You know the scenario, you're sitting at home or at work bored out of your mind, aimlessly cruising along this thing they once called the information superhighway da-di-da when, having exhausted all the sites you usually visit during the course of a day, you pop back onto my blog hoping that I've maybe updated it in the forty-five minutes since you last checked and thus provide you with a brief couple of minutes of fun and entertainment, perhaps even a tiny chance to escape, albeit momentarily, from this horrid world and the shameful lives that we all lead, when you discover that I have once again failed to upload anything at all so you jump to someone else's blog and find nothing new there either at which point you decide it might be a good time to check your email for the seventh time today, and it's not even lunchtime yet, but to your dismay your inbox is still empty so you go and make a cup of tea or something maybe a little stronger if you're that way inclined before settling back down and repeating the whole process again and again only to discover that there's still nothing new on here and you ask yourself "what is that lazy so-and-so doing? he hasn't posted anything for five days".

Sound familiar? I know this scenario because I experience it almost every day with blogs. And I know some of you do too. Whenever I view the statistics for this page (which is rare but today is one of those days) I see some mind-boggling pieces of information. I can often deduce, for example, who some of my regular visitors are thanks to information such as user-location, access time and visitor's ISP and OS language, all of which are recorded by my sitemeter.

So in the interests of entertainment I'd like to spoil you all with a brief awards ceremony, kind of like the oscars. All the following statistics were taken from the last 100 visits to this blog and basically cover the period of time from Friday lunchtime to Monday night. There are the three hotly-disputed categories, which are as follows:

Most visits by country
Most visits by a single person
Longest visit by a single person

First of all, Most visits by country:

Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly the clear winner here is Japan with 47, followed by the United States on 19, the United Kingdom 8, Australia 7, Spain 6, European Union 3 (?), Canada 2, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Korea, Norway and Switzerland 1, Unknown country 1

I can't explain the three visits from the EU, especially as I know the person in question is based in Newcastle, UK (therefore the UK should really read 11 visits and not 8). As for the sole visitor from the Unknown Country, well that's even more of an enigma. Could it be Kazakhstan? Or maybe Bhutan? No, probably not.

Just for the record, notable absences in the last few days include visits (or should I say a lack of visits) from Italy, Portugal, Finland, Sweden, Jamaica, Malaysia and Thailand, all countries which usually account for their fair share of visitors.

Okay, let's move on. Here is the award for Most visits by a single person:

Discounting visits made by people in Fukuoka (which because of their large number are more difficult to analyse and I don't have the time or the inclination to rake through the data), a total of twelve were made by two different Mac users, one most probably a tall chap in North Carolina and the other more than likely a Japanese living in Sydney, Australia. Both share the crown for having made six visits each. Well done! Notable mentions also go out to the guy who should have been studying in New York State and the girl who should have been preparing her lessons in Cádiz, Spain. You know who you are!

The final award, the one for the Longest visit by a single person, was a close one. The eventual winner, who managed an impressive seven minutes and forty-four seconds, appears to be a Japanese salaryman who was recorded enjoying my site whilst at work last Friday afternoon in Tokyo. However this is mostly speculation and it may equally have been a foreign tourist whiling away the hours in one of Tokyo's many internet cafes.

Could this have been you by any chance?

Getting paid to gamble?

My hot vein of virtual football form has continued with another rather fortuitous occurrence. Mistyping ten pence in haste saw me inadvertently place a bet for ten pounds at 4-1 which, would you believe, miraculously won! This made me very happy indeed. I'll let you guys work out the maths.

In addition to this I've been keeping myself busy on the spy trail. I have now completed five spying missions on top British retail outlets. And my secret agent skills, not to mention my secret agent charms, are skyrocketing!

Today I had two such missions to two separate branches of the same chain. It was a chain, no less, of bookmakers. My mission briefing was to place a five pound bet in each store on a horse or greyhound race to be run whilst I was in the shop. I was also on the look-out for a whole host of secret things during my visits but, for reasons of secrecy, I cannot reveal what they were. Of course my two five-pound bets will be refunded with my pay, however the appeal of these missions was that should I win, I get to keep the winnings. I figured this was a good deal for me because whichever way I looked at it, this was a win-win situation. Hence I chose two missions rather than just one (and I would have accepted more had there been more missions available within walking distance of my house. As it was these two missions were miles from my house and miles from each other. And I did it all on foot. And in the rain).

Now despite getting wet all of this was made much nicer by the fact that, due to an amazing display of mystical talent, my horse in the first shop came in first, at 5-1. What can I say? Twenty-five pounds in my pocket, thank you very much! Unfortunately I didn't win in the second shop but I'm not complaining.

Getting paid to gamble? What is this world coming to?

I spent the weekend battling with a gruesome translation on Catalan politics and now I'm happy to report that I've finished and submitted it. This makes me very happy.

It has been an action-packed seven days. I completed my first week of work, a whopping 28 hours of teaching (which is a lot in the TEFL world), but if anything it was good to be working again. Finally things are beginning to click into place for me here.

And it was good to see Asashoryu get off to a winning start in the Kyushu Grand Tournament. However, despite my best efforts I was unable to find any online bookmakers prepared to accept bets on sumo. So I put a few pounds on the football instead, well, virtual football to be more precise. I went to lay 70 pence on Virtual Reading at 4-1 to win away at Virtual Arsenal, however in my haste to make the bet before the rapidly-approaching kick-off time I crucially mistyped and actually put down seven pounds instead of seventy pence (7.00 as opposed to 0.70), with no way of reneging on the bet. This was a double-disaster as I only had a little over seven pounds in my account and Reading had virtually no chance of winning the game either. So I cursed my luck and berated myself for throwing away seven pounds and went to make a cup of tea. Imagine my surprise then when I returned to find that Reading had upset the odds by romping to a 0-3 victory! Of course this would not happen in the real world but I'm not complaining. The surprise did wonders for my account balance as it ballooned from just a few pitiful pence to a marvellous ₤35 (€52, ¥8000, US$67) in the blink of an eye. Fantastic! Not bad for a mistake eh? And pretty awesome when you haven't earned any money for five months!

Of course, it goes without saying that I do not condone gambling in any way, shape or form.

On Sunday night we watched Sayuri, better known to the western world as Memoirs of a Geisha. It had been sitting there on my hard drive since my friend Johnson illegally downloaded it and installed it onto my computer back in June, so it was about time we watched it.

And despite the thoroughly annoying fireworks outside (Sunday was Guy Fawkes Night) we rather enjoyed the film, even the really silly bits (the portrayal of Americans at the end was funny and so true). But we just couldn't get our heads around the fact that Sayuri had blue eyes. In three years in Japan I never saw any Japanese with any eye colour other than "black", and a certain Japanese person I live with hasn't either, so we couldn't quite work that bit out. Anyway...

I started work this week. It's a hard thing to do after 105 days off, but what can you do? To my surprise two of the other teachers at the school have also worked in Japan, one at Nova in Hokkaido and the other at the Yokohama branch of the school I am now working at. Green tea at morning break is not what I had in mind when I speculatively applied for this job but I'm not complaining.

And it just occurred to me that we're only a few days away from the start of the Kyushu Grand Tournament. Last year was awesome and I'm definitely going to miss it this year.

I think I'll put a few quid on Asashoryu. If I can find a bookmaker prepared to accept the bet, that is.

Well, I should have known better than to talk about religious issues on this blog. Whilst I wasn't meaning to offend anybody it seems my last post ruffled a few feathers. I'll steer clear of such topics in future.

Now a few of you might be wondering where I have been over the past ten days or so. Contrary to popular belief I haven't been chasing earthquakes in the North Sea (there hasn't been any since last week's Thornhill quake incidentally), I have just been very busy. I'm now rather up to my neck in a despicably difficult Spanish to English translation of a journalistic text on the Catalan Statute which is causing me no end of pain and grief. Why oh why did I decide to go back to school?

In other news, I am no longer an unemployed English teacher, I am an employed one, well part-time anyway, or at least I will be from next week. The money is not that good and the hours depend on how many students the school has at any given time, but it's flexible and it's a hell of a lot better than sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring. If nothing else it will bring in a bit of money and steady the ship.

Anyway, last weekend I went under cover on a rather different job! Yes, in true James Bond style I went on a veritable spying mission. Let me explain. A few weeks ago I saw an advert on a website for part-time casual work. Thinking that this might be better than a kick in the head from a horse I applied for it. The job in question was as a mystery shopper, a person employed to go into a specified store on a specified day and secretly rate it on a number of previously given criteria, such as cleanliness, product availability and customer service. For obvious reasons, due to the top-secret nature of this work (and due to the fact that you never quite know who's reading) I cannot divulge the name of the company I was asked to spy on but suffice to say it was a major UK retailor. For simply going into the store and ordering an item from the patisserie section, I was paid a whole six British pounds. Sounds wonderfully easy doesn't it, six pounds just for walking into a shop and ordering a cake? You might even say a cakewalk, haha! However, once you've taken into account how long it took me to read the mission-briefing, pass a quick online test to prove I had understood it fully and then actually walk to the store, not to mention the length of time needed to fill-out the online questionnaire once I got home, it didn't seem so great. All in all it took up at least two and a half hours of my time. Worth it? Not on your nelly!