Be silly!

I can't help noticing that when I posted a blog entry about global warming, I got three more or less entirely serious comments in response, discussing the extent to which my energy-saving lightbulb would contribute to the crisis. And yesterday when I posted one of my occasional can't-think-of-anything-to-write-about pieces of nonsense (and not even a particularly good one, at that), someone commended it as 'rather imaginative'.

Really, I'm starting to worry that people are taking this blog seriously. So I command everyone who comments on this one to say something completely stupid and not even remotely serious, just to restore Zoomy's Thing's reputation as a totally pointless waste of everyone's time.

Also, you all need to watch Damekko Doubutsu, one of the strangest and funniest Japanese cartoons I've ever seen, about a forest populated by useless animals.

Coventry Ikea

The Ikea store in Coventry is larger than most, being a vast underground complex spanning the whole of the city and parts of the surrounding countryside, plus a small, cramped tunnel leading all the way to Belfast. The complex was built as a result of a mix-up on the part of the architects who redesigned the town hall after the Gulf War - their blueprints got mixed up with a picture one of them had drawn of a revolutionary new hamster habitat he was planning to build. It would have been a terrible hamster habitat, being several hundred square miles of empty cavern, but it made a passable Ikea once a few shelves and tills had been fitted and the hamsters that had quickly colonised the place had been put to work providing electricity by running around on little treadmills.

The real problem with the store is that although it is located directly underneath the car park in Coventry, it is only accessible by means of the small, cramped tunnel from Belfast, there being no other access point. Customers are therefore faced with difficulty in leaving the store with their purchases and staff, given the difficulty of entering and leaving the store, spend their entire lives in the gloomy caverns and have evolved, over the course of the three years the store has been open, into a race of mole-like beings, two feet tall, with no eyes and worm-like appendages that sometimes alarm small children.

On the other hand, it's better than the Tesco in Coventry, which has slippery floors.

More Blue Peter-related remarks

After tonight, I won't mention Blue Peter again, I promise. But I thought I really should say a public thanks to the boy who reassured me that I'm like a million times better than all of them put together, after my rather unimpressive memory performance. If only I could remember his name...

I'm also told, by an unreliable maternal source, that the first proper sentence I ever said was "It was Goldie's birthday and all the dogs came to his party!", so possibly if not for Blue Peter I would never have learned to talk and this blog would consist of disjointed incoherent childish babbling. Oh, wait, that's all it does consist of...

Also, and this isn't really anything to do with Blue Peter at all, have they stopped making Drifters? The chocolate bar, not the vagabonds. It's my choccie of choice and there aren't any in the shops any more!

Here's one I prepared earlier

To be fair, I did tell them I'm not particularly good at memorising names.

Actually that's not being fair at all - while the names-and-presents thing was the Blue Peter team's idea, and they couldn't be talked out of it, it was me who suggested throwing in birthdays as well. The idea was that by adding something numerical to the mix, I could turn it into a challenge that not just anybody could do, while still being confident that it was still eminently doable for a half-competent memory expert like me. And in all honesty, it really shouldn't have been any problem - I attribute my spectacular failure to excitement and unpreparedness, never having done anything remotely like that before and having to take a guess at what would be the best strategy. And having the numbers come up of the few kids who I couldn't remember - I would have been fine with most of the others. And getting the first one wrong really annoyed me, because I did know him - Harold was the littlest one of the thirty and the thought of him playing for Chelsea was a funny mental image that should have stuck in my brain but somehow didn't when I was put on the spot.

But still, it wasn't about succeeding in the challenge or providing watchable entertainment for the nation's youth, it was about going on Blue Peter, meeting the presenters (Zoe and Andy are exactly the same off-camera as on, I'm pleased to report - I've always been worried that Blue Peter presenters are nasty, cynical grown-ups who swear and watch pornography when they're not on air, but in fact they're fantastic people. Although Andy had to be reminded not to say "I'm knackered" like he did in rehearsal after playing on that groovy electronic floor game thing), meeting the pets (as well as Socks sitting on my lap, Mabel decided she liked the taste of my shoes), getting the badge (still haven't lost it again) and having fun! And I certainly achieved that. Too bad nobody's going to want me on any future TV shows after that shambolic performance, but never mind. I was getting tired of celebrity status, anyway.

Up for the Cup

As part of this memory demonstration we're going to do in the unis, in the spirit of memorising something more, well, memorable than numbers and cards, I volunteered to memorise all the FA Cup Final results. Which is easy enough, but proved unexpectedly complicated when it came to finding out what all the results were in the first place. Most reputable internet sources say that the Wanderers beat Oxford University 2-0 in the final in 1877, but Wikipedia (and the various websites who steal their information from Wikipedia), give the score as 2-1, with an Arthur Kinnaird own goal for Oxford.

I wondered whether this was one of those falsehoods people put on Wiki to discredit someone - a great-grandson of someone Kinnaird fouled a century ago, possibly - but no, it seems the 2-1 result is correct, and the other websites share a mistaken source. I checked with the FA website and a real book (because if they put it in a real book, it must be true. Even the real books that just steal their information from Wikipedia).

I'd still like to be absolutely certain, though. Has anyone got a time machine I could borrow? And the price of a ticket to the cup final in money minted at some point before 1877? I'll bring you back a programme and half a 130-year-old meat pie.

When you do nothing all day...

... it's really hard to think of something to write about in the evening. Well, tomorrow I'm going to get off my lazy backside (metaphorically but not literally), sit down and work on my book and our upcoming university memory demonstrations. No, really, I am, because I've planned out tonight what I'm going to do, and writing it in this blog makes it official, so I can't not do anything tomorrow now without being some kind of public liar.

Who knows, I might even find something to blog about tomorrow, too.

Global warming? Yeah, that's my fault. Sorry.

I switched to energy-saving light bulbs a couple of years ago, but the bulb went in my living room last week and I dug up an old non-energy-saving lightbulb to replace it until I could get a new one. And since then I've never remembered to buy a new one while I was in town. So I'm hoping that by writing about it at unnecessary length in my blog tonight, it will stick in my memory a bit better and I'll be able to get back to making an infinitesimally greater contribution to saving energy, and thus saving the entire world from flooding and sunburn.

The Blue Peter Badge, chapter 94

I'm well aware that this blog has turned into "The Saga Of Zoomy's Blue Peter Badge", but I think I have to record that I found it again. It had fallen down behind my armchair, where I briefly dumped my jacket on Thursday night before deciding to be tidy and hang it up instead. So now I'm reunited with my status symbol, and I don't need to mention the thing again. Yay!

So, what else can I talk about? Let's try memory. I've been seriously unmotivated to train my memory lately. I don't know if this is in spite of or because of the fact that I've been doing so many tangentially-related memory celebrity things like This Morning and Radio 4 and the chimps and Blue Peter, but I'm really unable to sit down and practice the long or even medium-length memory disciplines now. I've become a performer rather than a competitor. Which isn't good. I really want to win the WMC again - I'd hate to go down in the history books as someone who only won it once, because I know, all modesty aside, that I can do better than that if I really live up to my potential.

Maybe it's just because it's Christmas. I always get depressed at Christmas.

Oh, I don't believe it!

I've lost my Blue Peter badge! It must have fallen off somewhere yesterday, because it wasn't on my jacket this morning. And still isn't, for that matter. I can't believe I didn't notice it last night when I hung the jacket up - possibly someone broke in to my flat last night and stole it. But this is terrible! I look like a normal person again, someone who's never been on Blue Peter and had Socks the cat sitting on his lap and everything! Well, I'm not going to stay badgeless. I'll buy one on eBay. Or steal one from someone else. Or draw a picture and send it to them.

I didn't wear the badge

At least, not for the interview. But I put it straight back on my jacket immediately afterwards. And in a charity shop in Burton, two people were very impressed by it. A woman in the shop told me that she's always wanted a Blue Peter badge, and that when she was little she sent them a story she'd written, but they wrote back saying that she hadn't written it herself, she'd just copied a story written by someone else. And she swears she didn't. It must have been a terrible childhood trauma, and I felt deeply sorry for her, but if she was hoping I'd give her my badge to make up for all her upset, well, she'll have been disappointed.

The interview went passably well, though - I'm making an effort to write about real life in this blog a bit more, because I'm conscious that I don't do that very much. I wouldn't have given me the job based on that interview, but I'm tougher than most people, so you never know.

Today on Blue Peter, Burgess Meredith memorises things!

I won't talk about the actual contents of the show until it's on telly next Wednesday, but I will say now that I've got a Blue Peter badge! My trousers are absolutely covered with hairs from Socks the cat! I got my own dressing room at Television Centre! I've never had my own dressing room on a TV show before!

I should have thought a bit more about the actual dressing part, though. I decided to wear my black suit jacket and trousers with a predominantly white T-shirt because I thought it would look cool and memorable. What I failed to take into account was the fact that I have a rather large and pointy nose, and the Blue Peter studio is currently festooned with animatronic penguins. I can't help thinking viewers will make comparisons.

Still, all this celebrity stuff is REALLY getting in the way of real life - I got a call from one of the recruitment agencies on Tuesday morning just before leaving for London, arranging an interview with Coors in Burton for tomorrow morning. What with being a nationally famous children's TV entertainer nowadays, I really haven't got a lot of time left to read up on the job and the company in preparation. It sounds like a cool job, though, so I'll do my best.

Should I take the Blue Peter badge off my jacket before the interview? All professional logic says yes, but I want people to see me wearing it. I will brush off the cat hairs, though.

Worst advert ever

I saw an advert on a tube train today for Vicks First Defence, which went along the lines of "A stinking cold is the last thing you want for Christmas. Vicks First Defence fights the cold virus in the early stages and may prevent symptoms developing. In fact, 77%* of people who used First Defence said they didn't get a cold. Happy Christmas."

The asterisk leads to some very small print saying "2006 satisfaction survey of 90 UK users."

So let's get this straight. Out of 90 people who used this product last Christmas, TWENTY of them developed a cold over the Christmas period? What percentage of people would normally get a cold over that kind of timespan? I'd be very surprised if it's as high as 23%. It seems to me that this First Defence stuff actually makes it MORE likely that you'll get a cold! And they're using this statistic for advertising purposes?

Anyway, that rant was the main reason I've come to this internet cafe/barber's shop in the heart of London tonight, but I suppose I should also mention that the chimp memory filming went very well too - I see they made the BBC news tonight, too, so I'm sure it will be old news by the time the documentary makes it to your screens, but you will have the fun of seeing me attempting the same memory test and scoring significantly worse than Ayumu the chimp. It's going to be great!

Make a note in your diaries (and cross out the other one)

See me on Blue Peter on Wednesday December 12th! And not the 5th, as I might have said before! It's being recorded in advance, you see.

Check out my memory chimp friends on BBC News! In fact, the performance you can see by clicking on 'number memory test' is rather more impressive than anything I can do (without practice, anyway), although I think Ramón Campayo, who specialises in split-second memorisation of random digits, could still beat them. Actually, I wonder whether that film's a bit misleading and there's a limited number of positional distributions of digits that the chimp has seen plenty of times before, but that's just me being a sceptic. Still, I think tomorrow I get to have a go at the same test, or something more similar to it than the one they knocked together for this documentary last time - we're basically redoing the whole thing that I filmed with them previously.

The life of a memory man really is groovy, isn't it?

Word of the day

It occurred to me that I was aware that there is such a word as 'amanuensis', but I had no idea what it meant, or how I became aware of the word's existence without also learning its meaning. So I looked it up on the internet and now do know what it means (I would share it with you, but I'd hate to think that this blog was educational in any way), but I still can't think where I heard it from in the first place.

I am friends with several pretentious people who like to use big words, it might have been from one of them, but perhaps I was asleep during the conversation and didn't pay attention to the context. Or maybe I came across it in some unnecessarily pompous factual book or article I read and didn't pay particular attention to.

Well, however I heard the word, I'm now enlightened and, being both pretentious and pompous, will do my best to use the word in everyday conversation and everyday bloggery as often as I can. And I'll maybe employ an amanuensis to transcribe my blog and show it to people who haven't got computers, so they'll all know how clever I am!

Ooh aah Tominaga

I was rather hoping for a super-rare European win at the world othello championship, but despite the best efforts of Stéphane Nicolet, the trophy goes back to Japan again. Still, it looks like it was a great tournament. I would write more, but it's late at night and I'm typing in between rounds in a somewhat smaller-scale othello tournament on kurnik.

It's quite staggering to realise that it's December, though.

Have cards, will memorise

I finally got round to buying two new packs of cards today, to bring my total of useable packs back up to 36. Maybe I'll have a go at memorising the whole bally lot of them in an hour tomorrow. I doubt I will, knowing how useless I've been at the whole training thing just lately, but you never know.

Other than that, I can't think of anything to write about tonight. Or rather I can, but it's all about subjects I would never sully this blog with, like the latest entertaining developments in the latest political scandal, or the fact that I was mentioning Christopher Biggins in this blog before he was cool, or the fact that the fourth-most-emailed story on the BBC News website is about a puppy that got its head stuck in a watering can but is okay now. So I'll just leave it at that.

Now, it is beginning of a fantastic story!

I've become worryingly addicted to Bubble Bobble. I dug out the old Sega Master System a couple of days ago and played it, and I've been hooked ever since. I've been semi-hooked on the game ever since I bought it back in, um, 1992, probably. That kind of time period, anyway. But I've usually had other things to do with my time to keep me from playing it all day and all night...

I have done some things today, though - I've been practicing memorising cards and then reciting them immediately, in preparation for Blue Peter. I'd rather not make a total fool of myself on such a big show. And I'm persisting with the swimming thing. Let's see if I've lost some weight by mid-December, shall we?

In other news, the World Othello Championship is underway, and it looks like it's going to be a close contest - you can't really identify any favourites to reach the semis yet, although Matthias Berg seems to be doing very well, Ben Seeley's obviously still on form despite being out of practice, Anon Hongthong, who I've never heard of before today, seems to be beating everyone he meets, all the French seem to be looking dangerous, and check out Geoff on five out of seven, including some really good wins! Which reminds me I haven't emailed him my transcripts from Cambridge like I was supposed to, but never mind. He won't pester me about it till he's back from Greece...

But if you've been bad, he will kill you

It's that time of year when everybody's thoughts turn to a silly song on an episode of Maid Marian And Her Merry Men from nearly twenty years ago. So I was very pleased to find that typing "Father Bloopy" into YouTube not only gives me the song itself, but also enlightens me as to the existence of a band who named themself after the song. And not only were they genius enough to call themselves Father Bloopy, they also did a cover of Dragostea Din Tei live in Miami Beach, in which they more than make up for any shortage of musical talent with raw enthusiasm. This is my kind of band, and I'm going to find out whether they've got a fan club and join it.

Never work with children or animals

Next Tuesday I'm going down to London to watch footage of the Japanese memory monkeys (well, chimps, but I'll take alliteration over accuracy any day) and offer my expert opinion on their thought processes for that documentary. Then I'm staying in a hotel overnight at the BBC's expense yet again (it's a shocking waste of licence fee money, it really is) and on Wednesday I'm memorising information about an assortment of children Blue Peter have dragged in off the street.

[Please ignore the following observation, it's unworthy of an intellectual non-lowbrow-political-observational-comedy kind of blog like this one, but it came into my head when I typed that last sentence: If Revenue and Customs had also asked me to memorise information about children instead of putting it on two disks and losing them, they wouldn't be in the mess they're in right now.]

I've also been working on How To Be Clever a tiny little bit! I'm starting to be in the mood to actually do something with it, for the first time in ages! I might just be able to crank out some kind of finished product after all! But this enthusiasm seems to have come at the expense of practicing actual memory stuff - I haven't done a real training session for ages. I'm feeling all unmotivated right now, and I really need to keep in mental shape if I'm going to win the WMC. I've been doing speed cards quite regularly, but nothing else, and it's the long disciplines I really need to work on. I wish there was a competition, even a little tiny one, some time soon.

Seriously, who ARE these people?

I don't know who Ziggy and Chanelle are. I keep seeing one or the other of them on the front of trashy magazines, apparently describing the intimate details of their breakup, but I honestly do not have the faintest idea who they are or why they're famous. What am I missing? In fact, don't tell me. I'm actually quite proud of not knowing. It shows that I live on a higher plane than the kind of people who care about these, um, celebrities (if indeed they are celebrities).

Anyway, I really genuinely am a celebrity, and I can prove it. All you have to do is watch Blue Peter on Wednesday December 5th. Woo! I'm not supposed to write about exactly what's going to happen, for some reason, but I think I can safely promise that it'll be an unexceptional and by-the-numbers routine episode of the long-running show that will go down in history as one that doesn't get mentioned in the history books, ever. But it'll have me in it.