Friday, February 06, 2015
Blogs, blogs everywhere!
Another of the XMT qualifiers has started up a blog - Alex Mullen, the latest new superstar of American memorising! I can't wait for May, the internet will be absolutely deluged with people's personal experiences of the Extremeness in San Diego!
Sunday, February 01, 2015
Thyme flies
I knocked a jar of thyme off my kitchen cupboard shelf today, and it flew everywhere.
Why did I even have a jar of thyme, I hear you ask? (I assume you're familiar with my style of home cooking and know that it doesn't involve fancy seasoning.) Well, I've had it since I was dieting, like five years ago at least, and making a short-lived but brave attempt at cooking nice-tasting but low-carb vegetable-based meals for myself. The nearly-full jar of dried thyme has been sitting in my kitchen cupboards ever since then, and it's a mystery to me why I saw fit to bring it with me when I moved house. I didn't realise I'd done it; I didn't bring any of the other herbs I stocked up with way back then.
Logically, I must have subconsciously packed it away in my cardboard boxes of kitchen supplies, safe in the knowledge that one day in the far future I would knock it over and be able to write a blog entry with a vaguely funny punning title. And now that day has come.
Why did I even have a jar of thyme, I hear you ask? (I assume you're familiar with my style of home cooking and know that it doesn't involve fancy seasoning.) Well, I've had it since I was dieting, like five years ago at least, and making a short-lived but brave attempt at cooking nice-tasting but low-carb vegetable-based meals for myself. The nearly-full jar of dried thyme has been sitting in my kitchen cupboards ever since then, and it's a mystery to me why I saw fit to bring it with me when I moved house. I didn't realise I'd done it; I didn't bring any of the other herbs I stocked up with way back then.
Logically, I must have subconsciously packed it away in my cardboard boxes of kitchen supplies, safe in the knowledge that one day in the far future I would knock it over and be able to write a blog entry with a vaguely funny punning title. And now that day has come.
A final word
Week five of XMT qualification is words! Not a very exciting one visually, this - I find it easier to just read the list of words as it is on the screen, rather than highlighting one batch of three at a time. I do do them in batches of three, though - until last year's XMT, I'd never used a journey for words, just strung them together in one continuous story, but I find it helpful to use locations with such a short fast discipline.
Accurate recall is tricky, and I do suspect English-language-users are at a bit of a disadvantage, if only because there are more possible synonyms, and the translations will generally default to the most commonly-used word in other languages. But then, there are plenty of English-speakers who do this much, much better than I do, so I can't really use that as an excuse.
And so that brings us to the end of qualification! When the results are in I'll run down the list and blog about who I'll be competing against in May!
Accurate recall is tricky, and I do suspect English-language-users are at a bit of a disadvantage, if only because there are more possible synonyms, and the translations will generally default to the most commonly-used word in other languages. But then, there are plenty of English-speakers who do this much, much better than I do, so I can't really use that as an excuse.
And so that brings us to the end of qualification! When the results are in I'll run down the list and blog about who I'll be competing against in May!