D*ff

The most important thing I learned today - on the French dubbed version of the Simpsons, the Duff beer logo is blurred out, because it's an actual real beer now, and so contravenes product placement laws, even in episodes made when it was just a fictional thing. That's weird.

Anyway, there has also been the first day of the French Open Memory Championship! The one in 2008 attracted only two French competitors, a French-only competition in 2015 drew in eight, but this year's event breaks all the records - nineteen entrants in total, 13 of them French! That's enough for a national Memory League event!

It's the first old-fashioned memory championship I've competed in since the UK Championship in August 2015, and my complete and total lack of training shows, but it's still been fun! All the new French competitors have identical dark hair, glasses and beards, so I'm not at all to blame for not remembering who's who, but it's a two-day competition so I'm sure by the end of the day tomorrow I'll be familiar with them all.

I'll write a full report just as soon as I can get round to it - meanwhile, I've got a French dub of the Simpsons to distract me - most characters' voices are imitations of the American originals, but for some reason Krusty is totally different; he's got a sort of deep, booming voice. Foreign countries are strange and different.

And the whole world loves it when you're in the news

News websites the world over are running memory-related stories today! It's fair to say that 99% of them have latched onto a soundbite that "scientists have said something about memory" and used it as an excuse to fill a column with the usual blurb about the subject (here's the BBC's typical example), but there is some genuine Science behind this one - Boris and his gang's investigation into the brains of memory competitors, including me. Here's the actual science-stuff. I don't understand a word of it, but it scores points for not being illustrated by a picture of Basil Rathbone. Or some other thicko.