Wednesday, January 28, 2009

It's hard work being memorable

High up on my to-do list is organising the Cambridge Memory Championship. It gets harder every year to come up with 'historical events', especially since we need 120 of them now. It's just typical of those memory competitors, insisting on raising the standards without a thought for us poor slobs who have to create the memorisation papers. It's very difficult to think of a whole lot of vague event descriptions, ideally two to five words, along the lines of 'peace treaty signed'. There are only so many things that can possibly happen, and I'd hate to repeat myself and use a description that I've used in previous years.

And then there's names and faces. It's a real chore finding pictures of people and then putting names to them. If anything, that's even more difficult than remembering their names in a competition (which, as everyone knows, I'm rubbish at).

And I've got to email people and pester them to come along and compete. Because all this work of creating things for people to memorise is much less worthwhile if nobody turns up to the competition. I'm way behind on keeping in touch with competitors, and it really is easy to forget about a memory competition if you don't get reminded...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you want a volunteer you know won't be competing to help out thinking of events?

Anonymous said...

Surely all this stuff could be easily computer generated?

Eddie 2-Sox said...

When's the compo happening Zoomy?

Anonymous said...

Ever thought of using your poohsticks friends for the names and faces? I certainly wouldn't mind a few seconds of fame lol

Zoomy said...

Katy, thanks for the offer but I actually quite like the fun of doing it myself. I just moan about it to keep everyone else entertained!

Geoff, the numbers can be computer generated easily, the rest needs a human touch, especially since the words-based disciplines need to be roughly the same difficulty level in multiple languages...

Eddie, it's Sunday May 3rd, Trinity College, see www.cambridgememorychampionship.com for details, please feel free to come along!

Ace, I would, but despite the way I normally keep my memory-social-circle separate from my poohsticks-social-circle, there is some overlap. You've met James Kemp, for example, so if he comes along and competes he'd recognise your face and probably be confused...