Let me count the ways

 I have a habit of falling in love with fictional characters. And of using the phrase "falling in love" to excess, even though I acknowledge it sounds all kinds of weird. Don't like weird, don't read my blog.

But when I use that expression, I mean I've found a character who reminds me of me, and who I want to take care of and protect from the world forever. The latest of these (although he hasn't supplanted Simon the chipmunk, who seems destined to be my number one crush forever) is Gus from The Owl House.

Here he is declaring his dream to become an ambassador to the Human Realm and re-establish contact with the giraffes (which of course were banished from the Demon Realm and exiled to Earth long ago, for just being too freaky).

In an attempt to pin down exactly what the magic formula is for this kind of obsession (and fit it into the right number of characters on social media), I compiled a list:

Why I love Gus:

He's a sidekick, and he embraces that role in life

He's little, but he gets to play with the big kids because he's clever

He always cheers people up with a friendly word of support whenever they need it

He loves his dad

He needs more hugs! People don't hug him enough when he's upset!

Also:

He's really really cute!

He's actually a super powerful witch!

He gets really geeky about the things he's interested in!

He's totally me. Exactly the kind of character I identify with.

... Which I think about sums it up. Yes, I do see myself as a perpetual sidekick to other, cooler people. I'm well aware that some, even most, of the people I associate with don't see me like that at all, but I assure you it's true. And Gus is the always-cheerful sidekick to the main characters and their myriad adventures and problems in this series!

But the one episode that really makes me want to hug Gus is "Thanks To Them", the first double-length special of the third and final season. Luz the Human and a small group of Demon Realm friends have become trapped on Earth, leaving behind everyone else to an unknown fate. Luz is hiding the fact she sort of caused the whole thing, introducing evil Emperor Belos to the all-powerful Collector. Hunter is concealing his discovery that he's an artificially-created Grimwalker clone. The others, like Gus, are just dealing with losing all their family and friends...

Luz's mother is impressively accepting of the existence of the magical Demon Realm, the universe-threatening danger and also her daughter's bisexuality, but she's clearly a bit old-fashioned when it comes to sleeping arrangements. So Luz and Amity (involved in a romantic relationship) get to share a bedroom with Willow and Vee (the latter of whom is a shape-changing basilisk in the form of a teenage girl), while the two boys, Gus and Hunter, are sent to bunk down in the basement. And this gives them a heart-to-heart conversation at bedtime...

Hunter is showing off the shirt he's sewn pictures of wolves (mystical beasts from the Human Realm!) to. He cut his finger on the sewing machine, but he's very happy with the result. Gus admires his handiwork.

That looks great! You know, you've been smiling a lot more since we've been here.

Hunter hides the shirt behind his back, and waves his hand in denial.

It-It's not like I don't want to return! I just, uh, need a way to pass the time. That's all.

He folds up the shirt neatly and puts it down by his mattress, getting into bed. Gus settles down into his bed on the couch.

No! It's good to see you happy! One of us might as well be. 

Awkward pause. Hunter looks at Gus, whose usual cheerful mood has dissipated. Hunter is completely unequipped to deal with other people's feelings, and can only wait for Gus to continue.

What was it like to be in the Emperor's Coven for so long?

Hunter thinks about it, lying in bed.

I... trained a lot. I studied a lot. I wasn't really allowed to be around the other scouts. But weekends were nice! I got to leave the castle for missions!

Do you miss it?

I miss... knowing who I'm supposed to be.

Gus rolls onto his back and looks up at the ceiling. Hunter does the same.

I miss my dad.

Gus tugs the blanket up closer around himself. Another awkward pause. Hunter's got a reply this time.

We'll find a way back. We have to.

Gus leaps back out of bed, beaming again and grabs a book!

Oh my Titan! That's a line from this book I found! Cosmic Frontier! It's a story that takes place in... the stars!

And so the two of them get excited about bad science fiction and cheer up again! I really love this scene. It tugs on my heartstrings so much, and it's a shining example of what's so brilliant about The Owl House!

(Although to be fair, I feel the same towards Simon when a girl's going to find out he wrote a love poem about her. I think the secret ingredient to win my heart is just nerds needing hugs.)

Your latest HSBC savings account statement is available to view

I don't really need an email from my bank to tell me that my latest bank statement is available to view. But if they have to send one every month, do they have to illustrate it with weird staged photos like this one?

I'm almost certain that nobody has ever shown such delight and excitement on reading their bank statement online. Or rejoiced in their bank balance while sitting in a scenic location and enjoying an al fresco cup of tea and bowl of fruit.

Or maybe it's just me. Maybe people do that all the time if they're the sort who can afford a state-of-the-art wheelchair or a height-of-fashion woolly hat? But there's no need for the bank to rub it in like that when they're emailing paupers like me about their meagre balance!

All eyes on Vaduz

 I've mentioned before that I love the Nations League. I mean, I'm not really bothered about whether England can avoid messing everything up against the Republic of Ireland tonight, I'm unmoved by Scotland's crunch game with Poland tomorrow and only take a passing interest in what happens between Wales and Iceland the day after. No, the one that fascinates me is the clash of the titans in group D1 tomorrow night, when Liechtenstein play the mighty San Marino!

Is there anyone in the world who hasn't been blown away by The World's Worst Football Team's amazing run of form this autumn? They won a game in September! Conquering the comparatively high-ranked Liechtenstein (currently ranked 200th of the 210 national football teams recognised by FIFA, and thus ten whole places above San Marino) and recording their first win since 2004 (also against Liechtenstein, in a friendly), bringing the all-time total to two games won! And they followed it up in October by drawing with Gibraltar! The San Marino Stadium in Serravalle has become a fortress, where the Sammarinese are unbeatable!

And now they travel to Liechtenstein knowing another win will put them top of the table and promote them to the unheard-of heights of Group C in the 2026 Nations League! Even a draw will get our heroes a play-off against one of the two best fourth-placed Group C teams (currently the comparatively huge countries of Luxembourg and Latvia) and keep those promotion hopes alive! It's all terribly exciting.

I'm not a knight

 There's been a rash of people asking me for memory advice lately (someone dug up an old post on the Art of Memory forum, and so a lot of other new memory-training enthusiasts discovered it and me), and despite all my polite requests, these people still keep addressing me as "sir".

I really don't like that. I get this from my dad, who would often get a new kid in his primary school class who tried to 'sir' him, and got the inevitable reply "Don't call me sir, I'm not a knight!" But it does bother me unreasonably when people call me Sir, or Mr Pridmore, or anything like that. I don't like honorifics. I don't merit any kind of deference or submission, and if you think I do then you're labouring under a misunderstanding as to how the whole friendly learning environment of memory sports works.

I mean, I know I have plenty of friends who would never dream of calling me sir, and doubtless no end of deadly enemies who would contemptuously refuse to call me sir even if I asked them to, but there's just this contingent of people who insist on doing it. Please don't, everyone! Thank you!

Safari Jo(e) does it again!

 There's a big elephant in the room of my occasional posts about the comics work of people who wrote my all-time favourite cartoon, Thundercats. I do have fun appreciating the varied and fascinating comics produced by the likes of Leonard Starr, Bob Haney, Howard Post and Ron Goulart in the course of their long, productive and successful lives, and I'd like to share more wonders from people who wrote really great Thundercats episodes and contributed in one way or another to really cool comics too. But there's a shortage of people who fall into that very narrow category, and there's just that one name that I haven't really been able to do an article about.

And that's Stephen Perry. I've refrained from writing about him for two reasons. Search for him on the internet, if you can find him among all the other notable people with the same name, and you'll only find one thing - the gory details of how he was horribly murdered in 2010. Maybe with a few added notes to the effect that he was penniless and unhappy before he died. It's the kind of thing that deflates a light-hearted ramble about comics, whether you actually mention it or not.

I might have written something before now anyway, if there was a comic of his I wanted to admire at length, but that's the second problem right there. His Thundercats writing was really, really great! There should be some other work of his out there that could captivate me, right? And I've tried my best to plough through Timespirits, which sounds like a personal project that would give full scope to his creativity, and I can't even finish it. Don't ask me why. Likewise, the opening story of Psi-Force, where Perry had the job of introducing the team of pre-designed new characters - something he should have been very good at - doesn't capture my interest at all. There must be something out there, surely, but I've never found it yet.

But someone has been chatting to me on the internet about their recent discovery of the wonders of Thundercats, including reference to this very specific subject, so having got all that bad stuff out in the open, please join me in scrutinising Safari Joe!

Joe with an E, you'll notice. That's the name that appears in the title card of the cartoon, and when they made a toy of the character, he was Safari Joe with an E too. But for some reason when the cartoon episode was adapted into comic form, with Steve Perry again the only credited writer, he'd changed for some reason into Safari Jo!

That's the title page of the 14th issue of Marvel's Star Comics Thundercats series. A bit of a strange double-credit for Steve Perry adapting the teleplay of Steve Perry, and when it was reprinted in the British Marvel comic they only credited him once, but at least it doesn't leave us in any doubt as to who wrote it!

Apart from a few new narrative captions, the script of the comic is basically identical to the dialogue of the cartoon. And it was a story specifically written for the animated form, which loses something when reduced to a comic. There are just two fun points worth talking about in detail...

In the cartoon version of this scene, Wilykit's line "I thought Panthro fixed it!" is missing. Safari Joe's quip is still there, but is a completely meaningless non-sequitur! I mean, even with the feed line it's still pretty meaningless, but at least it doesn't come completely out of nowhere. I assume it was in the original cartoon script, but somehow ended up being cut out to trim the episode for time, by someone who didn't really think it through. It's good to see the comic adaptation making some sort of sense of it, at least!

And incidentally, this whole spaceboarding scene is a specific reference to the earlier episode The Time Capsule, written by Peter Lawrence. This is intriguing, because Thundercats was a series where individual writers had an amazing amount of freedom to do their own thing without editorial interference! It's very rare to see such continuity between episodes written by different people! Which leads into the second fascinating difference...

The technical details of the Thundercats' powers and weapons are a lot more extensive in the comic than they were on screen. Maybe cut for time or pacing again, or maybe added into the comic script because technical jargon works a lot better in written form? But that's not the really fascinating bit. The bit that's really fun is Tygra's weakness - "Tygra cannot swim."

I don't know if that's something Stephen Perry randomly made up, or if it was a line from the character bible. Cheetara's weakness (can only maintain top speed for short distances) is certainly a defined character trait, used by head writer Leonard Starr elsewhere. But then, that's a standard feature of real-life cheetahs, while real-life tigers are excellent swimmers. So who knows?

The point is, that's not how it sounds on screen. In the cartoon episode, we get the absolutely ludicrous line "Except when he's invisible, Tygra cannot swim."

That was clearly an editorial change to Stephen Perry's script. It's handwaving away the episode The Fireballs of Plun-Darr (written by William Overgard), in which Tygra does a lot of swimming. Most but not all of it while he's invisible. Watching the episode for the first time as a ten-year-old, I thought this line extraordinarily stupid and thought they would have been better off just not lampshading it like that [people didn't say 'lampshading' in those days, but you know what I mean].

Because this is exactly the kind of thing that Thundercats never did! As mentioned above, each writer just did their own thing and nobody changed their scripts to fit with what some other writer had said! Except in this case. Was it Peter Lawrence's editing, or Stephen Perry noticing the discrepancy and fixing it? I'd like to know. One of these days I'll track Peter Lawrence down and bombard him with hopelessly minute questions about a cartoon he made forty years ago, but I'll wait till I've gone completely insane first.

Because Panthro's only weakness ("Panthro fears bats") in the following scene is also contradicted by The Fireballs of Plun-Darr! The comical ending of that episode tells us that Panthro's scared of spiders! And neither Lawrence nor Perry felt the need to add an "and spiders too" to the cartoon or comic script!

So that's the fun of Safari Jo or Joe - rest in peace, Stephen Perry! A great hero of cartoon history!

Return of the Hat

"There is probably no better proof of the accuracy of that definition of man which describes him as an imitative animal, than is to be found in the fact that the verdict of humanity is always against any individual member of the species who presumes to differ from the rest. A man is one of a flock, and his wool must be of the general color. He must drink when the rest drink, and graze where the rest graze. When the others are frightened by a dog, and scamper, starting with the right leg, he must be frightened by a dog, and scamper, starting with the right leg also. If he is not frightened, or even if, being frightened, he scampers and starts out of step with the rest, it is a proof at once that there is something not right about him. Let a man walk at noonday with perfect composure of countenance and decency of gait, with not the slightest appearance of vacancy in his eyes or wildness in his manner, from one end of Oxford Street to the other without his hat, and let every one of the thousands of hat-wearing people whom he passes be asked separately what they think of him, how many will abstain from deciding instantly that he is mad, on no other evidence than the evidence of his bare head? Nay, more; let him politely stop each one of those passengers, and let him explain in the plainest form of words, and in the most intelligible manner, that his head feels more easy and comfortable without a hat than with one, how many of his fellow mortals who decided that he was mad on first meeting him, will change their opinion when they part from him after hearing his explanation? In the vast majority of cases, the very explanation itself would be accepted as an excellent additional proof that the intellect of the hatless man was indisputably deranged." 

So said Wilkie Collins in 1857, the golden age of hat-wearing. If only we lived in that era now, but I'm doing my best to keep the hat-wearing dream alive. I've been sadly hatless most of this year, after the previous one was blown under a tube train in February or thereabouts (which was a refreshingly new way to lose a hat, considering that I normally just accidentally leave them behind on trains), and what with having no money I didn't really want to splash out on another one straight away. But today I couldn't resist the sight of a cool black hat on sale on a market stall, and splashed out a tenner on it. No longer will Victorians think me mad when I invent my time machine and go back to the good old days!

Collins goes on to observe of his hero Andrew Treverton: "Local reports described him as having bought the first cottage he could find which was cut off from other houses by a wall all round it. It was further rumored that he was living like a miser; that he had got an old man-servant, named Shrowl, who was even a greater enemy to mankind than himself; that he allowed no living soul, not even an occasional charwoman, to enter the house; that he was letting his beard grow, and that he had ordered his servant Shrowl to follow his example. In the year eighteen hundred and forty-four, the fact of a man's not shaving was regarded by the enlightened majority of the English nation as a proof of unsoundness of intellect. At the present time Mr. Treverton's beard would only have interfered with his reputation for respectability. Thirteen years ago it was accepted as so much additional evidence in support of the old theory that his intellects were deranged. He was at that very time, as his stockbroker could have testified, one of the sharpest men of business in London; he could argue on the wrong side of any question with an acuteness of sophistry and sarcasm that Dr. Johnson himself might have envied; he kept his household accounts right to a farthing, his manner was never disturbed in the slightest degree from morning to night, his eyes were all quickness and intelligence—but what did these advantages avail him, in the estimation of his neighbors, when he presumed to live on another plan than theirs, and when he wore a hairy certificate of lunacy on the lower part of his face? We have advanced a little in the matter of partial toleration of beards since that time; but we have still a good deal of ground to get over. In the present year of progress, eighteen hundred and fifty-seven, would the most trustworthy banker's clerk in the whole metropolis have the slightest chance of keeping his situation if he left off shaving his chin?"

... and I fully support his views on beardiness, too! I do take personal credit for making beards fashionable again, having worn one since the time when nobody else did, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before once more we live in enlightened times when anyone venturing outside the house hatless is shunned as a lunatic!

By the way, you really should read "The Dead Secret" - it's a criminally overlooked masterpiece of Collins' early days as a writer. Read the book, wear a hat and a beard, or I'll think your intellect is deranged!

Not enough hours in the day

 Except today, of course. Today has the right number of hours, apparently. I don't know if it's the extra hour or just that I've been so busy just lately, but today I've got so much done, I'm really impressed with myself! I've talked to all the people I've been needing to talk to, sorted out everything I've been needing to sort out, generally done everything. And it's only quarter past five now!

I should live on Mars. Days there last 35 minutes longer than days here, I'm told. It's clearly what I need, and the commute to work would be easy enough if I build a fast spaceship.

It's an improvement!

 The first two rounds of the Microsoft Excel World Championship were a lot of fun! I certainly found the first one easier than the second, but I wasn't too disappointed with how I performed in both. And I did say Brittany Deaton is awesome, so I don't mind losing to her. Reaching the round of 64 is a new high for me! Onwards and upwards next year!

This is the important bit of the draw:

But if you want to look at the whole thing and notice that my scores wouldn't have beaten a lot of opponents, the full details can be seen by squinting at this little picture, or clicking on it. The tasks for the morning session (yellow in the left-hand border) were different from the ones in the afternoon session (green), so the scores aren't comparable between the two.

Now I can happily spectate the remaining rounds, especially the climax in Las Vegas at the start of December! Excellent!

Weh!

I've now finished watching The Owl House, and still think it's awesome... what am I going to watch my way through now? I need to find some more good cartoons I haven't previously heard of. I'm going to ask everyone for recommendations! Any suggestions will be gratefully received!

Or maybe I'll watch the whole series again now. Especially the ones with Gus in a starring role. He's my new hero.

A favourable draw?

 Well, I avoid the top seeds in this year's Microsoft Excel World Championship. My bit of the round of 128 looks like this...

Mmm, it's not impossible for me to win the first round, if I have a good day (Jesi Lipp seems to do better than me slightly more often than not in these things, but it's kind of close), and even vaguely plausible I could get through the second round too (although Brittany Deaton is kind of awesome). Let's see what happens next Saturday afternoon, anyway! Let's get Excelling!

DNA doesn't lie

 But it does wander around Europe a little, if you follow Ancestry's ethnicity estimates. And I'm glad to see the latest update has nudged me just a little bit closer to being English once again!

If you haven't been following my occasional blog updates, I did a DNA test in 2022, and got this estimate of where my genetic origins might lie (based on comparing my DNA with that of other people with "deep roots" in specific regions). It had a surprising chunk of Scandinavia, both on my mother's side (not impossible; her father was more cosmopolitan than the Yorkshire origins of the other three-quarters of my heritage) and a mysterious 1% of Norway on my father's...

When they updated it the next year, I'd got 7% more English than I was before...

And now, in the October 2024 update, I've inched another 1% towards being a Full English Breakfast!

Sweden and Denmark have been split in this latest one, and 2% of it has ebbed away from my mother's side, while that bit of Norway has disappeared from my paternal genes altogether!

And now I'm significantly less Scottish than I've ever been, and not at all Welsh! Instead, I've acquired a little bit of "Germanic Europe" and a little bit of the Netherlands!

It's nonsense, of course - my dad's side of the family tree are nothing but working class midlands/Yorkshire ever since the dawn of time. I suspect the confusion comes from the branch that sprung up from the primeval sludge of Rutland - that's the kind of element that could confuse any kind of modern scientific testing! But the point is, I'm still gradually increasing my Englishness, which can only be a good thing, right?

Outstanding achievement in the field of excellence

 Woohoo! I admit I was worried about my chances of qualifying for the Microsoft Excel World Championship this year, with not having done all that great in the monthly competitions. That left me needing to get through the big qualification round to select the remaining 68 competitors to join the 60 who'd already qualified. And since it's divided into regions, I had to be in the top 22 Europeans (out of 194 entrants), excluding the lucky people who'd already secured their place and could just take part in this final challenge for the fun of it.

And maybe 'fun' isn't the word. After the hour's time limit was finished, I was a LOT more worried about my chances of qualifying! But I needn't have been - it turns out the tasks really were unspeakably difficult, and nobody (not even the REALLY great guy on the livestream who always shows us all how it's done) got close to the maximum 10,000 points. My measly 4,400 was enough to put me in European 6th place, provisionally.

It might still be corrected before the final results are announced, but that should be enough to guarantee me a third consecutive prestigious place in the grand final round of 128!

Now, can I get beyond that first round for the first time? I just have to hope for a lucky draw, avoiding the top seeds...

I also wish I could win a Nobel Prize

I'm sort of almost acquainted with Demis Hassabis, after all. I know who he is, and he might if prompted recollect meeting me and even having at least one conversation. So I'm kind of envious that he's going around winning Nobel Prizes and I haven't won anything for absolutely ages. Except an online chess match earlier this evening, but that's not quite the same.

Although to be fair, he only won a quarter of a Nobel Prize: "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 was awarded with one half to David Baker “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction”."

And what does predicting protein structure actually help with? My lack of understanding of the basic fundamentals of this area of knowledge is another thing that annoys me. Someone give me some kind of award, quickly, or I'm just going to feel terribly inferior!

I wish I was musical

 You know how Paul McCartney says he dreamed the tune to Yesterday? I mean, obviously he's just making that up so we'll think he's cool, and it's a pretty dull tune anyway, but the point is that I can dream cool music too, and sometimes wake up with a tune in my head that isn't totally stolen from whatever most recent song I've heard on the radio.

But not knowing anything about music, I can't exactly write it down or preserve it for posterity when I do dream something beautifully melodic. I suppose I could record myself, if I figured out a good way to do that on my phone, but I don't think it'd sound so good. I'd like to transcribe these things and give them to someone musically talented to reconstruct and tell me where I plagiarized it from.

This morning, for example, I tried to preserve the song in my head by writing down that it was basically the All Saints song Never Ever, but in a higher key, and had the really catchy line "You've been the beating of my heart for so long" or something similar. But after humming it all morning, I can't recapture what it sounded like now, so the world has been deprived of another masterpiece.

Further updates

 I haven't written enough in this blog recently, and can quantify how much I haven't written by following up the last-but-two post to say I've now watched the first 24 episodes of The Owl House (one a day), and it's even better than I thought after having watched the first nine! I really admire the clever writing that makes it feel like each episode is a one-off story disconnected from any other, but still never just resettles into the status quo, instead subtly changing and developing as the saga continues. I wish I could write like that. Or at all.

In other news, I seem to have become the head of a puppet theatre troupe, my qualifications being that I "seem to know what I'm doing". This is a bit worrying, really, because I genuinely don't. It's all going to be a horrible disaster, but never mind.

Secret Origins

 That comic disaster in the bath prompts me in multiple ways to talk about reason number five hundred and thirty-seven why I think "ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks" is the world's finest cartoon. So here we go...

See, Astro City issue #16, as I mentioned, tells us the origin story of the superhero El Hombre. Similarly, Electroboy issue #15 tells readers the true origin story of the great superhero Electroboy. The only difference being that the former comic really exists (and is impressively resistant to being submerged in a hot tub of water), while the latter only exists in the world of the Chipmunks.

This is the absolutely brilliant fourth-season episode "Dr. Zap vs Electroboy", in which Theodore is struck by lightning and believes this means he shares an origin story with his favourite hero! But only because he hasn't read the fateful fifteenth issue of his comic, which reveals that Electroboy was actually grown in a lab by his father, and the one who got superpowers from being struck by lightning was his evil arch-foe, Dr. Zap!

Theodore's reaction on finding this out is one of the greatest moments of the series. And incidentally, isn't that a great cover for a comic? I'd buy it!

So Theodore, believing himself fated to become an evil villain, dejectedly gets to work formulating his evil plans to conquer the world. In preparation for his criminal career, he follows the school bully, Derek around, making notes and signing up as Derek's sidekick. Luckily for the world, Miss Smith is eventually able to convince Theo that he has his own origin story and can still go out and spread joy and happiness and sweetness - it's a wonderful episode, it really is!

But it's that comic in the picture that I'm interested in talking about. Obviously the CGI prop was created specifically for that one episode, and we don't see it again until the fifth-season story "Bathroom Bully". In that one, Theodore is repeatedly seen reading Electroboy issue #15!

Which is very interesting. The plot doesn't require Theodore to be reading a comic at any point, and it's not mentioned in the dialogue. It seems to me that someone has put the comic there to specifically signal that this episode happens shortly after "Dr. Zap vs Electroboy", and this is absolute genius!

Maybe I'm wrong. The cartoon DOES sometimes reuse the CGI props to save money, and there's nothing wrong with that. It might just be accidental. But I'm fairly sure this is a deliberate piece of continuity to make the episode all that much better. This theory is supported by the fact that I don't think we ever see that comic again, except in these two episodes! I'm going to stick with my theory that someone involved in the creation of "Bathroom Bully" is a genius.

You see, that episode ends with Theodore confronting Derek (who's been bullying Simon) in a crowded hallway with the information that nobody really thinks Derek is cool; rather that people just think there's something the matter with him. Derek reacts with shock even before everyone else in the area agrees with Theo's assessment. I mean, it still works, even with the episode on its own merits - Theodore's charming, ingenuous simplicity does have that effect on people - but it's so much better if this comes straight after "Dr. Zap", and Derek knows that Theodore (for the usual unfathomable reasons of his own) has been researching bullies in great detail! It gives his little speech a lot more weight - obviously, he's genuinely well-informed about how everyone sees Derek!

You might say I'm overthinking it, but I think everyone needs to see this shining example of how they use the CGI animation to its maximum possible effect in this wonderful cartoon! Go and watch it, right now! (And don't worry, Theodore always comes out on top in the end)

Oh no!

 

If you heard a lot of loud swearing coming from my bathroom window this morning, that was me dropping Kurt Busiek's Astro City No. 16 in the bath. The one with El Hombre's origin story, part of the Steeljack epic. I'm sure I can dry it out without the pages sticking together, so it'll still be readable (it's not the first time I've done this in all my decades of reading comics in the bath), but it's still really annoying!

I bought this comic when it first came out, in early 1999. Probably from Page 45 in Nottingham, though I see now that I'd been keeping it in a bag with the cryptic price label "NX1408, NM, £1.65" rather than one of Page 45's usual ones. Maybe I bought this one without a bag, somewhere else on my travels, and subsequently put it in a bag I'd got with some other "near mint" but cheap comic. I definitely bought this one new, anyway - the comic was coming out once in a blue moon in those days because Kurt Busiek was ill and there were all kinds of delays, so a new Astro City was a rare and special treasure.

The point is, I'm very upset and aggravated about this disaster! This is something I've owned for a quarter of a century, in as near to mint condition as you would expect from something I've re-read whenever I was in the mood, and now it's always going to have wrinkled, water-damaged pages! Just think of all the things I've done in these 25 years, with this comic safely in my cupboard.

It's not even an appropriate comic to get wet. Steeljack spends a fair amount of time underwater in this storyline - not a naturally tenable position for a big heavy guy made of steel - but not in this particular issue. I'm REALLY annoyed by this. I've just drowned a piece of my history.

Hoot hoot!

 Among the things I've done in the fortnight since last writing anything here is discover "The Owl House" - a really great cartoon that I heartily recommend! I've watched the first nine episodes so far (so please, no spoilers) and really love it!

What impresses me the most, actually, is that although the central character is an eccentric teenage girl who doesn't fit in with the popular crowd (and, therefore, entirely identical to the protagonist of every single other cartoon made in the twenty-first century) and all the other characters she meets are all the usual archetypes, and this is played entirely straight without a hint of irony... it's actually still hilariously funny! Intentionally so! I didn't think that was possible, but perhaps there is something to be said for the lack of original characterisation in modern entertainment!

I should have watched this one before now. I'm not as up to date with modern cartoons as I should be. It's annoying having to do anything other than watch cartoons all day every day. Will someone pay me to do that, please?

AOO!

 Yes, it's the Asian-Oceanian Open on Memory League! For those who aren't keeping in touch with the world of Memory League, we have three big tournaments a year, each scheduled in a different time zone eight hours apart, so everyone around the world can join in from home and gets at least one in an optimal time of day, as well as one in the middle of the night.

For some reason, I only ever seem to qualify for the one in the middle of the night, British time. It's not a shortage of people choosing to take part in this one, it's just worked out that way. But for the second year in a row I had the honour of being up at 1:00 on Saturday morning to commence my match against top seed Vishvaa Rajakumar (in India, and only having to be up at half past five, because the "Asian" part of the tournament title is more thinking of east Asia and we got the earliest match).

And a great match it was, too! Vishvaa is a lot better than me, generally, and I didn't really have any hope of winning this match, but I did know that if I was at my best I could force him to be at his best to win it, and that's almost the way it turned out!

He chose international names for the first discipline, naturally - I'm famously bad at that and guaranteed to lose - but then I chose cards and managed to stop the clock a brilliant 0.09 seconds faster than he did!

Now THAT set down a marker in style! He has to go (very slightly) faster than his comfortable time if he wants to beat me! Not really an issue in his next choice, images, though - 'safe' for Vishvaa there is 'personal best' kind of time for me...

And then we're on to numbers, my other one of the five disciplines where I feel like I have any chance to do better than him. And again I set a faster time, and ooh, this was annoying!

See, I'd left that sixth three-digit block blank when filling in the recall, then went back and put in '081' (a building site). But I somehow didn't trust my memory there. I was imagining a sort of empty space, but was I extrapolating from the previous two images of a sit-down protest and a boot? Both of them come with vibes of desolation and emptiness, just like the 'site' does. Might it not have been some kind of building the boot was next to? Like 921, a betting shop? That carries a similar emotional context. I changed the 081 to 921 at the last minute, and I should have left it alone!

Maybe when I'm memorising in the middle of the night I'm more prone to thinking about the emotional context of my images than what they look like. Or maybe being sleepy just drives me slightly mad. Because I'd forgotten my golden rule - 'trust your memory!' It's never a good idea to discard your first slightly-uncertain idea to replace it with a second uncertain one! Like I mentioned in the comments there, that's advice I give to people! All the time!

Ah well. Vishvaa chose words next to wrap up the first set - he can safely do a score in the high 40s there, and I can only do that in a once-in-a-blue-moon miracle. Besides, this time I was still thinking about that numbers game and didn't come anywhere close getting it right.

And in the second set, by now way past my bedtime, I made mistakes in both cards and numbers, but was at least gratified to see Vishvaa had gone for super-safe full-one-minute memorisation times rather than trying to beat me. Sensible play when you're up against a capable opponent in two disciplines with a long tournament in front of you, and I'm pleased I achieved 'my opponent thinks I'm capable' even if I didn't come close to a victory!

After that I went to bed, leaving Vishvaa to get through the next round, six o'clock in the morning British time, against Naoki Miwa, which he did with some style. The second half of the draw is kicking off their second rounds as I write this, and you can tune in to Memorysports TV to watch it!

Or, if you're a night owl or living in foreign parts, the semi-finals start at 2:00am British time tomorrow! I might join Hannes in the commentary booth on Memorysports TV if I can disrupt my sleep patterns enough to cope with it.

You ARE the weakest link. Goodbye!

 It was twenty years ago today, or something close to it. I know it was very shortly after I won the World Memory Championship for the first time, but whether it was literally the next day or with a slightly longer gap between, I'm not sure. It might even have been the next weekend.

I had to look up on the internet the dates of the world championship (which was part of the Mind Sports Olympiad, in Manchester, that year), and it says it was August 28-30, the bank holiday weekend. But I'm not writing about the twentieth anniversary of that great triumph - I'd forgotten all about it, if I'm honest with you - but the twentieth anniversary of the time I came 4th in a TV quiz show that people only watched to see the host insulting the contestants.

It's a memory competition that reminded me about it, though - I've just played in the last round of qualifiers for the Asian-Oceanian Open Memory League championship next weekend, and won my match despite making mistakes in every single game. I was just lucky that my opponent was having an even worse day, but it doesn't really bode well for my first-round match next Saturday against Vishvaa Rajakumar. Not that anything would bode well for a match against someone who's a million times better than I ever was at the whole memory thing. It's not 2004 any more. I'm going to be remorselessly slaughtered, but it's fun to qualify for the tournament anyway!

But the point is, when in this qualifying match I messed up cards recall twice in a row - and cards is the one thing I ALWAYS get right, even when I'm playing badly - I shouted "Damn it!" in my annoyance. And twenty years ago (or something close to it) I was doing the same thing, albeit under my breath on account of how I was on BBC TV instead of sitting in my living room and only being watched on camera by the anti-cheating arbiter.

And so it was, on August 31st 2004, or maybe the following weekend, I went down to what was almost certainly London and a TV studio somewhere (a World Memory Champion might be expected to remember these things, but he doesn't) to appear on actual telly on the nation's favourite quiz show, The Weakest Link! I'd been to the audition some time previously in Derby (where I was living back then), and been accepted on the show not so much for being brilliant as because I wore my hat and everybody thought it made me look distinctive. People didn't wear hats in 2004. I was unique. So with the hat (but not expecting to be allowed to wear it, what with the shadows from TV lighting) I made my way to London (probably) for what was (maybe) my first time doing Real TV Things.

All the contestants had been asked to bring multiple changes of clothes, preferably bright and colourful, so the people in charge could make everyone coordinate nicely, but I arrived wearing my bright green, collarless, button-up shirt that I really loved and all my friends thought was hideous. The TV people loved it, though, and said I had to wear it! I wish I still had that shirt - I still wear plenty of shirts I owned in 2004, but I think I burned a big hole in that one with an iron a couple of years later and threw it out. I should get another one like it.

It was the low-budget version of The Weakest Link, rather than the big-money one - writing names on cards and turning them around, rather than them appearing on the screens on the podiums. I can't remember most of the contestants - the guy who won was called Peter, I think, and was obviously going to win, right from the start. The rest have disappeared from my memory almost entirely, except the unfortunate woman I voted off in the first two rounds. Possibly called Natalie. She looked a lot like someone else I know whose name I don't remember; the ex-girlfriend of someone I could still ask what her name was, I suppose, but I don't really want to dredge up memories of their 22-year-old breakup.

Anyway, Anne Robinson was sucking throat sweets at every opportunity and trying her best not to lose her voice. She had details of everybody on her cards, of course, but my World Memory Championship win was so recent I hadn't updated anyone on the show about it. When I told Anne during the game that I was the World Memory Champion (rather than 'a top memory competitor' or whatever my previous status had been) it would actually have been a surprise to her, but she rolled with it very professionally. And anyway, she had more fun with something I hadn't expected at all...

When she asked me what I do for a living, I told her my current unimpressive job title and told her I was "a credit control administrator". "Wouldn't you rather be a chef, or a dentist?" Anne asked, and I was bemused. "Or anything without an R in it?" she added, and I laughed out loud! Yes, I'd said I was a cwedit contwol adminstwator, and I do know I sometimes struggle with that letter, but I hadn't realised I was doing it. It was brilliant, and gave Anne a lot of opportunities to make jokes all through the show - between that and the 'memowy man' thing, it was classic, and all ad-libbed. They don't make TV like that any more!

I got my question right in the first round - two people didn't, so it was a choice which one to vote off, and I went for possibly-called-Natalie. More people went for the other one (probably a man, but I remember nothing else about him). I might even have banked some money and been the strongest link; I remember I was at one point.

In the second round I voted Natalie again, and so did everyone else. Anne rounded on me and asked why, and I said "I have a feeling she got all her questions wrong," with an apologetic glance over to her. Natalie nodded rueful agreement, and took the walk of shame.

After that I generally got questions right. There was a pause in filming at one point. Anne had just turned to me and said "Ben - In cartoons..." and I thought "ooh, my specialist subject!" but someone interrupted to query whether they'd done something wrong a minute earlier. Something to do with banking, and the timing of it, maybe. Anne was annoyed at having to stop. And I think it was decided in the end that everything was all right after all, so they reset the timer and carried on with the question. It was about The Far Side, and of course I knew it - all the other contestants reacted with surprise, because it clearly would have stumped them. I was starting to think I might win, even despite Peter knowing everything about everything. "Is Mister Memory fading?" Anne asked at one point in an end-of-round summary, and I didn't so much fade as crash out.

We're down to the final four, and Anne, gleefully noting the answer and probably re-phrasing the question on the fly, asked "Ben - What R is an item used in cleaning and a student charity week?" I was flummoxed. "Pass," I said, and a second later it came to me. "Rag!" I corrected myself, but of course Anne said "No, you said pass," and that was that. "Damn it!" I quietly said to myself - you can clearly see it on camera as it pans away from me. It was the last or penultimate question of the round, and of course the other three contestants didn't have to think hard about who to vote off.

So I took the Walk of Shame and watched the rest of the game (because they'd had hold-ups doing the interviews of losing contestants and didn't get round to mine until after the whole game had finished) before celebrating in the green room afterwards. It was a wonderful experience all round!

The show wasn't on TV until early 2005, I think - at work they brought a TV into the meeting room and we all watched it on video the next day. I looked great, as far as I can remember. I haven't seen it since, and I'd really like to now, but nobody's ever put it on YouTube or anything. Maybe one day I'll find it.

And I'm glad to know I still shout "Damn it!" when I get something wrong, even all these years later. Some people never change.