The Memory League World Championship is happening right now, and I haven't even been paying any attention to it for the last three days, because I've been in London, working on promoting a sensational, spectacular, tangentially-memory-related thing that will burst onto the world on Thursday 19th January! I even dragged Simon Orton (who, as always, has been working twenty-four hours a day behind the scenes to make the world championship run so seemingly effortlessly smoothly) away from his endeavours to help me out - but I think the end result is worth it, as when I demonstrated Memory League to a couple of dozen international media-related people, they all loved it and couldn't stop playing! The excitement of advancing to a new level really gripped the whole room!
It says something about my status in the modern memory-sports community that I spend my time doing this and not playing in the world championship itself, doesn't it? Hey, remember when they expanded the football World Cup to 24 teams instead of 16, and everyone thought that was a great improvement? Do you think Memory League might also benefit from doing that and, for example, having someone ranked 23 in the world joining the fun?
In fact, maybe Memory League could follow football's future plans, and expand to 32, because let's face it, my world ranking is likely to go down a few more notches...
Check it out! "Oswald Bastable, and others" by E. Nesbit! First edition, 1905, poor condition but still intact!
I read The Story of the Treasure Seekers when I was very small (and felt jolly clever for working out that the narrator was Oswald before he told us), followed by the sequels and E. Nesbit's other major works, but I've never read these ones before, and I'm rediscovering the delights of an author who not only influenced so many other later works but was just about the only writer in history to put a character called Pridmore in a story. She was also a fine poet, which makes it all the more impressive that she was able to pen Noël's masterpieces...
I've read the first story, and will save the rest for my train journey tomorrow - I'm going down to London, for reasons I'll be allowed to tell you about in a week or so's time. The secret will be revealed at last, but it really won't be entirely worth waiting for, so I'm sorry for building it up like this.
Basic knowledge of some important historical events has been lost to history. Which is generally fine - I mean, if it was really important, someone would have remembered it, right? But it bothers me a bit when we're talking about something that happened within my lifetime, and which I was personally deeply interested in. Such as... which Transformers Autobot cars were available in the UK in 1984?
Actually, this has eventually been reconstructed by internet fans in recent years - once they'd overcome the tendency for fan websites to be exclusively written by Americans who'd heard vague rumours about things that happened in other countries, and started getting feedback from British fans who were alive at the time, anyway. And the answer seems to be that there were only six of them released in the first range of toys.
This came as something as a surprise to me. I was seven years old when Transformers first came out, and thought they were really cool. If you'd asked me at the time which Autobot cars were available in the shops, I would have said "Well, all of them, stupid," or some such cutting put-down. If I'd counted the characters who appeared in the comic when it first appeared in September (which I'm fairly certain I never did), I might have said "Eleven full-size Autobots, six mini-Autobots and Optimus Prime, stupid." (At this time, I would most likely have been talking to my younger brother, who needed to be put in his place at every opportunity, whether I knew what I was talking about or not)
But, you see, I lived in the middle of nowhere - the nearest toy shop was ten miles away and a place to be visited only on rare special occasions. We didn't have the internet, or any other reliable source of information, except what we could glean from the TV adverts.
I showed one of the adverts here before - here are the first one again, and the extra-special one showing the two "leaders", Optimus Prime and Soundwave.
Now, if you pay particular attention to the Autobots the fair-haired, white-shirted boys are playing with, you can see that they've got multiple copies of each, but there are only six distinct models - Sideswipe, Ratchet, Hound, Mirage, Bluestreak and Jazz.
If you were lucky enough to OWN one of these exciting new toys, bought new from the shops, you'd also have got a folded-up catalogue showing all the available toys - and again, just those six in the "Robot Cars" range.
As well as telling us that the Transformers are currently living among us in vehicle mode and will one day transform back into robots and begin their adventures, it gives us a full line-up of the toys you can actually buy in the shops. And unlike the TV advert, it shows Bumblebee in the correct yellow colour, but still has Cliffjumper yellow instead of red.
The Transformers comic made its debut in September 1984, and got its own advert on TV too. It was a must-buy, every fortnight! (We got the Return of the Jedi comic on the weeks Transformers didn't come out, but it was comparatively rubbish.)
The comic never gave a hint that some Autobots weren't available. The other five (Ironhide, Prowl, Sunstreaker, Wheeljack and Trailbreaker) were all featured in the comic stories and implied to be hanging around with the others on the toy shelves, waiting for the day they'd get the call to transform into robots. Prowl is prominent on the animation used in the adverts, but then so is Megatron, and it quickly became well-known that you couldn't get Megatron in this country.
The toy adverts that appeared in the comic started out with this one, just showing one of each type (and a drawing of Bluestreak in the blue colour scheme used in his box art but not on the actual toy, which was silver)
But it was with issue no. 3, which came out on 18 October, just after my eighth birthday, that we got some more concrete information about what could and couldn't be bought in the shops. First a letter on the Openers page on the inside front cover...
(in the early 1980s everyone started sentences with Wot no, and I really had no idea what it was all about)
So yes, it's officially confirmed that Megatron can't be found over here. He turns into a very realistic gun, so although nobody ever confirmed exactly why, we all managed to deduce what was behind his omission. But the comic never said anything about five Autobots not being available either! We did get a new advert, starting from this issue, that showed the six usual suspects...
This one again seems to suggest that the Autobots haven't yet transformed out of their vehicle modes, but are ready to do so any minute now!
But even so, there was still a certain amount of confusion about what we could actually ask our parents to buy for us! With Christmas 1984 fast approaching, the Transformers comic turned to the one person who could help the poor British toy-buying public - Anthony Temple, in charge of Boys' Toys at Hasbro! He got his own regular column, starting in no. 7, released on December 15th!
He let us know that Megaton would be available at Easter! And that by then we'd also be able to use Robot Points for something! But he kept very quiet about those five missing Autobots...
Easter in 1985 was April 7th. A month before that, Transformers issue no. 13 came out on March 9th, and contained a picture of the new and exciting Insecticons (in their Japanese Diaclone colour schemes, not the ones that were used on the toys we got)
[the gap there was a fact file, which has been cut out. Sorry, I haven't got a complete copy...]
And Anthony Temple returned! But all he had to tell us about was the cheap and plastic Jumpstarters, which you could get if you couldn't afford a real Transformer!
He must surely have known by that point that there was a whole new range of desirable Transformers making their debut in British shops! Why couldn't he have mentioned some of them? Didn't he know we all look up to the great oracle that was Anthony Temple for all our Transformer toy information? How could he give us a column about nothing but Jumpstarters and a money-saving Autobot Watch Offer?
Dissatisfaction was obviously rife across the country. In no. 18, published on May 18th, the Transformers comic printed a letter complaining that the toy stores were full of new toys, and Anthony Temple hadn't said a word about it! The editor begged him to write another column, and he grudgingly obliged...
But this time all he wanted to talk about was the Dinobots. And rather than using any of the official storyline behind the characters, he apparently made up off the top of his head a story about how "they were created by the heroic Autobots to help them in their struggle against Evil and to protect the Earth's primeval fringes from attack. The Autobots modelled them on the now extinct Dinosaurs that were in existence many thousands of years ago."
It was around this time that we British Transformer-fans lost our faith in Anthony Temple as the all-knowing voice of wisdom for Transformers toys. We started to rely more on people like Fraser Irving, who obviously lived near a toy shop - he at least gave us the British comic's closest thing to confirmation that Ironhide and Prowl weren't available from the start in 1984.
In fact, we'd grown and matured, and no longer needed Anthony Temple's guidance. Transformers were a big deal, and everybody had at least one or two, or at least had seen the new packed-in catalogue as it passed around the playground. We could compare that with the stories in the comic and see which Transformers were available to us, and which ones (Swoop, Shockwave, Blaster...) would always be the stuff of legend as the "only available in America" ones.
Anthony Temple was able to disappear into obscurity, remembered only by the people who were around in that brief period of 1984-5. We will never see the likes of those days again...
Some family history researchers get to share photos and news stories of their ancestors' great achievements in the distant past, but my family weren't generally that type. Here's what my great-grandparents were up to 110 years ago...
From the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Wednesday 1st January 1913
NEGLECTFUL MOTHER PUNISHED.
Long continued neglect of children on the part of a Sheffield mother was visited by exemplary punishment in the Sheffield Police Court, before Mr. E. H. Banner and Mr. C. J. Whitehead, when Thomas Millership and Mary Ann Millership of 2, Cross Chantrey Road, were summoned for neglecting five of their children, varying in age from 18 months to 12 years.
The prosecution was brought by the N.S.P.C.C., for which Mr. Arthur Neal appeared. He said that defendant was an engineer's turner, the standard wage being 39s. At the beginning of the year the case was brought to the notice of the society's inspector by one of the lady inspectors of the Corporation. Inspector Carter found the house in a most deplorable state. The children were ragged and dirty, and their bed-clothing was insufficient. One of the bedrooms was more like a cesspool than a living room. On one occasion the woman said she was the daughter of a doctor and had never been brought up to work. The inspector hand made frequent visits to the house, and at times there was some improvement, but in November things went again from bad to worse.
Dr. Black said he found the children in a wretched state. A boy whose age was given as five looked more like a child of three. Doris, aged three, looked more like a child of two, and was in the worst state of all. She was exceedingly filthy, and was rickety through neglect. The youngest, two years of age, was smaller than many children at 12 months.
The male defendant said that he gave his wife 30s. every week, and she was to blame for what had happened.
Mrs. Millership, who appeared with a bandaged eye, said that but for eye trouble and general ill-health this neglect would not have occurred.
The magistrates adjourned the case against Millership to give him an opportunity to reform the home, and sent the woman to prison for three months.
The 12-year-old will be my grandmother - Sheffield Grandma, who died long before I was born, that is. I mean, it's not a cheerful story, but I think it's important to remember these things, as well as the grand accomplishments of other people's progenitors...
I got a Christmas card today, all the way from America, with my house name [my house has a name and not a number; this confuses a lot of delivery companies] missed off the address entirely and my name spelt wrong too, but those clever postal operatives still managed to reason "Well, there's someone with a name close to 'Ben Pridemore' living in this postcode area, it must be him" and deliver it here! Such people should be admired!
(Such people as the postal workers, I mean, not such people as have my name or something like it. Although those should be cherished too.)
My current job has me working some of the time in an big office full of accountants, which is the first time I've done that in a while. The last time I was office-based, we had a small office with a handful of finance people, a handful of marketing people and the IT guy. You get a more varied conversation that way, but on the other hand you don't get quite so many people who find it hilariously clever when someone says "it's accrual (a cruel) world." Also, I got Argentina in the office sweepstake, and I never get the good teams in these things, so I take this as a good sign for the job in general!
All this fuss about Harry Kane's role in today's big game against France tends to overlook the fact that he's really obviously the early-1940s Marvel superhero Hurricane in disguise, and thus able to use his super-speed and other godly powers to win the game for us easily if he wants to. If he doesn't, I can only assume it's part of some further ruse to protect his secret identity while fighting fifth-columnists sent by dictator nations. Or alternatively some comedy blundering on the part of his fat, comical sidekick Speedy Scriggles.
Hurricane, like most of the disposable heroes Marvel filled the back pages of their comics with in the golden age, was rubbish. But let's hope that his namesake (while keeping his clothes on better than the superhero did) can inspire England to victory today!
Fifty years ago, if you were a keen model-kit assembler in 1972 America, you would definitely have wanted Aurora's range of Prehistoric Scenes™!
There's clearly been some cutting-edge paleontological research gone into these scenes. I do love "The fierce Flying Reptile", but best of all has to be the fact that Cro-Magnon Woman was particularly famed for her needlework skills. I suppose that makes sense, considering the beautifully-tailored modesty-concealing animal-skin costumes that of course all cavepeople wore...
As a follow-up to my last entry, I do accept that my brief moustache phase in the late 1990s was misjudged, but stand by my insistence on the full beard being the way to go, even in my current circumstances of having a cold. There's no denying you ideally don't want to have a moustache if you've got a runny nose, but even that isn't enough to make me want to go for the clean-shaven look (or even, heaven forbid, one of those stupid beard-with-clean-shaven-top-lip affairs). Besides, I rarely get colds, so I think I can be forgiven both for keeping the beard and for whining about it extensively on the rare occasion I do have the sniffles.
Anyway, it occurred to me that I should probably post more on this blog of mine than a sentence every couple of weeks about the fact that I've got a beard. Let's talk football. It's the World Cup, you know! I do love the World Cup format, and I think I'm reluctantly agreeing with the commentators who say it's a bad thing they're changing the format to 48 teams (16 groups of 3?) next time round. I tend to automatically disagree with things football commentators are instructed to say and pretend it's their own words, even if I actually think they're right when I think about it some more (the FA Cup is still magic, whatever the naysayers might say. ("Nay," probably. Or is that the horses?)) and I'm sure I'll even prefer the new improved format soon enough.
But this one has worked out just great - lots of 'shocks', lots of 'upsets', but we've still got a Round Of Sixteen in which eight of the world's top twelve* international teams each play a plucky lower-ranked opponent. And the top teams, as I write this, have made it three out of three, so it all bodes very well for England tonight. I look wholeheartedly forward to us losing in the semi-finals again!
*It would be eight of the top nine if Belgium's failings hadn't let Croatia in. And it could have been eight out of eight if not for Italy's hilarious failure to even qualify for the tournament, just like they did at the previous world cup. Italy are totally rubbish at football. However, there's one thing at which Italy aren't rubbish, and that of course is the world of memory sports!
Specifically, the world of Memory League - yesterday, it was the grand final of Season 16, and as has become a long-established tradition by now, it was Alex Mullen (USA) against Andrea Muzii (Italy). Would Alex follow the long-established tradition of winning and leaving Andrea to be content with yet another runner-up trophy? No! After an epic battle, Andrea finally overturned the inevitable and won a well-deserved victory! It really was terribly thrilling!
I really need to get into the habit of playing more Memory League. I always find myself badly out of practice when a new season begins. And there won't be another league season until some time early next year, giving me no 'official' reason to play games for months and months (unless there's an unprecedented lack of interest in playing in January's World Championship; the top 16 in the world rankings get invited, and I'm number 23). Time for an early New Year's Resolution! Play more friendly Memory League matches! Get into the habit, and I'll be in world-beating form in no time!
I decided to grow a beard in November 2002, you know. It's been twenty years without a razor coming near my face, and as I often say, from a time when nobody had a beard, now they're everywhere! I'm a trendsetter. I'd shave it off and see if everyone follows suit, but I can't really be bothered.
Bubble Bobble is the classic arcade game adventure of the bubble dragons Bubblen and Bobblen (Baburun and Boburun in the original Japanese), trying to rescue their girlfriends from the monsters who have kidnapped them. And the very best incarnation of Bubble Bobble is the Sega Master System version - two hundred levels of bubble-blowing excitement with added story screens you won't find on any other adaptation!
The only minor problem with these story sequences is that the game was originally written in Japanese, and then translated into English (by Japanese programmers). And that meant the English translation had to use no more characters than the Japanese original, but still convey the same sense - which is tricky, since Japanese tends to use fewer characters, and considers leaving a space between words to be strictly optional. So a certain amount of simplification is going to be necessary. Here's the cutscene that plays if you complete level 100, having already collected "three magical balls".
じゃあくなる、かみのなにおいて
これよりけっこんしきをはじめ…
"In the name of our kami [Shinto deity], the wedding will commence." The rather more plain "WE WILL BEGIN THE WEDDING" isn't quite as cool, somehow.
おっだれだ、そこにいるのは！
"WHO IS THERE?" is easy enough to translate, but the Japanese is a bit more elaborate about it.
あっばぶるんぼぶるん
たすけにきてくれたのね！
うれしい♥
In the original, Betty (or maybe it's Patty) doesn't just exclaim that the boys have come to save them, she adds "Happy!" and a heart! In the English, she doesn't even use an exclamation mark, sounding like a newsreader with a flat, emotionless "BUB & BOB CAME TO SAVE US."
おのれここまでおいかけてきたのか！
In Japanese, he's surprised that the dragons have chased them all this way, but in English it's a simple exclamation of "YOU RASCAL!" - should really be rascals, plural, but then Japanese doesn't use different forms for singular and plural, much to the confusion of translators everywhere.
べていたちは、わたさない
よ～だ！
And this really isn't a translation at all. He's saying "We won't give you Betty and Patty! Nyah!", not "GET OUT OF HERE". Well, he says Betty-tachi, which I guess means the multiple people who fall under the subset of 'Betty', but I guess it makes sense to Japanese speakers...
たすけてばぶるん！
ぼぶる～ん！
"Help, Bubblen! Bobblen!" becomes "HELP US BUB!" It seems like there would have been room for the translator to fit Bob's name in there too.
くやしかったら
ここまでおいで～！
The first line is exclaiming that it's irritating, and the second is saying "Come here!", presumably meaning Betty and Patty. "GET ME YOU BOYS!" doesn't entirely convey what's going on, and sounds more than a little camp...
ぼぶるん、おいかけよう！
"Bobblen, let's go!" becomes "GET HIM, BOB!", as if Bub has had enough of the whole adventure now and is going home. His speech bubble is strangely misplaced in the English version - someone must have accidentally messed up the code while translating it.
おっけ～！いくぜ
Bob says "Okay! Let's go," in Japanese, but just "LET'S GO" in English.
And go they do, for another hundred levels. Only when the bubble dragons have defeated the Super Drunkard, father of the two villains whose wedding they interrupted, do we get some more story. It's the happy ending of the game!
ぱぱまで
やられちゃったの？
うっそ～！
"YOU BEATEN UP DAD?" is a little ungrammatical, but does sum up what he's saying. We don't get a translation of the "Ugh!" noise in the third line, though.
おぼえてろよ
ぜったいに
しかえししてやるからな！
The Japanese is a more elaborate promise to get revenge, but "I WILL MAKE YOU REGRET." does somehow sound cool.
きゃ～っ！
"EEK!" sounds better than "Kyaa!" to English-speaking ears, I think.
たすけてくれて
ありがとう♥
でも、そのすがた…
It's newsreader Betty again, with an emotionless "THANKS FOR YOUR HELP". In Japanese she adds another heart symbol, and then goes on to say "But your appearance..."
だいじょうぶ。
のろいはもうとけているわ。
ほら！
And "I FEEL FINE NOW" isn't translating Patty's observation at all well. She says "It's okay" in the first line, then adds "The curse is undone. Look!" Patty seems to have the ability to see the near future in this ending sequence, because immediately after she says that, the dragons turn back into their human forms.
うれしい！またへいわに
くらせるのね♥
And now the English translation is completely losing it. Patty's supposed to be exclaiming "Happy!" once more, and saying that now they can live happily again. "FOREST ALSO CHANGED" is the second half of the translation of the next speech bubble...
みて！
もりののろいも
とけていくわ！
"Look! The curse on the forest is coming undone!" says Betty in Japanese. In English she goes for the more succinct "THE COLOR OF THE"
べてい～だいすき♥
"I love you Betty!" won't fit in the speech bubble, so Bub just shouts "BETTY!"
よかったね。ぱてい～♥
And likewise, Bob's "This is great!" before his "PATTY!" has to be cut.
はっぴい～えんど♥
"Happy end" and a heart symbol just becomes "THE END." But our heroes seem to be happy, anyway, merged into two amorphous blobs as the background disappears. But then everything disappears, and the epilogue is told to us by disembodied speech bubbles.
そののち、ばび～たちは
むらにもどり、なかまたちから
だいかんげいされました。
Our heroes ("Babi-tachi" in the original - 'Bub and the rest'?) do return to the previously unmentioned village in the Japanese version, but there's space to start the sentence with "After that," and end it with saying their friends were happy about it. All the English version has room for is "BOB & BUB RETURNED TO THE VILLAGE."
よろこびにわくひとびと…
それをみて、ばび～は
ほんとうによかったと
あらためておもうのでした。
The specific "BUB WAS GLAD TO SEE THE HAPPY VILLAGERS." does accurately reflect the Japanese version, which also only mentions Bub, and generally talks about everyone being happy again.
いつのひか、ばび～たちは
またあらたなるぼうけんに
たびだつのかもしれません。
The content of this speech bubble gets spread over the next two in the English translation. In the Japanese, we're told that some day, Babi-tachi will start a new adventure. In English, it's "SOME DAY, BOB & BUB WILL START"
だってふたりは、おとこのこなんですから！
"A NEW ADVENTURE.", carried over from the previous speech bubble, obliterates the final cheery thought "Because the two of them are boys!" Roll the credits!
Yes, it's been a busy weekend of competition - good thing we've got an extra hour today so we can fit it all in! Yesterday afternoon it was the Microsoft Excel World Championship last 128 and last 64. The two rounds took place one after the other, and everyone was told to complete both tasks, even if you thought you'd done badly on the first one, because the results wouldn't be announced until after both were finished.
Which turned out to be advice I was in need of following, because I did terribly on the first task. Here's the theme of the puzzles:
General Instructions:
You have just joined university and made 50 new close friends. Your new friends haven't all met each other, and would like to understand the statistics on the relationships between them so they can form cliques more easily in the coming days.
By analysing your social media site, FaceWorkbook, you have built up a matrix of which pairings are friends and close friends with each other (as found on the Network tab). In all the questions, someone's close friends are also considered their friends.
If someone makes a social media post, it is seen by their friends and the friends of their close friends.
Please answer the questions below, based on the friendship status of your new friends. There are 5 levels of increasing difficulty available in this competition task.
So we've got a grid of fifty people and which of them each one is two different kinds of friendly with, and it's a question of counting and matching to answer the questions. Which should be easy, but I got all kinds of mixed up with it, and also lost track of time (I was thinking 5:30 as the cut-off point, and forgot I'd started as soon as I got the spreadsheet rather than waiting till 5:00 to begin, so I'd used the half hour maximum time before I realised). And I ended up with an atrocious score of 124, which turns out to be not quite the worst anyone managed, but pretty close to it.
But I went on with the last-64 task anyway, and that was a lot more fun!
You are secretly communicating in the classroom with your friend by passing notes. Unfortunately, recently your teacher intercepted a note in which you confessed cheating on the latest Geography test. Oops! To make sure that never happens again, you and your friend devised a way to communicate without a third person being able to read the messages.
The basic idea is to offset a certain number of letters. For example, an 'a' offset 10 places becomes a 'k'. A 'z' offset 1 place becomes a 'a'. Capitals stay capitals, so a 'Y' offset 4 places becomes a 'C'. All characters that are not letters are unaffected, so spaces remain spaces and dots remain dots.
The levels are in order of increasing difficulty. The first two levels do not include spaces, nor capitals. Level three includes both of them. Level four and five use a different algorithm, in which the offset is not constant.
Decoding messages - which can be tricky with Excel, if you have to split text into individual letters, and distinguish between lower and upper case (which some Excel formulas do and some don't). But it was fun to do, especially since all the secret messages turned out to relate to Sherlock Holmes - the puzzle-writer is obviously a fan of the books rather than the TV shows, so we're definitely on the same wavelength there. Not that you needed to know the books to decode the messages, obviously, but maybe it gave me a more positive mental attitude, because I got a great score of 555 on this one, which would have won a fair few last-64 matches, including the one in my bracket!
But sadly, since I didn't win the last-128 match, that was the end of the competition for me - and you'll just have to take my word for it that I did get 555 in the next round, because first-round losers' results don't show up on the website. I did, though, I promise!
It's too bad I wasn't in the morning session instead of the afternoon one - they had different puzzles, for obvious reasons, and just look what the last-64 task was for them!
Othello is a board game played between two players, Black and White. The game is played on an 8x8 board with reversible pieces (black on one side and white on the other), and a piece may change colour after it has been placed.
The board starts off as shown to the right, with two black and two white pieces in the centre. The players then take turns placing a token of their own colour on the board and capturing one or more pieces of their opponent's colour.
A player can play a piece in a position if:
1. That position is empty before their move; and
2. Adding the new piece completes a straight line in one direction (horizontal, vertical, or diagonal) where both ends are a piece of the colour just played, and all the squares in between are of the opponent's colour (no blanks).
After the move, all the pieces of the opponents colour on the lines described in (2) are changed to the player's colour.
For example, the second board to the right shows the configuration in Example 3:
● A1 is not a valid move for white, because the only adjacent black pieces (down column A) do not have another white piece on the other side.
● B1 is a valid move for white, because it completes two lines (horizontal from B1 to D1, and diagonal from B1 to D3) with white at both ends and black in the middle. The black pieces in C1 and C2 are then captured, i.e. turned white.
● C1 is not a valid move for white, because it is already occupied.
Note these are not complete rules of Othello, but they are the only ones needed for these questions.
Now there, being a veteran Othello player, I might really have had an advantage over someone who's not familiar with the game! Although the questions were more about assembling a board layout presented in a strange way and using Excel formulas to answer abstract questions about it, rather than choosing good moves, but even so, I would have been excited to be presented with that task!
As it happens, the World Othello Championship, which I'm also not good enough to qualify for, is happening right now in Paris! After two days of swiss competition, Team Britain (Imre Leader, David Hand, Guy Plowman) came joint fourth overall (after Japan, Finland and Switzerland), but no British representative in the finals today.
As I write this, the semi-finals (Kento Urano vs Katie Pihlajapuro, Arthur Juigner v Michele Borassi) are happening, and Kento is clearly the man in form this year, unbeaten while everyone else was taking points off each other.
Rémi Tastet, who beat me at the MSO when I was all chuffed at having beaten his dad in the previous round, is in with a shot at the junior championship. I really should see if I can qualify for this event again some time...
But this morning, I had the last round of qualifying for the African-European Open Memory League Championship, pitting me against Ewelina Preś in what was always going to be a tricky competition.
She chose Names for the first discipline, which of course everyone does against me because I'm so bad at it, and won comfortably. So I chose Cards for the next, which I do always think of as one I should be winning, but my brain wasn't quite in top gear and the first three pairs of cards took too much thinking about, before I clicked into top speed. I was intending to get under 25 seconds, but it ended up as 27.78, and Ewelina was faster.
What is the world coming to, when someone can memorise a pack of cards in 27 seconds and that's still not good enough to win? I'm getting too old for this. So anyway, she chose Words next, and I really do need to recapture some good form in this - I got a terrible 31, and lost to Ewelina's 39, but if I'd been on the kind of form where I do 40 consistently I could have made a real contest of this.
3-0 down and unlikely to be staging a heroic comeback, I wasn't sure whether to pick Images or Numbers. Figuring that I'm more likely to make a mistake than she is at high-speed numbers, I went with Images and hoped she'd get mixed up. But she didn't, and I did, so that's a 4-0 win to Ewelina! She goes on to face Andrea in the finals, and I'm in my fairly regular position of resolving to do more training before the next season starts!
I feel like I haven't written enough about comics here of late. Modern superhero comics aren't really much to write home about, although the world of the X-Men is rather good at the moment - rather than follow the usual pattern of reinventing the whole series on an annual basis, they've stuck with a status quo and told a fair few good stories in it. "Immortal X-Men" is especially worth reading, and "X-Men Red" can be pretty good too.
But way back in May I said something here about Amazing Fantasy #1000, saying I'd buy it "however overpriced and minimal its content might be", and I should probably apologise for being unreasonable there (about the 'minimal' thing, at least, and you do get a good amount of entertainment for the eight-dollar price). It's actually really awesome!
72 pages, plus the covers, and containing nine different complete Spider-Man adventures. That's the kind of format that started the popularity of superhero comics in the first place, and the kind of thing Marvel and DC should be doing more of! Modern writers and artists struggle to tell a story in eight pages or so; it's becoming a lost art. But the ones featured in this collection all do a good job of it, and I hugely recommend reading this celebration of Spidey if you haven't seen it yet!
Dan Slott wins the Zoomy prize for the best story of the lot - Spider-Man's sixtieth birthday goes the way his life always goes, but shows along the way what a great guy he really is. Kurt Busiek, with typical brilliance, gives us a sequel to Amazing Fantasy #15 with a twist, and Anthony Falcone and Michael Cho provide a perfect restatement of Spider-Man's core principles. And the others are all great fun as well, letting each writer/artist combination explore their own personal take on the iconic webslinger! Go out and buy it, if you haven't already! It's well worth a read!
I did promise to provide full details, so here's the correct viewing
order for the classic cartoon Thundercats. That is, the order in which they
were shown on British TV - the DVDs claim to have the episodes in the order
they were first shown in the USA, but I'm still very doubtful if that's true.
In any case, a lot of American showings were in roughly the same order as the
BBC showings, and the DVD order unquestionably has some episodes in the wrong
sequence ("Trouble With Time" explicitly comes before "Pumm-Ra", for example).
Here's the first series, with dates, times and writers:
16:55
Friday 02 January 1987
Exodus
Leonard Starr
Friday 02 January 1987
The Unholy Alliance
Leonard Starr
16:35
Thursday 08 January 1987
Berbils
Leonard Starr
16:30
Thursday 15 January 1987
The Slaves of Castle Plun-Darr
Leonard Starr
16:30
Thursday 22 January 1987
Trouble With Time
Ron Goulart & Julian P. Gardner
16:30
Thursday 29 January 1987
Pumm-Ra
Julian P. Gardner
16:35
Thursday 05 February 1987
The Terror of Hammerhand
Ron Goulart & Julian P. Gardner
16:35
Thursday 12 February 1987
The Tower of Traps
Leonard Starr
16:35
Thursday 19 February 1987
The Garden of Delights
Barney Cohen & Julian P. Gardner
16:35
Thursday 26 February 1987
Mandora - The Evil Chaser
William Overgard
16:35
Thursday 05 March 1987
The Ghost Warrior
Leonard Starr
16:35
Thursday 12 March 1987
The Doomgaze
Stephen Perry
16:35
Thursday 19 March 1987
Lord of the Snows
Bob Haney
16:35
Thursday 26 March 1987
The Spaceship Beneath the Sands
Leonard Starr
16:35
Thursday 02 April 1987
The Time Capsule
Peter Lawrence
16:35
Thursday 09 April 1987
The Fireballs of Plun-Darr
William Overgard
16:35
Thursday 16 April 1987
All That Glitters
Bob Haney
16:35
Thursday 23 April 1987
Spitting Image
Howard Post
16:35
Thursday 30 April 1987
Mongor
Peter Lawrence
16:35
Thursday 07 May 1987
Return to Thundera
Bob Haney
16:35
Thursday 14 May 1987
Snarf Takes Up the Challenge
Peter Lawrence
16:35
Thursday 21 May 1987
Mandora and the Pirates
William Overgard
16:35
Thursday 28 May 1987
The Crystal Queen
Leonard Starr
16:35
Thursday 04 June 1987
Safari Joe
Stephen Perry
16:35
Thursday 11 June 1987
Return of the Driller
Howard Post
[Summer break filled by repeating the 12-part European drama 'Silas']
16:35
Thursday 10 September 1987
Turmagar the Tuska
C. H. Trengove
16:35
Thursday 17 September 1987
Sixth Sense
Peter Lawrence
16:35
Thursday 24 September 1987
Dr Dometone
William Overgard
16:35
Thursday 01 October 1987
The Astral Prison
Peter Lawrence
16:30
Thursday 08 October 1987
Queen of 8 Legs
Stephen Perry
16:35
Thursday 15 October 1987
Dimension Doom
Bob Haney
16:35
Thursday 22 October 1987
The Rock Giant
Peter Lawrence
Those episodes were repeated on Saturday mornings as part of Going Live (or On The Waterfront, or UP2U) from 9 April to 3 December 1988, and then again on Saturday mornings at 8:35 on BBC1 from 7 October 1989 to 14 April 1990... except, for some reason, for the last four episodes, which went out on Sunday mornings from 7 January to 28 January 1990 (so while the other, earlier episodes, were being shown on Saturdays).
But there was a whole other series' worth of episodes that must have been just lying around at the BBC for years, which finally made it back to the 4:35 timeslot on CBBC in autumn 1990...
16:35
Monday 10 September 1990
Lion-O's Anointment First Day: The Trial of Strength
Leonard Starr
16:35
Monday 17 September 1990
Lion-O's Anointment Second Day: The Trial of Speed
Leonard Starr
16:35
Monday 24 September 1990
Lion-O's Anointment Third Day: The Trial of Cunning
Leonard Starr
16:35
Monday 01 October 1990
Lion-O's Anointment Fourth Day: The Trial of Mind Power
Leonard Starr
16:35
Monday 08 October 1990
Lion-O's Anointment Final Day: The Trial of Evil
Leonard Starr
[Strangely enough, "The Rock Giant" was shown again on October 15th]
16:35
Monday 22 October 1990
The Thunder-Cutter
William Overgard
16:35
Monday 29 October 1990
Mechanical Plague
Peter Lawrence
16:35
Monday 05 November 1990
The Demolisher
Bob Haney & Peter Lawrence
16:35
Monday 12 November 1990
Feliner - Part One
Stephen Perry
16:35
Monday 19 November 1990
Feliner - Part Two
Stephen Perry
16:35
Monday 26 November 1990
Excalibur
Peter Lawrence
16:35
Monday 03 December 1990
Secret of the Ice King
Bob Haney
16:35
Monday 10 December 1990
Sword in a Hole
William Overgard
16:35
Monday 17 December 1990
The Wolfrat
C. H. Trengove
[No Children's BBC on Christmas Eve]
[Or New Year's Eve]
16:35
Monday 07 January 1991
Good and Ugly
Peter Lawrence
16:40
Monday 14 January 1991
Divide and Conquer
Lee Schneider
16:40
Monday 21 January 1991
The Micrits
Bruce Smith
16:35
Monday 28 January 1991
The Superpower Potion
C. H. Trengove
16:35
Monday 04 February 1991
The Evil Harp of Charr-Nin
Douglas Bernstein & Denis Markell
16:35
Monday 11 February 1991
Tight Squeeze
Stephen Perry
16:35
Monday 18 February 1991
Monkian's Bargain
Lee Schneider
16:35
Monday 25 February 1991
Out of Sight
C. H. Trengove
16:40
Monday 04 March 1991
Jackalman's Rebellion
Bruce Smith
16:35
Monday 11 March 1991
The Mountain
Danny Peary
16:35
Monday 18 March 1991
Eye of the Beholder
Kenneth E. Vose
16:35
Monday 25 March 1991
The Mumm-Ra Berbil
Jeri Craden
[No Children's BBC on Easter Monday]
16:35
Monday 08 April 1991
The Trouble With Thunderkittens
Kimberly B. Morris
16:35
Monday 15 April 1991
Mumm-Rana
Bob Haney
16:35
Monday 22 April 1991
Trapped
Stephen Perry
16:35
Monday 29 April 1991
The Shifter
Matthew Malach
[No Children's BBC on May Bank Holiday]
16:35
Monday 13 May 1991
Dream Master
Heather M. Winters & Annabelle Gurwitch
16:35
Monday 20 May 1991
Fond Memories
Lee Schneider
Not shown at all
The Transfer
Lawrence Dukore & Lee Schneider
"The Transfer" should have come between "Trapped" and "The Shifter", according to similarly-ordered episode guides on the internet. Like most of the last twenty or so episodes, you're not missing much by not seeing it (they seem to have churned out any old rubbish to fill the 65-episode contract, after starting with so many classics), but that's where to watch it if you're going for a full marathon viewing. Which, despite that 'any old rubbish' comment, I heartily recommend that you do! Thundercats Hoooooo!
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