Memory Medley

It's the Memoriad in Las Vegas this week, which I would have liked to go to, but since I'm so totally out of practice I can't really justify the expense, especially since I've agreed to run all these competitions back in blighty over the next month. Still, I'm sure everybody'll have a great time!

As for the competitions I'm running, here's a quick reminder. Everything this year is a bit on the last-minute side, so I can forgive you for not knowing what's going on. Next year, everything I run (which I think will be two competitions at most) will be announced far, far in advance. See the bottom of this very post, for instance!

Saturday November 12th - Numbers and Cards, Broneirion, Wales.
Sunday November 13th - The Friendly Championship, Broneirion again.
Saturday/Sunday November 19th/20th - Peak UK Memory League Championship, London.
Saturday/Sunday December 3rd/4th - Peak IAM European Open, London.

The latter two are sponsored by Peak, the app for genuinely really fun "mind-training" games. I'd recommend it even if they weren't generously hosting memory competitions! [You know what I'm like, if I didn't like the app I'd say so, and sponsorship be damned, and get told off by everybody in the memory world. Luckily, I do like this one!]

All but the Memory League Championship are open to everyone; that one is invitation only and limited to British memorisers (BUT, if you're British and would like to compete, I'm currently waiting to hear back about filling a couple of vacated spots, so please let me know if you're interested!)



So that's your lot for 2016. But THEN, I'm happy to give advance warning that there will be a big, cool memory championship at the Mind Sports Olympiad in 2017, at JW3 in London, probably on Monday/Tuesday 21st/22nd August. It will be an international standard event, with the overall winner calculated in the usual way by adding up the scores of all ten disciplines, but it will also be split into three 'modules', which MSO competitors can pick and choose from, and which will each have their own individual winner and medals. Oh, and this competition will also be called the European Open, or something along those lines. But in both cases that just means it's in Europe, not that you have to be European to compete.

Day 1 morning/afternoon - "Marathon Memory" - 30-minute numbers, 30-minute cards and 30-minute binary.
Day 2 morning - "Natural Memory" - 15-minute names, 15-minute words, 15-minute images (or whatever the IAM come up with as a new discipline)
Day 2 afternoon - "Speed Memory" - 5-minute dates, 5-minute numbers, spoken numbers, speed cards.

I would urge everybody to come along to the whole MSO in 2017! I'm going to, and I'll probably wax lyrical about how I went to the first one as a 20-year-old in 1997, and now I'm going to this one as a 40-year-old in 2017, and ah me, where did all the years go, half of my lifetime, and so on and so forth. Look forward to it!



PS After my post earlier today, I need to put in some kind of disclaimer saying "any and all spelling mistakes in this post are obviously deliberately made as some kind of ironic comment. No, really, they are."

If you're going to use words like "author" and "professional"...

I get junk emails quite regularly from a thing called "Authorcraft - the professional network for authors." I don't remember why, which probably means I signed up to it with vague ideas of promoting my book about memory, in the days when I was determined to make an effort to write a proper book about memory. But I've finally decided to unsubscribe today after receiving their latest mass mailing with the subject line "AuthorCraft Caoching Call this Tuesday 8st November". And the attached email doesn't seem to be making a point about the necessity of proof-reading what you write, either. This is probably why I've never become an author, obviously - I'd much rather read a bad book with good spelling than a good book with bad. I'm probably very out of tune with the way book-readers' minds work...

Notability

I've come across the diaries of Elizabeth Firth on the universal repository of everything that is the internet. She was a woman of no particular significance, and her diaries are quite literally the dullest things ever written, but they're still of interest to people because Patrick Bronte (father of the famous writers) proposed marriage to her in 1821. She turned him down, sensibly enough - she was young and fairly wealthy, he was twice her age with no money and six small children - but that gives her enough of a connection that her brief scribbles documenting which of her neighbours came to tea that day can still be enthusiastically pored over by fans of that kind of thing.

I would quite like to be famous one day for having been vaguely acquainted with someone notorious. I really hope that somewhere in this last decade of drivel I've subjected my blog-readers to, there's a passing comment about someone who in the distant years to come will be considered really cool and important. I can just imagine people of the 23rd century looking back on this and writing inaccurate footnotes to explain what I'm referring to in blog entries either side of the one where I said I was hanging out with the cool and important person.

Remember memory?

I haven't written enough about memory stuff just lately. The upcoming competitions are all taking shape, whenever I get a moment to spare to arrange things about them - I've got next week off work, more because I needed to use up another five days before the end of the year than because I particularly had to be off, but it'll be nice to spend the week alternately loafing around and finalising all the details for the championships.

Also in memory world, I might well be appearing on a very cool programme, on British TV no less, before too long. I was just thinking to myself "I haven't been on British TV for yonks..." when I got the message about this one - am I one of those people who always dreams of being on TV, even at my advanced age and satisfactory levels of semi-fame? Or was it just perfect timing? Whatever the reason, I said yes straight away, so fingers crossed, it'll be fun for everyone!

By the horns of the prophet Balag, it's episode 3 of The Pirate Planet!

An anonymouse asked me to write a blog about episodes of Doctor Who written by Douglas Adams. This is a very impressively random request, and I'd like to see more of that kind of thing, please!

Now, there are actually only four episodes of Doctor Who with the credit "written by Douglas Adams" - the four episodes of the serial "The Pirate Planet" (September - October 1978). He also wrote the vast majority of the serial "City of Death", which was credited to BBC stock pseudonym 'David Agnew', and the serial "Shada", which was partly filmed but then abandoned and never broadcast due to a strike. And he was the script editor for series seventeen (1979-80), which included the latter two stories and four others, all of which he contributed a fair bit of writing to. But if you want to be picky and write about episodes 'officially' written by Douglas Adams, you're basically stuck with The Pirate Planet.

As it happens, episode 3 of The Pirate Planet was aired on BBC1 on my second birthday, Saturday October 14th, 1978, at 6:20pm (in between Noel Edmonds' Lucky Numbers and Larry Grayson's Generation Game). I probably didn't watch it. You never know, though, my parents might have had it on in the background and plonked me down in front of it for half an hour before bedtime in the hopes of keeping me quiet while they dealt with my four-month-old baby brother, but I think it's unlikely.

The Pirate Planet was the first thing Douglas Adams wrote for Doctor Who, and still one of the first things he wrote for television, though he'd chipped in bits and pieces here and there for a few years beforehand. He'd previously submitted a script called "The Krikkitmen" to the producer of Doctor Who, which was rejected and eventually recycled into his book "Life, the Universe and Everything", with the Doctor replaced by the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy crew - similarly, large parts of "Shada" and even "City of Death" ended up in "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency", many years down the road. The Pirate Planet also has a Hitchhiker's connection - very shortly after being commissioned to write the Doctor Who scripts, Adams was given the go-ahead to write the radio series that made him famous. He made that his number one priority, it's fair to say.

The writer's TV inexperience shows. The script to The Pirate Planet calls for a very large number of sets, costumes and characters - even after being rewritten extensively by script editor Anthony Read to make it possible to do it on a BBC budget - with the inevitable consequence that the sets and costumes look very very cheap and tacky, and the acting is pretty uniformly awful. No highly-paid big-name guest stars in this one, although apparently one actor insisted on and got a pay rise because she was required to play the part without her false teeth.

I've got the video - or at least my brother has, and his video collection is crammed into one of my cupboards - so I can happily watch it now and describe it on my blog. But before I do, let's travel back in time a little way, before the internet came along, before videos of old Doctor Who adventures came along, and let's settle down in the 1980s and look around ourselves. As a young Doctor Who fan, I can't just go out and buy a DVD or even a video cassette of the Doctor Who story of my choice. I certainly can't go on the internet and watch it on YouTube or illegally download it from somewhere. The only way I can experience the history of Doctor Who is by borrowing the books from the library.

There were novelisations of nearly every Doctor Who story ever made, going all the way back to 1963. Nearly all of them were written by Terrance Dicks, and all of them were fun, exciting and just awesome to this young fan! But there were just a few Doctor Who stories that weren't available as books - the ones written by Douglas Adams. He wouldn't give permission for anyone else to novelise them, and he wasn't prepared to do it himself for the paltry amount that Terrance Dicks got paid, either (or, to put it more charitably, he was too busy with his many other works). So while I had read and enjoyed the rest of series sixteen (the "Key To Time" year), The Pirate Planet was a fascinating mystery to me. What happened in it? Was it a good story? I didn't even know the title (even reference books were few and far between back then), so I couldn't even speculate whether it was about a planet full of pirates. Would I ever know?

Watching the video, after all that build-up, was something of a let-down. It's not that great. But now let's travel back a bit further, imagine ourselves on my second birthday, October 14th 1978, and tune in our television set (you don't need to tune in a dial, it's a swanky modern TV set with pre-set buttons, hired for a reasonable fee from Radio Rentals) to BBC1. Sit back and enjoy tonight's episode!

The opening titles at this point in history are a sort of rectangular pattern of swirling colours - the TARDIS appears in the middle of it as the theme tune plays, and moves closer towards the viewer, before fading away to be replaced by a wavy tunnel with a circular light at the end, which the camera chases down... then it fades into a picture of Tom Baker's face, which is in turn replaced by the diamond-shaped Doctor Who logo, which recedes down a diamond-shaped tunnel and eventually disappears as the story title "THE PIRATE PLANET" appears on screen, followed by "BY DOUGLAS ADAMS" and finally "PART THREE"

Tom Baker is in his fifth year as the Doctor now, and still going strong. We recall that this year (we're in the second four-part story of the latest series), he and his robot dog K-9 (voiced by John Leeson) have been joined by new companion Romana (played by Mary Tamm), a fellow Time Lord. They've been tasked with retrieving the six segments of the Key To Time, and it's become clear that each story this season will involve them searching for a particular segment, somewhere in time and space, and getting drawn into a largely unrelated adventure.

We start straight off with the ending to last week's episode - in a very poorly-lit underground cavern (really, it's hard to see anything happening), the black-uniformed soldiers of the Captain are chasing the Doctor, Romana and their new friend Kimus (who wears the stylish costume of the people from the planet Zanak). They run into the creepy robe-wearing Mentiads - "Doctor, we have come for you!", the leader ominously intones. That's where we left them last week. Close-up of the Doctor's face, complete with scar on his lip (Tom Baker was bitten by a dog just before filming started!) that is in various stages of healing throughout this story, playing havoc with continuity.

If we stretch our memories, we can remember that the Doctor and his companions thought they were arriving on the planet Calufrax in search of the second segment of the Key, but found themselves instead on Zanak, a planet commanded by the insane piratical Captain and populated by affluent and docile people. It has turned out that the planet Zanak itself is hollow, and can be teleported around the universe, materialising around a smaller planet and draining it of its precious minerals and jewels. Extremely cool concept!

One of the Mentiads pulls back his hood, and Kimus is surprised to see that it's his friend Pralix. It turns out that "We have come for you" is open to interpretation - the Mentiads are nice, and use their mental powers to create a force-wall protecting the heroes from the soldiers. They take the Doctor and his friends back to their base, where K-9 already is, along with another new friend, Mula. She's also surprised that the Mentiads have turned out to be nice.

Back at the Captain's headquarters (the Bridge), he reacts badly to a soldier reporting that the Doctor has escaped again. He unleashes his robot parrot (excuse me, his "polyphase avitron" - classic Douglas Adams stuff) to kill the hapless messenger. The costumes, sets and acting around the Captain are the worst of a bad bunch in this serial.

The Mentiads explain that they're opposed to the Captain, steadily recruiting new people to form a telepathic gestalt to resist him. The Doctor fills them in on Zanak's nature and activities. The Captain rants a bit more to his head scientist, Mr Fibuli. Bruce Purchase, as the Captain, goes too far with his overacting, I think - even though it's part of the script that he's a blustering fool rather than a real leader. His nurse, the real power behind the throne, does a very good job of remaining silently in the background.

The Mentiads fill the Doctor in on the history of their planet - it was ruined by wars instigated by Queen Xanxia, and returned to prosperity when the Captain arrived and took over. The Doctor gets Romana to explain why draining the "life force" of planets affects the telepathic Mentiads, in a way that's very technobabbly and really not as funny as you might expect from Douglas Adams - Doctor Who had recently moved away from a phase of deadly-serious adaptations of classic horror stories and into more light-hearted and silly directions (a good thing, on balance; the 'gothic' era is wildly overrated), but this one doesn't go anywhere near as far into comedy as it could.

The Captain and Mr Fibuli give the viewer a bit of exposition by telling each other what they already know, and don't add anything very significant to what the other characters have already said. He laments being trapped on the planet, and vows to kill the Doctor. The nurse approves.

Then we get our first look this episode at the astonishingly cheap model of the city, because the Doctor and Kimus have gone back to the surface since we last saw them. They lure the pilot of an air-car away with a trail of licorice allsorts, but it doesn't work, and they're captured. Mr Fibuli explains that they've identified the next planet for their piracy, rich in the mineral they need to fix their transporting equipment - turns out it's Earth.

K-9 has been left in the air-car - he hotwires and steals it (well, he extends the sucker thing out of the centre of his head, anyway - you have to use your imagination with K-9, it's not a very complicated prop), while Romana, Mula and the Mentiads walk through the wilderness, and the Doctor wakes up to find himself chained to a wall and confronted by the Captain. Actually, they're not chains. The BBC couldn't afford chains. They're very clearly car seatbelts, in fact. He goads the Captain into releasing him.

The Captain shows the Doctor the little bits of rock that are the remains of the worlds he's plundered. They're compressed in a way that worries the Doctor - it's one of those things that would destroy the universe if it goes just a little bit slightly wrong. The Mentiads are approaching the Bridge, and the Captain makes ready to resist them. He has a machine, powered by crystals from all the plundered planets, that can kill them or something - Kimus is infuriated and wants to attack the Captain. The Captain sets the polyphase avitron on him, but luckily, K-9 arrives just in time!

And... oh dear... there's a fight scene between the two robotic animals. On a shoestring budget. It's one of the stupidest-looking moments in television history. The Doctor and Kimus understandably run away from it and find themselves in a chamber with an old woman, frozen in time. It's Queen Xanxia (no false teeth or anything), suspended in the last few seconds of her life. Outside the door, the nurse is unusually impatient as the guards try to break in.

K-9 joins the Doctor, having killed the parrot. Sending him and Kimus down to sabotage the engines, the Doctor goes back out to see the Captain. He sentences the Doctor to die by walking the plank. "You can't be serious," the Doctor says, sounding more irritated than anything, probably because the cheap set doesn't at all convey the idea that the plank is supposed to be sticking out of a window over a thousand-foot drop. But the guard shoots at his feet, and the Doctor falls! Cliffhanger ending! The credits roll (Tom Baker is credited as playing "Doctor Who", as was always the case, even though in the episodes themselves the character is always just referred to as "The Doctor"), and we'll turn the telly off and put two-year-old me to bed, then settle down to watch Larry Grayson.

So there we have it - it's not a particularly great episode, certainly not by the standards of Douglas Adams, but it's fun and watchable. Far from the worst thing Doctor Who ever did, anyway, and quite worth watching if you're in the right mood. But if you're looking for classic Adams stuff... well, there's a reason he was never famous for writing Doctor Who, I'm afraid.

Signed and delivered

Today's randomly-chosen comic from my collection is number 1010 - Hellions #3, from 2005! Let's see what the next next next generation of mutant superheroes was up to, at that moment!

 A brief history of the X-Men comics is necessary at this point. The X-Men first appeared in 1963 - a comic about a team of teenage mutants at Professor X's school. It was a little bit lost among the many other superhero comics Marvel launched at that time, revolutionising the whole concept of superhero comics and remaining popular to this day, fifty-plus years later. The comic was cancelled in 1970.

It was relaunched in 1975, with a mostly all-new team, adults now (the originals had grown up in a slightly ambiguous way, but weren't teenagers any more at any rate), and became very, very, very popular. The coolest comic in the world, in fact, and so ripe for spin-offs, although at first Marvel were concerned about diluting the concept, and so kept these to a minimum.

The one they did allow, in fact, was New Mutants - a 1982 comic about a small number of teenage heroes who became the adult X-Men's students, and had adventures befitting the next generation of superheroes. There was a rival school of teenage mutants, more evil, called the Hellions and run by Emma Frost, the White Queen. The New Mutants carried on for a while, eventually embracing the gritty, tough, cool trends of the early nineties, changing their name to X-Force, carrying great big guns around and so forth.

In 1993, Marvel launched a new series with a whole new bunch of teenage mutants. This one was called Generation X, and they were, I suppose, the next next generation of mutant superheroes. They had a school too, separate but allied to the X-Men, and one of their teachers was Emma Frost, now on the X-Men's side but still basically the same evil person she's always been. They were cool, for a little while. The 'Generation X' thing got old quite fast, though...

In 2000 came the X-Men movie, which decided to go with the Hogwarts approach and depict the X-Men as having a school catering to hundreds of teenage mutants with cool superpowers (if anyone's wondering who copied whom, the movie came before the Harry Potter movies, but after the first few Harry Potter books), and before long the comics followed the movie's lead, and the X-Men now had a school full of the next next next generation of mutants!

After just being in the background of the grown-up X-Men's comics for a while, the students got their own comic, confusingly called New Mutants (although nobody referred to the characters by that name) in 2003. It focused on a small group of friends at the school, and was very slice-of-life rather than superhero-action - they went to classes, had dates, had arguments, had love triangles, and so forth. Then in 2004 the whole thing was shaken up a bit, the comic was renamed New X-Men: Academy X (in the hope that having "X-Men" on the cover would sell more copies), and the stories got a lot more superheroey - the students were split into squads of six, each under the supervision of one of the older X-Men, and they used their powers a lot more, in cool tests and training challenges. The comic focused on the six heroes, a squad called the New Mutants (that's right, as soon as the title stops being "New Mutants", the characters in it start being called "New Mutants") supervised by one of the original New Mutants, Moonstar; with their antagonists being the Hellions, supervised by Emma Frost.

That brings us up to 2005, when the Hellions were given their own four-issue limited series, and it just shows the problem with 'next generation of superheroes' comics - the previous generations aren't going anywhere! The original X-Men are still around, as young and active as they've always been! The New Mutants are still there, in a sort of uncomfortable no-man's-land of not being quite as grown-up as the X-Men but still being sort of more grown up than they used to be. Generation X are shunted off into limbo, because nobody knows what to do with them. How can we thrill to the adventures of this latest generation, knowing that we can't really see them grow and develop into adult superheroes in their own right, because of the classic superhero-aging problem? (And guess what, it's now 2016, and of course there's a next next next next generation of mutant superheroes out there now...)


So let's turn our attention to the Hellions. This comic has a helpful first page, telling us who the characters are and summarising the story so far - the kind of thing that was badly needed but missing from a lot of comics in this era of paperback-size stories chopped into six issues, but isn't at all necessary for this one, which follows the traditional superhero comic style; the characters mention in dialogue who they are and what's happened until now, they have a self-contained adventure in each issue, building up on sub-plots along the way, and ending with a nice cliffhanger leading into the next. Still, for the purposes of this review, the first page is very helpful:

 (It does seem to promise us Doctor Octopus, who doesn't appear in this comic at all, though...)

The first page doesn't have the creator credits, which come a bit later on - it's written by Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir (a husband-and-wife partnership), pencilled by Clayton Henry and inked by Mark Morales with (in smaller font) Jay Leisten and Rick Ketcham. When you see a penciller and three inkers, it usually means the artwork is a panic-to-hit-the-deadline kind of job, but this one actually looks very nice, all the way through! A lot of panels don't have backgrounds, but the characters all look good, detailed and consistently the same, the poses are a little bit stagey but quite acceptable, and the whole story flows very nicely. I like it a lot.

Colours are (particularly well done) by Wil Quintana, letters by Dave Sharpe, and the editorial board consists of assistant editor Sean Ryan, associate editor Nick Lowe, editor Mike Marts, editor in chief Joe Quesada and publisher Dan Buckley.

The Hellions, it turns out, work perfectly well as protagonists of their own series! They're not just a stereotypical group of bullies at all, even in the parent comic - Brian is a nice guy who just happens to be Julian's best friend; Sooraya is perfectly okay, just a bit unsociable and stand-offish; Kevin is the tortured loner who longs to touch other human beings but never can. This series lets us get to know them a little better, and it's very very well done, too.

We open in the research facilities of Genetassist, in the California Desert. Paladin and Diamondback, two long-established minor Marvel characters who work as mercenaries, generally on the side of good, are at work here, stealing "the sample" and deleting all the data on it from the computer files, while fighting off other people who are after it too. All the major players will be out to get it, Diamondback observes, so they'd better hurry.

Suddenly, the case is snatched - Cessily has slithered her way through the laser beams, as shown on the cover, and nabbed it! The mercenaries are confronted by the full lineup of Hellions - "Didn't anyone teach you that stealing is wrong?" Julian quips.

Then we flash back to two hours previously, with the team discussing the cool things the Kingmaker has done. Cessily is selfishly upset that Kevin can touch anyone now - she fancies him, so it was really quite good when she was the only one he could touch. She and Julian (the most self-centred and unpleasant pair on the team) have a really nice brief heart-to-heart about it, before the Kingmaker calls them in to the meeting room and tells them it's time to sign their contracts. They've had their wishes, now he takes Kevin's cure back, won't bring Sooraya's mother to America and so forth, until they agree to do a favour for him. Reasonably, he even agrees to tell them what this favour will be.

The relationship with the Kingmaker is nicely done, too - even Julian, who's always so cocky and confident around his fellow schoolchildren, looks a lot more nervous and teenagery in the company of a big, assured adult. He shows them Genetassist, explains that they've just completed a major project, and that the Hellions' job is to "stop it being stolen, and bring it to me." He explains that Paladin and Diamondback, among others, are after it. Most of the squad are happy to sign contracts straight away, Cessily needs a little more persuading, but eventually signs.

Back to the present moment, it's time for the big fight. And it's a good one, too - Paladin and Diamondback are outnumbered and don't have any particularly cool powers (they're normal humans with fancy but low-level technology), but they have the advantage of long experience in the superhero game. They both take the attitude that the kids are the ones who are outclassed, and it shows in the first part of the fight.

Brian takes the simple approach and "tags" the briefcase, making the mercenaries run away, but as soon as Diamondback gets out of range, she spins and throws one of her diamonds at his head, knocking him out and cancelling his powers. While Kevin laments that he's useless in this situation (his powers are still turned off by his last dose of the cure, even if he could find a way to use them in the fight), Santo and Cessily go on the attack but are taken down by the pros. Sooraya follows, but not before the mercs have pointed out that the Hellions are stealing a weapon, not doing whatever they think they're doing. Julian's more of a problem - his telekinesis stops him being harmed, and he can just smash Paladin and Diamondback into the walls by exerting his will (he'd probably have done that right at the start, but he was busy getting the unconscious Brian out of the way in case he got hurt). Unimpressed with Diamondback's insistence that she's one of the good guys,  he shuts her up.

The squad fly away with the case (Julian can fly, and he telekinetically carries the others behind him). The others are uncertain whether they're doing the right thing, and Julian rattles off a succession of valid explanations in a single speech bubble (I love this speech - he's uncertain too, so he's babbling, but the things he says do all make some kind of sense) "Even if they were with SHIELD, where were the agents? Why mercs? They were stealing it, too! You really trust the government any more than the Kingmaker? We made a deal, guys. Signed and delivered."

Back at the Kingmaker's base, Kevin's still not happy and doesn't want to hand over the case. Julian does, Brian agrees with him, but Santo steps in and insists he wants to know what's inside too. So does Cessily, and she can easily use her powers to pick the lock. Sooraya, characteristically, stands back and doesn't get involved. But the case turns out to contain some kind of canister, and the Hellions are none the wiser, until the Kingmaker comes along and tells them it's a biological weapon that could kill millions of people. And yes, it doesn't belong to him, his client "didn't want to have to pay them for the weapon, and he didn't want the government to get it." He insists that the team hand it over, and Julian snatches the case back from Kevin, and does so. A deal's a deal. Cliffhanger ending!


It's a really fun story, I'm glad I got the nudge to go back and read it again. Marvel never did enough with these characters - poor Brian and Kevin have been killed off since this series (though that's not such a permanent problem with Marvel characters as it is with most people), the other four are sort of hanging around in the background among all the millions of other X-Men and not doing much. But they all really shone for a little while in 2005...


If you'd like to see another random comic, give me a number between 2 and 3333! Thanks!

You invited everyone

Mid-Life Krysis is a song by Travis, from their 2003 album "12 Memories", which was full of protest songs about the Iraq war that were very worthy and admirable but nowhere near as good as their previous albums of non-political but much more musically appealing songs. They were probably having a mid-life crisis at the time they wrote it. I was never sure why they spelt it 'krysis' instead of 'crisis', but now I realise that it was an impressively ahead-of-its-time reference to 'Krysis', the latest episode of Red Dwarf, in which Kryten celebrates his birthday and has a mid-life crisis.

It sort of made me wonder, what with it being my 40th birthday, whether I should have a mid-life crisis. It might be fun, but on the other hand, it just seems like too much effort. Besides, I'm not mid-life. Since I'm not planning on ever dying, it follows that I'll never reach the mid-point of my life either, so I'll just plod along as I have been doing until I get bored with it.

I really must unsubscribe from those recruitment agencies, though - look at this one I've just got: "There is a chance to manage a small but busy team also so if you have not managed people before, this is your opportunity to add this to your CV. This company offers flexible working hours so great for anyone who works hard but who wants to finish early on a Friday or to get to that gym class mid week. "

What kind of person do they think I am? Adding important management experience to my CV by day, dashing off to that gym class at night? If they send me an email about a job that will encourage me to watch Red Dwarf and eat cake, well, then I might just be interested.

I'm turning 40 tomorrow

Could someone do something about that, please? Because I'm sure there must be some mistake.

Northern exposure

Do I count as 'northern' any more? I'm something like twenty miles south of Birmingham nowadays. Well, I'm not southern, anyway.

I get regular spam emails from all the recruitment agencies I've ever registered with, informing me about all the thrilling accountancy jobs out there that would suit someone of my qualifications and experience. The funny thing about it is that all of them come with a paragraph from the agency saying that this job would be a great thing to add a specific kind of experience to my CV.

Add to my CV? I'm (very) nearly forty years old. Even when I was in my twenties, I never looked for a job that I could add to my CV and use as a stepping-stone to some mythical future better job, further down the line. Who does that? Who cares so much about their career development that they apply for a job with the intention of later applying for another job and boasting that they worked in the first job? This is probably why I'm not a financial director.

It's the same with my sort-of career as a memory man. Someone really did once offer me some kind of memory performance gig (I forget what it was) and tell me it would be "great exposure" for me. This is showbiz talk for "not going to pay you" and I was quite thrilled to get it - it means someone, somewhere, thinks my memory tricks are the kind of thing I expect to get paid for!

Is the world truly ending?

In the latest random-number selection from my comic collection, thanks to an unimaginative anonymouse who wanted to see what came first on my list, I give you 1602, part one, from November 2003.

 Written by the famous author Neil Gaiman, this was a high-prestige project for Marvel, part of their policy (new at the time) of moving away from just telling stories set in the boring old Marvel universe, and branching out into new interpretations of their characters. In 1996, they "killed off" all the cool characters and relaunched them as Heroes Reborn, telling the old stories but in cooler 1990s ways. It was rubbish, and abandoned after a year, but it paved the way for "Ultimate" versions of the heroes a couple of years later, this time running alongside the old-style comics. 1602, on the other hand, isn't an attempt to launch a new universe, it's basically just letting Neil Gaiman play with the characters by writing them in a story set in 1602.

Unlike the previous two comics I reviewed, this one came out when the internet was up and running, and so it got a lot of attention from fans, wondering what was going on - not helped by Marvel first claiming that the series would be connected in some way to the mainstream universe, and then backtracking and saying that no, it wouldn't, really, sort of. But no comic is improved by knowing what internet fans said about it, so let's just ignore that whole side of things. It was fun at the time, though!

Art is by the big-name comic artist Andy Kubert, and 'digitally painted' by Richard Isanove, although the cover is drawn by Scott McKowen. Todd Klein does the lettering, and this is probably the peak of Marvel's too-many-cooks editorial policy - Joe Quesada is editor, Nick Lowe is assistant editor, Nanci Dakesian is managing editor, Kelly Lamy is assistant managing editor, Joe Quesada (again) is editor in chief and Bill Jemas is president. It's a wonder there was room for any comic after all those credits.


There really isn't much story in this issue. Some sort of plot does develop in the course of the eight-issue series, but this opening one is really just about introducing the characters. None of it makes any sense to readers who aren't familiar with the classic Marvel superheroes (the cast is strictly limited to characters from the 1960s), and if you are, the appeal basically lies in saying 'oh, that's a clever take on what such-and-such-a-character's 1602 counterpart would be'. Over and over again. Despite this, though, the whole thing is a fun read, and I do recommend it!

The art is quite epic, very nicely coloured to suggest candlelight, sunrise, sunset, night and so on (not a single scene in this one takes place in broad daylight), although some of the character posing is stiff and unnatural, and the facial expressions are a bit strange - people always seem to have their eyes half closed.


We open our story in Hampton Court, England, in 1602. Continuing straight on from the cover, we see that our cloaked figure is Doctor Stephen Strange (as in, Dr Strange, master of the mystic arts). He wears an Elizabethan ruff and a beard, rather than his classic moustache, and enters a room to meet Queen Elizabeth herself, and Sir Nicholas Fury (Nick Fury, agent of SHIELD). He's got a beard too, of course, as well as his traditional eyepatch. Elizabeth has her face plastered in white makeup, and coughs into a bloodstained handkerchief throughout the conversation, in a historically-accurate way.

She introduces the two men to each other, and they discuss whether the recent earthquakes, red skies and so on are signs of the apocalypse. Dr Strange isn't prepared to go that far ("No man shall know the day or the hour, eh?") but explains that he needs Sir Nicholas's help to convey something powerful from the Holy Land to England. He agrees, and the two of them go their separate ways.

Meanwhile, in Domdaniel, Spain, a young man with wings is chained up in the Inquisition's dungeon. His name doesn't seem to be mentioned in this comic, but it's clearly the Angel, of the X-Men. He laments his fate.

In Westminster, young Peter Parquagh (guess who?) studies a spider while a blind Irish singer called Matthew (that'll be Daredevil) entertains the customers of a tavern with the ballad of the Four from the Fantastick. Peter works for Sir Nicholas, while Matthew secretly has acrobatic powers, can see in the dark, and works as Sir Nicholas's informant, agreeing to help bring the mysterious treasure safely to England.

Dr Strange, meanwhile, goes back to his house in the village of Greenwich (see what we did there? He lives in Greenwich Village, New York, in the classic comics) where his beloved Clea speculates with him about the possibility of James of Scotland becoming King of England when Elizabeth dies, and then helps him gaze into a magic mirror to see visions of what is to come. It's not very enlightening - a red-garbed nun in the court of the Inquisition perceives his astral form and dismisses him.

She's Sister Wanda (the Scarlet Witch), and she and Petros (Quicksilver) serve the Inquisitor (who doesn't look anything like Magneto, but doesn't really need to, because who else could it be?) and discuss their planned alliance with King James to make common cause against the witchbreed (as in, mutants like the X-Men and themselves). It's all part of a typical plan to rise to power, convincing the English that the witchbreed plan to blow up the Houses of Parliament. The Inquisitor's enemy, Javier, will be powerless to stop him!

On board the Virginia Maid, in the middle of the Atlantic, is a young girl accompanied by a monosyllabic blond-haired native American called Rojhaz (Captain America), and she's worried what might happen if she 'changes' again... She's not actually a Marvel character, and caused much confusion among readers at the time. She's a real-life person, Virginia Dare, who's the subject of a legend that Neil Gaiman thought was common knowledge and was rather surprised to find out that nobody else had heard of it.

Sir Nicholas and Peter discuss the Templar treasure and fight off an assassin, while Matthew goes to his friend Captain Nelson's ship (hey, look, it's Daredevil's fat friend Foggy Nelson!) before dawn breaks in Spain and it's time to burn the Angel at the stake. But he's saved by two more witchbreed heroes!

 They identify themselves as Scotius Summerisle (Scott Summers, Cyclops) and Robert Trefusis (Bobby Drake, Iceman - and why he doesn't get to keep the surname Drake, which was a famous name in 1602 England, I don't know). Meanwhile, Queen Elizabeth has a dream of the Old Man (the Ancient One, Dr Strange's mentor) beginning on his journey from Jerusalem with the artifact. Then the witchbreed go back to their ship and introduce the Angel to John Grey (as in Jean Grey, Marvel Girl, doing the classic Shakespearean thing and disguising herself as a boy), before setting sail to their schoolhouse. And that's the rather anticlimactic end.

Like I say, it's a fun enough story, but the appeal is pretty much entirely in the novelty value of seeing the classic Marvel characters in new forms. The rest of the series is more entertaining in its own right, so I'd recommend that you check out the collected edition!


Despite being part of the Marvel Knights 'hardcore comics' kind of imprint, and having "Marvel PSR" (which probably stood for parental supervision recommended, although Marvel had only just introduced these ratings at the time and didn't go out of their way to tell anyone what they meant) on the cover, the moody Elizabethan artwork of this one is interspersed with a full complement of 'teen' adverts. Most notably, we get the high-point of the Lorillard Tobacco Company's legally-mandated youth smoking prevention policy, which consisted of running ads in comics using the slogan "Tobacco is whacko! (if you're a teen)"

Once you turn twenty, of course, tobacco is great. But it's kind of hard to see how this particularly strange picture is trying to convey the idea that smoking is a bad thing, isn't it? Especially if you read British comics of the 1950s and are used to 'whacko' meaning 'really jolly good'. Perhaps it's just meant to give teens nightmares about cigarettes with scary faces on them.


If you'd like to see another random comic review, give me a number between 3 and 3333, and I'll pull the appropriate comic from the pile!

I want Chromobots in my Beano!

A great benefit of the Beano's new policy of crediting its writers and artists is the unexpected pleasure of seeing that this week's fill-in artist for the Bash Street Kids is Mychailo Kazybrid!

... You know, Mike Kazybrid! The one who drew back-up strips for the Transformers comics for a little while in the mid-1980s! Well, maybe you have to be my generation to get it, but if you were eight years old when the Transformers first came along, you'll have been as enraptured as me with the two-page black-and-white filler strip "Chromobots" with its thrilling robot adventures, every fortnight until the comic went weekly and changed its format in 1985. It was great, it really was. He also drew the longer-running half-page comedy strip Matt and the Cat, but I never liked that one. Still, it's great to see him still around - or if not him (because you can't really tell from the Bash Street Kids art if it's the same person, since he has to copy the David Sutherland style, and someone else wrote the script so you can't see if it's got his old style of writing to it either) then somebody else with the same unusual name. And there can't be all that many artists called Mychailo Kazybrid, so let's assume it is. I'd love to see more Chromobots!

I made this!

I was joint runner-up employee of the month in September, you know. That's quite impressive for someone who does so very little work, and so ineptly, as I do. But that means I got £50 worth of Compliments Vouchers to spend in a wide range of high street stores, so I took them into Argos and bought a little desk and chair, and an oscillating fan heater that'll probably come in handy in my new flat when it really gets cold.

The desk, though, will definitely come in handy right now, because being without one has been a minor inconvenience ever since I moved in! So I spent this evening with screwdriver in hand (did you know I've got a screwdriver? I didn't think I had, but one turned up when I was rummaging through my box of miscellaneous rubbish looking for the electric screwdriver I thought I did own but which seems to have disappeared entirely) putting together big heavy pieces of wood and only occasionally saying things like "There's no holes where it says there are holes! Wait, it's upside-down. No, there's still no holes... oh, wait, there are holes but they're tiny little pinpricks, how am I supposed to get a screw into those?" and "Two people are needed here? You can't get to step 6 of the instructions before you tell me two people are needed! I'm six-seventeenths of the way through putting it together and I'm on my own! Actually, though, I don't need two people at all, I'll just prop it up like this..." and so on. And it looks really nice! The top's a bit loose, and has a hole in it that's not meant to be there, but it's out at the side so it won't get in the way. Now I've got a thing I can sit at and draw pictures or write things or memorise things in a non-computery way! Or even in a computery way when it comes to filming my qualifying sessions for next year's XMT (or whatever it gets called; the name's changing). I feel quite accomplished now.

On further reflection

This week's episode of Red Dwarf, "Give and Take", actually made me laugh out loud, which is something Red Dwarf hasn't done for years! I approve, and officially recant my 'not as funny as it used to be' complaints. Well, like 90% of them, since it's still not actually as funny as the funniest episodes of the early series, but the point is that now I feel bad about saying it's not.

The greater concern is with the "I don't watch live TV any more" thing, since I'm actually watching it on UKTVWatch, or whatever it's called, the week before it's on live TV. That means I'm watching it even more up-to-dately than I would be if I had a telly, and might be seen as violating this recently-acquired but deeply-held principle. But since the TV Licensing people have written me a nasty letter, I've changed my principle to "just not watching anything that would require a TV licence for me to watch". That'll teach them.

Eighteen googly years

The google doodle for today says it's their 18th birthday (though when I do a google search for google, it tells me they were founded on September 4th). Remember the days when you couldn't just type anything into google and see what the internet says about it? There were search engines with names like WebCrawler, but they were rubbish. The world was very different before 1998.

On mature reflection

You know, I think I was unduly harsh on Red Dwarf the other night. Watching it again, Samsara has some great moments. It's probably the best new episode we've had for a long time!

Genome

There's a cool thing that I just discovered last night - The BBC Genome Project, with all the Radio Times listings of BBC radio and television programmes from 1923 onwards! It's really cool, even if it is scanned in with text-recognition software that doesn't always get it right. So, after staying up all night researching and cataloguing all the BBC broadcasts of Thundercats cartoons and cross-referencing it with my own taped-from-the-TV video collection (because, I'm sorry, there are some things that are vastly, top-priority important and you really have to be me to understand it), today I had the idea of seeing how many times the name Pridmore shows up in the history of the BBC. Turns out it's seven.

Really? Seven? From 1923 to 2009, people with my surname can only muster seven mentions in the Radio Times? I know we're not exactly a foremost-in-the-land kind of family, but that's a bit bad, isn't it? One of them's me, from that "Make Me Smart" thing, the others are a fascinating mixed bunch...

Saturday 20 May 1933, 9:15pm, BBC Regional Programme - "The Bottle Imp". A radio adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's story, with the list of characters including "Pridmore, a young American in Honolulu". This is a bit strange, really, since there isn't a character called Pridmore in the original story. From his position in the 'in order of appearance' list, I assume Pridmore is the originally-unnamed idiot who bought the cursed bottle for two cents (it grants you great powers, but if you die owning it you're damned to Hell for eternity, and it can only be sold at a loss). What made James MacGregor, the radio adaptor, call him Pridmore? Maybe he had an enemy of that name.

Friday 14 June 1940, 8:00pm, For the Forces - "Thirsty Work". An evening of country singing recorded by the BBC Mobile Recording Unit. Singers: Bill Pridmore , Peter Wilson , Thomas Hendrie , Luke Webster , Bill Prodger , Frank Smart and other regulars of The Exeter's Arms, Wakerley, Northamptonshire. Hmm, Uncle Bill would have been 17 then, and in Sheffield, so it's probably not him. June 14th is my brother's birthday, too.

Sunday 15 March 1964, 6:15pm, BBC TV - "Meeting Point". "This is My Story - Faith on the River Kwai". How important is faith in conditions where all else which usually makes life acceptable— comfort, security, even human dignity-have gone? Neil Matheson, Leonard Morrison, Robert Pridmore who in the Second World War worked as prisoners on the ' railway of death' —the Burma-Siam railway-give their own answers in the light of their experiences, in a conversation with William Purcell. I don't know of any relatives on the Pridmore side of the family who were in Burma during the war. I assume Robert's answer was along the lines of "very important", because it was that kind of TV programme.

Friday 20 January 1967, 2:40pm, BBC Home Service - "Brave and Bold", a radio poetry programme with, down at the bottom of the listing, "also poems by Jane Pridmore, Zoe Bailey and Hal Summers". I've come across the name Jane Pridmore in books of poems before, but I don't know anything about her beyond that.

Thursday 20 August 1988, 11:30pm, BBC Radio 4 - "Fresh Air Media", A four-part series of feature-making by non-professional broadcasters. 3: Voices Four pieces with a common interest in the voice. Presenter Geoff Pridmore. Never heard of him.

Sunday 9 August 2009, 7:00am, BBC Radio 2 - "Good Morning Sunday", Aled Jones talks to that John Pridmore who I've come across in Google searches before, who seems to make a comfortable living for himself claiming to be a former gangster who found God.


Quite a motley crew, I must say. We really need to get more Pridmores on the BBC. Family pride is at stake!

DADDY! You KILLED her!

Number 910 in my comic collection, as randomly picked by my loyal blogling who goes by various aliases involving Dominic O'Brien's internal organs, is the first issue of the 1986-87 limited series "Fantastic Four versus the X-Men". (The cover says February 1987, it was actually published in late 1986; this is how comics work in America) Funnily enough, that makes two comics in a row involving team-ups of two superhero groups, and a whole lot of heroes crammed into one comic. To be fair, I like groups much more than I like solo heroes, so my comic collection is a bit biased that way anyway...

 Okay, this is a good one. After a not-all-that-special issue of Alpha Flight from the first random choice, we get something really quite cool here. Just look at this atmospheric, eerie opening page and that unmistakably Chris Claremont narration!

 So, this series is written by Chris Claremont, who at this point had been chronicling the adventures of the X-Men for more than a decade, and in that time had taken them from fringe characters in the Marvel universe up to the point where they were the most popular superhero comic in the world. Actually, this crossover series came out just at the point that modern fans, with hindsight, have pinpointed as the moment when "Marvel screwed up the X-Men" - just starting to cash in on their huge popularity with spin-off series, which was followed by insisting the writers give prominent roles to the 'cool' characters, and then there was a huge surge of popularity of certain artists, so they were given a bigger say in what happened, and eventually Claremont quit, and so on and so forth. But that was 1990, we're just at the start of the buildup to that here, and everything's going swimmingly. (Frankly, the fans who say things like that are a bit on the weird side, anyway)

Art is by Jon Bogdanove, who was young and still new to comic work at this time, and he does a wonderful job. He quite nicely emulates the look of John Byrne, the artist legendary for his work on both X-Men and Fantastic Four, and captures really well the haunting dream sequences, domestic life scenes and action moments that Claremont's script demands of him. It's a great comic to look at. Terry Austin's inks probably help a lot - he was a regular inker for Byrne. Tom Orzechowski is the letterer, Glynis Oliver the colourist, and there's a surprising number of editors. Ann Nocenti was the regular editor of X-Men, Don Daley was the editor of Fantastic Four, so it makes sense that he'd be a consulting editor. I've been searching the internet to try and find what Mike Carlin was doing at that time and why he was involved in this one too, but to no avail. Jim Shooter is the editor-in-chief.

The first five pages consist of a nightmare suffered by Franklin Richards, the young son of Reed and Sue, Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Woman, who form half of the Fantastic Four. Franklin is a somewhat troublesome character. For one thing, the problem of superheroes not aging (because nobody wants to read about a 70-year-old Spider-Man, do they?) come across much more strongly in him than in anyone else - his age has boomeranged inconsistently backwards and forwards over the years; he's around five years old here, which is his sort of default status. But more importantly, writers have tended to give him infuriatingly omnipotent universe-altering powers, to the extent that it became really easy to justify anything people want to happen in any Marvel comic by saying "Franklin Richards did it". On the other hand, Chris Claremont always liked him, and he's used well in this series - his powers here just involve prophetic dreams and astral projection, which isn't so bad.

In the dream, Franklin sees his father carrying his mother's corpse and tearfully demands to know why. "It was logical, Franklin. It was necessary," says Reed, adding that he's always certain, because he's a scientist. The bodies of the rest of the Fantastic Four - the Thing, the Human Torch and even the She-Hulk (who had filled in for the Thing a little while ago) are lying around too, and looking pretty gruesome. Along comes Wolverine, carrying the dead Shadowcat in his arms, and points out that Reed has killed the X-Men, too - they're all impaled through the chest on dead trees. The X-Men line-up here is Havok, Psylocke, Storm, Longshot, Rogue, Magneto and Dazzler. Ignoring Franklin's begging, Wolverine lunges at Reed, then drops dead. Reed, callously dismissing his son, ascends a flight of stairs and opens a book, "Reed Richards - Journal - State University" and although Franklin implores him not to, turns into Doctor Doom. It's great stuff, it really is.

Franklin wakes up, and in a nice touch his bedroom is decorated with a poster of the Thing, a photo of the FF during the She-Hulk era, a photo of the Power family (with whom Franklin has adventures in the much-better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be Power Pack comic about a family of child superheroes), a photo of the Avengers' butler Jarvis who usually ends up babysitting Franklin whenever the heroes are busy, and Franklin's own drawings of Kofi and Friday, from Power Pack. He goes to find his father, who (typically) is busy working on scientific stuff, with his trademark pipe in his mouth, and hasn't time to listen to Franklin, calling Sue on the video screen and asking her to deal with the child. Sue (a spotted kerchief on her head, just to show she's busy with housework - the Richards family really do live in the 1950s) does so, creating an invisible forcefield to bring Franklin to her. She comforts him with a hug, and gets on with what she was doing - unpacking some old boxes she's recently found. In one of them, naturally, is Reed's State University journal! Franklin is terrified and urges Sue to throw it away!

Then we cut to the X-Men, currently hanging out in their friend Moira McTaggert's lab on an island off the coast of Scotland (Chris Claremont is one of those unfortunate Americans who think Britain, and especially Scotland, is really really neat-o). We're filled-in on their current situation; with Nightcrawler and Colossus comatose and Shadowcat reduced to an intangible collection of molecules gradually drifting apart in a tube, they've roped in new members Havok (who, as he protests to Rogue in a scene that takes up a whole page but has no other bearing on what happens in this comic, was an X-Man in the old days before any of the others and feels he should be treated with more respect), Psylocke, Dazzler and Longshot. Their old leader, Professor X, also isn't around at this point - he's living up in space right now - and their arch-enemy Magneto, the former evil villain, is now on their side. He has been looking into ways to save Shadowcat's life, and found out about a device of Reed Richards's - he tells Storm he intends to contact Reed, even though the Fantastic Four still consider him to be an evil villain.

Dazzler and Longshot are out on a boat, and Longshot rescues a strangely sinister drowning fisherman, to take him back to Muir Isle. This is just something to remember if you read the rest of the series, nobody mentions it again in this issue.

Sue, back in New York (the narrator, with unusual accuracy for this kind of comic, points out that it's still night there, though it's dawn in Scotland), furiously confronts Reed with the journal! She's found out that it contains horrible revelations! "Especially the pages relating to the rocket flight that transformed you, me, Ben and Johnny into the Fantastic Four!" Franklin, in his astral form (wearing his Power Pack uniform, in another nice touch for regular readers) is horrified!

Elsewhere, the She-Hulk (who has the honour of being the only hero to appear in both of the comics I've reviewed here so far!) is busy researching; she's going to go back to her previous lawyer career for the sake of "a weird sort of fund-raiser" in which the trial of Magneto is re-staged. She's the defence counsel. The Thing also happens to be in the library (reading a book of Federal Aviation Regulations, just to remind us of his previous pilot career), and the two chat for a while before being interrupted by a series of massive explosions at a construction site. The comic gives no suggestion whatsoever of what's caused these explosions - the Thing and She-Hulk, being both defined as "the big, strong one", just get to work preventing the building from completely falling down and harming anyone. They're soon joined by Magneto, who helps out with his magnetic powers, despite the Thing not unreasonably suggesting "creep probably blew this place up inna first place!" and the Human Torch, whose impromptu welding comes in handy too.

Once that's dealt with, they all go back to the FF's headquarters, Four Freedoms Plaza, where Magneto (sealed in one of Sue's forcefields to stop him causing trouble) explains the situation. Reed apologises to Sue, but says he has to go and help. She stays at home while the others jet away - She-Hulk too, taking the time to change into her old FF uniform (do they keep it at the base?) for the occasion. On the way across the Atlantic, Reed asks Ben "Am I ruthless?", to which Ben replies that Reed is always certain in his convictions, and pretty much always right to be - with the exception of that rocket flight, when he didn't account for those cosmic rays...

They arrive at Muir Isle, with Reed now racked with indecision, thinking to himself that having made that significant mistake in the past, maybe he's wrong here too? With Franklin's astral form still watching, he decides not to use his device on Shadowcat. It might go wrong. The X-Men are not happy, and Wolverine attacks Reed - save her, or you die! To be continued!

It's a great story, it really is. Classic X-Men stuff from the late Claremont era, with a nice take on the Fantastic Four too (although it feels much more like an X-Men story, as is only natural). The whole limited series is really hugely worth reading and highly recommended! I leave you with the kind of thing that would give anyone nightmares:

Next up, we have number 2, selected by an anonymouse, which (in my sort-of-alphabetical but also category-based list) gives us 1602 #1, from 2003! If you want to see another random comic from my collection here, just give me a number between 2 and 3333!

Red Dwarf returns!

Having watched the first two episodes (which is totally not a breach of my who-wants-to-watch-live-TV-nowadays-anyway rule because I watched them on catch-up internet stuff and not quite immediately as soon as they became available), I have to say it's not as funny as it used to be. And after getting used to Kryten's new make-up and considering why, it seems to be a deliberate choice - the actors are playing the parts now as if they're in a serious science-fiction show, rather than a comedy. Did someone tell them to do that, or are they just too old to tell jokes these days?

Look at the scene in the latest episode when Kryten illustrates a point by strangling Lister - afterwards, he says "Thanks for the demonstration, Kryten!" in a seriously underplayed way. Compare it to the similar scene in "Justice", many years ago, when Rimmer does the same kind of thing, and Lister reacts with overblown sarcastic outrage, and the audience howls with laughter! All through this episode, in fact (which is quite up-front about re-using old ideas, and there's really nothing wrong with that unless the writer pretends they're not), Lister especially delivers lines so flatly, when he used to be so much more exaggerated in the way he said things. The other three are all more subdued than they once were, too, it really jumps out at me when I think about it. I should probably stop thinking about it...

Astounding Science Fiction

My favourite writer of the moment is H. Beam Piper. Well, I say "of the moment", he died in 1964, but from my perspective he's new and exciting. Most of his works can be found for free on the internet (a concept his future worlds couldn't imagine; they still use a lot of film reels and radio) and I heartily recommend them! Try Police Operation as a starter - the first in the wonderful series of "Paratime" stories, written in 1948 and providing a creative explanation for the flying saucer mania that had gripped the USA in the previous year. The exploits of Verkan Vall, policing the countless alternate universes, are my favourites, but you should also check out the extensive series of future-set adventures, creating a whole universe and describing its progress over the millennia.

I'll admit there's nothing strikingly original about Piper's works, but the appeal lies in the way he tells it, and the detail he goes into; far beyond the call of duty for a 1940s pulp sci-fi writer. And there's a great kitsch value to the worlds he depicts where men are real men, always with a pipe or cigarette in their mouths and a wide range of guns in their hands and holsters, getting the job done in the face of namby-pamby bureaucrats. Women are 'girls' and exist solely to be lusted over; atomic energy is the be-all and end-all and the most important development in history, even in stories set thousands of years in the future; and democracy is a silly idea that would never really work. A clear preference for a hereditary feudal system of government is perhaps Piper's most distinctive quirk. But all his works are well-written, imaginative and creative, and hugely enjoyable. Check them out, do!

Faster, Pussycat! Memorise! Memorise!

After really quite a long time of hoping I'd manage to get obsessed with something memory-related again, I've finally managed it this last week - someone pointed out that I was down to position 10 on the Memocamp speed cards high-score list. Tenth? I mean, I never really used Memocamp with any kind of regularity, but I DID do a sub-30-second time on it once, and that's now only good enough for tenth? What is the world coming to?

So I set myself a target of getting back up towards the top of the list, and because I'm approaching it in a slightly different way, it seems to have circumvented the ennui effect of memory practice I've been suffering from of late. For possibly the first time ever, certainly the first I can remember, I'm not having the official one minute of mental preparation time and then waiting for the whole five minutes of memory time to elapse before starting the recall - my aim isn't to practice the way I'm going to be memorising in a competition, it's just to get a good time on this website, by hook or by crook.

(But not by cheating; that would sort of defeat the object.)

And I have so far managed to get a very impressive 22.21 seconds! I'm trying to get used to going at that kind of speed, because mostly I have more gaps than filled-in-spaces when I do that, but I think I'm gradually getting better. A little more of that, another unusually-memorable combination of cards, and I'm sure I can edge just slightly closer to the golden 20-second mark.

Because 22.21 seconds is still only good enough for 5th, nowadays! I still have Alex, Simon, Lance and Marlo all sitting there above me, with times under 20 seconds (something I never managed to achieve, even in my heyday), so I've got them in my sights now. My enthusiasm is back! Ssssssh, don't scare it away...