Little bits of memory

There's a Mexican journalist who's sent me an email wanting to do an interview, who's apparently 'like 80% English speaker', which automatically makes me feel bad about asking to do it in writing rather than talking on the phone, in case she thinks I'm saying I don't think she speaks good enough English to do a spoken interview. Even though I ALWAYS ask journalists if we can do the interview in writing, yes. I worry about these things.

I also worry for the laws of nature - there's an ongoing debate about the new 'abstract images', and I'm agreeing with Gunther about absolutely everything! We're normally diametrically opposed on every subject vaguely related to memory. The problem is, we feel (and Clemens, Astrid and Joachim back us up on this), that if the random shapes Phil's fancy new random shape generator produces are coloured in, it makes it much easier to memorise them, because you only need to look at the colours. To be fair, it's not like they're primary colours, it's patterns and textures, but the point still stands.

Phil, Mind Map fanatic that he is, thinks that colours are essential to 'stimulate creativity', but I think that's nonsense. Memory competitions should be about giving the competitors things that are DIFFICULT to remember, and making them come up with creative ways to memorise them. Giving them things that make it easier to remember defeats the whole object. But it looks like the united front of the top competitors isn't going to get us anywhere again. Shocking. I'd complain and boycott things if I was the type to give a monkey's.

I'm watching the most amazing football match while I'm typing this - I know I've written about footy a lot on here lately, but this is something special. Middlesbrough came into the second leg of the Uefa Cup semi-final against Steaua Bucharest 1-0 down, played terribly for the first twenty minutes and conceded two more goals. With the away goals rule, that meant they had to score four to stay in the competition.

Now, for those of you unfamiliar with football, coming back from 3-0 down is a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of thing. But it's something that Middlesbrough actually did in the previous round of the Uefa Cup, against FC Basle, and somehow that statistic has inspired them to stage another amazing recovery. And everyone in the crowd is right behind them too - somehow, from the moment they went three down, they were hot favourites to win the game! As I write this, there's five minutes left and they've scored three of the required four. Unbelievable.

A bit more useless trivia - I've had the song 'Cool For Cats' stuck in my head all day.