Turned out nice again

After all my whining yesterday, the weather was actually quite nice today, and almost warm - certainly nice enough to cycle from Leicester to Oadby without dropping dead. The othello was fun, too, we had eight players, more clocks than we knew what to do with (we could have built them into a little tower, now I come to think of it, but that didn't occur to me at the time) and I won most of my games, drawing with Iain in the first round and just making a mess of things against Andrew to ensure that I ended up second instead of joint-first.

There was also the traditional lunch in the excellent pub down the road (The Old Library, which is right next door to the current Oadby library, so I don't understand why they bothered to move it), where I impressed our newcomer Rob with my status of world memory champion, and then even more so when a stranger at the bar recognised me and said hello.

And, since it's so nearby, I got home nice and early and didn't have to get up early in the morning. All othello tournaments should be like this.

Winter sports

It's the Oadby regional tomorrow, and I traditionally (ie for the last two years) take my bike on the train to Leicester and cycle out to the Baptist church where the competition is traditionally (for the last four or five years at least) held. But it's still really cold out there, and it's been spring-like for the last couple of years by this time. It's disgraceful. Still, I'm sure the tournament will be fun. I'll also make an effort to break with tradition and remember to bring my clock.

Drat those Germans

England lost to Germany in the semi-final of the hockey world cup today. You'd think they would have been more considerate, knowing how I love to find bad omens in minority-interest sporting events and relate them to the world memory championships. I tell you, if I don't win this year it won't be because I haven't done any training, it'll be because of bad omens. Evil spirits, that kind of thing.

Weight a minute

I've been trying to lose weight for the last couple of weeks, in a half-hearted, still-eating-lots-of-sweets kind of way. But it just occurred to me today that the one time in recent memory when I did genuinely lose a lot of weight and become really quite slender was back in early 2003, when I was particularly devoted to memory training and developing my systems. It's apparently true that mental athletes' exertions make them lose weight, and obviously I just need to mentally exercise some more to get the pounds falling off...

I'm bored!

I haven't been on TV for ages. This must be what it's like to be a normal person, instead of a major celebrity. Unless that other Japanese company decides to go for it, there's nobody even considering making a documentary about memory competitions at the moment, is the point I'm seriously making here. It's about time somebody came along and wanted to film the 2010 world championships. Come on, TV producers, the public wants to see the exciting spectacle of a group of people sitting in a basement looking at numbers!

Unclean!

I got a computer-virus thing on my laptop today - one of those fake security tool things that takes over your machine and tries to persuade you to download bad things and/or give people money. Luckily, I'd heard of them before when someone I know got something similar last year, but less luckily the thing stopped me getting onto the internet and finding out how to get rid of it. But it all worked out happily in the end, because I could still get Yahoo Messenger to work and I got a helpful friend to look it up on Google, and now I've got a clean bill of silicon health again. But I've never had a virus/trojan/whatever before, and now I can't be scornful towards people who get them and say that only stupid people are at risk from computer viruses. Well, I can, and will, but I probably won't sound so convincing.

Also, congratulations to Ron White for winning the US Memory Championship, and Nelson Dellis for nearly winning it and achieving some really cool-by-the-standards-of-American-memory-competition things. I expect both of them to become even more cool, memory-wise, in the future. Let's have an American invasion of top-notch memorisers, to fight off the Chinese and Europeans!

Cambridge Memory Championship 2010

The fifth Cambridge Memory Championship (wow! five years!) takes place on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010, at Trinity College, Cambridge.

It's part of the tenth (double wow!) Cambridge Mind Sports Olympiad, so please do come along and play something else on the Saturday. I'm playing othello, as usual.

The MSO website above gives you all the relevant details of how to get there, when things happen and so on. It costs £5 to enter, or nothing at all if you're new to the world of memory sports (or if you really convince me that you're so poor that you can't afford a fiver), and the competition lasts for the whole day, from nine o'clock in the morning until six o'clock in the evening. The schedule looks like this:

9:00 Welcome and introduction
9:15 Random words 5 min 10 min
9:45 Binary numbers 5 min 15 min
10:15 Names and faces 5 min 10 min
10:45 Numbers 15 min 30 min
11:45 Lunch break
1:00 Cards 10 min 20 min
1:45 Speed Numbers 5 min 15 min
2:15 Abstract Images 15 min 30 min
3:15 Historic Dates 5 min 15 min
3:45 Spoken Numbers 100 sec 5 min
200 sec 10 min
4:45 Speed Cards 5 min 5 min
5 min 5 min
6:00 Finish

Times are subject to change, but we usually get things done pretty close to that. Spoken numbers are in English, words and dates can be provided in any language of your choice, as long as you ask for it at least a week before the competition.

For lunch we'll go to a nice pub nearby, and afterwards we'll go to another nice pub (or, if we really liked the lunch, the same nice pub) and talk about the wonders of memory competitions in general.

Any questions, please comment on this blog post, or send me an email. A preview will appear on www.memory-sports.com shortly.

And you're only smilin' when you play your violin

That's one of those blog titles I've wanted to use ever since I encountered that particularly awful rhyme in the strange Abba song "Dum Dum Diddle". I was thinking of jusifying it by writing about how I'm considering taking proper professional lessons in some musical instrument to get over my lifelong desire to actually play something well - it's true, I am, but not so seriously that it merits a blog to itself, and I'd only feel like I was just saying it so I could use that title. Still, it is something I'd like to do. I'm quite sure I've got the soul of a musician (the cool hippy kind) trapped in the body of an accountant-cum-memory-master.

Also, should I go out somewhere distant and exciting tomorrow, or just stay at home and try to memorise things? I can't decide.

America's memory

Tch, it's the US Memory Championship on Saturday, and I can't use it as an excuse to visit New York this year, because I've got no holiday days left until the new year starts in April. It's probably my own fault for going to Japan so many times, but I'm still looking for someone else to blame. But at least Florian's going, so there'll be a full and interesting report on memory-sports.com!

Incidentally, expect a lot of blogging about the Cambridge Memory Championship this weekend and for the two months thereafter. I've rather neglected it (in the sense that I've done absolutely nothing by way of organising it, telling people it's happening and other minor matters like that), so I'm going to make up for it now. Well, not now, but Saturday, definitely.

The Boy With The Amazing Brain

I got an email today offering to use my amazing memory skills to win a fortune at blackjack and make me and my generous correspondent millionaires. I haven't had one of those for a while, and it's nice to know that some people out there still think I'm Rain Man. It always gives me a giggle, if nothing else.

But still, since I'm casting around for something new to try my hand at, perhaps I should learn to count cards properly. It does sound like fun, if you can do it well. Perhaps I'll break the bank at Monte Carlo yet. I'll just have to start wearing disguises and deliberately losing whenever I go to Las Vegas, in case they ban me from my favourite holiday destination...

A Buffy a day keeps the vampires away

Having acquired a complete collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer videos recently, as I probably mentioned in my blog, I've been watching an episode a night for the last week or so. It really is an awesome series, and there's nothing on TV nowadays quite like it. Somebody come up with another cool, clever and funny action show, please. I need more reasons to not do any memory training.

Time marches on

I was really taken by surprise today to notice that it's March. High time I sprung into action and did something new. To start with, I've trimmed my beard down to a sensible kind of length. But I've left the ends of my moustache quite long, because I've got half a mind to turn it into a villainous curly moustache. I think it'd look good on me.

The Old Man of the Mountain

The coolest thing about the Cambridge International is generally the meals. Okay, there are people who go there wanting to win the othello tournament, but I personally never harbour any illusions about being good enough to consistently beat the best players in Europe. It's a tournament I'd recommend to anyone who likes good food in interesting places with very interesting people, though.

Friday evening, having got away from the office and made my way down to Cambridge, starts with The Salisbury Arms, just down the road from the train station and also just down another road from the hotel I ended up staying in because Cityroomz was full. But not having travelled that road before, I still got hopelessly lost on the way - the road the pub is on is in some kind of spacial topographical anomaly so that it's at right angles to each of two different roads I'm familiar with but which are at right angles to each other. Or that's how it seemed to me, anyway, even before I had anything to drink. Still, it's such a great pub that I thought I should throw in a link to its website. It's a bit excessively real-ale, and wildly expensive compared to pubs around my neck of the woods, but it's got a staggeringly groovy deco, and the best music you can possibly imagine. I'd go along with the website's claim that it "encompasses all that is great about English pubs", more or less, although I wouldn't recommend that you check out the poetry page.

On othello tournament eves, it also plays host to a whole lot of European othelloists crowded around a smallish table, playing othello and variants thereof (four-by-infinity) and suggesting a really quite cool idea for an extra competition we could have at the Cambridge Memory Championship in May (assuming I tell people it's happening - I'll do it next week, promise). Aubrey gets the credit for the othello variant and the memory idea, naturally. A couple of drinks later, I followed some very simple directions back to the main road, and luckily looked over my shoulder to find that I was pointed 180 degrees in the wrong direction now, eventually ending up back at my hotel.

This being a nice hotel, it came with a full English breakfast - self-service buffet with a waitress whose sole job it seems to be to open the metal box things (there's probably a word for them that everyone knows, but I can't think of it) that the bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs etc are in whenever a breakfaster comes towards them, and close them again when they're done. It was very nice. Definitely an improvement on the 'light breakfast' you get with your cheaper room at Cityroomz, which basically consists of a croissant.

Thus fortified, it was down to the Lubbock Room in Peterhouse, just round the corner, where the Cambridge International has been played since time immemorial if like me your memory only goes back to 2002. That's also a very cool place, a big spacious room with pencil sketches of Peterhouse-associated Nobel Prize winners on the walls and, this year at least, a great forest of laptops belonging to players. This is what happens when you advertise wireless internet availability. There was barely room for othello boards among all the laptops. Still, at least nobody had a secret othello computer down their trousers this year.

After the morning's first three games, the leaders were Matthias Berg, Erwin van den Berg and David Beck - a really good morning for people whose surnames start with 'Be', although it was a very bad one for people with 'Be' first names. Before the next tournament, I'll change my name to 'Pan', which Corrie de Graaf thought was my name after mishearing an introduction. It was also a good morning for people with surnames derived from geographical features, and for prompting me to use the blog title above, which is a Betty Boop cartoon - the fact that her name also starts with 'Be' was the clincher in choosing it.

Lunch is traditionally in the university canteen next door. Great food, including a hot pudding with custard - it was treacle tart this year, and it was delicious. Expensive, naturally, despite being a university place. Cambridge is just plain expensive everywhere. It keeps the riff-raff away.

We had an afternoon's othelloing too, although I can't remember exactly what happened to me, let alone to anyone else. I certainly didn't win very many games all weekend, anyway. Still, in the evening it was drinks in the pub down the road, along with debate about whether or not rosé wine is made by mixing red and white wine together, and a really heated argument about the difference between raisins, currants and sultanas. Especially currants. Luckily, it's the 21st century, and everybody had iphones and laptops and access to the source of all knowledge, Wiki Answers. Then away to an Indian restaurant where the conversation (at our table at least) was unprintable in a family blog like this. The food was quite nice, though.

Day two of the competition ended up with me on five wins out of eleven, which could be worse, I suppose. Imre won the final against David Hand, so yay and congratulations to them and everyone else!

Drat!

Cityroomz was fully booked, after all my talk of tradition last night. I'm having to stay in a nicer, more expensive place instead. Tradition is ruined! Now I'll never achieve my usual mediocre results in the othello! I'll probably win it, or something useless and non-traditional like that.

Still, I'm cheered up by the news that David Taylor is entering the World Snooker Championship qualifying tomorrow, for the first time in millions of years. I always thought he was cool when I was very young, although I can't think why.

Z

It's that time of the year when I book a room in the Cityroomz hotel in Cambridge at the last minute, for the Cambridge International this weekend. And gah, it's £47.50 a night now! It's an awesome hotel, but it used to be a super-cheap one (in those days it was called "Sleeperz", which was a much more groovy name) as well, and now it's just a cheaper-than-average one. Still, it's traditional that I stay there, and I'm not going to break with tradition, even if I find a cheaper-but-still-nice place. Heck, maybe I'll even book a room for the MSO weekend, too, because I always leave it too late for that and find that the place is fully booked. May day weekend is somehow a more popular time to visit Cambridge than the last weekend in February, even though the othello tournament that weekend is smaller and less important.

Japan loves Zoomy

So, a Japanese TV company wants to fly me out to Japan and interview me and have me do some kind of interesting memory stunt in a studio and maybe scan my brain on an MRI machine or something unique like that.

Seriously. Fuji TV, "The Best House 123", mid-March or mid-April. Now, let's think about this. On the one hand, I have quite literally been there and done that, I only get 25 days of holiday a year and ideally I'd like to save quite a lot of them for China in August (if it doesn't get cancelled/rescheduled/moved to London) so I can go there a good few days early and beat the jetlag, and how many times can I fly to Tokyo and back before someone thinks I'm some kind of international millionaire playboy and kidnaps me to demand a hefty ransom that my impoverished family would be both unable and unwilling (because they don't like me all that much) to pay?

On the other hand, the more exposure I get on Japanese TV, the closer it brings me to fulfilling my secret lifelong ambition to play an evil scientist in a Godzilla movie. I'll seem to be a good guy at first, but then turn out to be secretly plotting to use the giant monsters to crush Tokyo and bring the world's economy under my control. It'll be great.

So I'll sleep on it and see what I think. I'll probably end up saying yes, if they really do want me to do it. I'd be great in a Godzilla movie. I could learn the lines in Japanese, no problem, on account of I'm a memory man.

I'd talk in a sort of deep, gruff, scientist voice and everything.

This is what I do when I'm bored

Seriously, I spend all day playing around with Excel spreadsheets at work, and sometimes I just want to come home and play with Excel spreadsheets in the comfort of my own living room. I'm a terrible sad case.

But I wanted to mess with unnecessarily complicated formulas to predict the Premier League table at the end of the season, based on who still has to play whom. The aim is to get to a point where my calculations are so weird and complex, yet still roughly justifiable by logic, that the end result is a pleasant surprise to me when I see it. Or an unpleasant surprise as it turns out. I really don't like Chelsea and I was hoping to come up with scientific proof that they weren't going to win it. But still, yay, it turns out that Aston Villa are going to get fourth place!

I won't bore everyone by explaining the calculations used (because I wouldn't know how to explain them comprehensibly, for a start), but I thought I'd put my predictions here for posterity and compare them with how the table looks after everything's done and dusted. I'll bet you a coke it's accurate, because it's generated by Science.

1 Chelsea 85
2 Man Utd 81
3 Arsenal 81
4 Aston Villa 72
5 Liverpool 69
6 Tottenham 68
7 Man City 68
8 Everton 53
9 Birmingham 52
10 Fulham 49
11 Stoke 46
12 Blackburn 43
13 West Ham 39
14 Wigan 39
15 Sunderland 38
16 Wolverhampton 38
17 Bolton 37
18 Burnley 37
19 Hull 37
20 Portsmouth [probably non-existent]

Right, that's enough time-wasting. Time to start doing something productive again.

Osero

Perhaps that thing I could do instead of memory is learn to play othello properly? I've been at the same unimpressive kind of level for many years now, and maybe it's high time I devoted some time and effort to improving? But then again, what if I did try to become a great othello player and ended up still being rubbish? I have a feeling that might well happen, so it's probably best to play it safe and never try to achieve anything, ever.

Comic Library Extra!

Okay, we get an extra bonus blog post tonight, because I've just noticed something weird about that Comic Library I bought today. It's something that will only be of interest to roughly three other comic fans in the world, none of whom read my blog and all of whom probably know about it already, but I thought I should share it with all of you anyway. I'm generous like that.

For the benefit of the 99% of my readers who don't know what a Comic Library is and wonder what the flip I'm talking about, they were mini-comics produced by D.C. Thomson and featuring characters from the Dandy and Beano (for the benefit of the 50% of my readers who don't know what the Dandy and Beano are, they're popular weekly British comics, featuring about a dozen regular comic strips, each of them one or two pages in length every week). Two Beano and two Dandy Comic Libraries were published every month, starting around 1981 or thereabouts, and they contained a 64-page adventure for just one of their regular characters. Some were brilliant, some were frankly rubbish, but they cost 20p and were a highlight of my month every time.

The inside front cover of each Comic Library would normally contain a full-page advertisement for the weekly Beano, the inside back cover had an advertisement for the two Beano Comic Libraries that would be out next month, and the outside back cover had an advertisement for the other one that was out this month. This was the days before the Beano ran ads from outside companies. It's sad, really, that not enough kids buy the things nowadays.

However, Comic Library no. 36, Baby-Face Finlayson in "Gold Robber" (which for some reason I never had in 1983, although I did have the hugely inferior "Count Whackula", starring Dennis the Menace, which came out in the same month), has this on the inside front cover:

And this on the inside back:


This is weird. No 'See Baby-Face Finlayson every week in the Beano!' and two 'next month' ads, promising different stories next month! The inside front cover is the correct one, except that the Bananaman story was actually called "It's A Knockabout" (and it was BRILLIANT, by the way, one of the best Comic Libraries ever, up there with the Baby-Faces), while "Castle Capers" didn't see print until the following year, in Comic Library no. 50 (it wasn't all that good, either). And the picture of Minnie the Minx on the inside back cover ad is by the artist who normally drew the Minnie Comic Libraries (I think it's lifted from "Min's Best Friend", but I haven't checked), while the picture on the inside front cover is by the different artist (I wish I knew their names, but the Beano never credited its creative talent in those days) who drew "Min's Pest Show".

Apparently they created the original ad, then rescheduled "Castle Capers" and drew up a replacement ad, but accidentally printed it on the inside front cover instead of the back, meaning that two contradictory ads went into the finished publication! I like finding things like this in my comics. I do wonder why the Lord Snooty story was held back for a whole year, too.

Anyway, since I had the scanner up and running again, let me show you why Ron Spencer's Baby-Face Finlayson Comic Libraries were the absolute high point of 1980s comics throughout the universe with just a couple of examples from "Gold Robber":

Baby-Face and friends have just stolen a shipment of butter, mistaking it for gold, but decide to make the best of it by having a feast. Ron Spencer loved his feast scenes.

Note the whole roast chicken in the background. Every Baby-Face story featured at least half a dozen whole roast chickens - it was Spencer's signature, in lieu of actually being allowed to write his name on his works.


It's the little things I love - Mayor Orless naturally has a framed picture of himself hanging on his wall.



And the complete non-sequitur of one of "Marsh" Mallow's horses thinking "Funny! I keep thinking it's Wednesday!" totally cracks me up.

Bloggin'

The charity shops around here seem to be full of great stuff all of a sudden. Just today, I found the Dennis the Menace book from 1960, a Beano Comic Library from 1983 starring Baby-Face Finlayson (full of quite brilliantly insane art by Ron Spencer, who I admire greatly but whose name for some reason I always have to look up before I mention him, because I always think he was called either Victor or Sid - I have no idea why), the second volume of Bang Bang It's Reeves And Mortimer on video, and a complete VHS collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And also a new pair of work trousers to replace my ones with the broken zip. Oh, and a Golden Picture Classics abridged edition of Treasure Island from 1956, to provide a belated illustration of the mystery pirate from my essay the other week. And all without any really significant cost to me, while still benefitting various more or less good causes! I don't know why anyone bothers to go into normal shops, I really don't.


It's probably the one in the green shirt.