Hey ho, come on let's go to Nowhere Land!

 I don't think there's any better way to spend the four-day Easter weekend than in watching my way through the first season of Maggie and the Ferocious Beast.

Someone asked me to recommend some non-serialised cartoons they could watch random episodes of on shuffle, and Maggie was one of the first that came to mind - there are no continuing storylines, after all. But after a moment's thought, I remembered that it actually works much better if you watch the whole series in sequence - new recurring characters are introduced along the way, and passing references are occasionally made to previous episodes.

And more importantly, it's fascinating to look at the three seasons (13 triple-episodes in each, making a grand total of 117 seven-minute self-contained stories) and pick up on the generally different feel of each one. Most cartoons that run to multiple seasons have one (often the second, funnily enough) that stands out as the best of the bunch, but Maggie doesn't really do that - it's consistently great all the way through, with some excellent episodes in each season.

But the first, which more than any other is made up mostly just of stories with the three central characters, provides the first real statements of what the whole series is about. No other show gives you such masterpieces as "The Lemonade Stand" (in which they set up a lemonade stand and sit around hoping a customer will come by, while the Beast keeps pretending to fall over and hurt himself because he wants a plaster on his knee like Maggie), or "Pack Up Your Troubles" (in which they decide to send all their troubles away down the river in paper boats, and end up concluding that they don't have any troubles after all, so just sail the boats), or perhaps the greatest of the first season, "Say Cheese" (in which Hamilton is upset because Maggie has a photo of herself and the Beast and she has to eventually persuade him to tell her what's wrong). These are stories where literally nothing happens, but it's absolutely riveting! And when there is some kind of conflict or happening, like in "The Push-Me Popper", when the Beast accidentally breaks Hamilton's new toy and they have a furious argument about it, things sort themselves out quickly enough when Maggie just puts it back together and everything's all right.

And that's just the first season! When we get into the second and third, with bigger roles for the wonderfully amoral Nedley, experimentation like "Morning in Nowhere Land" (no dialogue, and no Maggie, just Hamilton and the Beast getting ready for the day to musical accompaniment) and the amazing series-ending "Where's Maggie?" which raises the possibility that Maggie might not be coming back... well, you should really go and watch the entire series if you haven't already. You won't regret it!

And do watch the UK dubbed version - the voice acting is just so much better.

DBG

There are very few people in this world who appreciate why it's clever and entirely appropriate to create a picture of Dust Brain wearing Ruth Bader Ginsburg's clothes, so I thought I would share it with the internet just in case one of those people happens to see it.

I feel I should probably add the disclaimer that this is not at all intended to be any kind of suggestion that the late and much admired Supreme Court Justice resembled a hideous mummy. She really didn't.

 

Time flies when you're not doing anything worth writing about

 I don't seem to have posted anything here for a month, which really wasn't intentional. I should make a point of saying something here regularly - even if nobody else reads it, it's a very useful way to remind myself what I was doing at any point in history (history before 2005 doesn't really count, because nobody remembers back that far). So I'll follow the advice of one of my favourite other blogs on the internet, Dirty Feed, which is frequently devoted to complaining about other people's blogs that aren't updated frequently, but also spends a lot of time writing absolutely brilliant articles about minutiae of television production history. It's really worth reading through the whole thing, if you haven't already.

While I'm recommending things, is everyone reading Tom Brevoort's blog? If you've got even a passing interest in the history of superhero comics, you can spend hours engrossed in his fascinating writings!

That makes me feel better about not giving my loyal readers, if any, sufficient reading matter just lately. So what am I doing these days? Well, working for a living, which is a bit tiresome. I'd rather be making more documentaries about exercising and competing in memory competitions, but there's probably a limit on how much the public can stomach of that kind of thing. Mind you, I've been thinking for the best part of twenty years that my occasional worldwide TV star career has surely worn out its welcome by now, and new things keep on turning up, so who knows?

Also, I am not a number; I am a free man. But if you want to keep track of how I'm doing at Excel esports and find that their ranking tables list most of the competitors by a number rather than a name for some reason, I'm #408184. I came 34th out of the 80 competitors who registered a score in today's competition, and I think I'm still gradually improving. World champion one of these years, once I learn or develop a few new clever tricks with spreadsheets. I just wouldn't want you to think I'm hiding my mediocre performance behind the anonymity of numbers. There's probably a box to tick somewhere to say it's okay for them to publish my name, but I'm not a box-ticker, I'm an Excel wizard. Although I do know how to do things with tick-boxes on Excel.

Today's competition was at 7:30 in the morning. I did that, then worked from home from nine till half past twelve, then I had a Memory League match scheduled on my lunch hour only for my opponent not to turn up, then some more accountancy until five o'clock, and now I'm watching Italy v England play football on telly. This is how my life goes, and I really do think it's fascinating enough to merit blogging about regularly.

Also, I'm inclined to write at length about Frankenstein. Look forward to it.

Coup de chapeau

 I'm on my way home from Cambridge as I write this, after a weekend's othelloing. The finals are still going on, although as usual I was never in contention to finish in the top four. I did, however, impress myself yesterday by beating the entire Tastet family (or at least the three representatives of it who came to the tournament) one after the other in ascending order of seniority. And Marc assures me that 'coup de chapeau' is the French equivalent of the English 'hat-trick', and I'm not going to turn down the opportunity of making a hat-related remark when it's so appropriate.

Apart from that, I wasn't all that impressive over the eleven rounds - but I wasn't as absolutely terrible as anyone who's seen the two of my games that were covered on liveothello.com might think! Those were by far my worst games of the weekend, and I happen to think I played fairly well in most of the others. Honest. I finished the first day on four wins out of seven, having also beaten Carlo Affatigato and lost reasonably good games to Imre Leader and Emmanuel Lazard and one awful live-internetted one against Matthias Berg, and felt in good shape to achieve my usual aim of 50% success - maybe even having only played the best players at the event.

But this morning, after being wiped out ruthlessly by Takuji Kashiwabara in my second liveothello disaster and then losing a game I really felt I should have won against Luke Plowman, I was very much in the mood to inflict a vengeful wipeout on his little sister Anya (although all of Guy's kids, like so many people nowadays, are disturbingly grown up nowadays; it's almost enough to make me think I might be getting old, but that's just crazy talk). Anyway, I couldn't quite manage to completely wipe her out, and decided to pretend I was just too gallant to do it, only for Anya to jump in before I even had a chance to proclaim how nice I am and remind me I was the first person ever to wipe her out, years ago when she actually was extremely young.

But that only brought me out to five out of ten, and the final game against Emmanuel Caspard didn't work out as I'd hoped, though it looked for a while like I might end up on top, so five out of eleven is what I had to settle for. Still, a good weekend's fun all round!

Pic-a-nic baskets

I've said it before, but Excel Esports is a great pastime for anyone who's even slightly smarter than the average bear. This month's challenge involved calculating the revenue and costs of selling picnic baskets, with the added complication that any bears in the vicinity will steal the baskets and not give them back unless you give them a treat. And then for the final task, the bears are all out to get you and you have to calculate the quickest escape route!

As before, I did okay with it, but with a little bit more practice of thinking at high speed, I could do better. I've definitely got a real buzz of adrenaline after this session! Well, either that or I've drunk too much cherry coke again.

Anyway, this weekend it's back to merry old Cambridge for the EGP othello tournament! You know, twenty years ago at the 2003 tournament I was temporarily living in Cambridge and doing a course in teaching English as a foreign language. It turned out not to be a great career choice, and I quickly went back to number-crunching. But that weekend it unexpectedly snowed a blizzard and I was caught outside in Cambridge city centre in light, summery clothes. I hope that doesn't happen again this time, but I'm not packing any winter woolies anyway, so it'll be entirely my fault if it does.

The top part of Pridmore turned into painted iron and glass

Having re-read my way through all three-and-a-bit books about the Bastable siblings, I couldn't resist moving on to some of E. Nesbit's more magical (and brilliantly silly) children's stories - particularly her significant 1901 work, "The Cockatoucan". It's significant because of the nursemaid you can see in the centre of this picture. Her name? Pridmore!

Pridmore is a fairly uncommon name, an exclusively working-class one, and one that's historically been limited to the north and midlands areas. So when it comes to Victorian fiction (and for that matter modern-day fiction too), you'll never see a central character named Pridmore. You might, if you're very lucky, find the name applied to a servant... but even then, this one story by the great E. Nesbit seems to be the only time that's ever happened in history!

I don't know where Nesbit (the E stands for Edith, but she was always credited as E. so I feel I should just call her that) got the name from - this story, like all the stories back then, is set in London, where Pridmores were and still are vanishingly rare. Maybe she encountered a distant relative of mine, somehow!

She might not have really liked this relative, mind you. Pridmore in this story is a disagreeably strict kind of nursemaid, and the magical bird (which causes strange things to happen whenever it laughs) turns her into an Automatic Nagging Machine.

For before her eyes she saw an awful change taking place in Pridmore.

In an instant all that was left of the original Pridmore were the boots

and the hem of her skirt—the top part of her had changed into painted

iron and glass, and even as Matilda looked the bit of skirt that was

left got flat and hard and square. The two feet turned into four feet,

and they were iron feet, and there was no more Pridmore.

 

“Oh, my poor child,” said the King, “your maid has turned into an

Automatic Machine.”

 

It was too true. The maid had turned into a machine such as those which

you see in a railway station—greedy, grasping things which take your

pennies and give you next to nothing in chocolate and no change.

 

But there was no chocolate to be seen through the glass of the machine

that once had been Pridmore. Only little rolls of paper.

 

The King silently handed some pennies to Matilda. She dropped one into

the machine and pulled out the little drawer. There was a scroll of

paper. Matilda opened it and read—

 

“Don’t be tiresome.”

 

She tried again. This time it was—

 

“If you don’t give over I’ll tell your Ma first thing when she comes

home.”

 

The next was—

 

“Go along with you do—always worrying;” so then Matilda knew.

 

“Yes,” said the King sadly, “I fear there’s no doubt about it. Your

maid has turned into an Automatic Nagging Machine. Never mind, my

dear, she’ll be all right to-morrow.”

 

“I like her best like this, thank you,” said Matilda quickly. “I

needn’t put in any more pennies, you see.”

 

“Oh, we mustn’t be unkind and neglectful,” said the King gently, and he

dropped in a penny. He got—

 

“You tiresome boy, you. Leave me be this minute.”

 

Pridmore saves the day in the end. The only way to undo all the Cockatoucan's magic (which also included turning the King into a villa-residence, replete with every modern improvement, and the Prime Minister into a comic opera) is to make him laugh on the wrong side of his mouth, and Pridmore gladly obliges. "It was a terrible sight to witness, and the sound of that wrong-sided laughter was horrible to hear." I think we should all follow this shining example!

Krakoa, east of Java

 I'm trying not to spend money recklessly at the moment, after a year of mostly being idly and deliberately unemployed and also surprisingly physically active for the TV cameras. So when I say I've bought 95 comics over the last couple of weekends you'll probably just nod and say "Yes, that's consistent with your usual behaviour when you haven't got enough money and are trying not to spend it recklessly." But when I explain that they were very reasonably priced comics by the standards of American superhero comics generally, and that I was entirely justified in buying them because certain other comics are extremely good, you'll entirely forgive and heartily applaud my splurging, I'm sure!

You see, I may have mentioned before that we're in one of those rare eras when X-Men comics are great, just at the moment. Ever since the epic House of X / Powers of X series starting in July 2019, the mutants of the Marvel universe, good and bad alike, have all been living on Krakoa the sentient island in the Pacific, and generally lording it over the non-mutant humans in a new kind of way. And yes, according to this map in the first issue, Krakoa (unlike Krakatoa) actually is located somewhere to the east of Java.

Anyway, the location isn't important - the mutants now have access to a system of magic gates that can teleport them all over the world and beyond. Also, they have the ability to resurrect the dead. All of this was established by that original twelve-issue series and it felt like one of those cases where the comics would write a great story setting up the status quo, spend a couple of months failing to tell any readable stories in it, then tear everything down again in the next epic.

But one way or another, even though the first batch of comics spinning off the new set-up were unexceptional and then the pandemic stopped them altogether for a little while, the basic Krakoa premise really had legs, and they kept on producing stories set within it. And now, there are some totally awesome stories being told! The new epic that's just starting, "Sins of Sinister", I would have just dismissed as one of those 'spend a couple of months telling alternate-reality stories and then press the reset button implausibly at the end' things, except that this time the plot mechanism by which things will be reset has been spelt out clearly in advance and plays an integral part in the story, so that somehow makes me a lot more eager to read it.

And before that even started, the real masterpiece was "Immortal X-Men", which ties all the other comics in the range together and makes it all feel like a cohesive universe with a cast of hundreds all actively involved in one big, sprawling, fascinating adventure! Seriously, go out and read at least the last year's worth of X-Men comics, if you can find them.

Which brings me back to my splurging. See, Worlds Apart, the comic shop in Birmingham, was selling off its leftover comics (95p each or 10 for £5!), and I couldn't resist picking up a big pile of early Krakoa-era comics. Actually, 81 of them, over a couple of days, because I miscounted one pile and thought it was a multiple of ten, but well worth it! And then I went to a comics fair and got 14 more of the things from a 75p box for another tenner. But even though fifty pounds still sounds like quite a lot to spend on a pile of comics I just described as unexceptional, when you sit down and read proper old-fashioned paper comics (if you hadn't followed the trends in comic-reading, you might be thrilled to know you can get them digitally nowadays) all at once, you notice all the best parts. Even the ones that were widely dismissed as awful are really quite compelling, in my humble opinion!

I'm going to have to get a complete Krakoa collection now. Maybe after I've controlled my spending for a bit longer. Or at least not until I next see a big box with 'sale' written on it.

All Ages

That shot of my comic collection in Mind Games: The Experiment actually gives a glimpse of two more comics, apart from the ones I listed in the 'annotations' post (which, incidentally, seems to have got much fewer pageviews than the 'errata' post - I guess it really IS more fun to pick holes in things!) so I thought it was only fair to give them some time in the spotlight too.

Luckily, I haven't rearranged my piles of comics too much since they filmed that bit (it was part of the last bit of filming around my house, when they'd decided what story they wanted to tell and wanted to make sure there was footage to support it), and I can safely identify them from the blurry picture and their position in the cupboard - the one on top of the pile at the back is Last Hero Standing #3, from 2005, and the one out on the right is the Funny Stuff miniature edition that came free with Wheaties breakfast cereal in 1947. An eclectic kind of pair, so let's have a look at them!

I don't know why the third of this five-issue series is on top of one of my piles; all five of them are in the cupboard somewhere, but they must have got separated since last I sorted the things into order. This one is rather tatty all round, in fact, considering I bought it new when it came out in 2005, which maybe shows that it's more something I bought as a fun read and didn't think about much after reading it.

Last Hero Standing is an epic adventure in the MC2 universe. This was a family of Marvel comics launched in 1998, revolving around the flagship title Spider-Girl, about the teenage daughter of Spider-Man, with the other titles also following the theme of the next generation of the Marvel universe, fifteen years on. Yes, Spider-Man had a baby daughter, in 1996. She was quickly wiped out of existence in one of Marvel's periodic bouts of panic that readers will desert them in droves if they change anything about their characters, but Spider-Girl was conceived at a time when Baby May was still fresh in the memories of the type of creator and fan who cared about character development.

Although I'm that kind of fan in principle, I never liked the Spider-Girl comic all that much. Some of the short-lived supporting titles were better, and the idea of a newly-created universe of superheroes that was still connected in a way to the mainstream Marvel comics was definitely appealing. They're "All Ages" comics, meaning that the aim is to market them to new young readers. Marvel tried without great success to get the comics into shops where young readers might learn that they exist, but sales were pretty awful. Spider-Girl lurched along being reprieved from cancellation on a regular basis, but the wider universe wasn't able to support any other titles. By 2005, it was nice to see that the supporting characters were all going to get a moment or two on panel in a new limited series!

You see the general theme here on the first-page cast of characters. For example, Speedball is a goofy teenager in present-day Marvel continuity, so in MC2 he's a mature, grown up, respected hero. The established heroes of the present day are retired or otherwise less involved in superheroing than they used to be, and teenagers have taken over old mantles. It's the kind of thing you wish would happen in the 'real' Marvel universe, but you know never will.

Last Hero Standing, like all the MC2 comics, is the brainchild of Tom DeFalco, a real old-school writer who was passionate about this kind of thing. In fact, this kind of "event" miniseries is the antithesis of what MC2 was traditionally all about - good, old-fashioned self-contained stories in each issue with continually building subplots in the background. This is like an infusion of modern Marvel into the new old-fashioned universe, and probably not what DeFalco would have preferred to write if sales figures had permitted it. But the idea attracted me to the limited series, at least!

The creators of this issue are credited as "Tom DeFalco & Pat Olliffe - script, plot & pencils". I assume that means the traditional arrangement where they create the plot together, Olliffe draws it and DeFalco writes the words, but it's not laid out in the traditional way with 'script' under the first name and 'pencils' under the second. Scott Koblish is credited with "finished art".

Reading this one issue on its own isn't the best way to get into it - the five-issue series is really designed to be released as a trade paperback, or one of the popular little digest books Marvel had some success with around that time. But in the last couple of issues various heroes have been mysteriously kidnapped, and now they're starting to mysteriously come back with shiny black eyes and a new 'grim and gritty' attitude full of enthusiasm to take a more proactive approach to crimefighting. One of them is Spider-Man, who goes out and gets seriously violent with robbers in the street and then picks a fight with superhero Darkdevil.

And meanwhile, Spider-Girl has stumbled through a dimensional doorway along with fellow legacy heroes J2, Wild Thing and Thunderstrike, plus Captain America. And they're fighting an army of Asgardian trolls! The artwork in this comic is really sensational, both in the big battle scenes and the quieter moments. It's what all superhero comics should be like! Captain America isn't happy with these new heroes (he comes across very nicely in MC2 comics as someone who's past his prime but still trying to do his best) and thinks J2 and Spider-Girl have run away and abandoned them, when of course they're just going to save the day. They discover that Loki, arch-foe of the Avengers, is behind everything, but back on Earth he's already put his plan into action! To be continued with a big hero versus hero fight!

It's a pretty good comic all in all, but it didn't manage to generate any better sales for Spider-Girl or the MC2. It's about time they brought them back for another try - I think the general mood of comics is heading back that way.

One thing that seems less likely to make a return is the days when you could get a free comic with your breakfast cereal. But in spring 1947 in America, that was a reality!

A free comic book with your Wheaties! There were four different ones available, two from DC Comics, and two from Fawcett. Which is an interesting arrangement, and the choice of titles to release in miniature form is interesting too - Fawcett went with their two biggest titles, Whiz Comics and Captain Marvel Adventures, but DC went for Flash Comics and Funny Stuff.

Those two titles were both ones that had previously been produced by All-American comics - originally a part-owned sister company, briefly an entirely independent enterprise (at least on paper) but now bought out in full by DC/National. But at this point it was still basically being run as a separate company, with Sheldon Mayer the editor in chief, and he was probably the one to choose which comics to tape to double-packs of Wheaties.

Normal comics of the time had 52 pages, counting the covers (which were made of superior paper). These miniature giveaways, a bit more than half-size, had 32 pages, all on the cheapest newsprint, and you'll never find them in mint condition because they were attached to the cereal boxes with two strips of tape at the top and two at the bottom, and detaching them must have been quite a struggle for Pauline Howe, who's signed this copy on the cover and filled in her name and address on the coupon to send off for Wheaties premiums inside.She wanted the parachute ball kit (one Wheaties box top and 10c) and the navy signal mirror (one Wheaties box top and 25c), but perhaps she didn't have the money. The offer expired December 1, 1947.

Despite the poor condition, the Wheaties comics with superheroes in them command the usual ridiculous prices second-hand, but Funny Stuff can sometimes be found for an almost reasonable sum, because it was full of funny animals!

And funniest of them was Blackie Bear! Fascinatingly, he gets the cover and the first six pages of this miniature edition - in the regular monthly full-size Funny Stuff, that honour almost always went to The Dodo and the Frog. Since they made their debut in #18 (cover-dated February 1947), Blackie had only made the cover twice, and he normally had to be content with playing second fiddle. Which was a shame, because he really was the best of the bunch in Funny Stuff every month, so it's nice to see him and those pesky cubs getting their moment in the spotlight on Wheaties boxes!

It's the cubs who are the real stars. Rather than talking, they communicate by holding up wooden signs, with hilarious effect. In later years, just before funny animal comics died out once and for all, the 'sign language' was dropped and they started using speech bubbles like everyone else, thanks to some lazy artist, but I don't see how anybody could get tired of Blackie failing to realise that the adult authority figure he's talking to is actually just the cubs, one on the other's shoulders, wearing a trenchcoat and 'talking' to him by holding up two signs, one from the sleeve and one between buttons at waist height.

Blackie is followed by six pages of Henry the Laffing Hyena, who's made a poor choice of career...

Six pages of J. Rufus Lion, who's got a Wheaties-themed adventure about box top collections!

Six pages of the Three Mouseketeers (who shouldn't be confused with the more famous Three Mouseketeers who appeared in DC comics only a few years later but are entirely different; and nor should they be confused with the contemporary adventures of Marmaduke Mouse, who also worked for King Louie)

And just three and a half pages, filling the remaining space after the other animals and all the Wheaties promotions, of the usual stars of the series Dunbar Dodo and Fenimore Frog!

These guys are the headline stars whenever DC trawls the archives and tries to interest readers in a funny-animal revival today, but in 1947 they were at best the second-most important stars of DC animal comics - the Fox and the Crow, who were licensed characters and no longer owned by DC, were the big names. If DC would bring back Blackie and the cubs instead, it would probably go down better!

Personally, I might have liked this one more than the adventures of the Flash or Captain Marvel if I'd ended up with it stuck to my Wheaties boxes!

Everything made out of numbers and code

 I'm a computer! I'm a computery guy! And last Thursday evening, while I was too busy writing about that documentary which I've all but forgotten by now, I was taking part in the first battle of the Excel Esports Season! 

It's a series of monthly Excel spreadsheet modelling challenges - remember the world cup last year in which I put in a poor-to-moderate showing? Well, this time I was very much the same, but with glimmers of hope.

See, it was a tight 30-minute challenge, and in that time I worked through the first two of the five tasks, and the first two of the three bonus questions, and I was less than a minute away from finishing the third task when my time ran out. I thought that was halfway decent if unexceptional, but it seems that only one of the competitors around the globe got a really good score - all of the others were roughly around the level that I achieved.

Or WOULD have achieved, if I hadn't misread the bonus questions and thought they said "including the examples" when in fact they said "excluding the examples". If I'd done that properly (which wouldn't have taken any more time at all), I would have got a score that put me right up there with the leaders of the chasing pack behind that one runaway star!

This, I think, gives me hope for turning the whole Excel Esports thing into a thing I'm actually good at. I mean, it turned out that I'd made a fundamental mistake in my calculations for the third task, so it would actually have taken me a lot more than one extra minute to sort it out, but apart from that my fundamental stupidity in not double-checking that I'd read the question right gives me hope that with a bit more practice, and some more effective time management, I could eventually aspire to become the world champion in this field!

Next battle is February 16th - let's see how it goes!

You know it's easy to be a clever smart boy like me, if you could do it all digitallyyyyyyyyyyyy...

Groovy shoes

By far the coolest part of the whole experiment is that I got a pair of custom-painted shoes, bespoke designs just for me, by Greg Itahara! They're extremely cool, and have a cartoon squirrel and a brain on them. What more could anyone want?

I got these shoes just last week, as part of the advance promotion for the film, which also involved me teaching a masterclass in memory to a bunch of media people and other miscellaneous people associated with the documentary (Geoff, my personal trainer, was there).

I have to admit, that green lighting makes me look awesome. And everyone seemed appreciative of my "masterclass" in how to memorise words, names and images in the Memory League style. (Yes, I taught people how to memorise names. They were all better at it than I am.)

And everyone had a go on Memory League and loved it! I'm hopeful that we've won a few converts to competitive memorising, either directly or indirectly.

Annotations

 If you've watched Mind Games: The Experiment and are wondering about the little details you see, here's a FAQ*

*At the time of writing, I have had very few questions asked me even once, let alone frequently. Most of these are totally made up.

00:00:30 Nice outfit, shame about the shoes

That's my first training session - brand new sports gear, hadn't got my Asics trainers yet. I exclusively wore those velcro-fastening slip-on shoes until I got used to the trainers. Now I can't wear anything but the professional Asics footwear! Also, bending your leg like Geoff's doing is beyond my capabilities.

What's with all the branding? 

ASICS is the brand. It stands for Anima Sana In Corpore Sano. Which is almost but not quite what Juvenal said, but MSICS would just sound silly. They gave me lots of shoes and other clothing.

00:00:54 What's that at the left of the screen?

That's a shelf of video tapes belonging to my brother. Can't quite make out which ones,unfortunately.

What's on your shirt? I can't make it out!

The black one with the red circle says "I'M HUGE IN JAPAN"; the blue one with black writing says "I AM FROM SPACE"

00:01:20 Are you playing chess underwater?

Yes. It's part of the Mind Sports Olympiad, I was persuaded to go along and give it a go, but I think I need more practice (without a camera crew present) before I become a serious player. Also, I need some kind of prescription goggles to allow me to see the board underwater. I played one game and dropped out, it was all a bit of a disaster, which is probably why there's only one brief clip in the whole documentary.

00:01:41 Bandana?

Yes, red bandana. It was very sunny, I have a bald head, my trademark hat is very hot in the sun and also not prone to staying on my head when I'm exercising.

00:01:55 What are all your books?

I can't really list them all here. There's a lot of classics, a lot of comics. See how many you can recognise from the spines! The one they really show a lot, sticking out from the bookcase, is Wonder Woman newspaper comics.

Are those Mega Drive and Master System games? And an old-fashioned television? And VCR?

Yes. I live in the past. I've got a more up-to-date telly, and a Nintendo Switch, off-screen.

Wish you could afford a table for the floor lamp.

Two lamps normally live on the floor in that corner of my living room. This isn't a case of TV people moving things around and putting them in strange places - in fact, they picked one of them up and put it somewhere more sensible, to make the lighting work!

Do you have to wear shorts all the time?

Yes. My hairy legs and knobbly knees need the fresh air.

00:02:03 When was this?

It's old footage, isn't it? It's the world memory championship 2007, as recorded for The Mentalists. That would be the moment Ed described as me, "ludicrously stupidly", attempting to memorise 36 packs of cards in an hour and not succeeding. 

00:02:59 Where's that athletics track?

Halesowen. There's one a short walk away from my house, but apparently it was cheaper for us to go to the one at Halesowen. One time when they wanted to film, someone started playing music on the speakers, and when the TV people asked them to stop, the people in the gym laughed and turned it up louder. Then when they realised it was TV people and not some random nerds complaining about the noise, a hugely muscular man came out and apologised, turned the music off and chatted about the whole project. We really did go there at the crack of dawn. I was working during normal daytime hours.

00:03:04 Everyone else on this documentary is so good-looking and you're the only one who takes his shirt off?

The public wants to see this kind of thing, I promise you. If you don't, you're just weird.

00:03:53 You can only do three push-ups?

I did five, thank you very much. But yes, that was awful. There was a time in my younger days when I could do twenty at a time, and I was confident ten would be simple enough to start with. Now, though, I can do thirty!

00:07:02 Twenty-two moves?

Now, if I'd done the three-disc version and then the four-disc version, and added the scores together, that would have made 22. But I'm certain I (and by extension probably everyone else) only did three discs. These numbers may have come from some other test, but I'm not sure which one it might have been.

00:10:37 Is that where you live?

No. It's a beautiful establishing shot of beautiful England. Then we cut to inside my real house, which is much shabbier. We're watching The Mentalists on my old-fashioned video tape.

00:10:52 The Broons?

And Oor Wullie. Much-loved, long-running newspaper comic strips. Those are my collection of collected editions.

00:10:53 The Guinness Book of Records?

Yes, the 2014 edition, because that's the one that had a picture of me in it. I'm not in the book any more. I don't normally sit there looking at it, while a video of my past glories plays in the background. That makes me look rather sad and nostalgic...

00:11:13 Booyeah!

That's me breaking the 30-second barrier for memorising a pack of cards, in 2007! A great moment! And James Ponder in the background, just like he was in that clip of the world championship! He should get royalties. For that matter, so should I!

00:11:20 Nice photo.

That's the original hat, too. November 2003. This again is footage from The Mentalists. As is the cards scene afterwards, and the "legendary" bit - which I normally only say with some kind of prefatory comment that makes it clear I'm not serious.

00:11:42 An eighteen year absence.

So, yes, I was absent from memory competitions when I won the world championship in 2008 and 2009. That's how good I used to be! But see the previous blog entry - it's a mistake, but not as inaccurate as I was thinking at first.

00:11:45 Books

The Wonder Woman book mentioned earlier is blurry in the foreground. You can see Mickey Mouse newspaper comics and a Magic Eye book more clearly.

00:12:04 Are you the man being questioned?

It's an unrelated article. That's me with the cool moustache, though.

00:12:15 Very sceptical.

Amusingly, this bit was filmed right at the end, because they didn't have useable footage of me saying that (though I said it all the time, apparently off-camera, when we were starting up), so it's a tiny bit fake. But never mind!

00:21:25 Ahhh, England.

Pretty, isn't it? The camera crew travelled around the local area to find nice bits to film.

00:21:57 What's on that shirt?

"I am the man who arranges the blocks"

00:22:17 Lost a memory competition to a monkey?

A chimpanzee, actually. And I demand a rematch. Search for Ayumu.

00:22:41 Where are we now?

Oxford Street, London - the big Asics shop! Definitely unfamiliar territory for me.

00:23:58 An IQ of 159!

See, that sounds very boastful. This sentence was prefaced by saying that I took a Mensa IQ test at the age of 17 or 18, and for a short while went around telling everyone my score, and having to explain that it was a good score to get.

00:25:00 The Ben System

Yes, the first two cards there are indeed a shark, but the next two are a bar, and I guess me saying that must have been edited out.

00:25:45 The hat!

Yes, this documentary is sadly lacking in hat footage! It just doesn't seem to go with the athletic gear, somehow...

00:26:13 That's a lot of comics.

And that's only a small corner of my comic collection. It's very poorly organised - I drag piles of comics out to the front when I'm in the mood to read them. What we can see here are complete runs of Alpha Flight, Tom Strong, Metamorpho, Avengers Forever, House of X/Powers of X, New Warriors and Maison Ikkoku, and not-quite-complete runs of Micronauts and Defenders. I recommend reading all of them! Ooh, and then it pans down a bit to Runaways. Read that one, too!

00:26:17 What are those?

If you don't recognise He-Man figures then there's really no hope for you, I'm afraid.

00:26:36 Fish, chips and mushy peas

Yes, see the previous post. I didn't actually eat this; it's stage-dressing. I'd just had lunch, and then we ordered another meal so I could say the things I'd been discussing off-camera again. And so I immediately veered into an entirely different subject. I'm terrible to work with.

00:34:15 Forever Redditch!

A sneaky bit of advertising for the town I did most of my walking in!

00:35:24 What's the app?

It's called Runkeeper, and I really do recommend it!

00:47:00 The mid-study assessment

Yes, I really did get a lot better at it! I surprised myself - towards the end of the twelve minutes I said I wasn't likely to reach those flags, and I actually got well past them. My walking speed has outpaced my wildest expectations! As I recall, I did 18 push-ups in that session, and the dialogue saying 20 was from another filming session. I did 22 at the final assessment, in the pouring rain, which didn't make it into the final film.

00:51:00 The Mind Sports Olympiad!

It isn't really the biggest day in the memory sports calendar, but it is still very cool! That's the shirt designed by Phill Ash for the world championship 2014. And yes, Donatello is the coolest turtle. That's Daniel Evans, Susanne Hippauf, Nick Papadopulos, Klaus Jerrold, Ewelina Preś, and I think we get at least a glimpse of Daniele Vergine. I don't know who told me his name and I couldn't understand it. It might have been Dan Evans. I'm very bad with names, even of people I've known for decades.

00:54:30 What was your time?

I don't remember. It was very slow. That's me making sure Nick knows what to say and do - he does, of course, know perfectly, but I get very possessive about this competition even when I'm not arbiting.

00:56:25 What's on that shirt?

That's the lucky shirt - Pocket Dragons! This one has been drawn on and signed on the sleeve by Real Musgrave, creator of Pocket Dragons.

00:56:33 Who won the gold and silver?

I think it's shocking not to show it. Or for that matter the other medal-winners! One of these days, I'll manage to get another proper documentary made about memory competitions, not just about me doing exercises! Suffice to say Ewelina, Susanne, Daniele and everyone else were much better than me all round.

01:10:09 The results are staggering

I don't really know how any of those things are measured. You'd have to ask Brendon and his gang. But I'm sure there was a lot of science behind it.

01:12:30 A 5k race??

Yes indeed. Well, a parkrun. I walked, but I did 5K in around 45 minutes. Which is a fast walk, and probably wasn't quite completely the slowest time on the day! I'll probably do it again, when the weather's nice!

Did you meet the other mental athletes?

Not until after filming. Kassa and Ryoei at a publicity shoot a while before the competition, Sherry not until last week.

Are you all going to be world champions?

Probably, some day soon. Except me, maybe.

Errata

 The thing about a documentary is that you take remarks out of context and string them together to make a good story, but I rather worry it might give the wrong impression to people who actually know me. I'm a little concerned that when memory sport people hear me saying I'm a legend in the memory sport community and everyone always flocks around me for autographs, shorn of the surrounding jocular dialogue, they might think I'm more than a little big-headed. And I'm disturbingly certain that my late mother's partner (who I don't think reads this blog but who might well end up watching the documentary) will think I'm being horribly dismissive of my mother when I only give her the most slighting of passing references as a preface to talking about my father...

In fact, since I'm in such an E. Nesbit mood lately, I think an Oswald Bastable quote would be extremely relevant at this juncture: "Our Mother is dead, and if you think we don’t care because I don’t tell you much about her you only show that you do not understand people at all."

Having got that out of the way, let's talk about what I'm eating in that scene. I don't like mushy peas, as everybody should know, and would never order them in a pub. What actually happened was that I had a pub lunch with the film crew - I can't even remember what I had, but it certainly wouldn't involve mushy peas - and then they bought me another meal to pretend to eat while I chatted to the camera, and chose fish and chips because it looks so very nice and English. It wasn't intended to be a chat to the camera all about my dad, but that's how it turned out in the end, with no prompting at all from the director, and I rather like it when unintentional stuff like that turns out to be everyone's favourite part of the film. It's just a shame there was that little pile of mushy peas sitting there the whole time, making people think I eat them. Horrible stuff. Garden peas, if you're serving me fish and chips, everybody!

And then there's the matter of my getting on the podium. You see, while my physical transformation was an absolutely wonderful, miraculous result of the experiment, the documentary really wanted to back it up with me going to a memory competition and showing a similarly improved performance. And the problem with that is that there WEREN'T any memory competitions! I don't honestly know if the WMSC even exists any more (the only one I'm even vaguely in touch with is Phil, and last I heard he'd become Chief Arbiter Emeritus, which is a fancy-shmancy way of saying he's no longer actually doing it), and the IAM had rather gone into hibernation during the pandemic, though it's picking back up again now. I would have had to go far overseas to take part in a real memory competition - the only thing we had over here was the MSO memory event, which I traditionally organise myself (although, again, not since before covid).

Nobody else being able to take charge of the whole thing, we contrived a sort of halfway house where I put the little event together and took part in it too, and the documentary managed to make a big thing about my competing at the MSO memory competition for the first time in ages. Indeed, they got a tiny bit mixed up - what I said (and repeated myself often, explaining it in full detail) to the researcher was that the last time I actually competed in memory at the Mind Sports Olympiad was in 2004, which led the documentary to say I'd been out of the whole memory sports scene for 18 years.

I laughed at that, but then I explained that, although I'd been competing fairly regularly up to 2019, it was 2009 when I last considered myself totally seriously in training for memory competitions. And that really was THIRTEEN YEARS! Perhaps the documentary wasn't so laughably wrong after all...

But let's talk about my aim being to 'get on the podium'. I have NEVER gone into anything with the intention of only finishing third, and I hope I never will! Let's face it, that was how it ended, and so the script said that's what I was aiming to do from the start. In fact, I'm still aiming for the real goal, of actually WINNING competitions!

(Similarly, Kassa points out that he's beaten hundreds of grand masters - this is a common thing to happen when one is a high-ranking international master, although god knows I've never come close to winning a game against a GM or IM when I've played them. His aim, which he's getting ever closer to achieving soon, is to become a GM himself)

And what on earth was that bit about my taking 22 moves to do the Tower of Hanoi? They must have got a number mixed up somewhere, because I only did the basic three-disc version, and I did it in seven moves, of course. You don't get to my age and level of associating with nerdy puzzle-lovers without learning how to do the Tower of Hanoi.

Still, the important point to take away from Mind Games: The Experiment is that I most certainly improved my physical performance, probably also improved my general mental state, and got some really cool trainers too!