Whoops, Mrs Miggins, You're Sitting On My Artichokes

I'm wearing an old pair of jogging bottoms with big holes in the knees and somewhat loose elastic (what, you expect me to be a model of sartorial elegance when I'm on my own at home? Sorry to disappoint you) and just now as I was walking towards my kitchen sink, the arm of my sofa caught in the hole in one of the knees and pulled my trousers right down around my ankles. It was a perfect slapstick moment that just needed the vicar coming round unexpectedly for tea to make it complete.

Anyway, the World Othello Championships. It has ended up with three Japanese players in the semi-finals - Makoto Suekuni v Tetsuya Nakajima and Hideshi Tamenori v Ben Seeley. Tamenori, in fact, is the making-up-the-numbers extra player from the home nation this year (qualifying for the Japanese team is notoriously difficult, there are dozens of really, really, REALLY good players there), and is almost as impressive in that role as I was in London in 2004.

But slightly more controversially, the organisers have unilaterally decided that the Japanese should be allowed to have a team of three women as well, rather than the one that other countries are allowed (you can have a woman as part of your normal team of three as well, of course - I went into all this in detail last year some time, I think). There is a bit of a history in the world of international othello of Japan, since they always win everything, doing things their own way and not caring what the rest of the world thinks. Personally I think the whole thing's funny, but there are those who take it seriously. Which, of course, only makes it all the more entertaining. Controversy is a fun game for all the family.

Saddlesore

The saddle on my bike came loose on the way to work, and kept tilting back while I was riding along. So I had to sort of park my whole (considerable) weight on the front bit to keep it level, and then it tilted downwards the other way. You could pay to see circus clowns riding bikes like that, probably.

Anyway, it's the weekend, and I've got things that need doing. I'm going to go for that master plan of memorising all those six-digit square numbers, to aid my square-root calculations at the MCWC. I'm still no good at square roots, but at least this way I can get a few quick points for the first three digits of each question (you have to give the answer to eight significant figures). I'm also still going to do the one minute binary record attempt with a full 270 digits, even if, just for example, someone who previously held the record tries his best to claim that the new record set earlier this year shouldn't count, and argue that I should only try for 170 or so so that other memorisers can then beat that and get the great publicity that our sport deserves. The way I see it, there's no point trying to beat a much less impressive record when someone has done 240, and I won't be at all offended if I do manage 270 (or even 300!) and Gunther argues that that doesn't count as a real record either.

Ben Seeley's on top at the world othello championship after the first day - he's won seven out of seven, beating Makoto Suekuni (who beat Tamenori earlier in the day) in the last game. Seeley v Tamenori first thing tomorrow, quite literally, I think it's half past midnight British time. Nicky van den Biggelaar is doing well too - he looks like having the best chance of stopping there being three Japanese (plus Ben Seeley) in the semi-finals. I really wish I could play that well. Ah well, that's another thing to work on over the next year...

Curses, Moriarty

My arch-nemesis, Akira Haraguchi, has been up to his old tricks again. It seems that he's recited pi to 100,000 places, over a sixteen-hour period last night. That's just much too many numbers. I'd still like to beat the record some day, but I can see I'd have to go up to something like 150,000, just to make sure he doesn't pre-empt me again.

Of course, he doesn't really count as an arch-nemesis - or at least I don't count as even a lesser nemesis of his, seeing as I've never publicly recited any digits of pi, barring a couple of dozen in a pub every once in a while if I want to show off. Still, it's nice to imagine that I'm an adversary of his in the pi-memorising stakes, however inaccurate the idea might be. Besides, I should refrain from talking about people as if they were my enemy - certain misunderstandings arose from a comment I made after the WMC, although how anyone could think that when I described Clemens as 'evil' it might mean that I don't like him, I can't imagine.

What is a shame is that I didn't qualify for the world othello championships - if I had, I would be in Mito, Japan, right now, and would be able to hunt Akira down and... well, say hello, I suppose. But it would also be cool to be playing in the championship. It kicks off tomorrow, they've already done the draw for the first round in the traditional way the evening before - you can see it here, if you really want to. Team Britain are missing a few of our brightest stars this time round, but I'm sure they'll put up a good fight. You wouldn't want to bet against Hideshi Tamenori on his home turf, though.

I've just been watching a repeat of Pie in the Sky on ITV3, but now it's finished and they've moved on to "Another Audience with Freddie Starr". This is exactly the kind of situation for which the phrase "from the sublime to the ridiculous" was invented.

@ BCC 34 750

I've got a pair of corduroy trousers that I don't wear very often, but I've had them for years - I bought them for a seventies night quite some time ago, a very memorable evening to which the only people who turned up were me, my brother and his friend Takanori. Anyway, I've just noticed today that written in black marker on the inside of the seat is "@ BCC 34 750". You'd think I would have noticed that before, but then I'm not terribly observant. I could speculate as to what it means, but I can't think of any interesting things that BCC might stand for except Big Cool Cords.

Rather than doing anything useful tonight, I'm watching a charity football match between old fogies who played for Liverpool and Celtic twenty years ago. I was a Liverpool fan back in 1986, for the simple reason that they always won. This made it possible to pour scorn on fans of other teams for being so stupid as to support one of the teams who didn't win all the time. Which really makes you feel superior. Of course, my social group of nine-year-olds were also all Liverpool fans for exactly the same reason - this was Lincolnshire, and there weren't any good local teams to support - so we generally had to restrict our scorn to people we assumed looked like they might be Man Utd supporters.

Nowadays, of course, I feel superior to all those fans who are so stupid as to support a team that wins games occasionally. Poor Boston are still languishing second from bottom of league 2, despite a great win against Lincoln and a draw away at Swindon. If we can beat Bristol Rovers on Saturday it will catapult us up the table a bit, and then it'll just leave the speculation about our manager decamping to Darlington to worry about.

One minute binary

I've discovered that I have no trouble at all with reading through and memorising 270 binary digits in exactly one minute and six seconds. Getting it down to under a minute seems to be more of a challenge. The current record is 240, so technically I could do 250, or for that matter 241, but I prefer to do binaries in multiples of 30, because it's somehow less confusing that way. And doing eight thirties and a ten would take as long as doing nine thirties. Still, with a bit of practice I can probably do it. Or make a sufficiently impressive attempt that I don't get laughed out of the Mathematikum.

I've been attempting to do my homework from college, but it involves reading sixteen pages of horrifically tedious nonsense about financial strategy and the theories advanced by Modigliani and Miller in 1961 regarding dividend policy and the hypothesis of dividend irrelevance. Why couldn't it have been Victor Vroom and his theories? I can always remember those, because he had such a silly name and I automatically imagine him as having had a motorised unicycle instead of legs (and, for less obvious reasons, a hairy chest, big beard and tendency to wear fewer clothes than is generally considered decent). He fights crime with his assistants Porter and Lawler in a way that illustrates a lesson every week about motivation and cognitive theory.

He grew fat and then grew thin again

I think I'm putting on weight. Not that I care about such things, of course, but perhaps it would be a good idea to join that gym I've been talking about joining and getting a bit more exercise on a regular basis. I suppose you might say that I should stop eating so many sweets and things, but then I might reply that you should mind your own beeswax, and I like sweets and things, so leave me alone.

I'm watching Grease on Sky at the moment. I've seen it about seventy buhundred times before, and I've got it on DVD so I could watch it any time I like without adverts or anything, but I don't think it's possible to see that Grease is on TV and not watch it. Besides, I want to see what the Sky people edit out of it. The BBC chop out the naughty words from 'Greased Lightning', whereas ITV leave that intact but cut the slumber party scene out entirely.

I should really be memorising things, or calculating things, but never mind. A wella wella wella!

I'll talk when I want to.

It's probably a good thing I haven't written anything here for the last couple of days, because I had an email that I was tempted to write about. And when I say write about, I mainly mean poke fun at the person who sent it to me and publicly mock the contents of the private letter they sent me. Which probably wouldn't have been very nice, but it was very tempting because I could have said all kinds of funny things about it. It's difficult sometimes, being so ethical.

Still, it's October. Birthday month! The party's going to be a meal and drinking session in Nottingham on the 14th, and anybody reading this who would like to come, drop me a line. You'll be very welcome!

Go to the top of the class and give out the penguins

That was one of my dad's favourite sayings - he would have been sixty today. 59 is a really stupid kind of age to die at. Anyway, interestingly enough, one of my teachers at the uni is also the financial controller of the Crich tramway museum, which was one of my dad's favourite places for a day out. In fact, I have a feeling I met this guy the last time we went there - he gave us a lecture on the effects of recent tax laws relating to charities that was very similar to one I've heard before from a tramway person.

Another of the three lecturers didn't turn up at all - he had some good excuse, I forget what, but it meant we got to go home early. I was pleased to note that my reaction to that was "yay, I get out of school early" rather than "tch, I've paid good money for this course and the teacher doesn't even show up". The third was a rather dull guy who pronounces 'finance' differently from anyone else I've ever met. You'd think a career as an accountant would persuade someone to say the word the same way as everyone else, but obviously not.

Pot Noodles are two for a pound at Sainsbury's at the moment, so I bought a couple for the first time in years. That takes me back to my student days a lot more than going to university did (my university career wasn't really characterised by me showing up to classes very much, but it did involve a surprising number of pot noodles). I had one for my tea tonight, and while I'll admit it wasn't what you'd call nice, they do still have a certain something.

Anyway, my brother's coming round this weekend, so I might not write anything for the next couple of days. Not that I think anyone would really care, but I'd hate to have people logging excitedly onto the internet over the weekend specifically to see my unique perspective on world events.

But if I wore a cap, they'd never let me back in the university

It's back to school tomorrow, the first day in my weekly course of learning lots of useful accountancy-related things that nobody in the history of the universe has ever found a use for in the real world. It starts at 3:30 and goes on till 8:45. I'm also going to work in the morning, so I'll be well and truly worn out by the end. Still, having this qualification will come in pretty handy when I run out of money and need to sweet-talk my way back into the world of the wage-slave. And even if I don't, I'll get to impress a classful of impressionable youngish accountants with how clever I am. Besides, it'll be fun to be learning and preparing for exams again, probably. I need to remember all my old excuses for not having done my homework.

Ntl have changed the numbers on all their channels, for no earthly reason. The letter explaining it even says "we've also decided that channels on a revolutionary digital TV service such as ours are bound to grow a bit so we're changing to three digit numbers to allow for ongoing additions."

They already used three-digit numbers on quite a lot of their channels! The only difference now is that they're all three digits, so basically in order to allow for expansion they've changed from having the choice of any number from 0 to 999, to any number from 100 to 999. Weirdos.

Nerdy rant

It's kind of old news now, I know, but I've just been watching the Doctor Who episode "The Satan Pit", and I feel I have to say to the uninterested world that you can't do a story in which a space station's crew are composed of six major characters who work and interact extensively onscreen together, and two extras who say and do nothing and then die at dramatic moments. It just looks really weird. They could have at least given them names - that doesn't mean you have to pay them extra, does it? Or heck, just mentioned them in the dialogue so the whole production doesn't scream at you "hey, we need to establish that the Ood can kill people, but we need all the characters for later on, better throw in a couple more cannon fodder at the last moment..."

They didn't need to kill two people, anyway, the second one was completely pointless. Couldn't they have splashed out on one more speaking part instead of two walk-ons?

Sorry about that, I just fancy myself a drama critic from time to time. Anyway, it's not like I've got anything monumentally interesting I could be talking about instead, it was basically that or the football because since there's too much stuff on telly tonight that I want to watch, I've taken an executive decision to give the memory and calculation training a break. Describing it like that means it qualifies as effective time management instead of laziness.

Could have been embarrassing...

The zip's broken on my work trousers. Luckily, it didn't come open until I was taking them off tonight, or I really would have had a chance to see if anybody would notice a striking trouser-related change in my appearance like I threatened the other day.

The boss wants me to come in part-time now until the middle of December. On the one hand, this is good, because I'm not sure I want to leave anyway. Although I'll soon change my mind when I get to the annoying part of my monthly routine again, of course. But on the other hand, that'll be four months from the time I told them I was leaving, and it seems to me that any competent company would have had me replaced and things running perfectly smoothly by that point. And this whole voyage-of-self-discovery sabbatical thing isn't quite the same if I'm going in to work every now and then through it. Still, I just do what the universe throws at me and enjoy the ride.

Jings!

When I have nothing better to do, or at least don't have the inclination to do anything better, I can occasionally be seen browsing the children's section of a bookshop. As an aspiring children's author myself, it reassures me to see some of the rubbish that gets published these days - makes me more confident that some of my own rubbish could still find its way into print eventually.

The only drawback to this confidence-building exercise is that occasionally I stumble across a piece of work so brilliant that I could never in a month of Sundays hope to produce anything like it. And then I get all depressed again. One such book, which I came across today, is "The Giggler Treatment", by Roddy Doyle. It's sheer genius from start to finish. It features, among other things, a seagull which hates fish and if it had its way would round them all up and dump them in the sea, a character called Billie Jean Fleetwood-Mack, a man who's in a bad mood because his sandwiches and flask of chicken soup at lunchtime were robbed by a vulture, a short cut from his house to the train station via the Sahara Desert, the river Nile and the Eiffel Tower, and a chapter written by the dog in which, without advancing the plot at all, he describes the difficulty of using the computer without his owner noticing, and mentions that his girlfriend Lassie recently moved to Galway and he thinks he misses her more than she misses him.

"Measure a mouse's eyelash. Not down. Across. That was how far Mister Mack's shoe was from the poo. And his rescuers were in Egypt! In North Africa! They'd never make it on time."

The whole book, in fact, takes place in the time it takes for Mister Mack's foot to descend towards the dog poo. He's wearing new and very stiff trousers, so it takes longer than you'd expect. Seriously, this book reaches heights of excellence that I could never hope to aspire to, even in all the months of Sundays I've got in store for the next year.

In other news, I also bought the new Oor Wullie book yesterday. I'm more of a Broons fan, but I still get the bi-annual Wullie collection too, and this bi-year I did laugh out loud at least a couple of times, so I think I've got my money's worth as well as keeping up with tradition.

And speaking of traditions, I seem to be making one of critically analysing each new Coco Pops advert I see, but I can't help it - this latest one raises deep issues that need to be explored.

It's an advert for Coco Rocks, actually, the horrid-looking crunchy-and-soft-choc cereal that Coco Monkey and his gang also advertise. In it, the villainous Croc steals the Coco Rocks and expresses the intention of scientifically analysing them to discover the secret of what makes them so delicious. Coco observes that "all will be lost" if he does crack the secret, but doesn't elaborate on exactly why. What, exactly, would be the consequences of Croc learning the secret? All I can think would come of it would be that Croc would be able to make his own Coco Rocks without needing to steal them (he can afford the lab equipment and gorilla henchmen, so you'd think he'd be able to buy his own, but perhaps he's barred from the local jungle supermarket), and surely that would be better for everyone except the Kellogg's cereal corporation.

At worst, his plan could be to market his own Coco Rocks clones and make a fortune. And although this would maybe be unethical, I think that frankly Kellogg's could use some competition to their monopoly in this market. Coco Monkey's urging of consumers to help him thwart Croc's plan smacks of brainwashing innocent children into tools of corporate propaganda. I think it's disgraceful, and should be stopped. I've lost all respect for Coco. And Ozmelda Ostrich can forget about me asking her out on another date.

Just plain mental

I've been practicing mental calculations. There are six events at the MCWC - adding ten ten-digit numbers, multiplying two eight-digit numbers, finding the square root (to eight significant figures) of a six-digit number, and naming the day of the week for a given date, plus two "surprise" tasks. In each case you get a certain amount of time to do as many of the tasks as possible - ten minutes for the addition, fifteen minutes for the multiplication and roots, and just a minute for the calendar calculations. Which is a bit of a rush if like me you're not particularly brilliant.

You're given ten of each task, and I can just about do eight additions in the time, and six multiplications. The trick is to keep practicing so that I get most or all of them correct, because I have too many little errors at the moment. Dates is more a case of getting my mind in gear as quickly as possible - once you get going, it really is easy to rattle them off in a few seconds, but I seem to struggle to get warmed up properly.

Square roots are my weak point at the moment. I'm still not entirely sure what approach to take for them. I'd quite like to memorise all the six-digit squares and their roots, which would give me a head start, but it's quite a big task and I worry that that amount of long-term memory stuff would get in the way of the short-term memory stuff I'll want to do for the memory competition on the Sunday.

I've been doing a bit of practice for that, too - did 780 in five-minute binary today, which would equal my world record, but I know I can do more than that on a good day. Also a fifteen-minute number, where I was going for four journeys' worth of digits, 936, but had lots of gaps. I'm pretty sure that's a realistically possible figure, though, so I'm going to stick with it. I'm just pleased that I've been more or less in the training mood today!

The Unblogged

I feel like I should offer a heartfelt apology for yesterday's post. It may not be immediately obvious, but I do have certain standards here, and I do feel bad when I churn out a few unentertaining lines when it's late at night and I'm in a bad mood because of technical problems. I know I have literally more than one reader who tunes into this blog every day, so I'd hate to let you down. The whole MSN Messenger thing is fixed, anyway - turns out it was upset by me changing the date on my laptop in order to fool a dimwitted free trial of Microsoft Office into thinking it hadn't expired. Who would have thought that breaking the law could have consequences?

I did have a blog entry all planned in my head yesterday, before I spent the evening getting frustrated with these new-fangled machines. It was going to be about the fact that I forgot my tie when I went to work yesterday. I'm definitely cracking up, it's official. Nobody noticed, which just goes to prove something. Perhaps I'll try going to the office without trousers next, see what happens.

This isn't the first time I've had the intention of writing about something here and then ended up not, for one reason or another. I know it might sometimes seem like I chronicle every little thought in my head in excruciating detail, but you'd be surprised how much happens to me that I don't get a chance to mention. It seems terribly unfair on these things, although on the other hand if you start feeling sorry for abstract concepts, that's probably another sign of insanity.

Technical hitches

As I mentioned a few days ago, my laptop has decided not to let me use MSN Messenger. This is inconvenient, as it forces me to use my desktop when I want to chat with people, and my desktop is elderly and getting to a state where it's not a lot of use. It definitely can't cope with three or four messenger conversations at once, and takes five minutes of whirring every time I switch from one window to another. Tomorrow night I must sit down and mess with the laptop to persuade it to work properly.

Also, I have to invite people to the big birthday bash. I've decided to go for a meal and a lot of drinking in Nottingham, and so it's just a matter of seeing how many people want to turn up...

We struggled hard all our lives to get by

There are times when I really don't like my job. Today was most definitely one of those times. There should be a law against making people work for a living, especially when the work involves finding that you've made stupid mistakes in the course of putting figures together over the last month and having to apologise and correct them in a very short space of time. What I should have done is only given one month's notice, then I could have spent today sitting around doing nothing.

I still need to find some more wholesome activities to fill my time when I am jobless - this sabbatical needs to be a learning experience, rather than giving myself an excuse to be lazy. If I'm not enriched, fulfilled and a better person all round by, say, Christmas time, I'll be annoyed with myself. So, which languages should I learn? What useful charitable acts can I perform other than volunteering in a shop, which seems just too obvious? What should I create a website about? Which chapters of How To Be Clever should I write first? Answers on a postcard.

They fell apart some time ago

I went into a shoe shop today, for the first time in living memory. Mainly to see whether the "buy one get one free" sign in the window meant one shoe or one pair of shoes, but since my boots have reached the point where it is in fact painful to walk around in them, I did think it might be a good idea to get some new ones. But I didn't like any of the ones in the shop, so I'll leave it till the weekend.

I had the leisure time to hang around shoe shops, of course, because I did all my work for the day before 9am - twelve very quick interviews with local radio stations (it should have been 14, but Sheffield had technical problems and York cancelled. Typical Yorkshire people.)* It was fun noticing the very slight different in format and questions from each one - some focused on serious talking about Alzheimer's, others were more interested in getting me to recount my amazing memory achievements. Radio Lancashire decided to take the approach of making me out to be a complete sad case. I'd complain, except I am in fact a complete sad case.

I did do a bit of mental calculation practice, and I was pleased to see I'm not far off the level I was at in 2004 when I last did it. I'm not going to break any records there, but I should put in a respectable kind of performance.

*I have no previous experience of the habits of Yorkshire people when it comes to arranging radio interviews, so I'm just assuming based on today that they're always having technical problems or cancelling them at short notice. This prejudice doesn't apply to local radio stations in Leeds.

Video killed the radio star

Early start tomorrow - interviews on the early morning shows of lots of BBC local radio stations about the launch of the Alzheimer's campaign. Still don't know which stations, or exactly when, so if you want to listen to me it's more a matter of tune in and hope. I won't be saying anything interesting, anyway - I've got a very detailed briefing that should more than cover a couple of minute's chat in each case.

Disappointingly, I won't be flying from one radio station to another in a private helicopter, but doing the whole thing from Radio Derby down the road. I'll be finished by nine o'clock, and after that I've got the whole day off work to do something useful.

Also in the news, and I don't normally mention celebrity birthdays here, but I've just heard that June Foray is 89 today. And still doing cartoon voices, as she has been doing for well over sixty years now. Happy birthday, Granny!

Ah'm fed up! I never get ony fun here.

I'm bored! And by that I mean that there are many, many things I could be doing, like memory training, or mental calculations training, or writing books, cleaning my flat, arranging my birthday party, watching videos, playing games, emailing people, phoning people, heck, even leaving the flat and going for a drink, but for some reason none of these wholesome activities hold any appeal for me at the moment. The only thing I can reconcile myself to doing is lying around the place at 8pm on a Sunday night and moaning because I'm bored.

Have I mentioned that the day after the mental calculation world cup in Gießen, there's a memory competition in Stuttgart that I'm also competing in? I'm trying to work out how best to balance training for the two - the mental calculation bit involves some long-term memory of numbers, which kind of gets in the way of practising the short-term things for the memory competition. Although since, as previously mentioned, I'm not doing either right at the moment, perhaps it's just an academic question.

Cartoons R Fun

I know I've wittered on a lot about finding old cartoon videos in charity shops lately, but that's only because I've found such a lot of them. I'm most fascinated by a range called "Cartoons R Fun". I had never heard of this particular packager of public domain toons a month ago, although they're dated 1990, and in the last couple of weeks I've found five of their releases - one in London, two in Boston and now two in Derby. Is there someone out there with a complete collection who's following me around and planting them in charity shops for me to find? If so, I'm very grateful. You obviously appreciate that I prefer finding them like that to having them given to me. You should be a psychiatrist. Perhaps you are.

They come in cheap cardboard packages with a badly-drawn representation of a scene from the cartoon on the front - these people obviously couldn't afford plastic or screen captures. They also seemingly couldn't afford the effort of taking the copy-protection tabs off the tapes (so one of today's finds is enhanced by a couple of seconds of early-nineties Grange Hill presumably taped on it by mistake by the previous owner), although they did splash out on some sticky plastic labels that look surprisingly professional.

On the back of the each box is a picture of a gorilla and an organ-grinder's monkey (probably inspired by that Bugs Bunny cartoon, what was it called?) holding a sign detailing the cartoons to be found on the tape (usually just one cartoon with "and many more" written afterwards, to give the impression you're getting more than three seven-minute toons for your money. To be fair, these tapes would have been a complete ripoff when they were new, but for 50p from Oxfam they're a bargain!). The ones I found today even have the listed cartoons on them, which is more than can be said for the previous three. Good cartoons too - five late-thirties/early-forties gems from Warner Bros: "Porky's Hired Hand", "Farm Frolics", "Hamateur Night", "The Fifth-Column Mouse" (war propaganda at its very best) and the really brilliant "Robin Hood Makes Good", plus a Noveltoon from 1946 called "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" with an extensive follow-the-bouncing-ball singalong of the title song. Must have gone down well in the cinemas.

While I'm on the subject of cartoons (am I ever off it?), I've been indulging in some deep self-analysis today. You may recall me mentioning that Furrball is probably my favourite character on Tiny Toon Adventures? Well, having been watching an episode a day for the past two weeks, I've realised that the character I most look forward to seeing is Calamity Coyote. And I have not the faintest idea why! I always have a favourite character on a cartoon, but I can normally provide a rational explanation as to why. My preference for Calamity, though, seems to have bypassed my brain completely - he's almost exclusively a minor background character (he takes centre stage in a couple of shows, but not any of the ones I've seen this past fortnight), he doesn't really have any of the personality traits that normally appeal to me, he's not especially cute, I just really like him. Does there have to be a reason?

See, how many other blogs give you ruminations as to the writer's preference of characters on a decade-and-a-half old children's cartoon? You get something unusual here.