It's the EGP!

It seems like ages since I went to an othello tournament. And incidentally, Blogger, stop auto-capitalising "othello", please - I've always spelt it with a lower-case o, and I don't intend to stop now, whether or not the general consensus is a capital letter even for the board game. Not that Blogger knows I'm talking about the board game, the stupid thing, it thinks I'm talking about Shakespeare, I bet.

Where was I? Oh yes, Cambridge. I was in Cambridge this weekend, for the British leg of the European Grand Prix, also known as the Cambridge International. Lots of capital letters there, and I bet Blogger wouldn't auto-correct half of them if I'd forgotten them. We were in the luxurious surroundings of the Old Combination Room at Trinity College - I have no idea why it's called that, but it's dominated by enormous life-sized full-body portraits of illustrious people and basically looks like the kind of room that you'd find in Buckingham Palace if they held Othello tournaments there. The college porters, that army of bowler-hatted men who wander around the university doing unfathomable portery things, call it "the OCR".

We had 27 competitors from all around Europe - 9 British, 6 Dutch, 4 French, 2 Belgian, one each from Germany, Greece, Italy and Norway, and an American and Malaysian who live in Europe and came along to make it super-international. I'm so out of practice that I did really terribly, but that was only to be expected. It's just fun to be in the surroundings of an Othello competition - the click-clack of flipping discs, the buzz of conversation about games that have just finished, the sssssssh from someone who's still playing their game and wants the conversation to shut up so they can concentrate, the very-slightly-quieter-for-a-split-second conversation continuing unabated...

Highlights for me included a chance to apply my Golden Rule of othello (see, it doesn't get a capital letter even now) - always play a Stoner trap if it's possible, whether or not it looks like it might be a good idea. This all comes from a time when I decided not to play one and it turned out to be a good idea after all. And this time, it worked! Also, I won a really quite exciting game against Benkt, 33-31 that made up for losing quite a lot of other games in horrible ways.

I ended up with 5 points from 11 rounds, including one for a bye, and finished 20th out of 27 - which is obviously worse than the half-way point I normally aim for, but I don't really mind. The excitement came at the top end of the leaderboard - Imre was all-conquering on the first day but was caught up on the second by the European contingent; the final ended up between him and Nicky van den Biggelaar, who won 33-31 in the final game!

It's good to be back in the othelloing swing of things, although from now until the end of April I'm going to try to devote myself to memory. And not just normal memory, EXTREME memory! I'll blog about it at length tomorrow, if only to keep myself properly motivated.

This is awesome! This is awesome!

Perhaps there are better things you can do with your time than watching six men pretending (very convincingly) to beat each other up, but that still didn't stop the long-awaited wrestling match between The Shield and The Wyatt Family from being the coolest I've ever seen. Seriously, this is how wrestling should be, and usually isn't. I didn't bother watching the Royal Rumble last month when they made it clear it'd be dominated by old men who used to be cool wrestlers in the past (watching the New Age Outlaws doddering arthritically around the ring isn't really as much fun as their fans insist), and I think I'll skip Wrestlemania for the same reason (Hulk Hogan's coming back, once more), but the fill-a-gap-in-the-schedule pay-per-view (you don't have to pay for it in this country) Elimination Chamber was just great.

Admittedly the main event was dull by comparison to the clash-of-the-bad-guys, and some of the filler stuff was dreadful, but one really good "fight" is enough to satisfy my bloodlust for a couple of months at least - I'll tune in again the next time a thrilling storyline like this one builds up...

What's my age again?

This evening at the Co-op I was at the till behind a teenager insisting she was 35 years old in an optimistic attempt to buy a bottle of booze. It just makes me think, though - not once in my life has anyone asked me for proof of age. I've always looked old and ancient, apparently.

I should get some kind of expert make-up artist to make me look youthful, just so I can be refused alcohol or cigarettes in a shop. It'd be a great experience. I'm sure all I'd need is some trendy young people's clothes and maybe a baseball cap.

Illusion is the ultimate weapon

Someone found this blog by googling "mask cartoon vehicles". Which is interesting, because I don't remember ever blogging about the vehicles from the cartoon MASK, much though I actually am interested in the subject. MASK was cool. Not as cool as Transformers or Thundercats, but still pretty cool in its own way.

The most interesting thing about the vehicles was that they came with a driver who had a mask that had special powers, and the way this was phrased on the box was always along the lines of "Dusty Hayes with Backlash mask which pretends to create sonic waves." All the masks "pretended" to do something - the people who played with them didn't pretend, it was the mask itself.

The figures were also available without the vehicles, if you were too poor to afford the cool big toys. Cleverly, the manufacturers made sure that poor children could never be completely satisfied with this purchase, because the masks that came with the sold-separately figures were slightly different from the ones that came with the vehicles; the masks were sort of extended downwards a bit with some extra plastic, making it impossible to take the figures into primary school and tell people you'd got the vehicle at home.

The comic was also quite good (although again, not as good as the Transformers comic... it was probably about as good as the Thundercats comic, which was rubbish compared to the cartoon, but did have the advantage of a Lew Stringer comic strip - rating 30-year-old toy-tie-in comics can be hard work), and most notable for the way it would be filled with characters breaking the fourth wall - villains as well as heroes. There would always be an advert for subscriptions in which evil Miles Mayhem announced to the readers that he was going to buy every copy of MASK from the newsagent to stop you reading about Matt Trakker thwarting his evil plan, and one time the cover had the bad guys fighting over the chew bar that was that issue's free gift. "Stop pushing, Rax! You know I like chews!"

Constituent

It occurred to me that I should find out what parliamentary constituency I'm in now, and it turns out it's Mid-Derbyshire. Which is a brand new thing dreamed up for the last elections. And a funny kind of name, too, since it's in the south-east corner of Derbyshire and not in the middle at all. If I was the boundaries commission, I would have called it "That Bit That's Down Near Derby But Isn't Actually Derby Itself". Also, I would have abolished the whole parliamentary process and made myself some sort of ultimate king of everything (because I'm sure that such is within the powers of the boundaries commission), but first I would have changed the name.

In good order

Sorry I haven't blogged anything for the last couple of days. Busy at work and, you know, sleeping and things. But I've now got a phone and internet in my new flat (until now I've been latching on to an occasionally dodgy wifi signal), so everything's just peachy. So I thought this would be a good moment to remind everyone that Order of the Stick is still a great webcomic. I haven't blogged on that subject for quite a while, I'm sure.

Here's an example - in the book "Snips, Snails and Dragon Tales", which you can't read on the internet but you can go and buy, the dashing hero Julio Scoundrél has a second-in-command called Fidel Secundus. It took me ages to get that. Now in the online comic (set many years after that story), Julio's sidekick is a woman who talks about the days when her father was doing her job, and her name is Bandana.

This is the kind of gratuitous, clever silliness that makes me a fan of the comic even after all these years - a little joke that's only comprehensible to people who've bought the book and can put two and two together. Go and read it, from the start! All you need is a vague basic knowledge of how games like Dungeons and Dragons work, and you'll be well rewarded.

Can I point you in the direction of...

... Demis Hassabis?

The point being, I still get confronted by people who think I'm some kind of super-genius who's not only astonishingly clever and great at everything, but also well able to use this uncanny intellect of mine to amass fame and fortune by the gallon if I only felt like doing it.

So hearing that Demis has just sold his company to Google for £400 million makes me wonder why more people don't go and tell him he's great instead of picking on me. We're roughly the same age (I think he's three months older) and nodding-acquaintances from the glory days of the Mind Sports Olympiad (again, if you think I'm the kind of person who wins everything, you should see Demis), but the key difference is he was actually one of those child prodigies - chess grandmaster at the age of twelve or so, created a famous computer game and made a fortune at the age of sixteen (remember Theme Park? I've never played it, but I've heard good things) and, most impressively of all, is still doing clever things at the age of 37. Which not many child geniuses do, if you think about it.

I don't know what this company of his did, if anything (it was one of those internet startup things, so probably nothing - Google will buy anything), but it goes to show that there really are geniussy types out there, and they're not all fakers like me. Maybe I should give him a call and say hello. I should make an effort to cultivate the friendship of millionaires, you never know when it might come in handy...