Monday, July 25, 2011

One long whirl

I don't remember ever being as busy as I have been for the last month or so. I'm running around from place to place doing one thing after another without a moment's rest. Being an unemployed layabout isn't all it's cracked up to be. Anyway, the Cambridge Memory Championship (not in Cambridge) is almost upon us, and the next couple of days promise all the fun of printing things out. Hooray. With the additional thrill of putting the printouts in envelopes and keeping them safe until the competition. But then there's the optional-extra fun part of creating powerpoint slideshows, because the competition room comes with a projector and it'd be a shame not to make use of it. Just as long as I have time, and all my important procrastination doesn't get in the way.

And just as a footnote, can I just quote a comment from an anonymouse:
I enjoy your blog but I can’t help feeling that you are wasting your powers. Why don’t you teach yourself half a dozen languages and then write a book on mnemonics and language learning. I’m sure you can take it further than Linkword, O’Brien, etc.

I get this a lot. Please try to understand, people, I don't have "powers". Just because I can memorise a pack of cards quite quickly and only get the recall wrong 50% of the time, it doesn't necessarily follow that I could solve all the world's problems if I put my mind to it. I can't learn half a dozen languages, nor teach them to other people. Nor can I win millions in a casino. Believe me, I'm getting the maximum possible use out of my amazing abilities at the moment. So please stop telling me I could do other things if I wasn't so lazy. Thank you!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi there! Looking forward to the competition this weekend! I'm arriving friday afternoon. If any other competitiors wanna meet up then to exchange a few random words, I'd definately prefer that to mindlessly wandering the streets of Beeston. Perhaps the zoomster could mention a restaurant nearby for this purpose?

All the best!
/Mattias

Anonymous said...

There's so much more to language than the memorization and serial recall Ben is used to. You can memorize a dictionary but having recognition of words, phrases, grammatical variations etc. all at the tip of your tongue requires at least a year of hard work no matter who you are and before anyone mentions Daniel Tammet I've see the clip where he 'talks' icelandic and if you call that fluency you have shockingly low standards.

Keep up the good work zoomy!

Anonymous said...

You could always start wearing your pants on top of your trousers just to see if you really do have 'powers'.