Cobblers

There's a shop just down the road from my flat called The Beeston Cobbler. It's literally a tin hut - a metal shed with a corrugated iron roof inexplicably situated between the houses on the road into the town centre - and it's also in an inconvenient location unless you've travelled to Beeston by train and decided to walk the inconveniently long distance to the shops. So I've always wondered how it manages to stay in business, but when I went there the other day to get some keys cut, it turns out it's the busiest shop in town, with a constant stream of people coming in and out for shoe and/or key work. Meanwhile, the big shiny Timpson's in the town centre is always completely deserted.

Incidentally, at least Beeston's train station is closer to the High Road (we've got a High Road instead of a High Street, because we're weird) than Long Eaton's - for a little town, it's amazing that they managed to find a location so very far away from anything for their station.

Back in Beeston, also on the road into town is a nice bike repair shop (as opposed to the nasty bike repair shop on the High Road that I went to one time before I even lived in Beeston, who did a really terrible job of fixing my bike but at least also forgot to charge me for the job), where I've dropped my bike off today to stop it falling apart quite so drastically. I could probably buy a new bike for less money than I spend on repairs (or else I could just make some tiny effort to look after my bike so it doesn't need repairing so often), but then I'd probably put the bike repair people out of business, and it's important to support small traders.

The documentary that just won't die

I hear that Superhuman Genius is on telly again tonight. I do wish that someone would repeat The Mentalists instead...

In the stars

My horoscope in the Metro newspaper today was disturbingly accurate - it told me not to go wild with spending money recklessly while I was doing something different to blow off steam today. And since I read that while on the train to London to blow off steam and spend money recklessly, I took it to heart, and only spent a relatively small amount of money on unnecessary things. Still, I'm back at work tomorrow.

Timmy (baa), it's Timmy (baa!)

Have I ever mentioned just how completely awesome Timmy Time is? Really, you should all go and check it out, you won't regret it. Silent comedy at its best.

Even though the omens aren't good

Despite Philipp Petzschner (one of those Germans who I recently said were rubbish at tennis) winning the men's doubles, along with an Austrian who doesn't count for memory-championship-omen purposes, I've still got three days of holiday from work, which I'm going to spend preparing exhaustively for the UK Memory Championship in August, and we'll see how that goes. I've also pencilled into the schedule a certain amount of tidying up my flat, since my brother's coming to stay in a few weeks and there isn't currently room for two people to squeeze in among all the clutter. And I was also thinking of using this free time to work out what to do with my life, generally speaking. That doesn't take more than a couple of hours, I'm sure.

The project that interests me just at this moment is working out a nice balance between memorising and mental calculations to get a good score at the 'square roots of six-digit numbers' event at the Mental Calculation World Cup. What's the minimum amount of data (log tables or whatever) I can memorise that is still beyond what non-World-Memory-Champions can do and leaves a relatively simple amount of calculation?

Also, how can "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" be advertising a new, more butter-like taste? Does that mean their whole brand name has been a lie until now? If it tastes more like butter now, that means it previously didn't taste entirely like butter, and so believing it's not butter would have been really quite easy! I mean, I eat the stuff myself and if they hadn't made it explicitly clear that it wasn't butter, I might have believed it was. But then, I'm stupid.