How I wish that there were more than the 24 hours in the day

Back home again, to find that Sky have removed all their channels from NTL (or Virgin Media as it now is), and that Blogger have forced me to update to the new version, which is displaying what I'm typing in a slightly larger font. I hate change. Neither of these is particularly world-destroying, though - I didn't have Sky Sports in the first place, and I'm pretty sure nobody in the universe has ever watched Sky News, so it's really just the Simpsons and Futurama on Sky One that I'm going to be missing out on. And I've seen them all a hundred times already, so I can live without them.

Anyway, Viva Las Vegas indeed! There's a place that hasn't changed much since last I was there - there are always new hotels and casinos being built, of course, and while I was there the Barbary Coast closed down and started relaunching itself as Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon, but the general character of the city is one of those constants in life. Getting there is the difficult part, though. I flew into Minneapolis-St Paul without any difficulty (even remembering that Rocky lives in Minneapolis, or possibly somewhere else with a similar name, so I picked a house that looks like hers in a place we flew over that had a 50% chance of being the right city, and gave her a wave, just in case she was watching the plane with a powerful telescope), even though the Twin Cities seem to be under ten feet of snow at the moment, but then ended up staying there for quite some time. The plane was late, and when it arrived and we'd got on, we trundled up to the runway only for the pilot to announce that there was a technical problem with some piece of equipment that he assured us was essential, so we had to go back to the gate and have someone fix it.

So when I eventually got into Las Vegas, all tired and grumpy (you don't want to be around me when I'm up past my bedtime) having been up since half past eleven the night before, local time, it was very late at night, and I went straight to bed without even squandering a bit of money in the casino first. That seemed to crack any serious jetlag problem, though - I got up at about half past five every morning, which is fine in Vegas because everywhere's always open and the major shows are all finished by nine.

The Gold Coast hotel, as I might have mentioned before, is my absolute favourite Las Vegas hangout. It's off the Strip, but walkable in fifteen minutes or so. Not that you would want to walk, because there's a free shuttle service every ten minutes or so. There are also very big and comfortable rooms, a very nice buffet restaurant and single/double-deck blackjack. I didn't actually play much blackjack this time round, because I was enticed by "Ultimate Texas Hold'em", a new innovation which is basically hold'em poker played on a blackjack kind of table against the dealer, with a fabulously complex system of bets and wins. This game being based almost entirely on luck rather than skill I didn't have much opportunity to use my amazing memory techniques, but I refrained from losing quite all the money I'll ever have on it, so I don't mind.

I also had time to check out the many things that make Las Vegas so cool - the white tigers, the Venetian canals with singing gondoliers, the dancing fountains and the hourly artificial rain storm in the Desert Passage. On Wednesday morning, though, people homesick for British weather could just stick their heads outside, because it snowed. I'm fairly certain it's not meant to snow in Las Vegas, but it did. I also saw Dirk Arthur's Xtreme Magic Show, which is basically Siegfried and Roy's old routine but not as spectacular. Still a lot of fun, though. And the Blue Man Group, which defies description, and the Cirque Du Soleil's Beatles-themed extravaganza, Love, which is just sensational.

It's an hour and a half of dancing, acrobatics, slapstick, rollerblading, trampolining and everything else you expect from the Cirque, all choreographed perfectly to Beatles music and themed around the lives and times of the Fab Four. You have to see it to believe it, really, it leaves you breathless. Next time I'll need to take another Beatles fan along with me, to join in with me singing along to all the songs before and during the performance. In the usual Cirque style, the clowns were wandering around the audience before the show and one of them stuck a little plastic star to my forehead. When I got back to my hotel room, I stuck it on the mirror, up in the top corner, and hopefully it's still there now.

The new-look Blogger template has a box where you can enter labels for your post, "e.g. scooters, vacation, fall". Scooters? Actually, I can mention scooters here - one morning on the shuttle bus I noticed that the people in front of me were talking in broad Midlands accents, so I said hello and we got talking. They were from Mansfield and Lincoln, and were in Vegas for some kind of scooter convention. I'm not sure why anyone would go to Las Vegas just to look at Lambrettas, but it seems that people do. At least it's a good excuse for a vacation there, I suppose. As long as you don't fall off.

Going back was equally frustrating - it seems that planes have a real problem leaving Minneapolis. This time there was a problem with the in-flight entertainment system that had to be fixed before we could take off, following which the plane had to be de-iced. So when I finally got into London on Saturday morning, even tireder and grumpier, I decided not to incur the annoyance of travelling across London and getting the train back up to Derby (there was a real chance of me punching somebody for looking at me in a funny way) and spent the night in a hotel. Eighty quid, but worth it to keep the world a peaceful place. I found fault extensively with the bathroom (the door to the shower was bizarrely designed such that you couldn't get into the shower after opening it unless the bathroom door was open), went to bed and got up this morning (well, midday) feeling fully refreshed and happy again.

Best conversation of the week: Talking with an old American in the lift at the hotel - he asked me what part of Britain I was from, and when I said Derby, he thought about it for a minute and said "Like Derby County? Brian Clough? He's dead!" (this last in strangely jubilant tones). I agreed that he was, and the guy added "He was a good coach." Then the lift got up to my floor before I could enquire further how the heck he'd heard of Brian Clough, let alone been so wronged by him that he was still celebrating his passing. That's like someone in Derby NOT having heard of Brian Clough. Unusual, to say the least.

I'm leaving on a jet plane

Well, tomorrow I am, but I'm already down south in preparation (ever tried booking a flight to Las Vegas from Birmingham? Without going via Amsterdam? Well, I have, and it seems it can't be done). I'll be back on Saturday, and I'm not planning to hook myself up to the internet any more than is completely unavoidable for the next week. So only five or six hours a day, then. I sometimes worry that I suffer from net addiction, but whenever I turn on my computer to look up the symptoms I just get distracted by some other website and forget all about it until I next emerge from the world wide web ten hours or so later.

A conversation, or "Sorry, it's late and I'm in the middle of an othello tournament and I can't be bothered to write a real entry tonight"

Have you ever considered horses, Thatcher?

I'm not sure I really understand the question, Devereaux.

Horses, Thatcher. Have you ever considered them?

Well, if you put it like that, I suppose I haven't.

They have legs, you know, Thatcher. Legs. Four of them, I believe, although I haven't ever counted the things, of course.

Really, Devereaux? I didn't know that.

Ah, well, you're a country boy, aren't you? Not so many horses where you come from. Not like round our way.

Barnsley?

Barnsley, yes, that's right. A lot of horses in Barnsley.

Trees too, I would imagine.

Horses, Thatcher. We're talking about horses, not trees.

I thought perhaps you might have both horses and trees.

Do stop interrupting me, Thatcher. Listen to what I'm saying about horses.

I did in fact wait for you to finish your...

Horses, Thatcher, and their legs. Just bear that in mind.

Bedtime For Sniffles

Last time I went to Las Vegas, two years ago, I got the flu and spent most of the holiday in bed all feverish and delirious. Which was fun, in its own way, but it meant I missed out on a lot of the stuff I was meaning to do while I was there. So I haven't really had a proper Vegas experience since November 2002, which was the last time I decided to give up working and be an unemployed layabout. That time I saw Siegfried and Roy, before Roy's tiger-mauling (which I heard about on the plane back from the WMC in Malaysia a year later), and was completely amazed by it. Yet another of the things I'd love to be is a magician, but I've never really been good at magic tricks. I never had the patience to get the sleight of hand right. It would be good to do a memory/magic show, so maybe I'll force myself to make more of an effort some time.

And so, once again, the day is saved...

Thanks to the ability to memorise long numbers!

From this week's Civil War #7, which was okay if you like that kind of thing. The series as a whole has been very entertaining, although it's been more interested in big fight scenes than exploring the possibilities of the very original storyline. I would have preferred a better artist, too. But it's done its job of establishing a new status quo for the Marvel Universe, and some of the upcoming series spinning off from Civil War look like being fun (Dan Slott writing "Initiative" is sure to be brilliant). Almost makes up for Thunderbolts, Exiles and Runaways losing their writers and becoming in two cases at least (Joss Whedon's Runaways hasn't started yet) absolute rubbish. I'm a bit disillusioned with Marvel comics as a whole at the moment.

But more importantly, it makes me giggle to think that we're supposed to take his recall of a 69-digit number as further proof of the Black Panther's genius. Any old eejit can memorise 69 digits with a bit of practice! Really, boasting about something like that just shows what an insecure person he is (although you could maybe have guessed he's a bit strange by the way he wears a mask with little cat-ears on top).

Anyway, I've had enough of rain and not writing books. I've decided to have a holiday in Las Vegas after all. I really do think the change of scene will help me churn out a bit of writing, and I want to see that Cirque show with Beatles music.

I remember

I came tantalisingly close to a perfect 200 in spoken numbers today - just two digits wrong, and both of those were memorised wrongly (ie the digit was 0 and I memorised the image involving a 1 instead) rather than recalled wrongly. Of course, the first mistake was on the 35th digit, meaning a score of 34, which is rubbish, but this is still a good result for me, because it's the first time I've attempted 200 and got the recall spot-on without any problems. Now I just have to sort out this problem of memorising mistakes, which I think is caused more than anything by anticipation - I hear the first couple of digits in a group of three and I'm already thinking of a three-digit group that makes an image that fits in nicely with the story I'm creating. I need to make sure I listen to all three digits rather than making them up as I go along. But I'm definitely hopeful of getting a good score in the spoken numbers at the WMC this year. Of course, this probably just means it'll all go wrong for me in another event...

As mentioned previously, though, while the memory training is going fine, the book-writing and stuff really isn't. I'm having great difficulty sitting down to do it. I need some kind of slavedriver to stand over me with a whip.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

I've just been watching Man Utd playing Lille, a bad-tempered kind of match in which the Lille players threatened to walk off the pitch after a couple of very dubious refereeing decisions went against them. I think there's a part of me, my inner hooligan if you will, that always really wants trouble like this to flare up at sporting occasions - it really is exciting to watch an unexpected mass brawl break out in the middle of gentlemanly athletic pursuits. At moments like this I almost understand why people like ice hockey.

This is the 'round of 16' of the Champions League, and I have issues with that name. First off, it's not a league when it gets down to the knockout stages. A league is when each team plays all the others. And secondly, what's a round of 16 when it's at home? We've got by in football competitions for decades just by calling them 'first round' or whatever until it gets to the quarter-finals. It's just silly.

I must apologise for the preceding paragraph. It's psychological - after admitting to wild bloodlust, I find myself reverting to pedantic nerdiness. And then I feel the need to apologise for that. And I could go on saying things and then saying that I've said them all night, but Life On Mars is on.

Puckles the Cuckold

Well, this is the funniest thing I've ever seen - Knife & Wife! It was written by Paul "Mr Biffo" Rose, and the version of it that did appear on TV in 2001 completely passed me by somehow. It also seems to be the only television programme ever made that not even a snippet of is to be found on YouTube. I don't suppose anyone taped it?

I know I sort of promised to write about the weekend's othello activities, and I do have a lengthy and entertaining essay about it written in my head, but because I composed it on the way home yesterday, it feels like I've already written it, and I lack the motivation to rehash it. Maybe I'll do it another time, when I can't think of anything better to say. Meanwhile, I'll talk about what's on telly instead. "Heroes" starts tonight on the Sci-Fi channel. I've heard good things from American superhero-likers, and apparently it was a hit over there with normal people, too. Which makes it strange that the Sci-Fi channel have got first dibs on it, because that means that real channels like Sky and the BBC didn't want to spend money on it. Still, they spend money on all kinds of rubbish, so I'm not sure what that proves.

Also, Channel 4 are showing Studio Ghibli films every morning this week (except Wednesday, when for some reason they're showing The Brave Little Toaster), although I didn't notice that until Kiki's Delivery Service had finished today. Still, yay!

Young people today, I don't know

The British othello scene has been overrun lately by trendy young people who are better at the game than me. It's quite disturbing - I don't mind losing to old people like most British othello regulars (how's that for an off-hand comment guaranteed to offend no end of people?), they've been playing since the dark ages and have the wisdom that comes with their advanced years. Some of them are over forty, you know. But when I'm being comprehensively thrashed on a regular basis by youthful-looking twenty-somethings who can wear one of those hooded sweaters and get away with it and started playing the game more recently than I did, it makes me think I should start learning how to play properly. It's embarrassing being so bad and so old.

What's even more psychologically disturbing about this horde of new young players is that they're both called David, and I always get confused by their surnames. There's a story behind this, as there is with all of my weirdnesses. You see, as many of my friends know all too well, I automatically file people away in my brain by the name with which they were introduced to me. If for any reason they change their name thereafter, or if they were using a nickname or alias when I first encountered them, I find it impossible to remember to call them by their preferred monicker. Except for Kitty, who seems to have become fixed in my mind as such, even though he was SA when I first met him and seems to be mainly SumerianHaze these days, but that's another story.

So the thing with the Davids started at the nationals last year - I'd heard in advance that a player called David Beck, whom I'd never met, was going to be there, so when a newcomer introduced himself to me as David, I naturally assumed that was him. As it transpired, David Beck wasn't there after all, and this other guy was David Hand. But I didn't realise this for about an hour, and the mental damage was done. So now whenever I see David Hand, my brain automatically calls him David Beck. And when I see David Beck, my brain calls him... David Gray.

No, not David Hand. I know he's not David Hand. I'm not stupid. But I think that since I know, deep down, that he can't be David Beck, my subconscious trawls around for another likely-sounding name to pin on him, and comes up with David Gray. Who I believe is a pop singer of some kind, probably also younger than me and better at pop singing than I am, but who I otherwise don't know anything about.

When I started this post, it was with the intention of describing what I've been doing this weekend, but I think I'll do that tomorrow. This whole Beck/Hand thing has gone on too long already. And it's just this minute occurred to me that "David Beck/Hand" sounds surprisingly like "David Beckham". Maybe they're all related.

Darling, I am growing older...

I've just seen a trailer for Channel 5's tenth anniversary celebrations. Surely it can't be ten years already? I can remember Channel 4 starting, when I was tiny, and I wouldn't object to them commemorating that, but Channel 5? It's still brand new! Gah, I can't be thirty years old, it just isn't scientifically possible.

Ah well, I'll just cover my ears and sing 'la la la I'm not listening' whenever the subject comes up again. That'll sort everything out. Meanwhile, another thing I've noticed lately is a new and exciting magazine in the shops - Harry Potter chess! It's one of those magazines that give away a free gift, in this case a chess piece, with every issue, with the idea being that you gradually build up a complete collection as you buy the informative magazine, in this case a guide to how to play chess. The Harry Potter connection here comes from a couple of photos of Daniel Radcliffe and co liberally pasted all over it, and the fact that the chess pieces do exciting things! The rooks have got magnets in them so you can move them by 'waving a magic wand', the knights make a noise when you pick them up, the bishops make a slightly different noise when you pick them up, the pawns, um, fall apart, and the king and queen presumably do something fun too, but I stopped reading at that point.

The first issue is a mere £1.99 (normally £3.99), and comes with a rook, so presumably over the next 32 weeks enthusiastic Potter fans can spend well over a hundred pounds on a chess set and what must be a pretty exhaustive guide to chess play and strategy. Unless, of course, the series gets cancelled after three issues like these things always, without exception, are. Of course, since you won't be able to play chess until you've bought the final issue with that last piece, your learning will have to be strictly theoretical over the next seven months.

Off to sunny Cambridge tomorrow! Emmanuel Caspard gives what my limited understanding of French tells me is a very entertaining account of what makes the event so much fun in his blog, I might possibly write about it when I get back, if you're lucky.

I found it on YouTube

Happy Valentine's Day, again. I'd like to credit the writer, but I'm not sure who did it - the credits of the episode list lots of people with vaguely musical-sounding descriptions. Sung by Katie Leigh, who always deserved extra praise for striking a balance between doing the Rowlf voice and being able to sing.

You're Special To Me

What's the greatest piece of Valentine's Day poetry ever composed? Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls? Ophelia's song in Hamlet? No, the correct answer is in fact Rowlf's song from an episode of Muppet Babies. Or at least that's the one that comes first to my mind every time, anyway. Happy Valentine's Day to you all, anyway, love and kisses.

I've been looking back at last February's blog posts, because someone added a comment to the one about The Armstrongs today, to see what I was doing at this time last year. It turns out that I was getting better results at memory training than I currently am, observing that I was nearly a hundred places higher on the French othello rating list than I am right now (because they're rating more people nowadays, rather than because I'm getting worse at the game, but it's still annoying), appearing on BBC TV rather than just being tentatively filmed for a prospective Channel 4 documentary and organising the Cambridge memory championship rather more seriously than I'm currently doing. That's rather annoying. But on the other hand, this time last year the Uefa cup game I was watching was a dull 0-0 draw, and the one I'm watching tonight is 3-2 and quite exciting. AND there's an FA Cup replay later tonight too. So all things considered, I win in the achievement stakes over my year-younger self.

Another thing I did last year, although not in February, was enthuse over Life On Mars. Well, the second series is possibly even better than the first - I watched the first two episodes last night. They're putting more emphasis on the time-travel aspect this time round, but that's probably necessary because they're finishing it after this series and need to provide some kind of explanation. And it still doesn't get in the way of a brilliant police drama. The second episode was particularly enthralling - there really isn't a lot of stuff on telly these days that grips me in that way.

The sound of silence

I'm racked with indecision. I did a half-hour binary practice today using my 'new' method of linking all my groups of images together and scored 3660. Doing it the old way last week I got 3555. But I know I can do better than that with my usual approach, but then I'm also pretty sure I could do better with the new one too. It's just a matter of deciding which is the best way to go, if I want to get the maximum possible score. I'm going to try an hour cards new-style tomorrow (if I have the time and inclination) and see what happens there. I should go into more detail of what I'm talking about here, I know, but it would take hours and nobody would really be all that interested, so I'll leave it for another time.

This whole thing raises another existential dilemma - I'm doing lots of memory practice lately and that's all well and good, but when I left my job it was in order to experiment with ways of making money from being a memory guy (okay, if I'm honest it was in order to leave a job I didn't particularly like, but the making-money-from-memory thing was the justification for it), and I'm never going to make a living just by winning memory competitions, more's the pity. I should be writing that book that I'm all writer's-blocked on, I should be preparing an impressive pi-memory performance and getting it ready for Ulrich's pi-day festival next month, and I should be forcing people to make documentaries about me in much greater quantities than they currently are. If I'm to have any hope of not going back to accountancy when I run out of money, I need to do something other than mess about with infinitesimally increasing my score in half-hour binary, which I'm already the best in the world at and which nobody's going to throw money at me for doing.

Life is hard. I spend my days doing stuff I enjoy and having fun doing it, and I'm still complaining. I don't know.

Moral: always look at the bits of shops you don't normally look at

I had been thinking about buying the Order Of The Stick prequel book (containing stuff that isn't on the internet), and probably would have done already, but I assumed that buying it would mean ordering it from America over the internet. And I don't have any problem with that, but I generally think 'I should buy such-and-such' when I'm not sitting in front of my computer, and then I see a butterfly or some other distracting insect, and forget about it. But then on Saturday my brother and I went into Forbidden Planet here in Derby, and he happened to stand in front of the RPG section and talk to me, and I noticed that they had the book sitting on the shelf right in front of me! Which just goes to show something, doesn't it?

I decided to take an extra day off from 'work' today, because I woke up with a headache and a lazy attitude, and thought some fresh air and healthy exercise might help. The headache cleared up immediately, but the laziness didn't, and so I found myself in a bookshop. I sneezed in the foreign languages section, and a man across the other side of the room said 'Gesundheit'. I'm not sure if there is a distance limit for acknowledging a complete stranger's sneeze in public. Perhaps there are different rules for 'bless you'.

I also had my hair cut this morning. I was thinking of trying to grow it long, but it never works. It just gets down to collar length and then doesn't go any further. It's very frustrating when you've got the soul of a hippy trapped in the body of an accountant. I've also toyed with the idea of shaving off my beard (I had a dream the other day that I did, and it took me a while the following morning to remember that I was still hairy about the face). I seem to have almost more white hairs than black/brown/whatever-colour-they-should-be ones lately. Growing up sucks.

Never apologise, never explain

I would explain that I haven't posted anything for a couple of days because, as regular readers know, I don't like blogging when I've got guests. But I've said that two or three times before, and I don't like to repeat myself. Besides, I expect everyone who reads this blog to go through the entire archive and learn everything there is to know about me, so if you didn't know already that I wasn't going to post anything, it's your own fault. And besides, I'd be surprised if anyone really noticed, since practically everyone who reads this thing seems to read it at work on weekday mornings. I sometimes feel guilty about the amount of man-hours I'm costing British and international industry. And I'll be skipping a day or two next weekend too, because I'm going to Cambridge for the othello EGP.

I watched the Ireland/France rugby game today. I don't particularly like rugby, but for some reason I always end up tuning into a game or two during the Six Nations. Perhaps it's the way the BBC promote it excessively during their coverage of football and everything else I like to watch. I'm annoyed with the BBC because they deliberately showed Shrek last night at 7:15 in order to make people forget they were going to watch the new thing with the dinosaurs on ITV at 7:45, and I fell for it. I'm sure the dinosaur thing was rubbish ("Walking With Dinosaurs" was rubbish, and this is just the same sub-Jurassic-Park CGI dinosaurs with an added plot about time travel and a maverick scientist hero), and Shrek is great, but that's not the point. The rugby was also a good game, but that's not the point either. I'm not sure what the point is, but it almost certainly involves the licence fee.

My TV licence is actually in the name of Mr G Bridmore. I keep meaning to change it.

Country life

Derby's postcodes are very strange. I live in DE23, yet I just have to walk down the road and I'm in DE1. I'm right next to the city centre, how come I get a postcode that makes it sound like I live somewhere in the wilds of Derbyshire? When I lived in Tumby Woodside, the best part of fifty miles from Peterborough, I was in PE22, which is the postcode for all the little villages on the far side of Boston that aren't quite close enough to Lincoln to get an LN code. Boston itself is PE21. I've never lived, long-term, in any place with a postcode number under twenty. That statistic makes me sound like some kind of country bumpkin who's afraid of settlements with more than three inhabitants and lives in a cave somewhere, eating passing rabbits and weevils and shouting at goats. It's a good thing nobody knows or cares about my postcode.

I'm watching Crimewatch right now, for want of anything better to do. I used to watch it regularly when I was a lot younger. I don't know why, maybe it's the appeal of the badly-acted dramatisations, or the vague hope that I might have witnessed the arch-criminal without knowing it at some point in the distant past. Of course, with my inability to remember faces, I wouldn't know about it even if I saw them on Crimewatch.

COLD winter ahead!

It's going to snow! Unless the weather forecasters have lied to me, of course, but they don't usually. If I'd thought about it, I would have bought some more new shoes, or wellies, or something suitable for walking around when there's snow and slush on the ground. The famous other-materials shoes haven't really stood up to the strain of being walked around in every now and then, so perhaps next time I really need to splash out on the second-cheapest shoes in the shop instead of the cheapest.

Little Green Men (and Zoom Zoom)

I was wondering whether to watch the repeat of the last episode of the first series of Life On Mars on BBC4 in ten minutes. There's a new series next week, or possibly the week after. While pursuing my usual means of making my mind up about something, ie by doing nothing and waiting to see what happens, I clicked on the uk.misc newsgroup, for the first time ever and for totally un-Life-On-Mars-related reasons, to find a post about it. From a German who thought the characters speak with really weird accents and that it's strange that the police officers don't carry guns, but that's not the point. I took this as a sign from the universe that I should watch Life On Mars, and so that's what I'm doing.

If I were to think about it rationally, I might be worried about the way I'm taking orders from the internet. There are conspiracies, you know. This is probably what led to Spencer Perceval being assassinated. Innocuously-placed websites designed by freemasons and communists designed to prompt lone gunmen into doing things.

Also, it's been decided (by me and Jemfy, and we know about these things), that the word 'gerrymander' now describes the way geese walk. 'Goose-step' tends to have negative connotations nowadays, you see.

Incidentally, does anybody out there get the reference in this post title? I know they're normally obscure, but this one is particularly so, and I think it's particularly clever and funny (though I says it as shouldn't).

More tea, vicar?

It occurred to me early this morning that I had James and Ravinder and Victoria coming round with cameras and tripods and brain buddies and things, and that it's polite to offer guests something to drink. Since the only liquids I had available were tap water and past-the-sell-by-date milk, I went out to the corner shop and got some tea. I did consider getting coffee as well, but decided against it because while I can bring myself to drink tea every now and then, coffee tastes like yuck.

James arrived, asked if I had anything decaffeinated, and when I told him I hadn't, opted for tap water. When the TV people turned up, with all the accompanying excitement and talking, I forgot to offer them anything until just before lunch, when they politely declined since we were just about to go for lunch. So now I've got a box of teabags AND a pack of sugar that I'm going to have to drink and/or eat myself. With hindsight, I really should have bought coffee, seeing as my brother's coming round for the weekend and he drinks no end of coffee but dislikes tea.

But despite my shortcomings as a tea boy, I think today's secondary purpose of making a documentary went well. We did lots of talking about this and that, memorising cards and reciting pi, showing the camera around my stylishly untidy flat, drinking and talking in the haunted pub and expressing scepticism regarding James's mind-altering flashy-lights-and-pulsing-sounds Brain Buddy device. Actually, I expect the thing works very well - Dominic's always raving about it - but it normally takes me at least a couple of years to agree to try new things.

Sheriff John Stone, why don't you leave me alone

I can't get the song 'Sloop John B' by the Beach Boys out of my head today. I've also had an email from a TV guy asking me if I want to do a bit about counting cards for a programme called 'Beat The Casino', but I've turned him down. As previously mentioned, once or twice, I love holidays in Las Vegas, and when Dominic did a similar documentary years ago, all the casinos in Vegas sent him polite letters telling him never to set foot inside them again on pain of nobbling by hired goons. Well, I don't think the hired goons were mentioned, but I just assume they're implied in all letters from Las Vegas casinos.

The above paragraph makes it sound like I'm some kind of genius card-counter who periodically goes to Las Vegas to supplement his income by winning squillions of dollars at blackjack. I'm really not. When they hear that I can memorise cards, the first thing everyone says is 'I bet you're good at blackjack', or 'don't play this guy at poker', or something like that. And yes, I'd be great at blackjack if they allowed me to look through the deck of cards before the start of the game, but strangely enough most casinos prefer not to do that. Card counting is a completely different skill.

I can do it a bit, admittedly, but when I'm in Vegas I prefer to just trust to luck. It's more fun that way and I usually win anyway.

Everlasting, like the sun

I've just watched "Do You Want To Live Forever", the documentary about Aubrey, and it was brilliant. I've heard and read about his theories at length before, but it's always a lot of fun to see him talking about them, with the beard and hair and a glass of beer on the go ("I have the genes that mean I like beer, and drinking it in the morning isn't a problem. I mean, it's ten in the morning, this is my third pint, and that's fine for me..."), and with a very convincing kind of passion for the subject. Jay Olshansky claimed in the documentary that Aubrey is full of bitterness and hate towards the scientific community, which is a wildly inaccurate thing to say - I've never known anyone less hateful, he does everything with a sense of just having fun with it.

Am I convinced by the arguments that we could eradicate the aging process with just a bit of work? Yes. Not from any kind of scientific understanding, but just because I like to believe we live in the kind of world where Aubrey's right. If I had money, I would gladly invest it in SENS research, or bump up the Methuselah Mouse prize fund, or whatever, and I hope it all comes to fruition, just so I can say I knew about it before it was cool. Even before meeting Aubrey, I generally approached life from the point of view that I was going to live forever, so it's quite nice to know I was right all along.

Meanwhile, I notice tonight that Amazon.co.uk seem to also have a different approach to time - they've just sent me an email saying:

"Dear Customer,

We wanted to give you an update on the status of your order
[026-4457344-7257252].

We are sorry to report that the following items have been delayed.

Antonia Forest (Author) "Falconer's Lure"

Our current estimate is that it will take an additional 4-6 weeks to
obtain these items for you.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this causes."

This, I might point out, is a book I ordered for a Christmas present for my mother, BEFORE Christmas, and this is the first I've heard that it hasn't been delivered yet. (Yes, if I spoke to my mother occasionally, I might have learned as much by now, but that's not the point.) I don't know, what is the world coming to?

Still, to look on the bright side, at least I didn't go to the football like I was thinking of doing yesterday. We got thrashed six-nil. At home. To Grimsby.

It's grim up north

Boston Utd are at home to Grimsby tomorrow, in yet another crucial relegation six-pointer. There's a whole gaggle of six teams fighting it out for the next-to-bottom spot, and most of the others have got home games against mid-table opposition tomorrow, so a win for Boston is absolutely vital. I'm not sure whether or not to go and see it - Boston-Grimsby games are always fun, since Grimsby are the dirtiest team in the league, they're local rivals and games are always more like a punch-up in the mud than a classic football match.

Alternatively, I might stay at home and do memory practice. I did an hour numbers today, trying out that thing where I link the last image from one group to the first of the next, like I do with spoken numbers. It's slower, so I only went through the 2340 digits three-and-a-bit times instead of four or five, but the recall was better, and I ended up with a score of 1800, which is more than acceptable, especially since I'm pretty sure I could do better than that with a bit more practice.

I'm not sure whether to try doing that in hour cards or half-hour binary, but I think I probably won't. Hour numbers was the only one where I was getting to the limit of what I wanted to try to memorise before half way through the memorising time, and just revising it for the rest of the time. Which I don't think is an effective way to do things, but trying to memorise more than ten journeys doesn't really work for me either. Still, it was quite exciting.

There's also a big long documentary on ITV tomorrow night about Aubrey and his life-extension stuff, which I'm sure will be fun to watch. I'd probably miss the start if I went to the football. Plus if I stayed at home I could hoover the place and pick up some of the filth, you know, seeing as I've got guests on Monday.

Wow, that's weird. I've just noticed that there's a series called "After You've Gone", starring Nicholas Lyndhurst, on BBC1 on Friday nights nowadays. I assume it's a sitcom of some kind. Tonight's is episode 4, but it's the first time I've noticed that it exists. And I normally make a point of checking out new sitcoms, even BBC1 ones, in case they're good. I need to be more observant.

Beauty school dropout

I'm watching Grease on Sky again tonight. Last time I mentioned this in my blog I was emailing a TV producer about a documentary about memory stuff - this time I've got two of them on the go. The one I've been talking about for a while that looks like being fun, and another guy who just emailed me the other day to ask about things. I'm practically a superstar. In terms of fame, I must be at least on the level of the guy who played Eugene.

Reactor engaged, traction locked, all go!

I noticed in HMV today that Thundercats is finally out on DVD! The first 33 episodes, anyway, which is a good start. I never really understood why it wasn't released a few years ago when 80s cartoon nostalgia was really, really big. Everything else was. And Thundercats was the BEST of the half-hour-toy-advert cartoons that made my childhood so special - yes, better than Transformers, better than He-Man, the whole lot of them. Nothing could beat Thundercats.

I've already got all of these episodes on video, taped off the TV when they were first shown (except "Pumm-Ra", when we had the video set to the wrong channel and taped the snooker on BBC2 instead, and "Spitting Image", where the tape ran out half way through, but I've got those on the commercial VHS release - luckily, they were not only two of the handful of episodes that were released on video, but they were both on the same tape!), but I might buy the DVD anyway, just to show support for Thundercats in general. Thundercats Hoooooooo!

Derby day

I was in the town centre yesterday when a man asked me if I knew how to get to the Wardwick. "What's a Wardwick when it's at home?" I thought to myself, and apologised for not being able to help him. I went on my way, turned a corner, looked up and saw a sign saying "WARDWICK". The following thoughts then went through my head:

"Oh, this is a Wardwick? I always thought this road was called 'That street with the library and the Cats Protection League shop and all the old buildings'. I could never get the hang of street names that don't say 'street' or 'road' or 'boulevard' or anything like that after them. Oh, and the guy who asked me the way wandered off in the other direction. I feel all guilty now. No, it's okay, assuming he asked someone else (and you'd think he would have done, unless I'm the only approachable-looking person in town today), he could just have gone the other way around and got to this road from the other end. Oh heck, that means he might be walking towards me right now, ON the Wardwick, not five minutes after I told him I don't know where it is! He'll think I knew all along and just sent him in the wrong direction as a cruel joke! I'd better hide. But if I hide in the library or the Cats Protection League shop or one of the other grotty shops down here, that might turn out to be where he was going, and it will look ten times worse! He'll probably call the police and everything."

In the end I decided to just keep walking on my way, and I didn't bump into him, nor did I get arrested. Hopefully he found whatever he was looking for, despite my hindrance.

There's also a TV show on tonight about one of the few things Derby's famous for - sumo wrestling! Yes, it's a little-known fact that the British Sumo Federation is based in Derby. Makes me wonder if I should try to organise the British othello championships alongside one of their events - "the two most popular Japan-originating pastimes in Derby, together on the same day!" Hey, they have chess boxing, why don't we have sumo othello!

Another hit Derby-connected documentary of the future is taking shape - James Kemp and I are being filmed here next Monday talking memory for this latest project. This leaves me with the dilemma of whether I should clean up my flat a bit before the squalor is captured for posterity, or whether the cheerful clutter will just make me look loveably eccentric on camera. I'm inclining towards the latter, because it means I don't have to do any tidying.

Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

I dug out my old Teach Yourself Japanese course today and refreshed my memory of the first couple of chapters. I've started to learn the language a few times in the past, and always got stuck when I got to verbs and gave up. This time, I fully intend to become a master of the tongue, able to chat fluently with Hideshi Tamenori or Rumiko Takahashi or Usagi Yojimbo, should they happen to come round for tea. I expect to be talking like a native by tomorrow lunchtime, teatime at the latest.

I feel I should point out that I've also done a huge amount of memory training (I'm really getting somewhere with the spoken numbers now) and writing of Cambridge Memory Championship website today. Having weekend non-memory-stuff breaks is definitely a good idea. But then if I get so used to the idea of not memorising things at weekends, I might not be able to do it at competitions, which are invariably weekend events! Maybe I'll have a weekend in the middle of the week. Or just do what I want, when I want, like I always do.

It was Sunday, what a black day

I was thinking of having an image. Or a different image, anyway. Rather than being the one with the hat and the strange clothes, I thought it would be cool to be the one with the hat and the all-black clothes, or the one with the hat and the 18th-century period costume, you know the kind of thing. That way it will be easier to become a major TV star, because everyone will remember me after the first time they see me perform.

Or I could become a nudist.

I don't write as much as I used to

By which I mean that I actually write more nowadays than I used to, but it's all on this blog thing, and so is mostly dull stuff about my everyday life, rather than dull fictional stuff that's supposed to be funny. I used to be quite prolific with that kind of thing in the olden days.

I'm using my antique desktop that I've had since 1999 (I think - I had to pause for a moment and replay my life so far to work out when it must have been, and it still might have been 1998), because I needed to dig out "The Adventures of Jayce and Alex" from the hard drive, in order to force it on someone who I somehow neglected to force it on back when I wrote it in 2001. J&A was a serious attempt to see if I could become a writer of children's books, and I continued to try to start a career in that field for the next couple of years, on and off. The publishers of Britain were unanimous in their opinion that I'd be better off as an accountant. I've re-read Jayce and Alex tonight, and I STILL think it's quite good. But then, I'm biased.

While I was here, I decided to have a look through the various Word documents saved on my PC. Since I save everything in 'My Documents', usually with the title that Word suggests (the first few words of the text), it provides a fun guessing game to see if I can remember what any document is from the title. Things of note include:

The special secret extra Jayce and Alex adventure that I wrote a month or so after the first book, intending it to be the opening chapter of the sequel, which nobody knows exists, and the first few paragraphs of chapter two. I wasn't entirely happy with the way it turned out, and since by then the rejection letters were coming in thick and fast, I decided I should maybe try writing something else instead. Then I think I got distracted by another project, and didn't write anything at all, until...

"Interesting Private Detectives", another planned masterpiece of fiction for the discerning primary school audience, that I never got very far with. It would have been a real epic, with dragons and squirrels, at least three different planet Earths and a lot of mad-scientist inventions - I must finish writing it some time.

A story involving a giant that I had completely forgotten about, dated 2003 and seeming to be so heavily indebted to Lemony Snicket that I would never dream of trying to get it published now. Strange, because it was written long before I'd ever read any Snicket books.

Lots and lots of exercises I wrote for my students while I was learning to teach English as a foreign language. They're not very good. The poor foreigners (and I mean 'poor' in more ways than one - you could pay for lessons from qualified teachers at that place, or get taught by trainees for free) can't have learned very much.

"Alpha.doc" Good grief, it's an Alpha Flight fanfic. And a TERRIBLE one! I'm pretty sure I never showed this to anyone. I don't do fanfic, this is the only time I've turned my hand to it.

"Animal Cookies.doc" Oh, I remember this. I was going to write a story based on a surreal conversation I had on the Bridge with a bunch of people. And since most of those people were Americans, I tried to write it with an American accent. I didn't get very far without giving up on it.

"Bagshot is large.doc" A hilarious one-act play about the upper classes. I'll save that in case I ever find myself needing to put on a comedy revue at the local theatre.

"Bratislava application.doc"? When the heck did I apply for anything involving Bratistlava? Oh, it's a TEFL thing. I didn't get the job. Or indeed a TEFL job anywhere, but I only applied for a couple before deciding I would have a lot more fun going back to accountancy.

"Brotherly Love.doc"? What the... ohh, wow, another thing I'd forgotten. It's the script for a Doctor Who comic strip that another member of the Mensa Doctor Who fan club was going to draw. We got as far as talking about it, when I realised that my writing was, in fact, horrific, and I decided not to go on with it. Shame, but looking at it now I can see it was a very good decision.

"Code Effect.doc" Ooh, a list of the secret codes for Mortal Kombat 3! You never know when that might come in handy...

Hmm, it's going to take all night at this rate, and I sincerely doubt anyone's still reading. Besides, there's an othello tournament on Kurnik starting in a couple of minutes. I'll continue the journey down memory lane.doc later, and won't write about it here unless a lot of people really want me to.

Okay, I definitely need to take a break

I've had decidedly diminishing returns in everything I've turned my hand to over the last couple of weeks. With hindsight, it's possibly because the schedule I set myself for doing things (if a collection of vague intentions can really be described as a schedule) now I'm my own boss has me working seven days a week without variation. Weekends were invented for a reason - I'll arrange things in future so I do different kinds of not-work on different days, and make myself stick to it. And not even pay myself overtime if I work extra.

In recognition of this, I've spontaneously decided to go to Manchester tomorrow. I'm not sure what the mental connection is, but that doesn't matter - I've not been there since the MSO in 2004, and I've never really explored the city as much as I probably should. Then I'll come back home and be all refreshed and get on with things on Sunday. It might happen. And monkeys might fly out of my butt.

Easy? Maybe if you're a millionaire...

I was pondering going to Center Parcs, because they email me occasionally to tell me that they've got special offers (very expensive special offers, but special nonetheless), so I decided to look into how easy it is to get there without a car or an obliging father who'll give you a lift anywhere. I was pleased to see that the official website says "Getting to Sherwood is easy by rail or road". Then it elaborates on the method of getting there by rail - "The nearest mainline station is Newark Northgate, which is approximately 15 miles away. There is also Nottingham station approximately 20 miles away. For further information contact National Rail Enquiries on 0845 7484950 or visit www.thetrainline.com/. A taxi may be taken to Center Parcs from Newark or Nottingham station, using the following companies..."

I'm sorry, but taking a taxi for fifteen miles does not constitute easily getting somewhere by rail! This really does nothing but reinforce my prejudice against the kind of wealthy middle-class people who ponder going to Center Parcs. Obviously they're all so wealthy and posh that they think nothing of taking taxis whenever they travel anywhere! Bunch of snobs, the lot of them! Pfah!

I could be brown, I could be blue, I could be violet skies

Yes, I really love the song "Grace Kelly" by Mika. I like squeaky voices. I've been mistaken for Maurice Gibb in the past, you know. It also comes passably close to providing a relevant title for what I was going to write about tonight - for the benefit of mutual friends who might not know about it, check out Jemfy's other other blog, especially the latest entry where she describes her meeting with Gordon from Sesame Street. I never really watched Sesame Street when I was little, but I was an ardent devotee of Rainbow, and I've always kind of wanted to meet Geoffrey and see what he's like in real life. I'm sure there are plenty of people who meet him every day - he's a minicab driver these days, as opposed to a hermit - but I still can't really imagine what it must be like to actually meet such an iconic figure. I'd probably be all speechless and in awe.

And while I'm throwing links to VPSers around, can I recommend this seriously cool video by Jimi (aka Dog-Faced Boy)? I think it deserves to be a hit.

Also, because this post has contained a lot of me saying other people are great and not so much about how fantastic I am, here's a blog post that describes me as 'the incredible'. Actually, I only mention it because the picture it uses is one of the few pictures you get when you put my name into Google images. People have asked me before if that's a picture of me in my younger days. It's a picture of the Decamentathlon competition at the MSO in 2003, and I'm not actually in it - Google's just picking up my name from the article attached to it. It shows Demis Hassabis, Tony and Alex Wilkinson and I think it's George Lane in the background - I was in the room, to Demis's right, just off-camera.

As the actress said to the bishop

I'm thinking of moving house. I'm tired of waking up every day and seeing the words "Super suction, compact cylinder!" on the vacuum cleaner box on top of my wardrobe. It contains some of my stuff, probably - I can't really be bothered to look, but I assume it's up there for some reason, like the various other boxes and suitcases up there. There isn't really anywhere else in the flat that I could fit a large-ish cardboard box.

I suppose technically I could just turn the box around, rather than moving house, but I would quite like a bigger place. On the other hand, moving is such a lot of unnecessary work that I vowed never to do it again after moving here three-and-a-bit years ago. And unless I got a proper job it would be difficult to find a new place anyway, of course. Perhaps I could become wealthy enough to buy a second home without moving out of this one? Although then any time I wanted one of my posessions, it would always be at my other place. Millionaires must be constantly frustrated.

How do you eat yours?

The correct way to eat gingerbread men is to bite their heads off first. It's vitally important to make sure you kill them with the first bite, so that they don't suffer unduly. I felt it was necessary to publicly point this out, because I've been hearing people advocating other means of eating the things which I think are frankly sadistic. Anyone who starts with the toes and works their way up is a horrible, horrible person.

I've just been re-reading my old sitcom, "Sitcom", that I wrote years ago and occasionally forced people to read. I also made a couple of attempts to persuade people to put it on TV, but it never worked out (although I did exchange emails with a guy at Channel 4 for some time about the possibility, and not just with me saying 'oh, go on' and him saying 'no, stop emailing me' either). Even reading it now I think it's occasionally funny. I was thinking that I might try to rework it as a webcomic, since I'm reading so many of them lately and always wanted to write one. Or maybe even make it into a webcartoon, if that's a word. It would be a fun kind of exercise to develop some artistic ability. Here's a scene from episode 11, which I don't think I ever finished writing and so probably didn't show to even my long-suffering readers:

Everybody is sitting around in the living room. Dean is in his usual armchair, watching television, Rufus is in the other armchair reading a book entitled “I Hate Everybody”, by Rufus Hemingway, Cecil is dressed as a boxer, shadow-boxing and skipping around in the way he imagines boxers do when they’re training for a fight, and Adolf and Celia are sitting on beanbags, playing ‘Guess Who’. Celia is extremely pregnant. There is a bizarre humming noise in the background.

ADOLF
Is it Herman?

CELIA
No. Is it Claire?

ADOLF
No. Is it Richard?

CELIA
No. Is it Michael?

ADOLF
No. Is it Herman?

CELIA
No. Is it Michael?

CECIL
You’re not playing it right.

EVERYBODY
Shut up, Cecil.

RUFUS
What the bleeding heck is making that humming noise?

ADOLF
Not me. Probably a dog.

RUFUS
Dogs don’t hum. You’re thinking of hummingbirds.

ADOLF
Well, maybe it’s a hummingbird.

RUFUS
Don’t be stupid. Anyway, since you’re talking to me, even though I told you not to, I suppose I should make some polite conversation. What are you going to call the baby?

CELIA
We’re not quite sure yet. I think I’m going to call it Captain Invincible, if it’s a boy, and Captain Invulnerable if it’s a girl. Adolf’s going to call it Boris.

ADOLF
No, I’ve changed my mind again since I said that. I think I might call it Ferdinand, after my brother.

CECIL
Your brother’s called Godris.

CELIA
Shut it, Cecil. Nobody asked you.

ADOLF
Maybe I’ll just pick a name at random out of our book of baby names.

CELIA
Well, make sure it really is a book of baby names, and not a dictionary. That’s the kind of thinking that led to our previous four children being called Satisfactory, Burlesque, Artichoke and Artichoke Two.

ADOLF
Well, it’s hardly my fault that the book came open at the same page twice. You keep opening it at that page to look up the word ‘artisan’, because you think it’s rude.

CELIA
It is. The dictionary’s got it wrong. I keep writing to them and telling them to change it, but they haven’t yet.

CECIL
Wait a minute. You’ve got four children already?

ADOLF
Yes. Hadn’t you noticed?

Rufus, Adolf, Celia and Dean all point and laugh at Cecil, saying things like “What an idiot!” for quite a long time.

CECIL
But you only got married last year!

CELIA
Well, it’s not like we’d never met each other before our wedding day. We’ve known each other for years.

RUFUS
Oh, is Satisfactory Fortescue your son? The one who works at the pig factory, with green hair, a tattoo of Cliff Richard on his nose and blue eyes?

ADOLF
No, that’s the other Satisfactory Fortescue from the pig factory. Our son’s got brown eyes.

RUFUS
Oh yes, I think I’ve seen him around. Fat, isn’t he?

ADOLF
Yes. We’re always making fun of him about it.

CECIL
Hang on, how old are your children?

CELIA
Twenty-four, nineteen, fourteen and eight.

CECIL
What? But… I mean… I’m only thirty-six, and you’re a year younger than me, so…

ADOLF
Isn’t Cecil an idiot, everyone?

Everyone points and laughs at Cecil for another long time. Godris enters, and joins in. Then he leaves again.

RUFUS
That humming noise is really getting annoying. I think it’s coming from outside.

Rufus gets up, and goes outside. Everyone else sits in silence, looking at the door. The humming noise gets louder.

CELIA
He’s only made it louder.

ADOLF
I’ll go and sort it out.

Adolf goes outside. The humming noise stops immediately. Adolf and Rufus come back in and sit down again.

ADOLF
Is it Herman?

CELIA
No. Is it Claire?

RUFUS
Oh, get out of my house, the lot of you!

More fun than any other sport that's almost 'raccoons' spelt backwards

I'm watching the final of the Masters snooker as we speak. Well, as I write and significantly before you read, but you know what I mean. Someone asked me just recently whether there is anybody in the world of memory competitions who is the Ronnie O'Sullivan natural genius type, and I wasn't sure what would be a good answer. Andi springs to mind, but that's more of a temperament thing than a natural-brilliance thing, although there's no doubt Andi's got plenty of that too. And my second thought was that memory things aren't so much a case of natural talent, because it's more a case of work and preparation - which is a silly thing to think, because of course snooker players probably do ten times as much training and practice as us part-time memorisers.

So are some memory people more naturally gifted than others? I've never been quite sure. I tend to say that it's really something anyone could do, and that the only difference between the people who compete in championships and the people who don't is that the former are weird enough to want to. But who knows? I'm a competitor, not a pundit. When memory competitions are huge and televised, Dominic can be Steve Davis and talk about natural ability and motivation, I'll be Stephen Hendry and get to the semi-finals while everyone talks about how good I used to be.

The US Championship in a couple of months, incidentally, is going to be the same format as last year (except that there will be seven finalists instead of six, presumably to make the last round go on a bit longer). I would really, really love to see a British championship in that exact same format, just to see if we could get anyone to watch it. Maybe I'll make a serious effort to sell it to some TV people - I'm sure we could rustle up half a dozen good competitors without even opening it to foreigners.

Anyway, Ronnie's won, and brilliantly. And what do we get to fill the hour-and-a-quarter extra time in the schedule? A programme about the Norfolk coast. I ask you. If I was the director-general of the BBC (or whoever's in charge of choosing filler, I don't imagine he does it personally), I'd break out the cartoons at moments like this. I know what Hunstanton looks like, and anyone who doesn't isn't missing much.

Would it be monstrously self-indulgent of me?

If I went to Las Vegas for a holiday? You know, as opposed to visiting the various friends in the Americas who are reading this and might reasonably expect me to drop by if I find myself on the other side of the Atlantic? But it's a couple of years since I last went there, and it's still my favourite holiday destination, and the solitude would definitely help me work on my book and things (this last sentence is what we in the trade call a terminal case of self-delusion). Flights aren't too expensive at the moment, and it's practically two dollars to the pound these days, so I'd be able to throw even more money around than I usually do when I've got foreign cash on me and can't be bothered to work out exactly how much I'm spending.

I thought of promising it to myself as a reward if I meet my self-imposed targets writing the book, but I know from past experience that I'd just fail to meet the targets, take the reward anyway and feel terribly guilty about the whole business, losing productivity, money and morale all in one fell swoop. So maybe I'll just do it anyway and not care about anything or anyone else. Is it me, or do I sometimes come across as a really terrible person in this blog thing?

Card sharp

I did an hour cards practice today, and got 20 packs, attempting 30. It's annoying how sharply my results drop off, in the longer events especially, when I haven't practiced them for a few months - this was only the second time I've done it since last year's WMC, and I got 17 last week, so at least I'm getting better. I did an hour numbers the other day and got 1480, whereas I've done two half-hour binaries recently and got 2505 and 2715. Not that these are particularly bad scores, but I look on them as a good base to look back on in a couple of months when hopefully after some more training I'll be doing much, much better. Always write your scores down, that's been my motto ever since I first started doing the memory thing. There's no better rivalry than with your past self. You're already envious of his youth and comparative good looks, you see.

Actually, outside of memorising things, my personal motto is "Start with dessert". There is practically no situation to which you can't metaphorically apply that one.

But I've got an excuse

It's not just that I have a major psychological flaw that prevents me meeting self-imposed deadlines, you know. Events always conspire to stop me doing things. So it's not entirely my fault that I spent yesterday (and, to be perfectly honest, most of today too) not writing the Cambridge Memory Championship website, or working on that pi system so I can let Ulrich know whether I'm going to do his pi challenge, or doing anything else.

It's Dave's fault. After I enthused about the webcomic Goblins, he pointed out another webcomic along the same lines - Order Of The Stick! Which, as it turns out, does the same jokes about RPGs as Goblins does, only OOTS did them first, and much funnier, and has just produced its four hundredth full-page strip. To say that I love Order Of The Stick is a wild understatement - the art isn't gorgeous, but then it's not trying to be, and it tells the story more than adequately, and the story itself is sheer genius. It has squillions of interlaced plotlines that develop out of each other, and get resolved satisfactorily in the short, medium and long term. This isn't one of those comics that gives you the impression that it was just made up as the writer went along. It probably was, but it's done so cleverly that it doesn't look like it. And it's freaking hilarious!

So, basically, I was up till half past one in the morning reading the whole archive. Including stopping to work out the cryptograms that make up Haley's dialogue for a large chunk of the adventures. Hey, when I procrastinate, I do it wholeheartedly!

D

I was hoping that something momentous would happen today that I could pentacentennially blog about, but in fact I've followed my usual practice whenever I have several specific tasks that I was intending to do, and have sat around all day doing absolutely nothing. I may have mentioned this before, but I suck at self-motivation. I'll just have to leave all that stuff until I've forgotten how personally important it is to me.

In the meantime, the Bristol Comic Expo for this year has just announced its guests. Brian K Vaughan AND Kurt Busiek?! Ignoring Alan Moore, who doesn't do this kind of thing, they've got my two favourite comic writers in the world right now! I've never been to one of these things before, but I'm not missing this one. I'll have to get an autograph book and start a collection! Oo, I'm all excited already and it's not until May! The weekend after the Cambridge MSO (othello on the Saturday, memory on the Sunday), in fact, so I get to indulge three of my geeky hobbies in two weeks!

2D6 (+1 modifier)

Part 97 in the occasional series of posts where I link to a webcomic I've just discovered and think is brilliant, to the interest and fascination of absolutely none of my readers. In that spirit, I give you Goblins!

It maybe works best if you've got a passing knowledge of role-playing games, but then I've never been all that seriously into them, even in my particularly geeky teenage years, and I can still pick up on the ways Goblins pokes fun at the silliness and unusual features of the hobby. And it's the kind of storyline that covers the whole range from just-plain-silly to deadly serious, depending on the mood the writer's in (I love that kind of approach to writing). I've read the whole archive today, and I laughed out loud lots of times, and cried when they did horrible things to poor Fumbles. And the art is just plain gorgeous! I may have mentioned two or three dozen times before that I'm wildly envious of people who can draw well, but it's one of my major hangups in life, and I'm sure I'm going to mention it again and again. Get used to it. I'd love to do my own webcomic.

Like the corners of my mind

I seem to have written about memory stuff more than is decent just lately. But then, I've been doing a lot of memory stuff recently, so it always tends to be on my mind when I'm blogging. Anyway, while practising spoken numbers today, I tried something a bit different - running all the groups of three images together so that the last of each group was interacting with the first of the next, and so on. It's something I don't normally do when memorising, because it adds a couple of seconds to the time it takes. But in spoken numbers, the whole reason I don't consistently do well at it is that the numbers are coming at a rate of one a second, whereas I like to go through them faster than that. So I have time to spare. And it worked surprisingly well, first time out. I got the first 108 digits perfect, and 185 of the 200 in total. That'd be a decent result at any memory championship (I've done better in practice in the past, but I have a feeling that I could do that kind of thing consistently that way).

I've also been thinking of a new way to memorise pi, which I'm going to play around with before telling Ulrich I'll do his challenge thing. It's the kind of thing that may or may not work at all, but it'll be interesting finding out. And I also have a memory-related problem - I'm doing so much practising these days that I'm reusing journeys before I've completely forgotten what was on them last time. I'm torn between dreaming up a lot more journeys, or just reusing them over and over again until I get over this problem. I think that would work, but I'm not certain.

By the way, is anyone else out there on Myspace? In the past couple of days I've discovered three people I know with Myspace accounts. I've got one myself now, although I don't intend to ever do anything with it. It just seems kind of un-user-friendly.

Why does nobody tell me these things?

Lew Stringer's got a blog! If you haven't heard of Lew, you're obviously not a thirty-year-old British comic fan - he was the guy who drew "Robo Capers", and "Combat Colin", and for that matter "One Cat and his Cod", the hilarious little comic strips in Marvel UK's comics like Transformers, Action Force and Thundercats. In the mid-eighties, you bought Transformers comics because it was Transformers, and kids in those days couldn't get enough of anything Transformer-related. It was just a happy coincidence that the Transformers stories were often brilliant pieces of work, the backup strips were usually readable and the Lew Stringer strips made you giggle all week until the next one came out. Marvel didn't need to produce anything good, kids would have bought anything with an Autobot sign on the cover, so I'm eternally grateful that they turned out such a quality product anyway.

Lew also draws strips for Viz on occasion (Tranny Magnet was sheer genius), and he's one of those rare names that you're always delighted to see in any comic anywhere, because you know that it's going to be great. Back in the heady days of 1998, when I first got a computer and started poking around on the internet, someone on a comics forum asked what ever happened to Lew Stringer, and I mentioned the last couple of things of his I'd seen. He then sent me an email detailing the comics he was currently drawing, and I was all giddy with excitement. Lew Stringer - officially the first celebrity to write to me!

Anyway, I should stop acting like a giddy groupie before it gets embarrassing for everyone. Another thing I noticed on the internet today is that the list of alumni on the Horncastle Grammar wikipedia page is growing at a steady rate! To recap, it was just Robert Webb when I first came across it last November, when I mentioned that fact here one of my fans kindly put me on the list too, and now we've also got the Reverend Jonnie Parkin! So that's three famous pupils in the school's four-hundred-year-plus history! And I notice nobody's tagged his entry as non-notable. Anyway, I've never heard of him, but he was in Robert Webb's year, apparently.

I take this as a challenge. We need a Wikipedia page for someone else from my year so we can add a link. The only person I can think of who went on to be famous is Helen Wikeley, who was one of the vets on Rolf Harris's Animal Hospital. Sadly, that sentence comprises absolutely everything I know about Helen, except that she was in my form and lived in Woodhall Spa on the same street as Chris Timony and John Gray. That's probably not enough for a proper wiki entry. Somebody out there must know all about her - create a profile, link it to the QEGS page and restore the honour of the class of '94!

In other other news (I've had a busy day today, because I decided to take a day off from memory practice and book-writing and things - I also went to a car boot sale this morning, and in the afternoon talked to James Kemp about this Cambridge Memory Championship website, which is actually going to be really cool, but I've waffled on too much tonight already to go into that, especially seeing as I've already embarked on a lengthy tale about train journeys) I went to Nottingham today, just because it was an unseasonably warm day, thanks to global warming and everything, and I felt I should go somewhere. On the way there, the train was sitting outside Nottingham station for about twenty minutes because of engineering work at the station, and the guard made tannoy announcements every five minutes or so with enlightening updates like "We're still here, but we might be moving in a minute or two."

On the way back, the tannoy announcement on the train before it left was even more helpful - "Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, I'm your senior conductor. This is the..." (roughly a minute's silence) "this is the 16:48 Nottingham... er..." (two minutes' silence, during which the train departed from the station, followed eventually by details of where the train was actually going). This kind of thing fills you with confidence in the ability of the train crew to get you where you want to go.

Near A Raven

I had an email today from Ulrich Voigt, inviting me to join him and Rüdiger Gamm in a pi-memory contest. He's got a program that asks you for, say, the 93rd digit and you have to fill it in, or else the next two or ten or whatever digits after that point. He says "I feel that Rüdiger Gamm / Ben Pridmore / Ulrich Voigt might suceed in getting some sponsor to make the matter financially interesting", which I'm a bit sceptical about, to be honest, but I suppose anything's possible.

The question that mainly concerns me is whether I could be any good at this kind of thing. For the first hundred digits it would be a piece of cake - just give me ten minutes or so to memorise a hundred three-digit numbers (01-1, 02-4, 03-1 and so on) and I can blitz that no problem. But for a task like 5000 places, 10-digit answers, I would have to not only re-memorise pi (like I've been meaning to do for quite some time), but memorise it in a way more conducive to naming the nth digit on demand. Because the way I did it before is rather inconvenient for that purpose.

So I think I might do it, just for the challenge. But will anyone want to watch? Ulrich is a very big fan of this contest, but what it boils down to is someone tapping numbers into a computer. It's a bit incomprehensible for spectators, even after the whole premise has been explained to them. Still, you never know what will catch on, and I'll try anything once.

The Great World Memory Champions of History

In the fifteen years of its existence, the World Memory Championship has spawned many memorable world champions. Some of the most interesting are described here:

Rotisserie Vasquez (World Memory Champion 1654-1659) was conspicuous for his unusual hairstyle, refusal to wear clothing and utter disdain and loathing for every other competitor at the World Championships. He filed official complaints with the IFRS (the predecessor of the WMSC) on several occasions, saying that it was ‘unreasonable’ to expect him to have to compete against other human beings. He wrote several worst-selling books expanding on this theory, revolving around the general idea that the World Memory Championship each year should consist of himself in an empty room, performing whatever memory feat he saw fit, and telling the arbiters afterwards what he had done. In fairness, Vasquez was genuinely the greatest memoriser of his time. His achievements seem modest by 21st-century standards (his world record for memorising a pack of cards was seven years, three hundred and twenty-four days), but he outshone the other notable competitors of the sixteen-fifties by some margin, and seldom resorted to violence in his pursuit of the title.

Galadria Ntemi (World Memory Champion 1832, 1835, 1846, 1953) first competed in the world championships three weeks before her birth in 1827, finishing a creditable 7th out of 98 competitors. Dedicating herself to memory sports from an early age, she refused to speak to or acknowledge the existence of anyone or anything not directly related to the World Memory Championship, and astounded the pre-Victorian world with her capacity for recall of binary numbers, setting a world record of seventeen digits in thirty minutes in the course of winning her first championship in 1832. Prevented from competing in the majority of World Championships in the following years by repeated unrelated kidnappings by octopi (it has been speculated that she exuded a sort of pheromone irresistible to cephalopods), she nonetheless won with ease two more titles before drowning at the age of nineteen. Reincarnated in 1932 as a Glasgow fishwife, she struggled to adapt to the new century's advances in memory techniques, finishing in the top five every year for fifty-seven years, but only winning one more world title, in 1953 (aided by the ironic kidnapping by octopi of reigning champion and hot favourite Politesse Perkins).

Pippi Langstrumpf (World Memory Champion 1724-1739, 1815), who despite his name was male, was one of the two World Champions to hold the title without ever memorising anything. He inherited the title from his mother, Raymond Langstrumpf, during the period when the title of World Memory Champion was hereditary, rather than a contest of skill. Popular among memorisers, he attended the World Championship every year of his reign, but declined offers to compete, protesting that he was far too stupid. Eventually, it was decided that the hereditary title was unfair on the competitors and it reverted to a merit-based honour, after which Pippi retired from memory sports. He was awarded the 1815 title, nearly fifty years after his death, for largely political reasons.

Etsuko Teranishi (World Memory Champion 1901) was described by her predecessor "Le Clopinel", who had forgotten his glasses on every occasion the two memorisers met, as "the largest man I have ever seen, with towering beard and ears like goldfish". She in fact stood less than three feet tall and had ears more resembling bream, but her memory power was unquestionable. In the 1899 World Championship she astounded the competitors and spectators by memorising a three-digit number in five minutes, shattering the previous record of two, and followed it up with another world record of seven random words in fifteen minutes. She would probably have won the World Championship comfortably, had she not suffered a near-fatal heart attack during dinner on the second day which left her in a coma for eighteen months. Returning in 1901, not yet fully recovered and suffering lengthy bouts of unconsciousness during the competition, she won nonetheless when all the other competitors were kidnapped by octopi, surviving just long enough to receive the trophy before expiring.

All these champions and many more can be found in the Big Book Of The World Memory Championships, priced £352.95 in all good bookshops, and 27p in bad ones.

Bless this mess

I'm very nearly in the mood where I want to clean this place up a bit. Let's face it, this flat is extremely untidy, or to put it another way, filthy. I really should devote a whole day some time to scrubbing and disinfecting things, hoovering, picking up the comics and magazines and clothes and playing-card boxes and cardboard boxes and videos and books and palm trees and bits of sofa and sweet wrappers and electric keyboards that cover the floor, that kind of thing. And maybe, if I'm really feeling brave, cleaning the bathroom.

Also, and I realise I'm not the only person in the world saying this right now, since when does Easter start immediately after Christmas finishes? There are creme eggs and mini eggs and hot cross buns in the shops and it's January 11th! No, wait a minute. I like creme eggs, mini eggs and hot cross buns. I don't really have a problem with eating them all year round. I'm obviously only complaining because everybody else is. Long live six-month Easter food sales!

Roman room

This is my 493rd post on this blog. That means that in a week's time, give or take, I'll reach the fabled five hundred! Unless I have more problems with mathematics than I'm aware of, of course. So what should I do for the big occasion? I don't believe in celebrating minor anniversaries and landmarks, but 500 posts is a pretty big deal. Perhaps I should devote the whole day to writing the blog, and see just how many words I can churn out? Perhaps I should write some nonsense story, because it's a couple of months since I last did that. Perhaps I should subvert people's expectations and write one word (I'm leaning towards "potato")? Any more suggestions will be gratefully received, mentally filed away and forgotten about next Wednesday when I devote the historic post to insulting commentary about a minor television personality who's annoyed me.

I also need to learn how to do websites. Having decided to organise another Cambridge memory championship in May, I would really like there to be a nice-looking website I can point people to, featuring example memorisation and recall papers, rules phrased in a way that is comprehensible to beginners, basic how-to-memorise-numbers-and-cards information, pictures that give the impression that memory competitions are fun, all that kind of thing. Because (and I mean this in the nicest possible way) you can't really rely on the WMSC website to publish this kind of thing in a half-decent way.

Once I've got this wonderful website up and running, I intend to try to infiltrate Cambridge University and the surrounding area with the information that this competition is taking place, and attempt to persuade impressionable young students to give it a try. And also pester local businesses to see if we can arrange any kind of sponsorship to pay for the thing. Hopefully there'll be someone wanting to film it for a prospective documentary again, and I'll be able to hype this fact up for the advertising-hungry entrepreneurs of Cambridge. Of course, while I'm great at vaguely planning this kind of thing, I'm really terrible at putting it into practice, so we'll just have to see what, if anything, happens.

I just don't want to offend anyone

But if you buy a video from eBay and rather than what's supposed to be on it it contains an edition of Top of the Pops from April 1993 and part of an episode of The Bill from the same kind of time period, that's probably grounds for asking for your money back, maybe even leaving negative feedback, right?

But on the other hand, I only paid 30p for the tape, plus postage and packing, and I don't really want the money back that badly, nor the hassle of posting it back to whoever I bought it from. And it was one of those Cartoons R Fun tapes that I've mentioned before, produced so cheaply that they don't knock the copy-protection tabs out, so it's easy to tape over them by accident. And I always did like "Young At Heart" by the Bluebells, which was number one when this TOTP was made, and it's got the brilliant video on the tape. So I probably got as much enjoyment from the actual contents of the video, if not more, than I would have done from "Porky's Pastry Pirates". I'll just leave my usual glowing and positive feedback, rather than complaining.

Slight Return

Back to the normal, boring, live-from-our-Derby-studio blogs, after another four-and-a-half-hour train journey. Places really should be closer together. Still, it's comforting to know that the two of us are still good friends, that I still lose two out of three chess games and three out of three pool games on average and that it really isn't possible to run out of things to say about Doctor Who.

Also nice to know that one of the videos I found over the weekend doesn't have "Hollywood Steps Out" on it, claims on the packaging to the contrary, but does have "Have You Got Any Castles", which I also needed to find. I officially now have more videos than can fit in a single pile on top of the boiler cupboard. Well, I could stack them a bit higher, but then I wouldn't be able to reach the top row without a stepladder (as opposed to climbing on top of my computer like I do now). I also have many more books than can be safely piled on top of the cupboard in my bedroom, and almost too many to coat the floor of the room like they're doing at the moment. I need a bookcase. Several bookcases, in fact. And another flat to store them all in.

X Marks the spot

Something I could have mentioned yesterday, had I not felt that the joke about EastEnders was so much more important, was that during this Scottish sojourn I've been introduced to the wonders of geocaching.

It's a strange hobby involving tracking down hidden 'caches' by means of given co-ordinates and a GPS device. So this is a pastime combining healthy outdoor exercise with the latest in modern technology, and as such is something that I wholeheartedly approve of. On Saturday, we went to the extremely picturesque little town of South Queensferry to find three hidden containers - one of them we had to go on an educational treasure hunt to piece together the co-ordinates from dates on buildings and information boards; another, hidden near the Forth Rail Bridge, was a box containing not only the obligatory log book for everyone who finds it to sign, but various trinkets to swap and 'geocoins' to exchange. We had a delicious lunch in an extremely picturesque little cafe in between hunts, got lots of sea air and walking, and then came home to find that a brand new cache had just been hidden not far down the road, so had to rush out again to be the first to find it.

There's a whole huge community of people who hide and seek these little tupperware containers and the things inside them. Now that's the kind of subculture they should be making documentaries about! I find it fascinating, anyway, and I might just have to splash out on the technology and go treasure hunting around Derby when I get home.

The fruit bowl

EastEnders is so unrealistic sometimes. I've seen the last couple of episodes, for the first time in ages, and the conversation between Martin and Sonia really should have gone like this:

Sonia: Yeah, sorry, Martin, I did sort of kill your mother. My mistake.

Martin: Oh, that's okay. If memory serves, I killed your boyfriend a few years ago before we got married, so this makes us even.

I mean, why don't soap opera people just forgive and forget every now and then? It's no wonder they're so unhappy.

Tom Walton's Schooldays

As is probably compulsory for old school friends getting together, we've been reminiscing about the people we knew, teachers we liked and disliked, nationally famous comedians who we didn't really technically know so much as admire when he did brilliant comedy routines in assemblies and school shows but was three years above me so we weren't actually friends or anything, memorable chess competitions in Scunthorpe where it took Dr Chambers three hours to find the school, us twenty minutes to be soundly thrashed in all our games and the rest of the evening to find the way home again.

It occurs to me that all our school friends who we might want to look up on Google have spectacularly unexceptional names. How do you search for Tom Walton, James Richardson and Richard Taylor? Why can't people retroactively have the decency to have unusual surnames like Pridmore or Bickerdyke-Throgmorton? It probably wouldn't take too much work to find them, to be perfectly honest - Jimmy at least is on Friends Reunited, so it would just be a matter of paying however much they charge, sending him a message and hoping he gets it. Tom was last heard of joining the army, so it would be simple enough to declare war on everyone and everything and insisting on surrendering personally to him when the tanks roll up. And while we know nothing about Slosh's career after he left school, I definitely remember him having a pet cat, so we would just have to learn to speak cat-language and track him down through the global feline network. All cats know each other.

North of the border, down Edinburgh way

Live from Scotland! What other blog brings you that? Probably no other blog in the whole universe. I'm in Dave's living room, sharing my sleeping accommodations with Dylan the rabbit and a tank full of little fish. Which I'm assuming will be quieter than Crispy and Sleepy's hamsters, but you never know. Perhaps they're the kind of fish who have wild parties when the lights go off.

I haven't seen Dave, formerly known as Noddy, for something like six years, and he very unfairly hasn't physically changed even a tiny bit in that time, whereas I've gone all bald and bearded. We've spent the evening playing chess - normal chess, rifle chess, chess with grasshoppers instead of queens, five-leapers instead of knights and reflecting bishops - just like we used to waste our schooldays. It all comes flooding back. It's like we're stuck in a time loop, a never-ending time loop (that's an in-joke that only the two of us would get, so why I'm publishing it in this blog without explanation I can't imagine).

And tomorrow I'm going to explore the big city while Dave and Abi are at work, and see what kind of cartoon videos the charity shops of Edinburgh have to offer. And I only feel a tiny bit guilty about taking a break from the memory training/book writing routine after three days.

Over my shoulder a piano falls

I had a long phone conversation today with a TV producer - yet another prospective Channel 4 documentary about memory competitions. Still, one of them's sure to come to fruition one of these days, and this one sounds quite hopeful. We were talking for more than an hour, I think, although that's probably more of a testimony to my ability to waffle on and on about nothing than anything else.

Anyway, I'm off north of the border tomorrow, visiting my long-lost friend Dave who I haven't seen for years and years. So I probably won't post anything here till I come home next Monday (I don't know why I feel the need to mention that here, I just have visions of disappointed legions of fans tuning in to see my latest words of wisdom every day). I haven't been to Scotland since new year 2001, I think it was. I've only been to Wales once, and that was an accident. I need to broaden my horizons a bit more, I know.

Another one for the gallery

It's a strange time of year for people to be giving ancient cartoon videos to charity shops. Unwanted Christmas presents from 2006, yes, but this one I found today surely wasn't a recent gift. Or maybe it was, and the generous giver seriously misjudged the recipient. Still, for whatever reason, this wonderful Marc-illustrated masterpiece turned up in the Oxfam shop here in Derby at some point in the last couple of weeks, and I quickly snaffled it up. Another 'Vidage' release, and since this one is volume three, it's possible that there are others out there. I'll have to keep an eye open. It's bad art, even by Marc's standards, I have to say. I know that sounds nasty, but I honestly do admire him really.

And if you think I've been doing nothing but collecting cartoons in 2007 so far, shame on you. I've done a heck of a lot of memory training the last two days. I've got a pretty exhausting schedule, but if I keep it up until the world championships, I'll walk it. I've also been writing the book, and that's going quite well too. I'm almost doing as much work as I intended to do, which is a good start.

Although I am going to take a well-deserved holiday on Thursday when I go up to Edinburgh for a long weekend. That's the good thing about being unemployed.

013457689014658757562987032105-5

Didja see it? Huh? Did you? The climax of "The Sarah Jane Adventures" tonight hinged on memorising a big long number! Who says this whole memory thing has no real-life applications? If not for memory skills, the whole planet would have been taken over by aliens! Hey, do you think they stole the idea from my movie synopsis the other month?

Of course, if we're going to be just a tiny bit picky, I could point out that the number Luke mutters to himself while typing it into the communicator wasn't the same one that he heard earlier in the show, so technically the Bane should have killed them all and gone on to subvert the human race, but never mind. I liked this. A lot. I think it's going to be a very fun series. Elisabeth Sladen is brilliant in the Doctor role as the eccentric investigator, and she has good support from the young co-stars (although Porsha Lawrence-Mavour, playing the least important of the three kids' roles, seems to be the best actor by some distance - they're all quite acceptable, though).

Hopefully for the series proper they'll ease off on stories where almost the whole Earth's population fall under the mental control of the aliens, because we've had quite a lot of those just lately. Also it would be nice if they'd ease off on the CGI monsters - tonight's episode had one infuriating little moment when the alien chases our heroes up the stairs and runs right over a hat hanging on the bannister without moving it at all. That's just sloppy. Besides, I like to see a guy in a monster suit - the actors seem to react better when they can see what they're supposed to be reacting to. And while I'm criticising, Sarah Jane goes to great lengths to investigate the mystery drink, even getting scientist friends to analyse it for her, but never thinks to point her alien-life-detector watch at it!

Enough nit-picking. Like I said, I really liked this, and I think it might be a big success. But then, I like Torchwood, and that seems to be getting very mixed reviews. I'll have to try to redress the balance by raving about it after tonight's final two episodes. Well, I'll wait until they've been on BBC2 on Wednesday in case any of my devoted and non-Sky-having readers are still watching.

The most powerful man in the universe!

The whole New Year thing, as well as Auld Lang Syne, fireworks and Jools's Annual Hootenanny, means the annual World's Strongest Man competition on telly. The first heat was tonight, and I was watching it avidly as usual. In many ways, you know, strong man contests are very like memory championships - they have a small core of regular competitors who all seem to be good friends, they involve a range of specific disciplines that the competitors have to train for and that aren't just about pure strength, and the British competitors never win it nowadays. Yes, I just compared myself to Geoff Capes.

It came as something of a surprise to me to see that Mariusz Pudzianowski is 29 years old. I hadn't realised it until I saw the statistic on screen, but I instinctively think of strong men as being older than me. Probably because they're generally a foot taller and twice as heavy as I am, making me automatically think of them as grown-ups. I don't know if that's a universal syndrome, or just something for those like me who have difficulty remembering they're actually adults.

And incidentally, if I see one more advert for Barbie's dog Tanner with genuine excreting action (seriously), I'm going to have to stop watching the cartoon channels quite so much, or possibly just keep a brick handy to throw at the TV screen. Which seems like a good note to end the year on. Happy 2007!

The Persistence of Memory

I was practicing memory today before I was fully awake (I'm turning into a very late riser just recently - with not working, I seem to be shifting into a 25-hour day pattern and not getting tired until later and later at night), and getting on quite well - slightly slower than my best times in memorising, but recall much closer to 100% than usual without needing to think about it. After finishing with numbers and binary, I had a go at some speed cards, and only as I got to the end of the pack did I get a slight sense of deja vu. The last six cards were two fives, two sevens and two tens, and I thought to myself "didn't I memorise another pack a while ago that ended like that?"

Thinking back over the past minute or so, I suddenly realised that I'd picked up the pack of cards from the pile on the right-hand corner of my desk, where I keep the cards I've used in previous memorising sessions but haven't got round to shuffling yet, rather than the pile on the left of shuffled and ready-to-memorise packs. How can I remember the sequence of a pack of cards without too much effort, but forget an instinctive thing like picking up the pack from the left side (which is how I've ALWAYS kept my cards)?

Makes me wonder if I've done that before without even noticing it. As a side-effect of learning to memorise cards, I've developed the ability to instantly forget them after I don't need to recall them any more (so that I can reuse the mental journey they were on), and it was only that distinctive run of cards right at the end that rang a bell. Perhaps I'm actually just a big giant fraud, and whenever I think I've memorised a pack of cards in training, it was actually just the same pack over and over again.

Go stop

Neopets have just added their version of godori to their extensive library of games. It's one of those games that I've heard of before but never played, but there's something insanely addictive about it. I think I might have a gambling problem.

Neopets, all in all, is an amazingly good website - the only website I know that has its own functioning economy, although there are probably plenty of others out there somewhere. But Neopets is so overwhelmingly vast, unashamedly cute and unexpectedly clever that I can spend hours or days on end wandering around it when I'm in the mood. The rest of the time I neglect my poor pets, of course, and feel terribly guilty about it.

Clip show

It's nearly the end of the year. There's nothing on telly but shows about what's happened in 2006, nothing in the blogosphere but posts about what people have posted about in 2006, and on top of this I've spent the day writing emails, writing an article for the British Othello Federation newsletter that I suddenly remembered promising to write, not writing my book, and writing a big blog post tonight seems like more tap-tapping of keys than my fingers can cope with.

So in the spirit of doing something a bit different, here's something I found while dredging the depths of my huge cardboard box that contains all my important paperwork, looking for my CIMA registration number. It's an exciting story that I wrote on a particularly boring long plane journey a long time ago, and at first I thought it might be a good idea to type it up and put it on the blog. Then I realised that that would be even more work than actually writing a big long blog post, so I thought it would be even better to scan it and post it in that way. Hope it's more or less legible. I can read it, but then I'm used to my handwriting. There should be more handwritten blogs, don't you think?

Piper of poppy

I've just been watching "The Ruby In The Smoke" on BBC1. It was very well done, but there's just too much plot in the Philip Pullman book for a 90-minute TV adaptation. Even having read the book, it was hard to keep track of what was going on on screen. What happened to the days when the BBC would make this kind of book into six half-hour episodes or more, and show it as a serial? That kind of treatment would work much better for the Sally Lockhart books, because we need a bit of downtime here and there to show her, for example, settling in with the Garlands and becoming part of the family and business. To cram everything into the feature-length adaptation, they had to cut out all the scenes that didn't have a direct bearing on the multiple intertwined plot threads.

That said, Billie Piper was surprisingly brilliant as Sally. I really have to get over my prejudice against her, I know, but when I first heard about it I thought something along the lines of 'tchoh, why do the BBC insist on believing she can pass for a teenager?' And she very nearly did, this time! Not just from the makeup, but her acting too. I was impressed. The makeup was a bit excessive in one case at least - David Harewood plays both Bedwell twins, and yet they didn't look anything like each other, despite what the script said. And it was an interesting decision to cast black actors in a couple of parts, at least one of whom is required by the plot to blend in with the people in the Victorian London streets - but then, historical accuracy tends to just get in the way if you take it too seriously, and they never get it entirely right however hard they try.

I'm looking forward to the others - apparently they're planning to do at least the other two Sally books, which has to be a good thing. And here's another claim to fame of mine - Philip Pullman, before he was famous, was my good friend Fat Andy's English teacher. Apparently he was really great, too. Perhaps if I'd had him instead of Mrs Slater, my own writing career might not have been quite so entirely unsuccessful...

Big black horse and a cherry tree

I love that song. I wanted to come up with a good excuse to use it as a blog title, but couldn't, so I decided to just let it be a non sequitur. Anyway, Christmas is over, the goose is getting digested, penny for the thoughts under the famous black hat? Well, I've got Plans for what I'm going to do with my time from now on. Maybe not quite big enough Plans to really merit the capital P, but I like to make things sound important. I've got a proper schedule of book-writing, memory-training, working on this memory performance, learning to play that darn piano, things like that. I've got another TV producer to talk to, and I'll make an effort to see that this one goes somewhere. All in all, I want to make sure I'm busy enough to justify not working. If I ever confess here that I've been doing nothing all day, everyone reading this has to shout at me.

Absent friends

I'm really going to miss my dad phoning at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning, incoherently drunk already, to wish me a happy Christmas.

Hope everyone out there in internet land and beyond has a magical day! Happy Christmas, merry wishbone, happy Holiday, pleasant Festivus, anything else you might care to celebrate, do it with style.