What was I going to blog about?

There's been something in my head that I've been meaning to mention for ages, and at odd moments I think to myself "I must blog about that tonight," but then by the time I sit down in the evening to do it, it's gone. It won't be anything important, it'll be an observation that coke is better than pepsi, or vice versa, so don't expect wonders, but hopefully it'll come back to me soon.

Meanwhile, I notice that the UK Snooker Championship is taking place at the Telford International Centre. Now, don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against Telford, I thought it was great when their football team got to the quarter-finals of the FA Cup back in nineteen-eighty-whateveritwas, but I don't think a town should claim to have an International Centre unless it's a place that someone outside Britain (or even someone outside Shropshire) has ever heard of. But that's just me being nasty for no reason.

Local Hero

I've been meaning to mention for a while that that interview with me has now appeared in the Beeston Express and been posted on the internet for the world to see. It's probably worth making it clear that I didn't actually claim that the reason I didn't win the world championship for the last three years is that I didn't take part, nor did I neglect to mention (as I always do when I end up telling that pi story) that I never recited it and would probably have only made a mess of it if I'd tried, and have forgotten the whole thing now anyway. Still, Grandma got a namecheck, which is the important thing!

Rain, sleet and snow

Few of these things seem to fall on me while I'm cycling to and from work. I've been with Boots for five months now (doesn't time fly?) and I've only had a couple of light showers on the way in, in all that time. Which is good, since I don't own any waterproofs, so if I get wet on the way to work I basically end up staying wet. Perhaps somebody will buy me some for Christmas. And some new work trousers. I'm reduced to wearing the ones with small and inconspicuous holes in the legs but which at least zip up properly.

Alternatively, I could stop being a dishevelled old tramp, start acting like a comfortably-well-off financial analyst and buy myself some decent clothes. I'll check out the charity shops at the weekend.

How to hold a successful conference

The whole memory performance went very well, except for one little thing. The little thing in question was the zip on my trousers, which seems to have lost the ability to stay closed. I didn't notice this problem until after I'd stood up in front of sixty people and memorised a pack of cards, so I have no idea exactly what kind of display I put on for them. Nobody mentioned seeing anything out of the ordinary, but perhaps they were all being polite. I did have to spend the rest of the day discreetly adjusting myself at regular intervals. This will teach me not to buy cheap work trousers. Or, possibly, not to buy 34-inch waists when I know perfectly well I can't fit into them any more.

Anyway, this reminds me of my theory of how to organise a good conference/course/official gathering of any kind. I've noticed over the years that there is always a set pattern when the event takes a break for tea and biscuits. Everybody, without exception, goes for a jammy dodger. Only when all the jammy dodgers are gone does anybody take a different kind of biscuit, usually with a cheerful grumble about how the jammy dodgers are always the first to go. The small proportion of attendees who managed to get a jammy dodger spend the rest of the conference in a happy frame of mind, whereas all the others leave in the evening feeling vaguely dissatisfied but not quite able to put their finger on why.

You might think that the solution would be to provide more jammy dodgers, but in fact that isn't the case. A large part of the satisfaction factor is knowing that you got one of the good biscuits, while your peers who weren't quite as fast as you had to make do with a garibaldi or, if they were really really slow, a shortbread. The actual key to a successful conference which everybody leaves feeling fulfilled is to hold numerous tea-breaks and strategically position the seats and the biscuits so that everybody attending gets exactly one jammy dodger during the course of the day. The feeling of 'yay, I got one' outweighs the feeling of 'aw, I didn't get one' by at least five to one, so a maximum of four tea-breaks should be provided.

This didn't apply to today's conference, as all the biscuits on offer were equally nasty, and yet everybody still seemed to have a good time. Must have been the excellent lunch.

Homework

There's a departmental conference at a hotel tomorrow and I've been roped in to be the Offical Boots Memory Man again and entertain the crowd with some memory tricks. This is actually quite cool, because I'm still pretty bad at performing memory stunts in front of an audience, and it's embarrassing if I'm called upon to do something impressive and make a mess of it. Showing off in front of Profit Protection Managers is good preparation for next time something like Blue Peter comes up (I mean, they'll never invite me back after that shambles, but someone else might...)

Of course, it does mean spending the evening memorising numbers, interrupted only by the football (I was hoping Chelsea would lose, but never mind). Still, I really do need the memory practice, too, so I shouldn't complain.

Yarrrgh, work is bad

Busy days at the office leave me comparatively inarticulate, sorry. Roll on Christmas, when I can stay in bed for four solid days and do nothing!

Phone's ringing

Yesterday I had a phone call that I just missed by half a second. I did 1471 and found that it was a number I didn't know with a Nottingham area code, called back and there was no answer. Being a superhuman genius, I quickly deduced that it was a phone box, and that the caller must have been my brother, who hasn't got a phone. Nobody else in the country uses phone boxes these days, after all. I typed the number into Google, just in case there's a directory of all public phone numbers in the country on the internet (turns out there isn't, but there is a list of all the phone box numbers, without any attached address. Just in case you want to call one at random, I suppose).

I rang back again, but still nobody answered it. I was hoping that someone would pick it up and tell me where this phone box was located - if it was just down the road from his flat, I could cycle down there and see what he wanted, and also tell him off for being too lazy to come here himself and tell me what he wanted (he's only about a minute away), whereas if it was in the city and next to his favourite pub, I could call that and accept his invitation to lunch/booze/debauchery.

Don't people answer the phone any more if they hear a phone box ringing? I know there was that film about a man who answered a phone and bad things happened, but it hasn't stopped me from theoretically answering phones. It's actually much more exciting than answering your own phone, because it could be anyone in the world, and they almost certainly didn't want to talk to you at all! And you might help a stranger who wants to pinpoint his brother's whereabouts!

There was a happy ending - he called back a bit later on, and only wanted to check whether I was in so he could come round later on his way back from Attenborough. But even so. Answer the phone, next time a phone box rings at you!

19 days?

Wow, Christmas sort of sneaks up on you, doesn't it? I was wondering whether I should put some decorations up in my flat - I don't normally bother, seeing as I live on my own and don't generally drag people in off the streets and force them to look at my walls, but seeing as it's a new flat and it's big enough to accommodate quite a lot of sparkly tinselly things, maybe I should.

On the other hand, I am extremely lazy. Maybe I won't bother.

Zoomy Clarifies Your Confusions Regarding British Weirdnesses

This week's blog entries, and the comments readers have appended to them, made it clear that I need to explain a few things here.

1) Mince pies are made with mincemeat. Mincemeat, despite the name, doesn't contain any meat, and I'll have to get back to you about how much mincing is involved. Probably none. It's made with raisins, apples, sugar and things.

2) Black pudding is not, as Americans might think, an unusually-coloured variety of a sort of gooey dessert. It's made with (and I worked in a factory that made them for six and a half years, so I know what I'm talking about) dried blood powder, leftover fat from butchering legs of pork, bread rusk, seasoning and whatever other ingredients are left lying around the factory.

3) BBC TV, rather than being funded by commercials advertising products viewers might like to buy, is funded by money from everybody in the country, who are required to buy a TV licence. The TV Licence people are famous for pretending that they are able to detect whether somebody has a television in their house by means of fantastic radar devices, and sending out threatening letters to every address without a licence claiming that they have an army of inspectors who might come round to your house at any moment and catch you watching TV, whereas in fact they don't do any of these things, ever.

The good thing about the licence is that you can watch BBC channels without having your favourite shows interrupted by commercial breaks. The bad thing is that you have to give the BBC money for the privilege, and many viewers feel that it's not worth it considering that the BBC no longer show anything worth watching.

A few years ago, the BBC had a big advertising campaign stressing that the licence fee is great, because it enables the corporation to experiment with unusual and innovative TV programming rather than being desperate to deliver viewers to its advertisers. They've stopped doing that now, acknowledging that everything they show these days is a desperate attempt to attract as many viewers as possible.

Any more questions?

It's happy hour again...

Sorry for the late (and very brief) blog tonight - I've been out for an early Christmas meal with the people from work. Night-night!

Lost things

Isn't it great when you're looking for something and find something else you'd forgotten about? I was looking for my TV licence tonight (they keep sending letters to The Occupier of this flat, implying that they're going to do something about it if I turn out not to have a licence) and came across a consent letter from the BBC that I never got round to signing and sending to them. You'd think they would have chased me up for it, it's been quite a while now. Maybe they just forged my signature.

Didn't find my TV licence, but then remembered that I don't need it, because I pay by direct debit and I could look up the number via internet banking. It's great being hi-tech. Just to celebrate that, I logged onto the TV licence website and offically changed my name from "Mr G Bridmore" too.

Also re-found my transcript sheet from Saturday's othello. I'm also surprised that Geoff hasn't chased me up for that, come to think of it. I get the feeling everybody's given up hope of getting stuff from me. This is going to make my Christmas shopping a lot easier.

Mincemeat!

It's at this time of year, what with the mince pies and everything, that I remember how much I really do like mincemeat. My preferred method of eating mince pies (when nobody's watching) is to nibble away at all the pastry and then eat the mincemeat bit last. Yummy. Eventually, I'm sure I'll move on to the next step and just buy a jar of mincemeat and a big spoon.

I wonder if the Co-op's still open?

You ask, I answer

Thank you all for your responses to my 'what should I blog about' post the other day. Let's see what I can come up with...

Mike said...
Mikinho:

What is the best curry house in Derby, based on your experience?
I went to one once near a big round-about and I found it adequate.


Actually, I don't think I've ever eaten at a curry house in Derby. I don't go out for curry very much. There's a place called the Siam Corner where I would guess you can get a Thai curry, I recommend there. Never been there, but I walked or cycled past it plenty of times on the way into town.

Boris said...
Memory!!! :)


Oh, but I always talk about memory! And nothing much is happening in the memory world lately. I did another three speed cards practice runs tonight, all under 30 seconds, and got them all recalled perfectly. Need to expand my training routine, though. I must get round to taking part in more Online Memory Challenges. Also, I need to buy 36 new packs of cards - my old ones are getting tatty and sticky.

Anonymous said...
Tell us about your mother, and your relationship with her.


Good grief, what kind of blog do you think this is? Go and watch EastEnders if you want to see people's relationships with their mothers. There's probably a lot of that kind of thing in there nowadays. I hear Bianca's back and has lots of children.

Chris said...
All of the above, one at a time. (Not at once; that would be silly.) Start at the end of the list and work backwards...


Hmm, that's more than I can fit into one blog post. Maybe I'll make a series out of it...

Anonymous said...
Memory :-)

Dai


I refer the right honourable gentleman to the answer I gave some moments ago.

Anonymous said...
snooker. always worth it....


Yep, but I don't know very much about that, either. The first Bahrain Snooker Championship happened a couple of weeks ago - Neil Robertson won it, and the headline "Robertson Stays Cool In Bahrain Heat" suggests that if the World Memory Championship does end up taking place there in November next year, it'll still be baking hot, which is nice.

There doesn't seem to be an easily-googled Bahraini royal family tree available on the internet, so I can't check what relation Shaikh Abdulla bin Abdulrahman al Khalifa, president of the Bahrain Snooker Association is to Shaikh Fawaz bin Mohamed al Khalifa, patron of the World Memory Championship. Get on the internet, al Khalifas! It's the 21st century, for crying out loud!

Casdok said...
The history of bubblegum sounds interesting!


It does, doesn't it! If only I knew the first thing about it. I'm guessing it was invented by an American, probably called Hiram Bubblegum or something like that, in the early thirties and was intended as a building material to replace wood in the event that trees were all destroyed by socialism.

Anonymous said...
It would not be that silly to talk about them all at once Chris.

One may easily imagine a man made of chewing gum playing othello with Ben who in turn, is moving his pieces with a snooker cue which is also made of chewing gum and becoming stuck to said pieces. Then sudddenly a cartoon Tony Buzan comes along and cuts the othello board in half with a cartoon samuri sword and also decapitates Ben's head. As Ben's yellow hat falls on to the othello board it sticks to the chewing gum pieces making it impossible for Ben to ever forget it again.

Dai.
Events here are based on a true story and peoples identities have been changed to protect the innocent from Cartoon Tony Buzan.


See, this is how memory people's minds work. All the time. Be afraid.

Funny names

Watching Histon beat Leeds today, all I could think was "He can't really be called Daniel Knight-Percival, can he? There surely can't have been a person called Knight and another person called Percival who thought it might be cool to join their names together like that? Hey, darling, let's saddle our offspring with the name 'Knight-Percival' and then make Holy Grail jokes as soon as they're old enough to understand them!"

I know I probably shouldn't devote an entire blog to poking fun at the surname of someone whom I'm just envious of because he's a semi-professional footballer and I'm not, but hey, little things please little minds. Remind me to regale you some time with the tale of how I met a guy called Rudolf Reinders once. I can get half an hour's stand-up comedy out of that one.

Nursery rhyme time

Thanks for all the suggestions for things to talk about, my loyal bloglings! However, I had about four and a half hours' sleep last night, and when I'm sleep-deprived and on a train, my brain does strange things. Today it thought up the following traditional nursery rhyme, which I mentally added to and enhanced during the othello tournament (unlike memory, I find that I only use about 75% of my brain even when I'm fiercely concentrating on an othello game - the other 25% is free to do what it wants. I remember a previous London regional when I'd had an early start and not enough sleep when I composed a song about going to the shops and encountering Gareth Enniskillen and his son Theodore. I should try to remember that and type it up for you all to read too...)


Oh, Father's donkey was no bleeding good!
He took it down the garden for to gather in some wood,
It got hold of his axe and swung it at his head,
Kicked in the window of the old garden shed,
Sent shards of flying glass through the bust of Robin Hood,
Oh, Father's donkey was no bleeding good!

Oh, Father's donkey was no bleeding use!
He took it to the forest for to hunt for deer or moose,
It got hold of his gun and shot him in the pants,
Smashed his lunchbox open and attracted all the ants,
Coating the soil for yards around with sweetened apple juice,
Oh, Father's donkey was no bleeding use!

Oh, Father's donkey was no bleeding good!
He took it to the kitchen for to cook it in a pud,
It got hold of his knife and stabbed him through the chest,
Ruining his overcoat, his waistcoat, shirt and vest,
Soaking his best trousers and his socks and shoes with blood,
Oh, Father's donkey was no bleeding good!

Oh, Father's donkey was no bleeding use!
He took it to the market for to swap it for a goose,
It got hold of his leash and swung it round his neck,
Dragged him down the road and dunked him in the beck,
Kicked him in the pants so hard he landed in a spruce,
Oh, Father's donkey was no bleeding use!


Oh, by the way, Graham won the othello, beating everybody with staggering ease, and I ended up with three wins out of seven. But hey, could be worse.

T'was ever thus

Whenever I have to get up super-early in the morning to catch the train down to Cambridge, I always end up sitting up late doing nothing and not even leaving myself enough time to write my blog.

So, I promise that next week I'll write lots and lots of interesting bloggery, all about subjects of interest to my many readers. And on that note, what would you, my loyal readers, if I still have any readers, like to see me talk about? Memory? Othello? Chocolate? Last week's Beano like I promised to write about but never did? Trousers? Geraniums? Dentistry? The history of bubblegum? Tell me!

I'm a memory man again

Did three speed cards practice sessions tonight, and made mistakes in all three packs, but the important thing is that I'm back in training! Now if I can just get into a regular routine and keep in shape throughout the winter, I might just win the world championship again next year. I'd still quite like to be a three-time winner. Or more. Nine would be nice, but I'll be really really old and ancient by that time...

In other news, othello in Cambridge on Saturday, woo! The radio interview was quite good, although the host took the approach that all people who play board games are terrible nerds, and I spent most of it trying to convey the impression that, despite the fact that I am a terrible nerd myself, othello is very much a game for everyone to come along and play. Please do come along and play on Saturday! Trinity College, 9:30, come and see the World Memory Champion! Or, you know, play othello. Whichever you find more exciting.

More Great World Memory Champions Of History

As we all know, history has been full of interesting World Memory Champions. And here are a few more of them:

Terence "The Punching Man" Punchman (World Memory Champion 1763), a noted London prizefighter, was the other World Memory Champion to hold the title despite never memorising anything. During the celebration dinner at Simpson's-On-The-Strand (then a social club for philosophers, fortune tellers, coal miners and similar professions) after the world championship in 1763, newly-crowned world champion Edith Estragon promised to hand over the trophy, title and all attendant ranks and privileges to anybody who could beat her in a fight. Punchman, who was dining at the next table, immediately got up and knocked the champion unconscious with a single punch to the head. Her one hour, thirty-seven minutes and fifteen seconds as champion (timed by the ever-pedantic Baron Crysanthemum on his pocket-watch) is of course the second-shortest title reign in World Memory Championship history.

It was suggested that the frail 93-year-old Estragon had probably been making a joke, and that her offer therefore shouldn't have been legally binding, but as she never regained her memory of the incident (or of anything else), there was no way to prove it and the title devolved on the boxer. During his year-long reign as World Memory Champion he had a regular newspaper column in which he answered readers' questions on the subject of memory to the best of his ability and was invited to dinner with the Prime Minister, during which he punched several people unconscious and thereby also became Under-Secretary of State and Minister for Taxation and Tennis. He declined to compete in the 1764 world championship, but failed in his attempt to win the title when he was spotted lurking outside the championship venue and clobbered by the bodyguards that eventual winner Szeznlwicz Norberto had had the foresight to employ.

Baboushka Boguinskaya (world memory champion 1853) competed in every world memory championship from 1800, when she was three years old, until 1847, and finished last on each occasion. She despised memory sports and everybody involved with it, and only took part in the competitions because her mother forced her to. Domineering Mrs B eventually gave up on her dream of vicariously living the life of a memory master through her untalented daughter (who was unable to remember what playing cards were, let alone which one she had recently seen) and instead took her to America to force her to become a rodeo champion.

This turned out for the best in 1853, when the World Memory Championship was held in Idaho. The venue had been announced three months in advance, but this was insufficient time for the message to reach Africa, where all the world's memorisers lived, and for them to make the lengthy and arduous journey to the championship venue in the middle of the empty plains. The Boguinskaya family, however, happened to be in the neighbourhood, looking for buffalos to ride, and Baboushka was forced to take part. Although she scored zero in every discipline, she was given a bonus point for owning an unusual hat, and thus won the championship by virtue of being the only competitor. Her mother, however, had lost interest in memory sports five minutes earlier and departed for Nepal, resolving to give up on her talentless daughter and become a mountaineer herself.

Porcelain Palladium (World Memory Champion 1947, 1956, 1983) was supposed to be called Percival. However, his parents both suffered from speech impediments that prevented the registrar of births and deaths from understanding what they said. He also refused to allow them to change the name, even when they wrote it down for him. Young Porcelain therefore grew up embittered towards authority figures and often found fault with the arbiters when he competed in memory championships. He generally hurled bricks and kettles at them from his seat while they were trying to tell contestants where the toilets were, and if at any point anyone tried to tell him the rules of the championship, he would attack with bone-crunching fury until nobody in the room was left standing. He won three world championships on the three occasions when unfortunate ski-jumping accidents (he wasn't a ski-jumper and never went within a hundred miles of a ski-jump, but freak gales caused ski-jumpers to land on him on three separate occasions) left him paralysed and unable to speak or otherwise do anything that might get him disqualified.

Football is rubbish!

When did the big and cool football teams lose the ability to score goals or play interesting games? I've given up on tonight's games and turned over to watch Mitchell and Webb, even though I've seen it before and it's the most recent series which wasn't all that good, mostly. That's how bored I am.

Attention, people of Cambridge!

I'm going to be talking on Radio Cambridge (possibly Radio Cambridgeshire) tomorrow morning at 8:15 about the othello tournament this weekend. So make sure to listen in if you don't know that there's an othello tournament, open to everybody, on Saturday, starting at 9:30, at Trinity College's Junior Parlour (use the entrance opposite the great big one, near to the post office), entry is free if it's your first tournament, a great day out for all the family, drop us an email if you're coming so that we're sure we've got enough boards, details can be found on http://www.britishothello.org.uk, othello is that game that you might know as reversi if you play on the internet, everyone's welcome regardless of age, ability or hair colour, wearing a hat is optional but recommended.

So if you're still in the dark about what's happening this weekend, tune in tomorrow morning when I will be saying some or all of the above, and nothing else, for your entertainment. And please do come along to the tournament, it really is fun!