4Q And 4Q2

It took me a long time to figure out what on Earth 4H stood for, and now I think of young people being helped every time I see one of the 4H signs.

Well, I was given another challenge last weekend at the Brighton Market, as I had my customary cappuccino and fully loaded fish cutter. There I was chatting with a couple, whom I shall call The Flowering Key Melon, when up came a friend whom I shall call the "Bequia (pronounced beck-way) Ninja". The highly trained ninja is a warrior whose mastery of martial arts is used for sabotage and assassination missions as a way to destabilize and cause social chaos in enemy territory. Well, for many women, men are the enemy territory. I can't remember exactly what provoked the "attack". I know that, as is often the way with women, there was some comment about the man appearing (I stress this) to not having done anything and therefore cementing the label "wuffless" onto his forehead. My companions knew that I had in fact gotten to the market at day break, bought vegetables and was only then chilling out. My wife and little daughter were still making eyes at their pillows.

Anyway, I sort of carried on trying to chill and the conversation moved--naturally--to laser ophthalmologists in the United States. Who would I recommend? Ms. Ninja had the name of a surgeon, who supposedly operated in DC or Maryland. Well, I had no clue, but always willing to see eye to eye with someone, tried to find out how we could get a quick answer. Cue the BlackBerry. "Let's do a search for him," I suggested. Having found the doctor, who in fact practised in Pennsylvania, not the Greater Washington area, I quipped that he had just been investigated for malpractice. Well, then I got my first 4Q moment. I wondered whether this was a command or a suggestion. My mind drifted to my wife snuggled deep under the covers at home.

When I tried to do work as an economist, 4Q represented the last three months of the year--the fourth quarter. Was the end (of the year) nigh?

I'm learning to not let things bother me for too long these days. With financial markets destroying all the value that people thought they have, what's the use of worrying?

So having accepted that I had just been offered an epithet, I knew my head should stay low. Good thing, too, as I soon got the double barrelled form, when I suggested that maybe I would take the suggestion, and here came 4Q2.

Because I see life as full of challenges and opportunities, I did a little research on 4Q:

It's an Internet community that offers, amongst other things, online surveys.

It, of course, features in mathematics, such as the Diophantine equation (an indeterminate polynomial equation which has integral coefficients and for which it is required to find all integral solutions):
y2 = 4qn + 4q + 1

So if you get presented with a 4Q, take it for all it's worth, and be even happier if you get 4Q2.

Miss Ninja is normally very sweet to me and I know that the thought of having her eyes lasered was probably making her anxious, so I wont take offence of being in the line of a 4Q.