From a nameless message-board elsewhere which you may or may not have already seen:

If you say that A = 1 and B = 2 and C = 3 and so on and use this to add up the letters in numbers then there are only two numbers which equal themselves TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY ONE, and TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY NINE.

I ended up perpetrating this excrescence of a Perl script showing this conjecture to hold for numbers between 0 and 9999.

The following was then suggested - in essence, after showing by brute force that the conjecture held for numbers from 0 to 9999, 'every time you add a zero on, you'd add maybe another two words to the total, coming to substantially less than ten times the alphabetic total, but the number itself has gone up by 10 times and so the growth of the number will always be higher than the growth of the alphabetical total.'

QED?

Not quite.

After all, at some point you run out of words for numbers. For arbitrarily large numbers, the words that might be used to represent them will eventually also have to become arbitrarily long. You might argue that new words would be of analagous length to existing words, but this is not the case as you will simply run out of letter combinations after a while, and at some point, new words for numbers would always have to be longer than previous new words for numbers.

Since it is not reasonable to suggest that such new words would necessarily always be of minimal length, they themselves can be of arbitrary length. In which case, the original conjecture falls, though we cannot say which numbers it falls to.

I'm so glad to have cleared that up. Unless I'm talking bollocks, which is possible. Hence the Maths Fun Challenge bit, to wit:

Am I talking bollocks?

It was a stupid weekend, in which I played three gigs in less than twenty-four hours on Friday night and Saturday during the day.

I really shouldn't have booked myself two gigs on the Friday. I should have turned down the second one. Mind you, I attempted to, but after I told the guy from the Australian band, 'well, no, I am actually playing earlier on that day' he replied that it was ok as he was booking a late set anyway, so I'd be able to come down after my first gig. My mistake was not to immediately reply 'fuck off', so I found myself roped into it.

So, unwillingly, and late, after the first gig on Friday night (to which the cello player failed to turn up in the end, being taken unwell) I tore myself away from the interesting band who had followed the interesting 20's / 30's / 40's jazz singer I'd stayed to see and buggered off to the 12-bar in Denmark Street.

Turned out that S. the new drummer, who was also running the night, had overbooked himself, and was trying to fit no less than eight bands into the evening, including us.

See if you can guess what his favourite drug is. Go on, guess.

Anyway.

We went on and played three songs, which was short and fun, and then I hit the bar heavily.

Which was when it started getting silly. Some random Italian guy who wanted to make everyone think he was Russian kept buying me shots of vodka, which it would have been as impolite to turn down as it would have been impolite not to down in one then whack the bar with the empty shot glass. But I should have guessed that it would all come to no good.

Pretty soon I was at the opposite end of the bar to random Italian guy for no particular reason, and found myself being flirted with outrageously by some random and cute Canadian girl. A., the singer from my band was in the vicinity, and then... bam. Canadian girl disappears. Oh no, there she is, flirting outrageously with A.

I'll have another drink then. Oh, hello cute Canadian girl. Why, you wish to flirt outrageously with me some more. That's fine by me. How are you doing anyway?

So she oscillated between the two of us for some time... at which point my memory becomes hazy.

Next thing I know I'm walking along Oxford Street yelling at A. down the phone.

Then I'm in Cafe Helen on Edgware Road eating shwarma.

Then I'm waking up at home next day in a panic, realising that no, it's ok, I have time to get to my piano gig that afternoon, so long as I get up and leave immediately.

And I don't know what happened.

I rang A. after the piano thing apologising and asking if I'd taken a swing at him or anything. He told me no, it was all cool and he too had been very drunk, I'd just upped and left, then sent him an angry text message, following which he'd rung.

I don't know. I'm kind of embarrassed. I have no idea why I am telling you all this.

Anyway. The other rock band I'm playing with have some new mp3s if you want to hear some loud rock type things.

And I have now been procrastinating from things I ought to be doing for even longer than before.

I'll stop now.