String fellow

Does anyone share my interest in magic squares - 4x4 (or larger) blocks of different numbers whose rows, columns, diagonals, corners etc. all add up to the same total? Below is one I worked out yesterday to reflect City's current points tally of 88. It's a good way to relieve the frustration of getting stuck on a difficult Sudoku puzzle and something I sometimes include in birthday cards, the recipient's age being the number total. Unfortunately, my method doesn't work for prime number totals, only composites. 08 26 17 37 38 16 22 12 23 10 40 15 19 36 09 24

This is the first time ever that City's points total has stood at 88. In the only other three seasons when they accrued more than that, they missed the two fat ladies out!

Poor Cov, having to live with the curse of the Ricoh (now CBS) Arena. That hidden Leicester City shirt will haunt them forever!

Imo, play-offs should only happen if there's a gap of less than 10 points between the 3rd. and 4th. placed clubs. Btw, if it's logical to have play-offs for promotion, why not also have them for relegation? Maybe we'd have survived in the PL last season if they'd been used.

Not sure I'd be so enthusiastic to see Ipswich promoted, if say they scored a 99th minute winner in their last game, putting us into the play-offs, which we then lose, and a club 20 points below us in the final league table goes up instead. That would be extremely hard to stomach.

The league tables should add an asterisk or some other symbol against the names of clubs definitely in that zone, imo.

They're third from top and we're third from bottom of the form table for the last 6 matches. Also mirrored are the results. Them W/D/L = 4/1/1. Us W/D/L = 1/1/4. So a draw it is. Btw, the goat problem isn't Vardy missing sitters, it's a famous and very tricky maths problem involving a goat tethered to the edge of a circular field.

Except that, had one of them gone in, the game might have changed completely, with us hanging on to a slim lead before finally running out of steam (again) and still losing. Right now it seems like our best chance of automatic promotion is if Leeds or Ipswich lose their mojo, just as we have.

Enzo needs to bring a wheel brace and jack to Seagrave to put the wheels back on, otherwise this is going to be the most embarrassing meltdown ever, on a par with Jean van de Velde's triple bogey at the 72th. hole of the Open Golf in 1999.

Here's my adaptation of the first verse of William McGonagall's famously crap poem about the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879:- Beautiful road bridge of the silv’ry estuary Alas! I am very sorry to say That some lives have been taken away On the last Tuesday of March 2024, Which will be remember’d for evermore.

Bataclan, Manchester Arena, Re'im, Crocus. Where next?

I'm sure there's some dodgy logic in that statement!

Can't help thinking that if we only make the play-offs after being top virtually all season, the players will be so crestfallen that they'll completely blow it.

Galvani believed that frogs' legs muscle movements were caused by electricity somehow produced in the pelvis. Volta believed that the response was caused by salt in the muscle acting as an an electrolyte between the two different metals in contact with it at the time, a scalpel and perhaps a copper dish. It was this insight that resulted in his invention of the battery.

If anyone should be credited with 'inventing' electricity, my choice would be the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, who invented the first battery way back in 1799. Arguably, this was one of the greatest inventions ever, and finally disproved Luigi Galvani's idea that electricity was somehow produced by fluid in animals to bring about muscle movements.

At junior school, I vaguely remember learning that Newton invented both gravity and rainbows! Maybe that sentence is missing the phrase 'the theory of'. (Brian May always reminds me of Newton, for some reason.)

In Newton's defence, he had an awful childhood, without parents, and was socially inept throughout life. He was unable to make friends easily, never married, and almost certainly had what today would be called Asperger's syndrome. But he made the very best of his unfortunate situation by using his mind to be the equal of, or to outshine, all the other outstanding scientists and mathematicians of the time, including Leibniz, Hooke and the Bernoulli brothers. One example of his genius was to solve the problem of the fastest descent curve within just a few hours. Newtonian mechanics are at the heart of much of classical physics, and without him we'd have no gravity!

There's a high probability that this season will see the highest points total ever recorded by an English club which doesn't then gain promotion.

Not sure the FA Cup has much prestige now. Clubs fielding weakened teams, fifth round played mid-week, no replays after round 4, inconsistent rules regarding VAR usage, etc. all point to the FA Cup being only slightly shinier than the EFL Cup these days. I suspect that City would have happily traded their Bournemouth win for a win at Leeds.

There are three certainties in life: death, taxes and City taking a one-goal first-half lead in vital matches then hanging on until about 10 minutes from time when the opposition finally equalises then grabs a late winner via a deflected shot.

Footage of the long range B1 Bombers taking off last night didn't seem to specify where they were taking off from. I assume that it was from Lakenheath or maybe Cyprus or perhaps Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. It would be interesting to know.

He's clearly not the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus!

Sixth place over the last ten seasons has been achieved with the following number of points, going forward from 2013/14:- 72, 78, 74, 80, 75, 74, 70, 77, 75, 69. On that basis, two more wins would give us a better than even chance of at least making the play-offs. (Nightmare scenario: only making the play-offs then losing to Cov on pens in the final!)

A total of 69pts. is exactly half of the theoretical maximum total of 138pts. available in the Championship in a season. So if we lost every remaining game, we'd be averaging 1.5pts per game, which would still be above average, because draws are worth only 1pt.

Being a Swan match, a Vesta-gaard strike would set the place on fire!