It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw

Just a quick post to say hello from Pittsburgh. Getting here did indeed take longer than you'd think, thanks to a delayed connecting flight in Newark (fake Newark in America, not the real Newark I cycled to and from the Sunday before last), so I'm quite justified in using the blog title I've been itching to use ever since booking the holiday in the first place.

It wasn't until getting to Pittsburgh that I realised I'd booked my flight home for the wrong date - I'm supposed to be back at work on Wednesday, but I don't get in to Birmingham airport until about nine o'clock on Wednesday morning. I'm still not sure whether to go to the trouble and expense of changing my flights, or the work-related trouble and hotel-related expense of hanging around America for another day after the convention ends and emailing my boss to ask for another day's holiday. That would mean working long, long hours on Thursday and Friday to catch up with everything I need to get done, and that's never a good thing to do when you're jetlagged.

Maybe I'll just stay in the USA permanently, living on the streets and earning a living as a busking memory man. That'll solve all my problems!

One more day to our holiday

Hooray, because I've only got one more working day to go before I fly away for a week. Actually, this holiday has rather snuck up on me, because I organised it so far in advance by my standards (more than a month ago!), I'd almost forgotten about it. I haven't packed yet, but I have made a mental note that I'll need to book a hotel near the airport for tomorrow night, so that's progress.

Oink

I've had an increasingly irresistible urge these past few weeks to go up to Dundee, find the DC Thomson offices and demand to know why they're reprinting old Rasher strips, of all things, in the Beano. I mean, is there really that much demand for Rasher? His own series was dropped many years ago now, and his appearances in Dennis's have been few and far between in the 21st century. If the Beano is so short of creative talent or the money to pay for it these days that they're forced to plunder the archives for page-filler, why not dredge up something really good? Rasher was always okay, but it was never anything special. And Calamity James isn't appearing in the comic at the moment, I'd love to see his early adventures get another airing! I tell you, if I ran the Beano, it'd be cheaper, funnier and would sell better. I've missed my vocation in life, I think...

The Embodiment Gris

If I had a time machine, the first thing I'd do with it wouldn't be preventing any horrific and tragic disaster, or even skipping ahead a couple of hours to see tonight's lottery numbers. It would be to take a telly and video back to 1965 and tape "The Daleks' Master Plan" in its entirety. Like most BBC programmes of the sixties, the tapes were all destroyed long ago, and only three of the twelve episodes still survive. But I've been watching them today, and it really is cracking stuff. And not, like some old Doctor Whos, the kind of thing you watch to laugh at the cheap sets and effects, but it's brilliant, enthralling, deadly serious sci-fi drama that leaves me impatiently waiting for the next episode. Which, of course, is unlikely to be shown any time soon, unless another old film turns up in a BBC junk room unexpectedly.

Also brilliant is the DVD commentary on the recently-discovered episode 2 ("borrowed" by a young BBC engineer in the early seventies when he found it lying around the place, never returned and forgotten about until 2004), by Peter Purves and Kevin Stoney. They both cheerfully admit to having no memory of filming this 40-year-old episode they once starred in, but have a lot of fun discussing the old days and the people they worked with. It's somehow very warm and cosy to hear them referring to Zephon, Master of the Fifth Galaxy as "Julian Sherrier". The name actually suits the character surprisingly well. A typical bit of commentary goes like this:

"There's Julian again..."
"No, that's not Julian, that's Bill."
"Is it?"
"Yes, Nick Courtney beat up Julian and put his cloak on Bill, so now he's infiltrating the council of war. Do keep up, Kevin."
"I'm getting lost here..."

Somebody give me a Tardis, so I can watch episode 3!

Stop Press

For the benefit of those people out there who use my blog as the source of up-to-date news about memory competitions (these are the people who tend not to turn up, because I tend not to get round to mentioning important details), please note that the venue of the World Memory Championship this year has changed, from Bahrain to London. Dates are still currently intended to be November 13-15. I'd comment on the situation and the probable reasons for it, but I'd only get in trouble. Anyway, it should still be a great event, it always is.

In which I attempt to write the shortest blog entry in history (not counting the title, because titles don't count. This is the longest title allowed)

Too much on telly on Thursday nights. And I still did a good hour of memorising as well as all the tennis and comedy and working for a living. I was going to write a blog about how the skin on my sunburnt arms is peeling, but I didn't want to upset anyone with the graphic descriptions.

In the abstract

I'm in the process of doing something I should have done years ago, and getting serious about abstract images. Specifically, I'm putting together a randomising program to mix up the images from the handful of practice papers available online and enable me to practice it every night. Still a lot of work to do - copying and pasting images into the Excel spreadsheet one at a time is time-consuming and tedious - but it works pretty well so far, and when it's finished I'll share it with the world. Meanwhile, I'm aiming to cut down my time for memorising a page and a half of images down to three and a half minutes, in among the various other training exercises I'm still more or less sort of sticking with.

Also, I need to find a new barber. While I'll grant you that it's hard to make my hair look great, the place down the road really made a mess of it last Saturday. I'd hate to have to go back to Derby every couple of months for a trim, but I haven't had much luck yet finding a half-decent scalper here in Beeston. Perhaps my expectations are too high - all hairdressers nowadays have a photo of David Beckham in the window, as if to promise they're going to make me look just like him...

Ding dong, ding dong

I learned today that it was Big Ben's 150th birthday last month, and nobody told me. You'd think I would have been invited to the party - quite a lot of people, generally the non-British ones, have given me the nickname "Big Ben" in the past, on account of how I live in England, am called Ben and possibly also because I'm quite small.

A much better nickname, which nobody has ever yet applied to me, would be "Big Ben Brain", which was the name of a famous bare-knuckle boxer in the 18th century, and which incorporates the 'brain' theme that the World Memory Championships are often quite keen to promote. I might have to get some new business cards printed, just to give potential nicknamers a subtle hint.

Yawwwn

I'm still feeling all stiff and achey after my uncharacteristic physical exertions. And that's my excuse for laying around doing nothing all evening - I'll get back into memory training and so on tomorrow, I promise.

But since I've done nothing but watch the telly this evening, can I just observe how surprisingly incompetent the presenter/commentator/whatever-you-want-to-call-him on BBC Parliament is? Granted, I only flicked over to it a couple of times to avoid graphic replays of knee injuries on the Wimbledon coverage (I'm very squeamish about hurt knees), but even though I have little or no knowledge of or interest in the process of electing a new speaker, I seemed to know more about what was going on than the guy who was providing the voice-over (along with Betty Boothroyd). I could at least add up a couple of numbers correctly, remember the names of MPs that had been read out five minutes ago and that he'd presumably been discussing all day, and so on. I was sort of expecting a slick, professional, general-election-style coverage, but apparently BBC Parliament's audience is only big enough to justify a clueless commentator dragged in off the street and dropped in front of a microphone.

Makes it all worthwhile

I've got a shiny little gold medal, commemorating that I did indeed manage to cycle fifty miles! And more, if you count the six miles cycling from Beeston to the starting line at Holme Pierrepont (I got the train back, but there weren't any trains early enough in the morning). I've also got terrible sunburn on my arms. And now I'm going to bed to rest my aching... body.

I'm definitely going to need some kind of cushion

Cycled about 15 miles today, making sure I knew how to get to the starting point of tomorrow's bike ride and getting horribly lost along the way (don't worry, I know how to get there now) and I'm already sore. I should have invested in a pair of padded shorts like people have been recommending. I'm sure I can improvise something with things I've got around the house...

Anyway, rider number 2741 (you get real, official numbers like in a proper bike race!) is all ready to go. It's going to be a definite change from my usual Sunday of sitting at a desk and memorising cards and numbers.

The Calliope crashed to the ground

I like reading my old blog entries in idle moments. Although it always makes me feel like I was much more eloquent and entertaining in the old days, compared to the hastily-written drivel I always seem to be reduced to lately. But looking back through my writings of years ago leads me to notice that this epic poem of mine, which I still think is rather clever and funny, didn't ever get so much as a single comment! Really, my readers are so ungrateful. Who else in the blogosphere comes up with that kind of thing? I bet the new poet laureate, whoever he/she is (I've forgotten), doesn't even have a blog with such melodious verse in it!

Actually, I was reading old blog posts mainly to see whether I'd previously made light of the early-nineties articles about the Mind Sports Olympiad in old Synapsia magazines - I have, so I won't do it again. I will point out an impressive world record reported in the same magazine, though: "Creighton Carvello memorised one pack of cards at speed with only one error in 2 minutes 59 seconds" on Record Breakers in 1987. This, much more than that old chestnut about scientists' predictions of spoken number memory capacity, is the best example of how the World Memory Championships have stretched people's brains. Right now, 22 years later, I'm seriously worried that any one of two or three top memorisers is going to beat me to being the first to memorise a pack in under 25 seconds in a competition very soon. And 'only one error' is not going to get you a round of applause these days.

Il faut que tu fasses du vélo

For some reason, that's a phrase that has stuck in my head ever since French lessons at school got as far as teaching the subjunctive. French grammar is a very silly thing. Anyway, it's just a couple of days until I go on a longer bike ride than any sensible person would want to do, and I'm a bit worried about the weather. We seem to be getting baking hot sunshine followed seconds later by torrential downpours just lately, and I'd hate to get struck by lightning and then slowly fried like an egg on the tarmac. That'd really knock down my average speed.

It's not too late to sponsor me, by the way. And many, many thanks to everyone who already has!

And even bigger thanks to Jabba, who sent me a really cool book just because she knew I'd like it! That's the kind of charity there should be more of - Entertain A Zoomy.

A conversation with Microsoft Excel 2007

Excel: This spreadsheet contains macros. Macros can contain viruses. I'm going to disable, delete and destroy them, okay?

Me: No, it's not okay. Open up the file, macros and all, please.

Excel: Macros can contain potentially harmful viruses. You shouldn't open files with macros in unless you're completely sure that they are safe and virus-free.

Me: They are. Shut up about macros and just open the file.

Excel: So, have you run a virus-scan and got some professional to double-check that there are no viruses lurking in these macros of yours?

Me: No, of course I haven't. Nobody does that. Just open the file.

Excel: You mean open it with the macros disabled, right?

Me: Look, I wrote these macros myself, the file has never been anywhere other than my laptop, there's no way anyone could have ever infiltrated my visual basic workbook with viruses. The file doesn't work without the macros, so why in the name of flip would I want to disable them?

Excel: I'm really not sure this is a good idea. Let's just forget about this workbook, and play with something else, shall we?


I mean, seriously. I've been writing and using macros for many, many years, at home and at work (mainly just for the sake of it because very few people can do them, and everyone thinks you're some kind of magician if you know how, but sometimes because they're really useful things) and I've never had a single problem with viruses, nor met or heard of anybody who has. And yet every new version of Excel forces you to select ever more 'non-recommended' macro security options, special file types, hidden toolbars and so on, just to use a tiny little harmless macro! Stupid Microsoft.

Did I fall asleep?

I'd heard pretty uniformly bad things about Dollhouse, so I'd been meaning to check it out ever since it started. I've seen the last two episodes, and it's actually really quite good. Certainly worth watching, although tonight's episode could have been done rather better towards the end - lots of different and less predictable ways the ending could have worked out. I don't expect the really formulaic stuff from Joss Whedon.

But even so, it's something new to add to my things-to-watch list, and that's a very sparse list right now. TV isn't the opium-of-the-masses it used to be...

Yay!

I've just discovered that TMF, the second-rate music channel, shows cartoons before nine o'clock (when the teenage audience are presumably still in bed). I've got another cartoon channel that I didn't know about! I can watch the first half of Maggie and the Ferocious Beast before I leave for work in the mornings!

Beer good

A Saturday getting horribly drunk with my brother, followed by a Sunday recovering from it, is a great way to spend a weekend every once in a while. And hopefully I'll have stopped feeling quite so dreadfully unwell by tomorrow morning when I need to go to work...

The train of thought is late again

I just thought to myself something along the lines of "Right, finished my hastily-knocked-together costume for my brother's party tomorrow, now for the more important task of..." and there was some word or phrase after that. But now I've got no idea what it was that I was going to do. I'm pretty sure it was something very significant that probably won't wait until tomorrow morning. But never mind.

Anyway, what I was going to blog about tonight was the idea of technologising the memory competition world. Check out the latest interview on memory-sports.com, the extremely cool website that I might have mentioned before. On the one hand, it's a good idea to save the arbiters the hassle of marking (and avoid the mistakes that causes), and the idea of spectators being able to see live updates is fun (although I think people would prefer to see updating numbers rather than animations of people running).

On the other hand, there are definite health and safety issues with requiring competitors to stare at a computer screen for an hour. I think it'd still be better to have the memorisation done on paper, and the recall on computer. But then, that would probably lead to more possibility of technical problems, and that's the wider issue - the cost of setting up computers for everyone is something the organisers could maybe deal with, if they get a bit more money from somewhere, but there would inevitably be something go wrong with it. Probably a power cut in the middle of a competition that causes all the numbers the competitors have spent the previous two hours typing in to be lost. I remain sceptical.

The Flaming Sword Of Fire

If you like Maid Marian and her Merry Men, you should probably watch Kröd Mändoon. It's the same thing, only with adult jokes and Americans. Although I'm not sure whether Sean Maguire is American nowadays, or if he's still English. Anyway, he's extremely funny, and so is the whole show.

Okay then

I'm going to do the Great Nottinghamshire Bike Ride and see if I can cope with a 50-mile cycling tour of the scenic countryside between Nottingham and Newark, if any. Consquently, I want people to give money to charities, by clicking here. I know I said I was thinking of doing it for the Alzheimer's Society, but I'm doing another thing for them in September, so I decided to just go with the GNBR's official charities list. Come to think of it, I know more people with cerebral palsy than people with Alzheimer's, anway.

I should probably point out that if the weather's awful or if I feel too lazy to get out of bed, I might still not bother with it, and just cycle the 50 yards down the road to the Co-op for a big bag of sweets, then come home and lay in bed all day eating them. If that happens, you won't be required to give any money. Although you probably should donate anyway. I'm sure none of my readers is the kind of person who makes promises of money to the needy but makes it conditional on the cycling performance of a fat, lazy oaf. Just sign up for your donation and stop moaning!

If I do stay in bed all day eating sweets, in fact, I'll triple my own donation. Can't say fairer than that.