Gah! The team behind Big Brother are seriously running out of ideas. I'm not even talking about last week's 'recreate the dance moves from a music video' task which -- to my eyes at least -- was a little bit like the 'recreate the dance moves from a music video' task they had earlier in the series. You know, the one on treadmills.

This evening though, they did at least manage to avoid copying something they'd already done. Instead they copied something that somebody else had already done. They copied the Prisoner's Dilemma endgame from Golden Balls. Of course, Golden Balls had already copied it from Shafted, who had in turn copied it from Trust Me, a show hosted by Nick Bateman who had previously been a contestant on -- you've guessed it -- Big Brother. How, er, coincidental.

Anyway, to have two of the current Big Brother housemates playing the Prisoner's Dilemma game this evening wasn't just unoriginal, it simply didn't work, at least from an entertainment point of view. The two players have lived with each other for months and would still have to live with each other for a while after tonight's exercise in game theory was over. Of course, under those circumstances, they're not going to do each other over! Especially since the £25,000 they'd each get from sharing the pot is a fairly chunky sum in itself. Maybe if each person had to choose between getting just £10,000 each or stealing £50,000 for themselves, that might have given them more of a decision.

Of course, these poor ideas probably wouldn't happen at all if Big Brother was on for a reasonable length of time each year instead of being dragged out for months and months...

Meanwhile, the third game in the new series of Deal or No Deal also happened to be the third disasterous game in the new series too. Val didn't do too badly to salvage £1500 from it.

Today I enrolled onto a course to obtain a 'Certificate in Education in the Lifelong Learning Sector'. Hopefully the first thing that I'll learn is a decent way to abbreviate the course's title. The initial letters spell out CELLS -- let's hope that I don't feel like I'm in prison whilst taking the course, yeah? Right? Huh? Eh?

Ahem. That was possibly the most strained attempt at humour I've ever tried. Please forgive me.

Before I'm officially accepted onto the course, I have to be interviewed by a course tutor, just to make sure that the course is actually appropriate for me. Now, I thought that such an interview might be a quick chat over the phone or something, but I thought wrong. I actually have to attend a 'group interview workshop' at 9.30am on Friday 5 September, where, amongst other activities, I will be required to complete a "free writing initial assessment".

Does this mean I'll have to come up with a short story or something? I'll need to start developing characters and plot arcs pretty sharpish if I'm going to have to turn my hand to a spot of creative writing! Maybe I should have a go at something right now...

Olav Svensson from Barcelona stood gazing out of the window at the balcony of his bungalow flat. A single tear fell from the end of his nose, having travelled there from one of his eyes. The left one.

Just then, a beautiful woman walked in.

"How did you - ?" said Olaf, not bothering to finish the sentence due to his being quite surprised to see her.

"Shh," said the woman, who happened to have a dog with her. The woman then walked over to Olav and snogged him.

"Oh Fatima!" moaned Olaf, remembering her name from his memory. "I thought you were married to somebody else and thus unavailable to snog me!"

Fatima looked quizzical. Her long blonde hair seemed to beckon Olav over to where she was standing with that quizzical expression displayed all over her face. "I am married to somebody else!" she exclaimed. "But my jealous husband doesn't know I'm here. This story is all about our extra-marital affair! Who knows what will happen to us between now and the end?!"

"Oh Fatima!" repeated Olaf.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Can you believe that I actually made all that up as I went along?! I am so talented in the ways of romantic fiction! This interview next week is going to be a doddle!

Meanwhile, the tale of today's Deal or No Deal wasn't quite so heart-warming. Unlucky Nikki was very unlucky as she unluckily had to endure an extremely unlucky game. The £100 she eventually won seemed like a fortune at the end of it.

Let's get some things straight right now. Led Zeppelin's greatest riff is The Rover. Black Sabbath's best ever riff is Supernaut. And the riff that Deep Purple can call their finest is Black Night (although Space Truckin' comes pretty close). Of these facts there can be no disputing. In fact, if you looked up the phrase 'cast-iron, axiomatic, self-evident truth' in the dictionary it'd probably give those exact statements as examples, perhaps even playing the riffs at you if it were a special riff-based dictionary that used riffs to illustrate the definitions of phrases that nobody would realistically ever use. I'm not altogether sure that such a dictionary exists, actually. Maybe there are complicated copyright issues involved.

I am digressing.

The point I'm making is that in Planet Rock's poll to find out ROCK'S GREATEST 40 RIFFS, not one of those songs featured. Instead we saw a top ten which featured Whole Lotta Love from Led Zep, Sabbath's Paranoid, and the overall winner, Deep Purple's Smoke On The Water. But these riffs aren't better! They're just more famous.

Perhaps my familiarity with the more well-known repeated musical phrases that did make the chart is actually dampening my enthusiasm for them. Am I judging these riffs too harshly, simply because they're more famous, possibly trying to give the impression that I'm cool and knowledgeable by deliberately going for the slightly more obscure stuff. Maybe the fact that I've heard Whole Lotta Love being used as the theme tune of Top of the Pops for so long has diminished all of its power for me. I mean, sure, I do have a vague memory of hearing that Jimmy Page riff for the first time when I was a child and liking it a lot, so maybe it does deserve recognition in this chart.

That doesn't change the fact that Smoke On The Water has always been disappointingly mediocre, though.

(Oh, and whilst I'm on the subject, AC/DC's best ever riff is not Whole Lotta Rosie, as those Planet Rock voters seem to think. It is actually Riff Raff. The clue is in the name, folks!)

Elsewhere, after a month's break, Deal or No Deal is back on! Today, Brian who once hugged me finally got his game broadcast. After a promising start, a combination of bad luck and inappropriate optimism meant that his game only gave him fifty pence.

After the sad demise of Humphrey Lyttelton earlier this year, reports are suggesting that Radio 4's brilliant I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue is going to continue with a new presenter. Well, there'll be a series with a number of guest presenters before they settle down with a permanent choice.

I like this idea. Although nobody could ever really replicate the uniquly dry manner in which Humph delivered his lines, it might be nice to see what qualities other hosts would bring to the silly proceedings. Just so long as the host doesn't try to do all the Samantha jokes in the same style. They need to be themselves. Having a number of different hosts for a few shows will give people a chance to see which presenter might work well long-term.

Obvious candidates such as Stephen Fry and Sandi Toksvig have been suggested for the role, but quite frankly they've already got other panel shows to be doing. However, there's been an idea that Jarvis Cocker might be a suitable man for the job. Whilst it might seem strange to choose a deadpan musician with no history of doing comedy to host, it does make sense when you remember that before Clue, Humph himself was a deadpan musician with no history of doing comedy. It all fits!

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the new series next year. If it's even half as good as we've had in the past, it'll be fantastic.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I have a confession to make. Despite having worked as a teacher for five years now, I actually have no formal teaching qualifications.

The reason for this is that I sort of fell into the profession. I never really had any desire to become a teacher when I was younger, and so I didn't bother studying for a PGCE or anything like that. When I did have the idea to stand in front of people telling them about the delights of algebra for a living, local colleges were so desperate for maths teachers that they simply overlooked the fact that I hadn't been to teaching college.

I did make a start down the long road towards gaining a Certificate in Education, commonly referred to as the 'Cert Ed', but I found it really quite difficult. Not the understanding of the concepts, but the writing of the essays! Having done science A-levels and a degree in mathematics, I really didn't have any experience of academic essays at all, and I baulked at the level of formality and rigour that was expected, particularly when it came to referencing published literature and the like. In fact, I did more than just baulk at it; I found the going so difficult that I ultimately failed to complete the work and thus didn't get any qualification from it at all. Since I already had plenty of teaching work, I wasn't really motivated to put in the effort and write these essays, the format of which I found so alien.

Since then I've had a nagging feeling in my mind that if my current employers weren't able to offer me enough work, being devoid of teaching qualifications I'd find it hard to find alternative employment. I can always do private tutoring, of course, but that alone wouldn't be enough to pay the rent. And yesterday I found out that from September I'll probably have 16 teaching hours per week at the place where I work. That's two hours fewer per week than last year, which was in turn four hours per week fewer than the previous year there. My income is dwindling.

I think it's about time that I bit the bullet and started the long road towards getting myself that Cert Ed. I'm not looking forward to it, but I've decided that I'm going to enrol on a course starting this autumn. I'm sure that there are plenty of people reading this who won't understand what the big deal is in writing a few essays, and who could probably knock out the required work in a couple of afternoons, but for me it's torturous. For the (former) arts and humanities students amongst you who are used to this kind of thing, imagine suddenly being thrown into having to study degree level maths or science. Imagine how hard that'd be to adjust to. That's the kind of struggle I'm faced with, only in reverse.

Wish me luck, everybody. I think I'm going to need it.

If a person doesn't make the effort to keep their living space tidy, instead choosing to ignore it and only do the things that are easier like sleeping or watching television, eventually it gets to the point where the piles of clutter are having a seriously detrimental effect to that person's comfort and well-being.

Which is a bit like life in general, really.

I thought that the Madison bicycle event a couple of days ago was going to be the silliest thing in this year's Olympic Games. I was wrong.

There's an Australian bloke competing in the Olympic Games' BMX races who has decided to officially change his name by deed poll. He's appearing on my TV screen under the moniker 'Kamakazi'. That's it. There's no other name there; he's not 'John Kamakazi' or 'Bruce Kamakazi', or even 'Kamakazi Smith'. He's just plain old 'Kamakazi'.

What is this person trying to achieve by choosing such a ridiculous name for himself? Is he really suggesting that racing about on a pushbike is as dangerous as being a wartime suicide bomber? Maybe I'm being over-sensitive here, but that does seem a little crass to me. Substituting an 'a' where there should be an 'i' doesn't make it any better, either. It just makes him look like even more of an idiot to me.

I have come to the conclusion that the practice of a person changing their name by deed poll should be abolished. The system is clearly being abused. Although I would probably make an exception for people called 'Hugh G. Rection'.

Today I finished a re-read of Danny Wallace's Yes Man book, in which the author opines that being open to opportunities and saying Yes to them is a good thing.

Then I read that cosy Channel 4 gameshow Countdown is advertising for an 'arithmetician' to replace the departing Carol Vorderman.

Are these two things connected? Is Danny somehow telling me that I should say Yes to trying to get my face on national television every weekday afternoon; Yes to persuading swathes of pensioners and unemployed people to develop a grudging respect for me through my demonstrating a basic understanding of primary school level arithmetic? Seems unlikely, but I decided to have a look at the application form anyway.

"Applications are open to all, both male and female candidates, but applicants will be expected to have excellent numeric and literacy skills."

Excellent literacy skills? Surely knowing the difference between a vowel and a consonant is enough, isn't it? I think I could manage that. Also, luckily I am male and so qualify there too.

"Previous television experience is not necessary..."

Not a problem. I watch little else.

"...although the charm and charisma to appeal to viewers is."

Oh dear.

The form itself only has two difficult questions on it. The first asks me to write down why I think I'm the best person for the role in 50 words. I suspect this is really just a test to see if I can accurately count to 50, so I should be okay with that. The other tricky question is the bog-standard 'use this space to include more information in support of your application' one. I'm not so sure what to write there. I could mention the fact that I've always had a soft spot for the 11 times table, and that it's a shame that there's no '11' tile in the numbers game. I think that might be a bit risky though, since they might interpret it as me being overly critical of their choice of numbers they use on the tiles. On the other hand, maybe they'll admire my radical new approach to the format. It'll show them that I'm an ideas man! Perhaps introducing an '11' tile is the shot in the arm the programme needs!

It'd be far better than having someone with 'charm and charisma' anyway...

This morning, I watched some of the coverage of the Olympic Games. In particular, there was a cycling race called the Madison which was possibly the most bizarrely incomprehensible sporting event I've ever witnessed on my TV screen. I shall try to explain the rules of this weird spectacle.

Here goes. There are literally loads of teams taking part in the race, which means that the cycling arena is really quite crowded with bikes speeding round the circuit. That would be fine, except for the fact that each team consists of two cyclists, only one of whom is actually racing at any particular time. It's the non-racing cyclist's job to just amble about conserving their strength whilst getting in everybody else's way.

When the non-racing cyclist feels up to it, he will hold hands with his team-mate for a bit. This isn't anything to do with any feelings of love he may harbour for his sporting colleague, rather it is an action suggesting that he wants to be swap positions and become the racing cyclist for a while. It's a bit like those tag-team wrestlers, only more affectionate.

The idea of the race is for each team to try and break away from the main pack of cyclists, and then lap the circuit so that they rejoin that main pack again at the back. The team that does this the most times wins. However, it is pretty much impossible to work out exactly how the 'main pack' is actually defined. Sometimes the racing cyclists are all together in a bunch, and at other times they're all spread out in a formation that really couldn't be described as a 'pack' by any reasonable definition of that term. Since the non-racing cyclists are scattered all over the place confusing matters too, the whole concept of a 'main pack' is rendered utterly irrelevant. Except it isn't, because the whole point of the game is to break away from it.

Making sense so far?

Every now and then, a whistle will blow. This means that the racing cyclists should start sprinting for one lap, and bonus points are awarded for the winners of each sprint. Lesser bonus points are awarded for teams that come second, third and fourth too. However, the awarding of these points seemed entirely arbitrary since it was all in relation to this 'main pack' of cyclists that -- as has already been mentioned -- didn't always actually exist. And these bonus points didn't really make much difference anyway since it's the lapping that wins the race.

This all goes on for about an hour.

Since the whole thing is pretty much impossible to follow from the position of spectator, I can only imagine how confusing it must be if you're actually competing in the race itself. I can't think that there's much time to consider strategy. Therefore the organisers could probably do away with the rigmarole of actually having people racing around the circuit and instead just pick the names of the winners randomly out of a hat.

Or, here's an thought, why not have a race where the winner is the one who manages to reach the finishing line before anybody else does? Or is that idea too radical?

So, it'll have been a year this week since I signed up to an internet dating site. I'm not going to renew my subscription.

Okay, so I'll be the first to admit that I could have probably done more to introduce myself to the ladies on the site. I didn't just sit back doing absolutely nothing though! I did spontaneously send a few e-mails out, most of which were ignored. Correction: all of which were ignored. The only times that anybody responded to me were the few times when they'd been the ones who'd initiated the conversation.

However, since the one and only actual date that took place turned out to be a great big ball of stress, I'm not in a rush to repeat the experience. In fact, there has only been one person who has made contact with me since that time anyway -- a woman who is a couple of years older than me and who I've been conversing politely with via e-mail for the past few weeks. In fact, I feel as though I've been a little stand-offish with her actually. When she made a flirtatious remark about me signing her underwear (because I used to be in a band and apparently that's what people in bands do to female undergarments all the time...) I got slightly scared and changed the subject. There have been no further flirtatious remarks from either party. I've also been ignoring lots of other things she has been telling me too, instead preferring to discuss the fact that my legs were aching, something that she probably couldn't care less about.

They really did ache though.

I think what I've realised is that I'm just not too good at polite conversation. Or even impolite conversation, come to that. If somebody wants to tell me all about some interesting thing that happened to them today, chances are I won't find it so interesting. Instead I'll rudely try to change the subject to something like the forthcoming changes to the A-level Further Mathematics syllabus, or to Rachel's chances of winning this year's Big Brother. Or I'll just not bother responding at all, thus giving people the impression that I'm being unfriendly and antisocial. Which, of course, is exactly what I am being.

That's a nice upbeat way of ending this entry, then.