Downpour!

We finished the competition yesterday more or less on time, so I was planning to not stay the extra night in London and come back home instead. But literally thirty seconds after leaving the building, it suddenly started raining so heavily that I was soaked from head to foot! And while a drop of water never hurt anyone, my blue suede shoes (stylish but not very practical) got completely waterlogged. So, not being the kind of person who brings more than one pair of shoes with him anywhere, I decided to stay in London for the night after all and not go home with soggy feet. You get pneumonia that way, I've heard.

So anyway, I'm eventually home now, and it's just started pouring with rain again up here as I write this. I'll chronicle the second half of the UK Championship when I have the time. Maybe tonight, but Doctor Who's back and there's football too...

Boris Bikes!

London is awesome! You can hire bikes for next to nothing and ride them all around the city and then drop them off in the amazing computerised bike stands that know where you've come from and who you are! As well as cycling from the hall of residence to the competition venue and back, I decided to not buy a travelcard and cycle from Hoxton into the bit of London that I know (the bit with the comic shops and this internet cafe - which incidentally isn't the really cool internet cafe I always used to go to, because that's turned into a trendy wine bar, or a Co-operative Bank or something along those lines, but this one is nice too and actually cheaper than the other one used to be), but after half an hour of going in circles I realised that London is actually quite hard to navigate, so I got a travelcard anyway. But the point is, Boris Bikes are groovy.

Anyway, there was also the UK Memory Championship today. It's in another splendid MWB Business Exchange conference room, which is spacious, quiet and ideal for this kind of event. We had a total of seven people turn up at the start of the day - not so bad for a competition arranged at three weeks' notice - me, the double-act of Jameses Paterson and Ponder, Rick de Jong from Holland and Mattias Ribbing from Sweden, US Champion Nelson Dellis and newcomer Londoner... damn, I'm not sure about this now I come to think about it... Martin Mwaka. Something Mwaka, anyway. I wish I knew how to remember people's names. Anyway, new British memory competitor! These are rare and precious individuals who need to be celebrated! We'll assemble a team of three for the World Championships one day, I know it!

During the course of the day we were also joined by Florian Dellé, who'd been meaning to compete but ended up just watching, and American newcomer who happened to be in town with nothing to do Jay Adams. Or a name similar to Jay Adams, anyway. See above. The Filipino duo who were also expected haven't yet been spotted, but maybe tomorrow. The exceptionally smooth running of the competition was thanks to Phil Chambers, Chris Day, Nathalie Lecordier, Gaby Kappus, someone who I met last year who laughed at me because I couldn't remember him and whose name I've now forgotten again, and probably someone else too. Full credit will be given in my next blog, because these people really are wonderful.

We started with everyone's favourite, names and faces - this is the first time any competition has done fifteen-minute names and faces under the slightly different new rules, meaning that the winner would be the world record holder at least until the German Championship in a couple of weeks. I was experimenting with a stricter journey-based memorising method, and thought I'd got a score of seventy-something, but it turned out only to be fifty-something, which just goes to show that I remain rubbish at names and faces, if anyone had ever dared to think otherwise. James Paterson remains great at them, and set the new world record score.

Then we moved on to binary, and the inescapable fact is that I'm not as good at that as I used to be. A bit more practice could bump my scores back up over four thousand, but my recall is just too patchy at the moment and it's annoying. I got a score in the 3400s, which was good enough to beat everyone else, but is short of where I want to be by quite a long way.

Abstract images went rather better, though - I'm at a point where I can comfortably do four journeys (300 images) in fifteen minutes with only a couple of mistakes, and so that's what I did, but by the time the world championship comes round I'll need to have stretched that to five if I want to be competitive. Anyway, a score of 288 (58 correct rows and two incorrect) was good enough for now.

In speed numbers I started with a 'safe' 360, noticing in the process that I was feeling tired and wasn't anywhere near as fast as I've been in practice at home, but had a mistake and ended up with a score of 320. For the second trial I had a go at the big 480, but was nowhere near getting it right.

And finally it was 30-minute numbers, and my plan was to try for six journeys, seven if I was feeling stupidly optimistic. But by the time I got to the third one I noticed that absolutely nothing was sinking into my brain at all. So I switched tracks and decided to try an experiment I've been meaning to work on - just going for four journeys (936 digits) and trying to get them all perfectly correct. For devoted followers of my memory techniques, this involves going through each journey quickly twice, then closing my eyes and trying to recall everything, only looking at the page when I hit a blank, and then making sure I cement the missing digits in my brain. It's slow and laborious, but it does work. Then I had time for another quick run through the 936 digits before the end of the memorising time, and it was a pretty successful experiment all in all. I had a couple of very annoying gaps early on, but after that I had an unbroken sequence that I was about 95% confident was perfect (which means there will undoubtedly be some silly mistakes, but not too many).

This is quite encouraging, because my recall in everything, but especially numbers, has been very very gappy in practice lately, and this shows that I can still do a nearly-perfect recall if I just change my ways and don't try for too much. A near-perfect 1170 would be entirely acceptable in the German championship, and we'll have to see what I can do in the hour numbers once that's out of the way.

Anyway, that leaves me comfortably ahead of the field at the end of day one, for what it's worth. There's no way to say this without sounding conceited, but there was never really any prospect of me not winning here, the important thing was to see what kind of score I can get in a real competition, and I'm not unhappy with how it's gone. I'm lacking the stamina to do a full day without flagging, but I knew that would happen, it's the first time I've really done a long day's work since last December, and it'll come back with a tiny bit more practice.

So now to bed - should I take a bike, or the tube? Probably better play it safe.

Suggestive

I like serendipity. I've been reading my way through the complete Sherlock Holmes in spare moments, and on the train journey down to London today, I got up to "The Bruce-Partington Plans", involving a dead body at Aldgate underground station. Woo, I thought, I'm going down there today! It's the nearest tube station to the competition venue! I was planning to go to Old Street first, drop my bags off at the hotel and then walk down there, so as I know how to get there tomorrow, but I decided it might be fun to do it the other way round and see the location of the thrilling story I'm half-way through reading. Especially when the train arrived at St Pancras just as Sherlock Holmes was deducing that the body had actually been on the roof of the train - closing my book, I made a mental note of the page number and found that it was 408, which in the Ben System is "roof". What more sign could anyone need that the fates want me to go to Aldgate?

And it's very cool, too - the stairs are easily a hundred years old, so Holmes, Watson and Lestrade came down those very stairs, stood on the platform and peered into the tunnel in the direction I'd just come from. It's great to walk in the footprints of fictional heroes.

The venue proved easy to find, and the walk up to my hotel was easily navigated. And it turned out to be a good thing I'd gone to Aldgate first, because that meant I arrived at the hall of residence just on the stroke of two o'clock, and it turned out that the reception closes for lunch between one and two, so if I'd done things the sensible way I would have just had to turn around and lug my baggage back into the streets of London anyway!

So here I am, it's a lovely day, and I've been all around the town - I went to the Royal Festival Hall, where fourteen years ago I had my first encounter with the Mind Sports Olympiad, with mind sports enthusiasts generally and (at a distance without paying much attention to it) the world of competitive memorising! Just give me a time machine, and I could go back to 1997 and win the World Championship by a mile and a half. And tell my 20-year-old self fourteen years' worth of winning lottery numbers.

London beckons

Tomorrow I'm going to London! Stay tuned for exciting accounts of Thursday and Friday's competition! I'm staying in a hall of residence, booked at the last minute and refreshingly cheap. This is important, because I've got no money.

I have, however, got a certain amount of preparation under my metaphorical belt (I'm too fat to need an actual belt), and looking forward to the championship. We'll see just how big a fool I do or don't make of myself - I'm alternating between optimism and pessimism with quite alarming mood swings at the moment.

He wasn't!

Another of the Google searches that lead a lot of people to my blog is "Douglas Fairbanks Jr gay" or variants thereof. I didn't realise I was propagating a scurrilous rumour when I innocently posted an advert for his thrilling story.

But seriously, he wasn't. If you search for that on the internet, you'll find absolutely nothing to suggest even the slightest hint of gayness about him. Which for a Hollywood actor is pretty unusual in itself. Just because the poor man wrote (or, more likely, had ghost-written for him) a story with a title that in later years became a double entendre is no reason to start speculating about his sexuality!

Not that there's anything wrong with that, obviously.

Drat, I forgot to blog today

And I'm still determined to keep up the daily chronicle. But it's past my bedtime already, and I do need to get up early tomorrow for work. Well, not really need to as such, but I'm also determined to get up early in the mornings. Determination isn't something I'm good at.

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.