Memory gossip

While I've been rambling about Chaucer, Channel 5 and Charlie Fox, it's been quite a busy week for the world of 'memory sports', or at least my little corner of it. It just turned out today that the German Championship has been postponed until some time in the autumn, which is a real annoyance. Also, the World Championship has been confirmed as taking place at Imperial College, London - not very glamorous, but there are worse places it could be - on August 19-21.

What I need, though, is a competition before then to get me properly in memory-championship-winning mood. For the last couple of years that role's been performed by the German championship, and the year before that it was the MSO. This year there's only the Speed Cards Challenge (which is a completely different kind of affair), unless I can engineer something else to fill the gap.

There is a vague possibility, though, from two sources. Firstly, James Jorasch and Chris Harwood have been talking about holding a memory championship in Manhattan some time in August. Just cards and numbers, James speculated, which sounds familiar. I've also spoken this week to one of the six billion TV producers trying to sell a memory documentary to Channel 4, and he's spoken to Andi Bell (quite a feat, these days). Andi, it seems, hasn't been training, doesn't think he'll come to the WMC this year, but is still talking about organising a championship of his own. Like the Memory World Cup in 2004, which was just cards and numbers, and a lot of fun.

There must be a way to get these people together and use their business sense and passion for memory competitions to benefit me in some way. I would love to see another World Cup - it would be great to have that on the regular schedule of competitions every year (that, and Gunther's reaction would keep me amused). July would be better than August, obviously, now that there's a void left by the German Championship. But would anyone come to a World Cup in America? Probably not. Well, Americans would, and I would, but I'd want to get some Germans over there too to make it a proper competition. We'd need to find a big sponsor or eccentric millionaire to throw money at it, but that kind of thing's possible for the likes of Andi or James if they put their minds to it.

I haven't got a phone number for Andi, of course, and I'm not sure I've got a current email address either, but I'm sure I could track him down...

In other news, thanks to the Metro free-on-trains newspaper, I've just discovered the pop group with the coolest name ever: Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. With full stops in the name and everything. Classic. Their music is pretty good too - check them out.

While I'm talking about the Metro, I should also mention that it has a rather cool comic strip - Nemi. Which according to my research is a popular Norwegian strip that's quite rightly gathering a cult following here in Britain. Although the British translation, given where it appears, is understandably toned down a bit from the Norwegian original - granted that I only speak one word of Norwegian, I'm almost certain Nemi's first word in the third panel of this strip isn't 'sod' like it is in the Metro version...

It's cool that they're still happy to show Nemi smoking and drinking and having casual sex, though. I hate excessive censorship.