In his fancy chapeau, he's a leader with taste

I've got a new hat! I saw it in M&S and quite liked the look of it, so I thought I might as well give it a try and see how it works. It's a bit different from the old one, it's a fedora, made of pure wool apparently (seems like a strange thing to make a hat out of, but that's what the label says), and it's black, of course. The brim isn't as wide as the old one's, so we'll have to see just how well it works at hiding my eyes while playing othello. It works fine in the important function of propping up my stopwatch on my desk.

Rather than doing anything useful this afternoon, I've been reading guides to Pacman. It fascinates me that people have gone into such depth analysing how the ghosts move, planning the optimum routes to run around each level and relentlessly playing it for hours and hours to get all the way to the end. And what reward do you get for all this effort? A bug in the program means that it crashes when it gets to level 256. And all the levels from 21 to 255 are identical. This is a task that takes real dedication and resistance to boredom. Possibly even more so than winning a memory competition!

Did you know there's a little spot in the maze where you can 'park' Pacman so that the ghosts just leave him alone? Top players use it to take a break now and then during marathon sessions. If I had unlimited money and space, I'd track down and buy as many old arcade games as I could and keep them all in my own private arcade. And by 'private' I mean inviting everybody to come and play on them as much as they like, obviously. Modern arcades aren't a patch on the way they used to be.