Excel's coming home

 Yes, it's the grand final of the UK Chapter of the Microsoft Excel World Championship's competition on Saturday! There'll be a livestream from around 11:00 here if you want to watch it and cheer me on. Or the other 31 competitors, if you'd rather cheer for them instead. I don't mind.

Anyway, my target here is to finish in the top five. I think that's realistic, given how the season has gone so far. I've done very well in the last two competitions (round 3 of the UK qualifying and round 8 of the worldwide "Road to Las Vegas"), but those both happened to be the kind that rewarded figuring things out in your head more than technical skill with obscure Excel formulas. I've not done so well on ones that work the other way, so we'll just have to see how it goes in London.

You could look at the rankings on the UK website and say I'm the fourth favourite:

But you'd be wrong to do that, since there are (at least) two really really good Excellers who only took part in one of the three rounds and still qualified. Chris Clarke was second in the world championship last year, and Lorenzo Foti got to the last 24 on the big stage in Vegas. If we look at the Road to Las Vegas rankings for this year (filtering just for UK and Italy, seeing as Lorenzo counts as Italian there but lives in Britain now), we can see they're both a good way ahead of me, as are the others of the top five UK-ers up above:

Actually, we can see that Karim is just fractionally ahead of me in both rankings. He's clearly my arch-enemy.

Harry G, Harry W and Elliott are among the wonderful people organising this whole UK event, and creating the cases for us to use our Excel skills on. Michael Jarman, reigning world champion, probably isn't going to be in London, unless they spring him on us as a last-minute wildcard.

But all in all, if I finish in the top five, I've beaten at least some of these rivals who are demonstrably better than me, so I'll be delighted! And it'll be a lot of fun whatever happens, so I wouldn't even mind coming last. Much.

Escape from Blood Castle

 This time it's my brother's fault for reminding me of another book in my sprawling collection...

This one hasn't quite been in my possession since time immemorial. I bought it from the Chip Club primary school book catalogue in what was probably 1985 (the first page rather confusingly says it was first published in 1984 and copyright © 1985) . Or rather, my father bought it at my request - it's not like I paid for Chip Club books myself whenever the new leaflet made its way to the classroom, but I always got one from it. I expect many parents grumbled at being expected to buy a vaguely educational book for their offspring on a regular basis, but since my dad was a teacher, he was all in favour of the idea, however short of money we might have been. And this particular one is a real treat!

It's the first in the series of Usborne Solve-it-Yourself books, and by far the best of them. I eagerly bought some others in the range, only to find they were much simpler, less complicated and ingenious than this pilot episode. It's a great shame, but at least we got Blood Castle in all its glory.

Each double-page spread presents a puzzle for the reader to figure out before turning to the rest of the story. How does Ivor get into the castle? Obviously, he climbs up the lion statue, onto the roof, up the drainpipe and onto the ledge, where he fishes for the key on the windowsill using the nylon thread and sharp hook described in the text, then goes back down and lets himself in the front door. Ignoring the open door that leads to the snake pit, of course.

There's a page of hints (in mirrored writing) at the back of the book, just before the answers pages which explain everything. It's great stuff, and the following pages are perhaps the best of all:

What really happened? You might well ask, because the really clever reader of this book, i.e. me, might notice that the whole thing doesn't actually quite work. The answers page is wrong!

"The pendulum goes up not down. (Follow the cogs round to see why.)"

But if you do follow the cogs round, you'll see that the pendulum actually goes down, right onto Ivor! Check out the pink and yellow cogs on the left, just above the big wheel that the balls turn. It's disguised by the arrows being on opposite sides, but the two wheels are marked as both turning in the same direction! The artist made a mistake, and I'm clever enough to spot it! It's no wonder I was such a fan of this book.

And no, I didn't get the solution to a single one of the puzzles without looking at the answer page. But that's not the point!

I had a little practice in spotting flaws with Heath Robinson machinery probably shortly before getting Escape from Blood Castle - the Beano Comic Library no. 64, Baby-Face Finlayson in "Little Angel" came out in November 1984 and among the many, many silly pictures that were almost certainly the funniest thing I'd ever seen in my life up to that point was this unusually-powered lift:

... which even my eight-year-old self (unobservant oaf though I generally was) could see doesn't quite work the way it should. The rope should be attached to the treadmill, not to the man on it. Was it deliberate (I mean, it's so obvious), or was it a glitch in the brain of the artist? To this day I'm not sure, but perhaps it encouraged me to start scrutinising every picture I could find in the hopes of spotting other gaffes...

Just to be fair

 Boots started it in both the big Puss and Boots stories I shared yesterday, so I thought there really should be one on here where the cat is the provocateur and gets his well-deserved comeuppance at the end of the tale. So here's an interesting one from the 1974 Sparky Book:

A full splash page with the title is something Puss and Boots seem to have often got. There are three others in this annual, one for I-Spy, one for the Kings of the Castle and one for the lengthy "Bushboy" story that takes up the last eight pages (all full-colour, too) of the book. A couple of others (Pansy Potter and the other Puss n Boots) have a big picture and two small panels beginning the story on the first page. I think it works best with this one - it doesn't feel like a waste of a page that could be used for more pictures, but an eye-catcher with still enough detail and reading to entertain the reader. That Boots wears braces with his football kit is brilliant.

The tongue-lolling enthusiasm of the first-aider is another high point. And see, this time it's Boots who's innocently going about his everyday business and Puss who torments him just for the fun of it!

I like the way Boots just carries on, still not expecting any more booby-traps.

You have to feel a bit sorry for Tich. The worst he's done to deserve that is a bit of pointing and laughing. Well might he say b-b-baggle!

And it's another Sparky crossover of sorts! Sir, the boss of the Sparky People and by implication the person in charge of this whole annual, intervenes to protect the readers' delicate sensibilities from the sight of the climactic duffing-up. Which is unusual - "We are the Sparky People" did supposedly represent the people who created all these stories, but they tended to live more in a world of their own. They also have a cat called Puss, but I don't think he's any relation to Tich's loving uncle.

Anyway, the most fascinating thing about the safety curtain there is that it's blue. Half of this Sparky Book's pages are full-colour, and the other half are duotone red, black and white. But this final Puss and Boots page and the title page, if not the middle two, are actually on the colour pages - they just use no colour other than red, except for the title and the curtain!

If it's a deliberate technique, it's very clever. It really reinforces the idea that Sir's interruption is on a different level of reality from the events of the comic story. The L-Cars story on the next three pages does something similar - it's all sepia-toned except for the sound effects lettering, which is very big, bold and all the colours of the rainbow! The story is about Frederic and Cedric driving the Inspector mad by making a lot of noise, and all the colours really make the point clearer. Someone at the Sparky was really doing creative things with the materials available!