That's the final line of a Tony Buzan poem. It just about qualifies as 'profound', as per my promise of the last couple of days. If you're still not satisfied, you might like to read this down a really big hole. Anyway, it leads in to what I actually wanted to talk about...
So, one of the traditional events at memory championships is memorising a poem. Usually a Tony Buzan one nowadays (he's the founder and leading inspiration of the world memory championships, has done a lot of great things in the field of learning and education and expanding the mind's capabilities and believes he's a great poet too), but the first few world championships had poems specially written by Ted Hughes, and it was one of the few disciplines with some kind of real-life application. But since the world championships became genuinely international, and especially now that all the good memorisers are German-speakers, it's become increasingly difficult to translate the poem in a way that's equally difficult to memorise in multiple languages.
Because of this, the World Memory Sports Council, which basically consists of Tony and the couple of people who do the actual work of running the world championships (god bless 'em), has decided to replace the poem with something new. So Phil Chambers, the guy who does 99% of the work (and I'm never sure what exactly he gets out of it, putting in long nights shuffling cards, calculating the scores, arranging a million and one little details, but I'm very grateful) contacted the top five competitors of the moment (me, Clemens, Gunther, Astrid and Joachim) and the rest of the WMSC to ask for ideas and suggestions. We kicked around lots of different ideas for new disciplines, and in the end put it down to a vote between four different ones.
I don't think this was intentional, but Phil in all good faith suggested a simple enough idea - everyone involved in the discussion would vote on their favourite new discipline, with Tony having the casting vote in the event of a tie. This of course created the possibility of all the competitors voting for one thing and still losing out to the WMSC's favourite choice. And that's exactly what happened. After some wrangling, we all voted for Gunther's word-pairs suggestion, while Tony, Phil, Dominic O'Brien (eight-times champion who's not actively competing any more), Chris Day (the other person-who-does-the-actual-work) and Ray Keene (chess grandmaster who if he actively does anything for the WMSC besides being Tony's friend, I don't know what it is) picked Dominic's "abstract images" idea.
So now we have a situation where the WMSC have 'consulted' the leading competitors and then ignored them. Doesn't create much good feeling all round. Not that I really mind in principle - I don't actually like the idea of the competitors being able to choose the rules in the first place (what other 'proper' mental sport does that? But it's been the norm in the world of memory in the past, especially during Dominic's heyday) - but what bugs me about the whole thing is the part of Phil's results-announcing email saying "Tony Buzan has asked me to thank you on his behalf and let you know how pleased he is with the extremely high level of mentally literate discourse."
Tony has a tendency to think of himself as a god-like figure, revered by all, and no doubt really feels that those patronising words would be well-received by people who are being told that their views have been acknowledged and ignored. And Phil genuinely does revere Tony, so that thought no doubt never crossed his mind. That's the thing about this - nobody's setting out to do anything but be considerate of others, and it's still ended up with all-round bad feeling. Not Andi Bell levels of bad feeling, but Gunther especially is in a bad mood over the whole thing. Coupled with the decision to hold the WMC this year in Kuala Lumpur, the WMSC aren't hugely popular at the moment.
It'll all blow over, of course. But it's fun to watch while it's going on...
No comments:
Post a Comment