Sunshine

Hooray, summer's here! Also, for some reason earlier today I found myself thinking it was Sunday, and then I remembered it wasn't, and I get another Sunday tomorrow. Which was nice.

I'm going to Cardiff on Monday for a meeting (I go my whole life up to this year without visiting Wales, and now I seem to be always dropping by), and getting the early train, so I was thinking I'd have to get to bed early tonight, when it suddenly dawned on me that it's only Saturday. Perhaps I should buy a calendar.

An apology

It seems that yesterday's blog entry used the word 'willy' rather more than is normal for a decent, family blog like this. It won't happen again. Except in that first sentence there.

Anyway, I'm wondering what to do tomorrow. It's the weekend, I've got nothing exciting planned and Saturdays in my current memory-training schedule (which I'm still following religiously, by the way) are a memory-free, mental-battery-recharging day. I might go somewhere nice and take advantage of the fine weather. Or maybe I'll stay indoors all day and watch Doctor Who videos. We'll see how I feel.

Everything you hear on the internet is wrong

On one of the internet forums I frequent, someone mentioned today the well-known fact that you can see Bugs Bunny's willy in one frame of one old cartoon. And someone else, in world-weary tones, directed him to the snopes.com debunking of this myth.

Snopes, with its myth-busting raison d'etre, has stumbled into a position where its word is taken as law - people are naturally sceptical about all the nonsense you can find on the internet these days, but this has the interesting side-effect of making people automatically believe anyone, even if they're just another guy on the internet, who says that something is just an internet myth. Even if it isn't. So in the interests of debunking Snopes, can I invite you to study "The Wabbit Who Came To Supper" in more detail?

Check out the shot of the "risqué" frame there. The website explains that the 'object' in question is just caused by the gap between Bugs's legs, the white background and the curvature of the towel. Now go and watch the cartoon and pay attention to how Bugs's character model works. The gap between his legs never goes up into his white tummy like that! It's either flattened or rounded underneath the white oval, depending on what position he's standing in.

I say it's Bugs's willy. It's possible that an in-betweener artist got the legs wrong for a frame or two, but not possible that Friz Freleng wouldn't have noticed and would just have okayed the incorrect animation. It was either a mistake that got left in because it made the gang in Termite Terrace giggle, or it was put in there on purpose. Anyway, it's a phallus and no question about it!

I'd advise you to watch the cartoon anyway, even if you don't care about Bugs Bunny's willy quite as much as I do. It's worth it alone for the brilliant moment when Bugs picks up the phone in Elmer's house, asks him for a nickel, takes the coin, casually pockets it and continues with his conversation!

Well, that was disappointing

I was confidently expecting a dull 0-0 draw, with Man Utd to win on penalties, but they were completely outplayed. Shame, really. Still, maybe Chelsea will lose the cup final and cheer me up again...

Wow, is that the time?

I did do my regular evening's memory training tonight, so I don't count as completely lazy, but then I've somehow got engrossed in a website detailing obscure Marvel comics characters until twenty to eleven at night. So I hope you'll forgive the short and late blog.

What the deuce?

I've got a reputation for being well-read, in some circles, but there are big gaps in my literary knowledge that I've always been meaning to fill. The most prominent gap is that I've never read anything by Charles Dickens (except A Christmas Carol, obviously, but everyone's read that. Or seen the Muppet version.) So in a charity shop today I bought The Pickwick Papers for £1.10 and I look forward to finding out whether it's a timeless classic or a load of rubbish.

It'll have to wait until I've finished Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro, mind you, because I know that's going to be good...

Holiday

Lots more memory training today, yay for me, so tomorrow's a day off to catch up with everything else I've been meaning to do. Although I might also spend the time creating a few more journeys - the ones I've got at the moment aren't enough for the excessive practice routine I've got going right now. This afternoon I was still remembering what was in the locations the previous time around. Might just be because my forgetting skills are as rusty as my memorising...

The Old Queen's Head

That was the venue of the Sheffield Regional - it's another pub with a long history, dating back to 1503 according to the rather cool stained-glass thing upstairs in the function room we were occupying. Which makes it older than the Queen it's named after, unless the sign with its picture of Elizabeth I was lying to us, now I come to think of it. Anyway, the room was nice, but would have been better as an othello tournament location if there'd been a door separating it from the noisy pub below. Still, I happened to have a pair of earplugs, left over from some memory competition, in my bag, so I was fine.

Well, fine in the sense of having some of the background noise muffled, anyway. My othello-playing varied from okay to not-okay, though. I started (before finding the earplugs) with a very groovy 55-9 win over Iain, who's much better at othello than me, but was then outclassed entirely by Aidan and Steve, who normally don't pose me too much trouble. Aidan, actually, had a really great tournament all round, and ended up joint second with Iain, after Geoff, who beat everyone without any apparent problems.

I was fourth, which leaves me 50 points clear of Geoff in the BGP with one regional to go. Farnborough on June 13th, and I'm still fairly probably not going to go. It's a very long way, after all, and I'm not sure I'd want to win the BGP by virtue of turning up to more regionals than my rivals. Also, what if I did decide to go along, and ended up losing? That would really annoy me.

Anyway, we had a new player today as well - a stratego player I've met once before at the MSO. Stratego is a really cool game that I haven't had enough opportunity to play in the course of my life so far (I practically never managed to fit it into my schedule at the MSO, somehow - just twice in ten years). I need to make an effort to get into the stratego tournament circuit, if I can fit it in around othello, memory and general laziness.

A few further non-othello-related observations I think are worth mentioning:

Did you know that Men's Health magazine comes in two different sizes? I noticed in W H Smith's in the train station today that there's a full-size, A4 kind of version, and also a smaller version, sort of half-way between A4 and A5, with all the same content, but worse quality paper. And the funny thing is the smaller one costs the same as the big one. The complimentary copy I got was the big one, by the way. As is only right.

Also, the Npower advert with Wallace and Gromit, in which the Npower representative apparently barges into their house uninvited and installs a new boiler, certainly seems to be an accurate portrayal of Npower's sales policies.

One more thing I forgot to mention yesterday - in the course of a general conversation at work about how old people look I mentioned that people always think I'm about ten years older than I am. To which the boss's PA replied "No, I wouldn't say that, you've got a young face. I'd say you look about late-thirties, early-forties." I need to dye my beard. Or scalp.

Weekend!

And I have to say, it's been a pretty successful week all round. I've got lots of clever stuff done at work, I've refrained entirely from eating anything between meals, despite Colin bringing a box of doughnuts into the office today, I've done a proper memory training session every evening, and I've watched every episode of Bagpuss!

Now it's a three-day weekend, and I'm going to win lots of games of othello, memorise lots of numbers (both decimal and binary) and cards, and catch up with lots of friends who I've been sort of neglecting lately.

Or else stay in bed all weekend doing nothing. We'll see how I feel.

Sheffield again

Othello again on Saturday. And I'm in such a memorising mood at the moment that I'm going to take my abstract images images (pieces of paper with the 'abstract images' patterns on one side and the name of the image they represent on the other) with my on the train and bone up on them in preparation for some more heavy-duty training on Sunday and Monday.

It's great to be back in the routine of doing an hour or so of memory every evening, seeing my times get a bit faster and my scores get a bit higher every time. I'm still some way away from the level I was at last time I was seriously training, but I know there's the potential to be better than ever before by the time of the world championship. Which is a nice thing to aim for, even if I don't win the thing.

I suppose it wouldn't hurt to practice my othello a bit, too - it really would be nice to win the BGP and go to the world championship and lose all my games there against the best in the world. But on the other hand, I often find myself playing quite well when I haven't so much as thought about the game for a couple of weeks, so maybe I'll follow that strategy again...

My brain doesn't work

I just thought to myself "Hmm, I'll look that up on Google while I'm sitting here at my computer..." and then by the time I'd clicked onto Google I'd completely forgotten what I was going to type into it. All those articles about me are right when they say I always walk into a room and forget what I was going to do there. And when they say a chimp beat me in a memory test.

I do realise, incidentally, that my blog entries for the last week or so have been a bit lacking in length and substance. I just never seem to remember to write anything until last thing at night, and then I can't think of anything cool to write about. I'll make up for it tomorrow with some big long essay about something exciting. Like whatever it was I was planning to look for on Google.

World champion standard

I'm really back into the swing of memory training, it's great! And what's more, I'd forgotten it's a bank holiday weekend coming up, so I get an extra day to do all sorts of useful and productive things! Furthermore, I've cut down on snacking in between meals and I feel extremely slender and healthy for a change! And the weather's relatively nice, in between rainstorms! And the recession and swine flu don't seem to have been in the news lately, so I assume somebody's sorted them out! Life is great.

I've got Bagpuss

Here's something I forgot to mention about the weekend - in a charity shop I found the complete Bagpuss on video! For 50p! Well, I wasn't going to pass up that kind of opportunity, so I'm watching it right now. It's the ship in a bottle one.

A little bit more memory

I did manage to remember the Online Memory Challenge today, which pleased me. I didn't perform terribly well in it, of course, but I'm sure with a bit of practice I can catch up with all these really good Germans who dominate it at the moment. I want to get back in the habit of doing a bit of speed memory every night when I get in from work. That'll have a knock-on effect in improving my results in the long disciplines too.

Anyway, enough memory training minutiae. From tomorrow I'll be back to blogging about whatever drivel pops into my head...

Dreißig Minuten

Ooh, I feel accomplished tonight. I've done practice sessions of half-hour cards, half-hour numbers and half-hour binary - with an hour's recall time for each, that's four and a half hours of proper training for the German championship. If I can do that kind of thing most weekends between now and the end of July, my brain will be ready for anything!

Didn't get particularly great scores, mind you, especially in the numbers where I made oodles of annoying little mistakes, but the important thing is that I didn't have nearly as much mind-wandering as I'd expected to have. Considering I haven't done a big lengthy memorising session for aaaaages, in fact, I was on really great form. I'm happy!

Another good memory-related thing - I found a half-eaten bag of tooty frooties in my jacket pocket this morning that I'd forgotten all about. I love when that happens!

Someone please remind me

I keep meaning to do the Online Memory Challenge on Sunday mornings, but I always remember it when I'm in the middle of something else and anyway it started twenty minutes ago. This is, of course, the first memory-based challenge, and I tend to fail it. So could someone give me a poke to remind me beforehand? Thanks.

Statto

"How does it feel to join Herbert Sutcliffe, Denis Compton, Geoffrey Boycott and Graham Gooch as the only English batsmen to score centuries in three successive Test innings?" an interviewer asked a bemused Ravi Bopara after today's play. Clearly it was news to him that he'd accomplished this quite impressive but rather obscure feat, but he managed to come up with a nice answer. I was impressed.

And it put me in the mood to find some statistic I could use to motivate myself to do some memory training - I like achieving statistics. And here's a good one - from the Austrian championship in November 2004 to the World Championship in August 2006, Clemens Mayer won seven consecutive memory competitions. I'm on five at the moment, so if I was to win the German and UK championships this summer, a world championship win would beat that record. Woo!

Of course, winning the German championship is pretty unlikely, since they don't generally do English translations, but it's still something to aim for...

Fat and useless

That's me. I never do anything productive these days. Well, from now on, starting tomorrow, I'm going to be hard-working and efficient and also eat less and exercise rather more. That's a Zoomy guarantee!

I am going to Pittsburgh in July, you see, and I intend to be perfectly in shape, body-wise and memory-training-wise by then. Like I said, starting tomorrow.

I don't normally write about work, but...

Gah, I've had too much to do at work this week! And it's only Tuesday! I need a holiday!

Actually, I'm wondering whether I should go to AnthroCon (the world's largest gathering for lovers of funny-animal comics, cartoons etc) in Pittsburgh in July. It would be nice to get away for a week or so and see the sights of a place I've never been to. But the only thing stopping me is the fact that I went to New York in March, I'm going to Hamburg at the end of July and then probably Bahrain in November. Four foreign trips in a year is rather the kind of thing I disapprove of in others. If you tell me you go overseas four times in a year, I'll decry you as some kind of bourgeois snob who the working classes need to rise up and overthrow and probably not want to be your friend. So I'd feel like a bit of a hypocrite.

On the other hand, I can just about afford it, more or less, and I really want to do it...

The superhuman power of eternal youth

There's an article about me in the Derby Evening Telegraph (and you can read it on the website even if you're not fortunate enough to live in Derby), telling the locals who might have missed it that I'm in Men's Health magazine.

Someone from the Telegraph did call me, at work, last week and ask for a quick interview. I told him my home number and asked him to give me a call outside office hours, but in the end they seem to have decided that my input wasn't necessary, and just gone ahead and written the article without it.

The best thing about this is that they've assumed my status quo is still what it was the last time they interviewed me - so the article says I still live in Derby, and, best of all, that I'm still 31! I'm never going to do another interview with anyone again, so as to stay youthful forever!