I bet if we met  we'd be friends straight away," and "I admire the way you keep your garden so well tended." Honestly I worry about the mindset of this book's authors sometimes.

So aside from the creepiness of their suggestions there's also the fact that I'm just a little bit phobic of making calls, especially to any number that isn't the mobile number of someone I know (specifically mobile, I always have this vague worry with landlines that someone else will pick up and I'll say something embarrassing before I realise who's on the line). It's all Pat Sharp's fault3.

This is quite clearly another of those norm violating, get comfortable breaking rules and being odd type of tasks. I have another book, the A-Z of Experimental Tourism, which is all about unusual ways and themes of travelling. One of them involves ringing a random name in the city you plan to visit and persuading them to give you a list of five places there that are significant to them, and then visiting those. Which is honestly pretty interesting and maybe also less weird than this? So I figure doing that still satisfies the book's task and also is way less awkward than calling someone and going "Hi, this may sound strange but I bet you have a lovely laugh," or something.

Unfortunately, I do not get a list on my first call, what I get is a very confused but quite polite old lady from Duluth, MN. She listens as I try to explain the whole concept, but I don't think it's ever really clear, and after a few minutes I thank her and hang up. I don't try another number because international call fees. So I guess what came out of this task is that some grandma in Minnesota has a slightly confusing story to tell her family about the strange English guy who called in the afternoon? That'll do.

Day 64: Lure a fly onto this page and squash it. Are there special fly lures? I don't know. I didn't even see a fly today, let alone figure out a way to tempt one into a small corner of a page in a book. (The page has a small red box marked out, which I assume is where I was meant to do the squashing.) So, failure?

1 The book says to write to the government, not to any particular member of it, so I have taken that literally

2I will continue to use this pen name for any tasks like these, having adopted it for the initial military letter writing job.

3My traumatic Pat Sharp experience: As a young child, maybe 5 or 6, I called into a contest on one of those Saturday morning kids shows. It was a question about Sonic the Hedgehog, with some Sega stuff as a prize. And oh boy did child me ever fucking love some Sonic the goddamn Hedgehog. I was going to win that shit. Except the phone rang, I heard "Hi, I'm Pat Sharp and you're-" and I panicked, let out a squeak, and hung up in terror. Since then I've always had a slight dread of phones.

Day 61 was a weird and slightly uncomfortable task. It's also one that calls for a little audience participation. The goal of the day is "Check your sex life is normal". This is to be done apparently by filling out a small survey, making it public and asking people to provide feedback.

So yeah, feel a bit strange posting this sort of thing up but I guess I didn't decide to do this book without expecting a little discomfort? Here then is the book's sex survey, all answers as honest as can be.

Virginity Lost: Yes At Age: 18

Number of Partners 16 (I assume this means total, not current)

Venereal Diseases Current: None Past: None

Intercourse Regular: Yes Frequency: ~15 times monthly (Maybe? I guess that seems about an accurate average?)

Fantasies Favourite: Erm, so I guess pretty much anything under the general main umbrella of "kink" and BDSM?

Okay so that survey wasn't actually too awful. The audience participation part is in asking people to categorise this as one of the following: Normal, Boring, Perverted, Grounds to cut off all contact. So I guess have at it.

The first task of March was unfortunately another one of those silly ones, with not all that much to sink one's teeth into.

The idea was apparently to spend the day trying to make the Dalai Llama lose his temper, to prove that everyone will flip out eventually. The book says he was giving a public talk in Nottingham on day 60 of the year of publication, so I guess the idea was that everyone would go along to that and heckle him?

Obviously this is less practical a few years on when he's back in Dharamsala. And even if he were possible to meet and annoy it seems a little petty to try and wind up an old man just to see if he'll snap. I am not an expert on Tibetan culture or the teachings of the Dalai Llama by any means, but for a religious leader he seems like an okay kind of guy. Generally either somewhat progressive in his views or happy to just let people get on with their lives.

So yeah, I obviously didn't attempt this one due to simple logistical reasons, and would have felt kind of bad if I had actually made a proper go at it.

And so we end out month 2 with an easy but kind of underwhelming task. Job for the day? Work the word "vortex" into as many conversations as possible. The book helpfully provides a few suggested examples, which I won't reprint here1.

So I set about dropping vortexes in wherever I can. Sometimes it's easy "Remember Slough?" "Fuck yes, that place was a vortex of all the worst things in life."

Other times it's a bit more forced. "How are you today?" "I'm a vortex of goodness." "What?"

To be honest the main barrier to this is that I often found myself just sort of forgetting. This is the problem with tasks like this or the smile at kids one - as they're neither a single instance with a clear end like the uterus eating, nor an ongoing thing that's hard to get out of like the blindfold day, I sometimes just forget to keep up with them. So that's one thing to aim for going forward, is keeping this kind of task in mind more.

So that's the end of month two, thoughts so far? I've found that the tasks have been generally easier to complete but on the whole not quite as fun to do as the first month. There have been some highlights, certainly, but February in general seemed a down month for crazy tasks. Possibly it's just that the new project shine has worn off and it's turned into routine? I am not quitting though, or becoming one of those tumblrs where updates slowly become more infrequent and then eventually stop without fanfare. If this does stop for any reason I'll at least make a big thing of it and record myself setting the book on fire or something.

This month has had less stuff to support the ongoing theory of book as spy indoctrination. Perhaps it's just more subtle. Can't lay that sort of thing on too thick after all.

1 I'm already pretty much giving away the main point of the book by describing every task. If I start typing out the actual text on the pages I feel I'm getting a bit close to just scanning the whole thing in and saying fuck the publisher's copyright and what not.