Bons mots

Have you ever spontaneously said something really funny and clever, but in a context that takes so long to explain that you can never repeat it to anyone without making it a long, boring anecdote? Well, to heck with it. Even though the line itself isn't funny unless you were there at the time, here's an abridged-as-humanly-possible summary of the online conversation.

Me: Yes, I forgot to take my hat when I got off the train. Twice.
Friend: Tut, didn't you read the manual? Rule one: Never take the hat off.
Me: (reading manual) Hey, also, you're not supposed to keep chickens in one.
Friend: Yep, I had a problem with that once. So many eggs...
Me: That's only a problem if you forget to check it's empty before you put it on. And even if you do, you can always quip "Boy, do I have egg on my face!"

Anyway, Dublin beckons! It's a flying visit, in more ways than one, I'll only be on Irish soil for about 24 hours, but in that time I'll get to hang out and watch the rugby with Charlie Garavan (who conveniently lives very close to my hotel) as well as talk with The Panel about memory and hats. I even get a write-up on their website!

Where the hell is the thunderstorm coming from?

In honour of Blogger's continuing corruption by the German language, and the fact that I found an old Fix & Foxi comic in my flat today, I'd like to share with you the one-page English-language comic strip it contains. Fix and Foxi are popular German comic and cartoon stars, and they help to teach young Germans to speak English, too. It's very impressive, and the kind of thing that really should happen in British comics too - if I'd grown up reading Dennis the Menace occasionally having adventures in German, maybe I'd be able to hold a conversation with all those fluent-English-speaking German and Austrian memorisers.

Still, much as I admire the good intention of the uncredited writer of this story, I do have to giggle at the quality of the translation - the grammar is just plain wrong in a couple of cases, but my favourite line has to be the one I've titled this blog post with. Teaching small children to say "Where the hell" could get them in trouble if they go to America, where that kind of talk can shock and horrify people.

So sit back and enjoy Foxi burning Lupo's house to the ground (it's okay, because it's educational).

I'm pretty sure nobody ever taught me the German for 'tranquilizer' (even if they didn't spell it right) in all my years of education. So it's not my fault I can't speak the language.

Woo! I did it!

No, not achieved anything noteworthy like writing my book, but I did manage to say no to someone on the phone today. Regular readers will know this is something I find impossible, but this afternoon when I got an email from a guy at Radio Solent followed immediately by a phone call from the same guy asking me to be on the breakfast show early tomorrow morning, giving tips on how to remember answers to quiz questions, I politely declined. Even when he continued to try to persuade me to do it, even after I'd explained that I'm rubbish at remembering facts, or anything halfway useful. I felt quite pleased with myself.

I did agree to another TV thing, but just a quick bit of filming for a taster sequence for some kind of ITV show currently in development about impressive mental and physical abilities. I'm going to do that next Thursday, since I'm already in London that day being shown up by a chimp. It's funny how the requests keep rolling in lately - I didn't get asked to do anywhere near this much when I actually won the world championship. And I don't even think Tony's publicity people are pestering the press about me any more either.

In other news, while I may not have achieved anything noteworthy today, I did give blood, and that's the kind of thing that makes up for being otherwise a lazy slob who cares about nothing but his next television appearance. The blood people who do the health check form had never heard of Bahrain and had to look it up in the book to see if you can donate after visiting there. You can. It must be a healthy place.

Oo, Blogger's gone German again! Tastaturkürzel: drücken Sie Strg zusammen mit: B = Bold. I thought it had fixed itself...

History

Of all the creatures in the world, except for gazelles, the one most loathed by Winston Churchill was the pelican. He had developed a deep-seated prejudice against them during the Crimean War, when he had read a book that mentioned pelicans the day before getting his legs blown off by an exploding gazelle. During his lifetime he would regularly take a break from his prime ministerial duties and go to London Zoo to complain about the number of pelicans housed there, and after his death his ghost could occasionally be observed wandering the streets and muttering unpleasant slurs against pelicans and those who support them.

The irony is that Churchill spent his entire life and afterlife under the mistaken impression that pelicans were a kind of insect. The book he had been reading, "Weevils!" by Charles Dickens, only mentioned the birds in passing without giving a detailed description, and his copy of the only other book then published that mentions pelicans, "Weevils!" by George Eliot, had been eaten by a gazelle before Churchill had a chance to open it.

In speeches in Parliament, Churchill would frequently compare his political enemies to pelicans, referencing their scuttling movements, many legs and habit of causing damage to crops. 'Pelican crossings' were so named by special order of Anthony Eden, just to get on Churchill's nerves. A plan to replace the statue of Nelson in Trafalgar square with a giant bronze pelican, approved by the Commons and Lords in 1972 in what became known as the Teaching Winston Churchill A Lesson For Being So Fat And Stupid Act, was abandoned when it was realised that Churchill had died several years previously and wouldn't have recognised the statue as being a pelican anyway, because of the aforementioned confusion.

On the other hand, pelicans generally liked Winston Churchill. His approval rating among pelicans and simliar species polled at London Zoo varied from 89% during the war years to 69.7% in the late fifties. Giraffes, staunch socialists all, were much less supportive of his policies, while the gazelles refused even to answer questions on the subject for fear of Russian reprisals.

A follow-up to last Tuesday's post

No, actually, I mean the Tuesday before last. The one where I talked about Batman and Doris Day. You know, the 1960s Batman series is rubbish! This isn't one of those cases where fond childhood memories make for entertaining viewing as a cynical thirty-something. I must have grown into a bitter old man accidentally. And the "Legends" documentary tonight was Alma Cogan, who's definitely dead, so there were no shocking revelations there either.

But on the other hand, Ripping Yarns is on right now and it's Across The Andes By Frog. Yay!

I really need to do stuff with my life...

I hate unsolved mysteries

This morning I had a tune in my head. It was a catchy tune, but I had no idea where it came from or what the words to it were, if any. Since I was in town, I whistled it to myself to keep it flowing through my brain so that I could hum it to someone later and find out what it was, because it was bugging me. But then I walked through the market and on a tailor's stall there was a sign advertising "SHORTNING TROUSERS £6.99", which of course immediately started my brain singing that mama's little babies love short'ning trousers and wiped out the previous tune, whatever it was. So now I'll never know.

I can't imagine a stall in Derby's indoor market does much business in shortening people's trousers for £6.99, anyway.

Anyway, the day wasn't a complete loss. I did some practice with cards and found that I can still do a pack comfortably under 30 seconds and get it right two times out of three. That was turning it over in the old way, following which I tried a couple of packs shuffling them between my hands in the way that I think could be faster if I work on it, but it's going to take me a while before I can do that as impressively. Need to train my fingers to move in different ways.

Tomorrow I'm going to a recruitment agency in Birmingham for a registration interview arranged last week, despite the whole publicly-announcing-that-I-maybe-don't-want-to-be-an-accountant thing that several of my readers have pointed out might have been a bad idea. Although I said I'd pad out my CV a bit more (even though the CV they have is the one prepared by the Nottingham branch of the same agency on my behalf) and I haven't done it yet. Feels like I haven't done my homework and the teacher's going to tell me off.

Is there a job where the ideal qualifications are fatness and laziness?

Well, I didn't do any memory training today. In fact, I've done nothing at all all day, unless you count doing a couple of extra-difficult hanjie puzzles and watching a heck of a lot of sport, sitcoms and cartoons on telly. I haven't written my book either, and you promised to pester me about it, so it's your fault, readers. There are times when I'm frankly disgusted with myself. What I need is a slavedriver, to force me to do things that I really want to do but am too idle to actually sit down to. Where does one hire a slavedriver these days?

I have been thinking, though. Did I tell you I've left my job at NCN now? No, that's right, I deliberately refrained from mentioning it because I felt vaguely ashamed of being voluntarily unemployed again. But frankly, that's silly. It wasn't much of a job, and if I can't get a good permanent job that I really like (which, judging by the last few months, is surprisingly hard to do), I don't need to spend my time doing temp jobs (even temp-with-the-possibility-of-making-it-perm-later jobs like that one) that I don't particularly enjoy.

In fact, to take things one step further, I think I might have issues with the whole accountancy thing. Perhaps it's time to stop saying that I don't want to try to make a living from the memory stuff, and really try it to see if it actually is possible. You never know, I might like it. And now's the time to try, while I still have money sitting around in the bank. If I'm honest about things, a main reason I've been reluctant to try it before is that I didn't want people to think I can't hold a proper job like a normal person. Well, I think I can get round that mental block if I really try - after all, I'm nearly 31, I've been an accountant for well over ten years now, my mother's going to be disappointed in me whatever I choose to do for a living and everybody else actually would think I was quite cool if I was a professional memory man.

So I'll give it a go, while still looking for a good office job at the same time. I'll sit down and work on the book, and also look into performances and TV appearances and writing other things and so on. Yay! This is the dawn of a bright new era, or else the dawn of a lot more sitting around doing hanjie puzzles and watching telly. We'll see.

Practice makes 90% accurate

I need to do some memory training. Haven't done any since the world championships, demonstrations for journalists and TV people aside, and I need to stay in shape all year if I'm going to actually win the blasted world memory championship next time round. I also need to work on memorising cards by shuffling them between my hands (like I was doing on This Morning), rather than turning them over like I normally do. I'm pretty sure I could go faster if I do it that way, but it'll take me a while to get used to it. But there's just not so much motivation to practice when there isn't a competition for so long. Anyone out there want to organise one for me?

Someone pimp me!

Ever have one of those days when it feels like you've done nothing but talk to TV people? Well, I might be exaggerating things here, but I did talk to two different TV people today in a matter of minutes, and that's two more than I talk to in an average day. So I'm going to Ireland for September 30th, to be gently derided by comedians, and London on October 4th to test my memory against the best the non-human world can offer. Also, you can see my This Morning performance here. Enjoy! (It's not very exciting.)

Maybe I should get an agent. An agent could talk to these people for me and just give me the edited highlights. And an agent might be able to persuade some of these TV people to pay me actual money for these TV appearances. That'd be cool.

On the panel

I've heard on the grapevine that Irish TV show "The Panel" want me on. I don't know the show, but I can only assume they have a sort of guess-the-nonentity kind of sequence, a la Never Mind The Buzzcocks. You can watch an episode on the website, in which the panellists discuss the Irish elections in an entertaining way. I have secretly always wanted to be on Have I Got News For You, this could be a step in the right direction...

Incidentally, everyone who watched This Morning (a list which seems to consist of Grandma and Ian) says it was great. I'm a star!

This Morning, this afternoon and my pants

This Morning was great fun. They cut my bit shorter than planned to make way for some 'breaking news' about Madeleine McCann (I tell you, it's hard to be a minor celebrity right now), but I still got to chat with Phillip Schofield and Fern Britton, memorise a pack of cards and impress an audience of millions. Well, thousands, at least, I'm not sure what kind of viewing figures they get. I also got Phillip to give me an autograph for my grandma ("To Dorothy, lots of love"), which will make her day - she fancies him. Meeting him was rather groovy for me too, I grew up watching him presenting children's BBC and it's strange to realise that he's actually a real person.

This afternoon, I had to hurry back to Derby for my interview with DHL. However, I got a bus that I thought would take me there only to find that it had dropped me at a different DHL place miles away, with no way to get to the right place. So no new job there, but never mind. If I can't get there by public transport, it's not the job for me anyway.

Also, I'm confused about my pants. I have two pairs of green tartan boxer shorts that are seriously falling to pieces ('more holey than righteous', as Grandma says), so I don't wear them much. At least I think I don't, but I've noticed that every time I take a load of washing out of the machine, those old green pants are in there, without me remembering wearing them. It's very strange. Is someone breaking into my flat on a regular basis, wearing my pants and putting them in the wash?

It's in the bag

I've just packed my trusty rucksack to go down to London tonight. I'm worried that it might be reaching the end of its lifespan, though - at the othello at the weekend, the remaining zipper came off and I can't get it back on, so it's going to remain closed for all eternity now. This isn't an insurmountable problem, because of the big hole through which I normally put things in and take them out of the bag, but it makes it more difficult to fit oversized things inside.

It's a Reebok rucksack, black and what used to be a very garish pink before it faded over the decades to a gentle pastel hue, with still just about legible the motto "Pump It Up!" on the front. It's given me many years' service now, and before that it served my brother well as the bag he took his PE kit to school in. He hated PE, and probably transferred some of his dislike for the subject to his PE kit bag, so I think I did the bag a favour when I borrowed it in 1994 and never returned it. It's had a life of continued variety since then - it went to university with me, it's helped me move into my own rented room, followed by my first flat on my own, it's been to MSOs and othello tournaments, it's gone with me to the USA, Germany, Austria, Brazil, Malaysia, Bahrain and elsewhere, and it's still more or less in one piece. I think it's still good for a few years yet, before it becomes actually impossible to carry things around in it. Then maybe I'll have it framed and hang it up on the wall.

Zoomy Doubles For Darwin

Now this is the kind of thing that makes me really, really glad I'm a memory champion! Forwarded from the WMSC, an email from another TV producer:

Dear Secretary,

I am producing a series entitled Extraordinary Animals for Channel 5/BBC World, exploring animal behaviour and intelligence. Each 30 minute film will focus on an animal who has shown exceptional abilities and has furthered scientific understanding not only of its' species but also of our own.

One of our films features AI, a remarkable female chimp living at the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University. Working with Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa and his team, she has mastered the ability to count to ten, memorise symbols for numbers (including Arabic), and words for colours. Both she, and her son Ayumu have shown remarkable ability in a memory test where numbers 1 to 9 appear on a screen randomly, are then covered up and the chimps remember their positions. They can do this at speed.

We have completed our filming in Japan with the professor and the chimps and it really is truly amazing to see them doing the test. However, to see just how skilled they are, I feel we need to see humans take the same test. It would be fascinating to see the result. As the chimps are extraordinary, I think it only fair to use extraordinary humans. It would be fantastic to find British memory champions/experts to take part – both adult and junior. Do you think you might be able to help or refer me elsewhere?

We plan to shoot the test in London in early October. Should you require any further information, please contact me.


Can the British memory champion out-memorise a chimpanzee? Wouldn't it be cool if the answer was no?

Was?

Why when I posted that blog entry did I get a screen saying

"Your blog post published successfully!
Blog anzeigen (in einem neuen Fenster)
Need to change it? Edit post | Create a new post"

I'm sure I haven't told Blogger to give me part of their status reports in German.

Nats

Not the annoying flying insects, the not at all annoying national othello championship. Sorry I didn't post anything yesterday, but Geoff and Michael were staying over and I still don't like blogging when someone's watching me. I don't know why, seeing as I'm aware that people are going read what I'm writing anyway. Still, I'm not sure I was a perfect host, as shown by the following conversation when Michael asked for black coffee:

Me: Oh, there isn't any. I normally keep some in the house for guests, but I took it down to the community centre so we'd have something to drink at the tournament, and it's still there. Ditto milk, sugar and tea.
Michael: What is there to drink, then?
Me: Water.
Michael: Fine. (going to the sink)
Me: Oh, also, the cold tap doesn't work.

Well, I never claimed this was the Ritz. Anyway, the competition all went fine - I had been worried that the venue, a cheap and somewhat shabby but extremely nice community centre not too far from the city centre, would have cancelled my booking, even though I called on Friday to confirm that it was still happening, or would otherwise take exception to us, but no, it was all okay. I must be a great organiser after all. We had the AGM before the championship started, which was as exciting as usual. Graham filled in as chairman while Aubrey's busy in America promoting his new book (just for a change - I think this is the fifth year in a row that we've called on Graham's services as official Acting Something-Or-Other).

By the time the competition was ready to start, we had a whopping 18 competitors. This forced me to cycle home and get another board, but we didn't start too late - luckily, really, since we only had the room till six before we had to make way for a live 'guitar vocalist'. Among the 18, just for maximum confusion value, were two Davids, two Jeremys, two Roberts and two Ians (well, one Ian and one Iain, but that's not a big help when you're reading out names). I think some othello players need to splash out on a name change to something more exotic and unique, like Imre or Aubrey.

I lost to Imre in round one, disappointingly enough - three wins in a row against him would have been something to really boast about - but made up for it with a really cool win against Michael in the third round. I've never done that before. Now I just need to work out how to beat Graham some time. Geoff's got the knack of that - he beat Graham in round two, while Iain beat Imre. That pretty much set the standard for the tournament as a whole - it really wasn't one of those championships where the highest-rated players beat everyone below them on the rating list, there were upsets and surprises all over the place. Iain drew with David Hand in round three, so at the end of the first day David Beck was on his own at the top of the table with three wins.

We went to a Thai restaurant in the evening, it being the first place we could find that wasn't full up. Actually, it was nearly empty when we all piled in. The food was good, though, but the service wasn't what you would call exceptional. A surprisingly extensive discussion about coca-cola led to Jeremy Dyer learning that they do in fact still make cans of cherry coke, and my revelation that in Bahrain, the coke cans still have old-fashioned ringpulls.

Today, I didn't manage to follow up that win over Michael with any more impressive results, unless you count winning on time against Ian when I was well and truly dead on the board. Graham also beat me 63-1, just to teach me not to get too cocky. Elsewhere, David Hand rather impressively made it two draws in a row with his first game of the day against David Beck, who then beat Graham but lost to Iain, who took the lead after five rounds but then lost to Imre and Graham, Geoff and Jeremy Das. Geoff was in contention for the lead all the way through, as were both Davids and Michael. It was anyone's guess who would end up in the final, but normality reasserted itself at the last, and it ended up being Graham versus Imre, for about the 73rd time. Imre won for the (genuinely) ninth time. Congratulations to him!

We had lunch in the Dunkirk Tavern down the road from the venue. Their food selection turned out to be rather less extensive than I'd assumed it would be from the sign outside promising inexpensive Sunday roasts - it didn't add "and no other kinds of food" - but it was very nice. All in all, the whole thing went really well, and a fun time was had by all! So I needn't have worried about it all going wrong and me getting the blame.

I'm gonna live forever

Okay, next Wednesday you all have to skive off work and/or come to Britain to see me on This Morning. They're even putting me up in a hotel in London on Tuesday night! And, in a shining example of effective time management, I've arranged a job interview at DHL at East Midlands Airport for late Wednesday afternoon. Although to be honest I'm not over-enthusiastic about the job.

But that's all for next Wednesday, and as the old saying goes, next Wednesday never comes. Tomorrow, on the other hand, we have the othello nationals! I would really like to do well in it, although as I've hardly played the game for months now, it's unlikely that I will. Still, it's my dream that one day my page on the othello wiki will mention something about my othello-playing ability.

TMWRNJ!

Okay, this is cool - This Morning want me on the show! I get to hang out on national TV with whoever hosts This Morning these days, possibly Phillip Schofield! Don't know what day yet, but I'll keep you informed. Also, I've just been talking to someone over the internet who didn't know my real name, and when I told him he said "You're Ben Pridmore? Wow!" I never meet people who've actually heard of me without being told! I'm really turning into a global celebrity! I'll have paparazzi going through my bins before you know it!

I also did that interview with the Rheinische Post today, so if you're a devoted reader, stay tuned. Alexei the UK correspondent says that he might be able to write the article some time soon if the paper stop insisting he write about Madeleine McCann and nothing else. So don't hold your breath.

It's that time of year again

It seems I'm probably going to have a big birthday party again this year. I always thought of myself as the type not to have a big bash, what with it being so depressing being as old and ancient as I am (I CAN'T be 31 next month, can I?), but after the last two years of having a get-together with all the gang, it's become one of those annual traditions. The plan is to try to find an apartment to rent for the weekend somewhere nice, like Manchester.

But 31? I don't know how that happened.

Holy Pillow Talk, Batman!

Ahh, bliss! BBC4 are repeating the sixties Batman series. Which, although I wasn't around in the sixties to watch, I have fond memories of thanks to the repeats on early-morning ITV in the eighties. Those were the days. And being on that channel and not bothering to turn the telly off led me to another interesting discovery - did you know Doris Day was still alive? It's news to me. I don't know why, but I'd just automatically assumed that she was dead. I'm going to have to look up all the other people I've been assuming were no longer with us now, just to make sure they're not going to be turning up unexpectedly on my doorstep. I'll start with Julius Caesar.

The documentary, which I turned off after five minutes despite being vaguely interested in Doris Day and her continued existence, was one of those horribly badly made ones with sort of semi-dramatisations of what the narrator is saying in the background, so that when it recounts how she was hit by a train at the age of thirteen we hear train sounds, clanging bells and a scream. Yuck. If the documentary about me contains anything even vaguely like that, I'm going to sue somebody. Or at least decry it in public as loudly as possible. The filming's finished now, I don't know if I mentioned that - Nick is now busy editing it into some kind of coherent whole (I don't envy him), and it'll be out either late this year or early next, I forget which. So mark your diaries.

It took me years to write, will you take a look?

Okay, I've decided I need to get on with writing this book of mine. I don't even care about getting it published, I'm just sick of "How To Be Clever" sitting there in absentia and mocking me with its non-written-ness. Enough of this talking to people about it, composing chapters in my head, vaguely assuming it'll get done one of these days. It's been a good four years now since I started "writing" it, it's just silly now. So from now on, I'm really, properly going to work at it. And everybody reading this has to constantly pester me about it and complain that it's not on the shelves of Waterstone's yet. Okay?