State quarters!

Another thing I did in America was acquiring lots of those 25-cent coins with pictures on them depicting one of the fifty states of the US. I already had a couple of them here in my drawer full of miscellaneous foreign coins, but now I've got 14 in total! Obviously I need more American holidays, so I can acquire a full set.

And another thing I did on the way home was lose my stopwatch. I really have to get a new one so I can do some last-minute training for the German championship. It's less than three weeks away, and I haven't booked any flights or hotels yet!

Zzzzzzzzz

A day at work with serious jetlag is really no fun. I'm going to bed now, I don't expect to wake up until Monday.

Pennsylvania Pippins

I'm home at last! And feeling hugely sleep-deprived, despite spending most of the afternoon napping. Hopefully I'll be recovered enough to stay awake at work tomorrow.

Anyway, here's something new - I've become a baseball fan while I was in America! Channel-hopping during a quiet moment I came across a game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Houston Astros, and to my surprise I loved it! It's an exciting and fascinating game and I really should have listened to the people who've told me so in the past. Last night while stranded in New York I watched the Yankees thrash the Twins 10-2, and I'm definitely a convert to the joys of baseball now. I'm going to have to find out whether it's possible to watch games on the telly over here...

I even know what the designated hitter rule is, and even have an opinion on it! (It's bad.) I need to go to a game in real life, next time I'm over that side of the ocean! Go Pirates!

There's no escape!

Well, the flight from Pittsburgh to Newark was even more delayed than the one in the opposite direction last week (due to thunderstorms somewhere, apparently, although since it's been beautiful summer weather everywhere I've seen for the past week, I don't know where these thunderstorms could have been), and I missed the flight back to Birmingham. And they couldn't put me on another one until 7pm tonight, so I'm stuck in New York for the day.

Okay, there are worse places to be stuck, so I'm not going to complain too much - I'm going to see the sights and have some fun. The only problem comes when I get back to work on Friday and have to fit at least three days' worth of number-crunching into a couple of hours. But hey, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, and for now the sun's shining, the city's got that distinctive New York smell to it, there's things to do and places to go. See you if and when I eventually get home!

It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw

Just a quick post to say hello from Pittsburgh. Getting here did indeed take longer than you'd think, thanks to a delayed connecting flight in Newark (fake Newark in America, not the real Newark I cycled to and from the Sunday before last), so I'm quite justified in using the blog title I've been itching to use ever since booking the holiday in the first place.

It wasn't until getting to Pittsburgh that I realised I'd booked my flight home for the wrong date - I'm supposed to be back at work on Wednesday, but I don't get in to Birmingham airport until about nine o'clock on Wednesday morning. I'm still not sure whether to go to the trouble and expense of changing my flights, or the work-related trouble and hotel-related expense of hanging around America for another day after the convention ends and emailing my boss to ask for another day's holiday. That would mean working long, long hours on Thursday and Friday to catch up with everything I need to get done, and that's never a good thing to do when you're jetlagged.

Maybe I'll just stay in the USA permanently, living on the streets and earning a living as a busking memory man. That'll solve all my problems!

One more day to our holiday

Hooray, because I've only got one more working day to go before I fly away for a week. Actually, this holiday has rather snuck up on me, because I organised it so far in advance by my standards (more than a month ago!), I'd almost forgotten about it. I haven't packed yet, but I have made a mental note that I'll need to book a hotel near the airport for tomorrow night, so that's progress.

Oink

I've had an increasingly irresistible urge these past few weeks to go up to Dundee, find the DC Thomson offices and demand to know why they're reprinting old Rasher strips, of all things, in the Beano. I mean, is there really that much demand for Rasher? His own series was dropped many years ago now, and his appearances in Dennis's have been few and far between in the 21st century. If the Beano is so short of creative talent or the money to pay for it these days that they're forced to plunder the archives for page-filler, why not dredge up something really good? Rasher was always okay, but it was never anything special. And Calamity James isn't appearing in the comic at the moment, I'd love to see his early adventures get another airing! I tell you, if I ran the Beano, it'd be cheaper, funnier and would sell better. I've missed my vocation in life, I think...

The Embodiment Gris

If I had a time machine, the first thing I'd do with it wouldn't be preventing any horrific and tragic disaster, or even skipping ahead a couple of hours to see tonight's lottery numbers. It would be to take a telly and video back to 1965 and tape "The Daleks' Master Plan" in its entirety. Like most BBC programmes of the sixties, the tapes were all destroyed long ago, and only three of the twelve episodes still survive. But I've been watching them today, and it really is cracking stuff. And not, like some old Doctor Whos, the kind of thing you watch to laugh at the cheap sets and effects, but it's brilliant, enthralling, deadly serious sci-fi drama that leaves me impatiently waiting for the next episode. Which, of course, is unlikely to be shown any time soon, unless another old film turns up in a BBC junk room unexpectedly.

Also brilliant is the DVD commentary on the recently-discovered episode 2 ("borrowed" by a young BBC engineer in the early seventies when he found it lying around the place, never returned and forgotten about until 2004), by Peter Purves and Kevin Stoney. They both cheerfully admit to having no memory of filming this 40-year-old episode they once starred in, but have a lot of fun discussing the old days and the people they worked with. It's somehow very warm and cosy to hear them referring to Zephon, Master of the Fifth Galaxy as "Julian Sherrier". The name actually suits the character surprisingly well. A typical bit of commentary goes like this:

"There's Julian again..."
"No, that's not Julian, that's Bill."
"Is it?"
"Yes, Nick Courtney beat up Julian and put his cloak on Bill, so now he's infiltrating the council of war. Do keep up, Kevin."
"I'm getting lost here..."

Somebody give me a Tardis, so I can watch episode 3!

Stop Press

For the benefit of those people out there who use my blog as the source of up-to-date news about memory competitions (these are the people who tend not to turn up, because I tend not to get round to mentioning important details), please note that the venue of the World Memory Championship this year has changed, from Bahrain to London. Dates are still currently intended to be November 13-15. I'd comment on the situation and the probable reasons for it, but I'd only get in trouble. Anyway, it should still be a great event, it always is.

In which I attempt to write the shortest blog entry in history (not counting the title, because titles don't count. This is the longest title allowed)

Too much on telly on Thursday nights. And I still did a good hour of memorising as well as all the tennis and comedy and working for a living. I was going to write a blog about how the skin on my sunburnt arms is peeling, but I didn't want to upset anyone with the graphic descriptions.

In the abstract

I'm in the process of doing something I should have done years ago, and getting serious about abstract images. Specifically, I'm putting together a randomising program to mix up the images from the handful of practice papers available online and enable me to practice it every night. Still a lot of work to do - copying and pasting images into the Excel spreadsheet one at a time is time-consuming and tedious - but it works pretty well so far, and when it's finished I'll share it with the world. Meanwhile, I'm aiming to cut down my time for memorising a page and a half of images down to three and a half minutes, in among the various other training exercises I'm still more or less sort of sticking with.

Also, I need to find a new barber. While I'll grant you that it's hard to make my hair look great, the place down the road really made a mess of it last Saturday. I'd hate to have to go back to Derby every couple of months for a trim, but I haven't had much luck yet finding a half-decent scalper here in Beeston. Perhaps my expectations are too high - all hairdressers nowadays have a photo of David Beckham in the window, as if to promise they're going to make me look just like him...

Ding dong, ding dong

I learned today that it was Big Ben's 150th birthday last month, and nobody told me. You'd think I would have been invited to the party - quite a lot of people, generally the non-British ones, have given me the nickname "Big Ben" in the past, on account of how I live in England, am called Ben and possibly also because I'm quite small.

A much better nickname, which nobody has ever yet applied to me, would be "Big Ben Brain", which was the name of a famous bare-knuckle boxer in the 18th century, and which incorporates the 'brain' theme that the World Memory Championships are often quite keen to promote. I might have to get some new business cards printed, just to give potential nicknamers a subtle hint.

Yawwwn

I'm still feeling all stiff and achey after my uncharacteristic physical exertions. And that's my excuse for laying around doing nothing all evening - I'll get back into memory training and so on tomorrow, I promise.

But since I've done nothing but watch the telly this evening, can I just observe how surprisingly incompetent the presenter/commentator/whatever-you-want-to-call-him on BBC Parliament is? Granted, I only flicked over to it a couple of times to avoid graphic replays of knee injuries on the Wimbledon coverage (I'm very squeamish about hurt knees), but even though I have little or no knowledge of or interest in the process of electing a new speaker, I seemed to know more about what was going on than the guy who was providing the voice-over (along with Betty Boothroyd). I could at least add up a couple of numbers correctly, remember the names of MPs that had been read out five minutes ago and that he'd presumably been discussing all day, and so on. I was sort of expecting a slick, professional, general-election-style coverage, but apparently BBC Parliament's audience is only big enough to justify a clueless commentator dragged in off the street and dropped in front of a microphone.

Makes it all worthwhile

I've got a shiny little gold medal, commemorating that I did indeed manage to cycle fifty miles! And more, if you count the six miles cycling from Beeston to the starting line at Holme Pierrepont (I got the train back, but there weren't any trains early enough in the morning). I've also got terrible sunburn on my arms. And now I'm going to bed to rest my aching... body.

I'm definitely going to need some kind of cushion

Cycled about 15 miles today, making sure I knew how to get to the starting point of tomorrow's bike ride and getting horribly lost along the way (don't worry, I know how to get there now) and I'm already sore. I should have invested in a pair of padded shorts like people have been recommending. I'm sure I can improvise something with things I've got around the house...

Anyway, rider number 2741 (you get real, official numbers like in a proper bike race!) is all ready to go. It's going to be a definite change from my usual Sunday of sitting at a desk and memorising cards and numbers.

The Calliope crashed to the ground

I like reading my old blog entries in idle moments. Although it always makes me feel like I was much more eloquent and entertaining in the old days, compared to the hastily-written drivel I always seem to be reduced to lately. But looking back through my writings of years ago leads me to notice that this epic poem of mine, which I still think is rather clever and funny, didn't ever get so much as a single comment! Really, my readers are so ungrateful. Who else in the blogosphere comes up with that kind of thing? I bet the new poet laureate, whoever he/she is (I've forgotten), doesn't even have a blog with such melodious verse in it!

Actually, I was reading old blog posts mainly to see whether I'd previously made light of the early-nineties articles about the Mind Sports Olympiad in old Synapsia magazines - I have, so I won't do it again. I will point out an impressive world record reported in the same magazine, though: "Creighton Carvello memorised one pack of cards at speed with only one error in 2 minutes 59 seconds" on Record Breakers in 1987. This, much more than that old chestnut about scientists' predictions of spoken number memory capacity, is the best example of how the World Memory Championships have stretched people's brains. Right now, 22 years later, I'm seriously worried that any one of two or three top memorisers is going to beat me to being the first to memorise a pack in under 25 seconds in a competition very soon. And 'only one error' is not going to get you a round of applause these days.

Il faut que tu fasses du vélo

For some reason, that's a phrase that has stuck in my head ever since French lessons at school got as far as teaching the subjunctive. French grammar is a very silly thing. Anyway, it's just a couple of days until I go on a longer bike ride than any sensible person would want to do, and I'm a bit worried about the weather. We seem to be getting baking hot sunshine followed seconds later by torrential downpours just lately, and I'd hate to get struck by lightning and then slowly fried like an egg on the tarmac. That'd really knock down my average speed.

It's not too late to sponsor me, by the way. And many, many thanks to everyone who already has!

And even bigger thanks to Jabba, who sent me a really cool book just because she knew I'd like it! That's the kind of charity there should be more of - Entertain A Zoomy.

A conversation with Microsoft Excel 2007

Excel: This spreadsheet contains macros. Macros can contain viruses. I'm going to disable, delete and destroy them, okay?

Me: No, it's not okay. Open up the file, macros and all, please.

Excel: Macros can contain potentially harmful viruses. You shouldn't open files with macros in unless you're completely sure that they are safe and virus-free.

Me: They are. Shut up about macros and just open the file.

Excel: So, have you run a virus-scan and got some professional to double-check that there are no viruses lurking in these macros of yours?

Me: No, of course I haven't. Nobody does that. Just open the file.

Excel: You mean open it with the macros disabled, right?

Me: Look, I wrote these macros myself, the file has never been anywhere other than my laptop, there's no way anyone could have ever infiltrated my visual basic workbook with viruses. The file doesn't work without the macros, so why in the name of flip would I want to disable them?

Excel: I'm really not sure this is a good idea. Let's just forget about this workbook, and play with something else, shall we?


I mean, seriously. I've been writing and using macros for many, many years, at home and at work (mainly just for the sake of it because very few people can do them, and everyone thinks you're some kind of magician if you know how, but sometimes because they're really useful things) and I've never had a single problem with viruses, nor met or heard of anybody who has. And yet every new version of Excel forces you to select ever more 'non-recommended' macro security options, special file types, hidden toolbars and so on, just to use a tiny little harmless macro! Stupid Microsoft.

Did I fall asleep?

I'd heard pretty uniformly bad things about Dollhouse, so I'd been meaning to check it out ever since it started. I've seen the last two episodes, and it's actually really quite good. Certainly worth watching, although tonight's episode could have been done rather better towards the end - lots of different and less predictable ways the ending could have worked out. I don't expect the really formulaic stuff from Joss Whedon.

But even so, it's something new to add to my things-to-watch list, and that's a very sparse list right now. TV isn't the opium-of-the-masses it used to be...

Yay!

I've just discovered that TMF, the second-rate music channel, shows cartoons before nine o'clock (when the teenage audience are presumably still in bed). I've got another cartoon channel that I didn't know about! I can watch the first half of Maggie and the Ferocious Beast before I leave for work in the mornings!

Beer good

A Saturday getting horribly drunk with my brother, followed by a Sunday recovering from it, is a great way to spend a weekend every once in a while. And hopefully I'll have stopped feeling quite so dreadfully unwell by tomorrow morning when I need to go to work...

The train of thought is late again

I just thought to myself something along the lines of "Right, finished my hastily-knocked-together costume for my brother's party tomorrow, now for the more important task of..." and there was some word or phrase after that. But now I've got no idea what it was that I was going to do. I'm pretty sure it was something very significant that probably won't wait until tomorrow morning. But never mind.

Anyway, what I was going to blog about tonight was the idea of technologising the memory competition world. Check out the latest interview on memory-sports.com, the extremely cool website that I might have mentioned before. On the one hand, it's a good idea to save the arbiters the hassle of marking (and avoid the mistakes that causes), and the idea of spectators being able to see live updates is fun (although I think people would prefer to see updating numbers rather than animations of people running).

On the other hand, there are definite health and safety issues with requiring competitors to stare at a computer screen for an hour. I think it'd still be better to have the memorisation done on paper, and the recall on computer. But then, that would probably lead to more possibility of technical problems, and that's the wider issue - the cost of setting up computers for everyone is something the organisers could maybe deal with, if they get a bit more money from somewhere, but there would inevitably be something go wrong with it. Probably a power cut in the middle of a competition that causes all the numbers the competitors have spent the previous two hours typing in to be lost. I remain sceptical.

The Flaming Sword Of Fire

If you like Maid Marian and her Merry Men, you should probably watch Kröd Mändoon. It's the same thing, only with adult jokes and Americans. Although I'm not sure whether Sean Maguire is American nowadays, or if he's still English. Anyway, he's extremely funny, and so is the whole show.

Okay then

I'm going to do the Great Nottinghamshire Bike Ride and see if I can cope with a 50-mile cycling tour of the scenic countryside between Nottingham and Newark, if any. Consquently, I want people to give money to charities, by clicking here. I know I said I was thinking of doing it for the Alzheimer's Society, but I'm doing another thing for them in September, so I decided to just go with the GNBR's official charities list. Come to think of it, I know more people with cerebral palsy than people with Alzheimer's, anway.

I should probably point out that if the weather's awful or if I feel too lazy to get out of bed, I might still not bother with it, and just cycle the 50 yards down the road to the Co-op for a big bag of sweets, then come home and lay in bed all day eating them. If that happens, you won't be required to give any money. Although you probably should donate anyway. I'm sure none of my readers is the kind of person who makes promises of money to the needy but makes it conditional on the cycling performance of a fat, lazy oaf. Just sign up for your donation and stop moaning!

If I do stay in bed all day eating sweets, in fact, I'll triple my own donation. Can't say fairer than that.

Oily fish? Pah!

Another story in the news today about the wonders of oily fish. Apparently it fixes macular degeneration now, too. But if you eat it more than four times a week, you die, or something. I personally don't believe in omega-3. I think somebody made it up, for nefarious reasons. Probably a cat. Cats don't like fish and want them to be eaten.

The glorious fourteenth

It's my brother's 31st birthday on Sunday, which is good in that I get to go to a party on Saturday to celebrate it. But it does also lead me to realise that that means it's four months until I turn 33, which is really not a good age to be.

But then that leads me to realise that in another four months after that, I'll turn 33-and-a-third, which is actually a rather groovy age to be! And this will happen on February 14th, 2010 - I'm going to have to have a Valentine's-Day-cum-third-of-a-century party! How often do you get an opportunity to go to one of those? Practically never!

Unless you're longtime friends with Cliff Richard or Roger Moore or one of the other lucky people who was born on October 14th, of course. Come to think of it, Cliff, like me, was unmarried at the time of his Valentine's Day 33-and-a-third birthday. Roger Moore, according to Wikipedia, was in the process of splitting up with his second wife at the time. E.E.Cummings was single, after being dumped by his second wife and before meeting his third. The Battle of Hastings celebrated its 33-and-a-third anniversary during the reign of the unmarried King William II. There's something decidedly unromantic about this occasion...

Shiny things

A magpie keeps flying right up to the top of my kitchen window. I thought there might be a nest up there, or maybe on the roof, but I can't see one by leaning out of the living room window and craning my neck. Anyway, it creeps me out. I'm superstitious about magpies, and seeing one at a time on a regular basis is disturbing. I need to lure more of them to my windows somehow, five or six at once.

Dammit, Radio Times!

They provided a pretty extensive preview of Robert Webb's appearance on "My Life In Verse" last night, but didn't mention that they were going to go back to his (and my) old school and interview Mr and Mrs Slater, the English teachers! I would have watched it if I'd known that, instead of deciding not to bother! Now I'll have to find out whether it's possible to see it on the internet. Or did anyone happen to video it? I prefer to do things the old-fashioned way, it's more fun.

Actually, one of the three pictures in RT shows Rob (I think his friends call him Rob - let's be honest, I was three years below him and never spoke to him, although everyone in school knew him and loved his comedy routines, so I probably shouldn't give people the impression that we were friends) sitting in a classroom, and I'm trying to work out whether it's a room at QEGS. I'm fairly sure it's not rooms 8, 9 or 10, which is where English lessons were held in my day. Possibly room 10, if it's got fewer windows than I remember. Or it might be the new geography room (or was it the new history room? The closest one to the changing rooms, anyway - the one where the old chemistry lab used to be). It's the kind of thing a TV crew would do, deciding that the English classrooms are the wrong size or shape for a photo, so let's use the geography room instead.

In other news, if I did the Great Nottinghamshire Bike Ride, would anybody want to sponsor me? I was thinking about it, apparently the 50-mile one only has one really nasty hill on it, and I have just had my bike serviced so the brakes work and the handlebars don't fall off. Money would go to the Alzheimer's Society, say. C'mon, who'd give money to see me get sunstroke and/or soaked by downpours while giving myself a heart attack from unnecessary exertion?

Also, I'm watching the first couple of episodes of "Lie To Me" on Sky. Tim Roth is good, like he always is, but it's typical mainstream American detective drama stuff that thinks it's a lot cleverer than it is. And some of the actors trying to convey the subtle facial gestures the script calls for are downright embarrassing! And also, it'll lead to even more people becoming NLP fanatics, which the world could do without. NLP people get on my nerves something chronic, and I'm not sure exactly why.

With the possible exception of this guy, if he is in fact an adherent of NLP. He kind of looks like he might be, but his extremely well-designed website doesn't say so, so maybe he isn't. He does look like he might be a lot of fun as a speaker. And more importantly, he mentions me in a very groovy way in his blog.

Incidentally, I swear I don't google my own name every day. Once a month, tops. But it seems like every time I do, I find a fun reference to me that was made just the day before!

Closure

Well, following on from last night's post, I'm sorry to report that Pat Lally (like every other Labour councillor in Broxtowe) lost his seat. And the new Conservative councillor is called Eric Kelly, which is much harder to make a comedy name out of (there are plenty of half-rhymes with Eric, but no real ones except 'cleric').

Still, following on from last weekend's (or thereabouts's) post, I can confirm that The Pickwick Papers really is worth reading! That Dickens bloke does have something going for him, after all. I think he'll go far.

I don't blog about politics

And I also don't devote a blog to making fun of someone I've never met and know nothing about. So it's really been difficult, these past few weeks, to refrain from mentioning that the Labour candidate for the county council is called Pat Lally. And, although I'm sure he's perfectly slender and sensible, whenever I see his name, I always want to give him the subtitle "the fat wally".

Luckily, the election's all over now (or will be tomorrow, when the results come out), so I'll be able to avoid blogging about something else. It'll be a relief!

Here comes the summer sun

Well, today's been cold and cloudy, but the previous few days were baking hot and sunny, which has led me to the conclusion that this new flat of mine is backwards. The front room and kitchen get the sun through the big windows in the mornings, while the bedrooms get it in the afternoons, which means that when I go to bed I come from a relatively cool room into a baking hot one. I think it would work better if it was the other way round.

Maybe I can borrow a giant crane and spin the flat around 180 degrees? That would solve all my problems, and be quite good fun, too!

Remembrance

I'm watching Remembrance of the Daleks on video. Haven't seen it since it was first shown, on the weeks surrounding my twelfth birthday, and I recall having no idea what was going on at the time. Actually, the plot still doesn't entirely make sense to me now, but it's a lot of fun to watch anyway.

And talking of memory, have you heard that Simon did a pack of cards in 27.36 seconds at the South German championships? I really can't wait for the German championship now, there's going to be such a huge volume of really, really great memorisers there, and I have no idea who's going to win.

Long day

The good thing about spending seven hours on trains in a day is that it really makes you appreciate the days when you get to work at an office ten minutes' cycling away. Still, it's fun to visit an exotic place like Cardiff, even if the Doctor wasn't hanging around there today. Anyway, I'm going to bed. Humans weren't designed to get up in time to catch 6:00 trains.

Yesterday ... and Today

I forgot to mention a couple of groovy things that happened yesterday. In W H Smith's, I was served by a woman who asked me "Were you on that Superhuman thing?" Which is always nice. And I weighed myself on that machine in Boots and it told me that my Body Mass Index is down to 27.9, and thus I'm no longer in a position to benefit from that scary weight-loss drug we sell! I've lost five pounds since I weighed myself about a month ago, and I attribute that to the last couple of weeks of not cramming sweets into my gob all day long.

Also, I did 1224 in 30-minute numbers practice today, which I think is a personal best. And I've come up with a scheme for creating an abstract images training program, although it'll take a fair bit of work to put it together.

Sunshine

Hooray, summer's here! Also, for some reason earlier today I found myself thinking it was Sunday, and then I remembered it wasn't, and I get another Sunday tomorrow. Which was nice.

I'm going to Cardiff on Monday for a meeting (I go my whole life up to this year without visiting Wales, and now I seem to be always dropping by), and getting the early train, so I was thinking I'd have to get to bed early tonight, when it suddenly dawned on me that it's only Saturday. Perhaps I should buy a calendar.

An apology

It seems that yesterday's blog entry used the word 'willy' rather more than is normal for a decent, family blog like this. It won't happen again. Except in that first sentence there.

Anyway, I'm wondering what to do tomorrow. It's the weekend, I've got nothing exciting planned and Saturdays in my current memory-training schedule (which I'm still following religiously, by the way) are a memory-free, mental-battery-recharging day. I might go somewhere nice and take advantage of the fine weather. Or maybe I'll stay indoors all day and watch Doctor Who videos. We'll see how I feel.

Everything you hear on the internet is wrong

On one of the internet forums I frequent, someone mentioned today the well-known fact that you can see Bugs Bunny's willy in one frame of one old cartoon. And someone else, in world-weary tones, directed him to the snopes.com debunking of this myth.

Snopes, with its myth-busting raison d'etre, has stumbled into a position where its word is taken as law - people are naturally sceptical about all the nonsense you can find on the internet these days, but this has the interesting side-effect of making people automatically believe anyone, even if they're just another guy on the internet, who says that something is just an internet myth. Even if it isn't. So in the interests of debunking Snopes, can I invite you to study "The Wabbit Who Came To Supper" in more detail?

Check out the shot of the "risqué" frame there. The website explains that the 'object' in question is just caused by the gap between Bugs's legs, the white background and the curvature of the towel. Now go and watch the cartoon and pay attention to how Bugs's character model works. The gap between his legs never goes up into his white tummy like that! It's either flattened or rounded underneath the white oval, depending on what position he's standing in.

I say it's Bugs's willy. It's possible that an in-betweener artist got the legs wrong for a frame or two, but not possible that Friz Freleng wouldn't have noticed and would just have okayed the incorrect animation. It was either a mistake that got left in because it made the gang in Termite Terrace giggle, or it was put in there on purpose. Anyway, it's a phallus and no question about it!

I'd advise you to watch the cartoon anyway, even if you don't care about Bugs Bunny's willy quite as much as I do. It's worth it alone for the brilliant moment when Bugs picks up the phone in Elmer's house, asks him for a nickel, takes the coin, casually pockets it and continues with his conversation!

Well, that was disappointing

I was confidently expecting a dull 0-0 draw, with Man Utd to win on penalties, but they were completely outplayed. Shame, really. Still, maybe Chelsea will lose the cup final and cheer me up again...

Wow, is that the time?

I did do my regular evening's memory training tonight, so I don't count as completely lazy, but then I've somehow got engrossed in a website detailing obscure Marvel comics characters until twenty to eleven at night. So I hope you'll forgive the short and late blog.

What the deuce?

I've got a reputation for being well-read, in some circles, but there are big gaps in my literary knowledge that I've always been meaning to fill. The most prominent gap is that I've never read anything by Charles Dickens (except A Christmas Carol, obviously, but everyone's read that. Or seen the Muppet version.) So in a charity shop today I bought The Pickwick Papers for £1.10 and I look forward to finding out whether it's a timeless classic or a load of rubbish.

It'll have to wait until I've finished Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro, mind you, because I know that's going to be good...

Holiday

Lots more memory training today, yay for me, so tomorrow's a day off to catch up with everything else I've been meaning to do. Although I might also spend the time creating a few more journeys - the ones I've got at the moment aren't enough for the excessive practice routine I've got going right now. This afternoon I was still remembering what was in the locations the previous time around. Might just be because my forgetting skills are as rusty as my memorising...

The Old Queen's Head

That was the venue of the Sheffield Regional - it's another pub with a long history, dating back to 1503 according to the rather cool stained-glass thing upstairs in the function room we were occupying. Which makes it older than the Queen it's named after, unless the sign with its picture of Elizabeth I was lying to us, now I come to think of it. Anyway, the room was nice, but would have been better as an othello tournament location if there'd been a door separating it from the noisy pub below. Still, I happened to have a pair of earplugs, left over from some memory competition, in my bag, so I was fine.

Well, fine in the sense of having some of the background noise muffled, anyway. My othello-playing varied from okay to not-okay, though. I started (before finding the earplugs) with a very groovy 55-9 win over Iain, who's much better at othello than me, but was then outclassed entirely by Aidan and Steve, who normally don't pose me too much trouble. Aidan, actually, had a really great tournament all round, and ended up joint second with Iain, after Geoff, who beat everyone without any apparent problems.

I was fourth, which leaves me 50 points clear of Geoff in the BGP with one regional to go. Farnborough on June 13th, and I'm still fairly probably not going to go. It's a very long way, after all, and I'm not sure I'd want to win the BGP by virtue of turning up to more regionals than my rivals. Also, what if I did decide to go along, and ended up losing? That would really annoy me.

Anyway, we had a new player today as well - a stratego player I've met once before at the MSO. Stratego is a really cool game that I haven't had enough opportunity to play in the course of my life so far (I practically never managed to fit it into my schedule at the MSO, somehow - just twice in ten years). I need to make an effort to get into the stratego tournament circuit, if I can fit it in around othello, memory and general laziness.

A few further non-othello-related observations I think are worth mentioning:

Did you know that Men's Health magazine comes in two different sizes? I noticed in W H Smith's in the train station today that there's a full-size, A4 kind of version, and also a smaller version, sort of half-way between A4 and A5, with all the same content, but worse quality paper. And the funny thing is the smaller one costs the same as the big one. The complimentary copy I got was the big one, by the way. As is only right.

Also, the Npower advert with Wallace and Gromit, in which the Npower representative apparently barges into their house uninvited and installs a new boiler, certainly seems to be an accurate portrayal of Npower's sales policies.

One more thing I forgot to mention yesterday - in the course of a general conversation at work about how old people look I mentioned that people always think I'm about ten years older than I am. To which the boss's PA replied "No, I wouldn't say that, you've got a young face. I'd say you look about late-thirties, early-forties." I need to dye my beard. Or scalp.

Weekend!

And I have to say, it's been a pretty successful week all round. I've got lots of clever stuff done at work, I've refrained entirely from eating anything between meals, despite Colin bringing a box of doughnuts into the office today, I've done a proper memory training session every evening, and I've watched every episode of Bagpuss!

Now it's a three-day weekend, and I'm going to win lots of games of othello, memorise lots of numbers (both decimal and binary) and cards, and catch up with lots of friends who I've been sort of neglecting lately.

Or else stay in bed all weekend doing nothing. We'll see how I feel.

Sheffield again

Othello again on Saturday. And I'm in such a memorising mood at the moment that I'm going to take my abstract images images (pieces of paper with the 'abstract images' patterns on one side and the name of the image they represent on the other) with my on the train and bone up on them in preparation for some more heavy-duty training on Sunday and Monday.

It's great to be back in the routine of doing an hour or so of memory every evening, seeing my times get a bit faster and my scores get a bit higher every time. I'm still some way away from the level I was at last time I was seriously training, but I know there's the potential to be better than ever before by the time of the world championship. Which is a nice thing to aim for, even if I don't win the thing.

I suppose it wouldn't hurt to practice my othello a bit, too - it really would be nice to win the BGP and go to the world championship and lose all my games there against the best in the world. But on the other hand, I often find myself playing quite well when I haven't so much as thought about the game for a couple of weeks, so maybe I'll follow that strategy again...

My brain doesn't work

I just thought to myself "Hmm, I'll look that up on Google while I'm sitting here at my computer..." and then by the time I'd clicked onto Google I'd completely forgotten what I was going to type into it. All those articles about me are right when they say I always walk into a room and forget what I was going to do there. And when they say a chimp beat me in a memory test.

I do realise, incidentally, that my blog entries for the last week or so have been a bit lacking in length and substance. I just never seem to remember to write anything until last thing at night, and then I can't think of anything cool to write about. I'll make up for it tomorrow with some big long essay about something exciting. Like whatever it was I was planning to look for on Google.

World champion standard

I'm really back into the swing of memory training, it's great! And what's more, I'd forgotten it's a bank holiday weekend coming up, so I get an extra day to do all sorts of useful and productive things! Furthermore, I've cut down on snacking in between meals and I feel extremely slender and healthy for a change! And the weather's relatively nice, in between rainstorms! And the recession and swine flu don't seem to have been in the news lately, so I assume somebody's sorted them out! Life is great.

I've got Bagpuss

Here's something I forgot to mention about the weekend - in a charity shop I found the complete Bagpuss on video! For 50p! Well, I wasn't going to pass up that kind of opportunity, so I'm watching it right now. It's the ship in a bottle one.

A little bit more memory

I did manage to remember the Online Memory Challenge today, which pleased me. I didn't perform terribly well in it, of course, but I'm sure with a bit of practice I can catch up with all these really good Germans who dominate it at the moment. I want to get back in the habit of doing a bit of speed memory every night when I get in from work. That'll have a knock-on effect in improving my results in the long disciplines too.

Anyway, enough memory training minutiae. From tomorrow I'll be back to blogging about whatever drivel pops into my head...

Dreißig Minuten

Ooh, I feel accomplished tonight. I've done practice sessions of half-hour cards, half-hour numbers and half-hour binary - with an hour's recall time for each, that's four and a half hours of proper training for the German championship. If I can do that kind of thing most weekends between now and the end of July, my brain will be ready for anything!

Didn't get particularly great scores, mind you, especially in the numbers where I made oodles of annoying little mistakes, but the important thing is that I didn't have nearly as much mind-wandering as I'd expected to have. Considering I haven't done a big lengthy memorising session for aaaaages, in fact, I was on really great form. I'm happy!

Another good memory-related thing - I found a half-eaten bag of tooty frooties in my jacket pocket this morning that I'd forgotten all about. I love when that happens!

Someone please remind me

I keep meaning to do the Online Memory Challenge on Sunday mornings, but I always remember it when I'm in the middle of something else and anyway it started twenty minutes ago. This is, of course, the first memory-based challenge, and I tend to fail it. So could someone give me a poke to remind me beforehand? Thanks.

Statto

"How does it feel to join Herbert Sutcliffe, Denis Compton, Geoffrey Boycott and Graham Gooch as the only English batsmen to score centuries in three successive Test innings?" an interviewer asked a bemused Ravi Bopara after today's play. Clearly it was news to him that he'd accomplished this quite impressive but rather obscure feat, but he managed to come up with a nice answer. I was impressed.

And it put me in the mood to find some statistic I could use to motivate myself to do some memory training - I like achieving statistics. And here's a good one - from the Austrian championship in November 2004 to the World Championship in August 2006, Clemens Mayer won seven consecutive memory competitions. I'm on five at the moment, so if I was to win the German and UK championships this summer, a world championship win would beat that record. Woo!

Of course, winning the German championship is pretty unlikely, since they don't generally do English translations, but it's still something to aim for...

Fat and useless

That's me. I never do anything productive these days. Well, from now on, starting tomorrow, I'm going to be hard-working and efficient and also eat less and exercise rather more. That's a Zoomy guarantee!

I am going to Pittsburgh in July, you see, and I intend to be perfectly in shape, body-wise and memory-training-wise by then. Like I said, starting tomorrow.

I don't normally write about work, but...

Gah, I've had too much to do at work this week! And it's only Tuesday! I need a holiday!

Actually, I'm wondering whether I should go to AnthroCon (the world's largest gathering for lovers of funny-animal comics, cartoons etc) in Pittsburgh in July. It would be nice to get away for a week or so and see the sights of a place I've never been to. But the only thing stopping me is the fact that I went to New York in March, I'm going to Hamburg at the end of July and then probably Bahrain in November. Four foreign trips in a year is rather the kind of thing I disapprove of in others. If you tell me you go overseas four times in a year, I'll decry you as some kind of bourgeois snob who the working classes need to rise up and overthrow and probably not want to be your friend. So I'd feel like a bit of a hypocrite.

On the other hand, I can just about afford it, more or less, and I really want to do it...

The superhuman power of eternal youth

There's an article about me in the Derby Evening Telegraph (and you can read it on the website even if you're not fortunate enough to live in Derby), telling the locals who might have missed it that I'm in Men's Health magazine.

Someone from the Telegraph did call me, at work, last week and ask for a quick interview. I told him my home number and asked him to give me a call outside office hours, but in the end they seem to have decided that my input wasn't necessary, and just gone ahead and written the article without it.

The best thing about this is that they've assumed my status quo is still what it was the last time they interviewed me - so the article says I still live in Derby, and, best of all, that I'm still 31! I'm never going to do another interview with anyone again, so as to stay youthful forever!

If you're roughly my age and from the same country

You'll be pleased to see that this is available on YouTube.

If you're the wrong age or the wrong nationality, or if you were hoping for a more interesting blog tonight... sorry.

Othello transcripts

This is a public apology for not typing up my transcripts from last Saturday yet, like I said I would. I seem to have spent the whole of the last three weeks or so not typing transcripts, and it's inexcusable. I'll do it tomorrow, if I can be bothered.

Hamburger Sammich & Sum French-Fried P'tatoes!

With Cambridge out of the way, I can start planning for the German championship in Hamburg! July 31st and August 1st! And if I'm going to do well in this, the second-most-important memory competition of the year, I'll need to spend the next few weekends getting back into the habit of 30-minute memorising. A half-hour cards, half-hour numbers and half-hour binaries, all in one day, really takes it out of you, but once I've done it a few times, my brain remembers the knack of keeping the concentration going for that length of time, and before you know it I'm all ready for the world championship and the hour-long disciplines.

I really want to do well in Hamburg - historically I always used to do badly at the German championship, but then I had a great one in 2007, couldn't afford to go last year, and I think it'd be nice to win it this time...

It's gone!

SAS Furniture, down the road! That shop's been there forever, and now it's turned into Bubble-It! I don't even know what Bubble-It sells! Maybe it... bubbles things. Anyway, it doesn't sell furniture, probably, and it's an outrage!

As I mentioned in a blog only a month or so ago, SAS Furniture has always been on the corner there. Whenever we used to drive into Beeston on the way to Grandma's house (being modern, and keen to avoid big bad wolves, we took the car via Beeston instead of skipping through the woods), we'd go past the place. What with that and Woolworth's, I'm getting extremely fed up with the modern age. When I work out exactly who's responsible for the entirety of the world's problems, I'm going to go around to his/her house/bungalow and shout at them. Loudly.

He hits ye and ye gang tae the hospital

One interesting thing you notice when you watch enough cartoons and read enough comics from the olden days is that plagiarism isn't as modern an invention as you might think. Even in the thirties, when it was still possible to think up a new gag that hadn't been done before, you'd still see examples galore of stealing a joke from a rival and hoping to get away with it.

Even so, it surprised and entertained me to find the original (or maybe just an earlier iteration) of an Oor Wullie strip in an earlier Popeye comic:

Thimble Theatre starring Popeye, December 18, 1932

Oor Wullie, January 30, 1938


Five years and the Atlantic Ocean between them - I wonder if there's a missing link here? I don't think Thimble Theatre had made it to British newspapers yet at that point, huge though it was in the USA, and I don't think that gag was ever used in the animated Popeye cartoons...

See, this is the kind of thing that really fascinates me, so I thought I'd share it with the world in general.

Further news from the weekend

I realised today that while I was trying to make the attendance at the CMC sound as international as possible, it didn't occur to me that one of the English competitors had an Indian name. And now I'm worried that people think I'm either some kind of racist, or some kind of excessively politically-correct berk, or both.

Another thing I forgot to mention is that although I didn't see fit to provide any prizes for this year's competition, I did get some extremely cool gifts from competitors - Dai gave me several cool and interesting coins to add to my collection (an old-style 5p to add to my 10p and 50p!) and Christopher presented me with a giant chocolate gold medal, by far the best and tastiest medal I've ever got from a memory competition!

I should also mention the fun with the window in the competition room - it had been recently broken and patched up with brown tape, and half way through the championship we found out why. It seems the window has trouble staying open and slides down closed of its own volition. Luckily, my screeches of "Catch it!" and James and Jenny's quick reactions saved it from shattering any more panes.

And just to save the best till last, I heard today that Marco proposed to Jane in the evening after the competition, and she said yes! So, you see, memory competitions lead to romance! Another reason for everybody to come along and take part!

Ahh, Cambridge

It makes all the tedious preparation work feel worthwhile when we have a fun and successful Cambridge Memory Championship at the end of it! I'm back home again now and looking forward to catching up with the various things I haven't been doing just lately, like not ignoring everybody unrelated to the Cambridge Memory Championship who's been wanting to talk to me.

Anyway, here's what I've been doing this weekend. It was othello on Saturday, and lots of people turned up again - 15 of them, plus a non-playing Adelaide and Aubrey, who was in the country for once and able to organise the whole Cambridge MSO. Which all seemed to be a roaring success, except that there were too few events on the Saturday (the stratego was cancelled) and too many on the Sunday (the draughts was extended to cover both days). This led Aubrey to greet me with ominous questions like "Do you actually need tables for the memory competition?" and "There's no real reason why it has to be indoors, right?"

The othello itself went reasonably well, all in all. I beat Geoff in the first round, which I seem to be making a habit of lately, then lost to Imre and David, who are both much, much better than me, but who I manage to beat once in a while and was hoping to this time as well. Still, I was on four wins out of six before the final round, and just needed to beat Jeremy to end up in joint third with Geoff (who beat Imre, who in turn beat David - if you're interested in the statistics that don't involve me, you should probably check out the British Othello website instead, I'm too self-centred) and keep my undeserved comfortable lead in the BGP. But I lost the decisive game 33-31, ended up a comparatively rubbish joint fifth with Ian (not that Ian is comparatively rubbish compared to Geoff, although I can see how you might draw that inference from my last two sentences), and am now only seven points clear of David. Still, maybe I'll win or be the only person who turns up to the last two tournaments.

After the othello, I decided it might be a good idea to check out the possibility of alternative venues for the memory the next day, to avoid sharing a room with backgammon players or sitting outside in the courtyard on those chairs with little wobbly mini-desk attachments. In the spirit of nothing-ventured-nothing-gained, I went into the Royal Cambridge Hotel at half past seven on Saturday evening to ask the receptionist if there was any chance of getting a cheap conference room for nine o'clock on Sunday morning. Funnily enough, they didn't seem to think there was anything at all unusual about this request, and provided us with a perfect venue - much more swanky than the usual location, and not at all expensive, especially since Aubrey chipped in with a part of the cost from the MSO funds.

The international turnout of the memory competition was extremely impressive - two Swedes (one of whom has an Albanian name), four Germans (one of whom has a French name), an Italian (who lives in London and whose accent veers between Italian and cockney at random), one Welsh and even two English participants! We really need to get more British people involved in memory competitions.

We also had a huge and me-very-grateful-making turnout of helpers who ran the competition and marked papers promptly and accurately, ensuring everything worked out exactly the way it should, ran on time and suffered no major disasters and hardly any minor ones either (slight technical hitch or two with the spoken numbers, but nothing worse than usual) without me having to do much real work at all!

Star of the show was Dennis Müller, who's only been doing memory stuff for six months and is already confident enough to attempt a 20-second pack of cards and talk in terms of beating me next time we go head-to-head (Hamburg, end of July). It's a bit worrying, but on the other hand, really great. I look forward to seeing how well he does after a bit more training!

Dennis joins the illustrious list of Cambridge Memory Championships winners (Clemens Mayer, Ed Cooke and Gaby Kappus), while Mattias Ribbing joins the equally illustrious list of Best Beginners at the CMC (James Paterson, Fan Kai Yoon, Katie Kermode), who have all (except Fan Kai Yoon, who never came to any memory competition ever again) gone on to great things.

So, a good time was had by all! Now I'm going to go to bed, because it tires you out, organising events. Normality resumes tomorrow!

The loveliness of Leicester

Getting to Cambridge from Beeston tonight took less than three hours, which only happens on very rare occasions when you can change at Leicester without waiting more than a few minutes and get a direct train to Cambridge. But the 17:08 tonight was one of those times, and I managed to leave work early despite having to cover someone else's Friday-afternoon report that always takes ages to gather various different people's input.

So I was already in a good mood when I went in to the cafe at Leicester station for something to eat, and it only got better when it turned out that the till wasn't taking cards and I didn't have quite enough money to pay for my crisps, ham salad roll and bottle of coke, only for the man behind the till to cheerfully chip in 50p from his own pocket to make up the difference!

And then, if that wasn't enough to convince me that Leicester station is great, the announcer over the tannoy described the next train to arrive as "the chronologically disadvantaged 17:30 to London" and got a chuckle from the crowd of people waiting for it. Most big stations like Leicester have a robot announcing the trains, or else a low-paid, non-English-speaking temp. Hooray for the traditional British sense of humour and the traditional British sense of giving someone 50p to pay for a sandwich!

That's made me all cheerful and chirpy about the weekend ahead, and was just what I needed after lots of busy-ness at work and lots of running around frantically for the last few evenings getting everything sorted for Sunday (I still need to create the spoken numbers program on Powerpoint, but I can do that in the comfort of my hotel room. All the memorisation papers are printed out and safely stored in my small rucksack - which I was carrying on my front, like some kind of baby harness thing, because my big backpack was on my back. And in a way, these memorisation and recall papers are my babies. A strange way that only a certifiable lunatic would use, but a way nonetheless. I laboured over the things and printed them out, using the very last drop of ink my Lexmark cartridges would allow me. Wait a minute, I opened a set of brackets about 500 words ago, let's close them before we go any further). That's better.

On my journey down here tonight, I must have given people the impression that I'd recently come from Bahrain - I was wearing my souvenir Bahrain T-shirt, and my big rucksack has still got the little white band around it saying "Bahrain International Airport Security" from my trip there six months ago. People probably concluded that I'd been to the grand prix. Perhaps that's why the guy gave me that 50p - he must have assumed I'm a millionaire playboy and would reward him with gold bars and mansions!

Anyway, I'm rambling. I think I'll go to bed now. Othello tomorrow, memory on Sunday!

If you're a man and you want to be healthy

Then you could probably do worse than buying the latest issue of Men's Health magazine, available now for £3.95 from all good newsagents. Or just ask me if you can borrow the free copy they sent me. I'm on page 108, the fifth in the series of profiles on 'superhumans', incongruously sandwiched between Lance Armstrong and Sebastian Coe. "The Genius", they call me - I won't disillusion them if you don't.

You can also find that interivew I did with the Canadian news agency on the internet with a quick Google search, if you really want to. It covers essentially the same ground as the Men's Health article.

I'll leave you with a quote attributed to Tony Buzan in an email I got from some Australians:

Quite Simply...
"Good Food = Good Brain
Junk Food = Junk Brain”

Tony Buzan

And an alternative quote from someone whose brain is generally held to be not too shabby:

Junk food is great! What are you talking about, Tony?

Ben Pridmore (genius)

Cambridge? Yes, I probably should do something about that.

Haven't booked a hotel for the weekend yet. If I end up having to commute from Beeston and back every day, I'm really going to be worn out by Monday...

There just aren't enough puns in the world!

On BBC2 tonight, there was a trailer for a programme about Kew Gardens, followed by the snooker. And nobody made a "and now a different kind of cues..." quip! What is wrong with everybody nowadays? Don't they know there's some kind of depression happening, and the best cure for depression is jovial banter from BBC continuity announcers?

A thought occurs

Do you think that some fervently anti-Communist heraldist has ever reworked the old 'Better dead than red' slogan to make it 'Better ghouls than gules'? If not, do you think I could trademark it somehow? Because it really makes me giggle.

Anyway, tonight I'm going to do something productive for once - a bit of memory training, a bit of finishing off all that printing for Cambridge, maybe even a bit of typing up my othello transcripts from London, like I've been meaning to do for quite a while now. And a minimum of snooker-watching.

I work for MI5

I spy on people, memorise what they say and do, and repeat it with roughly 85% accuracy. They hired me for my binary-digit-remembering skills, obviously, but we're still waiting for the first terrorist attack (or whatever it is that MI5 investigate, if indeed MI5 still exists and is still called that - I don't keep up with the news as much as I should) that somehow involves a need to memorise up to 4000 1s and 0s in 30 minutes. The bosses were thinking of letting me go, but then someone realised that I'm quite a bit cheaper and easier to secretly install in someone's house than a hidden microphone.

It's a printing-things-out weekend

I always forget how long it takes to print all the papers for even a tiny little memory competition like Cambridge. It does give me a much greater admiration for those wonderful people (ie Phil and maybe a couple of other helpers if he's lucky) who do all the preparation work for the world championships.

I also forget how much paper and expensive print cartridges it takes - I had thought I'd be able to use my Boots staff discount this year (it's got to be good for something - normally the only thing I buy at Boots is earplugs, which cost £1.99 for five pairs, so my discounts are pretty negligible), but I left it to the last second as usual, and the big Nottingham store had run out of the kind of cartridges I need, so I had to buy them for full price at Dixons.

As a tangent, why does every type of printer take differently-shaped print cartridges? Is there any reason why all Lexmark printers couldn't be made so that they use a universal kind of cartridge? It's all a big conspiracy, I tells you.

As another tangent, yes, I still call it Dixons. If they're too lazy to change their colour scheme along with their name, they've only got themselves to blame. The general public's collective brain just processes the colours and doesn't look at the words.

Crash! Shatter! Tinkle!

Some of the lights in this place have sort of strange frosted glass globe lampshades instead of normal ones. I was just sitting down to eat tonight when there was suddenly an almighty crash-shatter-tinkle kind of noise from the kitchen. The lampshade thing had spontaneously fallen to the floor and shattered into a zillion pieces! I was standing roughly directly underneath it not more than a couple of minutes beforehand, too! I could have been killed! Well, actually, the thing weighed practically nothing and seems to have been fairly fragile, but I might have got Bond-villain kind of scars on my bald shiny head. I'd sue the landlord if not for the fact that I changed the bulb a couple of weeks ago and clearly didn't put the stupid lampshade back properly.

Weight a minute

To celebrate the launch of a scary-sounding miracle weight loss pill in pharmacies, there were weighing machines at work today, inviting everyone to come along and see what they weigh. Just like the one that used to taunt me at Woolworth's before I engineered the closing down of the entire company just to shut it up. Only this Boots one was even nastier to me - it tells me that anyone with a Body Mass Index over 28 can benefit from a weight loss plan, and mine is 28.6.

I'm being forced to the conclusion that I need to start making an effort to eat properly. This last couple of years, I genuinely have got much too chubby. It's just that the very thought of trying to lose weight sends me scurrying to the Co-op for a bag of Tangfastics. The idea of dieting seems to be against all of my principles, somehow. Like wearing a cycle helmet or sunscreen. It's the kind of thing that a certain kind of person does, and I don't want to be that kind of person, however sensible it would be. It's hard to explain.

Character-building

Watching some snooker player trying to conceal his annoyance as he snappily answers questions like "What's your favourite colour" in the BBC's attempt to convey the personalities of players makes me think about the marketability of memory competitions.

It's a regular complaint nowadays that there used to be "characters" in snooker, whereas now the players are all interchangeable, boring young men. This complaint is generally made by old men who forget that the old players were also boring. But I think "The Mentalists" showed that we could do a big feature about all the top memory athletes, sum up each of their personalities and quirks in a soundbite and make the general public genuinely interested in us. You know, Gunther's the German mastermind, Ed's 'the upper-class chap' (as someone I met in the street a while ago repeatedly described him), and I'm the working-class hero. Or maybe the weird nerd with the beard and hat, take your pick.

I bet I could describe the whole top twenty in the world in their own unique phrase, if I put my mind to it. But I don't think I will - I'd only end up offending everyone by using some harmless phrase like "the big fat idiot who can't remember anything".

Lots of phone calls

Well, two of them, anyway, which is two more phone calls than I like to deal with of an evening. But hopefully they'll result in an article appearing in the Cambridge newspaper about the upcoming memory championship, and in Canadians coming to film the UK and World championships later in the year, so it's worth it.

Meanwhile, to make up for me not replying to Florian's email because I haven't got round to it yet, have I plugged memory-sports.com on my blog before? I don't think I have, but you should all go and look at it anyway.

The things I do for memory

A journalist from a local Cambridge newspaper said he'd call me at some point tonight for an article about the Cambridge Memory Championship, and I needed to go out to the supermarket, so, with great reluctance, I had to change the message on my answering machine.

It's not an actual answering machine, you understand, it's the normal 1571 service, but I've got an outdated vocabulary. Anyway, it used to say something like "Hi, I never check this thing, but leave me a message and if you're lucky I might hear it some time and call you back. Or you could just email me like a normal person." I don't like phones.

But so as not to offend this intrepid reporter, I changed it to a bland hello-I'm-Ben-I'm-not-here-right-now thing. And did he call? Did he heckers. That'll teach me to compromise my principles just for the sake of not being rude to people.

Pound for pound

As I think I've mentioned, I've been browsing around coin-related sites just lately, and in the process discovered something I didn't know - there's one different design of pound coin for every year from 1983 to 2008, but from now on they're sticking with the same shield design along with the new versions of all the other coins. So, naturally, this means I need to collect one of each, just for the sake of having a complete collection. 26 of them, you see - one for each location on one of my journeys, it's fate. The minor problem is that some years' pound coins weren't manufactured in bulk because there were already enough of them in circulation, so I'd have to buy one of those official Royal Mint collection sets from some official Royal Mint coin collector, and that seems like an excessive length to go to just to satisfy a 'hey, I should get hold of one of each kind of pound coin' urge. Maybe I'll just limit myself to what I'm doing at the moment, and putting aside a kind that I haven't got yet every time I get one in my change...

An interesting side-effect of paying attention to pound coins is that I can now spot a forgery if need be. You know how there are stories in the news every now and then saying that 10% of pound coins in circulation are forgeries, or something like that. I got one in my change today - it's quite obvious, if you're paying attention; the writing on the edge is wobbly and not deep enough, the heads and tails sides aren't lined up with each other right and it's slightly the wrong colour. I'm not sure whether to start a collection of fake pound coins alongside the collection of real ones or just to buy something with it next time I'm in a shop. I think it's probably illegal to knowingly spend fake money, but I think that's a monstrously unfair rule, punishing you for being clever enough to know a forgery when you see it. Fair laws should punish stupid people and give extra money to clever people. That's how things would work if I ruled the world, anyway. Also, cleverness would be legally defined in some way that includes me and excludes anyone I don't like.

I'd make a really great evil dictator, wouldn't I? Maybe that should be my next career move. Anyone want to be my henchman? I'll pay you a pound!

Capital fun

When the weekend brings such lovely, warm, sunny spring weather, what better way to spend the day than sitting in a room above a pub in London, playing othello with thirteen other enthusiasts?

Othello returned to its regular London home of the Bath House, just off Oxford Street, and we had a very big turnout for a regional - just about all the regulars and semi-regulars, including the likes of Steve MacGuire and Jeremy Dyer (whose rhyming names make me want to turn this blog entry into a poem), who haven't been to a tournament for quite some time. And a brand-new player (new to real-life othello, anyway, but not to playing on the internet) by the name of Stephen Spencer, too! I've mentioned it on other forums before, but the point is worth mentioning - Stephen Rowe was also at the Bath House today, and I went to primary school with a boy originally called Stephen Roe who changed his name (for some reason I don't recall) to Stephen Spencer. As you all know, I have a history of getting othello players' names mixed up, and this kind of thing really doesn't help me!

Still, the tournament went surprisingly well for me - I lost to David Beck, but he squished everyone he played today, and I also lost to Ian Turner (I did beat Kali in my first game, which was a relief), but Ian then lost to Geoff Hubbard and I finished the day by beating Geoff, so the three of us ended up jointly in second place!

Since David, Geoff and Ian all didn't come to the first regional of the year, and since Iain Barrass, who came second in Oadby, had a bad day today and ended up joint eighth, this gives me a big impressive lead in the British Grand Prix standings! It probably won't last, of course, with three regionals to go and there being so many people who are better than me, and me probably not going to the last one since it's down in Farnborough and getting there is a hassle and it's my brother's birthday the next day, but still, yay for me!

And although it's true that the BGP has a tendency to be a prize for the player who turns up to the most tournaments, the winner does get to play in the World Championship! (If it doesn't clash with the memory one, of course - it's normally in November, and the WMC is currently scheduled for that kind of time...) And there's even a trophy now! It made its debut today, all gleaming and shiny, the George Greaves Memorial Plate, and was presented to last year's BGP winner Iain.

It would be extremely groovy to see my name engraved on it (I've never had my name engraved on a trophy before - the WMC used to have a trophy like that, but hasn't for years now, it's a long story) and who knows, if I get another couple of flukey wins or second places, it's possible...

Also, since I dissed the local Labour/Lib Dem council in my blog recently, I feel I should record that I got a leaflet through the door today from the Conservatives that spells 'sincerely' wrong. Bunch of illiterates, I'm not voting for them...

Simpsons

I do watch the Simpsons quite a lot. It's just that it's always on in the evenings when I'm sitting around and feeling lazy. But somehow, even though season one seems to be repeated over and over again and they never show season 2 or 3, I don't seem to have seen "Homer's Odyssey" for years and years, until tonight. And it's quite good, actually! Maybe I'll get the DVDs and watch all five million episodes in one sitting...

I realise I should probably be spending my evenings memorising numbers instead of watching the Simpsons. But, you see, I just can't be bothered. It's Friday.

Oh Canada

I was feeling really productive and fired-up at work today for some reason, and considering staying late even though I didn't need to, just to get lots of stuff done. This isn't the kind of mood I'm often in - I do do a good job as an analyst, but I don't generally get so into it that I want to be in the office all night when there's football on telly - so it's probably a good thing that I snapped out of it with remembering that I'd agreed to do a phone interview with a Canadian journalist tonight.

If you're Canadian, and read newspapers (I don't know which ones - any or all of the publications printed by Sun Media), make sure to check it out, sometime in the next couple of months, probably. It's not going to contain anything I haven't said in dozens of other interviews before, but I'll be saying them in a different order, probably, so you'll want to read it anyway.

In other news, I notice that there's a programme on BBC1 tonight called "The Narnia Code" in which, according to the Radio Times, a Dr Michael Ward claims to have discovered a "profound subtext" to "the books' ostensibly fairy-tale events". Um, is that really a new and shocking idea? Perhaps poor Dr Ward is the only person in the world who's never noticed the subtext before, and thought it was just a story about a magic land with a talking lion?

Things I don't own but which people seem to think I should own

A mobile phone
Hammers, nails, screwdrivers, electric drills, basically anything you can buy from B&Q
A microwave
Nail-clippers
A car
A frying pan
A razor
More than one pair of shoes
A DVD player that isn't my laptop
Paper tissues
An ipod, or for that matter a CD player that isn't my laptop
Basic cooking ingredients like eggs, flour, spices etc
A wig.

Big city othello

London regional this weekend, and I've been playing online a bit to see if practice helps me or hinders me. I can't quite understand my othello-playing ability. Some days I have a run of great games where I spot all the clever little moves and plan ingenious strategies far in advance, other times (and against the same opponents in the same positions) I find that I have no idea what's going on and I just make really stupid moves. Possibly there's some kind of loose connection in my brain. I need some kind of brain scan. Actually, there is some kind of neurologist or something who wants to talk to me, maybe I'll get round to emailing him back and have him check my wiring...

Holidays

Well, it's back to work tomorrow after four days off, and naturally this puts me in the mood to plan not going to work again at some point in the near future. It's a new financial year, you see, I've got 25 days between now and the end of March next year, and I'd quite like to plan it out properly for once, instead of taking them all whenever I feel like it and ending up with no holidays left for the second half of the year. If I wasn't so lazy, I'd sit down and work out how much time I'd need for each memory competition, including recovery time afterwards, then plan a couple of other little breaks at appropriate times in between them. I'm not going to, but it's definitely a step in the right direction for me to acknowledge that it's a good idea to do it.

Breakout!

I've got worryingly addicted to playing Arkanoid since I discovered it online yesterday. It's a very compelling game that I haven't played since the BBC Micro version when I was still at school. Although I have got the extremely similar Breakout on the Master System, and had a good long game on that tonight, too, in an attempt to get it out of my system. In fact, I'm pretty sure I got further than I ever have before, in the whole history of me playing video games - perhaps it's all the memory training and discipline that I've instilled in myself since the days when I was regularly playing it!

Tomorrow, I'll finish creating the memorisation papers for Cambridge (just need to write all those historic dates...) and send that long-overdue email to all the definite and possible competitors.

Why do these things always involve horses?

Flat 7, Gordonstoun Court, Suffolk Street, Oulton Broad, Suffolk is the subject of an interesting law, enacted in 1537 by Henry VIII and still in effect today. The law requires two living horses to be within the flat at all times, failure to adhere to this law carrying a minimum twenty-year prison sentence for the owner, occupants and any visitors to the property in the previous seven weeks. The last time anyone was prosecuted under this law was in 1987, when building works forced the then resident Humphrey Dalmas to briefly move one of the horses out into the corridor in order to access a leaking gas pipe. The team of twelve police officers who constantly monitor the flat sprang quickly into action and had Dalmas taken into immediate custody.

The current owner, hippopotamus breeder Hugo Bugeleisen, has made sure to keep at least four horses in the flat, so as to avoid prosecution should one or two of them spontaneously drop dead, and describes himself as "happy" with the situation, "although not as happy as those whose flats contain no horses at all, obviously."

The law was introduced at the request of Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham, whose cousin, Derek Tunstall, lived in Pakefield and kept a mistress in Camps Heath. Oulton Broad being roughly half way between the two locations, the law enabled Derek to ride as quickly as possible to his mistress's house every Saturday afternoon, changing his tired horse for a fresh one at Oulton, steal a quick kiss and return home again before his wife had finished her weekly bath. The law originally applied to a large country house with attached stables; this was destroyed in the war and a block of flats built in its place in the early fifties, when it was ruled that for the purposes of the Living Horse Law, Flat 7 should be considered the successor of the original property. A small, one-bedroom, three-kitchen flat, the presence of two or more horses leaves no room to swing a cat, let alone breed a hippopotamus.

The law serves no practical purpose today - Derek Tunstall lived to a surprisingly ripe old age but was eventually executed in 1667 on the posthumous orders of Oliver Cromwell for treason and unlicensed dispensing of rat poison - but an attempt to pass a bill through parliament invalidating the law was unanimously defeated in 1992, with even the MP who introduced the motion deciding to vote against it.

Fun fun fun

I feel bad about devoting a whole blog to a TV review, because I like to be a bit more unconventional than that. But I feel that I should mention the comeback of Red Dwarf that was on tonight, seeing as I loved the original series (with the obvious exception of the last couple of seasons). It was fun, better than most resurrections of sitcoms that passed their best long ago, but nothing too special. What really surprised me is that while the cast haven't physically aged too much, Rimmer's voice in particular has put on a few years. And Chris Barrie's a voice actor, I would expect him to be pitch-perfect (Frank Welker still nails the voice of Freddy on Scooby-Doo, and he's ancient now...)

See, now I've got that out of my system I won't be able to devote tomorrow to talking about Doctor Who, and I'll be able to go back to my usual inane witterings...

Maundy Thursday is here at last!

Ahh, a four-day weekend. Exactly what I need to do all that Cambridge Memory Championship preparation I was meaning to do last weekend! It really was very clever of me to arrange the championship for a few weeks after Easter, wasn't it? I take full credit for that decision, even though it was nothing to do with me.

Meanwhile, if you want some fun, type my name into Google blog search and sort it by date. It seems there are fake blogs out there that take popular news stories or posts from genuine blogs, run the words through a thesaurus to make it look at first glance like a different post and use the resulting text to lure unsuspecting searchers into their site, for nefarious purposes of their own (probably involving selling stuff, but maybe spreading viruses or other mischief - either way, clicking on the link is likely to be a bad thing, so don't.)

This procedure has turned that BBC article into phrases like "It attacks less than 30 approves for the reigning World Remembrance Protector to recall the sequence of a pack of hovering cards." and "I ignore the unscathed shebang" and "I prowl into a abide and ignore what I am doing there, arguable the fridge and theorize why I am looking in there."

From now on, please call me the World Remembrance Protector! And remember that I'm splendidly putrescent at remembering people's names.

An important footnote to tonight's post

There's an advert on TV that sings the line "Don't be afraid to be young and free", which I misheard as "Don't be afraid to be onion-free", and wondered whether there were onion-fans out there who would ostracise those who chose not to have onions with their hamburgers. Because I prefer not to have onions, and it does make people look at me strangely, sometimes.

Doctor Whooooooooo!

Yay, it's been too long since the last time the Doctor was on our screens, so I'm looking forward to the Easter special on Saturday. Despite the interview with Russell T Davies in the Radio Times in which he promises "a bunch of ordinary commuters stranded on an alien world". Because the concept of an isolated bunch of ordinary humans facing an alien menace just hasn't been done enough in modern Doctor Who, has it? I think there was one episode in the first season that DIDN'T feature a bunch of ordinary people under siege by weird aliens! Gosh, maybe this latest episode will feature some kind of everyday item turning against humanity and the whole world's population being attacked by monsters that the Doctor is able to defeat by pressing the right button in Cardiff!

But still, I'm just being mean for no reason. I'm sure it's really going to be great!

I'm better now

Thanks to everyone for the messages of sympathy, and sorry for not even mustering a word of bloggery last night, but I decided to just go to bed early instead. Still, I'm well on the road to recovery now, and as if to celebrate the fact, that long-ago BBC website interview has finally made it online!

Sheesh, I'm typing this while watching Man Utd's should-be-easy game against Porto, and they've just gone a goal down after three and a half minutes! Probably because they've got a player called Hulk.

Anyway, back to the subject of memory, and I was at one point at number 8 on the most-read-right-now list, and number THREE on the most-watched/listened-right-now! Right after Kim Jong-Il and an extremely small puppy. To be fair, the puppy's quite a lot cuter than me, so I'd recommend that you watch it instead. For that matter, Kim Jong-Il's probably cuter than me, too. And with less of a silly voice. But still, why should he get all the attention? I've been ill too, and nobody's speculating whether or not I'm still alive. These blogs could be being ghostwritten by my minions, you know, and there's no way to independently verify the date of the footage of me on the BBC. Someone start a conspiracy theory, or I'll have to do it myself!

Well, must go and watch how the football turns out. I might turn down the commentary if they make one more Hulk-joke, though. I can't cope with another hour-and-a-half of "Don't make him angry". Still, it's impressively nerdy of a football commentator to admit that he knows "Lou Ferrigno played Dr David Banner in the TV series", even if he's not entirely right about that...

Cough, hack, snort, sniffle

I'll resume regular blog output when I'm feeling better. For now, I'm going to bed. Get-well-soons would be gratefully received.

Ohhh, my head...

Sorry about last night's unusually brief post. I wasn't planning to go out drinking - for one thing I'm suffering from a terrible cold at the moment - but my brother phoned me and invited me to come out and buy him drinks, and how could I refuse? But I blame the cold virus for the fact that I've had the worst hangover of my life today. I didn't even drink all that much, but I still feel pretty terrible even now, and I'm sure it can't be that I just can't cut the mustard like I used to.

Still, to look on the bright side, while we were loudly singing and carousing and breaking things, a passer-by glared at us and said "Bloody students..." Obviously I still look youthful for a 32-year-old, bald accountant!

Sorry, no blog tonight.

Drunk. Brother. Singing was involved. Need bed.

Cambridge! Roll up, roll up!

Okay, this coming weekend is my official emailing-everyone-about-the-Cambridge-Memory-Championship weekend, so here's a little advance warning, just in case anybody wants to email me first and tell me they're definitely coming. Because the 'definites' list consist of a Norwegian, two Swedes, two Germans and an Italian from Tunbridge Wells, so it would be nice to also have a confirmation from some of the British people who've said they're probably coming along.

Maybe I should lose weight

Or perhaps it's just the ancient dining chairs this flat came with. Either way, while memorising cards this evening, I tilted my chair back on two legs as I always do, only for it to fall to pieces and drop me comically on the floor. Oliver Hardy couldn't have done it better, I just wish I'd had a camera filming me at the time.

I should get some more chairs this weekend. I've been meaning to get some new furnishings to fill out this semi-furnished flat of mine, perhaps I'll go to SAS Furniture (the strangely military-sounding shop down the road that I've been driven past on the way to Grandma's house for my entire life, but have never gone inside) and splurge on some tacky and tasteless items!

Just how much of a celeb am I?

Let's just look a bit more closely at last night's "clever celebrities" lineup on Watchdog, and bear in mind that they invited me to be on it only for me to turn them down because of the Welsh Memory Championship. The team consisted of Keith Chegwin, Konnie Huq and Iain Lee. Those are all Real Celebrities! Okay, I'm sure even they would agree that they're not exactly A-list superstars, but they're all unquestionably people who the man on the street would describe as celebrities, rather than people who've been on the telly once or twice. Except possibly Iain Lee, who I had to look up on the internet, but he's got his own radio show, so he must be cool.

And they wanted me on the team too! I'm really chuffed by this. That means I must be a genuine famous person! I'm quite serious, by the way - I realise that there are people in the world who wouldn't consider it a high point in their career to be listed alongside Cheggers and her off Blue Peter, but I really do! This really is fantastic stuff, and I'm all delighted! I wish I'd blown off the memory competition and done Watchdog now...

Other things I've learned recently

Bristol Parkway train station hasn't got a platform 1. Just 2, 3 and 4. Which is groovy, because it reminds me of good old Skegness station, which has six surviving platforms numbered 2 to 7, although only one of them ever gets used. Cardiff Central makes up for this by having a platform 0.

Slightly more interestingly, I had something of a revelation while on my way down to Wales on Friday night. I just thought to myself "You know, actually, the reason I have an aptitude for memory stuff is probably that I've had a lifelong obsession with cartoons, comics and any and all forms of visual storytelling. And the basic principle of memory techniques is to use mental visual storytelling to remember things. Hey, I've never thought of it like that before!" Dai's response when I told him was, I suspect, pretty much what everybody else will be thinking too - "Well, yeah, that's kind of obvious, isn't it?" - but this is a whole new outlook for me. The fundamental interconnectedness of all things amazes me!

STOP PRESS: About five seconds after typing Dai's name there, blow me down if I didn't get an email from him, reminding me that Watchdog was on tonight, and guess who they got for the pub-quiz segment after I turned them down? Keith Chegwin! Wow, I'm cooler than Cheggers! When do I get my own series of Zoomy Plays Pop?

Cymraeg Chof Chydymgais / Welsh Memory Championship

'm hovercraft ydy llonaid chan llyswennod. I have returned from the land of bilingual traffic signs and train station announcements after a very fun weekend! Ai Ddeudais caech a 'n arddun chorff , afaelech 'i rhago? Wales is certainly an interesting place to visit, and it's funny that I've never found a reason to do it before now. Dwi na 'n bellach heintiedig. The first-ever Welsh memory championship was a big success, even attracting three Welsh competitors (as many UK competitors who turned up for the first UK championship) as well as six outsiders. 'm ddidennau chwala ag ddifyrra! And I did rather better than I'd expected to do, which is reassuring!

It's great to be officially back in the memory-competition season! Ringland Community Centre, near Newport, welcomed a posse of new and old memorisers - a Welsh Team made up of old hand James Paterson, newbie Carl Griffin and new-to-competitions-but-not-to-memorising-cards John Burrows; an English Team of me, Katie Kermode and Ameel Hoque; and a Foreigners Team of Dagfinn Hammar (Norway), Idriz Zogaj (Albanio-Sweden) and Conor Muldoon (Ireland). Plus an all-important organising and arbiting team of Dai, Dai's dad and neighbour Sian, Phil, Warren and (Ameel's girlfriend who mentioned during one conversation that nobody ever spells her name right but who for some reason I didn't ask to tell me the correct spelling, so if this is right I'll be very surprised) Dionne.

I haven't got the final results to hand, so can only rely on my memory, but we started off with a new world record in the 5-minute words, from Katie of course, with 109 (or something close to it). I think that was the only world record of the day, I certainly wasn't up to speed enough to set one, unless there was one in the names and faces right at the end (we did that discipline last, unusually, for technical reasons - the papers needed to be printed out during the competition). I got an 82 in the words, which I was entirely happy with. I moved into the lead after discipline two, 5-minute binary, with a pretty impressive 840, and I think held on to it all the way through from then on. Throughout the competition, I was some distance away from my best, but not as far off as I'd thought I would be - my brain was running slower than it does when I've been training, and I was completely burnt out by the end of the day, but I posted quite acceptable scores in nearly everything.

Katie was a fairly comfortable second place - she's the top contender for next-new-British-World-Champion at the moment, unless she forgets everything during the general excitement of having a baby in August - and Ameel and James were fighting it out all the way through for third, with Ameel ending up on top. Hooray for Team England!

Dai provided floor-space (and even bed-space for me! I'm privileged, on account of I'm the world champion, you see), food, drink and fun for everyone, and organised a cracking weekend. Book your tickets for the next one, this time next year!

Ponty-Prid

Well, tomorrow I'm attempting to find my way to Risca & Pontymister train station, deep in the wilds of Wales, somewhere. I've never actually been to Wales before, even though some people dubiously claim that the name Pridmore originates there, so it'll be weird and different and unusual. But probably also fun!

Of course, if not for the Welsh Memory Championship, I could be furthering my TV career - I had a last-minute invitation this evening to be on Watchdog! They're filming a thing on Saturday for a piece about phone directory services, funnily enough (see my post of a couple of days ago), which made me think it's fate and almost made me consider ditching the memory championship in order to do it. But then I remembered that I'm unlikely to keep getting this kind of TV invitation anyway if I don't win the World Memory Championship this year, and I'm unlikely to win the WMC if I don't go to any memory championships. So it's a good celebrity-career move not to be on telly next Monday. Be sure to tune in and see who they managed to recruit at even shorter notice!

Healthy, wealthy and wise

I had a photo shoot this afternoon with Men's Health magazine. And a surprisingly painless one, too - the guy is a proper professional photographer who was under instructions to produce 'a strong portrait of Ben Pridmore' (quite a challenge), and my experience of such things is that getting one photo tends to involve at least three or four hours of rearranging/accidentally breaking all my furnishings, setting up huge camera/lighting apparatus, taking pictures from all angles and finally using the one that makes me look fat. However, this shoot took less than an hour from start to finish, nothing got broken, set on fire or eaten, and although I don't know which shot they're eventually going to choose, I seemed to come out looking positively slender!

In fact, here's the link to the photographer's website, which I mentioned but didn't link to in a previous post. Give him a call if you're looking for a photographer for your wedding! He probably doesn't do weddings, but he might know someone who does. He made me look just as glamorous as Kate Winslet in that picture.

Planning

How many packs of cards to go for in the 10-min cards on Saturday? I could probably do six and not make a mess of it, even out of practice as I am, but I don't like to attempt something that's worse than the world record. It bugs me. This is why I'm not a serious, dedicated professional, of course - I always end up going for something I know perfectly well is beyond my capabilities when I'm out of practice, for no good reason.

I'll also probably go for a 20-something seconds pack of speed cards and get it all wrong. I can just see that happening.

Blood, blood and more blood

When giving blood today, the nurse made a mess of getting the needle into my left arm, and they ended up draining a bag of B-positive from my right arm instead. Which doesn't bother me unduly, except that I've thereby ended up with sticking plasters on each of my inner elbows. And I've got surprisingly hairy arms for a nerd, so getting plasters off my arms is always painful and unpleasant.

Still, I was cheered up completely when I came home to find that 118 247 have launched an ad campaign based on Magical Trevor (and Trev himself even makes a cameo appearance in the brilliant advert)! Could this be the end of 118 118's advert-campaign-fuelled domination of the directory enquiries market? I'm certainly going to call 247 next time I want to know a number, anyway. Everyone loves Magical Trevor...

Britains Space!

Talking with my brother today reminded me how cool these things were! A series of spaceship/spacemen/alien toys, that could be taken apart, to a certain extent, and combined in exciting ways! We had just about all of the toys shown on that page - they were cheap, really cool and on sale in Perkins newsagent in Horncastle in the early eighties. We've still, indeed, got some of them, under my bed in what remains of our toy collection. That website is quite right about the robots' soft plastic bits going sticky and unpleasant after twenty-something years, but they're still awesomely cool. Long live Britains!