Thursday, December 22, 2011

Can I just point out...

That's it's the 22nd of December, it's officially winter, and I haven't got my heating on. It's lovely around here at the moment, and I hope it stays that way! I still want to emigrate to Australia (actually, maybe New Zealand, there's an Australian I want to avoid), but I think I could tolerate wintering in England this year if it's going to stay like this.

And I'm sure it is, just because I've been seeing tabloid headlines for the past several months saying "icy horrible nasty snowy weather coming right now, definitely!" and if they've been wrong so far, it stands to reason that they'll be wrong forever.

Meanwhile, please go to memrise.com and learn things! They've got lots and lots of things to learn there! Enrich yourself!



PS If you're reading this and you're Australian, I wasn't talking about you. It was another Australian.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Goals galore

Hooray for Marc Albrighton, scoring the 20,000th goal in the Premier League like that. And for having the same name, nearly, as the Mark Albrighton who briefly played for Boston Utd and is now, according to the internet, playing for Nuneaton. And also the same name as the Mark Albrighton who was briefly my boss in a temp job I had many years ago, and who was a fairly athletic type who jogged to and from work. It must be a football kind of name.

It's funny, because it's not a common name, and I've never heard of anyone with the surname Albrighton who wasn't called Marc or Mark. Perhaps it's a family tradition. Perhaps they're all related, although the jogging boss assured me he wasn't related to the Boston player. Perhaps they're all the same person, in fact, because I've never seen two or more of them together at any one time.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

You know what memory sport really needs?

Apart from a swift kick up the backside and general telling not to be so silly and go out and do something worthwhile, of course? A Wikia site, that's what!

Okay, I was bored, avoiding the important task of deciding what kind of new and exciting career I want to new-year-resolve to get, and it occurred to me that this kind of thing is by far the best way to produce the kind of memory competition database that everyone wants. I'm envisioning a huge, sprawling website, with profiles of every competitor detailing their results, records, rankings, favourite foods and other important information like that; pages for every memory competition that ever has or will take place anywhere in the world, complete with results and stories about what happened or will happen there; a page for every discipline's rules, regulations and records as well as when the rules changed and what they were in the olden days, and much much more.

Currently I've written a basic page for the first world championship, and a profile of David Berglas, a very important figure in the history of memory competitions, just to show you what it looks like.

I'm also envisioning a website where everybody works together harmoniously to produce something informative, 100% accurate and also (since this is the real spirit of memory competitions) light-hearted, occasionally silly and irreverent without ever containing anything that could possibly offend anyone, ever. At all.

I think (I'm quite new to the whole wiki thing) that it's currently set up so that anybody can edit anything they want but nobody can go around deleting or disciplining other contributors. Except me, because I created it, but I hereby solemnly promise never to use these great powers, ever, because otherwise it would go to my head and turn me into some kind of mad despot. So come on, memory aficionados, add a page or two and let's make this into a big thing!

Oh, and don't edit your own page. That's just sad.