Sleepless in Ubi

Performing over-night standby duty at HQ right now.

It's my rostered rest time, but after lying down for a while, I know this is one of those nights that dreamland shall remain elusive to me.

Morpheus doesn't want me anywhere in his domain tonight. Sigh.

It must be the bed sheets or the pillow case that makes me feel this persistent itch and makes me toss and turn compulsively while on the bed. Forget it. No point insisting to fight a battle you are destined to lose.

To pass time, I could do some reading that I brought with me. Not in the mood to do any serious work stuff, though. So I searched the web to see if I could find anything about the dice game that Ced taught us some 3 years ago back when we were in the UK. After all, this is the game that gave me my virgin experience on what it is like to be stone drunk. After all, this is the game that became the namesake of this blog.

Wikipedia has this very comprensive entry on Liar's Dice, which contains information on many variants of the game, including this one called "Mexican", which sounds very much like Ced's Kinigu. Still, I thought the name Kinigu must have come from somewhere and if so there must be traces of this word that I ought to be able to find in vast cyberspace. True enough, I think I've found what I was looking for at this website :

http://www.electrical.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=49900&sid=aba31470162f289dc3d0b675f1acade8

Kuriki.

Backwards it would read as Kiriku. It is instantly apparent how this Japanese-sounding name would confuse a Frenchman, such that he would later on articulate to his friends as "Kinigu".

I also note from the documented rules that our french friend had made the "5 6" combi a Kuriki (or Kinigu in our case), even though the original rules dictated that only the "1 2" combi would be deemed a Kinigu. Also, there's this other made-up rule that anyone scoring a Kinigu could appoint drinking penalty to any opponent he selects. Ced's customised rules serve well to ensure that we all ended up very very high after each game.

Ku-Riki, Quirikii, Ka Rickey, Carickey, Kuricki etc are the many names for this game, according to the site.

No matter.

A error in naming that is 3 years old ceases to be an error. Committed by a Frenchman makes this error all the more understandable and forgivable.

To us, Kinigu shall forever remain as Kinigu.

Till our next game. Kinigu !!!