Saturday, April 13, 2013
It's a good time to be a Doctor Who fan
Okay, we're three episodes in to the new series of Doctor Who (or the second half of series 7, as they strangely insist on calling it), and they've been three good ones! Nothing even approaching the depths of that one with the pirates last year, or the various other lows of the whole River Song saga, I've enjoyed the whole semi-series so far, and I can't wait for what's still to come!
Saturday, April 06, 2013
Wa erf?
The Waterfall pub in Derby is now called the Wa erf, according to the big letters on the wall. I suspect someone must have stolen the other four letters - and given what they spell, and that you'd need to be able to reach about twelve feet off the ground to swipe them, all evidence points to someone who's of above average height.
Wednesday, April 03, 2013
The goggle box
While I was too poorly or too busy remembering numbers and things to be sitting in front of the telly, the Easter weekend saw the return of Doctor Who and Jonathan Creek! Yay!
Although the Doctor was pretty good, my thoughts on watching the opening moments went along the lines of "Oh, the whole world in some kind of peril again. Oh, wow, it's wi-fi that's our enemy this time. Didn't we already do sat-navs? Seriously, he's not even pretending he doesn't write these in the car on the way to work any more!" This was followed after the opening titles by "Where did they find that guy? It's not just that he can't act, he sounds like he's never heard anyone act, or talk, before! Meanwhile, the older monk talks like everyone used to in Doctor Who of the sixties. They really ought to do a special episode where all the actors talk like a fifty-year-old BBC drama, that'd be cool!" And then "Wait, the whole opening couple of minutes was just there to justify the clever episode title, wasn't it." And then there was "So how did the hulking great robot get into the upstairs of Clara's house so quickly? What, did it climb up the drainpipe?"
But after that, and after resisting the urge to just fast-forward through it and skip to the end to see the Doctor press the good old 'make everything okay again' button, there were some good points, and I did like the clever revelation that it wasn't the real Doctor who'd broken into the building. Steven Moffat does write the exact same story over and over again, but it's usually entertaining when he does.
But then I can't help thinking "Maybe Doctor Who should try to be Jonathan Creek, just for a change, every now and then?" Because that's a programme that really makes you think "Oh, that's very clever, in a silly kind of way!", which is exactly the kind of thing that Doctor Who strives for a lot of the time. And the Doctor really should be more of an outer space detective, it suits him.
The new Jonathan Creek was just awesome in every way, and there needs to be lots more of it. Particularly Rik Mayall!
Although the Doctor was pretty good, my thoughts on watching the opening moments went along the lines of "Oh, the whole world in some kind of peril again. Oh, wow, it's wi-fi that's our enemy this time. Didn't we already do sat-navs? Seriously, he's not even pretending he doesn't write these in the car on the way to work any more!" This was followed after the opening titles by "Where did they find that guy? It's not just that he can't act, he sounds like he's never heard anyone act, or talk, before! Meanwhile, the older monk talks like everyone used to in Doctor Who of the sixties. They really ought to do a special episode where all the actors talk like a fifty-year-old BBC drama, that'd be cool!" And then "Wait, the whole opening couple of minutes was just there to justify the clever episode title, wasn't it." And then there was "So how did the hulking great robot get into the upstairs of Clara's house so quickly? What, did it climb up the drainpipe?"
But after that, and after resisting the urge to just fast-forward through it and skip to the end to see the Doctor press the good old 'make everything okay again' button, there were some good points, and I did like the clever revelation that it wasn't the real Doctor who'd broken into the building. Steven Moffat does write the exact same story over and over again, but it's usually entertaining when he does.
But then I can't help thinking "Maybe Doctor Who should try to be Jonathan Creek, just for a change, every now and then?" Because that's a programme that really makes you think "Oh, that's very clever, in a silly kind of way!", which is exactly the kind of thing that Doctor Who strives for a lot of the time. And the Doctor really should be more of an outer space detective, it suits him.
The new Jonathan Creek was just awesome in every way, and there needs to be lots more of it. Particularly Rik Mayall!
Monday, April 01, 2013
Dragon flu
Okay, I'm finally back home in Beeston, a day later than planned! I had to stay an extra night in the hotel in Pontypool, because I was hugely, violently ill all day on Sunday. I did suspect the catering in Llanover, but nobody else was affected, so it must just have been some evil Welsh virus - it was a proper 24-hour thing; having been up all night being sick and generally yucky all day, I woke up at 11pm on Sunday night suddenly feeling a lot better again. I absolutely never get ill, so this whole thing was a bit of a disturbing surprise.
In any case, that's set back my easter-weekend schedule enough that only now do I get to talk about the Welsh Memory Championship 2013! Everybody will have forgotten about it by now...
I got the train to Abergavenny on Saturday morning and cycled to Llanover from there - it's actually only a bit closer to Abergavenny than it is to Pontypool, but I was trying to make sure I didn't get lost, having made that trip last year. It worked, too - I was at Llanover Village Hall well before the start time of nine o'clock! It was only on arriving that I suddenly realised I wasn't wearing my hat, and had to unsuccessfully rack my brains for where it might have been. I eventually concluded that it was back in my hotel room, along with the spare pens I'd cleverly thought to bring along because my favourite biro was running out of ink, but no. I can only assume it's on the train, never to be seen again. Oh well, time to keep the headgear industry in business by buying Hat Number Six, and I'll have to do it before I go to Darmstadt at the end of the month! Maybe I should go back to the fedora, I don't seem to lose those with quite such frequency.
The village hall is a really great location for a memory competition, as I think I might have mentioned last year - it's quiet, there's a little room for arbiters, a kitchen and a big, spacious room for the competition itself. Which is good, because we had a record turnout, something like seventeen competitors, including more newcomers than you could shake a stick at and delegations from Sweden, Norway, Hong Kong and the Phillipines, plus the ever-awesome Dai and Phil to keep the whole thing running smoothly.
We started with names and faces, which didn't go too terribly for me. I'm trying to be a bit more systematic about it nowadays, rather than just looking at the paper and thinking 'right, how am I supposed to remember these things?'. But after that, we went on to five-minute binary, and I did better at that than I've done for many a year! Granted, not quite well enough to get my old world record back, but in fact I got the exact same score, 930, that I did in the golden age of 2008. Next time, I'm sure I'll do even better!
In random words I got an extremely respectable 87, then in 15-minute numbers a sort-of-acceptable five-hundred-and-something, and then five packs in 10-minute cards. Both of which I could improve on, but it's still a lot better than what I was getting this time last year. After a nice buffet lunch which wasn't at all responsible for poisoning me (that was probably McDonald's in the evening), it was five-minute numbers, which was my only completely disastrous result of the day, something awful like 160. I need to get back in the habit of being comfortably able to do 360, error-free, every time.
Anyway, I was roughly neck-and-neck with Jonas all the way through, but he moved ahead with one of his usual earth-shattering scores in abstract images, which I can definitely get better at with a little more practice, and beating me in historic dates, which I really should get good at again. We both got 100 in spoken numbers - that's the kind of thing that happens a lot when there are just two trials, of 100 and 400 digits - and so he had a lead of about 250-ish points going into speed cards.
We both did a 40-something-second first trial, then I came thiiiiiiis close (imagine me holding my finger and thumb really really close together) to winning it at the last, with a 26.88-second pack where I annoyingly switched the order of a pair of images right at the end. Oh well. So Jonas breaks my unstoppable Welsh Open winning streak! Much deserved, of course, and all the more motivation for me to try to win it back next year! John Burrows was overall-third and new Welsh Champion, beating last year's winner (and only other Welsh competitor) James Paterson. Dai had arranged some awesome medals - the international-competitor ones had a Welsh dragon made up of flags of all nations on them! - and Phil Peskett (one of those newcomers I mentioned) accompanied the prize ceremony by playing triumphant music on the piano. It was almost as stylish a ceremony as at the World Championship, and lasted for less than six hours!
Anyway, sorry for the cursory and entirely-me-centric review, but I'll be back on form shortly. Going to have some chicken soup now, not that I'm feeling all that much like eating, but I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that going 48 hours without any kind of nutrition is bad for you. Cymru am byth!
In any case, that's set back my easter-weekend schedule enough that only now do I get to talk about the Welsh Memory Championship 2013! Everybody will have forgotten about it by now...
I got the train to Abergavenny on Saturday morning and cycled to Llanover from there - it's actually only a bit closer to Abergavenny than it is to Pontypool, but I was trying to make sure I didn't get lost, having made that trip last year. It worked, too - I was at Llanover Village Hall well before the start time of nine o'clock! It was only on arriving that I suddenly realised I wasn't wearing my hat, and had to unsuccessfully rack my brains for where it might have been. I eventually concluded that it was back in my hotel room, along with the spare pens I'd cleverly thought to bring along because my favourite biro was running out of ink, but no. I can only assume it's on the train, never to be seen again. Oh well, time to keep the headgear industry in business by buying Hat Number Six, and I'll have to do it before I go to Darmstadt at the end of the month! Maybe I should go back to the fedora, I don't seem to lose those with quite such frequency.
The village hall is a really great location for a memory competition, as I think I might have mentioned last year - it's quiet, there's a little room for arbiters, a kitchen and a big, spacious room for the competition itself. Which is good, because we had a record turnout, something like seventeen competitors, including more newcomers than you could shake a stick at and delegations from Sweden, Norway, Hong Kong and the Phillipines, plus the ever-awesome Dai and Phil to keep the whole thing running smoothly.
We started with names and faces, which didn't go too terribly for me. I'm trying to be a bit more systematic about it nowadays, rather than just looking at the paper and thinking 'right, how am I supposed to remember these things?'. But after that, we went on to five-minute binary, and I did better at that than I've done for many a year! Granted, not quite well enough to get my old world record back, but in fact I got the exact same score, 930, that I did in the golden age of 2008. Next time, I'm sure I'll do even better!
In random words I got an extremely respectable 87, then in 15-minute numbers a sort-of-acceptable five-hundred-and-something, and then five packs in 10-minute cards. Both of which I could improve on, but it's still a lot better than what I was getting this time last year. After a nice buffet lunch which wasn't at all responsible for poisoning me (that was probably McDonald's in the evening), it was five-minute numbers, which was my only completely disastrous result of the day, something awful like 160. I need to get back in the habit of being comfortably able to do 360, error-free, every time.
Anyway, I was roughly neck-and-neck with Jonas all the way through, but he moved ahead with one of his usual earth-shattering scores in abstract images, which I can definitely get better at with a little more practice, and beating me in historic dates, which I really should get good at again. We both got 100 in spoken numbers - that's the kind of thing that happens a lot when there are just two trials, of 100 and 400 digits - and so he had a lead of about 250-ish points going into speed cards.
We both did a 40-something-second first trial, then I came thiiiiiiis close (imagine me holding my finger and thumb really really close together) to winning it at the last, with a 26.88-second pack where I annoyingly switched the order of a pair of images right at the end. Oh well. So Jonas breaks my unstoppable Welsh Open winning streak! Much deserved, of course, and all the more motivation for me to try to win it back next year! John Burrows was overall-third and new Welsh Champion, beating last year's winner (and only other Welsh competitor) James Paterson. Dai had arranged some awesome medals - the international-competitor ones had a Welsh dragon made up of flags of all nations on them! - and Phil Peskett (one of those newcomers I mentioned) accompanied the prize ceremony by playing triumphant music on the piano. It was almost as stylish a ceremony as at the World Championship, and lasted for less than six hours!
Anyway, sorry for the cursory and entirely-me-centric review, but I'll be back on form shortly. Going to have some chicken soup now, not that I'm feeling all that much like eating, but I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that going 48 hours without any kind of nutrition is bad for you. Cymru am byth!
Friday, March 29, 2013
Ponty-Pridmore
Here I am at Pont-y-pwl, which is what the Welsh call Pontypool. The train station is "Pontypool & New Inn", or "Pont-y-pwl & New Inn". You would have thought there would be a Welsh name for New Inn too, but perhaps it's an exclusively English-speaking inn. Getting here on the train was an interesting experience - I've mentioned in this blog a couple of times that whenever I take a long train journey, someone throws themself in front of the train, and sure enough that's what happened today. I got to Birmingham to find that everything was being delayed or cancelled, including the train I was supposed to get to Newport. But there was one to Hereford that left a mere ten minutes or so late, so I hopped on that. I happen to know that there are trains that go from Hereford into Wales the other way, and then go south down through places like Pontypool, since I was expecting to go through there anyway and was a bit surprised that Cross Country Trains Dot Com was sending me via Newport, so I figured it couldn't hurt to be on that one. The people who work at the station were pretty clueless about what was happening, and were besieged by crowds of people expecting them to help, so I think it's always best to follow the rule-of-thumb "get on the first train that's going in the right general direction".
I only mention that rule when it works. Usually it doesn't, and I end up in Thorpe Culvert (small station on the way to Skegness) for six hours, but today it was just perfect. The Hereford train went a strange circuitous diversionary route to Droitwich, but when it eventually ended up at its destination, there was a Pontypool train on the platform right next to it, just about to leave. I hopped on and arrived in "the 'Pwl" about fifteen minutes later than I was originally supposed to. I'm impressed by my train-catching abilities!
In other news, it's sad to hear that Richard Griffiths has died. I feel I should mention it here, because the news stories all list a huge number of roles he's played, but never mention the two things I'll always associate him with - the starring role in "Pie in the Sky", and Doctor Meinheimer (and his nearly-exact double Earl Hacker) in "The Naked Gun 2½". Brilliant, both of them.
Anyway, tomorrow is the Welsh Memory Championship! I should qualify my comment the other day that I always do badly in Wales by admitting that I've won every previous Welsh Championship, but the competition should be very fierce this year! Lots of people, from beginners to experts, will be there!
I only mention that rule when it works. Usually it doesn't, and I end up in Thorpe Culvert (small station on the way to Skegness) for six hours, but today it was just perfect. The Hereford train went a strange circuitous diversionary route to Droitwich, but when it eventually ended up at its destination, there was a Pontypool train on the platform right next to it, just about to leave. I hopped on and arrived in "the 'Pwl" about fifteen minutes later than I was originally supposed to. I'm impressed by my train-catching abilities!
In other news, it's sad to hear that Richard Griffiths has died. I feel I should mention it here, because the news stories all list a huge number of roles he's played, but never mention the two things I'll always associate him with - the starring role in "Pie in the Sky", and Doctor Meinheimer (and his nearly-exact double Earl Hacker) in "The Naked Gun 2½". Brilliant, both of them.
Anyway, tomorrow is the Welsh Memory Championship! I should qualify my comment the other day that I always do badly in Wales by admitting that I've won every previous Welsh Championship, but the competition should be very fierce this year! Lots of people, from beginners to experts, will be there!
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Wales, here we come!
It's Easter, and it's also the Welsh Memory Championship on Saturday! I have a tendency to do really badly at these things, but I'm at least in better mental shape than I was last year, so we'll just have to see what happens. I'm going down to Pontypool tomorrow, and then finding my way out to Llanover on Saturday morning. I'm sure to forget something important, like my hat or a map of how to get there, and not remember until I'm half-way there on the train...
Monday, March 25, 2013
Familial
It's been a while since I researched my family tree, but I logged on to Genes Reunited the other day to find a message from someone in New Zealand who's also descended from my virile great-great-great-grandfather, William Bancroft (his first wife died when he was in his early fifties, so he married a woman thirty years younger than him and had three more children). Maybe I'll dig into my family history a bit more and see who else I can meet...
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Congratulations to the winners!
At the UK Championship in 2008, I was at my peak of memory fitness, at least in terms of National Standard competitions, which are a different beast to World Championships. I set three cool new world records, in 15-minute numbers, 10-minute cards and 5-minute binaries, which have all stood to this day - because that's the point when I stopped training for these things with any kind of enthusiasm, and because there are very few National Standard championships in the world.
But no more! At the Italian Championship in Rome today, Johannes Mallow beat my numbers record, and he, Ola Risa and Jonas von Essen ALL beat the binary record! Okay, it was always a bit silly that I held a world record in numbers, which lots of people are better than me at, but binary is supposed to be My Thing! Now I'm the fourth-best in the world at 5-minute binary! I'm going to have to do something about this...
Hannes also beat his own record in abstract images, and Boris beat his own record in 5-minute words. I think that's all the records that have tumbled today, but if I missed anything, sorry. Rather than sitting here all day and following the live streaming and Dai's entertaining commentary on Facebook, I was dedicated and did a practice session of every single discipline myself! No world records here, especially towards the end of the day when it was a struggle to remember anything at all, but the practice is going to be useful for next weekend. Also, it kept me from being too depressed that I'm here at home in the middle of a never-ending blizzard, when all my friends are having fun in Italy. I bet it's really hot and sunny, too.
Well done, everyone!
But no more! At the Italian Championship in Rome today, Johannes Mallow beat my numbers record, and he, Ola Risa and Jonas von Essen ALL beat the binary record! Okay, it was always a bit silly that I held a world record in numbers, which lots of people are better than me at, but binary is supposed to be My Thing! Now I'm the fourth-best in the world at 5-minute binary! I'm going to have to do something about this...
Hannes also beat his own record in abstract images, and Boris beat his own record in 5-minute words. I think that's all the records that have tumbled today, but if I missed anything, sorry. Rather than sitting here all day and following the live streaming and Dai's entertaining commentary on Facebook, I was dedicated and did a practice session of every single discipline myself! No world records here, especially towards the end of the day when it was a struggle to remember anything at all, but the practice is going to be useful for next weekend. Also, it kept me from being too depressed that I'm here at home in the middle of a never-ending blizzard, when all my friends are having fun in Italy. I bet it's really hot and sunny, too.
Well done, everyone!
Friday, March 22, 2013
It's... disturbing
Those adverts for mind-altering drugs to use on your cats and dogs. There's something deeply wrong about the whole idea. Though I'm tempted to get one of the things and plug it in, just to see what effect it has on me.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Football fan
I see that next Thursday, there's a match between Gateshead and Newport County, at Boston Utd's York Street ground. Gateshead apparently couldn't find anywhere better or closer to stage their home game, which I find a little difficult to understand, seeing as how it's hundreds and hundreds of miles away. But still, it puts me in mind of the time I went to York Street, some time around 1986, to see an England v Wales under-15 match. England won 5-0. This has to count as a good omen for the Welsh Memory Championship two days after the thrilling Gateshead/Newport match. As well as a good omen for Gateshead, although I don't really care about that.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Who keeps buying the thing?
Remember that blog last year about how my monthly income from "How To Be Clever" had inexplicably increased to the dizzy heights of £47.29? Well, it kept going up, and now it's always well over £50 a month. Last month was a staggering £83.69, although today's payment has sunk to a mere £65.71. I'm mystified. It still isn't a real book, after all...
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Memorable results
The results of the Slovenian championship that I was so ignorant about yesterday have popped up on the internet - Christian Schäfer, Boris Konrad and Annalena Fischer showed seven Slovenian starters what a trained memory can do, in a regional-standard competition (the short format with more emphasis on the disciplines that require non-technique memory).
Over in New York, meanwhile, where the memory competitions are even more non-system-demanding (you won't find binary digits or abstract images there, and if you can't remember random words you won't win the title), congratulations to Ram Kolli! It's a long-awaited win - he won the championship in 2005, the year before the new-style cool final format was introduced (incidentally, is it really seven years since I went to watch the first one?) and then seemed to come second every year thereafter, so he's well overdue another win now.
I'd really love to arrange an American-style competition as some kind of English Memory Championship some day. Maybe if I ever end up with some money, somehow, I'll do it.
Over in New York, meanwhile, where the memory competitions are even more non-system-demanding (you won't find binary digits or abstract images there, and if you can't remember random words you won't win the title), congratulations to Ram Kolli! It's a long-awaited win - he won the championship in 2005, the year before the new-style cool final format was introduced (incidentally, is it really seven years since I went to watch the first one?) and then seemed to come second every year thereafter, so he's well overdue another win now.
I'd really love to arrange an American-style competition as some kind of English Memory Championship some day. Maybe if I ever end up with some money, somehow, I'll do it.
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Memory 2013 is go!
The USA Memory Championship is happening right now, over in New York. Wish I was there - a Canadian TV company were looking for something to make a programme about and I dropped some heavy hints that the best thing for them would be to fly me out there, but they didn't bite. It's always a lot of fun, and it's good to see that they've amended the rules to allow for the possibility of two or more competitors perfectly remembering two packs of cards in five minutes - I remember the days when no Americans could come close to doing a single pack in that time; now there's the possibility of a play-off with three minutes, and then thirty seconds!
Judging by the pictures and tweets they've posted on Twitter, the eight finalists include Nelson Dellis, Chester Santos, either Ram Kolli or someone who looks a bit like him, and several people I don't recognise. I really do wish I was there to watch the finals and cheer them on! My money's still on Nelson to win...
There's also rumours vaguely fluttering around the internet that there's a Slovenian Memory Championship happening today, but I know absolutely nothing about it. It's probably in Slovenia, but that's not a great help; I can't really point to Slovenia on a map with any degree of accuracy. I'm sure it's a great competition, though!
Next Saturday there's the first Italian Memory Championship, in Rome. I extra-double-wish I was going to be there, but I haven't got any money. There are prizes, that would just about cover the cost of the trip, more or less, if I did go there and won, but that's a bit of a big if. Anyway, the Saturday after that, it's the Welsh Memory Championship, in Llanover! And that I will be going to. I'm a lot more prepared than last year, although admittedly that's not difficult. It's great to have competitions everywhere! The memory season is here!
Judging by the pictures and tweets they've posted on Twitter, the eight finalists include Nelson Dellis, Chester Santos, either Ram Kolli or someone who looks a bit like him, and several people I don't recognise. I really do wish I was there to watch the finals and cheer them on! My money's still on Nelson to win...
There's also rumours vaguely fluttering around the internet that there's a Slovenian Memory Championship happening today, but I know absolutely nothing about it. It's probably in Slovenia, but that's not a great help; I can't really point to Slovenia on a map with any degree of accuracy. I'm sure it's a great competition, though!
Next Saturday there's the first Italian Memory Championship, in Rome. I extra-double-wish I was going to be there, but I haven't got any money. There are prizes, that would just about cover the cost of the trip, more or less, if I did go there and won, but that's a bit of a big if. Anyway, the Saturday after that, it's the Welsh Memory Championship, in Llanover! And that I will be going to. I'm a lot more prepared than last year, although admittedly that's not difficult. It's great to have competitions everywhere! The memory season is here!
Wednesday, March 06, 2013
Compare the adverts
Normality reasserted itself well and truly on the final day of the othello, with me losing all three games horribly - I'm meaning to write at greater length about it and othello in general, just as soon as I feel like it, but tonight I'm distracted by another subject. Those Compare The Market ads with Robert Webb completely destroy the suspension of belief
... that's weird, I'd got that far into writing when someone posted a comment asking how the final day of the othello went. I must be some kind of future psychic! Maybe I will write about othello tonight after all...
The fun of othello, you see, is analysing your games on WZebra, the computer program that knows everything about othello, after the game. The modern generation of young othelloists immediately pull out their iPhones or whatever and check to see what moves they got right and wrong, whereas old codgers like me wait until they've got home to their old-fashioned laptop computers. It tells me that there wasn't some kind of awesome game-winning move that I missed against Emmanuel C, that in fact we were basically neck-and-neck all the way through, with just a couple of mistakes towards the end tiltiing it from 34-30 to him, to 34-30 to me, and back again. It's fun, if you're the geeky type.
Right, I'll write properly about othello at some point in the future, and also finish that thought about meerkats. Look forward to it!
... that's weird, I'd got that far into writing when someone posted a comment asking how the final day of the othello went. I must be some kind of future psychic! Maybe I will write about othello tonight after all...
The fun of othello, you see, is analysing your games on WZebra, the computer program that knows everything about othello, after the game. The modern generation of young othelloists immediately pull out their iPhones or whatever and check to see what moves they got right and wrong, whereas old codgers like me wait until they've got home to their old-fashioned laptop computers. It tells me that there wasn't some kind of awesome game-winning move that I missed against Emmanuel C, that in fact we were basically neck-and-neck all the way through, with just a couple of mistakes towards the end tiltiing it from 34-30 to him, to 34-30 to me, and back again. It's fun, if you're the geeky type.
Right, I'll write properly about othello at some point in the future, and also finish that thought about meerkats. Look forward to it!
Saturday, March 02, 2013
Othello!
Othello! I haven't played for so long, I seem to have forgotten how to play badly. Eleven players, so a round robin with eight games today and three tomorrow - my first game, against Emmanuel Caspard, was one of those where I was sure that there must be some clever move that would win it for me by miles and miles, but if there was then I missed it, and ended up losing 34-30. But after that, I went on a sort of unstoppable winning spree, beating Roy, the other Emmanuel, Pierluigi and David Beck, and playing really well (by my standards) in all four games! Then against Stéphane for the first time I got the feeling of not at all knowing what I'm doing, but somehow he took twenty minutes and two seconds to complete the victory (20 minutes on the clocks) and so I won on time, completely undeservedly. Then I had a bye to bring me up to six points from seven rounds - for reference, my rule of thumb is that five and a half points in total from the Cambridge International would be a great achievement, and I've only managed it once before! The final game of the day was a loss to Martin Ødegård, who apart from having a surname full of letters I don't know the ascii codes for had a perfect day, winning eight out of eight. Caspard is second with six and a half, and I'm in third place overnight with six. Woo!
Three games to go tomorrow, against Imre, Arnaud and Borja, all of which I'd expect to lose, but even if I do, the competition has been a great success. I must make a habit of never playing othello, even online, between tournaments!
Three games to go tomorrow, against Imre, Arnaud and Borja, all of which I'd expect to lose, but even if I do, the competition has been a great success. I must make a habit of never playing othello, even online, between tournaments!
Friday, March 01, 2013
The old alma mater
Here I am, back in Cambridge. Depending on whether I went to the Christmas tournament last year (I can't remember), I haven't been here for at least a few months. But I'm breaking away from the tradition of staying in Cityroomz and going with somewhere a great deal cheaper, albeit a much longer walk from the train station. Cityroomz, back when it was Sleeperz, was the really cheap and nice hotel in Cambridge. Nowadays it's the moderately-priced and nice hotel, which is a terrible shame. Nobody wants a moderately-priced and nice hotel, at least not while there are still fairly-cheap and nice hotels around the place!
Anyway, Cambridge International othello tomorrow and Sunday! It's not part of the European Grand Prix this year, so I'm not sure how many Internationals, or even Locals, will be there, but we'll see. I haven't played any othello at all since the last tournament I went to, whichever it was, so I think we can guarantee I'll do badly.
Anyway, Cambridge International othello tomorrow and Sunday! It's not part of the European Grand Prix this year, so I'm not sure how many Internationals, or even Locals, will be there, but we'll see. I haven't played any othello at all since the last tournament I went to, whichever it was, so I think we can guarantee I'll do badly.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Hello Sam!
While my brother was here, he showed me something he'd found in a charity shop, and asked "Do you remember this book?"
"Not even slightly..." I said, picking it up and looking at it. "OH, GOD, YES!" I exclaimed after opening it up and seeing the Computer Card and Word Displays inside. It's only the best book ever, 'Hello Sam' by Heinz Kurth!
It's about a Solar Automatic Man called Sam, and you communicate with him like this:
Take the Computer Card that comes with the book and put it on top of the appropriate coloured word...
And hey presto, you're having a conversation! Such an ingenious idea, and I really loved it when I first read the book. There's an adventure involving Sam's Booster Box, that makes things grow bigger. And it ends with Sam telling us he's going to the sea for a holiday and that perhaps he'll see us there, but I don't know if there was ever a sequel. I don't know what happened to our original copy of this book, either - we weren't exactly ones to throw things away, but I don't remember seeing it after I was eight or nine. Impressively, this nearly-30-year-old copy still has the Computer Card with it - not necessary, since the book cleverly includes a template for you to make a replacement, but still cool!
"Not even slightly..." I said, picking it up and looking at it. "OH, GOD, YES!" I exclaimed after opening it up and seeing the Computer Card and Word Displays inside. It's only the best book ever, 'Hello Sam' by Heinz Kurth!
It's about a Solar Automatic Man called Sam, and you communicate with him like this:
Take the Computer Card that comes with the book and put it on top of the appropriate coloured word...
And hey presto, you're having a conversation! Such an ingenious idea, and I really loved it when I first read the book. There's an adventure involving Sam's Booster Box, that makes things grow bigger. And it ends with Sam telling us he's going to the sea for a holiday and that perhaps he'll see us there, but I don't know if there was ever a sequel. I don't know what happened to our original copy of this book, either - we weren't exactly ones to throw things away, but I don't remember seeing it after I was eight or nine. Impressively, this nearly-30-year-old copy still has the Computer Card with it - not necessary, since the book cleverly includes a template for you to make a replacement, but still cool!
Monday, February 18, 2013
Thundercats forever!
My brother's just gone back to China, having been staying with me for some time, and one thing we always like to do when we get together is watch Thundercats cartoons - we videoed them when they first came on TV in late 1985, probably because we were out playing in the snow when the first ever episode was on, and have watched them pretty much constantly ever since. Now that the series is available on DVD, of course, other people without our video collection have the ability to watch Thundercats too, but it'll take a heck of a lot of watching before anyone catches up to my and my brother's word-for-word knowledge of everything that happens in every episode.
One thing about the DVDs is that they have the episodes in a weird order. Wikipedia insists that that's the order they were originally broadcast in in the USA, but I personally doubt that. I never saw any website claiming that sequence of episodes until the DVDs came out - there were basically two different episode orders proclaimed by American websites, one of them roughly the same as the British broadcast order, one of them with a few differences. America, of course, is a weird place where different states get different television schedules, so all of the broadcast orders might be correct, but I still suspect the DVDs are just plain wrong.
Anyway, in Britain (the only country that matters), this is how the greatest toy-commercial cartoon of all time first appeared on our screens. If you've got the DVDs, this is the order you must watch them in, okay? With a few incidental notes along the way...
1 Exodus
2 The Unholy Alliance
3 Berbils
4 The Slaves of Castle Plun-Darr
5 Trouble With Time
6 Pumm-Ra
7 The Terror of Hammerhand
8 The Tower of Traps
9 The Garden of Delights
This is the end of our first videotape, which our father had inaccurately labelled "Thundercats (30 mins)" - the first episode was shown as a compilation of the first two, and actually lasted 40 minutes or so. Actually, being an old-fashioned E-180 tape, it only had room for eight episodes, but we had the video set to the wrong channel for Pumm-Ra and recorded the snooker on BBC2 instead. So having noticed the problem a week or so later, we taped Tower of Traps on top of it, leaving only a couple of seconds of Willie Thorne and an out-of-sequence videotape to show anything had gone wrong.
But as fate would have it, that's a perfect cut-off point for the first marathon watching session you might like to have - you get the first four world-building episodes and one other by head writer (and best writer in the whole series) Leonard Starr, and the four by Julian P Gardner, with his own somewhat different (but still, mostly, hugely compelling) take on the early days of Thundercats. He disappeared completely after The Garden of Delights (an incoherent and almost completely incomprehensible story that's still strangely fun to watch), leaving the way clear for the golden years of Thundercat adventures...
10 Mandora - The Evil Chaser
11 The Ghost Warrior
12 The Doomgaze
13 Lord of the Snows
14 The Spaceship Beneath the Sands
15 The Time Capsule
16 The Fireballs of Plun-Darr
17 All That Glitters
18 Spitting Image
19 Mongor
20 Return to Thundera
21 Snarf Takes Up the Challenge
22 Mandora and the Pirates
23 The Crystal Queen
24 Safari Joe
25 Return of the Driller
Two more three-hour cassettes full of excitement and adventure! Volume 2 goes up to about half-way through Spitting Image - we were experimenting to see if we could fit nine episodes on a tape, knowing that as good luck would have it Pumm-Ra and Spitting Image were available on a commercially-sold tape, whereas most episodes were never released to the video stores at all. Volume 3 covers the rest, up to the point where Children's BBC stopped showing Thundercats for a good long time.
Virtually all the episodes on volumes 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 were written by the five writers who'd go on to define the cartoon - Leonard Starr (all-round great), Peter Lawrence (script consultant who seemed to be roped in to provide a hasty script whenever someone else had missed a deadline), William Overgard (wrote stories almost exclusively about his own characters, with a Thundercat or two grudgingly included in the margins of the adventure), Bob Haney (with his unmistakeable contraction-free and weird-sounding dialogue) and Stephen Perry (perfectly okay stories without the characteristic quirks of his fellow writers). Well, there's also one by C H Trengove and two by Howard Post in the 'golden age', but the series certainly benefited from the small core of consistently good writers. But then we had to wait a while before volume 4...
26 Turmagar the Tuska
27 Sixth Sense
28 Dr Dometone
29 The Astral Prison
30 Queen of 8 Legs
31 Dimension Doom
32 The Rock Giant
And when it did come back, it was just these seven episodes. All good ones, though, even The Rock Giant, a Peter Lawrence classic with a plot consisting of "a rock giant comes and the Thundercats fight it".
33 Lion-O's Anointment First Day: The Trial of Strength
34 Lion-O's Anointment Second Day: The Trial of Speed
35 Lion-O's Anointment Third Day: The Trial of Cunning
36 Lion-O's Anointment Fourth Day: The Trial of Mind Power
37 Lion-O's Anointment Final Day: The Trial of Evil
Then, later still, we got the Five Trials. This is where American episode guides differ from British ones - the ones that come closest to our order tend to place the Trials earlier in the sequence. The problem is that the final scene features lots of characters who haven't been introduced yet, like Hachiman and Snarfer, which would mean that the Trials have to take place after The Thunder-Cutter and Feliner. On the other hand, Lion-O encounters Acid Lake and the Gaw-Rak-Rak apparently for the first time, which would mean that the Trials take place before Return of the Driller and The Astral Prison... unless he's just got a really bad memory. It's all very confusing.
Anyway, we saw fit to end Volume 5 at this point, since it had the Five Trials on it, although the BBC continued almost immediately with new episodes - almost, since they started with The Rock Giant, apparently unsure whether it had been shown before, and then moved on to...
38 The Thunder-Cutter
39 Mechanical Plague
40 The Demolisher
41 Feliner - Part One
42 Feliner - Part Two
43 Excalibur
44 Secret of the Ice King
45 Sword in a Hole
That's the end of volume 6, and also of the Golden Age Of Thundercats Cartoons. The remaining 20, which didn't get shown until even later, are mainly written by a wide range of one-off jobbing writers, most of whom didn't seem to understand even the basic concepts of the series. I suppose they had to fill out the 65-episode contract somehow, but it's a bit of a dismal end to the show. Our volumes 7 and 8 had to be reconstructed after losing the originals, so I can't completely 100% promise that they were shown in this order, but it was something very close to this, anyway:
46 The Wolfrat
47 Good and Ugly
48 Divide and Conquer
49 The Micrits
50 The Superpower Potion
51 The Evil Harp of Charr-Nin
52 Tight Squeeze
53 Monkian's Bargain
54 Out of Sight
55 Jackalman's Rebellion
56 The Mountain
57 Eye of the Beholder
58 The Mumm-Ra Berbil
59 The Trouble With Thunderkittens
60 Mumm-Rana
61 Trapped
62 The Transfer
63 The Shifter
64 Dream Master
65 Fond Memories
Luckily, that wasn't the end - imagine if your marathon watching-session had to end with Dream Master (possibly the worst episode ever) and Fond Memories (consisting largely of footage from previous episodes, although at least it wasn't a straight "clip show" like some cartoons produce). To get the full British Thundercats-watching experience, you need to watch Thundercats-Ho! The Movie - never shown on TV over here, but available as a video release. It appeared on the shelves before the second half of the first-season episodes had been shown, so you could watch it after The Rock Giant if you want to, but it's best to save it for a finale. Watch the VHS, not the split-into-five-episodes version on the DVD. You haven't got the VHS? I don't know, try eBay or something.
That, however, is the end. While they did make further episodes in America, they never found their way across the Atlantic, and I'm pretty sure that's a good thing. Okay, off you go and watch those DVDs! Relive my childhood!
One thing about the DVDs is that they have the episodes in a weird order. Wikipedia insists that that's the order they were originally broadcast in in the USA, but I personally doubt that. I never saw any website claiming that sequence of episodes until the DVDs came out - there were basically two different episode orders proclaimed by American websites, one of them roughly the same as the British broadcast order, one of them with a few differences. America, of course, is a weird place where different states get different television schedules, so all of the broadcast orders might be correct, but I still suspect the DVDs are just plain wrong.
Anyway, in Britain (the only country that matters), this is how the greatest toy-commercial cartoon of all time first appeared on our screens. If you've got the DVDs, this is the order you must watch them in, okay? With a few incidental notes along the way...
1 Exodus
2 The Unholy Alliance
3 Berbils
4 The Slaves of Castle Plun-Darr
5 Trouble With Time
6 Pumm-Ra
7 The Terror of Hammerhand
8 The Tower of Traps
9 The Garden of Delights
This is the end of our first videotape, which our father had inaccurately labelled "Thundercats (30 mins)" - the first episode was shown as a compilation of the first two, and actually lasted 40 minutes or so. Actually, being an old-fashioned E-180 tape, it only had room for eight episodes, but we had the video set to the wrong channel for Pumm-Ra and recorded the snooker on BBC2 instead. So having noticed the problem a week or so later, we taped Tower of Traps on top of it, leaving only a couple of seconds of Willie Thorne and an out-of-sequence videotape to show anything had gone wrong.
But as fate would have it, that's a perfect cut-off point for the first marathon watching session you might like to have - you get the first four world-building episodes and one other by head writer (and best writer in the whole series) Leonard Starr, and the four by Julian P Gardner, with his own somewhat different (but still, mostly, hugely compelling) take on the early days of Thundercats. He disappeared completely after The Garden of Delights (an incoherent and almost completely incomprehensible story that's still strangely fun to watch), leaving the way clear for the golden years of Thundercat adventures...
10 Mandora - The Evil Chaser
11 The Ghost Warrior
12 The Doomgaze
13 Lord of the Snows
14 The Spaceship Beneath the Sands
15 The Time Capsule
16 The Fireballs of Plun-Darr
17 All That Glitters
18 Spitting Image
19 Mongor
20 Return to Thundera
21 Snarf Takes Up the Challenge
22 Mandora and the Pirates
23 The Crystal Queen
24 Safari Joe
25 Return of the Driller
Two more three-hour cassettes full of excitement and adventure! Volume 2 goes up to about half-way through Spitting Image - we were experimenting to see if we could fit nine episodes on a tape, knowing that as good luck would have it Pumm-Ra and Spitting Image were available on a commercially-sold tape, whereas most episodes were never released to the video stores at all. Volume 3 covers the rest, up to the point where Children's BBC stopped showing Thundercats for a good long time.
Virtually all the episodes on volumes 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 were written by the five writers who'd go on to define the cartoon - Leonard Starr (all-round great), Peter Lawrence (script consultant who seemed to be roped in to provide a hasty script whenever someone else had missed a deadline), William Overgard (wrote stories almost exclusively about his own characters, with a Thundercat or two grudgingly included in the margins of the adventure), Bob Haney (with his unmistakeable contraction-free and weird-sounding dialogue) and Stephen Perry (perfectly okay stories without the characteristic quirks of his fellow writers). Well, there's also one by C H Trengove and two by Howard Post in the 'golden age', but the series certainly benefited from the small core of consistently good writers. But then we had to wait a while before volume 4...
26 Turmagar the Tuska
27 Sixth Sense
28 Dr Dometone
29 The Astral Prison
30 Queen of 8 Legs
31 Dimension Doom
32 The Rock Giant
And when it did come back, it was just these seven episodes. All good ones, though, even The Rock Giant, a Peter Lawrence classic with a plot consisting of "a rock giant comes and the Thundercats fight it".
33 Lion-O's Anointment First Day: The Trial of Strength
34 Lion-O's Anointment Second Day: The Trial of Speed
35 Lion-O's Anointment Third Day: The Trial of Cunning
36 Lion-O's Anointment Fourth Day: The Trial of Mind Power
37 Lion-O's Anointment Final Day: The Trial of Evil
Then, later still, we got the Five Trials. This is where American episode guides differ from British ones - the ones that come closest to our order tend to place the Trials earlier in the sequence. The problem is that the final scene features lots of characters who haven't been introduced yet, like Hachiman and Snarfer, which would mean that the Trials have to take place after The Thunder-Cutter and Feliner. On the other hand, Lion-O encounters Acid Lake and the Gaw-Rak-Rak apparently for the first time, which would mean that the Trials take place before Return of the Driller and The Astral Prison... unless he's just got a really bad memory. It's all very confusing.
Anyway, we saw fit to end Volume 5 at this point, since it had the Five Trials on it, although the BBC continued almost immediately with new episodes - almost, since they started with The Rock Giant, apparently unsure whether it had been shown before, and then moved on to...
38 The Thunder-Cutter
39 Mechanical Plague
40 The Demolisher
41 Feliner - Part One
42 Feliner - Part Two
43 Excalibur
44 Secret of the Ice King
45 Sword in a Hole
That's the end of volume 6, and also of the Golden Age Of Thundercats Cartoons. The remaining 20, which didn't get shown until even later, are mainly written by a wide range of one-off jobbing writers, most of whom didn't seem to understand even the basic concepts of the series. I suppose they had to fill out the 65-episode contract somehow, but it's a bit of a dismal end to the show. Our volumes 7 and 8 had to be reconstructed after losing the originals, so I can't completely 100% promise that they were shown in this order, but it was something very close to this, anyway:
46 The Wolfrat
47 Good and Ugly
48 Divide and Conquer
49 The Micrits
50 The Superpower Potion
51 The Evil Harp of Charr-Nin
52 Tight Squeeze
53 Monkian's Bargain
54 Out of Sight
55 Jackalman's Rebellion
56 The Mountain
57 Eye of the Beholder
58 The Mumm-Ra Berbil
59 The Trouble With Thunderkittens
60 Mumm-Rana
61 Trapped
62 The Transfer
63 The Shifter
64 Dream Master
65 Fond Memories
Luckily, that wasn't the end - imagine if your marathon watching-session had to end with Dream Master (possibly the worst episode ever) and Fond Memories (consisting largely of footage from previous episodes, although at least it wasn't a straight "clip show" like some cartoons produce). To get the full British Thundercats-watching experience, you need to watch Thundercats-Ho! The Movie - never shown on TV over here, but available as a video release. It appeared on the shelves before the second half of the first-season episodes had been shown, so you could watch it after The Rock Giant if you want to, but it's best to save it for a finale. Watch the VHS, not the split-into-five-episodes version on the DVD. You haven't got the VHS? I don't know, try eBay or something.
That, however, is the end. While they did make further episodes in America, they never found their way across the Atlantic, and I'm pretty sure that's a good thing. Okay, off you go and watch those DVDs! Relive my childhood!
Friday, February 15, 2013
The world's foremost cartoon character
Facebook is a funny thing. Yesterday I found myself with invitations to "like" two pages - Dave Farrow's, which asserts that he's "the world's foremost memory expert", and Tansel Ali's, which makes the slightly more modest claim (and, you know, not quite such an outright lie) that he's "one of the leading Memory Experts and Mind Athletes in the world". Facebook probably has hundreds of other pages following the same basic theme.
I don't teach memory courses myself, but this doesn't stop me getting lots and lots of messages on Facebook asking for advice in my capacity as one of the world's other foremost memory experts. And while I know that most of these come from people who don't speak English as a first language, I just can't resist making a slightly rude plea for a bit of basic message etiquette...
Rule 1 - Please don't address me as "Mr Ben". That just sounds silly. As a general rule, don't address anyone British by "Mr" and their first name; that's not how names work. But please also don't call me "Mr Pridmore" (that's my dad) or "Sir" (that's the boss of the Sparky People). "Ben" is fine on its own. Here's a visual guide for anyone who's confused:
Oh, and also please don't call me "Sir Ben", but as far as I know, nobody's ever drawn a picture of someone by that name. Incidentally, I somehow couldn't lay my hands on a Sparky Book this morning, though I know I've got some around here somewhere, so the Sir picture was stolen from this splendid blog which you should all go and read.
Rule 2 - Please don't start your email by saying "this is urgent", "this is very important" and so on. Not if you're asking me how to memorise random numbers, anyway. That really is never important. And do give me a day or two to reply before you follow it up with another note asking if I got the first one. Seriously, I wish I was as keen to improve my memory as some of these people are.
Rule 3 - Don't go into amazingly technical fiddly details of exactly how to visualise your person/action/object images, or whatever, and ask me if you're doing it right, because beyond the very basic principles, all I can do is explain how I do it and tell you that it's different for everyone and you should try different things to see what works for you. And I get tired of typing that, over and over again.
Rule 4 - Please don't assume I'm withholding some kind of super expert memory secret from you if I reply with something like the above. There really isn't a shortcut, you'll just have to work at it, I'm afraid.
Rule 5 - If you ask me for advice on how you can teach your tiny children how to memorise things in order to pass exams and be successful in life, don't be surprised if my advice is to just leave the poor kids alone and stop being such a pushy parent.
Thank you all for your attention
Mr Ben.
I don't teach memory courses myself, but this doesn't stop me getting lots and lots of messages on Facebook asking for advice in my capacity as one of the world's other foremost memory experts. And while I know that most of these come from people who don't speak English as a first language, I just can't resist making a slightly rude plea for a bit of basic message etiquette...
Rule 1 - Please don't address me as "Mr Ben". That just sounds silly. As a general rule, don't address anyone British by "Mr" and their first name; that's not how names work. But please also don't call me "Mr Pridmore" (that's my dad) or "Sir" (that's the boss of the Sparky People). "Ben" is fine on its own. Here's a visual guide for anyone who's confused:
Oh, and also please don't call me "Sir Ben", but as far as I know, nobody's ever drawn a picture of someone by that name. Incidentally, I somehow couldn't lay my hands on a Sparky Book this morning, though I know I've got some around here somewhere, so the Sir picture was stolen from this splendid blog which you should all go and read.
Rule 2 - Please don't start your email by saying "this is urgent", "this is very important" and so on. Not if you're asking me how to memorise random numbers, anyway. That really is never important. And do give me a day or two to reply before you follow it up with another note asking if I got the first one. Seriously, I wish I was as keen to improve my memory as some of these people are.
Rule 3 - Don't go into amazingly technical fiddly details of exactly how to visualise your person/action/object images, or whatever, and ask me if you're doing it right, because beyond the very basic principles, all I can do is explain how I do it and tell you that it's different for everyone and you should try different things to see what works for you. And I get tired of typing that, over and over again.
Rule 4 - Please don't assume I'm withholding some kind of super expert memory secret from you if I reply with something like the above. There really isn't a shortcut, you'll just have to work at it, I'm afraid.
Rule 5 - If you ask me for advice on how you can teach your tiny children how to memorise things in order to pass exams and be successful in life, don't be surprised if my advice is to just leave the poor kids alone and stop being such a pushy parent.
Thank you all for your attention
Mr Ben.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
What a beautiful day!
The sun's shining! It's warm enough to go out without a coat, just about! You have to chain yourself to the ground so as not to be blown away by the gale-force winds, but it's still starting to feel a bit like spring! Yay!
Meanwhile, an acquaintance last night accused me of calling myself a 'memory athlete' and told me that sounds a bit silly. I of course replied that I never use that expression myself, and think it's a lot silly, but then I looked up the word on that famous source of information-that-might-not-be-true-but-who-cares, Wikipedia, and found that "The word "athlete" is a romanization of the Greek: άθλητὴς, athlētēs, one who participates in a contest; from ἂθλος, áthlos, or ἂθλον, áthlon, a contest or feat."
So it's not necessarily a sporty thing, and we memorisers can quite justifiably call ourselves athletes, and if anyone says we shouldn't, we can just point them to Wikipedia! I'm still not going to call myself a memory athlete, though.
I know that's not nearly as interesting as the genuinely-true fact that 'gymnast' is derived from the Greek word for 'naked', but I thought it was worth mentioning.
Meanwhile, an acquaintance last night accused me of calling myself a 'memory athlete' and told me that sounds a bit silly. I of course replied that I never use that expression myself, and think it's a lot silly, but then I looked up the word on that famous source of information-that-might-not-be-true-but-who-cares, Wikipedia, and found that "The word "athlete" is a romanization of the Greek: άθλητὴς, athlētēs, one who participates in a contest; from ἂθλος, áthlos, or ἂθλον, áthlon, a contest or feat."
So it's not necessarily a sporty thing, and we memorisers can quite justifiably call ourselves athletes, and if anyone says we shouldn't, we can just point them to Wikipedia! I'm still not going to call myself a memory athlete, though.
I know that's not nearly as interesting as the genuinely-true fact that 'gymnast' is derived from the Greek word for 'naked', but I thought it was worth mentioning.
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