June?

This month has gone really quickly. The other day I was filling in a form and asked what the date was, thinking it was either the 25th or 26th, and it turned out that it was the 29th. I really need to get a job. I'm normally only one day out in my mental reckoning when I've got a job.

I'd also like to get a job sorted out quickly so I know whether I can go to Munich for the South German memory championship on June 24th. It's only a tiny little competition, what they call a 'regional standard', with just seven quick disciplines, but I've never done one before, and it fits in with the pattern of gradually working up to the world championship with increasingly taxing competitions (the British championship on July 14th, then the German on the 27-28th). I'm really in the mood to compete at the moment, I can't wait to get back into the memory championship routine. And I want to do well in a competition in Germany for once. Not counting the World Cup or Speed Cards Challenge, but every time I've gone there for a normal competition, I've done really badly. I think it's a curse.

I've bought a bookcase

Now I just need to put it together, pick up all my books and arrange them neatly on it. Sigh. I've had a flat-packed bookcase making my bedroom look even more untidy for the last couple of days. It doesn't seem fair that getting part of the way through tidying the place up only makes it worse than ever. There must be some fundamental flaw with the laws of the universe.

But apart from that, I'm feeling productive today, just because I had a big long interview with Hays Accountancy Personnel, who seem much more useful than the other agencies and likely to find me a good job some time soon. I have mixed feelings about returning to working life. On the one hand, it'll be great, because for some reason I think I'll be all the more disciplined when it comes to memory training and things if I have to schedule it around my work. I can go back to my old routine of doing an hour or so in the evenings when I get home, and longer sessions at the weekends. Whereas now, I can't do much during the daytime because I can't really unplug my phone while I'm at least technically looking for work. Not without feeling guilty, anyway. On the other hand, I've really got used to staying in bed till lunchtime whenever I feel like it.

Chewing gum for the eyes

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday after lifting my ban on showing off is that my Current TV 'pod' (that's what they call them. It's not my fault if no normal channels want to show programmes about me) is now available on the internet for anyone to see. Just click here. At least, that works in the UK and Ireland, I can't promise anything for the rest of the world. Search your local Current TV website and see what comes up, Americans.

And for those of you who want to watch something a little more worthwhile, I thought I'd do something a bit different tonight and, rather than thinking of something to write about, post a few YouTube videos I love. Hey, I do this very, very rarely, and normally this blog is cool and different. Besides, you can't deny this is a lot more entertaining than my normal posts.

Here's a very young Bob Dylan singing "Mr Tambourine Man" live at a folk festival in 1964. Absolutely wonderful.


KT Tunstall doing "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree", doing all the percussion and backing vocals herself by means of a foot-operated tape-looping device.


Give your inner hippy a treat with Devendra Banhart and "Little Yellow Spider"


You can't watch this and not cry. The Muppets sing "Just One Person" in tribute to Jim Henson.


Okay, that's got them out of my system (and hopefully into your brains forever). Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

Mass mouse murder

Sniffles is dead. In fact, there turned out to be two of them, but Deutero-Sniffles is also dead. Thanks for all the advice on how to humanely get rid of mice, but in the end, killing the little blighters turned out to be easier and not particularly troubling to the conscience. But today I banged my foot on my scanner and hurt my toe tremendously, which I assume is my punishment for being so evil.

Anyway, it must be roughly a week since I decided not to post anything here that sounded remotely boastful. I got 4320 in a 30-minute binary practice the other day, which I'm fairly certain is a personal best. Which raises an interesting thing about the way I memorise - with binary digits, I look at them twice. I go through a full journey (780 digits), revise it, then move onto the next, and keep going that way until I run out of time. Doing it my new, slightly-slower-but-much-better-recall way, I get up to about 5000 digits, a bit short of seven journeys' worth.

With decimal numbers, though, I go through a journey rather quicker - I see the image immediately when I look at the three digits, whereas with binary it takes longer, I can't see a group of ten in one glance. But this also seems to hinder my memorising, and if I try to do a 30-minute numbers only looking at them twice, it just doesn't work. I can do 8 and a bit journeys in 30 minutes, but have a huge number of gaps in the recall. I need to look at everything three times to recall it properly.

All of which is just fascinating, of course, but it doesn't really give me any pointers on how to get better. I suppose I'll just go on doing things the way I always have, making it up as I go along.

The joke only works with a Scottish accent

I've cleaned up my living room a bit. It occurred to me that having the floor knee-deep in books and papers and magazines and comics and things might make the place seem like a paradise to small rodents looking for a new home. I've even made a start on the bedroom, where I haven't seen the carpet for years because of the books all over it. Trouble with that is, I've got nowhere to put them if I do pick them up and arrange them nicely. So I've decided to do what normal people do, and get a bookcase. Maybe even a pair of bookcases, one on top of the other. I've got a high ceiling and own a stepladder, and I have got rather a lot of books.

It just worries me that keeping my books in a bookcase is so desperately conventional. I'd hate to turn my flat into a place just like any other. After all, if I pick up the books, I'll have to do the same with the clothes that cover the rest of the bedroom floor, and maybe find somewhere to put them too (I do own a wardrobe and cupboard, but they house my comic collection). And then what will distract people from the fact that I haven't used the vacuum cleaner or washed my bedsheets in about six months?

Mouse 1, trap 0

I set a trap last night for the mouse in my house, who I've decided to call Sniffles so that I feel even more guilty about killing him, but he not only ate the peanut butter without getting squished, but managed to break the trap so that it can't be set again. I'm dealing with a super-genius rodent here. But I've got another one now, and baited it with chocolate (and I tell you, giving up a bit of my Yorkie is a major sacrifice for me). And if that fails, I've got "Rodine mouse & rat killer", which I assume is what the cool kids are calling rat poison these days. There's a drawing on the front of a seriously evil-looking mouse and rat. But I'm reluctant to use this because it says on the back that "rats normally die within a week of eating Rodine, mice may take a little longer." Seriously, what kind of puny poison is this? Mice only live a year or so anyway, does this stuff actually do anything or are they just hedging their bets that it'll die of natural causes within a couple of weeks of eating it? And slowly poisoning poor little Sniffles is even more cruel and heartless than setting a trap to hopefully kill him quickly.

You know, I'm going off this whole mouse-killing idea. Maybe I'll get rid of the trap and just leave him alone.

Sword of Omens, give me sight beyond sight!

What I would really like to blog tonight is to quote my brother at length on the subject of comparing a 1980s episode of Thundercats to current real-world events, but I should probably ask his permission first, so I'll leave that for another day. Besides, it probably wouldn't be as interesting to someone not as familiar with the Thundercats cartoon series as the two of us. And there isn't anyone in the world who is. We both know every episode forwards and backwards, and have spent the past twenty years discussing every little detail of it. It's one of my many obsessions in life, and one thing I've been meaning to do for ages is to produce an exhaustive review and analysis of every episode for the entertainment of Thunder-fans worldwide. The recent release of the first 33 episodes on DVD must have reawoken a lot of people's interest in the cartoon, after all.

I envisage a new blogger page, updating daily with a new episode, detailing the latest exciting adventure of our heroes, and highlighting the good and terrible lines of dialogue, the bizarre idiosyncracies of individual writers, discussion of the many plot holes and artistic errors, all that kind of thing. I could write ten thousand words on each episode, easily, off the top of my head, and I'm sure there must be a few people out there who'd like to read it. It's just a matter of getting round to it...

I need more practice at going to interviews

I had an interview today for a job that I really didn't want, because it doesn't sound very exciting, it's a six-month temp contract, it doesn't pay enormously well and because it's in the quite literal middle of nowhere - the Denby Hall business park, near the tiny village of Denby, about ten miles away from here. Still, I decided to go along for the interview because I thought I could do with the practice. I worked out that the best way to get there would be to take my bike on the train to Belper and then cycle the three or four miles to the building. The interview wasn't till ten, but that left me having to get the 8:27 train, because they only stop at Belper every couple of hours.

Got to the station in plenty of time, bought my ticket, then realised I'd forgotten to bring my watch with me. This was going to make it difficult to arrive at the interview at the right kind of time, but I didn't have time to go home for it, so I decided to work something out when I got to Belper. Sat on the platform, reading the Metro newspaper, I looked up at the clock and noticed it was 8:27 and a half. 'Typical,' I thought, 'train's late as usual.' I got up and looked down the platform to see if it was coming yet, just in time to see it leaving. I was sitting on platform 6a, it was on platform 6b.

Faced with a choice between calling them to explain that I couldn't come to the interview because I'm too stupid to catch a train, or finding another way to get there, I went for option 2. 'You know,' I thought to myself, 'I can cycle ten miles in an hour and a half. Easily. I used to do it on a daily basis when I was living back in Tumby Woodside. And while I don't know the way as such, Derbyshire has what's supposed to be a very nice network of cycle paths going all around the county, with those little blue signposts showing the way. It'll be easy!'

And so I cheerfully set off on my way. And yes, it's very easy to find your way around Derbyshire by bike if you can just read signposts. Sure enough, having gone through Little Eaton and out the other side, I saw a sign saying to turn right for Denby. A couple of right turns later and I was thinking 'Something's wrong here. Firstly I'm going back the way I came, and secondly I'm on the dual carriageway. Ah well, if I keep going down here presumably I'll come to a turning for Denby. That's what the sign said, after all.'

Some distance later, I saw another road sign and realised the problem. The sign I thought said "Denby", actually said "Derby". You know, the big city where I live and the place I was coming from in the first place. It hadn't occurred to me that they're only one letter different. And the two letters in question are very similar in appearance, and if you think you're going to see a sign for Denby, it's only natural that you... yeah, I'm just extremely stupid.

Anyway, I eventually found my way off the dual carriageway, turned round and went back the way I came, and found my way to the interview at what was probably around ten o'clock (I hadn't thought to go home for my watch before setting off). The interview went well enough, although the man interviewing me thought I was hugely overqualified for the job, and although I tried not to agree with him for the sake of a bit of interview practice, he was entirely right. I need to talk to the woman from the agency - although I always say I don't care about career progression and things, I find that I do take exception to being put forward for what was basically an accounts assistant position. Maybe I am a dynamic go-getter yuppie, after all.

And since it was a nice day, I decided to cycle all the way back too, rather than getting some use out of my Belper train ticket. And I hardly got lost at all! And, to put it as politely as I know how, my bum didn't half hurt by the time I got home. I should go for long bike rides more often, it's fun.

Thomas! There's a mouse in the house!

Well, I declare. Heard a rustling noise in a pile of old papers and things, and saw a little mouse scamper out and disappear into the hole in the cupboard under the sink. I suppose I should do something about it, but the idea of setting a trap to kill something doesn't appeal to me hugely. My natural inclination is to let him get on with things and not disturb him, but then I suppose he might tell all his friends that I'm a soft touch, and the place will be overrun with vermin. The cartoony thing to do is to get a cat, of course, and set in motion a chain of events that will lead to the whole house being blown up by big red sticks of TNT while I stand on a chair screaming and lifting up my skirt.

I don't know why a mouse would come all the way up to my first floor flat, just to scuttle across the floor, however unhygenic and doubtless full of bits of food down the back of the cooker and so on my place may be. You'd think he would have found a place that's more convenient for the shops (it's a long way if you've got little legs, and the stairs are quite steep).

Because I banned myself from talking about the Guardian interview

Here's a comic for you. This is the second in my series of forcing-myself-to-draw-and-not-care-how-bad-it-looks comics - you can perhaps understand how bad the first one was if I tell you that this one is so very much better that I think it's absolutely brilliant in comparison. Of course, since you don't get to see the first one (my ego just won't permit it), you'll just see this and think "wow, he really can't draw." But I have been told that the child-like artwork just adds to the humour, so I'm going to pretend it looks like this deliberately.

Or if you don't like that, and because I haven't written anything silly for much too long and the following conversation is going through my head:

"Good morning. I represent the estate of your late uncle. My condolences on his recent death."

"I haven't got an uncle, dead or otherwise."

"Your aunt was secretly married to a man whose existence she concealed from the rest of her family due to his unsavoury reputation. This man is now deceased. My condolences."

"I also haven't got an aunt. Both my parents were only children."

"Your mother in fact had an identical twin sister from whom she was separated at birth without her knowledge. This sister is also now deceased. My condolences."

"I have video footage of my mother's birth. She couldn't have had a twin sister."

"The woman you know as your mother did not in fact give birth to you. Your biological mother was another woman who chose not to raise a child, preferring to live a life of carefree abandon and disregard for society. This woman is also now deceased. My condolences."

"Well... did any of these people leave me anything in their wills?"

"They did not. Good day."

He's the memory man

I feel that there's been too much about me in this blog lately, and not enough stories about a man who believes he's a branch of Woolworth's, but having written the latter and decided it wasn't funny, all I have left to talk about is my bit on Current TV. I saw it today for the first time - motivated by a commenter the other day who had not only seen it, but checked out my blog because of it, I thought I should really know what it was like so I can know what kind of thing all these new readers will be expecting. As luck would have it, I looked myself up on their website and found that I was on in five minutes' time. And it's actually rather fun! I'd recommend it to anyone who isn't appalled by the way my voice sounds on tape! I come across as a nerd, but in a funny kind of way. You get to see my living room, my cuddly toys, my video collection, my trophy collection (a great moment with me staring at one and, quite genuinely, saying "I can't remember what this one's for, actually...") and edited highlights of me memorising and recalling a pack of cards.

I don't know when it's next on - check out the website here or this might work better if you're American. It's one of those websites that redirects you according to what country you're in, so both of those might work for you wherever you are.

I hereby resolve not to do any more blog posts for at least a week on the subject of me showing off about my TV career, my othello talents, my memory records, my devastating good looks (I do look rather good on the Current thing, actually) or anything else.

The Radio Times is playing with my mind.

There's a film on tonight at 1:05am, called "GMT Greenwich Mean Time", and glancing at the listings I saw "1:05 GMT" and thought 'wait, is summer time finishing tonight? It can't be, it's May. Summer usually ends some time after June, I'm sure.'

I always feel a bit embarrassed about buying the Radio Times. It's so, well, middle-class. It's significantly more expensive than the dreadful, common, garish listings magazines full of nothing but soap opera gossip that nevertheless contain all the same information about what's on TV this week (probably more information, in fact, when it comes to satellite channels, because RT only covers them with great reluctance), but that I wouldn't touch with a bargepole (I disapprove of the middle classes on principle, but I'm a terrible snob). And it's a huge amount more expensive than just looking up the TV listings on the internet or my fancy interactive TV. But although I feel deep down that a working class hero like myself probably shouldn't buy the Radio Times, I just like it. So there.

I think this is a yay

I came third in the othello today, which is still a very good result by my usual standards - I won five games out of seven, and my two losses were 33-31 to Geoff and 34-30 against David, which is so close that it practically counts as winning. But after all my heroics in Cambridge, I was kind of disappointed by that. Still, it was a fun day, eight of us squeezed into Phil's living room in Mansfield playing othello all day in preference to watching the FA Cup final (I still haven't seen the result, so don't tell me before I watch the highlights).

And just to prove I don't just list the latest BGP standings here when I'm winning, the top of the table looks like this now:

David 590
Me 530
Phil 460
Geoff 460
Jeremy 410

I'd have to do something extremely heroic and unlikely at the last regional in London to win it now. Or nobble David before the competition, whichever seems easier. It goes 200 points for a win, 160 for second, 120 for third, then 100, 80, 60, 40, 20, 10, but the problem with London is that the likes of Graham will probably be there, making winning it extremely unlikely. And since finishing ahead of David in the first place is an unlikely feat in itself, well, I'm not booking my plane tickets to Greece just yet. I'll save it for when I win the nationals.

Something memorable I forgot

Last Sunday, the man in charge of the Bristol expo, I forget his name (it was something similar to, but not, Mike Allred), when we were introduced said "Have I seen you on TV? Your name sounded familiar." I suggested that he might have seen me on Child Of Our Time, the most prestigious non-Brazilian TV appearance on my sparse celebrity CV, and he said "Yes, with him with the moustache! I watch that!"

This very nearly counts as someone recognising me without being told who I am. I'm practically famous!

Trade secrets

I can't believe that I'm taking Saturday's othello tournament seriously enough that I'm a) preparing strategies for it, and b) reluctant to write about these strategies in my blog because I know that some or all of my opponents are going to be reading it. But it's a constant source of annoyance to me when certain players insist on playing the comp'oth opening against me, because I have some kind of irrational hatred of it and never play well when someone does that to me. So I've been working on it lately in an attempt to fix up this achilles heel of mine. 'Fix up' is the wrong phrase there. Shield it? Buy a proper armoured boot for it? Refrain from going into battle in such a way that my heel can be attacked? That can't be too hard to do, surely? Achilles must have been pretty useless.

Anyway, I was saying. So having done some proper opening analysis and learned the best way to deal with any eventuality if my opponent plays comp'oth, I thought it would be fun to blog about it (it was either that or talk about memory training again, because I haven't done anything else today). But if I do that, everyone eagerly reading this blog will analyse my analysis and find a way to beat me! So I'm not going to. Although I've already rather spoiled the surprise, haven't I? But this way, nobody knows whether I'm genuinely an expert on comp'oth now, or just saying so in a sort of cunning bluff to persuade them to play a different opening that I like better. Hopefully, now all my opponents on Saturday will be so confused that they won't play any moves at all, and I'll win on time!

May showers

I'm racking my brains for something to write about tonight, and the only thing I can think of to say is that it's been raining for the last week pretty much constantly. And what kind of blog talks about the weather? A very dull one, that's what kind. Or even worse, a very dull, ignorant and opinionated kind of blog that goes on to say that I bet there'll still be hosepipe bans and the government trying to stop me using my lawn sprinkler, because the government devotes its life to personally inconveniencing Daily Mail readers like me by lying about water shortages. So I'll stop now and just not say anything. That'll be much more fun to read.

New card smell

My new cards have arrived! I didn't get them from the people I ordered them from in the first place - they emailed me to say they'd run out of the Stratus cards, but could offer me 144 packs of the cheaper ones for the same price. I turned them down. I like Stratus, I'm not sure I could memorise anything else. Besides, the thinner cards just can't stand up to being repeatedly flicked over so well. So I got 36 packs of Stratus cards for about the same price from a bridge supplies website. They probably think I'm hosting a bridge club and making intellectual conversation about bidding systems. But I do really love the smell of new cards. It's hard to define exactly what they smell like, but it's nice in a hopefully non-addictive way.

Another significant landmark today - I got my ironing board out. I haven't ironed any clothes for six months now, but I took the iron to a work shirt and trousers. I feel horribly domestic. SF Group are setting me up with an interview at the industrial park down the road, although in contrast to what I said recruitment agencies always do, they seem to want to put me in an assistant accountant position, which is a step down from what I was before. I'm not sure whether I should be pleased or offended.

It's a working man I am

I'm meeting with the woman from the accountancy recruitment agency tomorrow, and I can't remember the name of the accounting software we used at my last job. That's the first thing anyone's going to ask at an interview. I'm going to either have to phone them up and ask, or just look like a complete idiot. You'd think I would have mentioned it in this blog, but even the time it stopped working, I just wrote "the accounting software". So it's official, this blog is completely useless as a chronicle of my life. I always suspected as much.

Shipshape, Bristol fashion

I'll start with the coolest bit rather than going chronologically, because I want the memory people to read it and they'll get bored with it if they have to wade through a lot of talk about a comic convention. So, talking with Kurt Busiek (wooo!) this afternoon about memory techniques, and he said "I do something like that, actually. Say if I want to remember the number 2083, I'll think 'well, Avengers #20 had Power Man and #83 was the first appearance of the Valkyrie', so I'll remember it as Power Man and the Valkyrie." How cool is that? He uses memory techniques based on his encyclopaedic knowledge of Avengers comics from the sixties! See, this is how you get to be my hero.

By the way, that was a paraphrase. I thought I shouldn't use the actual number he quoted to me, in case he was inadvertently using his PIN number or something. I'm sure he wasn't (you don't get to be my hero by being stupid), but just in case.

Anyway, it's been a very fun weekend. I didn't take my laptop with me, only to find that my stupid hotel had internet access via the telly and one of those infa-red keyboard things. At three quid an hour. But I nobly refrained from using it too much, and £6 isn't anything I'm really going to miss. Anyway, I did manage to leave the hotel room for extended periods in order to check out the expo. It was extremely cool in every way. I spent rather more money than I probably should have done on cool comics that I saw or that were forced on me by pushy creators. I got a signed copy of a book by someone I've never heard of that really isn't very good, I saw Jamie Smart and told him at unnecessary length that I think he's great. I got the latest Y: The Last Man collection signed by Brian K Vaughan AND Pia Guerra. There were expo staff people dressed as storm troopers, biker scouts, a tie-fighter pilot and Boba Fett. There were normal people dressed as Batman, the Silver Surfer, Rorshach and others.

Then today I had Ravinder filming me hanging out with Kurt Busiek at length. Seriously cool. We were walking up and down between the dealers' tables in front of the camera, exchanging conversation (not very sparkling from me, as I predicted, but I did get more coherent as the day went on). When someone stopped to talk to him, I took the opportunity to say to another passer-by "I'm walking around with Kurt Busiek!"

I also took in an audience with Brian K Vaughan, in which he was brilliantly witty and entertaining in answering questions from the crowd. I asked the last one - who would win in a fight between Agent 355 (from Y: The Last Man) and Old Lace (the telepathic dinosaur from the future from Runaways), and he replied, after some thought, that it would be a draw. And then they'd make out.

Then I had a lengthy private chat on camera with Kurt, encompassing a wide range of topics. And I got him to sign my copy of Thunderbolts #1. And just as he was leaving, he mentioned that he'd read my blog post of the other day. Seems that since he's got an unusual name, he puts it into search engines to see what people are saying about him. Very cool guy.

Decisions

A mid-afternoon post, in a break with all the traditions this country holds dear, because I'm going down to Bristol a bit later and I'm weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of taking my laptop down with me. On the one hand, I'm really having a problem lately with internet addiction (my only vice), and it would doubtless do me a lot of good to go cold turkey and not stay up all night chatting and playing. On the other hand, well, I'm having a problem lately with internet addiction and I really want to take my laptop with me. It's not a very well-reasoned argument, but it's one that I'm finding very persuasive just at the moment.

Greece is the word

Or at least, it's the word people are using more than any other today in response to questions like "Where is this year's world othello championship going to be held?". I'd really love to qualify for it, I've never been to that part of the world before. Not that I have any real chance of qualifying, but you never know.

Also in the news, I've ordered some new packs of cards over the internet. 48 of them, a big box that the makers presumably intended people to sell individually in shops rather than use for memorising themselves. But my old ones, that I've had since 2004 or even earlier, are getting a bit tatty and inclined to stick together, and now's the time to switch to new ones if I want to be comfortable with them before the competitions in July. It takes a bit of adjustment, and a bit of dropping the slippery new cards all over the floor and cursing.

And this is the real post

As you know (everyone reading this remembers everything I've ever posted on here before, right?), I'm going to Bristol for the comic expo this weekend. Ravinder's also coming to film, and, keen to make the experience in some way relevant to my memory stuff (I keep telling him that nothing in my life is, but he insists), he asked if any of the guests there created any of the various comic characters in my list of images. As it happens, they did, and now it seems Kurt Busiek has agreed to have a chat with me on film about it.

Kurt Busiek. THE Kurt Busiek! What the heck am I going to say to Kurt Busiek? Well, actually, I know exactly what I'm going to say to him. It will involve tongue-tied stammering and not being able to form a coherent sentence. Possibly shoving my copy of Marvels or Thunderbolts #1 at him and hoping he'll appreciate that I want an autograph. I mean, by all accounts he's a very nice guy, a lifelong devoted superhero comic fan who became one of the world's most talented and popular writers. We could theoretically talk at great length about comics, except that he's totally my hero and idol and I'm wildly unworthy of actually meeting him. Seriously, Kurt Busiek!

Rampaging Hulk

This is a bonus post, the one I was going to do last week but couldn't upload the pictures to Photobucket. It's not my real blog entry for tonight about the latest Zoomynews. But enjoy it anyway!

I think it's time this blog had a change of pace. Too much waffling lately about what I've been up to, not nearly enough pretending to be clever and knowledgeable about comics. So inspired by Lew Stringer's wonderful blog, here's a little treatise on the subject of Marvel UK's late-seventies comic, "Rampage". I didn't read it at the time it came out (I was born in 1976, it launched in 1977), but I’ve found quite a lot of them at car boot sales over the years.

In those days, before the Transformers comic showed the world that Marvel's British offices could produce their own material that was much better than the American stuff, British Marvel comics consisted of black-and-white reprints of years-old American comics. Rampage specialised in the adventures of the Defenders, a great favourite team of mine. It reprinted a complete issue of Defenders, 22 pages, every week, which was excessively long by the standards of British comics, which usually consisted of a series of six-page stories. And Rampage also had back-up strips, of course (nobody then believed British readers would touch a comic with only one story in it) - you could also read a quarter to a third of an American issue of Iron Man and Nova in every issue. Well worth 10p of anyone's pocket money.

What I like about Rampage is the covers. They used the same line art as the American comics, but re-coloured and re-lettered. Sometimes with the same words as the American version, sometimes subtly different. They seem to have been reluctant to use so many words on Rampage. For example, the speech bubbles on the cover of Defenders #30 go:

Hulk: NO! Hulk can't fight GAS!
Nighthawk: We haven't a CHANCE! Can't get PAST these choking FUMES!
Doctor Strange: We're facing our most INCREDIBLE foe -- and he may DESTROY US ALL!

Whereas on Rampage #30, they say:

Hulk: Hulk can't fight GAS!
Nighthawk: NO WAY can we pass those choking FUMES!
Doctor Strange: We're facing our deadliest foe -- and he may DESTROY US ALL!

Incidentally, the deadly foe was a tap-dancing super-villain called Tapping Tommy. On the other hand, the reprint of Defenders #2, which had no speech bubbles on the original cover, is enhanced by the bad guy shouting "Surfer! Hulk! Namor! None of you will survive the WRATH of the WARRIOR WIZARD!"

Occasionally, the re-lettering required some intelligence. They fixed the problem with Defenders #27, which showed Dr Strange intoning "The Baddoon WOMEN are far more SAVAGE than their men! Unless I strike swiftly, HULK and VALKYRIE are DOOMED!" This rather gave away what was supposed to be a surprise plot twist in the NEXT month's issue, that the lizard creatures the Defenders were fighting were in fact the females of the Baddoon species they'd been tangling with for some time. The Rampage version replaces Doc's faux pas with "The LIZARD CREATURES have risen from the MARSH!"

This, however, is the most interesting of the Rampage covers. Here's Defenders #17, published in 1974:

And here's Rampage #16, from 1978:



Notice that the Hulk's role has been strikingly diminished as it crossed the Atlantic. Now, the Hulk ("Marvel's TV Sensation", as they liked to call him in those days), was the only reason a lot of people read Defenders in the first place. A couple of later Defenders covers claimed he was in an issue where in fact he didn't appear at all. There's no way the UK Marvel people decided to re-draw the cover to make the Hulk less significant. They must have got hold of the original American art, which must have been altered before the American Defenders comic hit the newsstands to make the Hulk MORE prominent and sell more copies! And they would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for those meddling Brits.

Another funny thing about Rampage is the issues of Defenders it chose to reprint. The earliest one I've got is Rampage #3, containing Defenders #2. So either the first two Rampages each only contained half of Defenders #1 (which wasn't double-sized) or they reprinted one of the three issues of Marvel Feature which introduced the team before they got their own series. I have no idea which. Rampage then reprinted a complete Defenders story every week, but skipped Defenders #9 and #10, which were part of a crossover story with Avengers (to get the whole story, you had to read an issue of Defenders, then an issue of Avengers, then the next Defenders and so on). Maybe Marvel UK repeated the whole crossover somewhere else, maybe they just didn't bother with it, I don't know. So from that point on, Rampage’s issue numbers were one behind Defenders.

However, as well as the Defenders comic in America, there was also ‘Giant Size Defenders’, part of Marvel’s experiment with longer, more expensive, quarterly comics. They didn’t catch on, and their only lasting legacy is the existence of a comic called “Giant Size Man-Thing”, but there were also five less innuendo-worthy Giant Size Defenders comics too. The first of these consisted of reprinted stories with a perfunctory framing sequence, so it’s understandable that Rampage chose not to reprint it. The second was a weird story involving the Son of Satan that’s in a very different style to the usual Defenders stuff, and I think I would have skipped it too if I’d been in charge of Rampage. But they also skipped #3 and #4, the first of which, although self-contained and having no bearing on the long-term plot, was absolutely brilliant, and the second containing a very significant moment (Nighthawk’s love interest has her arm blown off in an explosion, which is a very unusually graphic kind of injury for seventies comics) which is referenced repeatedly in future issues, but which Rampage readers never got to see. Rampage finally gave in and reprinted GSD #5, which was an integral part of a long storyline – they split it over two weekly issues and changed the cover blurb from “A complete Defenders story every week!” to “A book-length Defenders story every week!”

But then they unfathomably skipped Normal-Size Defenders #26, another part of that extended plotline, albeit one that consisted almost entirely of unnecessary filler. You can cut it out and still follow the story with no problems, but why would you want to?

Rampage kept on reprinting Defenders for quite some time, even after the American comic was a long way past its best, but finally gave in to popular demand and switched to reprinting Hulk and X-Men stories instead. Shame, really, because if I’d been a comics fan at the time, Rampage would have been my favourite.

Asking only workman's wages, I come looking for a job

So, the time has come when I need to find a job again. Well, not need, technically, but definitely should before my brain and body completely atrophy. I was going to get in touch with the agency today, but I remembered I was going to give blood, and that's scary enough without being stressed by job-hunting, so I've left that till tomorrow. Then I get the delights of trying to persuade them to put me forward for a job at the same level as the one I had last time, rather than a level above. Agencies never want to do that. They assume everyone has high-flying career aspirations rather than just wanting a semi-senior number-cruncher position that pays enough to live on. I'm sure I can't be the only accountant who doesn't want to become a financial director some day (they're always posh and almost always completely useless, so I don't think I'd be qualified).

Anyway, giving blood was fun. I filled in a form detailing all the diseases I haven't got, all the disease-infected people I haven't had sex with and so on, got talked through the whole procedure at staggering length, had a needle stuck in my finger and a drop of blood dropped into a test tube of green stuff. It did what it's supposed to, so then I went into the other room to lie down and have a whole lot more precious blood drained out of me.

The nurse put one of those inflatable squeezy things around my upper arm, and poked around at my elbow for quite some time, looking for a vein. "Hmm," he said, "there's one there, but it's quite deep. John, have you got a second?"

Another nurse in a swankier uniform came over, did the same thing with the squeezy inflatable thingy, poked my elbow and said "Hmm, there's one there, but it's quite deep." Exact same inflection, too. They must teach them to say that in nurse school. It seems my veins aren't in the same place as other people's, but the more important nurse found one on the side that worked fine. So it was just a matter of sticking another sharp thing into me, connecting it up to a scary-looking tube (which I tried not to look at too closely), lying around until it had finished, lying around for another fifteen minutes to make sure I didn't collapse or anything, commiserating with original nurse, who's a Sheffield Wednesday fan, about the terrible performances of our respective teams this season, having a cup of orange squash and a couple of biscuits and going home. Safe in the knowledge that I've done a Good Deed for the day. I can just hear my dad saying "You'll get your reward in heaven, old boy." I don't know why he always said that, since he wasn't religious in the slightest, but he did.

Since I don't think I've been quite boastful enough yet tonight, can I just talk about my othello game against Imre on Saturday? I've been looking at it with WZebra, on its highest setting, and it reckons I played just about as close to a perfect game as I ever have. I was a couple of discs ahead all the way through and just kept that lead, playing the good move every time. A couple of mistakes in the endgame, but he didn't find the line to punish me for them. I'm seriously happy with this game.

Also today (for a day when I've done nothing, it's been busy, hasn't it?) I won a set of dominoes in a tombola in the shopping centre. Woo.

Yawwwwwn

Wow, I'm tired. For one thing I've been getting up earlier and going to bed later than usual all weekend, for another, organising a memory competition is very nearly as tiring as competing in one. I'm knackered, to use the technical term. Despite that, though, Sunday was tremendous fun all round. Everything ran more or less smoothly and almost perfectly to schedule, we finished on time without too much trouble, there were no major disasters and really only one minor one (an unshuffled pack found its way into the speed cards event). Three entirely new recruits to the world of 'memory sports' who all seemed to have a good time and be planning to come back for more. Lots of entertaining memory talk at the pub both at lunchtime and afterwards. Two different film crews chasing people around with cameras and just adding to the sense of fun. A horribly noisy location that everyone in attendance was too polite to complain about. I started the day waking up at 5am, and finished it getting back to the hotel a bit before midnight after going for a curry with Charlie (possibly the greatest conversationalist in the world of memory, who I hadn't seen since 2004) and Jenny. I was even persuaded to have a go at the speed cards myself, and did 29.93 seconds in the second attempt, only to mess up the recall. Drat. Ah well, next competition is the British Championship down in Shropshire (which I must try to find on a map some time) on July 14th. I need to get back in training.

Not a blog post

I should be posting about the Cambridge championship, which went really well, but it's twenty to midnight and this hotel unreasonably expects you to vacate the premises by ten in the morning and I'm drunk, so I'll tell you all about it tomorrow.

Bow down and worship my othello-playing ability!

I've just stopped off at my hotel to enthuse about the othello tournament. I didn't win, but I came an even closer second than I did in Oadby, just losing to David on disc count. We only had the room until 5pm, so we agreed to have 20 minutes on the clock rather than 25, to make sure we could finish in time. Eight people there, so we started out on a seven-round all-play-all. Then Aidan turned up as well and rather threw things out of whack. In the end it turned into a nine-round all-play-all, with the last round played on the grass outside the school since we couldn't fit it all in in time.

I just seemed to keep winning, for some reason. I beat Imre again, although frankly that's happening so often nowadays I probably shouldn't even bother to record the fact. I also beat Phil and David, and was on 7 out of 7, until I lost my last two games to Jeremy and Geoff and let David catch up with me.

I've also just calculated the latest British Grand Prix standings, not for any big-headed kind of reason, just because I know all my readers are fascinated by the competition and it would be letting them down if I didn't post them here for the world to see. It goes:

Me 410
Phil 400
David 390
Jeremy 310
Geoff 300

I've never been in the lead in the BGP before! Even though you'd think I would, seeing as how BGP are my initials, so it's pretty much the law that I should win it every year. Two more regionals to go - can I keep it up?

Tomorrow's memory competition is going to be in the same room, although we don't get kicked out till six so, if everything goes really, really quickly and smoothly, we won't have to do the speed cards outside on the street. Hopefully it won't be quite as noisy in the room tomorrow as it was today, with infant chess players running around screaming in the background. It's the over-twelves chess tomorrow, so they'll probably be shouting and swearing and writing graffiti, or whatever teenagers do these days.

Guest of honour

I'm in my hotel in Cambridge, complete with wireless internet access in the room. Rather temperamental internet access that goes on and off, so if you're not reading this, it's because the connection died before I could post it. Went to the new Wagamama in Cambridge with Jenny tonight - it's a very cool place, and it certainly seems to be doing excellent business, there were people queueing up outside all night. Meeting Jenny, of course, is just the first of many social engagements while I'm here - it's the othello people tomorrow, and the memory people on Sunday (along with the TV people pestering me all day, of course). I feel like the Queen in America, only on a slightly smaller scale and with a more stylish hat.

I posted the above, then realised I forgot to write the bit that would justify the "guest of honour" subject line, so edited to add: when I checked in this afternoon, the man said "Oh, yes, they're coming to film you on Sunday," with a grin, and was excessively friendly and helpful. I also have the idea that they've put me in the nicest room (because it is very nice indeed). There are definite advantages to being a celebrity.

Inventory

There are lots and lots of things I need to remember to take down to Cambridge with me tomorrow. And unlike other times when I go away for the weekend, a lot of these things are essential, absolutely can't forget or the whole Cambridge Memory Championship will be ruined, kind of things. It's not like forgetting my toothbrush or to wear any clothes.

So, let's see. There's my laptop, lots of brown envelopes full of memorising and recall papers, lots of packs of cards, the snazzy timers for the speed cards event, my stopwatch so I can keep track of the time, my alarm clock so I can get up at the crack of dawn rather than oversleeping and missing the whole affair, scrap paper and pens, the prize money, the event timetable and rules, a map of the area so I can find the way from my hotel to the venue, my hat so that I look cool...

I bet I forget something. The laws of comedy demand that I forget something important and essential for the memory competition.

I was going to write about comics tonight

But the scanned covers I wanted to include in what would have been a very long and boring post won't upload, so I'll save it for another day. Although that does leave me without anything interesting to talk about at all. I'm watching the snooker at the moment, and as usual thinking to myself "I could do that. Easy." I tend to forget that I can't play the game until the moment I find myself at the table with a cue in my hand. It's a lot harder than it looks, you know.

On the other hand, becoming snooker world champion remains one of my ambitions. When I'm a millionaire (that's another one of my unfulfilled ambitions), I'll have a big house with a billiard room and two or three servants to keep the table in perfect condition. There will also be a log fire and lots of bookcases with three-volume novels, and everyone who comes in will be required to wear a smoking jacket, although you won't be allowed to smoke. Then I'll practice snooker every day and become brilliant at it and win the world championship. You see, I don't just have ambitions, I have practical plans to make them happen. That's the secret to success.

Nosferatu

I'm going to give blood. I've never done it before, and I've spent practically my whole life saying 'I must get round to doing that some time'. Which is exactly the kind of attitude I always criticise in other people. So I've decided to do it, next Tuesday when the blood-sucking people (I think that's the technical term) are next in town. Hopefully it won't kill me. I gather that it doesn't usually, but I'm not a big fan of having needles stuck in me.

I don't even know what blood group I am. I have a feeling that I'm A and my brother's AB, or possibly the other way round, but I'm not sure. I also have a feeling that mine is one of the more useless blood types to have, but that's probably just my natural assumption that nobody could ever find a use for bits of my anatomy.

Maybe I'll donate some platelets too. I hear that's all the rage these days. Or bone marrow. Or a limb. I've got more than I need already, and I wouldn't want to be selfish.

Be Prepared

I still need to print everything out for the Cambridge championship. It's surprising how much all those sheets of paper weigh, you know. Last year I felt like I was lugging a ton of bricks around with me. There's not just piles of papers, there's lots of packs of cards (at least it's just tens, not hundreds like the WMC), my laptop, and the snazzy timers for the speed cards (yes, we've got them this year, not the hopelessly 20th-century people with stopwatches). It's a good job I'm such a perfect physical specimen.

I wasn't going to write anything else tonight, but then I remembered that last night's blog entry was one of my occasional super-brief rip-off ones, and that makes me feel guilty about not giving my readers their metaphorical money's worth. So here's a second paragraph, for your reading pleasure.

I fixed my video!

That tape I trod on last week? Fixed! Thanks to Ravinder, who advised me that you can cut the clear plastic bit out without ruining it, and gave me permission to blame him if I did ruin it despite that.

Apart from that, I've done nothing else all day today, but I still have a great sense of achievement.

Windows, at all?

There are some things about Boston that are going to stay the same forever. The double-glazing saleswoman in the market who has spent every Saturday since time immemorial trying and failing to hand out flyers to passers-by with a forlorn, muttered "Windows, at all?". The graffiti on the wall behind Kwik-Save ("R.N. BOASTS WE SANK TWO IRAQI TANKERS") which has been there since the first Gulf War. The May Fair, on its way next week (notices already up telling people, all of whom must surely know already, that the market will move to West Street while the fair's in town. If people don't know, the complaining market traders will soon fill them in without the need for notice boards). George the friendly mentally-handicapped old guy who can always be found in the town centre somewhere on a Saturday, cheerfully saying good morning to everyone whatever time of day it is. The dishevelled exotic birds in the shabby aviary in the park. And a football team who can't win a home game against the worst team in the league who've had a player sent off in the first half.

When you support the second-worst team in the league, there are few occasions when you can look forward to a win with some trembling confidence, but this was one of them. And the omens were good - we had a whole eleven full-time players to choose our team of eleven from, Torquay had already been relegated and had nothing to play for but pride, the home fans had turned out in droves for once (attendance about 2600, roughly eight of whom were die-hard away fans who'd come all the way from Torquay) - and the Pilgrims started brightly. We could have had half a dozen goals in the first half, it's a long time since I've seen them look like they could actually score. David Galbraith in particular had an amazing curling shot from outside the area that Wayne Rooney would be proud of, which was tipped over the crossbar by an equally Premiership-worthy save from the Torquay goalie. Three or four more times the ball was somehow cleared off the line by their defence at the last second. Then one of their players was sent off for hitting Ernie Cooksey while the ball was at the other end of the pitch and he presumably hoped the referee's eyes were too. Still nil-nil at half-time, but it looked hopeful.

When a team comes out after the interval and plays much, much better, people tend to attribute it to an inspirational manager's speech. So I can only assume Steve Evans delivered the exact opposite in the dressing room, because the Boston who came out again for the second half were woeful. Torquay were still awful too, so it shouldn't really have mattered, but then they got a goal out of nowhere, to everyone's surprise. Another of their players was booked for shoving Cooksey in another off-the-ball incident (he's not much of a player, but he must be great at annoying people). The crowd, who'd been enthusiastic all the way, switched to yelling abuse at the Boston players, especially the defenders who seemed very reluctant to tackle the opposing strikers, or even move at all unless it was absolutely unavoidable.

But Drewe Broughton got an equaliser in the 83rd minute, and it ended up 1-1. Which could have been worse, I suppose. Basically, this means that it all comes down to the final game, away at Wrexham next week. If we win that, we'll avoid relegation (at the expense of Macclesfield or Wrexham themselves). If we don't, we won't. Goodbye, football league. And it's five years to the day since we won promotion, too. I personally don't think we have a chance of winning that game. I know it sounds disloyal, but bluntly, we suck. I'll keep supporting them to the last, but... gah! Maybe I'll switch to Derby County.

Movie star, a movie star...

I've been talking at great length just lately with Ravinder about this documentary. It does look like it's definitely going to happen, and it's really definitely going to involve filming me and everyone I come into contact with in Cambridge next weekend and Bristol the weekend after. And probably elsewhere, too. Actually, it's only really occurring to me right now that this might get annoying pretty quickly. It probably won't - I could tolerate Nick following me around, and Ravinder's more fun to talk to (and I'm not just saying that because he reads this blog). Although it is going to be a director in charge of the filming, rather than Ravinder himself, and I might not like her. And then there's the worry that I'm going to end up looking bad, and the billions of people watching the documentary will be thinking "gor, lumme, what a complete eejit that Pridmore person is". I'm assuming all the viewers will have a sort of cockney-cum-Irish accent, naturally.

I was actually thinking of emailing all the friends I can think of to see if they want to be filmed hanging out with me, working on the theory that the less of me and the more of other people in the film, the more watchable it'll be. But then last time around the VPS people were all rather reluctant to be taped at one of our get-togethers, just because they generally involve drunken and unseemly behaviour. I suppose we could hang out and be sober and seemly, but then it would just look boring.

Anyway, I'm going to the football tomorrow. An even more crucial, must-win game than the numerous other crucial, must-win games I've mentioned so far this season. If we win this, and it's only against Torquay so we darn well should, it'll lift us out of the relegation zone with one game to go. Woo! Now if only we can find eleven fit players, we're sorted. We'll survive for another season and then get relegated next year (about to go into a voluntary arrangement because of the huge debts, which will mean a 10-point penalty).

Noone know what I do, but everyone calls me "boss"

For some reason, everybody in the world has emailed me about the Cambridge championship today. Okay, partly my fault since I posted on the forum to confirm that the event is being filmed for a Channel 5 documentary (woo!), but also Aubrey has volunteered me to organise the rest of the Cambridge MSO event on the Sunday (he's somewhere exotic prolonging the human lifespan). It's just a case of telling the other competitions where to go, but that's liable to make me unpopular, because there's the big sports hall and a separate room, and I'm having the latter for the memory competition. However much the go and shogi players complain about having to share space with backgammon and chess. There's only a separate room at all because I pestered Aubrey into arranging one the other day when he sprung it on us that he'd only arranged the sports hall. If there was a bit more time before the event, I'd find another venue in Cambridge, but at a week's notice it'd be hard to come up with a cheap, quiet and small place. I hate being in charge of things. How did I end up in charge of things?

Creative fervour

I've spent the whole afternoon doodling. That comic strip I was artist's-blocked with last week - I suddenly had the urge to sit down and draw and not care how bad it looked, so I did. And once I'd started, I obviously didn't want to stop in case the enthusiasm evaporated.

Also spent an hour and a half talking on the phone with Ravinder about this documentary, and he specifically asked me to mention him in my blog, but I'll go into more detail about that tomorrow, because all that scribbling has taken up too much of my time.

Oh, and I don't think I'm quite ready to actually SHOW anyone what I've been drawing yet.

Tradesmen and the scraper still troublesome

I'm watching "The Diary of a Nobody" on BBC4. It's not a dramatisation so much as Hugh Bonneville reciting edited highlights, Talking Heads style, and I don't think it entirely works. It's not a book that really lends itself to TV adaptation (although it has been done before), but it seems pointless to do it like this. It's a lot more enjoyable to read the book yourself - this version doesn't really add anything and takes quite a bit out. It's part of the Edwardian season on the BBC, although I'm not sure what definition of "Edwardian" they're using, since the diary dates from the late 1880s. But on the other hand, that's the kind of pedantic observation that Mr Pooter might have made himself, so I probably shouldn't say anything.

Curse my clumsy great clodhoppers!

I trod on a video tape and now it doesn't work properly any more. It's one of the ones with cartoons taped off the telly, and there are some good ones on it too. The most irritating part is that I have a feeling I could maybe fix it, but that if I tried to do so I would almost certainly ruin it for good. The tape itself is all fine, it's just the plastic casing that's cracked and sort of pushed in a bit, and not in a way that I can just pop it back into the right place. Now when I try to play it it stops after a few seconds and starts rewinding.

I suppose this might be a lesson to me to store videos on a shelf or on top of the telly or somewhere other than just lying on the floor, but I don't have a history of learning this kind of lesson. But darn it, what if I want to watch "Go Fly A Kit", or "Johnny Smith and Poker Huntas" or "Scaredy Cat" or "High Note", or about 40 other classic Looney Tunes? I'm annoyed now.

Supermarket Sweep

Doing my shopping at Sainsbury's today, I found myself at the till behind a large, elderly woman whose credit card was declined. Obviously, this is an embarrassing situation for anyone to be in, so I did my best to pretend I didn't notice anything as she rummaged through her handbag looking for money. When she only turned up a single two-pound coin, I decided to volunteer to pay for her stuff myself. Random acts of kindness are always good. But while I was considering whether that was really, definitely a good idea, she was looking through her groceries to find the most important item and came up with a four-pack of cans of stout. This cost £3.29, and she asked if she could just have two cans for £2. When the woman behind the till said no, she demanded that another shop assistant go and fetch her a single bottle of Guinness, and wasn't prepared to listen when the assistant told her they don't sell those in singles either. She eventually stomped off to get one herself. I decided to save my money for a worthier cause. Having paid for my own shopping, I was just leaving when I saw her coming back with a single bottle that she must have pulled out of a six-pack, and contemplated hanging around to see the rest of the story, but decided to beat a tactful retreat.

Another consequence of me entirely running out of food items last night was that I had to go to McDonald's for breakfast because the supermarket doesn't open till 10:30 on a Sunday. I burnt my tongue horribly on a cup of tea and it still feels all burnt now. Perhaps I should sue them. Or perhaps I should just get into the habit of drinking tea more often, so that I can judge how hot it is without taking a full mouthful.

Wedding belles

Yes, I said Sunday. Consider this a bonus. The civil partnership ceremony and subsequent festivities finished early enough that I decided to get the train home today rather than staying another night in Norwich like I'd been planning to. This way, you see, I can do lots of serious work tomorrow. (I don't know who I think I'm fooling when I write something like that, I really don't.)

I could have been back even earlier, actually - the trains from Norwich to Nottingham leave at 57 minutes past the hour, every hour, except the 15:52 which for some mad reason is five minutes earlier. And I got to the station just in time to see it leaving. Still, that did give me time to go and look around the charity shops, although Norwich's selection of cartoon videos was frankly terrible.

Enough complaining, anyway. The do itself was wonderful, and the crowd of people attending were all fun. I had a surprisingly good time, all in all. Everyone reading this now has to chorus congratulations to my mum and Pam, the happy newlyweds who've been together for 24 years.

I'm on the road again

Norwich this weekend! Never been there and have no idea what it's like. Still, hopefully I'll have time to poke around the charity shops and see what cartoon videos people have been getting rid of lately. Judging by Derby at least, the official period you have to keep an unwanted video you got for Christmas is just under four months, because the shops are full of second-rate Christmas cartoons on VHS at the moment. That said, in Ashford after the othello I found one excellent tape - a W H Smith exclusive from the mid-nineties that I'd never heard of before, with three hours of Looney Tunes including some quite obscure ones I still needed to collect.

So no more blogs until Sunday night from me. I hope you'll survive. I did consider taking my laptop with me and using it in the hotel, if it had internet access. I could pretend to be a businessman on an important trip. But then it probably does me good to get away from the internet every once in a while.

I want to be an artist!

I've been trying to draw a comic strip. I sometimes get the impression that if I sit down and try to draw things I'll acquire great artistic ability in the space of a couple of minutes. Then when I don't, I get all annoyed and discouraged and vow never to pick up or even look at a pencil again. It's very frustrating. One of these days I'll do the sensible thing and go on a course to learn to draw halfway properly.

I just have a mental block on the whole subject of art, though. It, like most of the great wrongs in the world, is entirely my brother's fault, because he was always better at drawing than me even when we were little, and it gave me a lifelong complex. If he'd had a good memory I would now be completely unable to memorise a one-digit number. Although come to think of it, he also always had a better memory for things like Transformers' mottos when we were young. Oh dear, I feel a complex developing...

A further example of my uselessness with computers

I had a phone call yesterday saying "hello, this is the Maid's Head hotel, we had you booked in to stay with us last Friday...". I thought to myself, what the heck? That's not the hotel I stayed in in Ashford. Did I book another hotel and forget about it? Am I quite that forgetful? Then it struck me that that's the hotel in Norwich that I'm staying in this coming Friday. A short conversation later, it turned out that I'd booked it for the wrong weekend over the internet. Good thing they called, really. If I was a hotel, I would just have charged my credit card and thought no more about it.

I'm sorry, I thought the above anecdote was interesting when I started to write it. Now I come to look at it, I realise it's the dullest thing you could ever possibly want to read. I do apologise.

Anyway, I'm busy with "historic dates" for the Cambridge competition. Have you any idea how difficult it is to dream up one hundred and ten one-to-five-word phrases describing ficticious historical happenings along the lines of "peace treaty signed"? Well, once you've got your head around how difficult that is, double it, because I've also got to use phrases that I didn't use when dreaming up the previous year's dates. And then after I've composed this list of fake events, I still need to ask the only Russian of my acquaintance whether he can help me translate them - I've got a Russian competitor coming! Okay, he's a student in Germany, where everyone seems to be mad about memory, but he's still Russian, which counts as a whole new territory for 'memory sports'!

Also, yay, they're repeating Ripping Yarns on BBC4!

Speed

I did a pack of cards in 25.98 seconds today, which I think is possibly a new personal best. That I can't remember for certain whether it is or not bothers me a little. You'd think I'd keep track of this kind of thing, seeing as memorising cards as quickly as possible is basically my sole purpose in life. Still, I'm sure I've never beaten 25 seconds before, and I'd really like to achieve that some time. Or maybe I should be focussing on finally beating 30 seconds in a competition, so that that stops being the holy grail of card-memorising? But then what would we do without a nice round number of seconds to aim towards. I suppose we could all start aiming for 25 seconds, but that's not as catchy as exactly half a minute, somehow.

Pins and needles, needles and pins

The hotel I was staying at in Ashford is a swanky enough place to have a sewing kit in each room, sitting on top of the Corby trouser press for guests to avail themselves of. At first glance I thought, as I always do in this kind of situation, "What kind of person comes to a hotel and sews things?" I'm more the kind of person who allows clothes to remain buttonless if a button falls off, you see. But then it occurred to me that this might be a good opportunity to try to fix the increasingly noticeable hole in the crotch of my jeans, so I did. And then, while I was on a roll, sewed up the hole in the pocket too. That'll save me a fair bit of money that would otherwise end up down my trouser leg, out the end and down a drain when I forget not to use that pocket. And then for a coup de grace, I sewed a button back on my shirt. Using the pink thread since I'd used up all the blue and white on the jeans (it's a blue shirt with white buttons, so the pink stands out in what I think is a quite stylish way).

It's been middle-of-summer hot around here today. I might just have to break out my unflattering shorts from their winter hibernation and appall the people of Derby. This also raises the question of what to wear to the wedding on Saturday - I was planning to wear my "smart casual" outfit, which consists of all the more or less presentable clothing I own, all of which is black. I'm pretty sure black still looks stylish, and people won't think I'm going to a funeral instead, but it'll be a bit uncomfortable if the weather's like this. Maybe I'll wear the shorts instead.

(Kent)

Okay, so I wasn't quite as successful in Ashford as Oadby. In fact, I came dead last. But, you see, it's not the winning, it's the taking part, and by doing so badly I probably made everyone else feel a lot better about themselves, so in a very real sense, I'm a winner.

Ashford is a strange kind of place for at least two reasons - it calls itself "Ashford (Kent)" to excess, for one. I walked past the Working Men's Club when I got there on Friday night and the sign outside says "Ashford (Kent) WMC". Would people really not know which Ashford they were in if they looked up at the sign and it only said "Ashford"? For another thing, I found when I daringly decided to walk from the station to my hotel that Ashford is some kind of magical land where however far you walk in any direction, you always end up in the same place at the back end of the town centre. After quite a lot of that, I got a taxi like some kind of big city fat cat.

Fun tournament, though, and lovely weather. I even walked from Charing Cross to St Pancras, taking in all the places I was intending to along the way, on my way back. And without once getting lost. It's official, I can cope with London streets now. Perhaps with a bit more practice I'll get Ashford (Kent) too.

Lazing on a sunny afternoon

There are days when I'm all hyper-productive and get lots of stuff done. There are also days when I just don't do anything. This has pretty much been one of the latter. Although I did talk to the Cambridge local paper. And I, well, expressed enthusiasm on hearing that Ravinder's documentary has officially got the sort-of go-ahead from Channel 5. That counts as memory-related work, right?

Anyway, I'm going to Ashford tomorrow afternoon for the othello on Saturday, rather than getting the early morning train, so I probably won't post anything tomorrow night. Yes, I'm still pointing it out every time I don't intend to post anything here. I have a very inflated sense of this blog's importance in the grand scheme of things.

More reasons to be cheerful

Man Utd won 7-1 last night and it was a great game. I saw the first five goals before turning over to watch the last episode of Life on Mars, which was also absolutely fantastic. I found those raffle tickets today without even meaning to, while looking for something else. I also found the something else I was looking for. Boston Utd did indeed beat Macclesfield on Monday, and are now at the lofty heights of 22nd (out of 24) in League Two. This is important, because the bottom two get relegated. Granted, they're only three points clear of Wrexham, who've got a game in hand, but it's the psychological advantage of not being in the relegation zone that matters. Plus, Boston's last four games are against Hereford and Chester (both comfortably mid-table with no chance of making the play-offs), Torquay and Wrexham (the two clubs below us). We've got a good chance of survival. I'm doing an interview with the Cambridge Evening News tomorrow about the memory championship, and hopefully getting it a nice bit of advance publicity. It's definitely spring, you know - it's been all warm and sunny for the last couple of days.

Hello, sunshine! Hello, birds on the wing!

I've got lots of bunnies! By which I mean that I've got The Tale of the Bunny Picnic, which you may remember me bidding for on eBay last week, in rather more formats than I was expecting. For some reason, the seller has also enclosed a "free gift" of a pirate DVD copied (or "ripped" or "burned" or whatever the technical term is) directly from the official, original VHS that he actually advertised, sold and sent to me. I don't get why he would do this. Did he think "well, if he likes the legal version, he's sure to also like a less legal version along with it!"

Come to think of it, "captured" might be the technical term.

Anyway, I'm glad that I've got it. I've watched it twice today, since that's obviously what the seller wants me to do, and watched a couple of the brilliant songs at least hrair times. I haven't seen the Bunny Picnic for years and years, and I'd forgotten just how great it was. If I had the first idea how to go about doing such a thing, I would burn/rip/capture/sync the wonderful musical number at the end when the bunnies confront the farmer and put it on YouTube for you all to watch, because nobody should go through life without hearing that song.

I find it hard to describe to normal people the feeling of sheer delight and euphoria I get from watching a stirring musical tale of bunny bravery like this. Suffice it to say I've been in a deliriously happy kind of mood all day. It even helps me put a positive spin on things that I might otherwise consider bad - having done a bit of Cambridge championship preparation work today, I've been thinking "well, it's nearly all done now and well ahead of time", rather than "I still need to do the historic dates in multiple languages, and that takes ages, plus I need to arrange stopwatches or timers for the speed cards and I should have done that yonks ago".

And when the charity Cerebra phoned me tonight to ask for money and I suddenly remembered I've got some raffle tickets of theirs that I'm supposed to be selling and have no idea where they are, my thought is "wow, good thing they called or I would have forgotten all about it and then felt horribly guilty when they write to me asking for money", whereas had I been in less of a cheerful mood, I might have been thinking "aw, now I'll have to turn my living room upside down looking for those raffle tickets. How could I have forgotten them, anyway? I'm supposed to be a memory champion. And why are Cerebra pestering me for more money when they haven't finished with this raffle yet, for Pete's sake?"

Everything's better with bunnies. Man Utd are 3-0 up after 20 minutes! It's the bunnies, I tell you! Incidentally, Lugsy is the real hero of Tale of the Bunny Picnic, not Bean. He's the one I always admired.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Woo! Did an hour cards practice today, attempting 33 packs and got 29½ right. And the half (you get half a pack if there's one mistake) was just stupidity on my part - I memorised it right, I just wrote the wrong thing down and didn't notice. I'm still not 100% confident with going for more than thirty packs, but I'm feeling now that I can maybe eventually speed myself up just that little bit more so that I can look at each one three times. Today the sixty minutes ran out when I was just short of the end of the 27th pack for the third time. And my recall was still good on the ones I only had time to look at twice - it was harder work and took longer, with a bit of educated-guesswork, but I got most of them right. The mistakes came on packs 24, 29 and 30, plus the aforementioned annoying blunder on pack 7. And I was finished with the recall with ten minutes of the two hours still to go, rather than frantically scribbling till the end. All in all, I'm happy with that.

And while I'm talking card-memorising (I have quite honestly been told that there are people out there who really like reading things like the above paragraph, you know), I'll throw out a favourite tip of mine for "memory athletes" in training - try to practice things in the exact format of the championships. Between memorising and recall when I practice hour numbers, while I'm putting those fiddly little rubber bands back around the cards and stacking them up neatly, I like to turn the telly or radio on to simulate the talking that goes on at competitions during the hiatus. I also avoid consciously trying to recall any of the images I've seen until the recall time has started, because you never know what distractions are going to come along at the world championships.

When it comes to speed cards, I also always wait the full five minutes until recalling, even though I'm going through the pack in thirty seconds and then just sitting in silence. Sitting still and not saying anything is something I have difficulty with, you see, so it's good to get in a bit of practice. I'm an incorrigible daydreamer, and I can never spend the whole four and a half minutes thinking about the cards I've just memorised without drifting off on a mental tangent, so practicing like that really helps - now I can daydream all I like and still keep the cards bobbing around in my brain until I have to regurgitate them.

When did my hobbies turn into work?

Not only am I wrestling with writing a book about memory and stuff (that's "wrestling" in the sense of doing nothing about it, which is an unusual but quite acceptable use of the word), but I'm also trying to entice people to chip in with some prize money for the Cambridge championship (I'm still hopeful on that front). And if that wasn't enough, I've been wrestling with a question about the British othello rating list that David asked the committee about - should people who don't live here any more still be included?

I can think of lots of sensible arguments both for and against the idea, which is confusing me a bit. I would have expected not to care either way, since the only rating I ever look at is my own, but in fact I seem to be deeply passionate about every possible argument for and against every possible arrangement. Perhaps I just need to get out more. Come to think of it, I maybe shouldn't be posting publicly about this in the first place. Some people might argue that it's private committee business (the committee of the BOF doesn't generally do anything, so it's probably a good idea to shroud anything we do do in mystery, so as to give the impression that we do more). Ah well. They can always excommunicate me, or whatever the expression is.

Heckle and Jeckle

I've been in Nottingham today for the dual purpose of finding out whether the comic mart is still a good thing to visit, and to see Boston Utd travel to Notts County in the hope of getting an essential win to pull them out of the relegation zone. It turns out that it's not, they didn't, and tonight's Doctor Who wasn't all that great either, so I'm in a bad mood.

I saw a freakish number of magpies today, not even counting the two Notts County mascots. From the train window I saw a whole bunch of single magpies and one group of four, which I interpreted as meaning that I was in line for a whole lot of sorrow, but at least would get a boy.

The comic thing, which I used to go to regularly when there were rather more people interested in buying and selling old comics, really isn't what it was. It's no longer taking up the whole basketball court in a leisure centre in the unfashionable end of town, but is now relegated to a smallish back room at the ice rink where four or five dealers try to offload their boxes of back issues at 50p each. Sad, really.

As for the game, the Pilgrims didn't play all that badly. It was just that they never really looked like a team that could score a goal - and sure enough, they didn't. County scored two. But they gave it their best, despite the continuing difficult circumstances - with Paul Ellender suspended again, we could only manage to bring three substitutes, and that included Adam Rowntree from the youth team, who looks about twelve.

Five minutes into the game, the ref noticed that we had two players on the pitch wearing number 17 - Colin Cryan had somehow managed to put on Stewart Talbot's spare shirt instead of his own. That's fairly typical of the way the game went. We're not quite doomed to the Conference just yet - with Torquay hopelessly dead at the bottom of the table and Wrexham also in dire straits, a win against Macclesfield (fourth from bottom) next week might just save us at the last. Fingers crossed...

That's how we use an apostrophe

There's a birthday card on sale in Smith's with the words "Life's to short" on the front (and "...to date ugly men" on the inside). I mean, seriously. What is it with young people* these days? Don't they teach them anything in the schools now that my dad's no longer with us**? He'd be turning in his grave if he hadn't been cremated. Yes, you might say "does it really matter if people don't know the difference between 'to' and 'too'?" You might add "it's perfectly obvious to anyone who reads it what the card means to say, so misspelt or not, the card is doing its job." You might go on to say that in a couple of decades' time, "to" (or even "2") might well be the dictionary-approved spelling of the word we pedants now write as "too". You might question my own grammar and punctuation in the preceding paragraph. And you'd be perfectly correct to make all these points, and within your rights to call me a weirdo for objecting at such length, but I don't care. I hate this kind of thing. With a passion. I'm going to find out who made this horrible birthday card, go round to their house and shout at them.

In less insane news, my mum sent me an easter egg in the post, and for some reason Thorntons decided to package it in a cardboard box that could have fitted a dozen easter eggs of the same size inside it. Seriously, it's the size of a house. I might live in this cardboard box if I ever feel I need a second home in the country. I found this box sitting outside the door to my flat today (someone else in the building must have signed for it) and thought some mystery admirer had sent me a new television set or vacuum cleaner.

*I'm assuming, with no evidence to back me up on this, that everybody involved in the production of this card is younger than me.

**And now I'm apparently assuming that everyone involved in the production of this card is so young that they went to primary school within the last year.

I guess I'm just lazy

This afternoon I got as far as laying out 33 packs of cards on my desk with the intention of doing an hour cards practice, then decided I wasn't really in the mood. So I left them out so I could do it tomorrow instead. A bit later on, after coming back in from the shops, I found that it was unbearably hot in my living room. Possibly, with hindsight, it was a bad idea to turn the heating on on the hottest day of the year so far. But if I opened the window, the wind would blow the cards on the desk all over the floor! I was faced with the choice of either leaving the window closed and the room like an oven (an oven at a temperature of about 30 degrees at the very most, but an oven nonetheless) or putting rubber bands back around each of my 33 packs of cards to keep them together. And I found the latter to be a quite unacceptable use of my time, so spent half an hour in stifling heat before finally giving in. And now I'll have to take all the rubber bands off again tomorrow!

That's if I do the cards tomorrow. Actually, I was planning to devote most of the day to promoting the Cambridge Memory Championship - dig the groovy new website, courtesy of James Kemp and James Ponder! One month to go, start practicing now!

The horrors of commercialism

Blogger tried to persuade me last night to put Google ads on this site. I would, but I gather they don't actually pay you anything until you've amassed a huge number of clicks' worth of money, and I doubt whether very many of my readers would be at all interested in adverts for memory foam mattresses (which is pretty much exclusively the ads you get on memory-related sites). Not that I've got anything against memory foam mattresses. I'd buy one myself if they weren't rubbish.

Ooh! I'm watching Heroes and there's a woman on it whose superpower is a super-memory! Seriously, everyone nowadays is saving the world by remembering long numbers! That's my new job, I've decided.

Land speed record

Ramón Campayo has invited me to the first World Speed Memory Championships, in Spain, on April 28th and 29th. Rather short notice, but since that (I'm almost positive now) is the one weekend in the foreseeable when I'm not doing anything, I might consider it.

"Speed memory" - memorising the maximum possible number of digits or whatever in one second, or three seconds, or half a second or so on - is not really my thing. In fact, it's not really anyone's thing except Ramón's, he's the only person who does it, as a rule. So it might be fun to do something a bit different here. I don't have much spare time to practice what with Cambridge and that loony idea of getting my book finished in the next month, but then the thing about speed memory is that it involves a lot more luck and instinct than 'real' memory competitions - there's no need for fancy techniques and things, it's just a matter of getting your brain used to going quickly.

On the other hand, it means going to Spain, and hanging out with a lot of other people who will presumably be mostly Spanish and complete strangers. As I might have mentioned before, I don't really like going places where I don't speak the language, and I certainly don't have time in the next four weeks to learn Spanish. I can't even watch Dora the Explorer, because I haven't got Nick Jr and it's only on ITV once a week. Also, it's a terrible, terrible cartoon.

It's the holidays!

Or at least it would be if I was a teacher or a schoolboy. It's deeply unfair that I don't get some kind of paid holiday, in fact. I mean, technically, I could go on holiday or just stop doing even the tiny bit of "work" I'm doing at the moment, but it's not the same unless there's some kind of official sanction for me not working.

Anyway, while we're talking about Easter, remember that Tale of the Bunny Picnic video I bid on on eBay even though it was £5? It ended up going for £23! I mean, I didn't really want it all that much, but seeing several other people bid insane amounts of money for it tweaks my competitive impulses. There's another copy on eBay now that I'm bidding on, and I can see me squandering my whole life savings on it.

Brown ale and black pudding

So, last night was Vicky's birthday party. We went for a meal at Soul, a place I've never been before because I had the vague idea that it was all organic food and things, so I avoided it on principle. It possibly is organic food and things, but if it is it doesn't rub it in customers' faces. Now I'm prejudiced against it mainly because it's posh and expensive. On the other hand, the food, though inexcusably posh, was actually very nice. Well, except for the chicken liver parfait which seemed to be the most edible starter on the menu. That wasn't terribly nice. But the main course I had, roast duck with black pudding, some fancy kind of potato with a creamy spinach concoction on top and a blackberry jus, was absolutely delicious. And considering it was posh, which normally means tiny portions on big plates, it was very filling. Big plates, but quite large portions, piled up vertically so it looked like small portions. I approve of this kind of thing. And then rhubarb creme brulee with rhubarb ripple ice cream for pudding, which was really scrummy too. The company was good too - nobody I knew, but a nice bunch of people all round.

Afterwards we went to the beer festival, where the highlight was the live music, provided by a German oompah band. The leader and tuba player, surreally enough, looked exactly like Ulrich Voigt (a comment that will be useful only to the very select group of my readers who not only know what Ulrich looks like but can imagine him dressed in lederhosen and a German army helmet, playing an Abba medley on a tuba). Their music was absolutely brilliant, and everybody got very much into the spirit of it, aided by the wide range of strangely-named beers on offer. They also played happy birthday to Vicky.

Onto other business, I've been "tagged" by a "meme", or by Jemfy, I'm not sure exactly how you phrase these things. So even though I don't do things like this (they make me feel like I'm trying to be a trendy young person), I'll do this one because the answer to it provokes a sort of funny story:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next three sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
6. Tag five other people to do the same.

"Call Lionel, over at the Times, and tell him his press privileges have been revoked. I didn't appreciate his little comment about my earrings. Questions?"

Not a particularly exciting three sentences, sadly - if we'd gone a few sentences further you could have read "What the--?" "Leave the lights off." "Gasp!", which gives a bit more of a clue to what the book is - only in comics do people say "gasp". It's from "Blood and Water", the fourth compilation volume of "Noble Causes", the comic by Jay Faerber. It doesn't have page numbers, so I hope you appreciate the effort it took to count 23 pages into it (when I run out of fingers and toes I tend to run into difficulty).

Jay Faerber is an American comic writer who I have a bit of a complex about. Back in the distant dark ages when I first bought a computer and started discovering the wonders the internet had to offer, I commented on a newsgroup about the upcoming second volume of New Warriors. I was a huge fan of the original New Warriors series until it was cancelled, and I was decidedly unimpressed by the previews of the sequel. I said as much on the newsgroup, and observed that Marvel Comics obviously didn't care about the New Warriors and their small but loyal fanbase, since although they had finally decided to relaunch the series, they'd done so with very little publicity, downright bad artwork, a change in tone to more light-hearted adventure with few of the original characters, and a second-rate writer in Jay Faerber. I was horrified to find that Jay Faerber himself replied to my comments, taking exception to the description. This was the first time I realised that talking about comics on an internet newsgroup was a bit more public than talking with friends in my house. It really hadn't occurred to me that I could bad-mouth someone on the internet and the person in question might actually hear about it.

So ever since then, not only have I been a little more careful to keep my opinion of comic book writers I dislike to myself, but I've gone to great lengths to pretend that I really, really like Jay Faerber's writing, so as to make up for my faux pas. This has been quite difficult at times - New Warriors volume 2 really wasn't very good, and was cancelled after ten issues. Volume 3, by someone else, was much, much worse, so I have high hopes for the upcoming volume 4. Anyway, after years of generally not reading anything by Faerber so I didn't have to say it was brilliant, I just recently decided to try "Noble Causes", his series about a family of superheroes. Flicking through the first collected volume in the shop, I was hooked. By the time I'd bought and read the first two volumes, I was positively ecstatic. Not only is Noble Causes quite genuinely and honestly great, it's by Jay Faerber! I really like something by Jay Faerber! I felt like I'd laid some ghosts to rest and could praise him to the skies without knowing that I was just doing it because I was rude about him eight years ago.

So just last week I bought volumes three and four, and... they're not as good. Volume 4 particularly so. I was quite disappointed, in fact. The story shifts towards more traditional superhero adventures and it's rather more insubstantial and less intelligent than the first two volumes. The artist of "Blood and Water", Fran Bueno, is a step down in quality from his predecessors. All in all, I feel let down after that brief burst of euphoria. And the fact that I haven't yet put the book away, coupled with this "tagging" thing, just brings all these conflicting emotions to the surface.

Well, enough. From now on, I resolve to not only buy more Jay Faerber stuff, in the expectation that I really will like some of it, I won't go out of my way to pretend I like the rest of it when I don't. Honesty is the best policy. I'm sure he's long forgotten the whole second-rate-writer episode anyway, so perhaps I should too.

Ooh, unless he reads this....