"Are, in retrospect, glorious..."

Someone found my blog by googling "The follies of men's youth" today. I'm going to have to stop reading that stats page, it's terribly addictive.

Anyway, looking back at 2006 to see the blog entry I wrote with that title, I noticed just how much of this blog is devoted to whining that I'm not sufficiently prepared for memory competitions. Now I come to think about it, I don't think I've ever felt that I've done enough training, since the world championship in 2004. Perhaps I should just give up on the subconscious desire to recapture the downright obsessive practicing I was doing before I won the world championship for the first time, because it's never going to happen.

Really, I'd settle for forcing myself to do just a little bit of speed numbers and binary training to get my speed back up again, between now and the Swedish championship. I'll see if I can muster the enthusiasm tomorrow...

An aid to memory

I feel that I should record for posterity that my favourite poem is Rudyard Kipling's "If". The subject of favourite poems came up recently in a conversation, and for some reason I couldn't think of one on the spur of the moment. So in accordance with the well-known mnemonic principle of 'write it down and even if you never look at the writing again, you'll remember it', let me just say that I absolutely worship and adore that poem, and it's always going to be the one that springs to my mind when asked for a favourite.

Then I'll follow it with an apology for choosing the poem that everyone lists as their all-time favourite, but it really is. Sorry.

Stats!

Hey, this is something new! Or maybe it was always there and I just didn't notice, but it's new to me! Blogger comes with stats telling you who's reading your blog and why!

Today, my viewers come from:

United Kingdom 70
United States 45
Australia 9
India 6
Sweden 4
Latvia 3
Canada 2
Germany 2
France 2
Hong Kong 2

Who's reading me in Latvia? I don't know any Latvians. I mentioned Lithuania the other day, but not Latvia. Perhaps they were offended! If I'd known I had Latvian readers, I would have pretended to think Latvia was great!

Furthermore, I've had a visit from the New Zealand version of Google, searching for "how to give myself food poisoning". I hope my blog was instructive - open a tin of tuna yesterday, save half of it until today, assume it'll be fine.

And people have been looking for Krypton Force again! I haven't done a blog post about Krypton Force videos for ages. I must devote another blog to Marc's artwork again soon. And people have been sent here by recordholders.org, too - I didn't know that site even still existed, let alone had a link to my blog. You learn something new every day. And, thanks to Blogger, the things I'm going to learn revolve around the question of who's reading my blog!

A need for speed

The only real problem I had at the UK Championship was that my brain was running too slowly. It was taking me more time than it should have done to look at the numbers/cards/whatevers and translate them into images. Once I'd done that, my recall was excellent and my mind really wasn't wandering at all, which surprised me a bit, because I haven't done very much marathon-memory training in the last year or so. So really, I just need a bit of regular evening practice going as quickly as possible, and hopefully I'll be back up to somewhere close to my best, possibly...

On the other hand, I was really super-fast with the random words last week. The first three or four columns of words just sunk into my brain with no trouble at all, it really struck me as weird. Maybe there's a reason behind that, or maybe they were just easy words.

Book report

While in London, I came across the most completely awesome book - "Find Chaffy", by the completely awesome Jamie Smart. It's like Where's Wally, but mixed with Jamie Smart's trademark weird and wonderful sense of humour, and you all really should go and buy it now.

I also found a copy of the first G-Man collection by Chris Giarrusso, which I've been meaning to buy for ages - it's also quite screamingly funny and clever and recommended to everyone. Also, it steals my ideas, but it's probably a coincidence.

And I also bought something by Charles Dickens, but he hasn't got a website yet. It's no wonder he's not cool.