Come on you blues

I really shouldn't enjoy seeing Chelsea lose so much - football really brings out the worst in people, doesn't it? But, you know, it's just funny...

Ocean's One

I see from my Blogger stats page that someone's been paying attention to my old posts that mention card-counting at blackjack. I haven't had anyone asking me to do that for quite a long time, actually, which is a bit surprising - there's apparently been a movie which I haven't seen, and there's certainly been an episode of the Simpsons which I have, giving viewers the idea that it's something any old gang of idiots can do and guarantees them a vast fortune with no effort or possibility of losing. So I was kind of expecting a resurgence of people contacting me and asking me to go to a casino and win them huge piles of money.

I'm always up for it if anyone really wants to - fly me to Las Vegas for a week, give me a couple of grand to play with and you can have all the winnings. But when I add the proviso that there's still a sporting chance that you'll end up broke (because, card-counting or no card-counting, it's still actually gambling on getting the right cards at the right time), potential investors tend to change their minds.

Maybe I could teach a group of potential casino bank-breakers how to do it properly (I'm not talking about "add one for a high card, subtract one for a low card" here, I mean properly memorising every card that's come out and recalculating the odds on every hand). I could get a reputation as the godfather of the whole blackjack racket and charge huge amounts of money. And get payment in advance, because 99% of people who tried to learn that would give up pretty quickly when they realised how much work it would take to get good at it...

Something of the Daleks

It's not that Doctor Who completely sucks at the moment, it just really needs some new ideas and a touch of original thinking, rather than just doing the same story over and over again. The second part of the latest Dalek extravaganza wasn't so bad, all in all. It's just that it makes me think "Where have I seen this before? Oh yes, every 'epic' Doctor Who story for the last ten years... and also that Batman comic, of course."

At least they dropped one of the new ideas they've had - those horrid cheap-plastic-toy-looking Daleks that made their spectacular debut a few years back. I'm all for changing "classic" designs if the new ones are better, but maybe Daleks are one of those things you just can't really improve on.

Missed THAT part before

Here's the interesting page of the Guinness Book of Records 2016:

I do know it's called "Guinness World Records" nowadays, but I'm a traditionalist. What I didn't notice is that on the previous page I'm also credited with the world record for 5-minute binary - which was actually beaten quite a long time ago. I'm a fraud!

Guinnesses all round!

The new Guinness Book of Records has a page of memory-themed records again - an interview with Johannes Mallow which claims he's the current world memory champion (he won it in 2012) and a couple of other bits, including crediting me with 30-minute and 60-minute cards. No photo of me this time, but at least my name's in the book... actually, the 2016 edition is a lot less cool than the 2014 one (on the memory page, at least) - back in 2014 it was shiny, exciting and well-written, but this one seems rather more phoned-in. But still, woohoo!

(Oh, and no Guinness beer for anyone - it's got gluten in it)

Othello trivia

This was the 11th time Imre has won the British Othello Championship, 32 years after the first time. That's a pretty impressive record, really, and not something that's anywhere close to being matched in memory competitions. Partly because there was no such thing as memory competitions before 1991, but also because it doesn't seem to be something that people can stick around at the top level of for more than a decade at most. But who knows, maybe there will be some kind of comeback by one of those old has-beens who used to be good at it...

Hooray for othello!

I really need to play more, I'm so out of touch with othello that I've basically forgotten how to play the game at all. But Imre still remembers after all these years, and he won the UK Championship for the 187th time, beating David in the final. A lot of fun was had by all! Roll on the World Championships!