BOOyeah!

"Booyeah" isn't a word I normally use, but I did find a good excuse to use it yesterday. The UK Open Memory Championship was great fun - what it lacked in competitors it more than made up for in entertainment value.

There turned out to be five of us taking part - me, James Ponder and James Kemp from Britain, Boris Konrad from Germany and Tomasz Krasinski from Poland. Idriz Zogaj was planning to come from Sweden, but didn't turn up, and there was a mystery new competitor who registered the day before but then changed her mind again at the last minute. So our five desks seemed a bit lonely in the middle of the very nice main hall in the very nice Severn Centre in Highley.

The Severn Centre is a bit of a mystery - it's a HUGE sports/leisure/everything else centre (it also contains a library and a police station and probably a small zoo somewhere among the masses of tennis courts, playgrounds, fields, badminton courts, large cafeteria and bar etc etc) in a village that, although apparently the largest village in Shropshire, is still a village. It's not a huge place, and you could probably fit the whole population of Highley into the Severn Centre without an overcrowding problem. But the facilities there were more than top-notch. We need to make memory competitions there a regular feature, however impossible to reach by public transport the place is. Hold the world championships there some time, and we'll car-pool.

Things went more or less well for me. I got quite respectable scores in nine disciplines out of ten, and the speed numbers wasn't my fault (this means it was my fault, but I'm making excuses) - the camera crew made a loud clanking noise early on in the memorisation time, just as I was fiercely concentrating and that put me in a bad mood throughout the five minutes, so that every muffled noise or movement seen out of the corner of my eye infuriated and distracted me. I had no end of gaps in the recall and ended up with one complete row and one row a bit further down (I think it was the fourth) with the only gap being the last four digits. So I crossed out everything below that and settled for a woeful score of 76.

In everything else, though, I was satisfied. I was generally a way below the scores I'd been getting in practice, with a slightly slower memorising speed than I'd expected, and a less efficient recall, but I was still getting scores that were more than acceptable. From memory, a decent 70 in five-minute words, a slightly-better-than-my-old-world-record 795 in five-minute binary, a thoroughly excellent 52.5 in five-min names and faces (I'm definitely getting better at that), 615 or so in fifteen-minute numbers, five packs in ten-minute cards, 99 in abstract images (getting there with that one, too, slowly), 84 in historic dates and 95 in spoken numbers. All of those, names and images aside, are scores that I know I can improve on, but which are more than enough to satisfy me, especially in my first competition for seven or eight months.

As for speed cards, well, that's the fun one. I was about 2000 points clear of Boris by that point, so no need to go for a safe first time. I decided to go all-out for that fabled 30-second barrier. The first time through, it didn't go so well, there were three or four images that didn't come instantly to mind and I had to drag them out of my brain kicking and screaming. The time was 29.16, but the recall was unexpectedly dreadful, and I didn't come anywhere close to getting it right.

So, second attempt, TV cameras on me, local newspaper reporter hanging around, Phil Chambers sitting to my right, Dominic O'Brien keeping an eye on me from across the room, last chance to break the record, and my brain obviously not fully up to speed, I didn't expect wonders. I sort of blanked my mind out, thought to myself "Come on, let's show them what I can do!" in a silly, macho style, giggled at myself silently, and started to memorise. "That's more like it!" I thought, realising I was seeing the images much more clearly. I focused on what I was doing, getting a good feeling all the way, and stopped the timer. 26.28 seconds. Damn, that would be something, I thought. That gave me four and a half minutes to sit and think before I could recall anything - running through the journey in my brain, I had the first three locations all there, just the first image of the fourth, all present and correct for the fifth and sixth, then a big gap and then the ninth location all present and correct. Drat, I thought, must have lost concentration towards the end there. Maybe I can work them out when I get to look at the unshuffled deck. That makes 16 cards I can't place, I've rescued packs with worse.

Then my mind wandered to other things, and suddenly locations seven and eight popped merrily back into my brain - tiny bit of doubt about the exact identity and order of the images at location eight, but not enough to worry me. By recall time, I was quietly confident. I worked out what the final two missing images were, sat indecisively for a moment trying to remember the order, and finally made an educated guess that I was about 90% sure of. Then I had to wait another two and a half minutes for the recall time to end before I could check them with Phil (and an interested crowd who had gathered to watch). Sure enough, they all came out correct, and I saw fit to shout "BOOyeah!", just to alert anyone who hadn't noticed that something interesting had happened.

That capped off a definitely enjoyable day. 26.28 - I'd like to see Andi beat THAT! Everyone involved has my deepest gratitude - Phil organised the tournament impeccably, as usual, assisted ably by Gaby Kappus and others. Everything worked the way it was supposed to, even the spoken numbers (more or less), we weren't more than half an hour behind schedule. Tony Buzan paid a flying visit before dashing off to see a sheikh from Bahrain, told us the story about how scientists once said that nobody would ever memorise a 30-digit spoken number (as I'd told the camera crew he would - I'm a psychic, aided by the fact that he says the same thing at every memory competition) and the one about his university teacher who memorised all the class's details (I hadn't heard that one before, but it's in at least two of his books). He also orchestrated a phone call to Jennifer over at the Australian championships in Melbourne (Simon Orton won, brilliantly) and generally inspired everyone with his unfailing enthusiasm for the world of memory. Dominic came by in the afternoon and did the same (in a slightly more low-key way), including very kindly describing me as the reason he isn't competing. He also said that he's working on training again, he's got a new system that he's breaking in, and while he won't be competing in Bahrain, he's 70% sure he'll take part in 2008. Which will be great.

But 26.28, baby. Booyeah.

I also wrote a pen-and-paper blog on Friday night, and when I find it, I'll probably transcribe it for the world to read. It's mostly about an anecdote told to me by a taxi driver, but you'll still want to see it, I'm sure.

Too much TV is bad for you

I've spent most of the day being filmed, and then tomorrow there's more to come. It's tiring! TV stars possibly don't entirely live a life of luxury after all. Anyway, this may be my last entry before the competition on Saturday (travelling down there tomorrow, and I probably won't have internet access there), so I'll have to take a few days off from bloggery. Wish me luck!

Not again!

It occurred to me this morning that I'm not going to have a chance to go somewhere and aimlessly wander around the shops for at least four days after today, so I decided to go to Sheffield on the train. I know that's not a great excuse, since I quite often go more than four days without wandering around shops, but never mind. However, the train was stuck in the middle of nowhere just outside Chesterfield for forty minutes, because the train in front had hit someone. I think I've mentioned on my blog before that I have a habit of being on trains delayed by fatalities on the line. It's starting to get worrying.

Everyone else on the train needed to call at least three people on their mobiles to explain why they were going to be late. The man behind me joked repeatedly that they'd have to wait for a health and safety man to drive up from Grimsby. After he'd finished the job he was on at the moment. If I was the social-commentator/stand-up-comedian type like he obviously feels he is, I would have varied the place the health and safety man was coming from, but perhaps he thought Grimsby is so naturally hilarious the joke bore repeating word-for-word to everyone he told it to.

Meanwhile, look at this:



...and tell me the answer. And not just the answer, a good reason WHY it's the answer. My feeling is number 5, and I've got a half-decent explanation for it, but it's not terribly convincing. It comes from a Swedish magazine IQ test that Göran Andersson and his poker buddies have been racking their brains over.

Tired of being worried about Ray

A major turning point in my brain - until today, I couldn't hum "Worried About Ray" by the Hoosiers without it turning into "Happy Together" by the Turtles (from which they stole the tune). Then I heard "Worried About Ray" this morning and a bit later on found that I couldn't hum "Happy Together" any more without it turning into "Worried About Ray". Quite disturbing, really.

Anyway, I've done my last bit of practice today before Saturday's competition, probably. I think I'm now at a point where I should avoid thinking about memory for a few days, just to help clear my mind. I might do a few quick cards practices on Friday night or Saturday morning, just to get me back in the right mood, although I'm never sure if that's a help or a hindrance. Two days now of proper job hunting - scouring the internet all over the country for people looking for part-qualified management accountants, memory champions and complete weirdos preferred. I quite fancy finding a nice job in a whole new city and relocating, actually, it'd be a bit of an adventure.

Oh, and also I'll be being filmed for this documentary, and talking to Radio 4 about appearing (does it count as 'appearing' if it's on the radio?) on Saturday Live. I also had a phone call yesterday from the executive producer of Child Of Our Time - apparently a transcription of my burblings on there, plus a photo of me, is going in a new book of the series. Fame! Fortune! Celebrity!

Forgive the lack of content, couldn't think what to write about tonight.

'Ropes' entered the room through the front door, and found Gordon and Borstal arguing loudly.

"It's a plum!" screamed Gordon.

"It's a bloody nectarine!" Borstal yelled back.

"It's a large plum! Any fool can see that!"

"It's a nectarine! I've never heard of anyone who can't tell the difference between plums and nectarines!"

"Nor had I until this moment! Now unless you concede that it's a plum, I'm going to give you a thick ear!"

'Ropes' decided this was a good moment to intercede. "Fellows," he said, although Gordon and Borstal were both female, "I can see what's happening here. You're both hallucinating and each imagine that you're seeing a slightly different kind of fruit. In fact, there's nothing there at all."

"Oh," said Gordon, calming down. "That does explain a lot. So who are you, anyway?"

"I'm 'Ropes', and this is my house," said 'Ropes'.

"No, this is my house," said Borstal. "Perhaps you're hallucinating and seeing your house instead of mine?"

"I suppose that would explain why my house is in a different town to the one it was in this morning," conceded 'Ropes', sitting down in an armchair. "What's on telly?"

"A programme about Greek table tennis stars," said Gordon, sitting down in the same armchair, with some difficulty. "There's no way to change the channel on this kind of television, so that's the only thing we can watch."

Borstal picked up a hammer and started smashing the coffee table to pieces.

"Perhaps we could listen to the radio instead?" 'Ropes' suggested.

"Nothing on it but the same programme about Greek table tennis stars, only without pictures," said Gordon, quite loudly so as to be heard over the sounds of hammering and splintering wood.

"Still sounds better than the telly," said 'Ropes', going over to the washing machine and turning it on.

"That's the toaster," said Gordon. "You're hallucinating and believe it to be the radio."

"Why do they call you 'Ropes'?" asked Borstal, suddenly. "Is it because you're not a human being, but a collection of ropes knotted together and able to move around and talk by some means beyond my understanding?"

"No, that's just a funny coincidence," said 'Ropes'. "They started calling me 'Ropes' before they'd seen what I'm composed of, and still assumed me to be a human being. I acquired the nickname because of sausages."

"Oh, the coffee table's broken!" Borstal lamented. "I was going to put coffee on it!"

"There's no such thing as coffee," said Gordon. "You must have hallucinated it."

Bad omens

Roger Federer reminds me of Clemens Mayer - they look quite similar, if you half-close your eyes (well, three-quarters close them, maybe), and they always win. Rafael Nadal, on the other hand, has long hair and therefore looks like I would if nature had been a bit more fair in its follicle distribution. So I was rather hoping for an upset, but no such luck. Another reason I might not win the world memory championship this year is that I haven't done any practice this weekend. My motivation seems to come and go, and it's well and truly gone just lately. Hopefully I'll get back into it over the next couple of days. It's not like the UK championship is real preparation for the WMC, but if I don't win it I'll be all annoyed with myself (unless I lose it and still beat all my records - actually, that would be even better, because it would force me to get even better over the next couple of months!)

But hey, for the benefit of those who don't care about memory stuff, look at this!

This, you see, is what my comic character would look like if I was a real artist! Drawn by the incomparable Munkart, who's not only the world's greatest creator of Chip n Dale Rescue Rangers fanart (a much more hotly contested title than you might think), but also a really nice guy. There are very few people in the world I admire enough that I would ask them to draw me as a squirrel, and even fewer people who on being asked such a thing would actually do it, rather than shipping me off to the nearest loony bin. Isn't it great?

Fix! Fix!

I bought a lottery ticket today, which I don't normally do (I was feeling a bit depressed, and thought that since money is the secret to true happiness, a lottery win would solve all my problems), so I watched the lottery numbers being drawn on BBC2 tonight after the tennis. And I noticed that while there were references to the tennis, the fact that they were running late, and a couple of time checks, these were all spoken by the voice-over guy. Tim Vincent and the people on screen didn't say or do anything that they couldn't have said or done if the show had been taped a week ago! I sense a conspiracy theory. I bet they tape fourteen million different shows for every week, one with each combination of numbers, and then broadcast the one that guarantees the most profit for Camelot. It's disgraceful.

Actually, it would be a lot more than fourteen million, because there's the bonus ball, too. 686 million, by my mental calculation. Still, Tim Vincent hasn't been on TV for years, he's had plenty of time for all that filming. And the guy with the white gloves is a robot, so he wouldn't have a problem.

Still, the tennis was fun, and almost certainly not rigged by sinister gambling syndicates. I've been cheering for Venus Williams all the way through the last fortnight, so if only I'd thought to mention it on this blog, I could be boasting about how right I was all along right now. Note to self, always write everything down. It's the only way to beat the government/alien/freemason conspiracy. I'm not paranoid, everyone really is out to get me.

Tut tut

It's just occurred to me that I really should book flights and accommodation for the German Memory Championship in three weeks' time, in Tuttlingen. A quick internet check suggests that there is exactly one hotel in the town, and no way to book a room online. Wonderful. You know, I miss the days when people would organise memory championships in some place other than the heart of a vast uncharted desert, five thousand miles from the nearest reliable public transport and ten squillion miles from the nearest internet-accessible hotel. Once upon a time, they even held these competitions IN hotels! See, that's convenient.

Of course, I shouldn't complain too much. Phil has, after all, booked me a hotel within hitch-hiking distance of Highley, and I'm sure I could just ask any one of half a dozen obliging Germans to find me a room somewhere close to Tuttlingen if I can't manage it myself. But still, it's fun to complain from time to time. Incidentally, my Cambridge championship was equally inaccessible, being a long way out of town, and starting on a Sunday morning before the buses start running. Maybe I set a precedent and everyone decided to copy me?

It's all about the money, it's all about the dum dum dada dum dum

I turned down a job offer today on purely financial grounds. I feel like such a money-obsessed miser. Well, mostly financial grounds, anyway - it was a temp job with the prospect of applying for the role permanently after six weeks, in Nottingham, and the job description made it sound good, but the pay was dreadful. Two-thirds of what I was getting in my previous job. And in all fairness, I can't believe it was as good a job as it sounded if they were only paying that amount - nobody with my qualifications would touch that with a bargepole. But I still feel bad about it.

But hey, there'll be other job offers (though probably not through SF Group, because agencies don't like it when you turn them down like that), and I really do want to make sure I pick something that I can stay at for a long time, until I become an institution in the office. A well-paid part of the furniture.

We could be Heroes

The TV series, Heroes, is really much better than it has any right to be. I love it to bits! They really have taken comic book superheroes and turned it into a proper adult drama series. I wouldn't have believed it possible, but I'm still watching it and I haven't forgotten it was on once (although that's made easier by the way the SciFi Channel shows each episode three or four times a week - I usually forget it on Mondays, but catch the Wednesday showing). Save the cheerleader, save the world! If you haven't seen it, and if it's possible to buy it on DVD, then you should. Even if you don't like superheroes.

Sorry I haven't got anything more, well, interesting to say tonight, but I'm fresh out of ideas. Ooh, did I mention I did 25.88 seconds on the cards the other night? Gradually, glacially, getting there. The only trouble is doing it in competition - I seem to be making a lot of mistakes in recall, going at that speed. And getting one in three packs correct isn't a lot of use at the world championships. Still, we'll see what happens...

Blasted Virgin Media

I bought a book about Jack the Ripper at the weekend, which makes entertaining reading. It's not really my kind of thing, normally, but I'd been re-reading Alan Moore's "From Hell" and wanted to know some more of the facts behind it. And this book, which is called "Jack the Ripper: The Facts", seemed like it would probably fit the bill. So now that I'm in a ripperological mood, I noticed tonight in the Radio Times that there's a programme on called "Vic Reeves investigates Jack the Ripper". Well, great, I thought. Vic Reeves is funny and Jack the Ripper is on my mind, I'll watch that. But then I noticed it's on Sky, and Virgin Media stopped carrying Sky several months ago. This is the first time it's really annoyed me. Although the Radio Times review calls it 'workmanlike', and Vic is never much good when he's not doing his own surreal material, so it probably wouldn't have been worth watching anyway.

I suppose I could watch "The Thick Of It" on BBC4 instead. The Radio Times says it's the funniest thing since Fawlty Towers, which is the kind of praise that's only going to leave you disappointed however good it is. And it's Alison Graham who's saying that, and I never like what she likes. But then again, if I'm going to judge everything on TV like this without seeing it, I'll never turn it on again. Actually, that would probably be a good thing. Opium of the masses, and all that. I could become one of those people who listen to the radio and have an ancient black and white portable TV for watching occasional nature documentaries.

Potters Bar

Ah, the Mind Sports Olympiad returns! I got the schedule and entry form in the post today. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to bother with it this year, though. All the really fun events either aren't there any more or have been shrunk down to nearly nothing. Othello is only one little 15-minute tournament, taking up 3½ hours, for which anyone who wants to just play in that will have to pay £12. What would be good there, actually, would be a memory competition. It'd be great if there was a full world-championship-standard event, for people who can't get to Bahrain a couple of weeks later. I wonder if I could organise one, if I could get a gang of people to help?

I'm great! Sort of.

I did 1224 in 30-minute numbers today, and possibly 18 packs in 30-minute cards (I couldn't be bothered to check them, but I'm pretty confident what I wrote down was all correct. Allowing for a few stupid mistakes here and there, it should still beat the world record). This is great, obviously, but on the other hand I first tried to do a 30-minute numbers this morning and gave up on it after a minute or so twice in succession, because I wasn't really in the right kind of mood. I didn't feel like the big practice session I was meaning to do today until five o'clock. That's not the kind of attitude that would get you very far in a real competition. But then again, I've never not been in the memorising mood at a competition - it happens here at home quite a lot, but when I'm there, I think the atmosphere and the adrenaline gets me all hyped up. So I probably haven't got anything to worry about. I didn't have time to do the 30-minute binary practice I was intending to do, but that one wasn't so important - I already know how many digits I can go for on that in Tuttlingen. Could probably do with one more practice session before the championship, though, to keep me at match fitness, so to speak.

But now I can concentrate on the short little disciplines of the Highley championship (less than two weeks away!). Still need to firmly decide how much to go for in 15-minute numbers - four journeys feels right, but I need a practice run or two to make sure.

I'm also officially good at othello again - I was up to my usual mediocre standard in the kurnik tournament last night. It's strange how my abilities seem to fluctuate like that. Ooh, and I also haven't mentioned here yet that I did decide to leave my temp job - I'm finishing at the end of the week. Then I'm going to throw myself into finding a real, permanent position, and choose carefully so I end up with one that I can work at for the next couple of decades quite happily. I'm fed up with chopping and changing jobs, I need stability and boringness.

Doctor, doctor, I'm feeling a little hoarse

I've got a sore throat from talking too much. This is what happens when I get chatting about memory to someone who knows nothing about it but is keen to learn. Actually, the most fun idea to come from talking to director Nick was the suggestion that we could come up with Team Britain shirts for the UK and world championships. Wouldn't that be cool? We could compete with all those Germans in their MemoryXL T-shirts!

Aren't you him off the telly?

Nobody has ever said that to me on the street. I wish they would. Well, I did use to get "Hey, it's Adrian Mole!" shouted at me when I was younger and had hair and no beard, but that's not the kind of thing I'm looking for. But, as I mentioned, the channel 5 documentary is definitely all systems go, and the director is coming round here tomorrow afternoon, so maybe in a few months' time I'll be able to deny being that weird memory guy when total strangers ask me if I'm him. Since my phone's still broken (repair man coming on Monday), I've been arranging things by email, which is probably a recipe for disaster, because he'll get lost on his way here and won't be able to call me. But never mind, what annoys me more is that I'll have to spend the morning tidying up my flat to improve its status from 'filthy' to 'eccentrically untidy'. I hate cleaning.

I also need to establish who Dave is. Ravinder, the, um, person in charge of the project (I'm not sure if he's a producer or something else) told me he'd found a director for the film, and then I got an email from this Dave person talking about working with me on it and sounding very directorial. But then he told me he'd passed my details onto the director, Nick, who's coming to see me. So I have no idea what purpose Dave serves in the whole food chain. It all seems very complicated.

I also want to spend a lot of weekend time practicing for the upcoming competitions, so I'd rather not spend too much time in front of the cameras. Some time this weekend or next, I need to do a half-hour binary, half-hour cards and half-hour numbers, all in the space of six hours, like you have to do on the first day of the German championship, so I can fix in my mind exactly what I'm going to attempt there. I don't want to do that the weekend before Germany (which is the weekend after Highley), because memorising so much in a short space of time sort of makes your brain blow up, and I wouldn't be fully recovered by the day of the championship. And I also want to do a last full practice run of the UK championship next weekend, spread over two days so as not to destroy too many brain cells. You know, in many ways, planning memory training is even more fun than actually doing it. I'm weird.

Stop the presses

Until ten minutes ago, I had a definite plan for this blog entry. In fact, I had the whole thing just about written in my head, and I was just waiting till I'd finished the othello tournament on kurnik to type it out. It was going to be about how for the last month or so, I've been really, really terrible at playing othello. I keep losing games stupidly, and basically seem to have forgotten how to play. But then after a tournament with lots of examples of that, I won my last two games in ways that I thought were rather clever, so that rather scuppers my plans to lament about my inabilities.

I suppose I could talk about how great I am, but that would be pushing it a bit. And anyway, I do that practically every day. No, tell you what, here's a subject - I saw an advert on telly the other day for a thing you put into your washing machine to stop colours running. Or rather, and I have no idea how this is supposed to work, to soak up all the running colours so that they don't dye your other clothes accidentally. Since all my clothes are a dingy shade of grey thanks to some black socks and my inability to sort them out from my whites, this is an invention that appeals to me. But their slogan at the end of the advert, displaying this little white sheet of whatever-it-is now a pink colour, is "the proof's on the sheet!" (or words to that effect). How in the name of sanity is that supposed to be impressive? I could get any old bit of white fabric, stick it in the wash with my socks and demonstrate that it's changed colour. That's what running colours do! I ask you. Pfah. Go along with you. The world is full of fools.

Everything I had to know, I heard it on my radio

Ah, now I'm really in the memory-championship-season mood! Radio 4 want to interview me! I assume it's because they know the UK championship is only a fortnight away, although it might be that they stumbled across my name somewhere and haven't the faintest idea. They asked the Alzheimer's Society for my details, which seems to be a popular way of getting in touch with me for BBC radio these days. You'd think they'd know my contact details already, anyway - I turned them down for an interview a few years ago (I had to work that day) and then more recently they turned me down for one, having originally planned to talk to me but then decided James would be more interesting (can't really argue with that).

Hopefully this one will actually happen - it's a good time for a bit of publicity, it might just help with Team Britain's efforts to get someone to pay for our plane tickets to Bahrain. Not to mention the possibility of getting a few more British people interested in competitive memory - I'm still determined to outnumber the Germans one of these days. Oh, and I nearly forgot, Ravinder's documentary is definitely going ahead, there's a director eager to, um, direct me who I need to get in touch with (they tried to call me, but my phone's still dead - repair man coming on Monday evening). Ah, fame and fortune. If only I could do this all year round. And if only some of these people would pay me. And if only I had a stunt double who could go and pretend to be me and do the interviews when I don't feel like it.

That's very personal!

I really can't think of anything to write about. Or rather, I can, but the one observation I want to make is an extremely rude and offensive and unnecessary comment about the appearance of a famous tennis player, and I like to think I'm above that kind of thing.

Anyway, I always preferred playing badminton, back in the days when I was almost capable of playing any kind of active game. I don't see why nobody watches badminton and everyone turns out in the rain for two weeks every year in the hope of seeing a couple of minutes of tennis between downpours at Wimbledon. They're essentially the same game, after all. I think the badminton authorities just need to get some PR guru to help them out and make the game more popular with the masses.

I was actually quite good at badminton. At least, that's my recollection. I wasn't terrible, anyway.

Do you want the good news or the bad news?

By which I mean that I've got several things I want to grumble about, and also something to enthuse about that I think is just great. I'll start with the grumbles, because nobody wants to end with a downer.

My phone's not working. I'm trying to cast my mind back to remember when I last used it - I know I unplugged it at the weekend while I was memorising, but I didn't pick it up and hear a dialtone before or after doing so. And yes, I did plug it back in again. I probably had a call some time last week from Hays the accountancy agency, but then again perhaps I didn't, since they mostly email me like I always ask people to do. It might have been not working for a week or so, at a pinch. So if anyone has tried to call me, sorry. But if you did, why didn't you email me? You know I prefer emails. You've only got yourself to blame.

I noticed the phone wasn't working when I tried to call in sick for work today. I've either got the mythical kind of stomach bug that people claim to have when they want a day off work, or food poisoning. I'm feeling better now, but I was decidedly indisposed this morning, ever since waking up at half past five.

Still, at least that meant not having to cycle to work in the atrocious weather. It's blowing a gale out there and it's been pouring down most of the day. All in all, today has been out to get me. It's just plain picking on me, is what it is, and I need a cuddle.

But on the other hand, Simon Reinhard won the South German Memory Championship, beating Clemens into second place! This is great, because it's the first time Clemens has been beaten since about 1736, and I think all of us (possibly excepting Clemens himself) were getting a bit bored with it. Even though it was a competition with only three quick "technique" memory disciplines (four if you count historic dates, which I normally don't), Simon has clearly been practicing - he got a 320 in speed numbers, which is fantastic, and without looking it up possibly better than anyone other than me has ever done before. (Just had to get a plug in for my own abilities there, I feel better now, thanks).

So it's going to be fun to see what happens in terms of the big German championship in a month's time. With any luck there'll be a battle royal between Simon, Clemens, Gunther, Boris, Cornelia and many more - hopefully Clemens will be all fired up and determined to get back on top, because I've been worried that he'd suffer the same been-there-done-that lack of motivation that I did, and I'd end up finally beating him when he was somewhere short of his best. Which would be much less fun than beating him when he's better than ever. Ooh, even though I didn't go to Munich, it's put me in memory-championship mood! Roll on Bastille Day!

Is it me, or

... has it started raining all the time just when I've started having to cycle to and from work on a daily basis? Actually, that's one of at least two reasons why I'm regretting taking the temp job. For another, it gets in the way of looking for something permanent - I've never had a temporary position before without the prospect of it becoming a long-term thing, and it's inconvenient when it comes to interviews and things. I know I wanted to get back to working fast, but it was a bit silly to go and take this one, I think. Still, I'm not sure whether to quit (which would probably look bad) or carry on and assume I'll still be able to find a real job (it doesn't really take that much effort).

Highley memorable

I haven't really hyped the UK Memory Championship here before, as far as I can remember, and today seems like a good time, since Phil's just announced the prizes they 'hope' to provide. It's in Highley, Shropshire, and I'm still not entirely sure where that is. But I was hoping to go there on the Severn Valley Railway (I did miss going to the Butterley steam railway place on father's day this year), only to find it's been washed away in the floods the other day. I'm not sure if that's a bad omen or not. Anyway, the first prize is flights, accommodation and entry to the WMC in Bahrain, which is nice. I did say a while ago that if I ended up with a free trip I'd give it to someone else, if I had the money to pay my own way, so if I do end up winning, I'll check my bank balance and see what I can do. There's a bottle of champagne for the winner too! I don't like champagne, but I've always wanted to spray it around in celebration. Hopefully I'll get the chance. July 14th, mark it in your calendars!

Bill Mantlo

If you happen to be passing a comic shop this weekend, go in and pick up a copy of Mantlo: A Life In Comics. It's a magazine/book/something all about Bill Mantlo, one of my all-time favourite writers of superhero comics. Even if you're not a fan, buying the book is a good thing - Mantlo was knocked down and nearly killed by a hit-and-run driver fifteen years ago, suffered permanent brain damage and all the proceeds from the book are going to the costs of his care.

Bill Mantlo, if you look at his work objectively, was never the greatest writer in the world. His dialogue is much too long-winded and stilted, and his stories are often more miserable and depressing than most people are happy with. Characters, when they're not being summarily killed off, will often spend pages lamenting about their own shortcomings and anxieties. None of the comics he wrote is hailed today as a landmark in the history of superheroics. But what he did do is write a heck of a lot - nowadays when a writer misses his deadline, the comic just comes out late. The publishers don't seem to care any more. In the seventies and eighties, if a Marvel writer didn't turn in a script on time, the editor called Bill Mantlo. He seemed to have an endless capacity for producing superhero stories that were always readable, and often exciting, funny and clever too. And his run on Alpha Flight was something that really struck a chord with me and played a big part in making me a comic fan today.

Picture the scene - it's the late eighties, or early nineties, I can't remember exactly which, I'm a young teenager and my comic experience has been limited to Transformers and whatever series had been the backup strip in Transformers. And a Spider-Man annual or summer special here and there. One day in WH Smith I found one of the paperback collections of the Marvel Universe handbooks, profiles of Marvel's characters from the Abomination to the Circus of Crime (it was only volume 1). Alpha Flight were in it, and they sounded like fun. A bit later, I can't remember exactly how or why, I ended up with a catalogue from the Nostalgia and Comics shop in Birmingham (or somewhere like that) and decided to order the latest issue of Alpha Flight, to see what it was like.

Actually, I didn't like it all that much. It was the penultimate issue of Fabian Nicieza's run, and that was the kind of comic you really had to sit down and study to make any sense of. Or I did, anyway. But I could see it had potential, stuck with it, and kept with it through the start of Scott Lobdell's run, which was a completely different style, still not a classic, but again compelling to a superhero-comic-newcomer. But after a year or so of this, I discovered the existence of back issues, and the wonders of the Bill Mantlo issues of Alpha Flight. And THAT was the kind of thing I'd been looking for!

For a couple of years, my aim in life was to collect the entirety of Mantlo's run on Alpha Flight - thirty-something issues of death, misery, characters recapping the events of the last twenty issues every time they opened their mouths and un-put-downably compelling stories. Yes, I also liked John Byrne's acclaimed original run on the series, but Mantlo's stories struck a chord with teenage me like nothing ever before. I got my brother reading and collecting them too, forced them on my best friend in return for having Judge Dredd forced on me, read them out of sequence, one or two at a time with months in between. I liked them a lot.

So this book describes a pretty significant person in my life. He wrote a lot of other great stuff, as I've discovered since - Spider-Man, Micronauts, Cloak and Dagger, many many more. A lot of them are long out of print and never collected, but I'm hopeful that one day we'll see a lot more graphic novels of his classic works. When it comes to people I admire in comics, the five people I wouldn't be the same without are Simon Furman for those wonderful Transformers comics that hooked me since the age of eight, Tony Isabella for an obscure Marvel Team-Up comic that found its way into a Spidey summer special and showed me that superhero comics could be something very much more than hero-fights-villain (it chronicled the supervillain Blacklash suffering a nervous breakdown), Kurt Busiek for dragging me back into comics in the late nineties when Alpha Flight had been cancelled and I'd given up on finding a new series that wasn't terrible, Alan Moore for just writing such amazingly, staggeringly good comics, and Bill Mantlo for those thirty-odd issues of Alpha Flight. Go out there and check it out!

No, I don't think I will

I think I'd be better off not splashing out on two German trips in two months, all in all. I'll stay at home this weekend and practice for the UK championship (three weeks and a bit to go! Woo! Even though I still don't really like the one-day events!).

Late

Sorry I didn’t post anything last night, I had a headache and went for a lie down at around eight o’clock, and didn’t wake up till two in the morning. And at that point there wasn’t much motivation to get up just to write a blog entry. I tell you, working for a living is much more tiring than sitting at home on one’s fat backside all day. Who would have thought it? So as a bonus, I’m writing from the office on my lunch break.

Anyway, I still haven’t decided whether to go to Germany for Sunday’s competition. On the one hand, I can’t really claim it would be good practice for the bigger championships coming up next month – it’s just speed numbers, speed binary and speed cards plus four disciplines in German – but it’s still a fun social thing, getting to hang out with the German memory contingent and see what everybody’s up to nowadays. Although I’ll get to do that on a bigger scale anyway in a month at the German national championship.

I don’t have a problem justifying to myself the expense of travelling to Munich for a weekend just to hang out with German memorisers for a day – I probably should, but I’ve got seriously reckless when it comes to spending my non-hard-earned cash these last few months. The main reason not to go is work, because I’ve only been here a week, I’ve already taken an afternoon off to go to an interview for a better job (and I feel terribly guilty about that), and I feel like I should at least try to give the impression that I’m taking the job seriously.

Hmm, sitting here typing this right now, that doesn’t seem like a compelling reason not to go. Well, I’ll think about it and make up my mind tonight. Assuming I manage to do my regularly scheduled blog post, maybe I’ll even tell you about it.

Why don't you get a job?

Thanks to the people who were going to remind me about the interview tomorrow, but I forgot to tell you that they changed it and made it today instead. It was funny - I knew it was in the same business park as Nord Anglia where I used to work, but I didn't realise it was in what used to be their Leapfrog nurseries head office before they closed it down and moved it all into the new place! I've been in that building plenty of times while they were still gradually relocating! In fact, when I got that job I had my interview in that very building (but not in the same room, which I was kind of hoping for).

Anyway, I think it more or less went well. They're interviewing loads and loads of people, according to the agency, but I seemed to make a good impression on the guys who were interviewing me. Or at least at the end of the interview they were still taking in ways that suggested they hadn't written me off as completely unsuitable. Although they mentioned (without being asked, I'm not that bad at interviews) that the work hours are 8:45 to 6:00, which seems a bit long. And it's only 20 days holiday a year, when 25 is normal for that kind of position. Still, perhaps I shouldn't complain about the job before I've even got on the second-interview shortlist. And it's still a great job, I'd be in charge of the whole accounts department, involved with every aspect of the bean-counting business, with three, count 'em, three underlings, and reporting directly to the really big bosses. So I still want it.

I probably won't get it, though.

To all the anonymice out there

I'm fairly certain the plural of anonymous is anonymice. 'Anonymouses' doesn't look right. Anyway, I seem to be getting quite a few comments on the blog just lately, which is great - there was a period when nobody was commenting at all, which makes me feel alone and unloved - but I would appreciate it if you'd put your name on the comments when you do! You don't have to use your real name if for some reason you don't want me to know who you are, just pick an alias and use it consistently. That way when I read my comments I can think to myself "ah, that Herbert Etheridge and his habit of mis-spelling the word 'a' every time he uses it...", rather than just feeling like I'm being shouted at by some unseen stranger in the shadows. I see the Zoomy's-Thing-comment-posting community as a friendly, social kind of gathering where everybody knows your name and we're all friends.

Of course, I would probably get more friendly comments if I made the kind of blog post with some kind of interesting and informative content, wouldn't I? Well, maybe tomorrow.

Aww, Sundays suck again

I'd forgotten that 'oh, I've got to go back to the office tomorrow morning' feeling that comes up on Sunday nights. That's the thing about weekends being special, it also means that they end. And I didn't get round to typing up my othello transcripts. Or ironing shirts.

Anyway I find myself without anything fun in my brain to write about tonight. So I'll just discuss the memory training I'm doing at the moment. The plan, and I've more or less stuck to it so far, is to do a speed numbers practice when I get home every evening, trying to memorise 468 digits in five minutes with somewhere close to good recall. I think I'm getting closer, but whether I'll be confident with it before the world championship, I don't know. I also do three packs of cards in an evening, and then if I'm not bored with memory, a bit of spoken numbers. I should really add binaries to the list too, but I do like to do other stuff with my evenings too.

Which reminds me, the South German championship is on Sunday and I still haven't decided whether to go or not. It does mean taking the day off work, and I don't get paid for days off on my temp contract, but then I don't really care about getting paid anyway. I think I'll see how this interview goes on Wednesday and then decide at the last moment.

Well, so much for Greece

Even though my chances of winning the BGP at the London regional today were strictly mathematical, what with there being so many good players at this one, I still played badly enough to demonstrate beyond doubt that I don't deserve to play in the world championship. Still, it was a fun day. The venue was a pub called the Bath House, just off Oxford Street and thus in the only part of London that I can find my way around without getting lost. It's another of those pubs with a history that boasts about it, although the fact that Karl Marx lived down the road doesn't strike me as particularly impressive. Nor does the fact that the lengthy official history on the wall of the meeting room admits that it has no idea why the pub was renamed the Bath House in the 19th century. It's never been a bath house or anything like that.

Anyway, an impressive 15 of us turned up at the historic silly-named pub, among them Graham, who unsurprisingly beat everyone. My game with him had an infuriating position that I sat staring at for ages, because I had what looked like it should be a really cool Stoner trap, but which just didn't work, and however I could try to play it, there just was no way to make it work. And a bit more staring later, I realised that there was also no other move I could possibly play except the X-square, so I had to play it anyway and resign myself to losing.

Not that I mind losing to Graham, I always lose to him, but then in the next game I made a really stupid mistake against Roy when I should have won, and then I also lost to Iain Barrass, who admittedly is much better than me and always beats me too, but I've been doing so well this season that it still annoyed me. And even more annoying, I didn't even get second place in the BGP! Geoff finished a horrible three points ahead of me, with David the clear winner. Not that you get anything for second place in the BGP, but I wanted it!

Actually, I don't really mind any of this at all, and I'm completely happy with the way the day went. I had fun. But it's also fun to lament about how badly I did.

Gene Genie

Robert performed genetic engineering and succeeded in creating a parrot with suckers on its feet, enabling it to climb up walls. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but the evolutionary advantage this gave the parrot and its many descendants soon led to humanity being supplanted as the dominant species on Earth. Driven out of the cities by the superior fighting ability of wall-climbing parrots, the entire human race was forced to set up home in the small Lincolnshire village of Herman’s Bum. Overcrowding was a problem.

Fortunately, Robert was still alive, and he quickly set to work genetically engineering a passing rabbit until its burrowing capacity was enhanced by a factor of ten. Soon enough, it had dug a large enough warren for every human being on Earth to have their own reasonably-sized accommodation under the ground, where the parrots’ sucker-feet would be hindered by the loose earth of which the walls were composed.

All was well for a short time, until the super-rabbit reproduced and its descendants burrowed to such an extent that they hollowed out the entire planet, leaving nothing but the surface. Humanity in its entirety was thus left rattling around inside the
globe in a way reminiscent of a handful of peanuts that have somehow been put inside a football. Dissatisfaction was rampant.

It was suggested to Robert, in a way that included obscenities, that instead of genetically modifying animals so as to make them better than human beings and bringing about the ruin of the planet, he might try his hand at performing genetic engineering on himself and either solving the planet’s problems or killing himself in the attempt. Either resolution, it was observed, would be a benefit to society in general.

Undaunted by his increasing unpopularity among all but his closest friends, Robert did genetic modification on himself until he had gained the ability to walk through walls. Because this made him better than the parrots, which could only climb up walls, he was able to return to the surface and install himself as unquestioned king of the planet, ruling with an iron fist over parrots, humans and rabbits alike. This, he maintained for the remainder of his natural life, conclusively proved that, despite what people say, genetic engineering is great.

Oh, and

I should probably also say a public many happy returns of the day to my brother, rather than just going on at length about me me me. Happy birthday, bro!

Little by little

I did a pack of cards in 25.94 seconds tonight. You might remember that a couple of months ago I was enthusing about a time of 25.98. At this rate I'll beat the 25-second barrier at some time in the 23rd century. It's funny, you'd think it wouldn't be as exciting to chip away at my personal best a hundredth of a second at a time as it was when I was just starting out with card-memorising and taking whole seconds off my record on a regular basis, but if anything it's more thrilling now than it ever was!

In other news, I've got an interview next Wednesday for a proper, permanent job that sounds really, really cool and exactly the kind of thing that I want. So everyone has to a) remind me to go to the interview, and b) cross their fingers for me.

sdaeh rieht edih dna nur yeht semoc niar eht fI

Ah, that's something I've really missed. Cycling home in the pouring rain without so much as a coat on because it was baking hot and sunny in the morning.

Ah well, I suppose it could have been snow. Or great big boulders. Anyway, I got an email today about the world memory championships, and it seems Bahrain is definitely going to host it. They've got a venue and everything. There might even be special rates for accommodation and plane tickets for the competitors, if we're lucky. And I'm sorry, I know the various organisers are doing a great job in providing this competition, for minimal or no reward, but I had to giggle at the line "The fee far participation in the competition has been fixed for the past few years, and will remain so again for 2007 at UK £30. As you can imaging this in no way reflects the actual cost of running the competition, so we are more than grateful to our many sponsors who are shown on the website. Please support them."

Seriously, I can't imagine many people will be celebrating only having to pay £30 to enter the competition when they have to splash out on plane tickets to Bahrain. Anyway, £30 from 50 competitors or so is £1500. I could run a world memory championship for £1500. Probably. Assuming lots of people wanted to help me and not get any money for doing so.

Handbags and glad rags

Well, I'm officially an office boy again. The coolest thing about the job is that they finish at 4:30! 4:00 on Fridays! And it's less than 15 minutes away by bike, so no lengthy commute home. That gives me plenty of evening time to lounge around doing nothing, or possibly practice memory stuff. Apart from that, it's a pretty unexceptional kind of employment, although I can't really judge based on today since, with impeccable timing, one of their servers was down, so I spent the day doing that old favourite, bits and pieces that can be done without using the main piece of software.

The building's on Newmarket Road, on an industrial estate where all the roads are named after race courses. I would like to know the reasoning behind that decision, but I'm not quite so fascinated that I can be bothered to look it up.

They just use your mind, and they never give you credit

I've got a job. A temp thing, three months I think it is (but I didn't write that bit down when the guy told me over the phone), starting tomorrow. It doesn't sound spectacularly exciting, but it pays fairly well, and it's only about 15 minutes away by bike, and it'll keep me off the streets. So back to the grind of ironing a shirt every single day, slaving away over a hot computer moving numbers from one place to another, mingling with other wage slaves. Ah well, at least it's entirely by choice on my part, so I can't complain.

I've even bought new shoes. Proper shoes, from Clark's, not the cheap ones that fall apart within a month of buying them. I haven't bought proper shoes since I can't remember how long ago. They're real leather, not other materials. I thought about buying a new suit and some shirts, too, but decided not to go mad. My old tatty ones will do fine, it's just a temp job. You don't expect temp accountants to be clean and shiny.

It's with Synergy Healthcare. They do industrial laundry, dental supplies and prosthetic appliances.

Mister Memory

You know, before I resign myself to life as an accountant again, I really should work out a stage show I can do with memory tricks. And by "I really should", I mean of course that I've been thinking about it this afternoon, and by "work out" I mean "steal from Boris". What I want to do, and I think it would look really good, is do basically what he did on a German TV show a few years ago, it goes like this:

There's a bunch of twenty or so tables, restaurant style, with two or three people sitting at each, and they each choose a meal from a menu with a choice of ten starters, ten main courses and ten drinks. I wander around each table in turn and they tell me what they're having, I memorise the whole lot without taking any notes, and then recount what everyone ordered. It'd be a piece of cake with just a little bit of advance preparation, and it'd look really good on Paul O'Grady's show or something else like that (I watch the last two minutes while waiting for the Simpsons to come on, every now and then). Then for an encore I can recite pi to a few hundred places until everyone falls asleep.

I was thinking I might like to try this, and a few other basic memory tricks, on an audience somewhere, sometime, to see how it goes over. It would be kind of a challenge for my organisational skills, but it would be cool to set up shop at the Edinburgh Festival and do a show. And I think it would be rather a groovy experience.

Behind the sofa

Doctor Who SCARED me tonight! Seriously, the bit where he blinks and the thing's suddenly about an inch away from his face, I squealed out loud. It was great! I don't think I've actually done that because of something I've seen on Doctor Who before, ever.

Anyway, it's time for another entertaining tale of the memory man who forgets things. You know I said yesterday that I didn't have any plans for the weekend? Well, actually, I had agreed to have lunch with Vicky and her great-aunt and uncle, and to bring Grandma along with me. But having agreed to do that, about a fortnight ago, the whole thing dropped out of my brain completely until Vicky sent me an email roughly an hour before we were supposed to meet up. Still, it was fun. But I really need to work on how to remember things other than playing cards.

Hooray, it's the weekend!

And while that might seem like an unusual sentiment from someone who doesn't work for a living, I've rediscovered the weekend feeling. I've been itching to do an hour cards and hour numbers practice, and I can't do it on weekdays, because I have agencies possibly phoning with exciting job prospects and things like that. And in the evenings there's things on telly or people to talk to and it's not really possible to set aside three hours at a time. But it's the weekend tomorrow, and one of those rare weekends when I'm not doing anything at all, so I can unplug that dratted phone and sit down staring at numbers and cards to my heart's content!

You know, sometimes, when I think about it, I think I might actually be a total sad case.

It's not just my blood group, it's my motto

My blood group, as I found out after my recent blood-donating episode, is B-positive. This is quite groovy, because it's rather uncommon, yet still allows me to get transfusions from about half the population if I'm ever running short. And, according to Wikipedia at least, the Japanese blood type theory of personality reckons that makes me creative, passionate, animal loving, optimistic, flexible and individualistic, if also forgetful, irresponsible, and self-centered. That's by far the coolest of the four possibilities listed there! I've always known I've got the soul of a hippy trapped in the body of an accountant (I'm a free spirit who charges £12 an hour), and this just PROVES it! I believe in this whole blood group personality thing with all my little heart, and I'm not even discouraged by the way that article suggests Mick Jagger is cool, controlled, rational, introverted and empathic.

I would also like to believe in horoscopes, but they never seem to say anything fun is going to happen to me. I read the ones in the Metro whenever I'm going somewhere on the train, and they're always good. There was a period last year when the stars were apparently urging all twelve signs of the zodiac to cheat on their loved ones, which makes me wonder what was going through the head of the paper's resident oracle. They also have a tendency to write things like "bosses are in a bad mood today, so you should keep your head down at work." Do the movements of the planets also predict the fortunes of bosses of Libras? I ask you. If I wasn't so enormously trusting and credulous, I wouldn't believe a word of it.

An epic, did I say?

The main reason I haven't written any huge long blog entries just lately is that there hasn't really been a great deal happening to me. I'm annoyed by how long it's taking to find a new job. I've got enough time and money to be able to pick and choose, but that's the kind of logic that only applies if there's job offers to pick and choose from. And to be honest, I seem to be having trouble even getting interviews for the good jobs.

I'm quite offended. Although I don't like to admit it in case people think I'm cool, I am in all honesty a darn good accountant. I know how many beans make five. I know how to present the information in such a way that it makes five beans look like a really good thing. I can tell other people when and how to go and count the beans. Admittedly I've spent the last six months indulging myself and my weird hobbies rather than diligently crunching numbers, but lots of cool people take career breaks nowadays. It's positively fashionable.

Someone give me a job! I need something to complain about!

What? No, of course I didn't forget. Don't be silly.

Wow, it's three minutes past midnight, I was about to go to bed after staying up late chatting on the internet and I realised I hadn't written my blog yet. This is a shocking memory lapse. I don't mind forgetting the important things in life, like names and appointments and things, but I pride myself on remembering stupid things like long numbers, packs of cards and writing my blog every night.

Well, I've written something now, at least. I seem to be slacking off with the big long blog entries just lately. I'll write a real epic tomorrow. Well, today I suppose. It's past my bedtime...

I'll Be Back

"The Terminator" is on Channel 5 tonight, and I feel like I probably should stay up to watch it. I've never seen it before, and it's one of those films that people just assume everyone has seen, and make reference to in everyday conversation. I lose count of the times someone has said to me "it's like that bit in The Terminator where..." or something along those lines. It must have happened to me at least once. And it is supposed to be a genuinely good film. On the other hand, I can't be bothered to watch it, especially with adverts in the middle. It's already on the list of films I should get the DVD of some day. Quite a big list, that one, but I'll get round to them when I'm old and retired and have nothing better to do with my life. Although it won't be DVDs then, it'll be space holograms.

Prohibition

Alcohol should be banned. No, not alcohol. Hangovers. The alcohol bit is fine. I was out drinking with my brother last night, and I haven't entirely recovered from it yet. I sometimes get the feeling I can't keep up with the young folk any more...

Anyway, I did manage to play in an othello tournament on kurnik today, and did no worse than usual. I seem to be drawing a lot of games in kurnik tournaments lately - two games out of eleven in each of the last two I've played in. I'm not sure if that means I and my opponents are playing perfectly or whether it's just random chance. I choose to believe in the perfect-play option. Sorry if this isn't entirely fascinating, but as I mentioned, I'm not in the best of shape today. Normal bloggery will be resumed tomorrow.

Whoops

Just remembered I'm going out tonight and staying over in Nottingham and I was meaning to write a blog entry this afternoon instead of this evening, but now it's time I was leaving the house and I haven't written one yet, so I'll just have to not write anything today. Except this, obviously, but this doesn't count. Pretend you didn't see it.

Connect-i-cut

While picking up books in my bedroom the other day, I found my atlas. I'd quite forgotten I owned one. I suppose not many people use them, nowadays, seeing as you can find all the maps you want on the internet. Life was more fun when you needed to look things up in books, I'm sure. Still, it came in handy today when talking to an American friend who lives in Connecticut. It occurred to me that I hadn't got the faintest idea where in the USA Connecticut is. North or south? East, west or middle? Not a clue. It took some finding, actually - I had no idea it was so small and tucked away in the top right corner there. Or that it's practically next door to New York. I'm quite shockingly ignorant when it comes to the geography of other countries. I also thought Delaware was one of the big square ones in the west or middle bits, but it turns out it isn't. I've never encountered, or as far as I know even heard of, anyone from Delaware. I need to go there and make friends.

Of course, while my atlas is fine for learning about the USA, I need to be a bit more careful with some other parts of the world. My atlas was published in 1987, and it still thinks there's a USSR, and East and West Germany. It's a useful historical artifact, actually - did you know Walvis Bay in Namibia was part of South Africa until 1992? Well, you probably either did know that or had no reason to need to know that, but it's something I only learned today after studying an outdated atlas and checking up on the internet. Learning is cool. Now I'm going to go and watch football for two hours and forget everything I've learned.

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.