Saturday, August 09, 2025

Old-fashioned Excellence

 The UK Chapter of the Microsoft Excel World Championship held its third and final online qualification round today, and it was another classic with a specifically British twist - calculating things in pounds, shillings and pence, and needing to create Excel formulas to give the answers in specific ways that Excel can't generally deal with, in a short space of time!


It takes some creative thinking. And there were price-lists to look up of commodities you might have bought in 1966, and calculating the difference between the price in 1966 and today, and all kinds of ingenious silliness like that.

And maybe it's just because I'm so old, compared to all these young people who seem to populate the UK nowadays, but I did better at it than everyone else!

So yes, I'm feeling happy with myself tonight! Next stop, the live final in London on September 6th! It's far too long since I've been to an in-person competition of any kind! And I can win a trip to Las Vegas for the World Championship, if I win that one! Which would be extremely cool, for many reasons! It's even far-too-longer since I went anywhere overseas, and longer still since I went to Vegas (even though I still cite it as my favourite holiday destination). Even if I don't win the free trip, in fact, I might rob a bank or something and see if I can get there this year...

Friday, August 01, 2025

This worm has a hat on

 A lot of people have been paying tribute to Allan Ahlberg, and quite rightly too! At least one person on the internet mentioned this particular favourite that can be found on my bookshelves...


As you can see, it belongs to Ben. This book has been in my possession at least since the time when our misguided parents bought me and my brother each a pack of stickers with our names on, resulting in everything in a five-mile radius becoming the property of either Ben or Joe - I've quite possibly had this book since it was published (third printing) in 1981.

I don't know why I've kept it among my books ever since then, but I'm glad I did. It is very funny, after all, and do I need any more reason than that?

Saturday, July 26, 2025

They try to make me go to rehab, I say no no no

 Sorry I haven't updated this blog for a long time. We're past the twenty-year mark of me starting to write things here regularly, so fire off the party-poppers, but it's a bit alarming to find I'm old enough to have been doing something for two decades. I'm an old man.

Coupled with this, I don't remember whether I've ever mentioned in this blog that I've got multiple sclerosis, but yes, that's a thing. It makes me into the kind of person who knows his NHS number off by heart to quote when people are delivering a new batch of medication to me every few months, and involves going for an occasional appointment with a nurse in the rehabilitation section of the hospital at lengthy intervals. It's very much like being Amy Winehouse, only less musical. But it's irritating when I always used to be the kind of young and active person who didn't see a doctor from one decade to the next.

So stay tuned if you're still keen to hear what Sniffer got up to in Daredevil comics of the late 1940s, because it's still coming, but excuse me if I indulge my more infantile side and talk about Bluey today.

See, someone on a forum recently ran a poll of favourite Bluey episode, and I stick by my judgement that "Shops" is the epitome of perfection for that wonderful cartoon. Just because it undercuts Bluey's habit of using heavily-scripted play sessions to deal with her issues by putting her into conflict with Mackenzie, who just wants them all to make things up as they go along. It's brilliant.

And as an honourable mention for sheer cleverness, you can't beat "Flat Pack". Capsule summary - Mum and Dad struggle to assemble a flat-packed garden chair while Bluey and Bingo play with the discarded packaging materials. Their playing represents the progress of life on earth, simultaneously on the macro scale of millions of years of evolution and the micro scale of a single human (cartoon dog) life. The episode ends with Bluey symbolically ascending to Heaven while Bingo leaves Earth to explore the universe. All in seven minutes, including opening and closing titles.

But someone else suggested the third-season episode "Cricket", which I hadn't seen before, and just... wow. I'm blown away, not for the first time, by this simple kids' cartoon. How do they manage to keep producing this kind of genius?

Bluey's dad Bandit narrates the episode in his characteristic way. "It was some kid's birthday, I don't remember who, and we were playing cricket." - which immediately makes this an episode that resonates with me. See, my brother's birthday is in the summer, and we had an important family tradition of the one whose birthday it isn't getting a 'little' present so as not to feel completely left out. It became a running joke that I'd always get a cricket set for my brother's birthday (bat, tennis ball and set of stumps). Which led to scenes exactly like what's happening at the start of this episode - an ad-hoc game of cricket that a handful of dads seem to be much more invested in than the kids, who are standing around or playing something else.

Bluey wants to play tig instead, but her dad insists that cricket is more fun. Rusty hasn't had a bat yet, so they call him over, and Bandit says they'll just get Rusty out and then play something else. "You'll never get Rusty out," says Bluey, matter-of-factly - and sure enough, Rusty nearly takes Bandit's head off with his fierce drive of the gentle first ball!


It turns out that Rusty is really good at cricket. The episode chronicles the dads trying to get the six-year-old out, starting out by taking it easy on him and moving on to throwing everything they can at him in an attempt to preserve their dignity, to no avail. And we flash back to see how Rusty got to be so good. He really loves the game, and plays it at every opportunity. Becoming an expert at placing his square cut so as not to break the kitchen window, dealing with the uneven surface of Jack's front yard, being allowed to play with his big brother's mates who bowl really fast and use a proper cricket ball - it's a story of dedication to the passion of his life and hard work at becoming the best he can be.

I was never really into cricket, despite the annual gift. I've no idea who thought I wanted a cricket set, but it did at least give the grown-ups an afternoon's entertainment in the garden every year. But the point of this episode is that Rusty is still me - it's me getting into memory competitions, and everything else I've been passionate about over the years. And the ending of the episode, as is so often the case with Bluey, is so wonderful as to make me shed a tear or two.

That there are people in the world who can produce this kind of masterpiece in the name of a simple piece of children's television entertainment will never cease to amaze me, and just goes to show that there's something generally right with the world. Go and watch it, right now!

Saturday, July 05, 2025

Teen-age lingo

 I shared one of DC comics' "published as a public service" one-pagers here in the course of talking about the Justice League, but this one here is an even better example than Snapper Carr of the way DC presented "teen-agers" in the 1960s:


From the Brave and the Bold №58, published at the new year 1965, it shows Superboy helping the teen-age population of Smallville plan a community event that will really let everyone get hep to the rules! Because that is of course what sixties teens were all about!

You can tell they're teenagers because one of the boys isn't even wearing a tie! He's probably the most outrageously modern of the group, and he'll probably learn a valuable lesson about conformity soon enough. At least they're all fully aware of the problem of spontaneous combustion of oily rags, now that Superboy's hammered the point home so effectively.

Mind you, Superboy's presence makes me wonder if this is really the sixties anyway - he is, after all, "Superman when he was a boy", which in the contemporary Superboy comics was depicted as non-specifically pre-war kind of surroundings (sixties Superman was generally depicted as middle-aged, unlike the modern insistence that he's under thirty). So maybe these teens are 1930s kids who are very much ahead of their time in terms of clothing and lingo!

In any case, please seal your oily rags away carefully and tell all your friends to obey the rules!

Sunday, June 29, 2025

Watching paint dry

"The Moonstone", mentioned in my last blog but one and one of my favourite books, has a central plot point involving the length of time paint takes to dry. So does my favourite cartoon, ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks (the episode "Safety Third"). I always say the later seasons are the best, with the snappy dialogue and perfect characterisation that I love so much, but this is one of many first-season episodes which stand up alongside any of the rest of the series. There's a wonderful conversation between our heroes of the type I've had (in the role of Simon) many times before. Some people just don't want to do sums themselves...



Don't touch it! The paint won't be dry for fifteen hours!
Oh, man! That's like ten at night!
Alvin, if it's two in the afternoon now, what time will it be in fifteen hours?
Erm, 12:30? No, 11:15! 6:35!
Stop guessing!
Just tell me!
Figure it out!
Tuesday!
T-Tuesday? What?!
I thought it was a trick question.
I know! I know! Eight o'clock!
You're not even trying!
Okay... think out of the box...
No, no! Think IN the box! Right in the centre of the box!
Is that a clue?
Five in the morning! It's five in the morning!

And this scene is followed by the greatest ever example of Simon's habit of talking in his sleep. "I've had enough with all these egotistical unicorns! I've had it up to here!" Alvin, sneaking out to steal the car at five in the morning, promises to take care of the unicorns, and Simon responds "Rub peanuts in their faces."

See, this is why I love Simon so much. Perhaps it's a little hard to explain.

Thursday, June 26, 2025

You kept that quiet!

 Someone told me today that she'd seen me on TV ("Superhuman Genius", of course - did they really show it yet again?) and was shocked to recognise me! This is someone I've known, in a professional capacity, for about three months, and I was doubly shocked to learn that I hadn't previously mentioned my illustrious TV career!

I mean, it's the first thing I tell people, as a rule. Am I getting less boastful in my old age? Clearly I need to work on that.

Saturday, June 21, 2025

June 21st, 1848

 A couple of weeks ago I found this treasure in the lovely second-hand book shop in Worcester.

£2.45 for what the back cover rightly calls "three gripping novels by Wilkie Collins". I'm a great fan of Wilkie, and definitely had to snap this one up when I saw it. And having read the two later, shorter novels first (having only previously read them on Project Gutenberg, which is nice in its way but not as good as having a real papery book in your hands), it was only today I came to start on The Moonstone.

And a very appropriate day it is, too, because I'd entirely forgotten that Rachel's birthday party when she receives the eponymous diamond happens on June 21st! I only mention this trifling circumstance because* this is exactly the kind of thing that Gabriel Betteredge would find in his Robinson Crusoe and take as an absolutely certain prophecy of the future! I'm confident that at some point today (better hurry up, it's half past seven already), someone will present me with a diamond worth at least twenty thousand pounds. Or something equally coincidental anyway, like maybe I'll get caught in the rain, fall into a fever and be unable to pass on important information until a plot-convenient moment. Or just do a memory stunt along the lines of the one that forms the climax of the novel.

This "Great Classic Library" was published in 1994, and seems to have been a great way to get some of the more obscure works by great authors into your hands. I'll have to collect them all!

I suspect the choice of which novels to include in each one was dictated as much by page count as by any objective judgement of quality. This Collins compilation is in the wrong order - My Lady's Money came before The Haunted Hotel and Mr Troy the lawyer from the former makes a cameo appearance in the latter, referring back to it. But I'm surprised I haven't come across these volumes before at some point in the last thirty years, and I'm going to have to find space on my bookshelves for them!

Or rather, buy some new bookshelves. My existing ones are full up at the moment, and any new acquisitions have to be wedged in on top of the rows of books. And these are really hefty things - 680 pages in the one I've got! Ooh, maybe someone will give me a bookcase as a present for Rachel Verinder's birthday today! The prophetic powers of Robinson Crusoe work in mysterious ways!

* That was an in-joke to entertain any other Wilkie Collins fans among my readers. His narrators are forever saying "I only mention this trifling circumstance because..." whenever they talk about something they have no reason to mention but which is important for the reader to know in order to make sense of the rest of the story. The existence of a dust-heap, described in minute detail in "The Law and the Lady" is a personal favourite.