Sport Billy

I know I probably say this every year, but it's so great when the football season starts again. Match Of The Day on a Saturday night is a great British institution. Scrap the summer break, make them play football all year round, that's what I say.

Weekend!

One last practice of memory stuff this weekend, then two days of work, then I've got Wednesday off to travel down to London before the competition on Thursday and Friday. And then it's a bank holiday the next Monday, and bank holidays are meaningful again now that I'm more or less working!

I'm really looking forward to the UK Championship now, just because it'll show how well I can do in a real competition this year, and give me a useful guide to how far I need to improve before December. I can never quite be sure where I am, preparation-wise, until I've done a two-day competition.

The Daley News

The press release for this year's UK Memory Championship is basically last year's press release with a few subtle changes, so it still says I'm of the status of Daley Thompson. I'm really not. I'm worried that he'll read it and come around and beat me up, because he's quite a lot bigger than me (or was in the 1980s, anyway).

In fact, the press release is pretty much entirely about me, which is a little bit worrying. Maybe nobody else is coming to the competition? That would make it easier to win, but it'd be a bit embarrassing if someone who's read the press release comes and writes an article.

Oh, and just for the record, the press release says I've memorised a pack of cards in 24.64 seconds, when it should be 24.97. And that's not even close to being a world record any more - I'm going to have to try to beat it next Friday.

Work!

There's no getting around it, I need to work. I've had the day off, all by myself, the brother's gone back to China, and I've done nothing. I need to be in the office so I can do things in my free time and complain about how I haven't got enough of it. And that really annoys me. Still, back to work tomorrow and I'll forget about it and wish I had whole days to myself again...

Comics!

Hooray, because I've got my new Order of the Stick book today - not reprints of the awesome webcomic, which has just passed its 800th episode and is still going strong, but reprints of the strips that appeared in Dragon magazine, plus a whole lot of never-seen-before unashamed-filler bonus material which is actually really brilliant. I laughed out loud four times, and really loudly too, which is well worth the price of the book. I'd say "go and buy it", but it was a limited edition and might actually not be available any more, I'm not sure. Go and acquire one somehow, anyway.

Also, the 2012 comic annuals are in the shops now - we seem to have given up on the in-time-for-Christmas release date and now be gradually inching towards a three-years-in-advance kind of thing. I was curious to see whether the Dandy annual would reflect the new look, or whether it would be a couple of years behind the weekly comic as usual, but actually it's sort of half-and-half, in an amalgam that's really quite interesting.

Ooh, Arsenal just scored after three minutes! Yes, it's also football season again, and I'm fully intending to waste a lot of time watching games (in addition to the time I spend reading comics) instead of memory training.

Anyway, as I was saying, the Dandy annual has a lot of characters who haven't been seen for quite some time, alongside some strips that came along with the latest relaunch. There's an old-fashioned art style on Desperate Dan and an all-new-looking Korky the Cat who's entirely unlike any previous incarnation. It's all very readable, too. Go and buy it. And the Beano, which is the same as it always is, and therefore worth reading.

One thing that's not out yet is the annual Broons and Oor Wullie classic-comic reprint book. But it's listed on Amazon, and ooh, look at that! No, not the cover (I know there are very few full-colour, high-quality pictures of the Broons drawn by Dudley Watkins, but they've already used that group pic on the covers of two previous reprint books, and it's getting silly now) but the page count! 144 pages, 32 more than last year, which makes me believe they've listened to the impassioned complaint in my blog post last year and brought the number of reprinted strips back up to what it used to be! Maybe it's also chock-full of racism, just like I demanded in my other blog post last year! I feel quite accomplished now.

It's all in the mind

I seem to be getting a lot of news updates about mind sports lately, so I felt that I should pass them on. The World Memory Championship has moved - but don't worry, it's only in space rather than time, and to a hotel rather than a university, which tends to be a good thing, more often than not. Hotel conference rooms are more luxurious-looking than exam halls, even if the latter are better suited to memory championships. New location is the Jingyi Hotel, in the Haidian district of Beijing.

I'm really quite looking forward to Beijing now. Just as long as I've got enough money for the trip from somewhere by then, it'll be a great place to visit! And since the press releases are still claiming (in defiance of all common sense) that six billion people watched last year's WMC on telly, no doubt I'll be mobbed by millions of devoted memory-championship fans!

Elsewhere, back home in London, I'm told that the fifteenth Mind Sports Olympiad kicks off on Saturday. It can't really be the fifteenth, can it? ... (A small amount of counting on fingers and toes later) ... It is. Wow, I must be old. I was there at the start, with all the wild dreams of international success and piles of money for competitors and organisers alike. Still, it's nice that it's still sputtering along, though I won't be bothering with it this year.

And I haven't said congratulations to Richard Ratcliffe on the Stratego World Championship last week! Shame I couldn't go to that, but it's got to be a good omen that there was a British winner for a change. And it's also the British Othello Championship in Cambridge on September 17th and 18th - once again, I can't go because of a memory championship clash, but if you feel like a bit of othello in its ancestral home, I recommend it heartily!

The Marc Gallery

As I've mentioned on this blog once or twice before, I'm fascinated by the work of "Marc", the illustrator of cheap cartoon videos in the 1980s. His depictions of the Japanese cartoons that came via America to Krypton Force can be seen here, but he seems to have really come into his own when drawing the covers for collections of public-domain American cartoons from the 30s and 40s, packaged by a company called "Vidage".

Vidage might well have been the same people as Krypton Force, or maybe they just also chose Marc from the usually-anonymous ranks of cheap-video-cover-artists, I don't know. But I've only got a couple of their videos, and the BBFC website tells me that there were actually quite a lot more, all seemingly with covers by Marc!

Here are the two examples I do own:

Betty Boop Noveltoon One - containing three Betty Boop cartoons ("Betty Boop and Grumpy" is actually called "Betty Boop and Grampy", and he isn't at all grumpy), a Porky Pig (the 1960s Korean-produced colorized version of the black-and-white original), Ub Iwerks's "Jack Frost", and a Little Audrey. The latter was a Noveltoons cartoon - the name given to the cartoons made by Paramount after they bought out the Max Fleischer studios - but the rest weren't. Nonetheless, the Vidage people seem to have liked the name, and applied it to a number of 'sequels' to this video.

But just look at that wonderful cover, proudly signed by Marc! His technique was to pause the video at carefully-selected points, and carefully copy the pictures, then combine them all into one big scene. So we get Porky in his nightshirt, with a slice of cake drawn into his hand to fit the general theme, and the cat in a singing pose that cleverly matches Little Audrey's delighted expression and the Candyland background. There's a lot of work gone into this!

The BBFC tells me that there are the following other tapes in the "Noveltoon" range by Vidage - two of them are available second-hand on Amazon:

Sport Champion Noveltoon Two
Mutt Jeff Noveltoon Three
A Kick In Time Noveltoon Four
Ding Dong Daddy Noveltoon Five
All's Well Noveltoon Six

"Sport Champion", which I'm guessing included the cartoon "Sport Chumpions", although maybe I'm wrong, got a PG rating for some reason - I wonder what other cartoons were on it? It's more normal to say "Mutt and Jeff" rather than "Mutt Jeff", which surely someone would have noticed by watching the cartoon, but perhaps the person who named the video collection thought it was about a mutt called Jeff. The cover to volume 3 is signed by Marc, volume 4 doesn't seem to be, but it's clearly his work. Again, they're real masterpieces!

And then there's Fun Parade:



Now this is really ugly, but you've got to admire the way the characters are grouped together so that Marc has to draw as few hands as possible. He also seems to have decided against trying to draw Bugs Bunny, perhaps because he couldn't find a pose to copy that would fit into the Christmas get-together theme he'd chosen for the cover.

The BBFC lists eight volumes of Fun Parade, with no further detail except that volume two is directed by "Seymour Kneitel/i. Sparbar/others", which suggests it might actually contain some more Noveltoons (Seymour Kneitel and Isadore Sparber also worked for Fleischer before Paramount took over, but the complex sibling politics there meant that Dave Fleischer was always credited as director on Max Fleischer cartoons).

I want to know more, and assemble a gallery of Marc's work for the world to see! Anyone finding one of these old tapes in a charity shop or attic is urged to please let me see it!

There might be more out there - the BBFC list omits one of the Sci-Bots tapes and the mysterious Mission Promete (which I'm increasingly convinced came from an alternate universe, because nobody else has ever heard of it). And Marc may have worked for yet more companies producing cheap artwork. I must put on an art exhibition some time...

If you're at the Fringe...

... You might want to check out Rrrants at "Laughing Horse at the Pear Tree", which might be a pub, although the website doesn't make it entirely clear. Anyway, it's on West Nicholson Street, and I think my friend Dave used to live there once, so go and ask him where it is.

Getting back to the point, I can't speak for most of the Rrrants crew, but my other friend Jammie Sammy, who's an awesome and funny singer, is among them, and it's well worth your while to go and check her out. You know I only give free plugs to people I really like, so this comes with a Zoomy guarantee of quality. I'd go myself, but I've got a job and a memory championship.

In other news, the Blogger stats tell me I've had 42 hits from the Bahamas today, and I'm wondering whether it's one enthusiastic reader or a suddenly-emerging community of Zoomy-fans that has sprung up over there. In any case, hello! I always love to see pageviews from new places.

I've fixed it!

My computer developed a thing where Internet Explorer and Firefox kept trying to open new windows, so I did a search on google and found that lots of people had had the same problem, but nobody had replied with anything beyond 'sounds like you've got a virus'. So I downloaded a new virus-killing thing and killed it. I'm a computer whiz.

Anyway, it's the weekend, and you really appreciate them when you're working nine to five during the week. Although actually, I've been starting at eight this past fortnight, because that way I get up and dressed and out of the house before my brother gets up, and we don't get under each other's feet in the mornings. Still, it's good for me - I might keep doing it when he's back in China, although I'll more likely go back to my old routine of waking up at twenty to nine and still getting to my desk (a 15-minute cycle away) at 9:00 on the dot.

Speaking of routines, I'm tentatively hopeful that if I can practice all the 30-minute disciplines again this weekend, like I did last weekend, I'll be better at the UK Championship than I was last year. That may sound like a modest goal, but we've still got four months to the world championship (more than that if they postpone it again), so I'm pacing myself carefully.

And remind me to talk about cartoon videos tomorrow. I want to mobilise some kind of Zoomy Army to find some for me.

I'm determined to post a blog entry every day

So this will do for tonight.

Remember remember the 25th of September

There are three memory competitions in the next month and a half, that hopefully I'll be going to if I've got enough money.

The UK Championship happens on August 25 and 26 in London. I just tried to look up the schedule, but all it says on the website is that it "will follow the same timetable as last year", so obviously I've failed the first memory test. Still, there are important principles at stake here. There have been four previous UK Memory Championships, and I've won them all. Gunther won seven consecutive German Championships, back in the dark ages, so I'm already half-way to one-upping him! By the way, this is also an invitation to other UK memorisers to get off their backsides and try to beat me, please.

The German Championship, nowadays not quite as Gunther-dominated as it used to be, although he did finish a strong second last year, takes place on 16 and 17 September, in Heilbronn. I'm certainly hoping to improve on my miserable performance last year. And as always, Germany is the place to go if you want to compete against all the best (non-Chinese) memory folk in the world! It'll be a classic, they always are.

And the Swedish Championship, which I also failed to win last year (although apparently a Swedish news article has recently announced to the world that I'm the reigning champion - it was actually Simon Reinhard, for avoidance of doubt, and I've never claimed otherwise) will take place on 24 and 25 September, in Gothenburg. People will come from all over the world to watch us memorising, because once again it's part of a busy book fair, and possibly in a giant glass cube just like last year. It's the place to be seen!

So pack your bags, everyone, and do some memory globe-trotting! I guarantee fun and frolics!

Hello, handsome!

Yesterday I saw myself in a mirror and thought I looked really quite good. This doesn't happen very often (because, let's face it, I'm no oil painting), and the fact that I was wearing an open-necked shirt like my dad always used to no doubt has something psychological to do with it, but my hair is at just the length where it's sort of flowing without looking stupid, and my beard is just the right thickness that I think makes me look cool, so I was quite impressed with myself for once.

And then shortly after that, I found a new Krypton Force video that I don't already own! It inspired me to update my authoritative blog on the subject, which thanks to some internet research now almost certainly lists every release of Force Five cartoons that made it onto the British market thanks to the good Krypton Force folks. By my count there are only four that I still need to find!

"Krypton Force" is one of the most popular searches that lead people to my blog, you know, so that post is extremely important. The only subjects that bring more people here are "Bumcivilian" and the perennial favourite "How to give yourself food poisoning". The latter worries me a little, quite frankly. Is it the same person every time, or is the world full of people who need a quick recipe for sickness and diarrhoea? Please tell me, next time you drop by.

Anyway, all this disjointed rambling isn't winning me any memory championships. Today is the first day for a couple of weeks when I haven't done any memory training, and it's my brother's fault. He's gone away for the next couple of days, so I've had to cook my own tea and completely fallen out of the habit of memorising things after eating. Changes to the routine can be fatal, you know. I did lots and lots of half-marathon training at the weekend, by the way. I'm almost feeling confident of putting in a passable performance at the UK Championship in a fortnight-and-a-bit. Just as long as I can get back to training tomorrow. I do need a live-in slavedriver of some kind, as I've always said.

The Door

"The Door" is a 1968 cartoon which is probably on YouTube, but is impossible to find because it's just called "The Door" and everybody else in the world seems to have made an inferior cartoon by that name. But what I was meaning to blog about before I started thinking about that, was that the whole controversy about my door on Saturday seems to have been blown up out of all proportion, with wild accusations flying around, so I should probably point out that the door to the block of flats was locked successfully, and so there was very little danger of me being robbed or ransacked. This is a neighbourhood where you can leave your door unlocked, as long as the exterior door is firmly bolted.

So, sorry I made such a fuss about it. Now, someone find me that cartoon, because I want to watch it.

Back to the grind

Temporarily back with Boots again for the short-term future - exactly how short-term depends on whether a regular work schedule helps me with developing a regular memory-training schedule, which strangely enough it usually does. And it needs to, because I was pretty awful in my attempts at memorising things tonight. Not slower than I was a month ago, but much less accurate in the recall. Hopefully the next three weeks will be enough to rebuild my synapses (or whichever bits it is that helps you memorise things, I don't really know. Neurons, possibly. Or dendrites.) before the UK Championship, German Championship and Swedish Championship come in rapid succession.

Cambridge in the spring

The Cambridge Memory Championship this year was a resounding success, I thought. Held at Attenborough Nature Reserve, which is nowhere near Cambridge but is just down the road from me, we had a great lineup of competitors including world number 2 Johannes Mallow, Boris Konrad, rising Norwegian star Ola Risa, British star James Ponder (there are so few British memory people that they all count as stars) and more. A large number of people were staying at my flat - Ola brought Norwegian chocolate, which guarantees you preferential treatment in any memory competition. Not really, I'm only joking. Dai Griffiths and John Burrows were coming on the train from Wales, which apparently takes six hours. Raj Jain had come all the way from India, which takes slightly longer. We also had Swedish superstar Mattias Ribbing, plus Ameel Hoque and his non-memory-related friend Mo, all the way from Manchester, and Conor Muldoon from wherever he lives at the moment, I've forgotten. Anyway, most of us went to the Victoria pub down the road for a meal and some serious memory-talk on Friday night before getting a good night's sleep. John ended up getting my one spare bed, I'm not sure exactly how - possibly because he's bigger and stronger than any of my other guests.

Saturday turned out to be a lovely day - I was planning for us all to get the train from Beeston to Attenborough, but James was staying in a hotel near my place and had brought his car, so he ferried us all there in groups of three or four at a time. Whoever was last out of my flat in the morning neglected to close the door, so it was standing wide open all day, but luckily nobody noticed. We were joined at the venue by ever-awesome arbiter-in-chief Phil Chambers and new-to-memory-competitions Sunjay Parmar, and found our way into the nature reserve's conference room.

This is a perfect room for a small memory competition - quietish, spacious enough for nine competitors and five arbiters to move around and swing cats if necessary, equipped with laptop and projector for the groovy Powerpoint slides I'd prepared and commanding a lovely view of the lake filled with swans, geese, coots, grebes, ducks and whatnot. It also came with a downright delicious lunch - a choice of several meals and desserts which people ordered at the start of the day and then, in the traditional way that memory experts have, forgot what they'd asked for. Also, everyone there was friendly and helpful, and the place is hugely recommended for anyone who's in need of a conference room, any time!

The competition itself was won by Johannes, as everyone had confidently expected, although he wasn't entirely happy with his performance. Ola, who's been working on his Ben System lately, had some really great results and came second. Sunjay, by virtue of being the only competitor who qualified as a beginner, won the much-coveted "Best Beginner" prize. The whole thing ran smoothly and less than half an hour behind the ambitiously tight schedule, so I was pretty happy with it, all in all. Full results can be seen already on the awesome memocamp.com website.

After the competition we went to the Village Hotel down the road, where Hannes was staying. Or at least most of us did - my ambiguous directions sent Phil, Conor and Sunjay to a different pub, where they had a drink before noticing they were alone and coming to find the rest of us. Then a small rebel faction decided that rather than having an expensive hotel-pub meal, we'd rather eat at McDonald's over the road, so my fellow junk-food aficionados John, Ola and Sunjay went there. Sunjay, who's a magician and clearly in league with some kind of demon who grants him supernatural powers, boggled my mind completely with an impossible card trick. Seriously, it was sinister. Then we went back to the Village and successfully arranged for everyone to get on the right train home - trains only stop at Attenborough once an hour, so that's quite a feat.

At around this time I realised that I'd forgotten my world-championship-souvenir jacket back at the nature reserve, but with it being such a nice place, I'm sure someone will have found it and kept it safe, along with the numerous other things that the memory masters will doubtless have forgotten to take with them.

And we've (rather late in the day) now been told that the UK Championship will happen on August 25 and 26, so that gives me something to work towards. I'm planning to get down to some serious memory training over the next few weeks (work and hanging out drunkenly with my brother permitting) and hopefully being on reasonable form by then - I was in a good shape a month ago, but TV and psychology-studies have interrupted my training schedule quite fatally since then.

Memory champion

Talking with my brother while looking through our collection of old toys (or, in most cases, small pieces of old toys that fell apart long ago):

I: For crying out loud! I'm the three-time world memory champion, you're putting me to shame by picking up a thirty-year-old scrap of plastic and saying "Ah, yes, we bought this at 10:07am on July 3rd 1982 in Ashley's toyshop in Boston, third shelf on the left..."

He: Yes, but my memory can only remember completely useless things like that, not anything remotely useful.

I: That's my line.

Seriously, I thank my lucky stars repeatedly that my brother has never seen fit to learn memory techniques, because he comes closer than anyone I've ever met to the fabled "photographic memory". It's scary. He's got synaesthesia too, you know.

One long whirl

I don't remember ever being as busy as I have been for the last month or so. I'm running around from place to place doing one thing after another without a moment's rest. Being an unemployed layabout isn't all it's cracked up to be. Anyway, the Cambridge Memory Championship (not in Cambridge) is almost upon us, and the next couple of days promise all the fun of printing things out. Hooray. With the additional thrill of putting the printouts in envelopes and keeping them safe until the competition. But then there's the optional-extra fun part of creating powerpoint slideshows, because the competition room comes with a projector and it'd be a shame not to make use of it. Just as long as I have time, and all my important procrastination doesn't get in the way.

And just as a footnote, can I just quote a comment from an anonymouse:
I enjoy your blog but I can’t help feeling that you are wasting your powers. Why don’t you teach yourself half a dozen languages and then write a book on mnemonics and language learning. I’m sure you can take it further than Linkword, O’Brien, etc.

I get this a lot. Please try to understand, people, I don't have "powers". Just because I can memorise a pack of cards quite quickly and only get the recall wrong 50% of the time, it doesn't necessarily follow that I could solve all the world's problems if I put my mind to it. I can't learn half a dozen languages, nor teach them to other people. Nor can I win millions in a casino. Believe me, I'm getting the maximum possible use out of my amazing abilities at the moment. So please stop telling me I could do other things if I wasn't so lazy. Thank you!

Continental are back on my Christmas card list

I'm in Newark Airport right now, waiting for my connecting flight back home - I should be still in the air en route from St Louis, but my flight was cancelled and the good people there put me on an earlier flight instead with no fuss at all. I'm impressed - I vowed never to fly with Continental again after they left me stranded in New York that time a couple of years ago (if I'd noticed before arriving at the airport that the St Louis people had booked me on a Continental flight, I might have asked them to change it), but they're off the naughty list now, for certain. That means my plane-company naughty list is empty again - I need some kind of travel-chaos horror-story, obviously.

Anyway, I've had a great time these last few days. Lots of not-too-strenuous memory tests, a surprisingly well-attended public meeting where I chatted generally about my life, failed spectacularly to perform any kind of impressive memory stunt and still got lots of applause and admiring noises, and a whole lot of sightseeing in the lovely sunny weather, too!

Actually, everyone in St Louis thought the weather was unbearably hot (as always, I hit the hottest weather in recorded history when I happened to be in the USA), but after I'd got used to it, I really enjoyed the heat and humidity. It's a nice change from the general miserableness back home.

So, are there any memory-folk reading this who'd like a similar holiday? The psychologists there are keen to do the same tests on a whole group of people who know about memory techniques, and I'd hugely recommend it. Most of the tests are word-based, so it's probably the kind of thing that would work better for English-speakers, but I don't know for sure.

As soon as I get back home, I'm going away on holiday again (my life is one big holiday these days, isn't it?), so I'll blog you all again in a week or so...

Now THAT was fun!

Without giving away any details, here's a summary of an email exchange with the good people at The Gadget Show:

I: So, you don't actually want me to do any kind of memory stunt?

They: No.

I: Nor anything that would require me to know the difference between an iPod and an iPad, nor how to work a mobile phone, nor to know anything about The Gadget Show or its subject matter?

They: That's right.

I: And for an hour's work, you're paying me...?

They: Two hundred pounds.

I: Okay.


And it's going to be great, too! I hugely recommend watching it, although it won't be on for several months (I'll remind you nearer the time). It's the first time I've been invited on a TV show to do something almost completely unrelated to memory championships! I'm a proper celebrity! And had fun filming it, too!

Anyway, now I'm going to St Louis, to be a laboratory guinea pig. See you all when I get back!

Repeat performance

I think the pilot was cooler, actually - maybe it was just because we'd all done it before, but the 'real' filming didn't seem to sparkle quite as much. Although I did come up with one ad-lib that made everyone in the studio laugh, so hopefully that'll end up in the broadcast version and not look too stupid. Tune in, some time late August/early September, to "Epic Win".

Meanwhile, I'm back to normality today - normality in the sense of working for Boots, albeit in the extremely groovy role of three days as a consultant financial analyst sandwiched between filming for two different TV shows (also tune in to the Gadget Show, some time after Epic Win, probably, unless they realise that I'm not really what you'd call a gadget person).

It's good to be back in the office, but today sort of reminded me why I left. It's finding-a-new-job time when I get back from my final groovy memory-man expedition of the month (St Louis, Friday), and I think I'll look for something radically different from accountancy/analysis. Banking, maybe. Or mountaineering.