Finding your way in Europe

The Facebook page for the Munich Open has an extremely helpful map on it, with a little arrow apparently pointing to the mountains of northern Italy:

This makes me think of the 1985 Transformers cartoon episode "Trans-Europe Express", which featured a car race from Paris to Istanbul. Here's a fun geography test for all my bloglings - imagine you're a Japanese animator, and you've got a script in front of you saying "The progress of the race is shown by a red line growing from Paris to Istanbul across a map of Europe". There's apparently not an atlas available and the internet hasn't been invented yet, and you need to draw the map and label it in English right now. If you can produce a better map than the one that ended up appearing on-screen, then you score ten out of ten:



If you fail the test, then people will be laughing at you on their blogs in 25 years' time.

The postman's got in touch with his feminine side

My postman's a woman - she always used to say "It's the postman" when she rang the doorbell to deliver something that wouldn't fit in the letterbox, but today she said "It's the postlady". This is either a great step towards gender equality, or a great step away from it, I can't quite decide which.

Memory championship news

Dear European memory athletes,

due to various reasons nearly all of the Europeans have chosen not go
to the World Memory Championships in China this year. Furthermore,
there is a lot to discuss about the future of memory sports.

To address both, we would like to invite all of you to Munich,
Germany, for the “Munich Open 2011” memory competition. The tournament
will be a National Standard event, i.e. ten disciplines with shortened
marathons: The kind of tournament you already know from Cambridge and
Sweden.

Important: We will have one age division only and we might do the
memorisation and/or recall phase of some or all disciplines with
computers or digital tools using Memocamp.

Date: December 9th to 11th 2011
Place: Munich. Exact and final location will be provided soon.
Languages: Material will be offered in German and English.
Fee: 20 Euro. Food is not included.
Registration deadline: December 2nd
Registration: By e-mail to b.konrad@memoryxl.de

Program:

Friday, December 9th

- Arrivals, visit of the famous Munich Xmas market, dinner

Saturday, December 10th

MORNING: Tournament, part 1

9:00 Welcome and introduction
9:30 Random words 5 min (15 min recall)
10:00 Binary numbers 5 min (15 min recall)
10:30 Names and faces 5 min (15 min recall)
11:00 Numbers 15 min (30 min recall)
12:00 Cards 10 min (20 min recall)
12:40 Historic Dates 5 min (15 min recall)
13.00 Lunch break

AFTERNOON:

Talk and discussion about the WMSC and the future of memory sports

Sunday, December 11th

MORNING: Tournament, part 2

9:30 Abstract Images 15 min (30 min recall)
10.30 Speed Numbers 5 min (15 min recall), 1st trial
11:00 Speed Numbers 5 min (15 min recall), 2nd trial

11.30 Spoken Numbers 100, 300
12.15 Speed Cards (two trials)
13.00 Prize giving ceremony

AFTERNOON:

Leisure activities, departure

Best Regards,
Your MemoryXL-Team



I'd better get training. I haven't really done any practice since dropping out of the WMC. I'm confident that I'll end up making a fool of myself anyway, so please do come along and beat me. If memory serves, the last time I went to a national-standard competition in Germany in the winter, I came 6th, my worst placing in any championship ever since I came up with the 'unbeatable Ben system'. I was beaten by Clemens, Cornelia, Gunther, Boris and Johannes, but still narrowly finished ahead of Simon. Let's see if I can repeat the feat five years later! (Cornelia's not coming, apparently, and I somehow doubt we'll be seeing Clemens either, so there's an opportunity for other people to out-memorise me)

And even though the venue is "somewhere in Munich" with a couple of weeks to go, I think we can guarantee that this competition will happen. I'll host it in my hotel room if need be...

Happy American Thanksgiving!

It turns out that it's Thanksgiving today in the USA, as opposed to Canada where it was Thanksgiving months ago, and here, where we're too rude to say thanks. So I celebrated by watching Friends on Comedy Central, and I was pleased to see that they even show the episode that E4 used to skip completely. I'm quite impressed with Comedy Central's lack of censorship, in fact. What better way to celebrate Thanksgiving than by watching Americans talking about pornography?

But then again, too few to mention

One thing I really do regret in life is never reciting pi to 50,000 decimal places. Particularly because I still come across people who credit me with the feat of memorising it, without adding the quite important qualifier that I never actually recited it, ever, and thus everybody only has my word for it that I memorised all those numbers in the first place.

For the benefit of people who haven't heard the story, this was back in 2005, I'd just won the World Memory Championship for the first time and I found myself completely and totally incapable of sitting down and training to win it again. Complete and utter mental block - my pile of packs of cards gradually fell down the back of my desk one by one whenever someone bumped into it, and stayed down there for months. There's probably still a three of diamonds down the back of the radiator in my old flat in Derby. So I decided that until I got over it, I'd do something else memory-related and break the world record for pi. The well-known story is that after several months of memorising, I'd arranged a date and place to recite it and then someone else recited 83,000 digits before I got a chance.

I still wonder whether I would have been able to do it. I think probably not, to be honest. Reciting out loud isn't a strong point for me, and however familiar I was with the sequence of numbers, I'm sure after a couple of hours in a public place, conscious that several increasingly bored spectators were following my every digit, my mind would have started wandering and I'd have got lost. But it still bugs me a little that I never made the attempt - at the time, it seemed like a better idea to give up on pi and throw myself into practicing for the world championship after all, since it was only six weeks away at that point (I came 4th, and was probably lucky to do that well), but now I wish I'd just accepted that it would have been an "amazing second-best-ever memory feat!" and done it anyway.

Because I've long since forgotten it, over the last six years. I recite 50 digits really quickly for a party piece (and sometimes 1000 digits at particularly boring parties), and I remember that the 50,000th digit was a 1, but the rest is lost in the darkest recesses of my brain's filing system.

One day, I'll finally have created by 4-digit number system, and then I'll memorise pi to 50,000 places again. And this time recite it properly and officially. Just to show I can.

An example of my astonishing memory powers

There was a book I wanted and couldn't find in the shops, so I ordered it on Amazon on Monday. Today, I was in Nottingham, saw it on the bookshelf and thought "Ooh, there's that book I wanted! Excellent!"

So I bought it, and halfway home suddenly thought to myself "D'oh!" And sure enough, there's a little card through my letterbox waiting for me when I get back, saying we've tried to deliver a parcel but you weren't in.

Keep on scaling it back

I have to confess that I'd never heard of DJ Shadow, nor of Yukimi Nagano, before Ewan and Casey asked me to do this video for them - they told me he did "trip hop", which I'd also never heard of (I'm not 'hip', and only a tiny bit 'groovy') and imagined would be some sort of sampled drum beat overlaid with rapping, which made me almost reject the whole idea out of hand. But luckily, Ewan included a link to the actual track on YouTube, and it turned out to be absolutely beautiful, and also just perfect for this kind of video.

Please enjoy the many "making of" photos here - see the people in the 'ninja' costumes who manipulated the props! See the understudy parrots waiting in the wings, as it were, in case of punctures! See me explaining that I'm not a ballet dancer and couldn't possibly crouch down in that cake and jump out again unless they raised it off the ground quite a bit! Honestly, the children and animals were great, but you should never work with me.

Scale It Back

One day, I got up at the crack of dawn to take the early train down to Cardiff, and waiting for me in the basement of an abandoned shop were a huge cast of unusual people and props. "Hello, I'm Ray, I'm the old man," said an old man. "Yes, I thought you probably were, but I didn't want to ask in case you were someone else," I replied. "Hi, I'm Toby, I'm doing the monkey," said someone else. A small girl called Teeohnee flapped by in a pterodactyl costume, and her mother Alison told me she recognised me from the telly. The giant green snake lying in the corner just grinned at us.

When Buzz the eagle owl arrived, he was immediately the centre of attention, and quickly proved to be the most reliable and patient of the actors, happy to just sit on his perch staring at people, making occasional squawky noises that reminded me of an electric screwdriver, and never failing to glare at the camera when it came over to him. He was a much more talented actor than the remote-control hummingbird, which quickly proved to be temperamental and moody.

But everybody was able to work together in the end to produce a masterpiece:


DJ Shadow "Scale It Back" from Ewan Jones Morris on Vimeo.


Okay, I'm not an actor. The music and fun start at about the 1-minute mark. Feel free to skip ahead.

The music is "Scale It Back", by DJ Shadow featuring Yukimi Nagano of Little Dragon. The directors and creative geniuses who had the idea of making one of my mental journeys into a music video were Ewan Jones Morris and Casey Raymond. It was all filmed in one continuous take, which meant nine hours of continuous filming, a lot of it spent hiding in a rapidly-disintegrating cardboard cake. But it was well worth it for that finished product!

It's a real pack of cards: 5h 3h 8c 2c Ac 3d 6c 6d Ah 4s 2s Kc 9s 8s Ad 7d 4c 5d Qs 5s 10h 3c Jc 3s Kd 6s 9d 5c 8h Jd 7h 10c 4h 9c 2h Qd Qc Jh 10s Qh 7c 6h 9h 4d As 8d Ks Kh 2d 10d Js 7s. And I did actually memorise it, but what you see at the start of the video is take four or five, so I'm fake-memorising cards I've already looked at.

Some of the images are changed from the ones in my head, mainly for copyright reasons - the generic pterodactyl is actually Dac from the cartoon Dinobabies (this pterodactyl was much more nice and friendly than mean old Dac), the street-fighter in my head is actually Fuuma from World Heroes, but I just said "street-fighter" and the producers interpreted that as Chun Li, the owl should be an eagle, but eagles aren't easily available in Cardiff, and so on. But apart from that, the interactions and the flow from one scene to another are exactly as they appear in my brain! It's really an uncannily accurate representation of what I'm thinking!

Well, this is going to keep me awake all night

Looking at the blogspot stats, I see that someone found this blog by googling "Come along and we can cross a bridge together". Five and a half years ago, I used that (with "the" instead of "a") as the title of a blog post, and I know it was the closing credit tune to a Japanese cartoon, but I can't for the life of me think which one. And internet searching isn't helping either.

The blog post wasn't about the cartoon, it was a clever play on words about a bridge-themed website that some of my longtime readers will be familiar with.

Actually, I think it might have been Bubu Chacha...

Anniversaries

Today is apparently the 140th anniversary of Stanley presuming that he'd found Dr Livingstone. Which means that while they were faffing around in Africa, they missed the football, because tomorrow is the 140th anniversary of the first ever FA Cup games.

You know, one of the 15 teams who entered the first ever FA Cup was Donington School, apparently the Donington near Spalding, in Lincolnshire. I went to a school chess tournament there once, possibly to the same school. That might have been the time I didn't come last in a chess competition, too. If it was, that makes me better than Donington School in 1871, who eventually withdrew from the FA Cup without playing a game.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, Saturday isn't the 140th anniversary of anything. 12 November 1871 must have been a very boring day - it was a Sunday, but it wasn't even Remembrance Day, because that hadn't been invented yet.

So the point is... no, there isn't a point. Sorry.

X

I've done some weird things in my time, but today was the weirdest, the grooviest and certainly among the downright-awesomest. It's still a secret, but I'll tell you all about it soon.

Welsh adventures

Is it me, or am I spending a lot of time in Wales these days? A few years ago I was telling anyone who might be interested (there were few such people) that I'd never been to Wales, ever, and now it seems like I'm there every week. Cardiff tomorrow, for Project X - and to be honest, it actually does look like it's really going to happen, so I will tell you about it soon.

It'll be a huge anticlimax, by the way, it's nothing special or important. Just groovy.

Opium for the eyes

Don't you hate it when you're in the mood to just lie around in front of the telly and there's nothing watchable on any channel except for an old episode of Blackadder with all the funny lines edited out? I'll have to watch one of my videos now, but they're all rubbish.

Yes, I've been in a bad mood for the last week, with all this memory stuff. I need to join the foreign legion and forget.

The adventure of the solitary cyclist

With it being nice and sunny and warm-ish-for-November today, I thought I'd explore National Cycle Route 6 beyond the stretch between Nottingham and Derby that I'm used to. I think I've mentioned before that it goes literally right past my front door, so as long as you can spot the little signposts (difficult to do, because they are very small), you can cycle the length and breadth of the country without getting lost.

Actually, today I only went as far as Bulwell and back, but it's a very pleasant journey, and one day I'd really like to follow the back roads and cycle paths all the way up to Sheffield. That's a project for next summer, I think, unless I perfect my weather-control weapon before then. If I do, I'll test it out by making it sunny for a day and bike to Sheffield, before I use it to conquer the world.

Top of the Pop Art Productions

I always take a great nerdish interest in the monthly American comic sales figures, but never more so than now, when I want to see whether DC Comics' "New 52" is working like it should. Sales figures aren't entirely useful just yet, of course - they're based on how many copies of each comic the comic shops have ordered, so it'll be another month or two before we can really see whether new people are buying them and making their feelings known.

But with that proviso, I'm pleased to see that OMAC, which was 52nd out of 52 in September, has moved up to the heady heights of number 49 in the October chart. And that it's been replaced on the bottom rung by Men Of War, which you might recall me describing as the worst comic I've seen in all my born days. I'm a bit surprised by that, actually - it's not my cup of tea, but I expected it to find a solid audience among the armchair commandos of America.

I do always feel that Superman should be outselling Batman - I mean, come on, he's got real super-powers! - but the caped crusader continues to pull in more readers at the top of the charts. And Green Lantern is edging closer to knocking the big red cheese (no, wait, that was Captain Marvel) off the second-most-popular-superhero spot, too.

Highest climber? Animal Man, up from 35 to 27. Actually, it's improved since my scathing review of #1 - now that the artist doesn't have to draw normal people so much and gets to fill the comic with hideous twisted mutations, it looks better.

Let's talk about the World Championship

I've been so wrapped up in that other business that I haven't even looked at the scores of the World Othello Championship until today, let alone sat in front of the live coverage of games waving a little British flag!

As we stand at the moment, Piyanat Aunchulee of Thailand is trying to fight off a Japanese team that looks even stronger than usual (Tomoya Toda, Hiroki Nobukawa and Kazuki Okamoto - not people I know, but they certainly seem to know their black from their white). Our own Imre Leader isn't out of touch with the leaders (I'm sorry, but it's really hard to avoid that pun when he's always so high up the leaderboard of any othello championship) after a bad start, but he'll have to do something special to get into the semi-finals tomorrow. Youthful Europeans Nicky and Matthias look like they might yet prevent an all-Asian final day, as does Canada's finest, Tim Krzywonos (who I haven't seen for well over a decade and must say hi to some time). And actually, Matt Vinar from Australia is on five points after eight games, too, so it might yet be a wildly multi-continental top four!

If you're in Newark (fake American Newark, not real Newark down the road from me), go along and cheer them all on!

World Memory Championship update

I'm not going.

It's a month before the competition, and all we're hearing is debates about whether it's going to happen, whether there'll be any prizes and whether anyone will go. In the complete absence of any communication from the people running the event, I've been waiting for the German gang to decide whether or not they're going before I book my tickets - I know they've been talking with the WMSC about the last-minute changes and shambolic organisation - and when I had an email last night from Boris, Mister Memory Enthusiasm himself, saying he still didn't know whether he'd be going, that was the final straw.

If I'm not excited about the World Memory Championship with a month to go, there's something seriously wrong. I've decided it's time to flex whatever remaining muscle I've still got in memory-competition circles and make a stand - because if I don't, I can see what's going to happen: we'll all go to the competition anyway, it'll be generally rubbish, and then next year will be even worse. So I'm staging a one-man boycott, and if the handful of people who haven't already done the same want to join me, more power to you.

This isn't the kind of decision I take lightly, you know. The World Memory Championship has basically been my entire life for the last decade. But this year's event just doesn't feel like the World Memory Championship any more. It's very sad...

I do feel guilty about depriving people of the opportunity to beat me, of course. When I won the WMC in 2004, I got no end of "Well, Dominic O'Brien wasn't there" responses, even though I would have totally beaten him if he had been. I'm not sure if my absence would have that effect on this year's winner, but I still feel bad about it.

Wednesday is comic day

It's official, I like DC Comics enough now that I'm going to have to place a standing order in a comic shop to make sure I get my comics every week before they sell out. Well, it's that or move to London (I was down there today) and just get my comics from Forbidden Planet, whose London branch routinely seems to order several hundred more copies of every American comic than they can possibly hope to sell.

Assuming I stay in this locality, that gives me three choices of comic shops to make my regular suppliers, and the decision is fraught with social difficulty - if I choose one shop to get all my comics from, the other two will be offended! I won't be able to show my face in there again! So let's examine the three choices:

Chimera is in Beeston, just down the road from me, which is a plus. When it gets wintery, going into Nottingham is more of a hassle. On the other hand, it's not really a comic shop so much as a role-playing games shop with a few comics on a shelf in the corner. The place is always jam-packed with people rolling dice and moving figurines around tables.

Page 45 in Nottingham is a shop I've been going to for many, many years, except for that five-year period when I was living in Derby and there was still a comic shop there. But before that, I was on semi-first-name terms with the guy who runs the place (he knew my name, I don't remember whether I ever knew his and we're long past the point where I can comfortably ask...) and I still feel guilty about talking to him when I've bought my comics at Forbidden Planet, seeing as they're the big evil corporation and he's the small local family business kind of place. Well, I don't think he's got a family, but that's not the point.

Forbidden Planet is the big evil corporation, but on the other hand they do have a policy of selling comics slightly cheaper than other local comic shops can afford to, so I could save some money there. And they do strike me as more likely than the other local shops to be able to actually get the comics I ask them to get without making a mess of it somehow. And the people who work there are actually really nice and not at all like tools of corporate sci-fi-and-comic-retailing.

I think it might have to be Page 45. They look so darn reproachful if they see someone come in with a Forbidden Planet bag...

Freedom and mysteries

Sorry for the lack of bloggery this last week or so. I'm now gainfully unemployed again, and I've been down in Cardiff today for what I'm calling Project X, and will tell you about in a couple of weeks. It was fun, anyway!

I'm hoping to spend the next month preparing for the World Memory Championship, just in case it does actually take place and I do actually go to it. I've got a training schedule in mind, and we'll just have to see whether I can stick to it.

The Planetary Chance-Machine

I love the Legion of Super-Heroes! No, not the current comic that I was so rude about last month; that's still incomprehensible rubbish (though very nicely drawn). I mean the original comics from the fifties and sixties on which the current version is loosely based.

It was, though, an attempt to fathom what was supposed to be going on in the new comic that led me to do some internet research - before this weekend, I'd only read a few of the old comics here and there, and the first issue of the most recent complete relaunch (the series has started over from scratch two or three times in the past, so I don't see why they didn't do it again when they re-started all the other comics last month), and while I appreciated the wonderful old-fashioned straight-faced silliness, I never realised that there was quite so much of it to be seen.

It's also really great comic-book writing in the classic style, about the adventures of a huge "super-hero club" of youthful heroes in the 30th (or 21st - the comics could never make up their mind) century who all have names ending with Kid, Boy, Girl, Lad or Lass. I've become a huge fan, just for the Planetary Chance-Machine. Look it up.