Saturday, September 12, 2015
Bearded lefties of the world unite
The terrible thing is that I'm going to have to vote Labour now. I never thought I'd see the day. And then if they win the next election, it'll be officially my fault whenever the government does anything at all...
Friday, September 11, 2015
Deprived childhood
I don't really keep up with the latest trends in Transformers toys, but I'm almost certain that British Transformers-buyers have the same range to choose from as their American counterparts these days. It was probably only the children of the 1980s who suffered from the dreadful prejudice of not being able to buy certain Transformers which were appearing in the comics and cartoons but not available on British toyshop shelves. The thing is, Transformers were so hugely popular, Hasbro UK were almost certainly mistaken in the belief that they wouldn't be able to sell such an extensive range of toys at a profit as they could in the USA. People need to go and complain to Anthony Temple ("from Boys Toys at Hasbro" who had a column in the early Transformers comics, and who now apparently is the managing director of DRi Licensing) until he changes his mind and makes all the cool toys available for us to buy in this country.
It was all the coolest characters who weren't available here too, and I'm never quite sure whether they were cool because they were unavailable, or whether it's just coincidence. American readers who were around at the time: were Shockwave, Swoop, Blaster, Perceptor and the Constructicons the coolest toys, or just lost in the crowd? I'll always consider them to be especially exciting, anyway...
It was all the coolest characters who weren't available here too, and I'm never quite sure whether they were cool because they were unavailable, or whether it's just coincidence. American readers who were around at the time: were Shockwave, Swoop, Blaster, Perceptor and the Constructicons the coolest toys, or just lost in the crowd? I'll always consider them to be especially exciting, anyway...
Thursday, September 10, 2015
Wednesday, September 09, 2015
What have I become?
When I'm driving my car to work in the morning, in my pocket a mobile phone that the number of people who know how to call me on it is nearly in double figures, I can't help thinking I'm a lot less cool and different than I used to be. I need to go and live in a cave somewhere. As long as there's a Wi-Fi connection.
Tuesday, September 08, 2015
Not quite
I was hoping to blog tonight about having done a real proper training session, but though I did a 30-minute binary AND hour numbers yesterday, and abstract images this morning, I was feeling too tired to follow it up with an hour cards this afternoon. But still, I work three-days-on-three-days-off nowadays, so I've still got tomorrow. It'd be awesome to get into a proper schedule of doing all three marathon disciplines and the all-important abstracts (as well as some XMT training) each three-day weekend. We'll see how it goes...
Monday, September 07, 2015
'Nuts
You probably remember my post from earlier this year about the frequency with which characters appeared in the Peanuts comic strip. Well, nobody technically asked me to continue it, but a couple of people expressed polite interest, and I just hate to leave things part-finished, so here's the second in a series of decade-by-decade analysis! It went on for fifty years, it's the kind of thing that takes multiple blog posts to talk about.
Here's the whole lineup of characters as we left them in 1957
Just to bring the first graph up to the end of 1959 - the most noteworthy thing is the birth of Charlie Brown's baby sister Sally in that year. She follows the example of Linus, remaining a baby for a good few years before magically catching up in age with the rest of the gang, and it takes even longer for her to be seen as frequently as the main stars of the comic...
And so now we move into the sixties. Actually, although a lot of fans feel the sixties was the golden age of Peanuts (I agree with them, too), in terms of character-prominence it's the most boring decade of the lot. The whole period is dominated by the big four - Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus and Snoopy, with everyone else huddled down in the bottom section of the chart far below them. But the lines on the graph still highlight some interesting trends in the comic strip's development...
The original characters have already faded away by the start of the decade but not entirely disappeared - Shermy shows up in the background once in a blue moon, Pig-Pen's appearances are even rarer (though the animated cartoons, which started in the mid-sixties, give him a more prominent role), Patty and Violet have become a double-act of occasional cameos and Schroeder has settled into the role of exclusively showing up in piano or baseball-themed comics, which he pretty much stays with until the series ends in 1999. So there is plenty of scope to introduce new people to take things in different directions, though it takes a while to happen.
Frieda (she of the naturally curly hair) makes her debut in 1961 and briefly becomes a regular star - for a little while she's a regular double-act with Lucy (chatting in the baseball outfield rather than paying attention to the game) and Snoopy (criticising him for not chasing enough rabbits). Her cat, Faron, shows up too, but disappears quickly; apparently Charles M Schulz decided he couldn't draw cats. I remember seeing him interviewed on British TV somewhere in the 1980s - when asked if there were any characters he regretted introducing to Peanuts, his first thought was "There was a girl who was always talking about her naturally curly hair, I never liked her much...", but Frieda carries on showing up in minor roles for many years after her 1961 moment of fame. Schulz went on to say that he probably shouldn't have introduced other dogs to the strip, since it stopped Snoopy being so unique, which was kind of a strange thing to say since this was during the period when Snoopy's brother Spike was all over Peanuts. Still, that's all in the future as we look at the 1960s - Snoopy's still somewhere close to being a normal kind of dog at the start of the decade...
1963 gives us the first appearance of 5, the reaction to the introduction of zip codes in the USA. This is the great thing about reading old comics; they can be like time capsules, reminding us of things that were considered a big deal at the time the strips were drawn, though they're just taken for granted these days. Clearly there was a moment when it was new and weird to put a string of numbers after your address. 5's sisters, 3 and 4 (their surname is 95472) also show up a couple of times, and all three of them turn into useful characters for crowd scenes over the years to come - Peanuts at this point still never shows any other characters except the named regulars, but there are some times when it needs to show a line of kids buying movie tickets or the like.
Here's everyone (except, strangely, Linus) all together in 1964
But the more interesting development comes in 1965 when, after fifteen years of being set exclusively in and around Charlie Brown's neighbourhood, the world of Peanuts becomes a bigger place. Charlie Brown goes away to summer camp, we see on-panel appearances of other nameless boys, and we meet a new named character, Roy. Okay, he never really does anything, but he represents a significant change in the whole focus of the comics.
Another significant moment very arguably comes in 1966 - I'm following the excellent Peanuts Wiki in dating that as the first appearance of Woodstock, though most other people who care about such things (you'd be surprised how many there are) say 1967. Really, though, it's more of a gradual development than a single debut moment, because Snoopy has been hanging out with birds (much more birdish-looking birds than Woodstock eventually becomes) for a long time before this, and really it's 1969 before it definitely becomes clear that it's the same bird every time. And of course it's 1970 before he gets a name and becomes Snoopy's ever-present sidekick, so maybe that yellow line shouldn't be on the sixties graph at all...
In 1966 it's Linus who goes to summer camp and meets Roy, who then makes his greatest contribution to shaking up the status quo of Peanuts by introducing his friend Peppermint Patty to the gang. (Original Patty's name hadn't been mentioned for years in the strip; though she did get a namecheck in the cartoons, I doubt many people remembered it. Still, the duplicated name is one of the strange things about Peanuts.) It turns out that Peppermint Patty and Roy live in another neighbourhood across town, and they very gradually develop a group around themselves (starting with José Peterson the half-Swedish half-Mexican player on Peppermint Patty's baseball team). Peppermint Patty immediately stands out as a wonderful character, but it takes her a while to become prominent - for the first few years she tends to take centre stage for a brief run of strips at a time and then isn't seen for a few months. It's the seventies before she really becomes a regular, and of course acquires her loyal sidekick Marcie.
When Peppermint Patty gets her own summer camp storyline in 1968, we get three more named characters in Sophie, Clara (something of a prototype Marcie) and Shirley, who become the comic strip's first one-off characters appearing just for one specific series of comics - everyone else who's shown up until now has at least been intended to be an ongoing recurring character. The camp trio do reappear nearly twenty years later, which is a kind of recurring, I suppose, but you know what I mean.
The final significant debut of the 1960s is of course Franklin, in 1968. More time-capsule stuff, obviously, and even today he hasn't really escaped from being talked about exclusively in terms of how radical it was to introduce a black character to the daily newspaper comic strip (that he goes to school with Peppermint Patty was the really radical thing in the USA at the time - just to make it extra clear how Schulz felt about that hot topic, there's also a rare appearance of Charlie Brown's unnamed schoolmates, who include a black girl, at around this time. Good man, Charles M Schulz). But in terms of character prominence graphs, Franklin is probably the final nail in the coffin of Shermy's days as a recurring character - he takes over the role of the nice-guy friend of good ol' Charlie Brown, and Shermy disappears for good (nearly) after one last showing in 1969.
The gang from the other side of town in 1969 - Peppermint Patty, Franklin, Roy and José Peterson
Lila, Snoopy's original owner who appears on-panel in just one 1968 strip, gets to be in the chart as well for the sake of completeness (seeing as she's got a name), though her little blip is lost in the general squiggle of lines down at the bottom there. But 1968 is most notable for that epochal moment when Snoopy's line moves above Charlie Brown's on the chart. The gradual transformation from "puppy who the kids play with now and then" to "central character of the strip around whom all storylines revolve" is complete. Peanuts will never be the same again, for better or worse. Join us again soon for the 1970s, when those lines get a lot more messy and we wonder how to tell the difference between Conrad, Olivier and Bill!
Here's the whole lineup of characters as we left them in 1957
Just to bring the first graph up to the end of 1959 - the most noteworthy thing is the birth of Charlie Brown's baby sister Sally in that year. She follows the example of Linus, remaining a baby for a good few years before magically catching up in age with the rest of the gang, and it takes even longer for her to be seen as frequently as the main stars of the comic...
And so now we move into the sixties. Actually, although a lot of fans feel the sixties was the golden age of Peanuts (I agree with them, too), in terms of character-prominence it's the most boring decade of the lot. The whole period is dominated by the big four - Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus and Snoopy, with everyone else huddled down in the bottom section of the chart far below them. But the lines on the graph still highlight some interesting trends in the comic strip's development...
The original characters have already faded away by the start of the decade but not entirely disappeared - Shermy shows up in the background once in a blue moon, Pig-Pen's appearances are even rarer (though the animated cartoons, which started in the mid-sixties, give him a more prominent role), Patty and Violet have become a double-act of occasional cameos and Schroeder has settled into the role of exclusively showing up in piano or baseball-themed comics, which he pretty much stays with until the series ends in 1999. So there is plenty of scope to introduce new people to take things in different directions, though it takes a while to happen.
Frieda (she of the naturally curly hair) makes her debut in 1961 and briefly becomes a regular star - for a little while she's a regular double-act with Lucy (chatting in the baseball outfield rather than paying attention to the game) and Snoopy (criticising him for not chasing enough rabbits). Her cat, Faron, shows up too, but disappears quickly; apparently Charles M Schulz decided he couldn't draw cats. I remember seeing him interviewed on British TV somewhere in the 1980s - when asked if there were any characters he regretted introducing to Peanuts, his first thought was "There was a girl who was always talking about her naturally curly hair, I never liked her much...", but Frieda carries on showing up in minor roles for many years after her 1961 moment of fame. Schulz went on to say that he probably shouldn't have introduced other dogs to the strip, since it stopped Snoopy being so unique, which was kind of a strange thing to say since this was during the period when Snoopy's brother Spike was all over Peanuts. Still, that's all in the future as we look at the 1960s - Snoopy's still somewhere close to being a normal kind of dog at the start of the decade...
1963 gives us the first appearance of 5, the reaction to the introduction of zip codes in the USA. This is the great thing about reading old comics; they can be like time capsules, reminding us of things that were considered a big deal at the time the strips were drawn, though they're just taken for granted these days. Clearly there was a moment when it was new and weird to put a string of numbers after your address. 5's sisters, 3 and 4 (their surname is 95472) also show up a couple of times, and all three of them turn into useful characters for crowd scenes over the years to come - Peanuts at this point still never shows any other characters except the named regulars, but there are some times when it needs to show a line of kids buying movie tickets or the like.
Here's everyone (except, strangely, Linus) all together in 1964
But the more interesting development comes in 1965 when, after fifteen years of being set exclusively in and around Charlie Brown's neighbourhood, the world of Peanuts becomes a bigger place. Charlie Brown goes away to summer camp, we see on-panel appearances of other nameless boys, and we meet a new named character, Roy. Okay, he never really does anything, but he represents a significant change in the whole focus of the comics.
Another significant moment very arguably comes in 1966 - I'm following the excellent Peanuts Wiki in dating that as the first appearance of Woodstock, though most other people who care about such things (you'd be surprised how many there are) say 1967. Really, though, it's more of a gradual development than a single debut moment, because Snoopy has been hanging out with birds (much more birdish-looking birds than Woodstock eventually becomes) for a long time before this, and really it's 1969 before it definitely becomes clear that it's the same bird every time. And of course it's 1970 before he gets a name and becomes Snoopy's ever-present sidekick, so maybe that yellow line shouldn't be on the sixties graph at all...
In 1966 it's Linus who goes to summer camp and meets Roy, who then makes his greatest contribution to shaking up the status quo of Peanuts by introducing his friend Peppermint Patty to the gang. (Original Patty's name hadn't been mentioned for years in the strip; though she did get a namecheck in the cartoons, I doubt many people remembered it. Still, the duplicated name is one of the strange things about Peanuts.) It turns out that Peppermint Patty and Roy live in another neighbourhood across town, and they very gradually develop a group around themselves (starting with José Peterson the half-Swedish half-Mexican player on Peppermint Patty's baseball team). Peppermint Patty immediately stands out as a wonderful character, but it takes her a while to become prominent - for the first few years she tends to take centre stage for a brief run of strips at a time and then isn't seen for a few months. It's the seventies before she really becomes a regular, and of course acquires her loyal sidekick Marcie.
When Peppermint Patty gets her own summer camp storyline in 1968, we get three more named characters in Sophie, Clara (something of a prototype Marcie) and Shirley, who become the comic strip's first one-off characters appearing just for one specific series of comics - everyone else who's shown up until now has at least been intended to be an ongoing recurring character. The camp trio do reappear nearly twenty years later, which is a kind of recurring, I suppose, but you know what I mean.
The final significant debut of the 1960s is of course Franklin, in 1968. More time-capsule stuff, obviously, and even today he hasn't really escaped from being talked about exclusively in terms of how radical it was to introduce a black character to the daily newspaper comic strip (that he goes to school with Peppermint Patty was the really radical thing in the USA at the time - just to make it extra clear how Schulz felt about that hot topic, there's also a rare appearance of Charlie Brown's unnamed schoolmates, who include a black girl, at around this time. Good man, Charles M Schulz). But in terms of character prominence graphs, Franklin is probably the final nail in the coffin of Shermy's days as a recurring character - he takes over the role of the nice-guy friend of good ol' Charlie Brown, and Shermy disappears for good (nearly) after one last showing in 1969.
The gang from the other side of town in 1969 - Peppermint Patty, Franklin, Roy and José Peterson
Lila, Snoopy's original owner who appears on-panel in just one 1968 strip, gets to be in the chart as well for the sake of completeness (seeing as she's got a name), though her little blip is lost in the general squiggle of lines down at the bottom there. But 1968 is most notable for that epochal moment when Snoopy's line moves above Charlie Brown's on the chart. The gradual transformation from "puppy who the kids play with now and then" to "central character of the strip around whom all storylines revolve" is complete. Peanuts will never be the same again, for better or worse. Join us again soon for the 1970s, when those lines get a lot more messy and we wonder how to tell the difference between Conrad, Olivier and Bill!
Sunday, September 06, 2015
The UK Memory Championship!
Just to catch up with blogging of memory competitions I've been to this year (not many of them; no money and various jobs getting in the way. Why can't I have no jobs and various money?), it was the ninth UK Memory Championship the Thursday and Friday before last, in London. Specifically, in L'Escargot restaurant in Soho, an interesting kind of location - right next door to the main shopping places in London, which is nice for touristy things but not so nice for peace and quiet in the memorisation room. The room itself was hugely, vastly too small (if you'll forgive the confusing adjectives) to fit everyone in, so we were all sort of squeezed together at desks with really quite cool and sturdy partitions between us to minimize cheating.
I wasn't really expecting to be able to compete with the top memory superstars (Simon and Yanjaa), not having done any training, but there was always a chance I could retain my 'best British competitor' title against the stiff competition of Marlo Knight and James Paterson. I might just have done it if I'd managed my 25.66-second pack of cards in the final discipline, but that was the only one where I came close to a non-mediocre kind of score, so I can't really complain about being reduced to 'Third-Best British Competitor', a title I'm very proud of, and dropping my trophy on the floor and breaking it was genuinely an accident, which I'm very sorry about! Seriously, great stuff, Marlo!
Apart from that embarrassing moment, it was a great couple of days! It's always fun to hang out with memory folks big and small (six-foot-ten giant Lars from Denmark and miniature Melanie from Germany were among the strong international field, as well as not-quite-as-big-as-Lars-but-still-really-tall-and-deserves-a-mention-since-he-travelled-all-the-way-from-America-and-is-generally-awesome Nelson) and the obligatory journalist - there'll be an article showing up in Saga magazine all about it! L'Escargot has a really super cool bar/lounge up in the attic, with no end of cool decorations and a big skylight, it's a great place to hang out.
I'd namecheck everyone who was there and talk about the results, but they're not up online yet and I'd only forget to mention someone, so I'll just play it safe. But there was a nice spread of people who got the medals for top three in each discipline, and a lot of people were very happy with the scores they did get, so it all worked out well for everyone! Huge thanks are due as always to Phil, Gaby, Chris and everyone else who helped out with the organisation and arbiting!
It really would be nice to get back up to the top level of memory competition, but I don't think it's going to happen...
I wasn't really expecting to be able to compete with the top memory superstars (Simon and Yanjaa), not having done any training, but there was always a chance I could retain my 'best British competitor' title against the stiff competition of Marlo Knight and James Paterson. I might just have done it if I'd managed my 25.66-second pack of cards in the final discipline, but that was the only one where I came close to a non-mediocre kind of score, so I can't really complain about being reduced to 'Third-Best British Competitor', a title I'm very proud of, and dropping my trophy on the floor and breaking it was genuinely an accident, which I'm very sorry about! Seriously, great stuff, Marlo!
Apart from that embarrassing moment, it was a great couple of days! It's always fun to hang out with memory folks big and small (six-foot-ten giant Lars from Denmark and miniature Melanie from Germany were among the strong international field, as well as not-quite-as-big-as-Lars-but-still-really-tall-and-deserves-a-mention-since-he-travelled-all-the-way-from-America-and-is-generally-awesome Nelson) and the obligatory journalist - there'll be an article showing up in Saga magazine all about it! L'Escargot has a really super cool bar/lounge up in the attic, with no end of cool decorations and a big skylight, it's a great place to hang out.
I'd namecheck everyone who was there and talk about the results, but they're not up online yet and I'd only forget to mention someone, so I'll just play it safe. But there was a nice spread of people who got the medals for top three in each discipline, and a lot of people were very happy with the scores they did get, so it all worked out well for everyone! Huge thanks are due as always to Phil, Gaby, Chris and everyone else who helped out with the organisation and arbiting!
It really would be nice to get back up to the top level of memory competition, but I don't think it's going to happen...
Saturday, September 05, 2015
The Friendly Memory Championship (a little late)
While I try to remember what song I was singing in a dream last night, let's have a belated recap of the Friendly (Cambridge) Memory Championship, back in June!
(See, the dream involved a concert by Tracy Chapman, though she didn't bear much resemblance to the singer from the eighties, and she was accompanied by a male guitarist also called Tracy Chapman, and since for the purposes of this dream my name was also Tracy Chapman I came up on stage and sang a song, along with a woman who once again happened to have the same name too on guitar and backing vocals. I performed a relatively recent hit song, I'll remember which one it was eventually. I was really quite awesome, anyway, though I couldn't remember half of the words)
This was the tenth Friendly Championship, which is quite a landmark. Back in 2006, as I pointed out quite excessively, it was one of the very few memory championships in the whole world - there was the World Championship once a year, the German Championships (and the North and South German little events), the different-format US Championship (only open to Americans), and that was basically your lot. Some exotic places like Australia and China had competitions too, even the top competitors would go to an absolute maximum of three memory competitions in a year. The world of memory has expanded quite a lot since then.
In 2015 we gathered together once more in the Attenborough Nature Reserve - not as lethally hot as last year, no particularly noisy interruptions from ducks and geese, good wifi connection so I could update the fans on Facebook with the latest scores, it was a pretty good venue as always. The lineup of competitors was just perfect - two of the absolute world's best in Simon Reinhard and Johannes Mallow, the two leading lights of British memory in Katie Kermode and Marlo Knight, two memory competition veterans in Javier Moreno and Dai Griffiths, and two complete newcomers in Eline Malleret and Rosalind Hoo. That is so exactly the mix of competitors I like at these competitions, it's almost like I'd hand-picked and invited them especially! We also had some kind of researcher, Zaïn Ceizar, keen to probe the brains of the competitors and find out how the whole memory thing works, just to make the whole event a bit more sciencey.
(Look here, Blogger - if I type "sciencey", I don't want you to autocorrect it to "science". "A bit more science" doesn't even work, grammatically speaking.)
We had a perfect line-up of arbiters too, in the form of me, Phil Chambers and Nick Papadopoulos - or if not exactly perfect, we did a pretty good job. The thing about the Friendly competition is that it's a friendly kind of arbiting - we're all sitting in the same room and marking the papers, and anybody's free to query their scores and check their papers to see where they (or the arbiters) went wrong. I'm pretty sure there was only one arbiting mistake (my mental addition going wrong), and that was caught straight away, so everyone was happy and nobody grumbling that their score was wrong. Also, we get things marked and the results announced as quickly as possible, so people can do those important calculations of how much they need to attempt in the next discipline to keep ahead of their rivals.
The competition, as best I can remember at this late date, was exciting, and absolutely packed with world records! Katie and Simon set the pace with scores over 100 in 5-minute words, which is pretty cool; Hannes followed that with 951 in 5-minute binary, which would have been a world record back in the days when I was the record holder, and then Katie totally blew everyone away with a score of 97 in 5-minute names and faces.
The thing about that is, you get 50 first and 50 last names, and the three she got wrong were just slightly mis-spelt. It's seriously freaky and beyond my understanding (although names aren't my strong point, as everyone knows - while writing this blog I've had to remind myself that Marlo's name isn't Marlowe Weisman, the American cartoon-writer, even though I've known him for years now). Simon deserves a mention too for getting a score of 88, which would have been a world record if not for Katie. Freaky, I tell you.
15-minute numbers then immediately provided us with another world record - 1014 for Johannes! To put that in context, memorising a thousand digits in an hour is still considered pretty exceptional; memorising a thousand in 30 minutes is something that very few people have done. It's getting quite scary.
Before lunch, we had 10-minute cards, and guess what? Another world record, sort of - with 7 packs and 8 cards, Simon set a new "non-digital" world record (he'd done a higher score on a computer screen in Los Angeles the previous month, but this is the best score with actual physical cards). "Wait, did I hold the old record for this one?" I asked, but everyone laughed that no, of course I didn't, my world record was broken ages ago.
Lunch was as awesome as always (they make great lunches at Attenborough), although I did my best to hurry it along - the conversation went something like "We want to have two trials of speed numbers instead of one" "Okay, but we'll have to have just a half-hour lunch break, otherwise we won't finish before they kick us out of the building at six o'clock" "No, we'll have an hour for lunch and still have two speed numbers trials, I think."
After a sort of compromise of 45 minutes for lunch, we did have our two speed numbers trials - no world records here, but Simon had built up a healthy lead in the competition by this point. Hannes fought back with yet another world record - 495 in abstract images! The scores in this one are just getting silly now; it's really about time someone did something about it, like making a 5-minute images discipline instead of 15 for these short competitions. In dates he scored 120, which isn't quite a world record but is still higher than anyone else apart from Hannes has ever scored, so it deserves a mention anyway.
The highlight of spoken numbers was me trying to get it to work, but we succeeded eventually, more or less. No world records, but an exciting finish in store with Simon a mere 150 championship points ahead of Hannes going into the speed cards. But Simon didn't manage to get a pack correct, and with a time of 30.33 seconds, Johannes Mallow became the 2015 Friendly Memory Champion! Is that an official title? It sounds a bit silly. It's something to be proud of, anyway! Hannes is now officially both Extreme and Friendly, in fact. And having been one of the competitors at the very first Cambridge Championship back in 2006, we can look back at the scores he got then and marvel at the improvement - back then he got 600 in 15-minute numbers, 720 in binary, 75 in dates, all of them considered really impressive scores. And 81 in abstract images, which was the first time anyone had ever tried the new discipline, but it just goes to show how much people can improve with nine years to think about how to remember things!
Simon was second, Katie third and Marlo fourth; Eline won the much-coveted Best Beginner title, and everyone had a good time!
(See, the dream involved a concert by Tracy Chapman, though she didn't bear much resemblance to the singer from the eighties, and she was accompanied by a male guitarist also called Tracy Chapman, and since for the purposes of this dream my name was also Tracy Chapman I came up on stage and sang a song, along with a woman who once again happened to have the same name too on guitar and backing vocals. I performed a relatively recent hit song, I'll remember which one it was eventually. I was really quite awesome, anyway, though I couldn't remember half of the words)
This was the tenth Friendly Championship, which is quite a landmark. Back in 2006, as I pointed out quite excessively, it was one of the very few memory championships in the whole world - there was the World Championship once a year, the German Championships (and the North and South German little events), the different-format US Championship (only open to Americans), and that was basically your lot. Some exotic places like Australia and China had competitions too, even the top competitors would go to an absolute maximum of three memory competitions in a year. The world of memory has expanded quite a lot since then.
In 2015 we gathered together once more in the Attenborough Nature Reserve - not as lethally hot as last year, no particularly noisy interruptions from ducks and geese, good wifi connection so I could update the fans on Facebook with the latest scores, it was a pretty good venue as always. The lineup of competitors was just perfect - two of the absolute world's best in Simon Reinhard and Johannes Mallow, the two leading lights of British memory in Katie Kermode and Marlo Knight, two memory competition veterans in Javier Moreno and Dai Griffiths, and two complete newcomers in Eline Malleret and Rosalind Hoo. That is so exactly the mix of competitors I like at these competitions, it's almost like I'd hand-picked and invited them especially! We also had some kind of researcher, Zaïn Ceizar, keen to probe the brains of the competitors and find out how the whole memory thing works, just to make the whole event a bit more sciencey.
(Look here, Blogger - if I type "sciencey", I don't want you to autocorrect it to "science". "A bit more science" doesn't even work, grammatically speaking.)
We had a perfect line-up of arbiters too, in the form of me, Phil Chambers and Nick Papadopoulos - or if not exactly perfect, we did a pretty good job. The thing about the Friendly competition is that it's a friendly kind of arbiting - we're all sitting in the same room and marking the papers, and anybody's free to query their scores and check their papers to see where they (or the arbiters) went wrong. I'm pretty sure there was only one arbiting mistake (my mental addition going wrong), and that was caught straight away, so everyone was happy and nobody grumbling that their score was wrong. Also, we get things marked and the results announced as quickly as possible, so people can do those important calculations of how much they need to attempt in the next discipline to keep ahead of their rivals.
The competition, as best I can remember at this late date, was exciting, and absolutely packed with world records! Katie and Simon set the pace with scores over 100 in 5-minute words, which is pretty cool; Hannes followed that with 951 in 5-minute binary, which would have been a world record back in the days when I was the record holder, and then Katie totally blew everyone away with a score of 97 in 5-minute names and faces.
The thing about that is, you get 50 first and 50 last names, and the three she got wrong were just slightly mis-spelt. It's seriously freaky and beyond my understanding (although names aren't my strong point, as everyone knows - while writing this blog I've had to remind myself that Marlo's name isn't Marlowe Weisman, the American cartoon-writer, even though I've known him for years now). Simon deserves a mention too for getting a score of 88, which would have been a world record if not for Katie. Freaky, I tell you.
15-minute numbers then immediately provided us with another world record - 1014 for Johannes! To put that in context, memorising a thousand digits in an hour is still considered pretty exceptional; memorising a thousand in 30 minutes is something that very few people have done. It's getting quite scary.
Before lunch, we had 10-minute cards, and guess what? Another world record, sort of - with 7 packs and 8 cards, Simon set a new "non-digital" world record (he'd done a higher score on a computer screen in Los Angeles the previous month, but this is the best score with actual physical cards). "Wait, did I hold the old record for this one?" I asked, but everyone laughed that no, of course I didn't, my world record was broken ages ago.
Lunch was as awesome as always (they make great lunches at Attenborough), although I did my best to hurry it along - the conversation went something like "We want to have two trials of speed numbers instead of one" "Okay, but we'll have to have just a half-hour lunch break, otherwise we won't finish before they kick us out of the building at six o'clock" "No, we'll have an hour for lunch and still have two speed numbers trials, I think."
After a sort of compromise of 45 minutes for lunch, we did have our two speed numbers trials - no world records here, but Simon had built up a healthy lead in the competition by this point. Hannes fought back with yet another world record - 495 in abstract images! The scores in this one are just getting silly now; it's really about time someone did something about it, like making a 5-minute images discipline instead of 15 for these short competitions. In dates he scored 120, which isn't quite a world record but is still higher than anyone else apart from Hannes has ever scored, so it deserves a mention anyway.
The highlight of spoken numbers was me trying to get it to work, but we succeeded eventually, more or less. No world records, but an exciting finish in store with Simon a mere 150 championship points ahead of Hannes going into the speed cards. But Simon didn't manage to get a pack correct, and with a time of 30.33 seconds, Johannes Mallow became the 2015 Friendly Memory Champion! Is that an official title? It sounds a bit silly. It's something to be proud of, anyway! Hannes is now officially both Extreme and Friendly, in fact. And having been one of the competitors at the very first Cambridge Championship back in 2006, we can look back at the scores he got then and marvel at the improvement - back then he got 600 in 15-minute numbers, 720 in binary, 75 in dates, all of them considered really impressive scores. And 81 in abstract images, which was the first time anyone had ever tried the new discipline, but it just goes to show how much people can improve with nine years to think about how to remember things!
Simon was second, Katie third and Marlo fourth; Eline won the much-coveted Best Beginner title, and everyone had a good time!
Thursday, September 03, 2015
Okay, I'm still alive!
Sorry for the three months of silence - the fact is, I've been pretty seriously depressed for quite a long time now, so it's been hard to summon the enthusiasm for mindless rambling bloggery on a regular basis. Really, quite a lot has happened over the months that it seems like people really want to read me going on about, so I shall endeavour to catch you all up with what's been going on, since you all asked so nicely...
Wednesday, June 03, 2015
I'm quite staggeringly out of touch
Why am I only finding out about something that supposedly "went viral all over the internet" last week today, when I decide to look up Charlie Watts on google? It's official, I'm an old man.
And my poor blog readers are drastically out of touch with my life right now, too, aren't you? I'll make an effort to fill you all in about my doings on a regular basis - I imagine there's a huge army of people out there who eagerly look forward to my blog posts and get terribly disappointed when I don't write one, although I don't have any tangible evidence of these people's existence.
And my poor blog readers are drastically out of touch with my life right now, too, aren't you? I'll make an effort to fill you all in about my doings on a regular basis - I imagine there's a huge army of people out there who eagerly look forward to my blog posts and get terribly disappointed when I don't write one, although I don't have any tangible evidence of these people's existence.
Saturday, May 09, 2015
The extreme future
It's great to come back to work to find a hand-made poster taped to the wall of the office, cheering me on. (No, I don't work in a nursery school, though I can see how you might think that). But the XMT is always a huge success with "normal" non-memory people when they learn about it - they can and do follow the results with excitement, and understand what's going on! You can't really say that about the world memory championships.
So, if they do the automatic qualification and seedings for the 2016 XMT in the same way, the top eight will be Johannes, Boris, Simon, Alex, Christian, Katie, Jonas and Enkhjin. I'd have to match my just-for-fun training performance this year with the same kind of really-trying-to-qualify scores if I want to get into the second pot for the group stage draw. But it's a bit early to be thinking about that, who knows what new innovations might come along in the next twelve months?
Instead, I want to try to keep hold of the training enthusiasm the XMT has filled me with to practice for the more traditional competitions - hopefully, if I have any money, I'd like to go to the German championship in July, followed by the UK championship in August, and maybe get some half-decent results for a change. That will mean a lot of marathon-discipline practice between now and then, so let's see how it goes...
Wednesday, May 06, 2015
Two days of extreme!
Well, the memory part of the first day was over, anyway - a bunch of us followed it up with dinner at Olive Garden (I sampled a few cool American food franchises while I was out there - In-N-Out Burger, however much it sounds like it's promising us an immediate case of food poisoning, is actually really great!) before retiring to our hotel for the night. The hotel was the Doubletree Golf Resort we stayed at last year, although the name turned out to be a lot less appropriate than it used to be, as the golf course is closed. Keen golfer Simon was particularly annoyed by this, met the manager and demanded half the price of his room back, plus green fees at another local course and a free lunch. He got everything he demanded, too, and suggested I do the same - since I didn't have any intention of playing golf and indeed hadn't noticed the course was fenced off until Simon pointed it out, I thought that might be a bit too unethical of me, so I passed.
I'm starting to consider being a bit less ethical about things like that in future, though; I can't help thinking it'd be nice to have more money and fewer made-up-the-rules-as-I-went-along scruples that nobody else cares about...
Anyway, day two dawned bright and sunny, if a little damp - San Diego was apparently suffering a three-year-long terrible drought when we arrived, but it sorted itself out with some overnight rain that didn't bother anyone and cleared up during the daytime to leave things lovely and sunny for everyone. I approve of this kind of weather. We all made our way back to Dart Neuroscience for the excitement of the Round of 16. Germans have a word for that, incidentally - Achtelfinale - which sounds so much cooler. With four matches going on at once, this meant that the eight of us who weren't in the first four hemidemisemifinals were sealed away in the auditorium to watch everything (except the surprise task, which had to stay a surprise) on xmtlive.com on the big screen. Which was awesome! It really was exciting to watch along and follow the developing excitement, and I've been told by numerous non-memory people that they enjoyed it too!
We watched Alex polish off Annalena 4-0 with some safe and steady scores; Katie brush aside Akjol in the same way including a 47 in words (on the second day, practically everyone copied my impressive score from day 1 - Boris, Christian and Hannes all did it!); Jonas also beat Ola 4-0 with some close contests including a names match that went to a replay; and the Battle Of The Johanneses end with a tighter 4-2, settled with an amazingly close names match - Mallow managed to stop his clock two hundredths of a second before the full minute was up, and thus beat Zhou's identical score of 17 names, taking him through to the quarter-finals!
The eight remaining extremers were set free from our isolation and took our seats to find out the surprise task. It turned out to be cards, just like normal, except with loud distracting music/conversation/noise blaring at us, and no earplugs/blinkers/distraction-minimisers allowed! Up against Enkhjin, I made the slightly dubious decision to go through the cards twice rather than once, only for him to do the same and stop his clock before me. I probably would have been fine with just looking at them once, with hindsight (Simon did just that, over at table 3), but there you go. As it was, we both recalled perfectly to give him a 1-0 lead.
That gave me the choice of discipline for the second round, and I opted for normal, quiet cards, doing a pack without any problems in 26.73 to make it 1-1. I had wondered whether Enkhjin would choose names next, which is usually a guaranteed easy win against me, and so nodded approvingly when he opted for images, his specialist subject which is very easy to make a mistake in at top speed. No mistakes here, though, and he blew me away with a time of 15.66. I went for numbers after that, and stopped the clock at my usual kind of solid speed of 31.24, only to realise that I hadn't paid enough attention to the last-but-one image (I read the last six quickly and say the names repeatedly to myself rather than taking the extra seconds to visualise them, but this time I didn't have a word at all for that penultimate one. Careless.) I took a guess, got it wrong and thus had three wrong digits, whereas Enkhjin had stopped the clock unnecessarily at 38.23 and misremembered one digit, but got away with both of these sillinesses to go 3-1 up. After that, he did go for names, and did remember more of them than me, winning 19-15.
I really have to learn how to do names better - I mean, looking at it now, there's a guy called Jay with a dark blue jumper and white collar which now when I look at it immediately makes me think of Mordecai the blue jay from Regular Show. Why didn't that occur to me at the time?
In any case, that gave Enkhjin the fully-deserved win, 4-1. As it happened, the other three matches all finished at that point too, a trio of 4-1 wins for Boris, Christian and Simon over Yanjaa, Marwin and Mark Anthony.
That took us into the quarter-finals, leaving me to cheer on Meddlers Katie and Alex, who both hadn't remotely expected to get that far - or at least were humble enough to claim as much, which is just as good. The surprise task here involved memorising a protein sequence, or in other words a lot of letters, on a grid. This one wasn't very visual, since they did the memory and recall on paper and nobody could see what was going on, but Alex and Katie both won theirs against those big big names of memory Johannes and Jonas (the competition had two Johanneses, one Jonas and one Johann, with no consideration at all for people who can't remember names. Luckily, we all had name-badges.) Boris beat Christian, Simon beat Enkhjin and we went back to the visual excitement of the regular five disciplines.
This time, Enkhjin did make a mistake in his super-speedy images memorisation, and although he was unlucky to stop his numbers clock fractions of a second after Simon, he did get them all right this time around while Simon made a rare mistake. That was the only point Enkhjin won, though, and hot-favourite Simon went through to the semis 4-1. Alex pulled off a big shock by beating Jonas by the same score, after Jonas tried fast times in both images and numbers without success, and couldn't keep up with Alex's 35-second cards. Katie fought valiantly against Hannes, intending to record good images times twice only to find he did it faster, and going out 4-2. The match between Christian and Boris was the most exciting of the quarters - particularly for Boris, who was in a state of wild, manic hysteria for most of the day (nobody could accuse him of not being passionate about competition!) A 21-21 in names which Christian won by virtue of stopping the clock just before the 60 seconds were up was followed by a 43-43 words in which this time Boris did the same thing! That made it 3-2 to Boris, and when he won at numbers to take him through to the quarters he screamed "JAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!", leaping to his feet, sending his chair flying, and giving everyone either a laugh or a heart attack, depending on their constitution.
After a break for lunch (in which I sampled a Cali-style burrito, which was delicious, and chatted with the St Louis academics who probed my brain however many years ago it was) we moved into the auditorium to watch the remaining games on the stage. This allowed them to project the surprise tasks onto the big screen - the one for the semis involved memorising a map with fictional towns, temperatures and weather-symbols. I couldn't help thinking that the temperatures would have been easy enough to remember perfectly in the time allowed, giving a better score than anyone managed, but it was probably different up on the stage and under pressure. As it was, Alex got a better score than Hannes, and Boris beat Simon (yelling "YES!" and running wildly around the room to celebrate it). When in the next match Simon chose names only to lose 19-17, the celebration this time was a squeal of "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" and a mad-march-hare bouncing fit that nearly took Boris through the roof. That seemed to make him a bit more self-conscious, possibly because every camera and phone in the building was pointed at him from that point onwards to see what he'd do next - everyone was a bit disappointed with the more restrained happiness when he went 3-0 up and even when he sealed a hugely surprising 4-1 victory over the tournament favourite!
Alex, meanwhile, put up a fight against second-favourite Hannes, taking advantage of his opponent's mistakes to win at cards and numbers only to finally go down 4-3 on another cards - I doubt anyone in the world could do a fast time without mistakes under that kind of pressure.
Alex and Simon then contested the third-place play-off, which boasted the coolest and most original surprise task yet - blindfolded memorising of different textures, which then had to be rearranged into the right sequence! Extremely difficult, but a fantastic idea that I'd love to have a go at under tournament conditions myself some day! Simon won that, and took charge of things from that point on, winning 4-1 to ensure a German 1-2-3 in the XMT. Fantastic performances from both him and Alex!
And then it was time for the grand final - best of nine, this one, with two surprise tasks! The first of these was the textures again, and Boris's fingers proved the more sensitive. Hannes chose cards next, and won it despite neither of them managing to put the deck back together in full. It's very, very difficult to produce good results on such a big occasion, the tension was almost unbearable! Boris then won at names, and Hannes at numbers. The second surprise task was to memorise car licence plates - the name of the state and the six-or-seven-digit/letter registration number. The recall was done in US Championship style, with them reciting one state/letter/number in turns, and Hannes had a lot of difficulty with it, losing out on all three to Boris. We went into images next, but Boris's fast time was too fast for him to be able to recall. Hannes then won at cards to go 4-3 up and when Boris chose names for the potentially final matchup, Johannes chose that moment to produce a personal best, 22, to top Boris's 19 and become the new Extreme Memory Champion!
Just to prove that my arbitrary 100-points-for-the-best-score-in-each-discipline really does show who is the truly worthy champion, those 22 names nudged Hannes into first place on the spreadsheet, too!
What an amazing and extreme competition it was! Huge thanks are owed to Nelson, Simon Orton and all the huge number of people who worked to make it such a big success! Here's to next year... hoping that I qualify for it, at least...
Tuesday, May 05, 2015
Extreme '15!
I'm on my way home from San Diego, after a day exploring the city - lots of good comic shops around here! After two days of extreme memorising in the hot sun, it's a bit of a drag to be going back to rainy old England. Maybe I'll just stay here and assume someone'll give me a pile of money.
Anyway, we all gathered in the same venue as last year, Dart Neuroscience, only this time we had four tables on the go at once instead of two, to cope with the expanded number of competitors and disciplines. Being in Group F, I got to watch the first four groups in action before having to face my first match - groups A and B kicked off with cards and then images and most people were playing it safe as they warmed up. The ones who didn't (Simon with a 27-second pack of cards, Yanjaa and Enkhjin with super-fast images) all made mistakes. Group A included fellow Team Britain member Katie (still politely cursing being drawn in a group with Simon), while Group B had our other battling Brit, Marlo, as well as Memory Medley Member Lance.
To explain, there's a group of us called The Memory Medley who have got together on Facebook to swap daily training scores, tips, friendly banter and general motivation. It's a select group of ten people who happened to be around at the time we decided to create it, but it's been a huge help in keeping me fired up and regularly training. Five of us were in the XMT - Katie, Marlo, Lance, me and Alex. The other five Meddlers are Phill, Clay, Kevin, Sri and AB, and they were sending electronic good wishes and support to San Diego throughout.
Groups C and D then had names and numbers, the highlight being a nearly-perfectly-recalled 20-second numbers time from Johannes M, before the final two groups got to sit down in the hot seats and test our skills with words and then cards.
There were spectators on all sides, and quite close too - the screens they were watching had a ten-second delay to reduce the possibility of cheating, which worked very nicely without any problems; as with last year, only more so, the coverage in the venue and online was wonderful, keeping everyone fully up to date with what was happening at any given moment.
My first opponent was Alex, who I'd previously listed among my Group Of Life on the grounds that he's 'not quite up to my level in all the disciplines'. I was mistaken about that, it turns out - I'd now describe him as someone who's actually a little bit better than me at practically everything. He won the words match, 42 to 36 (I'm significantly better at words now than I was last year, after some good improvement in training, but 42 was the highest score I'd managed in my practice sessions, and scores in the thirties were more normal), but then I came back and won the cards with a time of 29.18 seconds. I've got to a point in the training where I can do cards at that speed and get all 52 correct nine times out of ten, which I'm very happy with. That time put me on top of the best-scores leaderboard - the highest score in each discipline on day 1 took home a big cash prize, but I was pretty sure 29 seconds wouldn't be enough to take it; the days when that was an amazingly exceptionally fast time are long gone, I'm afraid. The others in Group F, Johannes Z and Tsogbadrakh, had also won one apiece.
And so it went on - I was confidently expecting not to have an easy time of it in the morning; two of my three names matches came in the first five. When I went up against Tsogo in names I thought I might have a slight chance, since he's not so great at it either, but he did in fact win 14 to 12. On the other hand, I had thought he might well beat me at numbers, but he took it slowly and still made mistakes, letting me get the win there. In Group A, the group of names experts, Simon had recorded a 23 to beat Anne and Katie a 22 to beat Yanjaa. Over in Group B, Jonas did the first sub-30-seconds numbers time.
I lost my next names contest to Johannes Z, which was expected, and then lost to him at images too, when he stopped the clock at 22.22 before I'd got to the end of mine (and I was going fast, too!) and recalled perfectly. Boris had already set a time of 19.29 seconds to top the leaderboard there. My last match before lunch was another images round, against Alex this time, and here I managed to stop the clock at 23.55 and get them all right. On the other table, JZ did 21.24.
That left me stuck at the bottom of the league table at the half-way point:
But that was okay, as I kept telling everyone - it was very close, I'd had the difficult matches, there would be a nice run of images-cards-cards-numbers after the break and I would soon catch up. With the hectic pace, it was hard to keep up with what was happening in the other groups, but Simon to nobody's surprise was romping away with group A, winning all his matches, while Katie was keeping pace nicely with Yanjaa in the fight for second place. In Group B, Marlo was struggling while Jonas and Enkhjin were proving very difficult to beat. Group C was finely poised, but Boris was keeping the challenge of Mark Anthony and Akjol at bay. Johannes M was topping group D without too much difficulty, although fellow XMT veterans Ola and Marwin were pushing hard. The surprise package of the morning was Annalena, who had won all seven matches in Group E - with a lot of luck, she insisted, but it put her in a totally comfortable position heading into the afternoon.
The afternoon went as well as I could have hoped for me - I beat Tsogo at images when he tried a fast time but got the recall slightly wrong, then beat him and JZ at cards with super-solid 31-second times before rounding up that nice run of four "good matches" with a win in the numbers too when JZ mixed up his recall. It all sounds simple now I look back at it, but in each of my matches against Tsogo I made a last-second change in the recall when I remembered just in the nick of time the right sequence of things. It certainly gave the spectators a bit of excitement!
That left me much more relaxed going into the final four games (words-names-numbers-words), but even that doesn't explain the performance I managed to produce in the first words match against Tsogo. I somehow remembered nearly all of the 50 words much more smoothly than I ever have before, getting 47 of them right and not being too far off with the others (along the lines of remembering at least what letter they started with...). 47 is a staggeringly huge score of the kind that only the real words experts manage to produce - it didn't quite top the leaderboard, since Simon had done a 48, but it was sitting proudly up there in second place. I heard later that the Mongolian translations weren't very good, with misspellings and such, but my conscience is clear there - my freakish result would have won against pretty much anyone, even if they had the best translation the world has ever seen.
Still in a buoyant mood about that, I went into a double-header against Alex in high spirits, only for him to comfortably beat me in names and then in numbers with an excellent table-topping 25.70 seconds. Looking at our league table, I consciously registered for the first time that even though I'd achieved pretty much everything I'd been aiming for, Alex had been good enough to beat me into first place - all he had to do in the final match was beat Tsogo at words to confirm it, leaving me and JZ fighting mainly for pride (my tie-break was good enough that even if he beat me, I would end up second if I didn't get an amazingly disastrous score). Alex did win, and so did JZ (36 to 35), leaving the final group standings like this:
Johannes M knocked Alex's score off the top for numbers with 21.01 in his final match. Simon, to nobody's great surprise, took three of the best-score prizes, just like last year - cards, names and words. In images, though, it was Enkhjin who blew everyone else away - having tried super-fast times twice and not quite got the recall right, he successfully did 14.40 seconds on his final attempt; nearly a full five seconds better than anyone else had managed! This was a little bit concerning, because my second place in Group F meant I would be facing him in the round of 16. My group-of-life pick, Alex, would go up against my other group-of-life pick who had exceeded expectations, Annalena.
All the results can be seen on the excellent website, which I hope you were following all the way through the day (or night, if you're in Europe). Katie had triumphantly gone through to the round of 16 in second place in her group; Marlo and Lance had sadly narrowly missed out in theirs, on tie-break score in Marlo's case. My Excel analysis of everyone's best scores showed my opponent Enkhjin as the fourth-best performer, although I couldn't feel too bad about finishing second, because the top three were the usual suspects Jonas, Johannes and Simon, who Alex could expect to meet in the quarters, semis and final if he could win through!
It's time for me to get back to England, though - all the thrills and spills of day two will be reduced to boring bloggery for your reading displeasure when I get back home!
Anyway, we all gathered in the same venue as last year, Dart Neuroscience, only this time we had four tables on the go at once instead of two, to cope with the expanded number of competitors and disciplines. Being in Group F, I got to watch the first four groups in action before having to face my first match - groups A and B kicked off with cards and then images and most people were playing it safe as they warmed up. The ones who didn't (Simon with a 27-second pack of cards, Yanjaa and Enkhjin with super-fast images) all made mistakes. Group A included fellow Team Britain member Katie (still politely cursing being drawn in a group with Simon), while Group B had our other battling Brit, Marlo, as well as Memory Medley Member Lance.
To explain, there's a group of us called The Memory Medley who have got together on Facebook to swap daily training scores, tips, friendly banter and general motivation. It's a select group of ten people who happened to be around at the time we decided to create it, but it's been a huge help in keeping me fired up and regularly training. Five of us were in the XMT - Katie, Marlo, Lance, me and Alex. The other five Meddlers are Phill, Clay, Kevin, Sri and AB, and they were sending electronic good wishes and support to San Diego throughout.
Groups C and D then had names and numbers, the highlight being a nearly-perfectly-recalled 20-second numbers time from Johannes M, before the final two groups got to sit down in the hot seats and test our skills with words and then cards.
There were spectators on all sides, and quite close too - the screens they were watching had a ten-second delay to reduce the possibility of cheating, which worked very nicely without any problems; as with last year, only more so, the coverage in the venue and online was wonderful, keeping everyone fully up to date with what was happening at any given moment.
My first opponent was Alex, who I'd previously listed among my Group Of Life on the grounds that he's 'not quite up to my level in all the disciplines'. I was mistaken about that, it turns out - I'd now describe him as someone who's actually a little bit better than me at practically everything. He won the words match, 42 to 36 (I'm significantly better at words now than I was last year, after some good improvement in training, but 42 was the highest score I'd managed in my practice sessions, and scores in the thirties were more normal), but then I came back and won the cards with a time of 29.18 seconds. I've got to a point in the training where I can do cards at that speed and get all 52 correct nine times out of ten, which I'm very happy with. That time put me on top of the best-scores leaderboard - the highest score in each discipline on day 1 took home a big cash prize, but I was pretty sure 29 seconds wouldn't be enough to take it; the days when that was an amazingly exceptionally fast time are long gone, I'm afraid. The others in Group F, Johannes Z and Tsogbadrakh, had also won one apiece.
And so it went on - I was confidently expecting not to have an easy time of it in the morning; two of my three names matches came in the first five. When I went up against Tsogo in names I thought I might have a slight chance, since he's not so great at it either, but he did in fact win 14 to 12. On the other hand, I had thought he might well beat me at numbers, but he took it slowly and still made mistakes, letting me get the win there. In Group A, the group of names experts, Simon had recorded a 23 to beat Anne and Katie a 22 to beat Yanjaa. Over in Group B, Jonas did the first sub-30-seconds numbers time.
I lost my next names contest to Johannes Z, which was expected, and then lost to him at images too, when he stopped the clock at 22.22 before I'd got to the end of mine (and I was going fast, too!) and recalled perfectly. Boris had already set a time of 19.29 seconds to top the leaderboard there. My last match before lunch was another images round, against Alex this time, and here I managed to stop the clock at 23.55 and get them all right. On the other table, JZ did 21.24.
That left me stuck at the bottom of the league table at the half-way point:
But that was okay, as I kept telling everyone - it was very close, I'd had the difficult matches, there would be a nice run of images-cards-cards-numbers after the break and I would soon catch up. With the hectic pace, it was hard to keep up with what was happening in the other groups, but Simon to nobody's surprise was romping away with group A, winning all his matches, while Katie was keeping pace nicely with Yanjaa in the fight for second place. In Group B, Marlo was struggling while Jonas and Enkhjin were proving very difficult to beat. Group C was finely poised, but Boris was keeping the challenge of Mark Anthony and Akjol at bay. Johannes M was topping group D without too much difficulty, although fellow XMT veterans Ola and Marwin were pushing hard. The surprise package of the morning was Annalena, who had won all seven matches in Group E - with a lot of luck, she insisted, but it put her in a totally comfortable position heading into the afternoon.
The afternoon went as well as I could have hoped for me - I beat Tsogo at images when he tried a fast time but got the recall slightly wrong, then beat him and JZ at cards with super-solid 31-second times before rounding up that nice run of four "good matches" with a win in the numbers too when JZ mixed up his recall. It all sounds simple now I look back at it, but in each of my matches against Tsogo I made a last-second change in the recall when I remembered just in the nick of time the right sequence of things. It certainly gave the spectators a bit of excitement!
That left me much more relaxed going into the final four games (words-names-numbers-words), but even that doesn't explain the performance I managed to produce in the first words match against Tsogo. I somehow remembered nearly all of the 50 words much more smoothly than I ever have before, getting 47 of them right and not being too far off with the others (along the lines of remembering at least what letter they started with...). 47 is a staggeringly huge score of the kind that only the real words experts manage to produce - it didn't quite top the leaderboard, since Simon had done a 48, but it was sitting proudly up there in second place. I heard later that the Mongolian translations weren't very good, with misspellings and such, but my conscience is clear there - my freakish result would have won against pretty much anyone, even if they had the best translation the world has ever seen.
Still in a buoyant mood about that, I went into a double-header against Alex in high spirits, only for him to comfortably beat me in names and then in numbers with an excellent table-topping 25.70 seconds. Looking at our league table, I consciously registered for the first time that even though I'd achieved pretty much everything I'd been aiming for, Alex had been good enough to beat me into first place - all he had to do in the final match was beat Tsogo at words to confirm it, leaving me and JZ fighting mainly for pride (my tie-break was good enough that even if he beat me, I would end up second if I didn't get an amazingly disastrous score). Alex did win, and so did JZ (36 to 35), leaving the final group standings like this:
Johannes M knocked Alex's score off the top for numbers with 21.01 in his final match. Simon, to nobody's great surprise, took three of the best-score prizes, just like last year - cards, names and words. In images, though, it was Enkhjin who blew everyone else away - having tried super-fast times twice and not quite got the recall right, he successfully did 14.40 seconds on his final attempt; nearly a full five seconds better than anyone else had managed! This was a little bit concerning, because my second place in Group F meant I would be facing him in the round of 16. My group-of-life pick, Alex, would go up against my other group-of-life pick who had exceeded expectations, Annalena.
All the results can be seen on the excellent website, which I hope you were following all the way through the day (or night, if you're in Europe). Katie had triumphantly gone through to the round of 16 in second place in her group; Marlo and Lance had sadly narrowly missed out in theirs, on tie-break score in Marlo's case. My Excel analysis of everyone's best scores showed my opponent Enkhjin as the fourth-best performer, although I couldn't feel too bad about finishing second, because the top three were the usual suspects Jonas, Johannes and Simon, who Alex could expect to meet in the quarters, semis and final if he could win through!
It's time for me to get back to England, though - all the thrills and spills of day two will be reduced to boring bloggery for your reading displeasure when I get back home!
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Go Diego Go!
Here I am in sunny San Diego! Well, it's night-time, but tomorrow it will be sunny, I'm assured. The Extreme Memory Tournament happens this weekend, and I hope you're all ready to tune in to the XMT Live website! As I said last year, click on everything, it's a Simon Orton masterpiece of clickability - in fact, I think it's even clickier this year than it was in 2014! Follow all the action, live!
Unless you're in bed. I do appreciate that it's four o'clock tomorrow morning back home.
Unless you're in bed. I do appreciate that it's four o'clock tomorrow morning back home.
Monday, April 27, 2015
Beware the red moon!
It does exist!
Big thanks to Gilby1385 for pointing me to an eBay auction for the one Krypton Force Force Five video missing from my collection! I'm not sure that I particularly want the tape for any reason other than completism - as I've mentioned in my various Krypton Force blogs, I don't really like the Grandizer cartoon, and the artwork on the Orion Quest covers doesn't even seem to be by Marc, so is missing all the so-bad-it's-good qualities you get with his artwork. But hey, from the picture of the box alone I've now got the subtitle, the text on the back and some pretty solid confirmation that it contains the first two episodes of the series, so I'll update the master blog page with the new details!
And let's hope I win the auction and nobody tries to extort money out of me by bidding thousands of pounds...
Big thanks to Gilby1385 for pointing me to an eBay auction for the one Krypton Force Force Five video missing from my collection! I'm not sure that I particularly want the tape for any reason other than completism - as I've mentioned in my various Krypton Force blogs, I don't really like the Grandizer cartoon, and the artwork on the Orion Quest covers doesn't even seem to be by Marc, so is missing all the so-bad-it's-good qualities you get with his artwork. But hey, from the picture of the box alone I've now got the subtitle, the text on the back and some pretty solid confirmation that it contains the first two episodes of the series, so I'll update the master blog page with the new details!
And let's hope I win the auction and nobody tries to extort money out of me by bidding thousands of pounds...
Monday, April 20, 2015
Let's go skating!
I'm sure you all remember the blog post I wrote eight years ago in which I compared memory competitions to figure skating. Or at least the picture that followed it. It's interesting how things have changed since then. Back in 2007, "national standard" competitions with their shorter disciplines were still a bit of a novelty, the US championship was the only really different kind of memory tournament, and the XMT didn't exist even in people's wildest imagination.
The XMT, of course, is exactly the kind of free-skating thing I was burbling about eight years ago, and I'm pretty sure it now gets the general memory-athlete community more excited than the world memory championships do. But things like that and the Memoriad and the multiple other competitions going on (I haven't even mentioned the cool things happening in Los Angeles, been so wrapped up in Extremeness...) have all sort of combined into a really quite cool whole. The WMSC isn't as big a deal as it used to be when those were the only memory championships in the world, but while the world championship with its hour-long disciplines is still something people aspire to, it's not going to be swept aside. I like the balance we have right now!
The XMT, of course, is exactly the kind of free-skating thing I was burbling about eight years ago, and I'm pretty sure it now gets the general memory-athlete community more excited than the world memory championships do. But things like that and the Memoriad and the multiple other competitions going on (I haven't even mentioned the cool things happening in Los Angeles, been so wrapped up in Extremeness...) have all sort of combined into a really quite cool whole. The WMSC isn't as big a deal as it used to be when those were the only memory championships in the world, but while the world championship with its hour-long disciplines is still something people aspire to, it's not going to be swept aside. I like the balance we have right now!
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Glossary
An additional note to tonight's blog - Yanjaa has given me a good telling-off for referring to names and words as 'nurds' instead of 'nards', so I do apologise for any confusion caused. The official ruling is now that 'nards' means 'names and words' or the people who are good at memorising them, and 'nurds' means 'numbers and cards'. So now there can't possibly be any mix-ups!
The draw is done!
And hmmmmm, not the group of death I was most worried about, but it's going to be tough. Check out the group draw here!
Let's have a look at the groupings, starting with Group A: Simon, Yanjaa, Anne, Katie. Poor Katie, she was hoping to avoid Simon, and I'm sure she would have preferred not to go up against Yanjaa either. But I don't think that's a problem - Katie really is better than those two at the crucial names and words (nurds), and I think she could spring a surprise or two. In fact, Simon could be in a little bit of trouble here! This is the nurdiest group of all, with four experts fighting it out. If he slips up on numbers or cards (which, I'll grant you, he seldom does), it might not be plain sailing for the reigning champ.
Group B: Jonas, Enhkjin, Lance and Marlo. I'd certainly give Marlo a chance here of reaching the knockout stages. (I'd really love to see Team Britain do well in the XMT). It does look like Jonas will be favourite to top the group, but I can see a fierce battle developing between the other three.
Group C: Mark Anthony, Boris, Tuuruul and Akjol. That's a good draw for Boris, I think he'll do well here. And I can see Akjol being his closest rival; he's got a sort of all-round consistency on the big occasions, I think based on my admittedly limited knowledge of the guy. By the way, is it me or does that photo look nothing like Boris? Are we sure it's him?
Group D: Johannes M, Ola, Enkhmunkh, Marwin. This is going to be a real ding-dong; all four of them are likely to be evenly matched and producing some impressive results. It'll be down to who can do it with the most consistency, and I think that's probably going to be Hannes. Marwin is my dark horse to do well at the XMT this year; he's improved a lot since 2014.
Group E: Christian, Johann, Annalena, Johnny. Interesting in that Christian and Annalena are a couple, and will be head-to-head against each other for the first time; that's something to talk about in the press. But I can see Christian coming out on top of this group quite easily, maybe with Johann in second place.
Group F: And finally, it goes Ben, Johannes Z, Tsogbadrakh, Alex. The good thing about this is that at least three of the group will probably be blogging extensively about it - Tsogo might too, although if he does it'll most likely be in Mongolian. I'm going to face some tough challenges from all three of the others here, and it really depends on how fast and reliable everyone can be with cards, images and numbers. In my training lately I've been pretty good at getting 100% correct in a reasonably good time, but we'll just have to see how it goes in the competition...
And if I win my group and my round-of-16, I'm liable to face Jonas in the quarter-final. Finish second, and it'll be Simon. But I'll cross those bridges if and when I come to them.
Let's have a look at the groupings, starting with Group A: Simon, Yanjaa, Anne, Katie. Poor Katie, she was hoping to avoid Simon, and I'm sure she would have preferred not to go up against Yanjaa either. But I don't think that's a problem - Katie really is better than those two at the crucial names and words (nurds), and I think she could spring a surprise or two. In fact, Simon could be in a little bit of trouble here! This is the nurdiest group of all, with four experts fighting it out. If he slips up on numbers or cards (which, I'll grant you, he seldom does), it might not be plain sailing for the reigning champ.
Group B: Jonas, Enhkjin, Lance and Marlo. I'd certainly give Marlo a chance here of reaching the knockout stages. (I'd really love to see Team Britain do well in the XMT). It does look like Jonas will be favourite to top the group, but I can see a fierce battle developing between the other three.
Group C: Mark Anthony, Boris, Tuuruul and Akjol. That's a good draw for Boris, I think he'll do well here. And I can see Akjol being his closest rival; he's got a sort of all-round consistency on the big occasions, I think based on my admittedly limited knowledge of the guy. By the way, is it me or does that photo look nothing like Boris? Are we sure it's him?
Group D: Johannes M, Ola, Enkhmunkh, Marwin. This is going to be a real ding-dong; all four of them are likely to be evenly matched and producing some impressive results. It'll be down to who can do it with the most consistency, and I think that's probably going to be Hannes. Marwin is my dark horse to do well at the XMT this year; he's improved a lot since 2014.
Group E: Christian, Johann, Annalena, Johnny. Interesting in that Christian and Annalena are a couple, and will be head-to-head against each other for the first time; that's something to talk about in the press. But I can see Christian coming out on top of this group quite easily, maybe with Johann in second place.
Group F: And finally, it goes Ben, Johannes Z, Tsogbadrakh, Alex. The good thing about this is that at least three of the group will probably be blogging extensively about it - Tsogo might too, although if he does it'll most likely be in Mongolian. I'm going to face some tough challenges from all three of the others here, and it really depends on how fast and reliable everyone can be with cards, images and numbers. In my training lately I've been pretty good at getting 100% correct in a reasonably good time, but we'll just have to see how it goes in the competition...
And if I win my group and my round-of-16, I'm liable to face Jonas in the quarter-final. Finish second, and it'll be Simon. But I'll cross those bridges if and when I come to them.
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
A different kind of death
Okay, I need to rethink exactly what the worst XMT group draw for me could be, because they've rejigged the seedings so I'm in the first pot and introduced rules limiting how many people from each country can be in a group. See the post here for details!
We have 6 groups (A-F), that will have 4 competitors each. The top 6 rankings will own a top spot in the first 6 groups (so, Simon (A), Johannes (B), Jonas (C), Mark Anthony (D), Christian (E), and Ben (F)). Then we will split the rest of the competitors into 3 pools:
Pool 1 (rankings 7-12)
7. Ola Kåre Risa
8. Boris Konrad
9. Johannes Zhou
10. Yanjaa Altansuh
11. Enhkjin Tumur
12. Johann Randall Abrina
Pool 2 (rankings 13-18)
13. Enkhumnkh Erdenebatkhaan
14. Annalena Fischer
15. Tsogobadrakh Saikhanbayar
16. Anne Reulke
17. Lance Tschirhart
18. Tuuruul Myagmarsuren
Pool 3 (rankings 19-24)
19. Alexander Mullen
20. Marwin Wallonius
21. Marlo Knight
22. Akjol Syeryekkhaan
23. Katie Kermode
24. Johnny Briones
GER: 7 competitors - no more than 2 in each group
MNG: 5 competitors - no more than 2 in each group
SWE: 3 competitors - no more than 1 in each group
UK: 3 competitors - no more than 1 in each group
USA: 3 competitors - no more than 1 in each group
PHL: 2 competitors - no more than 1 in each group
So, I'm now in group F, and who'll join me? Well, from pool 1 I think the name that instils the most terror in me is Boris - he'll beat me in names and words most likely, and everything else quite possibly too. The 'easy' option would probably be Enhkjin, who's in the top group thanks to some super-fast times in images and numbers in the qualifying tournament that he might not be able to replicate in a one-off situation.
I've thought about pool 2 since I did my previous Group of Death predictions and decided that Enkhmunkh is slightly more deathy than Lance is, so he moves to the top of my most-feared list today.
And now that I can't be paired with Katie or Marlo from pool 4, that I think leaves Marwin as the one to most make me tremble.
Revised Group of Death: Me, Boris, Enkhmunkh, Marwin. Revised Group of Life: Me, Enhkjin, Anne, Alex. Fingers crossed!
And then, of course, we have to think about who I'll play in the knockout rounds if I manage to get through the inevitable group of death I'll be drawn in. They're using the knockout phase structure from Euro 2016, apparently, but that doesn't strictly tell me who I'd be up against if I win my group, because that seems to be arranged so that groups A and D are the top two seeds (they're the ones who play runners-up rather than group winners in the quarter-finals), so there'll probably be a bit of re-jigging of the alphabet. But E and F do seem to be fifth and sixth seeds in that structure too, so I guess I'd be playing the runner-up of group E (Christian's group) in the round of 16. After that I play a group winner - it's logical to have 3rd seed against 6th in the quarter-finals, so that would mean... Jonas again. Should I say "yikes" or "aha, my chance for revenge!"?
Tell you what, I won't say anything until I've got through the group stage. It's seriously dangerous to start planning things as if I'm going to win my group, isn't it?
We have 6 groups (A-F), that will have 4 competitors each. The top 6 rankings will own a top spot in the first 6 groups (so, Simon (A), Johannes (B), Jonas (C), Mark Anthony (D), Christian (E), and Ben (F)). Then we will split the rest of the competitors into 3 pools:
Pool 1 (rankings 7-12)
7. Ola Kåre Risa
8. Boris Konrad
9. Johannes Zhou
10. Yanjaa Altansuh
11. Enhkjin Tumur
12. Johann Randall Abrina
Pool 2 (rankings 13-18)
13. Enkhumnkh Erdenebatkhaan
14. Annalena Fischer
15. Tsogobadrakh Saikhanbayar
16. Anne Reulke
17. Lance Tschirhart
18. Tuuruul Myagmarsuren
Pool 3 (rankings 19-24)
19. Alexander Mullen
20. Marwin Wallonius
21. Marlo Knight
22. Akjol Syeryekkhaan
23. Katie Kermode
24. Johnny Briones
GER: 7 competitors - no more than 2 in each group
MNG: 5 competitors - no more than 2 in each group
SWE: 3 competitors - no more than 1 in each group
UK: 3 competitors - no more than 1 in each group
USA: 3 competitors - no more than 1 in each group
PHL: 2 competitors - no more than 1 in each group
So, I'm now in group F, and who'll join me? Well, from pool 1 I think the name that instils the most terror in me is Boris - he'll beat me in names and words most likely, and everything else quite possibly too. The 'easy' option would probably be Enhkjin, who's in the top group thanks to some super-fast times in images and numbers in the qualifying tournament that he might not be able to replicate in a one-off situation.
I've thought about pool 2 since I did my previous Group of Death predictions and decided that Enkhmunkh is slightly more deathy than Lance is, so he moves to the top of my most-feared list today.
And now that I can't be paired with Katie or Marlo from pool 4, that I think leaves Marwin as the one to most make me tremble.
Revised Group of Death: Me, Boris, Enkhmunkh, Marwin. Revised Group of Life: Me, Enhkjin, Anne, Alex. Fingers crossed!
And then, of course, we have to think about who I'll play in the knockout rounds if I manage to get through the inevitable group of death I'll be drawn in. They're using the knockout phase structure from Euro 2016, apparently, but that doesn't strictly tell me who I'd be up against if I win my group, because that seems to be arranged so that groups A and D are the top two seeds (they're the ones who play runners-up rather than group winners in the quarter-finals), so there'll probably be a bit of re-jigging of the alphabet. But E and F do seem to be fifth and sixth seeds in that structure too, so I guess I'd be playing the runner-up of group E (Christian's group) in the round of 16. After that I play a group winner - it's logical to have 3rd seed against 6th in the quarter-finals, so that would mean... Jonas again. Should I say "yikes" or "aha, my chance for revenge!"?
Tell you what, I won't say anything until I've got through the group stage. It's seriously dangerous to start planning things as if I'm going to win my group, isn't it?
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Let's get extreme!
The most exciting part of the Extreme Memory Tournament that happens in advance (except for the qualifying competition) happens on Wednesday 15th, at 12 noon EST, which means 5pm here in Britain! It's the draw for the groups, and I would really prefer not to end up in the most horrifyingly difficult group again, if it can possibly be avoided...
So here's how it works. The names are in four pots, and I'm in pot 2:
1. Simon Reinhard
2. Johannes Mallow
3. Jonas Von Essen
4. Mark Anthony Castaneda
5. Christian Schaffer
6. Ola Kare Risa
7. Ben Pridmore
8. Boris Konrad
9. Johannes Zhou
10. Yanjaa Altansuh
11. Enhkjin Tumur
12. Johann Randall Abrina
13. Enkhumnkh Erdenebatkhaan
14. Annalena Fischer
15. Tsogobadrakh Saikhanbayar
16. Anne Reulke
17. Lance Tschirhart
18. Tuuruul Myagmarsuren
19. Alexander Mullen
20. Marwin Wallonius
21. Marlo Knight
22. Akjol Syeryekkhaan
23. Katie Kermode
24. Johnny Briones
Now, being in the second pot isn't so bad, because it means I don't get put in the same group as Boris, Johannes Z or Yanjaa, who are all experts at what Alex Mullen called 'nards', meaning 'names and words'. As an aside, that's not a good thing to call names and words. Not when 'numbers and cards' is another combination that people talk about. Let's call them 'nurds' instead; that should remove any possible confusion.
Pot one contains reigning champion and hot favourite Simon, who I would really prefer to avoid at all costs. It does include last year's 4th-placer Mark Anthony, who looks the most tempting prospect, for all that he did so well last time round. I'm fairly sure I can beat him if things go well, and finishing first in the group would give a big advantage when it comes to the knockout rounds.
Pot three contains a selection of scary Mongolians, who are more of an unknown quantity to me than the Europeans and so make me nervous with their occasional extremely good scores in numbers and cards. Tsogbadrakh, though, I know to be someone who concentrates on numbers more than anything else, and Tuuruul hasn't competed very much lately. Enkhmunkh is the one who's most worrying of the three, with his cards expertise; but Lance is concerning too, just because he's the kind of person who could pull an amazing performance out of nowhere. Hard to say which of them is the group-of-deathiest. The undeathiest in the pot would probably be Anne, though nothing's ever easy here.
Pot four, on the other hand, has the name of Katie jumping out at me. Just like with James Paterson last year, she's the big nurds expert in the bottom six, and I really want to avoid her. Marwin is improving a lot too, and he's got the advantage of having been there last year. I would say my preferred opponent out of those six is Alex - excellent memoriser and all-round-nice-guy though he is, I see him as someone who's not quite up to my level yet in all the disciplines (except names, of course).
So, the Group of Death that I really don't want to end up facing: Simon, me, Lance, Katie. Group of Life: Mark, me, Anne, Alex. Let's just see how it goes...
So here's how it works. The names are in four pots, and I'm in pot 2:
1. Simon Reinhard
2. Johannes Mallow
3. Jonas Von Essen
4. Mark Anthony Castaneda
5. Christian Schaffer
6. Ola Kare Risa
7. Ben Pridmore
8. Boris Konrad
9. Johannes Zhou
10. Yanjaa Altansuh
11. Enhkjin Tumur
12. Johann Randall Abrina
13. Enkhumnkh Erdenebatkhaan
14. Annalena Fischer
15. Tsogobadrakh Saikhanbayar
16. Anne Reulke
17. Lance Tschirhart
18. Tuuruul Myagmarsuren
19. Alexander Mullen
20. Marwin Wallonius
21. Marlo Knight
22. Akjol Syeryekkhaan
23. Katie Kermode
24. Johnny Briones
Now, being in the second pot isn't so bad, because it means I don't get put in the same group as Boris, Johannes Z or Yanjaa, who are all experts at what Alex Mullen called 'nards', meaning 'names and words'. As an aside, that's not a good thing to call names and words. Not when 'numbers and cards' is another combination that people talk about. Let's call them 'nurds' instead; that should remove any possible confusion.
Pot one contains reigning champion and hot favourite Simon, who I would really prefer to avoid at all costs. It does include last year's 4th-placer Mark Anthony, who looks the most tempting prospect, for all that he did so well last time round. I'm fairly sure I can beat him if things go well, and finishing first in the group would give a big advantage when it comes to the knockout rounds.
Pot three contains a selection of scary Mongolians, who are more of an unknown quantity to me than the Europeans and so make me nervous with their occasional extremely good scores in numbers and cards. Tsogbadrakh, though, I know to be someone who concentrates on numbers more than anything else, and Tuuruul hasn't competed very much lately. Enkhmunkh is the one who's most worrying of the three, with his cards expertise; but Lance is concerning too, just because he's the kind of person who could pull an amazing performance out of nowhere. Hard to say which of them is the group-of-deathiest. The undeathiest in the pot would probably be Anne, though nothing's ever easy here.
Pot four, on the other hand, has the name of Katie jumping out at me. Just like with James Paterson last year, she's the big nurds expert in the bottom six, and I really want to avoid her. Marwin is improving a lot too, and he's got the advantage of having been there last year. I would say my preferred opponent out of those six is Alex - excellent memoriser and all-round-nice-guy though he is, I see him as someone who's not quite up to my level yet in all the disciplines (except names, of course).
So, the Group of Death that I really don't want to end up facing: Simon, me, Lance, Katie. Group of Life: Mark, me, Anne, Alex. Let's just see how it goes...
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