Shadowstone Park returns!

Life has been very empty without the adventures of Lark the paralysed cat and Pecan the strangely muscular pelican, solving murder mysteries. That is, not solving the mysteries of specific murders, so much as trying to make sense of the insanity of their whole murder-filled world. It's a work of genius, and if you haven't seen it before, I really insist you check it out and look forward to new episodes in future!

Tape is not an easy prop

I was somewhat surprised this morning to receive a parcel through Amazon, containing four rolls of black tape. The reasons for the mysterious delivery were eventually explained to me four hours or so later, but my only immediate thought at the time when I opened the package was "I seem to be having Baxter's Bad Day."

I left the tape on the sofa for my brother to find when he came in from work, and sure enough, as soon as I came downstairs at lunchtime, he immediately asked "Are you re-enacting Baxter's Bad Day?"

Does everybody else think of that when they unexpectedly see black gaffer tape? Or do you have to be of a very specific generation and background? I mean, this is actually the only time I've received unexpected black tape in the post, and it's been well over thirty years since I read or thought about the book in question, but it's obviously one of those things that sticks permanently in one's mind.

A Read-and-Play Storybook, published in 1983. American, and very conspicuously and strangely foreign to a young British reader in the 1980s, it was written by Jean Marzollo and drawn by Shelley Thornton. We must have acquired it through one of the primary school book clubs, or something like that. It was a great work! The important thing is that it came with push-out figures of the characters in it, and a series of clothes to dress them up in. There may even have been a stage you could assemble, with multiple backgrounds and slots to slide the characters into, so you could stage the entire story at home! As best I can recall, this is how the story went:

Baxter, the bear on the cover, is having a bad day. I forget exactly what series of things made it bad - from the cover, it's obvious that it was raining on his way to school, but there were other things that happened to him too. Maybe someone had thrown a heavy object at him and broken four of his ribs, or possibly I'm mixing it up with our father's copy of Dr Fegg's Encyclopaedia of ALL World Knowledge, which I also enjoyed reading at around the same time.

Anyway, after a great deal of badness one way or another (did one of the other things relate to his packed lunch being in some way deficient?) Baxter and his four classmates, who may also have been bears but might possibly have been other animals, are told that they are each to pull an item out of a bag and create some kind of costume and performance based on that random prop. The other classmates all pull good things like a magic wand out of the bag, but Baxter is left to last and ends up with a roll of black tape.

He continues to lament his bad luck overnight, but then has some kind of inspiration involving a bee, and creates himself a bee costume using the black tape and probably his yellow raincoat as seen on the cover. The following day, he gives a spectacular performance, and although it's one of those everyone-gets-a-prize competitions, Baxter doesn't have to be contented with 'funniest' or the ribbons his classmates get; his accolade is 'best of all'. He concludes that it turned out not to be such a bad day after all - so maybe the book's action didn't actually cover two days, and he created the costume during school hours; I don't know.

Anyway, the gaping plot hole that everybody who read the book always felt ruined the whole suspension of disbelief came near the end, when the teacher apologised for Baxter getting a roll of tape, saying it wasn't supposed to be in the bag, and must have fallen in there accidentally or something. And yet when Baxter pulled the tape out, it was explicitly said to be the only thing left in the bag! If the tape just accidentally fell into the bag, what happened to the fifth prop that should have been in there? This, along with the peculiar Americanness of the whole thing, led a whole generation of primary school children to conclude that the writer had no idea how to write a coherent story!

Despite this, it was a great book. And maybe I'll use any leftover black tape to create a bee costume of my own!

The Beano does what I tell it to do

 Whenever I complain about something on the internet, I always like to check a couple of days later to see whether the powers that be have fixed everything that's wrong with the world. Somewhat to my surprise, a mere four weeks after my cutting critical dissection of the Bash Street Kids, I looked in this week's Beano (number 4141, and let's stand back in awe at a weekly comic that's long since notched up its four thousandth issue and is now thundering towards the big 5K!) to find there have been more changes to the Kids' cast of characters!

Not only are there three new Kids in class 2B, two of whom are definitely female, Teacher is sporting an artist's beret that evokes memories of his classic mortar board! Obviously the sheer force and eloquence of my rhetoric (I seem to have used the word 'style' five times in one simple sentence) has convinced the Beano bosses to implement exactly the scheme I was talking about, of gradually adding more characters to equalise the demographic mix. So, good job, Beano people. Carry on. You have my approval.

In all fairness, Andy Fanton is actually a really great writer of comics, so I shouldn't sound so scathing about the whole thing. He not only writes this Bash Street Kids story, but on the page before it there are mini-strips devoted to the three new classmates (plus Pup Parade, which doesn't seem to have acquired five new dogs yet. Or for that matter a Cuthbert analogue - I don't think the Pups ever had one of him, did they?)

Harsha is long-established by now as appearing every week, along with her family, in Har Har's Joke Shop. There's also a Summer Special on the shelves, in which the new bugs appear in the Bash Street Kids story, but not in the title banner, so obviously they're here to stay (for a while, at least. I mean, we don't talk about Wayne, do we?)

I hope they really do continue to add characters at this kind of rate! It would take things back to the earliest days, seventy years ago, when the cast of When The Bell Rings were a vast, mostly unnamed, horde of Kids, rather than having a well-defined roll-call. They DID have more than one girl in the earliest days, even for a little while when all the characters had got names, you know. So really, we're just moving back to the classic era! I approve!

But again, that joke at the bottom of the page! One that the average Beano reader's great-grandparents might possibly find funny! A quick internet search reveals that there was a disastrously unsuccessful Lone Ranger movie in 2013; it passed me by completely, and I doubt that a nine-year-old movie has made much of an impact on the typically nine-year-old Beano reader. If you're going to tell a joke that needs the Lone Ranger to be common knowledge, you really need to beam it back through time to the 1950s. They might have laughed at it then. You could get Leo Baxendale to illustrate it!

Just to make myself feel better

 Memory league training tonight started with a cards in 29-point-something seconds with a very ugly recall; I got them all in the end, which is better than I've done the last several times I've tried it, but it took a lot of thinking about. Then I had an almost entirely unsuccessful images trial, but then tried a quick numbers that I recalled with perfect ease, absolutely flawlessly! Barely any conscious thinking at all, the numbers just flowed from my fingers!

And then I got 35 in words, which is pretty awful. But all in all, it makes me feel a little better about my match with Kevin tomorrow afternoon, and the upcoming Pan-American Open qualifier...

It's the PAO

In the memory world, PAO always used to mean Person-Action-Object, a system which I half-heartedly tried once but gave up on very quickly; I can't tell the difference physically between different people, so it's very much not the right system for me. Other people have made it work very successfully, but I think it's maybe gone a little out of fashion nowadays. Anyway, I'm not talking about that kind of PAO here. Nor am I talking, loudly, about the cannons (pao) in Xiangqi; that's a different competition entirely. No, to all the cool people in the mind sports world, PAO means the Pan-American Open in Memory League!

If you remember the drill from last time (how long ago was it? It feels like absolute ages!) there are three online tournaments, each taking place in different time zones eight hours apart, so that everybody gets at least one in a halfway convenient time of day, wherever they live. Sixteen competitors in each, with the top ten in the world qualifying automatically if they choose to enter, and the other places filled with the winners of a qualifying competition...

I'm ranked 15th of the competitors who entered this one. This is an improvement on last time, when I was 16th, I think, or maybe even lower. That means I get a bye through to the last round of qualifying, where I'll probably play... Sayaka Hokazono. Who thrashed me in a match just yesterday. Great.

Although I was a long way from my best yesterday, so if I can improve before then, and she remains at the less-than-her-best level she needed to beat me, I might have a chance. And then, not being 16th seed, I avoid having to play the top seed in the first round of the tournament proper, if I qualify! Woo!

So instead of being beaten by Alex, I have the chance to play Simon! Who's also much better than me at everything and will beat me easily! But at least it'll make a nice change!

Now, let's think - WHY have I been on such poor form at Memory League just lately. I haven't completely neglected my training, but I haven't got good results whenever I've sat down to give it a go. Could it be a side-effect of the other thing I'm doing, which I was asked not to talk about all over the internet? That'll just have to remain a mystery, but I tell you - the readers of this blog have missed out on a LOT of witticisms already about the whole thing! I just hope I can remember them all when I'm finally free to discuss it!

No spoilers

 I've been decidedly remiss at finding cool new cartoons to watch just lately. I found myself watching the third episode of Infinity Train last night, having never seen it or even heard about it before, and wow, it's both funny and intriguing, and madly creative and different every week! I love it. And so now today I've watched the first four episodes - because I wanted to find out firstly what on earth the series is about, and secondly what happened next. And I've had to force myself not to plough straight on to the rest of the episodes (ten in a season, and each season is apparently about different settings and characters but with the same general theme), because these things really work better if you put some time in between viewing each one. I firmly disapprove of this modern tendency of releasing a complete series all at once; 'episodic' is a good thing to be, if it's done right! Not everything has to be a movie!

So nobody tell me anything about Infinity Train, ever, please. Even if it comes up in conversation, which to be fair it never has before in my life. Also, I've got a terrible cold, so you're allowed to tell me how sympathetic you are about that.

The Kids aren't alright

Unlike yesterday's blog, nobody has even vaguely hinted that they want me to write extensively about the most recent changes to the Bash Street Kids in the Beano, but I'm not prepared to let this complete apathy on the subject from my friends and acquaintances stop me from going on about it at length.

Here's an example of what good looks like:

This is taken from the Bash Street Kids Book 1984, but it would have originally appeared in the Beano at some point in the mid-1970s. Probably almost exactly fifty years ago, in fact; it seems to date from shortly after Cuthbert was added as a regular character (he might well have been added in after the comic was drawn, actually - note the front row of desks, which at that point usually went Wilfred-Danny-Smiffy-Spotty-'Erbert, while here Cuthbert has been stuck in the middle with a conspicuous white space behind him. When he was fully established in his position in the class, it normally went Cuthbert-Danny-Smiffy.). And I really think it's a classic example of how to draw slapstick comedy in a static medium like comics! Just look at Teacher destroying the hut with the out-of-control saw!

And I love the little details - hats, bow, glasses and even Sid's hair flying off in shock. The mice infesting the school feeling the cold too. Smiffy covering the back of his head when everyone else covers their eyes. Little silly things like that are what make comics great!

Now here's the latest adventure of the Bash Street Kids:

I mean, it's not terrible, by any means. Danny's awesome plan makes me laugh. And this week's story is actually a bit more of a throwback to the traditional style than they have been of late, although the humour is in the more ironic modern style. But the art is lacking the energy and motion that it used to have - I was going to make a crack about David Sutherland deteriorating in his old age, if this actually is him drawing this one, but I think it's more that he's been forced to move to a different drawing style that doesn't work quite so well.

And then there are the subtle changes to bring the Kids into the twenty-first century - you know, the kind of thing old people like me always moan about. Teacher stopped wearing his mortar board quite some time ago, which I think is a terrible shame. Even when the Kids first started, it was a rather outdated concept, and it suits the idea of Teacher being hopelessly old-fashioned, which has been played for laughs consistently over the years.

Fatty and Spotty, meanwhile, have been renamed Freddy and Scotty. I don't approve of this. Toots, however, remains Toots, and if anything I disapprove of this even more! Could you not give the girl an actual name?

But then, the most significant change is that Toots is no longer the only girl in the class - we've got two extras who have been imported in to redress the balance. A little. Sort of. I'm sorry, but if girls only make up 25% of the cast, it looks even weirder than only having one girl in the series! Maybe they've decided to address things in easy stages, and in another couple of decades we'll have achieved gender equality?

And while we're on the touchy subject of representation, there's the question of skin colour. As you can see from the first comic above, fifty years ago the concept of skin colour didn't exist in the Beano, quite literally. Some strips, like the Bash Street Kids, were in full colour, and others were still black and white line drawings, but nobody's skin was coloured in - everyone had a chalk-white complexion. When colouring techniques advanced, everybody became a uniform pink, which makes things rather a lot worse. I think they've missed a good opportunity to vary the skin tones of the existing kids a little and make things not quite so glaringly incongruent when they introduce other characters drawn in a more modern style. Don't be afraid to vary the classics, just a tiny bit, to keep up with current trends!

And finally, what on Earth is with that joke at the bottom of the second page? It's not only ancient, it's probably incomprehensible to almost every reader who's not familiar with both balls and reels! Maybe it's a teaching experience - modern Beano readers can just go and ask google, after all!

A different league

There are people out there who don't understand how the English football league system works, you know. Or the 'British premier league soccer' system, but that's just the whole two-nations-separated-by-a-common-language thing. It's the kind of thing that needs diagrams to explain, as well as a conscious mental effort to put yourself in the mindset of someone who doesn't understand the concept of promotion and relegation, so here's a detailed blog entry explaining all those things that are universally known to 99% of the world.

I mean, really, it's like having to explain what roast beef and yorkshire pudding is! Or steak and kidney pudding, or rice pudding, or sticky toffee pudding, or "the concept of hundreds of different foodstuffs being called 'pudding' and nobody thinking that's at all strange". It's something we think of as completely normal and self-explanatory over here, and the idea of someone not understanding it is incomprehensible to us.

(Another universally accepted thing over here is talking as if people from countries with different customs are stupid and wrong, as long as we say it in a way that shows we're only joking. I consider myself to have full permission to do that, and intend to indulge to excess. Anyone reading this is welcome to do the same to me and my country in return! That's the way to forge good international relations! Americans tend to have strange customs like 'politeness' that prevent them from doing it, which is a terrible shame.)

So, as everyone knows, the Premier League looks something like this:

A couple of important points of terminology here - it's not the British Premier League, it's the English Premier League. With a sort of asterisked footnote that Welsh teams are allowed to play in it too, but it's still definitely English. Scotland has its own football league, and Scottish people don't like it if you don't know that.

Also, it's "PREM-ee-er", not "pre-MEER".

So, there are twenty teams in the premier league, and they each play all the others twice in the season - once at each team's home ground. This system must seem strange and unfathomable to Americans - I don't understand American football at all, but as far as I can gather, each team plays seventeen games a season; two against some teams, one against others, and none at all against the rest. I find it difficult to comprehend who could have invented an arrangement like that, or why.

It's three points for a win, one point for a draw. A draw is what some people call a 'tie'. When both teams score the same number of goals in a game. Or no goals at all. Yes, match results of 0-0 are not uncommon - why would anyone think that's weird?

Anyway, you can ignore the colours at the top of the table; that's about European qualification, which is a whole different essay for another time. The interesting thing is the bottom three teams, highlighted in red. The teams that finish in the bottom three places won't play in the Premier League next season; they are relegated to the division below. 

Another important point about how to talk about football - a team is plural, not singular. "Manchester City HAVE won the league this year," not "Manchester City HAS won the league this year." Likewise, Burnley ARE going to play in the Championship next season.

Also, if you're talking about Wolverhampton Wanderers, it's "Wolves", not "the Wolves". Wolves have finished tenth.

Wait, "the Championship", you say? Yes, I'll admit this is a bit confusing. The Championship is the name of the league that sits below the Premier League. This is what the Championship table looks like this season:

There are 24 teams in this one, so they play more games in a season. And next season Burnley, Watford and Norwich will be playing in the Championship, and the Premier League will have Fulham, Bournemouth and the winner of the playoff tournament held between the four teams who finished below them. The final's on Sunday, between Huddersfield and Forest.

And the three teams that finished at the bottom of the Championship are relegated to the division below that, which is called (and I admit that this is rather confusing) League One. And they're replaced by the teams who finished at the top of League One this season, in the same way.

The structure looks like this:

These four divisions are still generally described as "the league" - it's a leftover from the days when all four were run by an organisation called the Football League (the Premier League is a separate entity nowadays), they were much more sensibly called Division One, Division Two, Division Three and Division Four, and the whole thing was more of a closed shop. There were more leagues underneath, but only on rare occasions would a team from them be allowed to join the 'league'.

But the 'English football league pyramid' in modern times keeps on going down, with automatic relegation and promotion to the levels below. Two teams are relegated from League Two, into the top of the 'non-league' divisions, which is called (again, rather confusingly) the National League.

And below that, we start to see why it's called a 'pyramid' (although some might say a 'triangle' would make more sense. It's not like it's three-dimensional.)

At level six of the pyramid (which is also called "Step 2" of the non-league league system. Yes, really.) it splits into a North and South. Each division has 22 teams (or should have - when we get down this low in the pyramid, we start to have issues with teams going out of business, so the numbers aren't always the same), and every year four teams are relegated from the National League and replaced by two from the North and two from the South.

If for example all four relegated teams are from the far north of England, then those all fall into the National League North next season, and two of the more southern teams from there are moved across to the National League South to keep the numbers even. And of course there's also relegation from the National Leagues North and South, down to the level below...

And now it gets a bit more confusing. At this level, there are three different governing bodies. They're called (for reasons owing as much to tradition as geography) the Northern Premier League, the Southern League and the Isthmian League. The latter basically covers the south-east of England, including London. It's not an isthmus.

Until very recently, each of these three leagues had one 'premier league' at level seven, and two regional divisions at level eight. But the Football Association, which is in overall charge of the whole pyramid, decided it would be better if the number of divisions at each level went in a more logical 1-2-4-8-16 progression, and so the Southern League created an extra premier division, and the other two each created an extra 'division one'. And a lot of teams were shuffled around from one league to another so that they could all have roughly twenty teams in each - it's entirely possible for a team to move from Northern Premier to Southern, for example, in order to keep the distribution equal, even though there are three different leagues with their own bosses and staff in charge.

And below those three leagues, it all gets a lot more local...

Yes, fifteen different governing bodies run the 33 divisions at levels nine and ten of the pyramid. Most of them have one division at each level, but there are various exceptions. There are 17 divisions at level ten instead of 16 - the two run by the South West Peninsula League (which covers Devon and Cornwall and is the only remaining league to be in level ten but not level nine; there used to be a couple of others) promote only one team at the end of the season, while all the other level ten divisions promote two. And of course each of these divisions has roughly twenty teams in it, just like all the ones above and below.

The pyramid keeps on going beyond that level, naturally. By this time we're well into the part-time amateur game, and teams and leagues down this low are prone to breaking up and re-forming as brand new ones, but there's still promotion and relegation going on. At level eleven there are a whole FIFTY divisions, and I don't think anyone could really want to keep track of them all. But they're very important to the people who play in them, against all the other small teams in their local area!

How far down does the pyramid go? It's really hard to say. It disappears into a morass of small local leagues, in a way that no American could ever hope to understand. Some people say it goes down to level 23 or 24, and try to track the potential route a team could take to reach the Premier League in a quarter of a century's worth of promotions. But I'm fairly sure I've lost everyone's attention by this point already, and I'm certainly not going to try to compile them all into a diagram.

So that's how football works! Simple, isn't it? Why can't American Football be so straightforward and common-sense?

A memorable match

The Online Memory League Championship is a great thing. Here's an example of a fun match I had today, just in case anyone reading this was still on the fence about joining the fun next season.

I'm up against Islomxo'ja from Uzbekistan, a new territory for memory games! We've played once before, in a relegation playoff at the end of last season - I won that one 4-1 (he was rather unlucky), but a shortage of players signed up for this season has led to us both in division 2 this time around.

The way Memory League Championship matches work nowadays is the opponents take turns to choose one of the five disciplines, and the first to 4 (with a lead of two or more) is the winner. Maximum of eight games, so a match can end 4-4 or 4½-3½ or 5-3.

I had the first choice today, so went for cards as usual - I can normally safely do a full 52 cards in under 30 seconds, and not many other people in division 2 can do that. This time, though, I started very sluggishly and forgot what one of my images was - which you'd think I wouldn't do after nearly twenty years of using these images, but that's a lack of practice for you. So it took me thirty-seven and a half seconds - but luckily, Islom was playing it safe and went more slowly, so I still got the first point.

Second game, Islomxo'ja's choice was of course names. I can't do names, it's universally known. So that made it 1-1. This is how my first two games in any memory match almost invariably start.

So my usual next choice, numbers, is a little bit more risky - it's easier to forget one images in numbers, because unlike in cards, you can't go back and make sure you've used each of the 52 cards once. But I memorised these ones smoothly in 24 seconds... but made a mistake at the end. I 'grab' the last six images (18 digits - or rather 17 with an imaginary zero on the end, since 80 digits doesn't divide neatly by three), just reading them quickly to myself and saying the name of the images to myself. And the problem is, 286 and 386 have basically the same names, and I wasn't certain whether I'd seen the one that starts with M or the one that starts with N. It's rather sloppy on my part there. Islom was playing it safe again, and took a 2-1 lead.

And he then chose images, which he's generally faster at than I am, and won with a very nice 18 seconds. 3-1, match point, and we're down to my third choice of discipline...

I chose words - and I'd got some terrible results in my previous match against Guillaume, just because I'm out of practice. I'd done a bit more training since then, but I found this set of words tricky, and didn't get up to the end of the list in the sixty seconds. Islom seemed to do the same, though, and I managed to get the win. 3-2. Still match point!

So Islom chose words again, and this time we both found it easier - which is interesting, since I normally have troubles when I do two words games in a row. 40 isn't a world-beating score by any means, but I was happy with it. I finished before Islom did, and watched his score ticking up - I thought it might be a draw, but I just barely won, 40 to 39, levelling the match.

So my fourth and final choice of discipline could only be images - I'm never going to choose names, am I? And I think we were both getting a bit tired after all this exertion! I was annoyed to get two pairs of images swapped around - I memorise them in groups of three, but I knew one couplet had interacted over the last of one group and the first of the next. I just forgot which one it was. So I ended up dropping four points, and Islom only dropped three, taking him to 4-3 and guaranteed at least a draw.

He had to choose numbers or cards for the last one, and sensibly went for numbers. I figured he'd go slowly, and decided to look at them all twice instead of once. And I still couldn't remember one image! Actually, I tend to make just as many mistakes if I review the data, so I don't know why I ever think it would be a good idea. It was all academic, anyway - far from going slow, Islom did a fast 27-second time and got them all right! So he ended up a very deserving 5-3 winner!

The day might eventually come when people who beat me in memory competitions no longer tell me I'm a legend who they admire, but it hasn't happened yet. I'll need to train harder to catch up with these new young legends again!

A rare treasure

 I'm delighted to hear (from fellow Krypton Force fan Andrew Joseph) that another copy of "The Mask" has shown up on eBay after all this time!

Until now, the copy I own was to the best of my knowledge the only one ever released in the UK! Nobody else ever seems to have even heard of it, not even the BBFC listings! But hey, it looks like they made at least two of them. Maybe there were even more - in Australia, it seems a whole four volumes of Mission Promete came out, although it's almost impossible to find any trace...

See this classic blog post for full details of the wonders of Krypton Force, if you haven't already. You probably have, though - it's the single most visited page on this blog, according to the Blogger stats page! There's a whole army of Krypton Force lovers out there! And quite right too - those videos are wonderful!

An amazing fantasy

Spider-Man turns sixty this year. He must be getting a bit arthritic as he swings around New York, unless he's got the proportional lifespan of a spider as well as all the other stuff. But the internet tells me that "many male spiders reach maturity within two years and then die after mating," so he probably wouldn't want to.

In any case, we're getting a big celebration comic for the anniversary, and I do like the look of the creator lineup in the ads!

I mean, I'm probably sold already by the time I'm half-way down that list, because I'll buy pretty much anything with Kurt Busiek's name on it, and wouldn't want to miss Neil Gaiman's take, or Jonathan Hickman's. And Dan Slott's pretty great, too. And Armando Iannucci? Seriously? That's got to be worth a look, at least.

But one name that nobody seems to be getting excited about in the comments section of the internet posts I've seen so far is Rainbow Rowell, whose revival of Runaways was just brilliant, and exactly the kind of thing you'd want to see in a Spider-Man anniversary special! I could go on about it for hours, using phrases like "Rainbow Rowell's revival of Runaways" quite recklessly and regardless of my difficulty pronouncing the letter R. That's how cool I think she is!

So yes, I'll be getting this comic, however overpriced and minimal its content might be. I do have a problem with calling it "Amazing Fantasy #1000", though. I don't really know why sticking "#1000" on the cover of American comics is still cool, especially when it comes to something like Amazing Fantasy. It's not like there's a long history of Amazing Fantasy comics that we're celebrating - there were six issues of "Amazing Adventures", followed by eight more of "Amazing Adult Fantasy" (because in 1961, calling a comic 'adult fantasy' meant 'ten-year-old kids who are worried they might be too old for comics will buy this one'), and then one "Amazing Fantasy #15" that was the first appearance of Spider-Man. And then they cancelled it and decided to give Spidey his own self-titled comic instead.

Couldn't they call it "Amazing Fantasy #60"? Or #720? Or #735, as if it had come out monthly ever since #15? I'd buy that.

This must be how TV newsreaders feel

I'm wearing pyjama bottoms and a proper work shirt, complete with cufflinks.

I don't think I've sufficiently embraced the possibilities of zoom meetings before now. I should vary the way I clothe my lower half every time. Just imagine all the strange things I could be wearing, when everyone's only seeing my serious top half! It'll be particularly fun if I stand up without thinking and show the Queen (I assume I'll be having a zoom call with the Queen some time soon; my invitation probably just got lost in the post) my frilly pink tutu.

Top of the table

 Season Fifteen is go, in the world of Memory League! And just when I'm busy with easily half a dozen little projects all week - seriously, they do all come at once, with a vengeance!

But I'm in division 2a this time, with an interesting lineup of opponents, and hopeful of doing better than last time around. First match is against Guillaume, who's a tough cookie - in fact, they all are. Against most opponents I generally hope to get a win in cards, and less definitely in numbers, but everybody tends to be very good at images nowadays, and are often better than me at words, and you need a win in at least one of those to get to the four points you need for victory. I'll just have to see how it goes. And hope my opponents make mistakes.

The best thing, of course, is that I'm top of the league! Thanks to the wonders of alphabetical order - and isn't it a good thing that I changed my memory league name from "Zoomy" to the regular Sunday-go-to-church "Ben Pridmore" to set a good example in the early days when people were complaining about the anonymity of nicknames? I'd hate to be in the red zone to start with...

A busy schedule

Things always seem to come along all at once, rather than patiently taking turns. I've complained about this before, but the universe hasn't reconfigured itself to suit my preferences yet.

So I'm going to London tomorrow in my latest chapter of celebrity status as a mind sports competitor - I won't give any more detail than that, since I haven't asked the people organising it if it's okay, and I'm perhaps more cautious about that kind of thing in my old age than I used to be. Indeed, it's just occurred to me as I write this that they asked me for links to my social media accounts and I said my only presence on social media is my facebook. In fact, this blog probably counts too, doesn't it? I suppose it doesn't really come to mind when you say 'social media', and indeed there's not so much of a social side of things since it's basically just me shouting into the void that is the internet. Does anybody actually read this? Post a reply if you read it! But it is the kind of thing a TV person might want to check to see if I'm in the habit of publicly saying things that would cause a media frenzy. I'll tell them about it tomorrow.

And anyway, I really don't ever cause a media frenzy. Except maybe that time with the chimpanzee, and even that was kind of low-key frenzy.

And then a week tomorrow I'm starting a new job. Or actually, I'm having induction sessions on Tuesday and Thursday mornings next week, even though I won't have officially started the job then. Which makes it okay that on Wednesday I'm having an interview for a different job, which was arranged fractionally before I accepted the job I'm actually starting. It's very poor form to have a job interview in your first week at a new place, but I don't think there are any rules about having one the week before you really officially start somewhere.

I need the practice at job interviews, you see - I'm awful at them. I never get jobs based on an interview (this new one, like the one before, was I think mainly a result of having worked with someone at the new place before now) and I need to get good at them. I need to practice not replying to "Why do you want to work for us?" with "Well, I don't, really." And replying to "Can you give us an example of when you did x, y and z?" with "Must I? I don't remember things like that, I just do my job..."

So this interview on Wednesday will be a good no-pressure way to practice interview technique, without worrying that I'll be jobless and penniless if I don't get it. And it's a good job of the kind I'd really quite like to get, so maybe I'll end up with the luxury of being able to choose between two jobs! Although if either company are among the hypothetical people who do read this blog, that would be a bit embarrassing - maybe I could avoid this kind of complication by not telling the internet all about me, but where's the fun in that?

I like a nice spreadsheet

Have I mentioned that before? Sorry, but Excel spreadsheets are my thing, and I happen to think they're great. So I like to find a nice one in the wild, and this is a real doozy. It's the end of the football season, you see, and as always at this time, fans of small non-league clubs all around the country are asking each other "how does promotion and relegation work, then?" It takes a lot of research and investigation to find out exactly what the rules are at any given moment, and then a ridiculous amount of calculation to figure out whether your team's points-per-game lands them in a play-off or what. So I'm delighted to see that the creator of this spreadsheet has laid everything out in a comprehensive, concise and comprehensible way. It's a delight to read through it, and I'm sure even people who aren't weirdo number-crunchers like myself really appreciate it too!

Good weekend for my former local team, anyway - my old home of Belper Town won their play-off final to move up to the same level as my current local team, Redditch Utd, next season. Long Eaton Utd, who were sort of almost my closest local team before I moved to Belper, topped the United Counties League Premier North and will be just one level below those two next season. I should buy some sort of three-way scarf and support the whole lot of them!

I think this goes a bit too far

 Following on from the post about Quality's line of funny animal heroes the other day, let's move ahead a few years, and look at one particular story from Marmaduke Mouse #26, dated October 1951.

Writer and artist unknown - they didn't credit people in those days, and it doesn't look like Ernie Hart's work. Nobody on the internet seems to have ever bothered to research the creators of lesser-known funny-animal comics, which I think is a great shame. Maybe we can pin down individual artists from variations in the costumes - this one, like quite a few Marmaduke stories around that time, doesn't draw the strap on Louie's overalls, but does pay quite detailed attention to Marmaduke's safety pin.

Anyway, this is a pretty typical kind of slight and unoriginal storyline, it just gets a little interesting towards the end...

Marmaduke gets an official title here - he's more normally just a general sidekick and dogsbody to Louie. This is pretty typical of the life they lead, though - for a king, Louie always seems to be down on his luck!

And this confirms what the story is this month - we're doing Jack and the Beanstalk. Obviously, this is seventy years ago, so a lot of the familiar tellings were still to come, but it's fair to say the story would be expected to be well known and seen many times before by all the readers. There had already been two Mickey Mouse cartoons on the theme by this point! It's the done thing for a story like this to give a new and funny twist to it - updating it by selling the car rather than the family cow!

Incidentally, it's worth mentioning that Marmaduke is an adult. That he wears nothing but a nappy is just part of his character design; it's rarely mentioned and never explained. His big brother, Manly Mouse, appears in one story, and he wears them too, so maybe there's some kind of hereditary condition. Although since Manly is hugely muscular and works as a fat lady in a circus, justifying it with "I get so cold in winter and the stuffing and inflating I wear as the fat lady keeps me warm!" he seems to run the gamut of every popular fetish culture you can find on the internet in the twenty-first century. Anyway, back to the comparatively normal adventures of Marmaduke and Louie...

It's not uncommon for Marmaduke to be confined to the dungeons. Working for Louie doesn't generally seem to be a very rewarding career...

It's interesting that Louie calls for the guards repeatedly, and they do what he wants off-panel without making an appearance. The early Ernie Hart stories used quite a bit of creativity with background characters, but these later anonymous entries into the series weren't quite so inspired. And so Marmaduke climbs the beanstalk... my favourite twist on the old story comes from an Order of the Stick book, in which Elan tells the tale and ends it at the point where the giant beanstalk first grows - Jack and his mother cheer that now they have all the beans they can eat, and can sell the surplus for a profit! They'll never be poor or hungry again! The end!

The giant doesn't seem particularly unreasonable or unpleasant. But still, Marmaduke feels it would be a good idea to rescue the duck that lays the golden eggs. For it to be a duck, rather than a goose or hen, is unusual, but there might just be a reason behind it...

Whoa, that final panel - the punchline to this story is that our heroes KILL and EAT the friendly chap Marmaduke has been cheerfully chatting with for this whole page?

I mean, like I mentioned last time, the life of a cartoon animal tends to come with the understanding that there are people out there who will eat you if they get the chance, and everyone tends to be rather blasé about the whole idea. Plenty of more modern cartoons have subverted the trope - one of my favourites is a fun moment in Rocko's Modern Life (1993) in which his chicken neighbour goes for a job interview with a poultry packaging company, and gets turned into the product. But it's really pretty striking and unique for the central characters of the story to cheerfully tuck into the roasted corpse of Marmaduke's 'pal' like this, isn't it? Makes you think he's not as wholesome as he appears...

One final thing worth noticing -  this duck is definitely referred to as a 'he', and proves his gender by wearing a man's hat, but he does apparently lay eggs. The world of Marmaduke Mouse is a strange one.

It's all kicking off

 A new season is about to start for my two favourite online competitions! First off, we've got Memory League, where it's time to sign up for season 15:

And what's more, it's Memory League May - play every day to get a free subscription! This is the best way to get into the whole Memory League thing, and I heartily recommend giving it a go even if you're a novice to the high-speed memorisation world.

And then it's also a "new season" of eOthello, although in that case it just means that we've got to the end of the previous list of eight unrelated tournaments and it's time to start a new one. But this is what the next 16 months or so have in store for othello players, and the first one starts in a week or so!

So one way or another, there's plenty to keep you busy online all the way through May! Never leave your home again!

The Quality Comics Funny-Animal Universe

 

I write a lot about superhero comics on here, but there's a lot more to the history of comics than just the long-underwear types. Let's go back to mid-1940s America, when the heroes were on the way out and the next big thing might just possibly be anthropomorphic animals. Mickey Mouse and his friends were big business, after all, so it's understandable that a lot of comic publishers turned to copying whatever they were doing...

Quality Comics, a fairly small publisher who had one big superhero hit with Plastic Man and one big war-comic hit with Blackhawk, decided in time for their 'Spring 1945'-dated comics to branch out into the animal kingdom, and recruited the great Ernie Hart, who'd created the popular (if not hugely original) Super Rabbit for Timely/Marvel Comics a year or two previously.

Ernie Hart's connection with Marvel continued into the superhero rebirth of the 1960s, tenuously - he wrote the dialogue scripts (under the pen-name "H.E. Huntley") for a handful of their comics when Stan Lee was too busy. One of them was the first appearance of the Wasp, which has led to him being rather dubiously credited as her co-creator. But it's with the animals that he was truly creative, and nowhere more so than for a little while at Quality!

It all started in Hit Comics #35 - you can read it and all the rest of these public-domain comics at that link!

Kid Eternity was the headline hero of Hit Comics - he's not as famous as he should be, he's got the interesting super-power to summon any person from history or mythology to help with his crime-fighting. His costume is rather cool, too; I like the red sash around his waist. But in the pages behind him (Quality still had 56-page comics, while market leader DC had been forced by paper rationing down to 48) are a lot of other features, including two new ones with the 'Hart' signature - Marmaduke Mouse and Egbert.

Marmaduke is the most significant one, because it doesn't just introduce the two central characters of that series (Marmaduke and Louie the lion), there's one panel - the one that started this blog post - that shows us a whole range of other characters too, prototypes of the ones who would later get their own stories. Ernie Hart was obviously planning right from the start on launching a whole line of funny animals for Quality!

It's also interesting to note that Hart originally saw the animals as actors who'd play different roles in each story. In Hit Comics #35, Louie is the evil king of the forest, and Marmaduke is the smallest animal but the only one who dares defy him (mainly because he doesn't know what 'defy' means). In #36, Marmaduke lives in a little suburban house of his own, inherits a million dollars and is kidnapped by Louie, a crook. In #37, Marmaduke skips school to go fishing and truant officer Louie tries to catch him. In #38, Louie is a homeowner trying to get rid of Marmaduke the mouse who eats all his food. In #39, Louie is a farmer, and Marmaduke a bum trying to beg a nickel for a cup of coffee.

The other strip, "Egbert and the Count" works in the same kind of way, although Egbert the chicken's personality is more consistent - he's extremely stupid, but somehow always gets the better of the Count, a fox who wants to either eat Egbert or rob him of his money. Their first adventure also introduces a Mr Owl, who mispronounces words to comic effect.

And comic effect is the key feature of the dialogue in these stories - there's no such thing as too many gags! The very best ones are when Ernie Hart manages to work a play on words or silly joke into every single speech bubble, whether they make any sense or not...

(Indeed, he's not above using the same gag repeatedly - hey, if they like a horse, then they'll like two horses twice as well!)

The funny animal invasion seems to have been a hit with the readers of Hit Comics - or maybe just with the publisher - because when the American paper rationing was lifted at the start of 1946, Quality launched all-new solo comics for their favourite heroes. Kid Eternity got one, but so did Marmaduke and Egbert! And they were both written and drawn entirely by Ernie Hart!

The comics each cram eight stories (plus the obligatory two-page text story that all American comics were required to have in order to qualify as a magazine and get a reduced postage rate) into their 48 pages (with #12, they're cut down to 32). Here's a rundown of all the characters:

Marmaduke Mouse is the one who really stood the test of time - his comic continued to be published until Quality went out of business in 1956 (though the last couple of years were just reprints of old stories). After all the role-switching of the earliest stories, it soon settles down into a fixed situation - Louie is the king of some unspecified country, and Marmaduke works for him. They get into scrapes caused variously by Marmaduke's bungling, Louie's idiocy or outside forces. Louie generally gets furious with Marmaduke and vows some excessive punishment, but they're always friends again by the end.

Cholly Chipmunk is fat and loves to eat food. He's perfectly happy to steal it from other people, or anyone who's left a pie to cool on the windowsill, and gets into all kinds of scrapes as a result. But he also dreams about being a hero and is regularly ordered by his conscience to do good deeds instead. In the first issue of Marmaduke Mouse, Cholly appears in the first Marmaduke story, then continues into his own strip, in which he reads Egbert's comic. He's really tying this shared universe together!

Frowzy and Fuzzy are a big stupid dog and a smaller, smarter cat, perpetually penniless, who travel the country looking for work, but always end up just as jobless and poor as they started out. It wasn't a terribly original idea, with its roots in the great depression, but maybe it introduced the concept to post-war kids! They're a very likeable pair, anyway.

Sad Sam Skunk has the usual problem of cartoon skunks (I think his cameo in the first Marmaduke story just predates the first Pepe le Pew cartoon, incidentally) - the other kids won't play with him because he smells. The interesting thing about Sam is that his smell isn't a natural feature, it comes from a scent atomizer that he always carries with him - it's part of his skunk family heritage. Sad though he is, he can never bring himself to just leave the scent at home - and he does still sometimes come out on top, usually when another character has a cold...

Giddy Goose gets around - he also had a story in every issue of All Humor Comics, yet another one of Quality's new titles launched in spring 1946. But despite the double exposure, there's nothing all that distinctive about Giddy - he's unintelligent and nonetheless gets the better of people who try to trick him, despite not knowing what's going on. He's got a nephew called Gaddy who serves as a general sidekick.

Buggy Corners (population - wow!) tells the story of Flip the Flea and Anson Ant, who are rivals for the love of Beetrice Bee. She's extremely fickle, and often ends the story by going off with the bad guy, but our heroes never give up. They face a lot of dangers along the way, too - it's a regular theme in these stories that being eaten is a normal occupational hazard of life as a funny animal, but these smallest creatures are always threatened by spiders, anteaters and natural disasters like rainfall, and they take it all in their stride!

Egbert, like Marmaduke, gets multiple stories in each issue of his own comic. And like Marmaduke with Louie, Egbert is mostly paired with the Count, but sometimes has solo adventures too. He's probably best with the smooth-talking scoundrel Count, but I think you can see why this was the less successful comic. There are still plenty of laughs to be had with dim-witted Egbert, though!

Nero Owl is an interesting one - he has his own story, titled "Nero Owl" in each issue, but they mostly (not always) feature Egbert as a supporting character. Nero, who speaks mainly in spoonerisms, is a doddering old fool who works as a private detective. And like all the great cartoon heroes, he usually comes out on top somehow!

Rollo Raccoon, always accompanied by his loyal sidekick Picklefoot Pig, has rather generic adventures. The first couple show him with a talent for talking his way out of a problem, but that rather goes away in subsequent stories. Still, he's distinctive in appearance thanks to the red bow tie he always wears, with no shirt.

Bunnyhunch and Buzz, the Bunny Boys, are a pair of brothers who get into all kinds of trouble thanks to Buzz's insistence on disobeying their mother and going to look for adventure. Hunch, who can't pwonounce his Rs, is always scared but gets dragged along anyway - but as soon as they actually find a frightening situation (wicked witch, big bad wolf, etc), Buzz is terrified and Hunch has to save him. The interplay between the two of them is a lot of fun!

Beanie Bear, the Cub Scout, tries to do a good deed every day - and everyone else tries to take advantage of his good nature, especially Mr Bindle, the bum. I really have no idea what kind of creature Mr Bindle is supposed to be - he's green, with floppy ears. But Beanie's complete innocence is always funny, anyway.

Foolish Fables is another series set in a town of bugs - indeed, it's sometimes called Buggy Corners, but sometimes Bugville. And it mostly chronicles the misadventures of Abercrombie Caterpillar, who is elderly and comically deaf. 

And if you were wondering what happened to Solly Sparrow and Frankie Frog from that original gathering of prototypes, well, Solly makes a cameo appearance in the first story in Egbert #1, but nobody very much like Frankie ever shows up in these comics. I wonder where he hopped off to...

But isn't that a fantastic line-up of characters to all flow from the pen of one writer-artist? There should seriously be a cinematic universe with all the gang interacting and entertaining the world! Nobody could fail to be amused by moments like this, could they?