In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay

 Yesterday was the grand final of the UK Excel Championship, live and in person in London! It all happened on the first floor of the Blue Fin Building in Southwark, with 29 Excel experts gathered around a big conference table with laptops, supervised by a whole lot of other Excel experts who did a really awesome job of running the whole show!

I was staying in the student hall of residence just next door, and very nice it was too, and so was there in ample time for the 10:00 arrival before the 11:00 start, as per the schedule.

Actually, the whole thing started rather late, although they made up the time very impressively by the end of the day. As I've said before about memory competitions and other things, if everything went according to plan I would have no idea what was going on. I like a bit of chaos at these things. And the worst technical problem seemed to be organisers' laptops that would either connect to the internet or to the big screen, but not both.

Still, Hadyn's bingo-card prediction of a late finish didn't come off, but the rest of his awesome predictions video was very impressive!

I note that he originally had me finishing fifth (as per my own goal for the championship set out in my last blog), but then downgraded me to ninth when he thought of a better way to calculate it. Shocking! But I did make sure to fulfil the other prediction that I'd bring a pack of cards. I wasn't planning to bring cards to an Excel competition, but having seen the video I made sure to do it anyway. I've generally kept quiet about being a memory man in the Excel community, but it's all common knowledge now, so that's my thing in Excel world until I become world champion at that one too.

The organising team are a very impressive mix of genius characters who manage to get everything done and look good while doing it...

And our first case of the day was written by the ever-humble Giles Male about his wardrobe of fur coats and dance troupe:

I did relatively okay at this one, but only managed the eighth-best result.

Ha Dang stood out straight away as being the man to beat, and kept that comfortable position all day!

I was feeling more hopeful about the second case, by Harry Watson, because his cases tend to be my kind of thing...

... but actually, I really made a mess of it. Mixed up a formula for one of the levels in a way I could have spotted with a basic bit of double-checking but didn't, and ended up way down the rankings. It was still a lot of fun, though!

So that was unimpressive, and I could have done a lot better. Not better enough to come close to troubling the top three, but still better than 14th. But never mind! We had one more big exciting task after lunch, this time by Harry Gross! And word had leaked out that it was going to be based around Alice in Wonderland, so my preparation for this competition (while everyone else was designing custom formulas for every eventuality and practicing hard) was to buy a copy of the book to read on the train down to London. Which I forgot to put in my bag.

I thought I did okay at this one, though again I could have been better with just a bit more attention to little details and picked up some extra points. Still, seventh-best was a new high for the day!

Lorenzo came close to knocking Ha off the top spot overall, but didn't quite get it. A well-deserved win, and some awesome performances all round! And I finished ninth, so Hadyn clearly knows better than me how good I am at Excel!

Ha wins a really awesome champion's belt, and a free trip to Las Vegas for the worldwide finals in December! And everyone else got prizes too - a medal for everyone, and our really cool name badges showing how long we've been using Excel were a real treat!

Yes, I remember when Clippy was new. There were alternatives to Clippy the paperclip that you could select, and I preferred one of those, but I can't remember which it was after all these years. And I remember when the ribbon was introduced and Ruined Excel Forever. I'm old.

But the very BEST prize was a custom T-shirt for the winners of each qualifying round and each case on the final day! And as the winner of "Old Money", the third qualifying round, I got this amazing design (courtesy of Jaq Kennedy) - 

This is far cooler than I could ever have expected. I wore my lucky Zoom-Zoom shirt to the championship, but that shirt is clearly only really lucky for memory competitions. From now on, this Old Money shirt is my lucky shirt to be worn at every Excel championship! I'll be the world champion before you know it!

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!

Baggle!

 I definitely need to update this blog more. It's only a few blog posts ago that I last read something good on Ludicrously Niche and had to chip in with a comic from my own collection, and it starts to look like that's all I do here. But he's talking about Puss and Boots, and I felt I just had to share this. There are a few Sparky Books I've owned since time immemorial - the ones dated 1976, 1977 and 1978. And the 1978 one (which I think might have been the first one I read, though it was so long ago I'm not sure why I think that) contains an all-time favourite comic adventure of that cat-and-dog duo!

Yes, it's not in mint condition. Like all good comics, it's been read a lot over the years. It's a little strange that the cover focuses on Ali's Baba, but the Sparky books of the seventies rotated their cover stars, and just crammed a few extras into the margins. Peering through the kitchen window here, we've got Throgmorton, Babbymummy, Superwitch, Peter Piper, and just barely visible at the edge of the window there's Boots. I wonder what he's done with Puss. Anyway, one of their stories inside is the all-time classic...

You see, the thing about Puss an' Boots is that they don't just fight like cat and dog. They fight like cartoon characters who know they're indestructible, and they revel in it! A quiet start like this is always going to escalate quickly...

In this world, an enormous anvil falling on top of you just causes a comedy bump on the noggin that disappears after one panel. And "I shall assume that the blacksmith left that up there when he was shoein' the HORSE-FLIES..." is a line that's always stuck with me for sheer cleverness and silliness.

The distinctly proletarian dialogue was a real treat, too. For someone whose main comic of choice was the Beano, where everyone's just that little bit more middle-class, this was like a glimpse into a different world! I also love the way one of Tich's friends has a much more advanced vocabulary than the others. Tich communicates solely by means of the word "baggle".

Boots lives in Nirdlewick-on-Tay. "Nirdle" is a word that appears possibly even more frequently than "Baggle" in these stories, and this annual also has a couple of "Planet of the Nirdles" stories, one of which is a sort of crossover with Puss and Boots!

Over the years, I've acquired a few more Sparky Books, including what was apparently the last one, dated 1980.

The poor condition of this one is nothing to do with me - it was like that when I bought it, a couple of years ago. This feels like a very strange kind of cover - the small figures and big letters somehow make it feel a lot more old-fashioned than 1980. Maybe that's deliberate, since a lot of the content is apparently reprints of old stuff.

The choice of characters is interesting, too. Notably, Thingummy Blob and the Prof are sitting on top of the S, but they don't have a story inside the book. Mr Ackroyd (the short-sighted silly-billy) takes up a lot of the interior pages, but he doesn't get a look-in on the cover. And Baron von Reichs-Pudding (the flying hun from world war one) is shooting a machine gun at Mr Bubbles, which seems a bit drastic.

But this annual does have a new four-page Puss and Boots, and four old one-page adventures too:

Cartoon violence is definitely the best kind.

Old-fashioned Excellence

 The UK Chapter of the Microsoft Excel World Championship held its third and final online qualification round today, and it was another classic with a specifically British twist - calculating things in pounds, shillings and pence, and needing to create Excel formulas to give the answers in specific ways that Excel can't generally deal with, in a short space of time!

It takes some creative thinking. And there were price-lists to look up of commodities you might have bought in 1966, and calculating the difference between the price in 1966 and today, and all kinds of ingenious silliness like that.

And maybe it's just because I'm so old, compared to all these young people who seem to populate the UK nowadays, but I did better at it than everyone else!

So yes, I'm feeling happy with myself tonight! Next stop, the live final in London on September 6th! It's far too long since I've been to an in-person competition of any kind! And I can win a trip to Las Vegas for the World Championship, if I win that one! Which would be extremely cool, for many reasons! It's even far-too-longer since I went anywhere overseas, and longer still since I went to Vegas (even though I still cite it as my favourite holiday destination). Even if I don't win the free trip, in fact, I might rob a bank or something and see if I can get there this year...

This worm has a hat on

 A lot of people have been paying tribute to Allan Ahlberg, and quite rightly too! At least one person on the internet mentioned this particular favourite that can be found on my bookshelves...

As you can see, it belongs to Ben. This book has been in my possession at least since the time when our misguided parents bought me and my brother each a pack of stickers with our names on, resulting in everything in a five-mile radius becoming the property of either Ben or Joe - I've quite possibly had this book since it was published (third printing) in 1981.

I don't know why I've kept it among my books ever since then, but I'm glad I did. It is very funny, after all, and do I need any more reason than that?