James emailed me to agree that a group of monkeys was a troop or troupe. However, he added that I had of course missed a barrel of monkeys, as in "more fun than a barrel of monkeys?" of course. How could I forget that? Silly me. Anyway, thank you James, oh and sorry that I'm a bit behind in emailing you, I will reply soon.

It occurs to me that I've posted very close in time with all of these postings, really I should have edited the old posts, but I'm sure that you're intelligent enough to work out that you need to look down the list and read the older ones first or they'll make no sense.

And This one says band or troop. Hmm, definitely looking like Troop.

Right, I decided to try Ask Oxford to put an end to my ponderings and as interesting as a machination of monkeys sounds, it does seem to be wrong, the terms provided here for the name of a group of monkeys are: cartload/tribe/troop or wilderness, which it says is possibly fanciful.

Oddly This Site says a group of monkeys is called a troop. Hmm, that's strange, that's what I thought it was called, yet the other page said machination. I wonder if both are correct. If anyone knows a definitive answer on this one, then please let me know.

Hmm, someone searched for what's a group of monkeys called and got to my site, I guess I have used all of those words somewhere. Sorry that I've never answered the question. I think it's troop, but I will try to find out. I don't know why I'm answering now, the person won't be here anymore. However, I thought I would. The kind of search term you really need is "Collective Nouns", that is the name for a group of a certain thing (okay, poorly worded definition of mine, but you get the gist), but if you don't know that term then it's probably quite hard to find a useful site. Right, I searched at Google for Collective Nouns and the top page seems useful. It informs me that the correct term for a group of monkeys is: A machination of monkeys. It's quite an interesting page that, it has a whole list of collective nouns, ones that are correct are listed as submitted (the monkey one is apparently correct) however if they have been unable to find a correct one and someone has suggested a term that could be used then it is listed as suggested, for example "An addition of mathematicians (-suggested by RP)".

Wow, I just did another search for my own name and found something at The Cincinnati Post I'll paste it here, this sounds like I'm bragging or something, I'm not really, it's just that I've been feeling down lately, so hearing such a positive comment about one of my sites from a complete stranger is great and I wanted to share it with someone:

[Of Kernel Jack's Pad] This is an absolute hoot of a site. It was created in the U.K by Ali Yates (aka Kernel Jack). She is in her early 20s and is obviously both a huge Stargate fan and a writer with a fantastic flare for making even the mundane marvelous. I found myself so charmed by the stories of her own childhood and how she (narrowly) survived it, I realized I had spent nearly half an hour at her site without even looking at the SG1 material, which is pretty darned good itself. This is a fun one.

Hmm, nothing very exciting to blog about. Yesterday I was running a Kids Club at church again in the morning, then I hung around with some friends, we even took an exciting trip to see Will's work in the pathology lab, 'cos he had to turn the machines back on as there'd been a power cut. Then we watched a film it was The One and starred Jet Li. He was the good guy and the bad guy in a film about alternate universes. This bad version of himself was going to every universe and killing each other version of himself, each time the life force in the dead version got split between the remaining ones letting him get stronger, faster and smarter. He goes to the last universe to kill the last version of him, a cop. Sounds great doesn't it? It was just as good as it sounds! I mean, this film ranks up there with such greats as Timecop incidentally did you know there's a sequel in production? Timecop 2 I only discovered 'cos I was looking at the IMDB for Timecop. The sequel doesn't seem to have Jean Claude Van Damme in it though, how sad? Back to The One, I'm being all critical and yes it was a film that didn't require your brain to be switched on, but it was quite entertaining. Certainly better than the kids film that we somehow ended up on after this one finished. That was The Three Ninjas Kick Back, a truely appalling film, I know, it's for kids, but still, you'd think they could at least have some sort of plot and how annoying was the smallest kid? We found the fight scenes interesting, they didn't even bother trying to make it look like it was the actors fighting, the old grey haired guy (Mr Myagi's friend) suddenly got dark black hair when he fought and I think his clothes changed too. We didn't really even see how he suddenly saw the error of his ways and stopped being evil either, it just happened, like oh, yes kids, you're right I was so wrong, I'll be good now. I don't know why we kept watching, it was one of those just not changing the channel or turning it off things. After that we went to the pub for someone's birthday, it was incredibly hot in the pub, I don't know why. Overall I had quite a good day.

Helen has been talking about me again, so I thought I'd better reply, she said:

Oh, Ali thinks I was mean by saying the things about her that I did the other day. The musical taste things. She says she likes Blur. Well, three songs by them. (ONLY THREE?!) And she says she likes The Gorillaz. She'll only have heard the single versions, mind you. I don't think she'd like the album ones. I told her as much.

I didn't say I liked Blur, I just said that I do like some Blur songs, that I don't necessarily hate them, I wouldn't go as far as to say I liked Blur. I think I thought you were mean because you were assuming I won't like certain music when I haven't actually heard it. I might. I mean, admittedly you're usually right, but it's possible that I wouldn't hate something. However, it's entirely possible that I didn't really think you were being mean at all and was just whinging for the sake of it. Yes, I'm an annoying whingebum.