Trousers

There are a couple of trouser-related things I felt that I should record in my blog. Because let's face it, there isn't nearly enough information on the internet about my trousers, and we urgently need to redress the balance.

On Thursday, as part of the team-building exercises that have been taking up a lot of my time at work lately (and which I won't comment on in case someone from work is reading this), we went out to a pub for lunch, and I had the hottest, fresh-from-the-microwave lasagne I've ever been stupid enough to put in my mouth. "Gah! It's melting my tongue!" I quipped after noticing the temperature just after putting a forkful in my mouth, much to the amusement of my colleagues. I then put my knife down in a way that somehow caused it to cartwheel up in the air and flick a huge amount of lasagne down my shirt and onto my trouser leg. "Gah, now I've got lasagne all over my trousers!" I observed. "AAAAAH! BOILING HOT LASAGNE!" I then yelled quite loudly as the temperature penetrated the thin fabric and forced me to wipe it off in a painful panic. Really, you can't take me anywhere, and my boss would be well-advised to remember this in future.

Another thing about my good work trousers is that there's a big hole in the bum, and people were starting to notice it at the office. So today I put on my best casual trousers (which incidentally have an even bigger hole in the bum) and went to the finest purveyors of clothing in Nottingham (excluding shops that don't give all their proceeds to cancer research) to buy myself some new ones. I found a nice and stylish pair of work trousers in a shade that matches my jacket, and a good pair of casual jeans-type-things-that-aren't-technically-jeans-as-such to wear in non-working situations. However, the latter turn out to have huge holes in both pockets, so I either need to fix them (not really going to happen) or only wear them on occasions where I don't need to carry any money, keys etc with me.

I would take them back to the shop and ask for my £3.65 back (along with maybe an explanation of how they chose that weird price), but the till was manned today by a woman who seemed to be in her eighties and who couldn't work the fancy electronic till, despite the alternately helpful and unhelpful instructions from two other workers crowding around her, so the simple sale transaction took about half an hour and I dread to think how long a refund process would have taken.

Still, a woman in Burger King recognised me from the telly and said hello, without even commenting on the state of my trousers, so perhaps I'm just attaching too much importance to the role that trousers play in every aspect of my life.

Curse the Swedish Mafia!

My bank saw fit to stop my debit card working, because I'd gone to Sweden without telling them and spent somewhere in the region of £25, so they assumed my card had been stolen. I did explain that going into the bank and explaining that I'd still got the card had caused me a lot more inconvenience than I would have suffered if the card had really been stolen by Swedish master criminals, but they assured me that the swift and decisive action by the fraud team (judging by the phone call made by Charlotte at the bank, this team is based in India and speaks very little English) was for my own protection and I should be jolly well grateful. I feel like I ought to demolish the bank with a bulldozer or something, just to show them how annoyed I am. I'd close my account and move my money somewhere else, but I'm pretty sure that every bank in the country uses the services of the same non-anglophone fraud team.

Also, there's a TV advert for Andrex that describes it as "soft, strong and unbeatably long," with small print at the bottom of the screen saying "excluding longer lasting/double roll products". So, it's unbeatably long if you exclude anything that lasts longer? I'm going to describe myself as the world memory champion, excluding those with better memories, from December onwards!

And what's more, it's the weekend and a friend in America has sent me DVDs of all but two episodes of Pocket Dragon Adventures to watch! And I've got the other two on video, so as and when I get round to working how to convert videos into DVDs, I'll be able to circulate a complete set around all the other Pocket Dragon fans in the world! (Except that there are only the two of us, as far as I know)

I know that last one wasn't really a complaint as such, but I wanted to finish on a more cheerful note.

Hold that tiger

Just for those readers who come to my blog hoping to find posts championing racism in reprinted comics, I thought I'd share another minor-adjustment-for-logistical-reasons from the Oor Wullie compilations, which came to light as a result of my recent splurging on old comicky things.

Original from February 9, 1941 (as reprinted in a 1989 wartime souvenir special I found on eBay)

As reprinted in "The Broons and Oor Wullie - The Early Years" in 2006:



I mean, really. Is this any the more acceptable for tippexing out the words "Hold dat tiger"? Judging by how often it shows up in Betty Boop cartoons, the Tiger Rag was a very popular tune of the time, and I hadn't really thought of it as being one with any racial connotations until I saw this comic. But the inclusion of a black kid in this one is interesting, because by this point Wullie's gang had settled down to just Bob and Soapy, and we very rarely saw them hanging out or forming bands with anyone else. For a while, a year or so earlier, it looked like Joe (who wore glasses and a flat cap) would become a permanent sidekick, but he didn't quite have enough staying power, and the gang remained exclusive until Wee Eck muscled his way in a bit later on. And nowadays, political correctness being what it is, Primrose is a fully paid-up gang member too - how long before Scotland's modern multi-ethnic society demands representation again?

The Glass Box of Gothenburg

So, I flew into Landvetter airport on Friday afternoon, to find someone waiting for me with a sign saying "Mr Ben", who chauffeured me to the tournament venue. As venues go, it was just plain awesome - just inside the main entrance to a gigantic book fair full of people who crowded around our glass box to watch what we were doing. It was like being in a zoo, or at least in the kind of zoo that Ayumu lives in. There was also full coverage in Swedish newspapers and radio broadcasts and things, so perhaps everyone in Sweden will want to take part next year!

Here's an interesting thing about Sweden, incidentally - they show a lot of British and American programmes on TV over there, subtitled. And funnily enough, on the Simpsons, even Bumblebee Man's Spanish is translated into Swedish! So any watcher unversed in both languages would think that Bumblebee Man is speaking the same language as all the other characters.

Anyway, suffice to say that I was hopeless all throughout the competition, much as I'd expected. And Simon Reinhard was entirely non-hopeless, so he beat me hands down. This is probably a good thing for me, because while I was generally poor in London, I didn't have any complete disasters, and I did have at least one in Gothenburg - in ten-minute cards, I tried for eight packs and ended up only getting one.

They arranged the speed cards for maximum spectator entertainment, with me, Boris and Simon in one group, lined up in front of the glass windows, and all the others (nine of them) thereafter. It was still technically possible for me to win if I did under 30 seconds and Simon didn't memorise anything, but we all just went for fast times without any of this namby-pamby "playing it safe" stuff. However, we possibly disappointed the watching masses when we all three of us failed to remember a pack of cards twice in a row. They were cheered up again, though, when Swedish newcomer Florian Minges did a pack in an extremely groovy one-minute-nineteen or so.

Full results can probably be found on the all-new statistics website here, along with the world ranking list and all the awesomeness of statistics from 19 years of memory competitions!

I must say, that I'm really hugely fired up, enthusiastic and motivated today... about playing the ukulele. Last night has really put me in the mood to be musical. I don't seem to have any enthusiasm about memory training, though...

A lapse of memory

Actually, my account of the Swedish memory championship will have to wait until tomorrow, because I'd forgotten that tonight's the night I was planning to go to the first meeting of the Nottingham Ukulele Club. Who would have thought that there were so many people in Nottingham who are interested in ukuleles? The room was jam-packed! I'll become a musician yet!

The Swedish Book Store

My account of the Swedish Memory Open will have to wait until tomorrow, because it's late, but the innovative venue in the middle of Scandinavia's biggest book fair certainly got us more spectators than any memory competition in history! It's just a shame I was so rubbish, really. Still, I picked up enough Swedish from all those books to be able to communicate with any Swedish dog (voff! vov!) or cat (mjau!). Next time I visit, I'll try to improve my grasp of the language to two-year-old human levels.

Unprepared

Flying to Gothenburg tomorrow (must make some effort to call it Göteborg while I'm there), haven't packed bags, worked out where exactly I'm going or done any training. So can't blog at length. See you Tuesday, unless you're going to be there this weekend.

Ultimate Grand Master!

You become a 'Grand Master of Memory' by memorising 1000 digits in an hour, 10 packs of cards in an hour, and a single pack of cards in two minutes. It's comparatively easy, and lots of people have done it.

What nobody has ever done, yet, is become a Double Grand Master (a title which I have just this moment made up), by successfully memorising 2000 digits, 20 packs of cards and a 1-minute pack. That should be my ambition, really. I'm constantly frustrated by my inability to get 2000 in hour numbers, and it really gets annoying after a few years. So perhaps I'll devote my every waking hour to achieving that. Or maybe I'll just spend all my time lying around doing nothing, as usual. We'll see.

Possibly I'll change the definition of "Double Grand Master" by making it 1000 digits in 30 minutes, and 10 packs in 30 minutes, because if I do that, I'm one already. I'll put the initials after my name.

(Having written that, I had to go and look up who else is a DGM. It's me, Gunther, Hannes and Cornelia. Simon, the Deutsche Gedächtnis Meister, only has a best of 985 in 30-minute numbers)

In other news, I need new trousers. The pair of trousers that I think of as 'my only decently wearable pair' are actually decidedly indecent in the rear, thanks to a big ripped hole where I caught them on something sharp protruding from my bike. I ought to get some more before I go to Sweden. I don't like buying clothes, I tend to just hope that people will buy them for me...

But you're such a charming, handsome man

A reader has complained that it's a long time since I blogged about being handsome. I actually don't think I've ever blogged about that, but if that's what my loyal readership want, who am I to complain? I am, after all, quite devastatingly handsome. And an article in the Washington Post agrees! Well, the (mostly) flattering article doesn't technically call me handsome, but it does say I'm "smartly clad in a fedora and a faded cartoon T-shirt", which shows a degree of sartorial appreciation unusual in anyone, let alone American newspapers!

Anyway, if I haven't mentioned it before, I'm taking my handsomeness and cartoon T-shirts to Gothenburg on Friday, there to test my faded memory techniques against some people who are really quite good at it and will doubtless kick my ass, metaphorically speaking. It promises to be a great weekend!

Groundhog Day

It's a really wonderful film. One of those ones you can watch over and over again, appropriately enough.

Actually, life is just like that when you're voluntarily unemployed. I was just thinking that I've been a productive member of society for much too long now - I'm starting to come across as a normal person. Perhaps I ought to abandon all worldly posessions and go and live in a cave for a while. A nice warm cave with central heating and an internet connection, obviously.

On the other hand, someone mistook me for a student today - I was out cycling this morning and noticed huge swarms of people crowding into the university campus, so I rode through there and someone with a microphone asked me if I was a fresher just moving in. Which was quite flattering. Must have been the Blue Peter badge.

Speaking of which, I suspect my new nice badge fell off the back of a lorry - the person who sold it to me on eBay is obviously selling lots of them under multiple alisases, it's some kind of master criminal organisation, I can tell. But still, I don't care, I've got a badge again!

Couldn't resist it

I've bought a new Blue Peter badge on eBay. Actually, I've ended up buying two, because I was outbid on the really nice new one and so bought an older and nastier one but then the winning bidder on the nice one dropped out and so I ended up with two. So now I can wear my nice badge with pride all day every day, and keep the nasty one in a safe place in case I lose the nice one again. Now everybody will envy me forever!

I've also been buying old comics on eBay, heedless of the fact that I'm going to Sweden next weekend and they've just changed the pay date at Boots from the 20th to the 28th of the month. But never mind, I'll just beg for krone on the streets of Gothenburg before the competition.

My unshakeable philosophies of life

I have two fundamental principles that I follow in every aspect of life, which flatly contradict each other but which I still nevertheless tell people to follow, whether they ask me or not.

First philosophy - read the instructions, dimwits. I've developed a reputation for being an expert at computery stuff at work, just because whenever someone turns to the office in general and yells "I don't know how to make this thing on the screen change colours!", I click the 'help' button and find out how to do it, and then pass the message along. Moral - anyone can be a genius, if you just make the effort to find out how to do something yourself rather than asking the nearest genius how to do it.

Second philosophy - don't read the instructions, dolts. I became the World Memory Champion precisely by not reading the various books and websites available on the subject, but by looking at the things you have to memorise in the World Memory Championship and inventing a new way of doing it that nobody had thought of before. So don't come to me asking for every tiny detail of my system, work out your own version.

And there you go - do what I tell you, follow both those simple philosophies and ignore everything I've told you tonight, and you too can be as clever and awesome* as me.


*Awesomeness currently scheduled to last until December, when someone beats me in the World Memory Championship by being much more awesome than me.

Bloggery

Sorry I haven't blogged anything for the last few days, but I just seem to have got out of the habit of finding a bit of time in the evening to ramble incoherently about whatever's on my mind. I'm sure everyone missed it terribly. But I'm forced to wonder what my loyal band of bloglings want to read on this thing, anyway - someone found this blog by searching for "funny chickens drawings" the other day, which made me feel terribly bad about their inevitable disappointment.

I should do some funny chickens drawings to compensate them, but I can't think of any particularly good punchlines. I'm sure my googler eventually found the Far Side or Perry Bible Fellowship or at least a photo of an unusually ugly chicken.

The Last Night of the Proms!

Lord, grant that Marshal Wade/ may by Thy mighty aid,/ victory bring! We really need to re-insert that verse into the national anthem. It's not quite as cool as the obscure verse of the French national anthem that denounces Bouillé and his complices, but it's still a lot of fun. Frustrate their knavish tricks! Crush the Scots! Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles!

(There was some brandy left over from putting in the fruit cake I baked earlier, and I foolishly drank it tonight. Much stronger stuff than I thought it was.)

As fast as you can

I said I'd make a cake for some kind of work-related charity cake stall, so that's been my excuse for not doing anything memory-related today. It's cooking now, and filling the whole flat with a pleasant cakeish aroma. I'd make a good baker - it's a profession that requires the wearing of silly hats and the eating of lots of tasty foodstuffs. Why have I wasted so many years being an accountant-slash-memory-champion?

Crabbit auld girn

Just to complain a little bit more about the new Broons/Oor Wullie collection, because I can't read an extremely entertaining and enjoyable compilation of long-out-of-print comics without whining that I want more from it... This latest volume is larger than the fourteen previous ones, in the sense that the pages are physically bigger. I have no idea why - the reprinted comics are the same size as ever, there's just more white space around the edges. But the number of pages is sharply reduced again - the first one, back in 1996, had 126 reprinted Dudley-Watkins-drawn strips, then they settled into a pattern of roughly 120 every year until 2006, when it shrank down to around 100 per compilation. This year's has 83. Yes, I counted them.

I mean, are they trying to test just how little work they can put into these books and still get people to buy them? If so, I'm worried, because I'll continue to buy them however small they get, and I'm sure everyone else who buys the things will do the same. It's not like they're running short of comics to reprint, because Watkins drew a LOT of them - by my count there are about 1800 still to appear in these annual collections. Aren't they satisfied with another fifteen-to-eighteen years of income before they have to test the waters with a Watkins-themed Beano or Dandy compilation? Heck, by that time I'll be crying out for a Ken H Harrison tribute book...

Well, there'd better be more than a hundred in next year's book, or I'll have no alternative but to whine in my blog again. And I don't think anyone wants that!

Did you know...?

That in pole vaulting, there's no rule specifying how long your pole has to be? I would have thought there would be.

Svenska

I've got a 'teach yourself Swedish' course, but I haven't got round to trying it out yet. I'm pessimistic about my chances of being able to make myself understood in Gothenburg at the end of the month - from what little I know of the language, I'm pretty sure I won't be able to get my tongue around the vowel sounds or tones. Maybe I'll just speak Japanese to everyone there. I've got quite good at Japanese.

One last stat attack

People persistently find this blog searching for cartoon-related topics on Google. I need to write more blogs about old cartoons, and especially the ones released on cheap knockoff videos, fast! I haven't toon-blogged for years, actually. Right, from now on, this blog is nothing but cartoons!

Return of the ukulele

I went into Nottingham today for no particular reason, and was walking through the Victoria Centre when I heard the sounds of ukulele music. It turned out that the music shop were having some kind of ukulele event, including free lessons/singalongs with the guy who wrote my teach-yourself-ukulele book. He even recognised me, too, although he seemed doubtful when I suggested he might have seen me memorising things on the telly and asked whether I do cabaret or anything like that.

Still, I know an omen when I see one, and clearly this means I should stop wasting time practicing memorising things, and start practicing the ukulele. I might even join the Nottingham Ukulele Group, which is probably going to be formed shortly by someone else who was there today.

I appreciate that I'm probably never going to be the World Ukulele Champion, both because no such title exists and because my fingers are generally clumsy and useless, but it would almost certainly be fun anyway...