XMTeeing-off

Hmm, how to maximise my qualifying scores for the XMT? I need to be scientific about it. Qualifying will start in January, apparently, and almost certainly be based on the same 100-points-for-the-world-record system as last year, so obviously I need to consider which disciplines can get me the most points and also which ones will give me the biggest edge over my potential rivals...

Cards - world record 52 in 23.34 seconds. That's fast. And although sub-30-second times are becoming more and more frequent lately, it's fair to say most of the memorisers in the qualifiers still can't do it. If I can get myself somewhere near that time of Simon's, it'd give me a great head-start. I did three tries at everything today and my best time was 25.38 - it'd be good if I could get it into the 24s or 23s consistently by January.

Images - world record 30 in 14.40 seconds. That's not just fast, it's freaky-fast. And quite a lot of people have been going very fast in training, apparently. I need to work on whizzing through the images more quickly than I do at the moment, because I think they'd stick in my memory just as well if I didn't consciously think about them quite as much. In three goes today, my best time was 21.64; let's see if I can get down into the teens consistently.

Names - world record 28 in 60 seconds. Yeah, I need to work on this quite a lot, don't I? The best I managed today was 12, though I know I can get up to the dizzy heights of 15 or 16 if I carry on in my usual way. But instead, what I really have to do is sit down and think about it; start pre-preparing mental associations for common names and facial features, make a proper effort to do it. I need to make a short-term resolution to get above 20, and then move on from there...

Numbers - world record 80 in 21.01 seconds. Very fast, but the problem with numbers is you don't get any prompting for the possible sequence in the recall like you do with cards and images, so it's easy to make mistakes. I know this from experience, since my three tries today all had errors in the recall, but the third one was 24.16 seconds and I just carelessly typed one digit wrong (if I'd bothered to go through and read what I'd typed instead of just clicking 'finished' I would have caught that - no more laziness, even in practice, from now on). In qualifying it's going to have to be a safe-ish time first to make sure I get all 80, then go for fast after that, but I can hope to aim for a time of 22 or better.

Words - world record 49 in 60.00 seconds. Someone's going to get all 50 in 2016, I'm sure. My best today was 40, but having got a freaky 47 in the actual XMT itself this year, I don't see why I shouldn't do it again some time. Maybe I'll get lucky and it'll be during the qualification? Or maybe, rather than relying on luck and flukes, I could work on it a bit more seriously? I'm pretty happy with my technique here, actually, but I could concentrate on pinpointing the optimum number of words to read before repeating, and so on. Let's aim to get consistently into the mid-40s here.

Science! Dedication! Let's keep it up! (I'm being my own cheerleader here; I think that'll help.)

Extreme Memory Training

Since I can't go to the world championship for money reasons, I think I need to dedicate my time to practicing for the XMT next year. For one thing, that's the only kind of training I've been able to get excited about for quite a while now. I don't know if I'd ever be able to come close to winning the thing, but you never know what you can do until you try...

When time it went back

It must be officially winter, or at least autumn, because the clocks go back tonight and people are already setting off fireworks. I would say that time flies, but on the other hand 2014 seems like so long ago I can barely remember it, so I guess not. Still, can't we keep summer going a bit longer?

It's time to get Extreme again!

Dates have been set for next year's Extreme Memory Tournament, which now has a brand new and unbelievably extreme logo! Go and check it out!

I'm excited about it already, although perhaps I shouldn't be, since I'll have to qualify for it this time (unless they change the rules - nothing's really been set in stone yet) and that makes me a little nervous. In all my long experience of memory competitions, they've all either invited me specifically or else been open to everyone; qualification is a pretty new innovation in the memory world. Possibly I won't be very good at it.

An underappreciated Doctor Who villain

I've been re-watching the seminal Doctor Who adventure The War Games, an episode a night, for the last week. People say it's too long and dragged out, but I've always liked it a lot. And a main reason for that is the evil Time Lord, the War Chief. Quite brilliantly played by Edward Brayshaw, very much like Roger Delgado at his best, he's confident, intelligent, nasty, a great villain all round.

I do like the theory that he's an earlier incarnation of the Master, fannish though the idea is, and even though it clearly wasn't intended by the writers at the time (the War Chief is shot dead towards the end of his only adventure, and it was many years before it was decided that a violent death causes a Time Lord to regenerate into a different actor, rather than just to die) - but really, what's the point of being a Doctor Who fan if you can't make up your own back story for a favourite character?

Back To The Future Day

Actually, it's tomorrow. See, they arrive in the future at 4:29pm, California time, which is half past midnight tomorrow morning in Britain, so we can't celebrate yet. It's still not the future.

Here come the muppets tonight!

The new series of Muppets has finally arrived on Sky 1 - they've been hyping it for months, obviously seeing it as a big priority for them, with marketing including making sure it's talked about prominently on social media, which really sums up the whole 21st-century muppet experience: it's unapologetically modern. Which is a good thing; muppets are a timeless concept, they shouldn't be locked in the 1970s. The new show is actually quite a lot of fun, I was pleasantly surprised. The format might turn out to be a bit too restrictive, I can see it getting repetitive, and obviously the general tone is more American than previous series, but all in all it's really enjoyable and I recommend it to anyone, even if they're not muppetationally obsessive!

Good grief, more Peanuts

Ah, the 1980s. The decade when I was around the same age as the characters in Peanuts are supposed to be - although the idea that they're children has long since been abandoned by this point, of course. By 1980 the strip has settled on its central cast, and not many others get a look-in...

Shermy is gone and forgotten by this time, and it's become very rare to see Patty, Violet, Frieda, Roy or 5, but we get a bit of a resurgence for the ones who are still showing up in the animated cartoons - 1980 sees a storyline with Pig-Pen (he goes out with Peppermint Patty) and one for Schroeder (going to music camp in Snoopy's doghouse aeroplane). The biggest rise to prominence comes from Snoopy's brother Spike, though - the mid-80s is the time we see him most, still living alone in the desert. He basically takes over a share of the strips that was previously given to solo Snoopy stories, which has the interesting effect of reducing Snoopy's appearances down to just about exactly the same level as Charlie Brown's - from here on in, their lines stick close together at the top of the chart.

Eleven new named characters make their debuts in the 1980s, starting with Harriet, another of the Beagle Scouts. Although still indistinguishable from Woodstock and the others, she's female. Harriet and Bill get married in 1983 and apparently leave the scouts at that point; immediately after the wedding there are more strips with four scouts, but a year or so later their names are given as Woodstock, Conrad, Olivier and Wilson, so I'm taking the view that it's Wilson with them from the wedding until Bill and Harriet are namechecked again in 1986. It makes very little difference, I know, but Wilson never gets enough credit among birdwatcher Peanuts fans.

Joe Richkid is Snoopy's golf opponent in one story, "Bad Call" Benny is his tennis opponent in another. Marbles, meanwhile, is another of Snoopy's brothers - he never really catches on like some of the others, but his short visit produces some classic funny moments. After that, we move away from the period when everything revolves around Snoopy and start to meet some new characters who don't just exist as his supporting cast...

Harold Angel basically exists to be a punchline to a Sally storyline, but then we get the first human to become a regular recurring character for many years - Lydia, Linus's irritating and fascinating classmate. One of those who really deserve a cameo in the upcoming movie, but I guess she showed up too late in the day for that. Maynard, who briefly tutors Peppermint Patty, is more forgettable.

The great time-capsule moment of the decade comes in 1986, with Tapioca Pudding. Remember that brief period when Strawberry Shortcake merchandise was absolutely everywhere? It came and went pretty quickly, but it's immortalised in Tapioca Pudding for a few months. It's interesting, really - back in the fifties, things like the craze among kids for Davy Crockett got a reference or two in Peanuts, but contemporary fads of the eighties seem to have passed Schulz by. Not a single joke about the toy-commercial cartoon mania that gripped us youngsters back then, but we did get jokes about Tapioca Pudding...

Our last two new faces of the decade are animals again - Raymond joins the Beagle Scouts, and you can tell him apart from the others because he's shaded in with the same greyscale as used with Franklin's skin (hi-tech shading, not done by hand, is a new innovation in the eighties Peanuts strips; Raymond is probably more of a reaction to that than to any racial issues of the time - his different colour isn't mentioned at all, in any way). And finally we get Snoopy's brother Olaf, the ugly one. Unlike Marbles, he sticks around until the end of the strip, but his partnership with Andy doesn't come along until the nineties. Stay tuned for the last decade in this thrilling series of blogs!

That's a lot of ones and noughts

My super-longstanding 30-minute binary record is no more! Johannes Mallow beat it in Spain today, with 4356!

I'm really surprised it took anyone eight years, to be honest, but now onwards and upwards! Who'll be the next to beat it?

I'm Big Ben, and I'm coming!

Remember that extremely cool promo video for Chinese TV earlier this year? I'll hopefully be filming something similar along those lines in a month or so. I need to assemble all these things into a compilation of video clips just about me - there's more than enough of the things out there...

Rugger

I keep meaning to watch rugby and get more than a sort of vague understanding of the rules. I mean, I know how it works, broadly speaking, but since most people who occasionally watch the game only have that kind of basic knowledge of it, I can't help thinking it would impress people with my sportiness if I actually knew what offside is...

Flight of Dragons

Soar in the purple light, in the sky, or in my mind... I've had the seminal 1980s cartoon movie on video for years, but haven't watched it for ages. I put that right today, and it's still a classic! Go out and find a copy, everyone, and watch it too. I insist!

And we'll paint by numbers till something sticks

Check out what Nelson's been up to! A children's memory book!

Hmm.

I'm very nearly 39. This isn't good.

Mustn't grumble

I get annoyed by the way that I always have just barely enough money these days - whatever my income at any given moment, there's always some expense that matches it exactly with nothing to spare. But I can't really feel like I'm desperately impoverished, because then I remember that I've had trips to America and China this year that have been paid for by memorising a few numbers, which you'd have to say makes me a lucky kind of person.

I could still do with winning the lottery, though.

Whoof

I've been working for the last two weeks straight without even a weekend off, but tomorrow's my last day at it, so then I get to spend three days in bed. And the middle one of them is my birthday, too!

It's getting wintery...

I really prefer summer. One of these days, when I'm a millionaire, I'll spend winters in Australia or somewhere like that. New Zealand, maybe, because everyone goes to Australia and I wouldn't want to be accused of following the herd.

Have I mentioned that I like muppets?

Oh yes, that's right, several times. So as someone who thinks the world always needs more muppets on television, I'm currently being cautiously optimistic about the new series, and basically trying to avoid hearing anything about it until it debuts on Sky the Monday after next. It might be really good, you never know.

Brief, you say?

Perhaps my recent blog posts have been a bit on the minimal side, but I've been working without a break for the last couple of weeks, covering for a colleague who's on a cruise. I'll have more time on my hands soon. Meanwhile, people might want to remember it's my birthday next Wednesday...

I'm feeling better now.

Junk food cures all ills.

I'm not well

And I blame dieting. It never does anyone any good. Right, from now on, nothing but junk food!

False memories

I woke up this morning from a dream about remembering something I'd forgotten and trying to work out whether I was remembering it from a dream or in real life. It was terribly confusing. It may be my subconscious mind trying to tell me to do more memory stuff. Or maybe less memory stuff, I don't know. My subconscious mind is as bad as my conscious mind when it comes to explaining things.

Peanuts in the Seventies

Presenting part three of the brilliantly unnecessary feature on which characters show up the most frequently in the long-running comic strip Peanuts.

The lines here are a lot more messy than the sixties chart, and there are a lot more characters on it as we enter into a phase of more than just the regulars showing up - a lot of named characters figure into one storyline and then go away again. But we can see the comic strip by the middle of the decade settling on the eight prominent characters who would sustain it right through to the end at the start of the year 2000 - Snoopy, Woodstock, Charlie Brown, Sally, Lucy, Linus, Peppermint Patty and Marcie. The originals are still around, of course, but in very diminished roles - Shermy shows up only once in the 70s (and that's more of a probably-Shermy than a definite sighting) and Pig-Pen only twice. Patty, Violet and Frieda are relegated firmly to the background, along with the likes of 5 and Roy.

The seventies is Snoopy's decade. He's now the central driver of practically every storyline (and the strip now focuses on storylines, rather than one-off gags), with the others supporting him in his adventures. This reduces the role of Lucy and Linus from their heights of the 1960s, and leaves Charlie Brown clear in second place.

The first big "new character" of the seventies has actually been around for a while - in 1970, Snoopy finds out the name of "that annoying little bird" who's been hanging around with him lately, and for a while Woodstock is a constant presence. He fades away a little, but only a little, after a year or so, and stays around as his friend of friends' sidekick for ever after.

Peppermint Patty has been around for a while, and adds another other-side-of-towner to her gang in 1970, the wonderfully unpleasant Thibault, but she finally gets what she needs to make her complete in 1971, when she meets her ever-loyal sidekick Marcie. The two of them form maybe the greatest double-act in newspaper-comic history and a lot of their appearances are just the two of them, separately from the other major characters.

Rerun, the little brother of Lucy and Linus, is born in 1972 (though we don't see him till the following year) and sets a new world record for remaining as a seldom-seen background character before growing up and joining the central cast in the mid-nineties. It was a strange decision to add another Van Pelt to the dynamic, and I get the feeling Schulz quickly wished he hadn't done it, but it all works out in the end - there are some classic three-handed comics in the nineties that show what a great idea it was, all along.

Poochie, an old friend who comes to visit in 1973 and is surprised by how Snoopy looks now, is pretty forgettable, as is Loretta, who sells girl scout cookies. Neither of them stick around. 1974, though, sees the debut of the strangest Peanuts character - the school building. It communicates, sort of, with Sally on a regular basis - for the purposes of this chart, only strips where we see that particular corner of the building and it has thought-bubbles are counted as 'appearances', although any other strip set in the school could technically count as well. The school building commits suicide in 1976, but the line on the chart includes its replacement, and also Peppermint Patty's school when Sally temporarily goes there and talks to it, too. Plenty of other inanimate objects follow the school's example and have thoughts of their own as Peanuts gets increasingly surreal, but the school is the only one with a real personality and a sort of name. It's also probably what elevates Sally to starring role status - she becomes much more frequently seen at around the time she starts talking to the school, and takes her place in the big eight central characters.

Spike, Snoopy's brother, makes his debut in 1975, and he's a strange one. Though his first storyline involves him coming to visit, after that he goes back to live in the desert with just the rocks and cacti for company, and when he appears in a strip he's almost always the only character who shows up, entirely disconnected from the rest of the Peanuts cast. At first there's usually a framing sequence of him writing to Snoopy, but after that it's just Spike on his own again. He stays around for the duration of the strip, and we'll see more of him in the eighties. Snoopy's sister Belle shows up as well in 1976 (as does her son in one strip, though he doesn't have a name). Other siblings come along in later years as the dogs steadily elbow aside the humans and take over the comic.

1976 also brings us Floyd in the now traditional summer camp storyline of that year, and then 1977 gives us four short-lived named characters in the diminutive Austin, Ruby, Leland and Milo, who look up to Charlie Brown for baseball advice. Later that year we meet Molly Volley, Snoopy's tennis partner, who continues to make occasional recurring appearances (during tennis season) for many years.

In 1978 we get our first introduction to the Beagle Scouts - with Snoopy as scoutmaster, he leads a quartet of identical birds on expeditions. Their names are given as Woodstock, Bill, Conrad and Olivier. Since all birds who appear in Peanuts from the seventies onwards are physically identical to Woodstock, it's difficult to tell who's who. Generally (because I was sure you'd want me to) I've credited Woodstock with appearing in any strip with one or more unnamed birds, and Bill, Conrad and Olivier with also appearing in any Beagle Scout or Foreign Legion strips, even if their names aren't mentioned. It all gets a bit more complicated in the eighties and beyond, with new Woodstock lookalikes appearing, but for the seventies it's comparatively simple...

Eudora, Sally's sidekick, shows up for the first time in 1978 and hangs around quite regularly (sometimes as support to Snoopy's flying ace, too) for the best part of a decade. "Crybaby" Boobie, Snoopy's tennis opponent, also continues to pop up infrequently for many years to come.

Which leads me into a tangent about major characters - the really quite brilliant Peanuts Wiki considers seventeen characters to be 'major'; a list which (indefensibly in my opinion) includes Eudora but not Spike. Peanuts.com goes with a slimmer list of eleven (Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Woodstock, Sally, Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, Peppermint Patty, Marcie, Franklin and Pig-Pen), omitting Eudora, Shermy, Original Patty, Violet, Frieda and Rerun from the wiki's list. The website for the awesome-looking upcoming movie restores Shermy, Patty, Violet and Frieda to starring roles, and also adds the little red-haired girl (whose 'thing' throughout the comics and most of the cartoons was that she was talked about a lot but never seen) and newly-created-for-the-movie dog Fifi.

This just illustrates that the old characters from the fifties always get remembered by the nostalgia buffs, while the likes of Rerun (whose five years of fame were the last five before Schulz's death) always get ignored. Which is a shame, because the comics from the nineties were some of the funniest, if you ask me.

To my mind, the 50-appearances-in-a-year line on the chart above are a good indicator of who's a major character and who isn't. If you're showing up in the comic at least once a week on average over a lengthy period, you've made the big time. So my list of the thirteen major Peanuts characters would go: Charlie Brown and Snoopy (throughout), Lucy and Linus (mid-fifties until the end), Woodstock, Sally, Peppermint Patty and Marcie (seventies until the end), Patty, Shermy, Violet and Schroeder (in the fifties; Schroeder's unique in continuing to show up more rarely all the way to the end) and Rerun (late nineties). Spike peaks at 49, by my count, and Frieda at 46. Eudora, Franklin and Pig-Pen don't even come close.

Stay tuned for the 1980s as Peanuts moves into modern times - by the end of the seventies it's safe to say we've already met all the memorable characters, but the next decade does introduce us to Lydia, Marbles, and... Tapioca Pudding.

Come on you blues

I really shouldn't enjoy seeing Chelsea lose so much - football really brings out the worst in people, doesn't it? But, you know, it's just funny...

Ocean's One

I see from my Blogger stats page that someone's been paying attention to my old posts that mention card-counting at blackjack. I haven't had anyone asking me to do that for quite a long time, actually, which is a bit surprising - there's apparently been a movie which I haven't seen, and there's certainly been an episode of the Simpsons which I have, giving viewers the idea that it's something any old gang of idiots can do and guarantees them a vast fortune with no effort or possibility of losing. So I was kind of expecting a resurgence of people contacting me and asking me to go to a casino and win them huge piles of money.

I'm always up for it if anyone really wants to - fly me to Las Vegas for a week, give me a couple of grand to play with and you can have all the winnings. But when I add the proviso that there's still a sporting chance that you'll end up broke (because, card-counting or no card-counting, it's still actually gambling on getting the right cards at the right time), potential investors tend to change their minds.

Maybe I could teach a group of potential casino bank-breakers how to do it properly (I'm not talking about "add one for a high card, subtract one for a low card" here, I mean properly memorising every card that's come out and recalculating the odds on every hand). I could get a reputation as the godfather of the whole blackjack racket and charge huge amounts of money. And get payment in advance, because 99% of people who tried to learn that would give up pretty quickly when they realised how much work it would take to get good at it...

Something of the Daleks

It's not that Doctor Who completely sucks at the moment, it just really needs some new ideas and a touch of original thinking, rather than just doing the same story over and over again. The second part of the latest Dalek extravaganza wasn't so bad, all in all. It's just that it makes me think "Where have I seen this before? Oh yes, every 'epic' Doctor Who story for the last ten years... and also that Batman comic, of course."

At least they dropped one of the new ideas they've had - those horrid cheap-plastic-toy-looking Daleks that made their spectacular debut a few years back. I'm all for changing "classic" designs if the new ones are better, but maybe Daleks are one of those things you just can't really improve on.

Missed THAT part before

Here's the interesting page of the Guinness Book of Records 2016:

I do know it's called "Guinness World Records" nowadays, but I'm a traditionalist. What I didn't notice is that on the previous page I'm also credited with the world record for 5-minute binary - which was actually beaten quite a long time ago. I'm a fraud!

Guinnesses all round!

The new Guinness Book of Records has a page of memory-themed records again - an interview with Johannes Mallow which claims he's the current world memory champion (he won it in 2012) and a couple of other bits, including crediting me with 30-minute and 60-minute cards. No photo of me this time, but at least my name's in the book... actually, the 2016 edition is a lot less cool than the 2014 one (on the memory page, at least) - back in 2014 it was shiny, exciting and well-written, but this one seems rather more phoned-in. But still, woohoo!

(Oh, and no Guinness beer for anyone - it's got gluten in it)

Othello trivia

This was the 11th time Imre has won the British Othello Championship, 32 years after the first time. That's a pretty impressive record, really, and not something that's anywhere close to being matched in memory competitions. Partly because there was no such thing as memory competitions before 1991, but also because it doesn't seem to be something that people can stick around at the top level of for more than a decade at most. But who knows, maybe there will be some kind of comeback by one of those old has-beens who used to be good at it...

Hooray for othello!

I really need to play more, I'm so out of touch with othello that I've basically forgotten how to play the game at all. But Imre still remembers after all these years, and he won the UK Championship for the 187th time, beating David in the final. A lot of fun was had by all! Roll on the World Championships!

Imperial Othello

It's the British Othello Championship, this year at the Imperial Rooms in Matlock. Well, the smaller of the Imperial Rooms, we're not using both of them. But we've got a healthy turnout of 17 competitors, and I've been playing as well as might be expected from someone who's barely touched an othello disc in the past twelve months. Still, it's all to play for tomorrow, so we'll see what might happen. After four of nine rounds, David Hand leads the field - and regular readers will be pleased to know I still instinctively wrote down his name as 'David B' while taking minutes at the AGM before the tournament...

I'm going on a gluten-free diet

I've heard good things. I'll let you know if I die.

Travel broadens the mind

It's a long way to Brighton, it's no wonder I've never been there before. I'm still fairly sure that Skegness is the best seaside town, anyway. On the way home now after a day of memory stuff. I haven't had many days of memory stuff lately - I'm always thinking that perhaps I'm not in demand as a memory expert any more, seeing as it's been so many years since I was a world champion or anything like that, but then someone comes along and demands me again. Possibly it will never end...

This week I are been mostly doing memory man stuff

They always come in threes - today I've been preparing for my memory-based jaunt to Bristol tomorrow, and talking about the exciting possibility of another TV jaunt to China next year. I was also supposed to be getting a call from the journalist who's writing up the UK Memory Championship, but I think he must have forgotten.

I also bought a new toothbrush, and I was surprised to see that they come in a 'whitening' variety, just like toothpaste does. The packaging says that the bristles are arranged in some kind of special tooth-polishing way, but I'm pretty sure the 'whitening' ones are identical to the 'fresh breath' ones that I opted for. I examined them closely. Also, if I ever get to the point of worrying about what colour my teeth are, you can go ahead and shoot me.

Oh, the places you'll go

I'm going to Brighton on Thursday, to record roughly three minutes' worth of quickfire videos for students about how to remember things. Perhaps hardly worth an eight-hour round trip, but it's nice to get out of the house once in a while. And then on Saturday and Sunday it's the British Othello Championship! Which comes with the possibility of qualifying for the World Championship, back in this country again in November! A pretty faint and remote kind of possibility in my case, since with one thing and another I've hardly played a game of othello since last year's nationals, but still, it's all terribly exciting. And since the nationals are in Matlock, I can drive there and back and not have to spend money on a hotel room. Which is good, since I haven't got any money and would have to either sneak into a hotel without paying or sleep on the streets. Or, I suppose, in my car, but somehow sleeping on the streets is cooler than sleeping in a car. I don't know why that is.

Doctor Who?

It still sucks. I'm really in the mood to go on at length about the many diverse ways in which it sucks, and make vague threats to stop watching it, as if this would somehow strike fear into the heart of Steven Moffat, but I'll just stick with saying it sucks. I do remain hopeful it'll get better again some day, though...

C. K. Watt

Fawlty Towers is 40 years old, apparently. You know, you can probably tell a lot about the secrets of a person's psyche by which episodes of Fawlty Towers are their favourites - a lot of people say The Germans, but the ones that always make me laugh the most are The Wedding Party and The Psychiatrist...

The thing about this blog

is that I can look back and see my blogs from the days when I was wildly enthusiastic about training for memory competitions. Well, semi-wildly enthusiastic, at least, my wildly obsessive days were back before I even started blogging, all those years ago. But still, it would be nice to get into that kind of mindset again. Any suggestions? Because I'm all out of ideas...

Pah

Going to bed early when I'm working the next day (I start at six o'clock nowadays) doesn't leave me enough time to think of something interesting to blog about...

It's really gone beyond a joke

The whole concept of time, I mean. It's my birthday in four weeks, and I'll be thirty-nine. That's ollllld. With five Ls. There's no pretending it's "early-thirties", and to be honest I still haven't come to terms with being thirty-anything yet. I'm definitely not prepared for 39. And don't even think about mentioning what happens the year after that. I'm warning you.

Who was Davis, anyway?

I always do enjoy the Davis Cup. If Britain win it this year, I'll... I don't know, wave a little Union Jack or something. And say "Yay." It'll be great!

I need to be on TV more

I was just thinking recently, it's ages since someone on the street vaguely remembered seeing me on telly somewhere, and saw fit to tell me so. I must not be as famous as I used to be...

Golden Gordon

Players called Tomkins and Noble feature in the game I'm watching right now. It's strange that I can't remember anyone's name, but things like this remind me instantly of the list of Barnstoneworth United players in that classic episode of Ripping Yarns...

Exposed: The Shocking Truth

The Blogger stats page that you get if you've got a blog is a fun thing to look at, as I've mentioned one or two times before. It tells you which old posts are attracting attention from readers, and apparently someone's been browsing the blog entries where I've talked about forgetting something in the course of my day-to-day life. I wonder if someone's compiling evidence for some sort of newspaper article or PhD thesis about the memory champion who can't even remember their own phone number or that they've ordered a book on the internet? I hope they are! I'd love that kind of publicity - it really gets tiresome having to explain to media people that I can't just remember anything they choose to show me, like massive great books and things, in a quick glance. If it became common knowledge that I've got a generally pretty hopeless memory except for things that I've made an effort to learn systems to be able to remember, things would be so much easier...

Bearded lefties of the world unite

The terrible thing is that I'm going to have to vote Labour now. I never thought I'd see the day. And then if they win the next election, it'll be officially my fault whenever the government does anything at all...

Deprived childhood

I don't really keep up with the latest trends in Transformers toys, but I'm almost certain that British Transformers-buyers have the same range to choose from as their American counterparts these days. It was probably only the children of the 1980s who suffered from the dreadful prejudice of not being able to buy certain Transformers which were appearing in the comics and cartoons but not available on British toyshop shelves. The thing is, Transformers were so hugely popular, Hasbro UK were almost certainly mistaken in the belief that they wouldn't be able to sell such an extensive range of toys at a profit as they could in the USA. People need to go and complain to Anthony Temple ("from Boys Toys at Hasbro" who had a column in the early Transformers comics, and who now apparently is the managing director of DRi Licensing) until he changes his mind and makes all the cool toys available for us to buy in this country.

It was all the coolest characters who weren't available here too, and I'm never quite sure whether they were cool because they were unavailable, or whether it's just coincidence. American readers who were around at the time: were Shockwave, Swoop, Blaster, Perceptor and the Constructicons the coolest toys, or just lost in the crowd? I'll always consider them to be especially exciting, anyway...

Still here

I'm quite determined to write a blog entry every day, you know.

What have I become?

When I'm driving my car to work in the morning, in my pocket a mobile phone that the number of people who know how to call me on it is nearly in double figures, I can't help thinking I'm a lot less cool and different than I used to be. I need to go and live in a cave somewhere. As long as there's a Wi-Fi connection.

Not quite

I was hoping to blog tonight about having done a real proper training session, but though I did a 30-minute binary AND hour numbers yesterday, and abstract images this morning, I was feeling too tired to follow it up with an hour cards this afternoon. But still, I work three-days-on-three-days-off nowadays, so I've still got tomorrow. It'd be awesome to get into a proper schedule of doing all three marathon disciplines and the all-important abstracts (as well as some XMT training) each three-day weekend. We'll see how it goes...

'Nuts

You probably remember my post from earlier this year about the frequency with which characters appeared in the Peanuts comic strip. Well, nobody technically asked me to continue it, but a couple of people expressed polite interest, and I just hate to leave things part-finished, so here's the second in a series of decade-by-decade analysis! It went on for fifty years, it's the kind of thing that takes multiple blog posts to talk about.

Here's the whole lineup of characters as we left them in 1957

Just to bring the first graph up to the end of 1959 - the most noteworthy thing is the birth of Charlie Brown's baby sister Sally in that year. She follows the example of Linus, remaining a baby for a good few years before magically catching up in age with the rest of the gang, and it takes even longer for her to be seen as frequently as the main stars of the comic...

And so now we move into the sixties. Actually, although a lot of fans feel the sixties was the golden age of Peanuts (I agree with them, too), in terms of character-prominence it's the most boring decade of the lot. The whole period is dominated by the big four - Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus and Snoopy, with everyone else huddled down in the bottom section of the chart far below them. But the lines on the graph still highlight some interesting trends in the comic strip's development...

The original characters have already faded away by the start of the decade but not entirely disappeared - Shermy shows up in the background once in a blue moon, Pig-Pen's appearances are even rarer (though the animated cartoons, which started in the mid-sixties, give him a more prominent role), Patty and Violet have become a double-act of occasional cameos and Schroeder has settled into the role of exclusively showing up in piano or baseball-themed comics, which he pretty much stays with until the series ends in 1999. So there is plenty of scope to introduce new people to take things in different directions, though it takes a while to happen.

Frieda (she of the naturally curly hair) makes her debut in 1961 and briefly becomes a regular star - for a little while she's a regular double-act with Lucy (chatting in the baseball outfield rather than paying attention to the game) and Snoopy (criticising him for not chasing enough rabbits). Her cat, Faron, shows up too, but disappears quickly; apparently Charles M Schulz decided he couldn't draw cats. I remember seeing him interviewed on British TV somewhere in the 1980s - when asked if there were any characters he regretted introducing to Peanuts, his first thought was "There was a girl who was always talking about her naturally curly hair, I never liked her much...", but Frieda carries on showing up in minor roles for many years after her 1961 moment of fame. Schulz went on to say that he probably shouldn't have introduced other dogs to the strip, since it stopped Snoopy being so unique, which was kind of a strange thing to say since this was during the period when Snoopy's brother Spike was all over Peanuts. Still, that's all in the future as we look at the 1960s - Snoopy's still somewhere close to being a normal kind of dog at the start of the decade...

1963 gives us the first appearance of 5, the reaction to the introduction of zip codes in the USA. This is the great thing about reading old comics; they can be like time capsules, reminding us of things that were considered a big deal at the time the strips were drawn, though they're just taken for granted these days. Clearly there was a moment when it was new and weird to put a string of numbers after your address. 5's sisters, 3 and 4 (their surname is 95472) also show up a couple of times, and all three of them turn into useful characters for crowd scenes over the years to come - Peanuts at this point still never shows any other characters except the named regulars, but there are some times when it needs to show a line of kids buying movie tickets or the like.

Here's everyone (except, strangely, Linus) all together in 1964

But the more interesting development comes in 1965 when, after fifteen years of being set exclusively in and around Charlie Brown's neighbourhood, the world of Peanuts becomes a bigger place. Charlie Brown goes away to summer camp, we see on-panel appearances of other nameless boys, and we meet a new named character, Roy. Okay, he never really does anything, but he represents a significant change in the whole focus of the comics.

Another significant moment very arguably comes in 1966 - I'm following the excellent Peanuts Wiki in dating that as the first appearance of Woodstock, though most other people who care about such things (you'd be surprised how many there are) say 1967. Really, though, it's more of a gradual development than a single debut moment, because Snoopy has been hanging out with birds (much more birdish-looking birds than Woodstock eventually becomes) for a long time before this, and really it's 1969 before it definitely becomes clear that it's the same bird every time. And of course it's 1970 before he gets a name and becomes Snoopy's ever-present sidekick, so maybe that yellow line shouldn't be on the sixties graph at all...

In 1966 it's Linus who goes to summer camp and meets Roy, who then makes his greatest contribution to shaking up the status quo of Peanuts by introducing his friend Peppermint Patty to the gang. (Original Patty's name hadn't been mentioned for years in the strip; though she did get a namecheck in the cartoons, I doubt many people remembered it. Still, the duplicated name is one of the strange things about Peanuts.) It turns out that Peppermint Patty and Roy live in another neighbourhood across town, and they very gradually develop a group around themselves (starting with José Peterson the half-Swedish half-Mexican player on Peppermint Patty's baseball team). Peppermint Patty immediately stands out as a wonderful character, but it takes her a while to become prominent - for the first few years she tends to take centre stage for a brief run of strips at a time and then isn't seen for a few months. It's the seventies before she really becomes a regular, and of course acquires her loyal sidekick Marcie.

When Peppermint Patty gets her own summer camp storyline in 1968, we get three more named characters in Sophie, Clara (something of a prototype Marcie) and Shirley, who become the comic strip's first one-off characters appearing just for one specific series of comics - everyone else who's shown up until now has at least been intended to be an ongoing recurring character. The camp trio do reappear nearly twenty years later, which is a kind of recurring, I suppose, but you know what I mean.

The final significant debut of the 1960s is of course Franklin, in 1968. More time-capsule stuff, obviously, and even today he hasn't really escaped from being talked about exclusively in terms of how radical it was to introduce a black character to the daily newspaper comic strip (that he goes to school with Peppermint Patty was the really radical thing in the USA at the time - just to make it extra clear how Schulz felt about that hot topic, there's also a rare appearance of Charlie Brown's unnamed schoolmates, who include a black girl, at around this time. Good man, Charles M Schulz). But in terms of character prominence graphs, Franklin is probably the final nail in the coffin of Shermy's days as a recurring character - he takes over the role of the nice-guy friend of good ol' Charlie Brown, and Shermy disappears for good (nearly) after one last showing in 1969.

The gang from the other side of town in 1969 - Peppermint Patty, Franklin, Roy and José Peterson

Lila, Snoopy's original owner who appears on-panel in just one 1968 strip, gets to be in the chart as well for the sake of completeness (seeing as she's got a name), though her little blip is lost in the general squiggle of lines down at the bottom there. But 1968 is most notable for that epochal moment when Snoopy's line moves above Charlie Brown's on the chart. The gradual transformation from "puppy who the kids play with now and then" to "central character of the strip around whom all storylines revolve" is complete. Peanuts will never be the same again, for better or worse. Join us again soon for the 1970s, when those lines get a lot more messy and we wonder how to tell the difference between Conrad, Olivier and Bill!

The UK Memory Championship!

Just to catch up with blogging of memory competitions I've been to this year (not many of them; no money and various jobs getting in the way. Why can't I have no jobs and various money?), it was the ninth UK Memory Championship the Thursday and Friday before last, in London. Specifically, in L'Escargot restaurant in Soho, an interesting kind of location - right next door to the main shopping places in London, which is nice for touristy things but not so nice for peace and quiet in the memorisation room. The room itself was hugely, vastly too small (if you'll forgive the confusing adjectives) to fit everyone in, so we were all sort of squeezed together at desks with really quite cool and sturdy partitions between us to minimize cheating.

I wasn't really expecting to be able to compete with the top memory superstars (Simon and Yanjaa), not having done any training, but there was always a chance I could retain my 'best British competitor' title against the stiff competition of Marlo Knight and James Paterson. I might just have done it if I'd managed my 25.66-second pack of cards in the final discipline, but that was the only one where I came close to a non-mediocre kind of score, so I can't really complain about being reduced to 'Third-Best British Competitor', a title I'm very proud of, and dropping my trophy on the floor and breaking it was genuinely an accident, which I'm very sorry about! Seriously, great stuff, Marlo!

Apart from that embarrassing moment, it was a great couple of days! It's always fun to hang out with memory folks big and small (six-foot-ten giant Lars from Denmark and miniature Melanie from Germany were among the strong international field, as well as not-quite-as-big-as-Lars-but-still-really-tall-and-deserves-a-mention-since-he-travelled-all-the-way-from-America-and-is-generally-awesome Nelson) and the obligatory journalist - there'll be an article showing up in Saga magazine all about it! L'Escargot has a really super cool bar/lounge up in the attic, with no end of cool decorations and a big skylight, it's a great place to hang out.

I'd namecheck everyone who was there and talk about the results, but they're not up online yet and I'd only forget to mention someone, so I'll just play it safe. But there was a nice spread of people who got the medals for top three in each discipline, and a lot of people were very happy with the scores they did get, so it all worked out well for everyone! Huge thanks are due as always to Phil, Gaby, Chris and everyone else who helped out with the organisation and arbiting!

It really would be nice to get back up to the top level of memory competition, but I don't think it's going to happen...

The Friendly Memory Championship (a little late)

While I try to remember what song I was singing in a dream last night, let's have a belated recap of the Friendly (Cambridge) Memory Championship, back in June!

(See, the dream involved a concert by Tracy Chapman, though she didn't bear much resemblance to the singer from the eighties, and she was accompanied by a male guitarist also called Tracy Chapman, and since for the purposes of this dream my name was also Tracy Chapman I came up on stage and sang a song, along with a woman who once again happened to have the same name too on guitar and backing vocals. I performed a relatively recent hit song, I'll remember which one it was eventually. I was really quite awesome, anyway, though I couldn't remember half of the words)

This was the tenth Friendly Championship, which is quite a landmark. Back in 2006, as I pointed out quite excessively, it was one of the very few memory championships in the whole world - there was the World Championship once a year, the German Championships (and the North and South German little events), the different-format US Championship (only open to Americans), and that was basically your lot. Some exotic places like Australia and China had competitions too, even the top competitors would go to an absolute maximum of three memory competitions in a year. The world of memory has expanded quite a lot since then.

In 2015 we gathered together once more in the Attenborough Nature Reserve - not as lethally hot as last year, no particularly noisy interruptions from ducks and geese, good wifi connection so I could update the fans on Facebook with the latest scores, it was a pretty good venue as always. The lineup of competitors was just perfect - two of the absolute world's best in Simon Reinhard and Johannes Mallow, the two leading lights of British memory in Katie Kermode and Marlo Knight, two memory competition veterans in Javier Moreno and Dai Griffiths, and two complete newcomers in Eline Malleret and Rosalind Hoo. That is so exactly the mix of competitors I like at these competitions, it's almost like I'd hand-picked and invited them especially! We also had some kind of researcher, Zaïn Ceizar, keen to probe the brains of the competitors and find out how the whole memory thing works, just to make the whole event a bit more sciencey.

(Look here, Blogger - if I type "sciencey", I don't want you to autocorrect it to "science". "A bit more science" doesn't even work, grammatically speaking.)

We had a perfect line-up of arbiters too, in the form of me, Phil Chambers and Nick Papadopoulos - or if not exactly perfect, we did a pretty good job. The thing about the Friendly competition is that it's a friendly kind of arbiting - we're all sitting in the same room and marking the papers, and anybody's free to query their scores and check their papers to see where they (or the arbiters) went wrong. I'm pretty sure there was only one arbiting mistake (my mental addition going wrong), and that was caught straight away, so everyone was happy and nobody grumbling that their score was wrong. Also, we get things marked and the results announced as quickly as possible, so people can do those important calculations of how much they need to attempt in the next discipline to keep ahead of their rivals.

The competition, as best I can remember at this late date, was exciting, and absolutely packed with world records! Katie and Simon set the pace with scores over 100 in 5-minute words, which is pretty cool; Hannes followed that with 951 in 5-minute binary, which would have been a world record back in the days when I was the record holder, and then Katie totally blew everyone away with a score of 97 in 5-minute names and faces.

The thing about that is, you get 50 first and 50 last names, and the three she got wrong were just slightly mis-spelt. It's seriously freaky and beyond my understanding (although names aren't my strong point, as everyone knows - while writing this blog I've had to remind myself that Marlo's name isn't Marlowe Weisman, the American cartoon-writer, even though I've known him for years now). Simon deserves a mention too for getting a score of 88, which would have been a world record if not for Katie. Freaky, I tell you.

15-minute numbers then immediately provided us with another world record - 1014 for Johannes! To put that in context, memorising a thousand digits in an hour is still considered pretty exceptional; memorising a thousand in 30 minutes is something that very few people have done. It's getting quite scary.

Before lunch, we had 10-minute cards, and guess what? Another world record, sort of - with 7 packs and 8 cards, Simon set a new "non-digital" world record (he'd done a higher score on a computer screen in Los Angeles the previous month, but this is the best score with actual physical cards). "Wait, did I hold the old record for this one?" I asked, but everyone laughed that no, of course I didn't, my world record was broken ages ago.

Lunch was as awesome as always (they make great lunches at Attenborough), although I did my best to hurry it along - the conversation went something like "We want to have two trials of speed numbers instead of one" "Okay, but we'll have to have just a half-hour lunch break, otherwise we won't finish before they kick us out of the building at six o'clock" "No, we'll have an hour for lunch and still have two speed numbers trials, I think."

After a sort of compromise of 45 minutes for lunch, we did have our two speed numbers trials - no world records here, but Simon had built up a healthy lead in the competition by this point. Hannes fought back with yet another world record - 495 in abstract images! The scores in this one are just getting silly now; it's really about time someone did something about it, like making a 5-minute images discipline instead of 15 for these short competitions. In dates he scored 120, which isn't quite a world record but is still higher than anyone else apart from Hannes has ever scored, so it deserves a mention anyway.

The highlight of spoken numbers was me trying to get it to work, but we succeeded eventually, more or less. No world records, but an exciting finish in store with Simon a mere 150 championship points ahead of Hannes going into the speed cards. But Simon didn't manage to get a pack correct, and with a time of 30.33 seconds, Johannes Mallow became the 2015 Friendly Memory Champion! Is that an official title? It sounds a bit silly. It's something to be proud of, anyway! Hannes is now officially both Extreme and Friendly, in fact. And having been one of the competitors at the very first Cambridge Championship back in 2006, we can look back at the scores he got then and marvel at the improvement - back then he got 600 in 15-minute numbers, 720 in binary, 75 in dates, all of them considered really impressive scores. And 81 in abstract images, which was the first time anyone had ever tried the new discipline, but it just goes to show how much people can improve with nine years to think about how to remember things!

Simon was second, Katie third and Marlo fourth; Eline won the much-coveted Best Beginner title, and everyone had a good time!

Okay, I'm still alive!

Sorry for the three months of silence - the fact is, I've been pretty seriously depressed for quite a long time now, so it's been hard to summon the enthusiasm for mindless rambling bloggery on a regular basis. Really, quite a lot has happened over the months that it seems like people really want to read me going on about, so I shall endeavour to catch you all up with what's been going on, since you all asked so nicely...

I'm quite staggeringly out of touch

Why am I only finding out about something that supposedly "went viral all over the internet" last week today, when I decide to look up Charlie Watts on google? It's official, I'm an old man.

And my poor blog readers are drastically out of touch with my life right now, too, aren't you? I'll make an effort to fill you all in about my doings on a regular basis - I imagine there's a huge army of people out there who eagerly look forward to my blog posts and get terribly disappointed when I don't write one, although I don't have any tangible evidence of these people's existence.

The extreme future

It's great to come back to work to find a hand-made poster taped to the wall of the office, cheering me on. (No, I don't work in a nursery school, though I can see how you might think that). But the XMT is always a huge success with "normal" non-memory people when they learn about it - they can and do follow the results with excitement, and understand what's going on! You can't really say that about the world memory championships.

So, if they do the automatic qualification and seedings for the 2016 XMT in the same way, the top eight will be Johannes, Boris, Simon, Alex, Christian, Katie, Jonas and Enkhjin. I'd have to match my just-for-fun training performance this year with the same kind of really-trying-to-qualify scores if I want to get into the second pot for the group stage draw. But it's a bit early to be thinking about that, who knows what new innovations might come along in the next twelve months?

Instead, I want to try to keep hold of the training enthusiasm the XMT has filled me with to practice for the more traditional competitions - hopefully, if I have any money, I'd like to go to the German championship in July, followed by the UK championship in August, and maybe get some half-decent results for a change. That will mean a lot of marathon-discipline practice between now and then, so let's see how it goes...

Two days of extreme!

When we left our extreme memory heroes, the first day had just come to an end. Here's the ranking calculation (my own made-up calculation, nothing officially-endorsed about it) that I meant to post in the previous blog but forgot: 

Well, the memory part of the first day was over, anyway - a bunch of us followed it up with dinner at Olive Garden (I sampled a few cool American food franchises while I was out there - In-N-Out Burger, however much it sounds like it's promising us an immediate case of food poisoning, is actually really great!) before retiring to our hotel for the night. The hotel was the Doubletree Golf Resort we stayed at last year, although the name turned out to be a lot less appropriate than it used to be, as the golf course is closed. Keen golfer Simon was particularly annoyed by this, met the manager and demanded half the price of his room back, plus green fees at another local course and a free lunch. He got everything he demanded, too, and suggested I do the same - since I didn't have any intention of playing golf and indeed hadn't noticed the course was fenced off until Simon pointed it out, I thought that might be a bit too unethical of me, so I passed.

I'm starting to consider being a bit less ethical about things like that in future, though; I can't help thinking it'd be nice to have more money and fewer made-up-the-rules-as-I-went-along scruples that nobody else cares about...

Anyway, day two dawned bright and sunny, if a little damp - San Diego was apparently suffering a three-year-long terrible drought when we arrived, but it sorted itself out with some overnight rain that didn't bother anyone and cleared up during the daytime to leave things lovely and sunny for everyone. I approve of this kind of weather. We all made our way back to Dart Neuroscience for the excitement of the Round of 16. Germans have a word for that, incidentally - Achtelfinale - which sounds so much cooler. With four matches going on at once, this meant that the eight of us who weren't in the first four hemidemisemifinals were sealed away in the auditorium to watch everything (except the surprise task, which had to stay a surprise) on xmtlive.com on the big screen. Which was awesome! It really was exciting to watch along and follow the developing excitement, and I've been told by numerous non-memory people that they enjoyed it too!

We watched Alex polish off Annalena 4-0 with some safe and steady scores; Katie brush aside Akjol in the same way including a 47 in words (on the second day, practically everyone copied my impressive score from day 1 - Boris, Christian and Hannes all did it!); Jonas also beat Ola 4-0 with some close contests including a names match that went to a replay; and the Battle Of The Johanneses end with a tighter 4-2, settled with an amazingly close names match - Mallow managed to stop his clock two hundredths of a second before the full minute was up, and thus beat Zhou's identical score of 17 names, taking him through to the quarter-finals!

The eight remaining extremers were set free from our isolation and took our seats to find out the surprise task. It turned out to be cards, just like normal, except with loud distracting music/conversation/noise blaring at us, and no earplugs/blinkers/distraction-minimisers allowed! Up against Enkhjin, I made the slightly dubious decision to go through the cards twice rather than once, only for him to do the same and stop his clock before me. I probably would have been fine with just looking at them once, with hindsight (Simon did just that, over at table 3), but there you go. As it was, we both recalled perfectly to give him a 1-0 lead.

That gave me the choice of discipline for the second round, and I opted for normal, quiet cards, doing a pack without any problems in 26.73 to make it 1-1. I had wondered whether Enkhjin would choose names next, which is usually a guaranteed easy win against me, and so nodded approvingly when he opted for images, his specialist subject which is very easy to make a mistake in at top speed. No mistakes here, though, and he blew me away with a time of 15.66. I went for numbers after that, and stopped the clock at my usual kind of solid speed of 31.24, only to realise that I hadn't paid enough attention to the last-but-one image (I read the last six quickly and say the names repeatedly to myself rather than taking the extra seconds to visualise them, but this time I didn't have a word at all for that penultimate one. Careless.) I took a guess, got it wrong and thus had three wrong digits, whereas Enkhjin had stopped the clock unnecessarily at 38.23 and misremembered one digit, but got away with both of these sillinesses to go 3-1 up. After that, he did go for names, and did remember more of them than me, winning 19-15.

I really have to learn how to do names better - I mean, looking at it now, there's a guy called Jay with a dark blue jumper and white collar which now when I look at it immediately makes me think of Mordecai the blue jay from Regular Show. Why didn't that occur to me at the time?

In any case, that gave Enkhjin the fully-deserved win, 4-1. As it happened, the other three matches all finished at that point too, a trio of 4-1 wins for Boris, Christian and Simon over Yanjaa, Marwin and Mark Anthony.

That took us into the quarter-finals, leaving me to cheer on Meddlers Katie and Alex, who both hadn't remotely expected to get that far - or at least were humble enough to claim as much, which is just as good. The surprise task here involved memorising a protein sequence, or in other words a lot of letters, on a grid. This one wasn't very visual, since they did the memory and recall on paper and nobody could see what was going on, but Alex and Katie both won theirs against those big big names of memory Johannes and Jonas (the competition had two Johanneses, one Jonas and one Johann, with no consideration at all for people who can't remember names. Luckily, we all had name-badges.) Boris beat Christian, Simon beat Enkhjin and we went back to the visual excitement of the regular five disciplines.

This time, Enkhjin did make a mistake in his super-speedy images memorisation, and although he was unlucky to stop his numbers clock fractions of a second after Simon, he did get them all right this time around while Simon made a rare mistake. That was the only point Enkhjin won, though, and hot-favourite Simon went through to the semis 4-1. Alex pulled off a big shock by beating Jonas by the same score, after Jonas tried fast times in both images and numbers without success, and couldn't keep up with Alex's 35-second cards. Katie fought valiantly against Hannes, intending to record good images times twice only to find he did it faster, and going out 4-2. The match between Christian and Boris was the most exciting of the quarters - particularly for Boris, who was in a state of wild, manic hysteria for most of the day (nobody could accuse him of not being passionate about competition!) A 21-21 in names which Christian won by virtue of stopping the clock just before the 60 seconds were up was followed by a 43-43 words in which this time Boris did the same thing! That made it 3-2 to Boris, and when he won at numbers to take him through to the quarters he screamed "JAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!", leaping to his feet, sending his chair flying, and giving everyone either a laugh or a heart attack, depending on their constitution.

After a break for lunch (in which I sampled a Cali-style burrito, which was delicious, and chatted with the St Louis academics who probed my brain however many years ago it was) we moved into the auditorium to watch the remaining games on the stage. This allowed them to project the surprise tasks onto the big screen - the one for the semis involved memorising a map with fictional towns, temperatures and weather-symbols. I couldn't help thinking that the temperatures would have been easy enough to remember perfectly in the time allowed, giving a better score than anyone managed, but it was probably different up on the stage and under pressure. As it was, Alex got a better score than Hannes, and Boris beat Simon (yelling "YES!" and running wildly around the room to celebrate it). When in the next match Simon chose names only to lose 19-17, the celebration this time was a squeal of "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" and a mad-march-hare bouncing fit that nearly took Boris through the roof. That seemed to make him a bit more self-conscious, possibly because every camera and phone in the building was pointed at him from that point onwards to see what he'd do next - everyone was a bit disappointed with the more restrained happiness when he went 3-0 up and even when he sealed a hugely surprising 4-1 victory over the tournament favourite!

Alex, meanwhile, put up a fight against second-favourite Hannes, taking advantage of his opponent's mistakes to win at cards and numbers only to finally go down 4-3 on another cards - I doubt anyone in the world could do a fast time without mistakes under that kind of pressure.

Alex and Simon then contested the third-place play-off, which boasted the coolest and most original surprise task yet - blindfolded memorising of different textures, which then had to be rearranged into the right sequence! Extremely difficult, but a fantastic idea that I'd love to have a go at under tournament conditions myself some day! Simon won that, and took charge of things from that point on, winning 4-1 to ensure a German 1-2-3 in the XMT. Fantastic performances from both him and Alex!

And then it was time for the grand final - best of nine, this one, with two surprise tasks! The first of these was the textures again, and Boris's fingers proved the more sensitive. Hannes chose cards next, and won it despite neither of them managing to put the deck back together in full. It's very, very difficult to produce good results on such a big occasion, the tension was almost unbearable! Boris then won at names, and Hannes at numbers. The second surprise task was to memorise car licence plates - the name of the state and the six-or-seven-digit/letter registration number. The recall was done in US Championship style, with them reciting one state/letter/number in turns, and Hannes had a lot of difficulty with it, losing out on all three to Boris. We went into images next, but Boris's fast time was too fast for him to be able to recall. Hannes then won at cards to go 4-3 up and when Boris chose names for the potentially final matchup, Johannes chose that moment to produce a personal best, 22, to top Boris's 19 and become the new Extreme Memory Champion!

Just to prove that my arbitrary 100-points-for-the-best-score-in-each-discipline really does show who is the truly worthy champion, those 22 names nudged Hannes into first place on the spreadsheet, too! 

What an amazing and extreme competition it was! Huge thanks are owed to Nelson, Simon Orton and all the huge number of people who worked to make it such a big success! Here's to next year... hoping that I qualify for it, at least...

Extreme '15!

I'm on my way home from San Diego, after a day exploring the city - lots of good comic shops around here! After two days of extreme memorising in the hot sun, it's a bit of a drag to be going back to rainy old England. Maybe I'll just stay here and assume someone'll give me a pile of money.

Anyway, we all gathered in the same venue as last year, Dart Neuroscience, only this time we had four tables on the go at once instead of two, to cope with the expanded number of competitors and disciplines. Being in Group F, I got to watch the first four groups in action before having to face my first match - groups A and B kicked off with cards and then images and most people were playing it safe as they warmed up. The ones who didn't (Simon with a 27-second pack of cards, Yanjaa and Enkhjin with super-fast images) all made mistakes. Group A included fellow Team Britain member Katie (still politely cursing being drawn in a group with Simon), while Group B had our other battling Brit, Marlo, as well as Memory Medley Member Lance.

To explain, there's a group of us called The Memory Medley who have got together on Facebook to swap daily training scores, tips, friendly banter and general motivation. It's a select group of ten people who happened to be around at the time we decided to create it, but it's been a huge help in keeping me fired up and regularly training. Five of us were in the XMT - Katie, Marlo, Lance, me and Alex. The other five Meddlers are Phill, Clay, Kevin, Sri and AB, and they were sending electronic good wishes and support to San Diego throughout.

Groups C and D then had names and numbers, the highlight being a nearly-perfectly-recalled 20-second numbers time from Johannes M, before the final two groups got to sit down in the hot seats and test our skills with words and then cards.

There were spectators on all sides, and quite close too - the screens they were watching had a ten-second delay to reduce the possibility of cheating, which worked very nicely without any problems; as with last year, only more so, the coverage in the venue and online was wonderful, keeping everyone fully up to date with what was happening at any given moment.

My first opponent was Alex, who I'd previously listed among my Group Of Life on the grounds that he's 'not quite up to my level in all the disciplines'. I was mistaken about that, it turns out - I'd now describe him as someone who's actually a little bit better than me at practically everything. He won the words match, 42 to 36 (I'm significantly better at words now than I was last year, after some good improvement in training, but 42 was the highest score I'd managed in my practice sessions, and scores in the thirties were more normal), but then I came back and won the cards with a time of 29.18 seconds. I've got to a point in the training where I can do cards at that speed and get all 52 correct nine times out of ten, which I'm very happy with. That time put me on top of the best-scores leaderboard - the highest score in each discipline on day 1 took home a big cash prize, but I was pretty sure 29 seconds wouldn't be enough to take it; the days when that was an amazingly exceptionally fast time are long gone, I'm afraid. The others in Group F, Johannes Z and Tsogbadrakh, had also won one apiece.

And so it went on - I was confidently expecting not to have an easy time of it in the morning; two of my three names matches came in the first five. When I went up against Tsogo in names I thought I might have a slight chance, since he's not so great at it either, but he did in fact win 14 to 12. On the other hand, I had thought he might well beat me at numbers, but he took it slowly and still made mistakes, letting me get the win there. In Group A, the group of names experts, Simon had recorded a 23 to beat Anne and Katie a 22 to beat Yanjaa. Over in Group B, Jonas did the first sub-30-seconds numbers time.

I lost my next names contest to Johannes Z, which was expected, and then lost to him at images too, when he stopped the clock at 22.22 before I'd got to the end of mine (and I was going fast, too!) and recalled perfectly. Boris had already set a time of 19.29 seconds to top the leaderboard there. My last match before lunch was another images round, against Alex this time, and here I managed to stop the clock at 23.55 and get them all right. On the other table, JZ did 21.24.

That left me stuck at the bottom of the league table at the half-way point:

But that was okay, as I kept telling everyone - it was very close, I'd had the difficult matches, there would be a nice run of images-cards-cards-numbers after the break and I would soon catch up. With the hectic pace, it was hard to keep up with what was happening in the other groups, but Simon to nobody's surprise was romping away with group A, winning all his matches, while Katie was keeping pace nicely with Yanjaa in the fight for second place. In Group B, Marlo was struggling while Jonas and Enkhjin were proving very difficult to beat. Group C was finely poised, but Boris was keeping the challenge of Mark Anthony and Akjol at bay. Johannes M was topping group D without too much difficulty, although fellow XMT veterans Ola and Marwin were pushing hard. The surprise package of the morning was Annalena, who had won all seven matches in Group E - with a lot of luck, she insisted, but it put her in a totally comfortable position heading into the afternoon.

The afternoon went as well as I could have hoped for me - I beat Tsogo at images when he tried a fast time but got the recall slightly wrong, then beat him and JZ at cards with super-solid 31-second times before rounding up that nice run of four "good matches" with a win in the numbers too when JZ mixed up his recall. It all sounds simple now I look back at it, but in each of my matches against Tsogo I made a last-second change in the recall when I remembered just in the nick of time the right sequence of things. It certainly gave the spectators a bit of excitement!

That left me much more relaxed going into the final four games (words-names-numbers-words), but even that doesn't explain the performance I managed to produce in the first words match against Tsogo. I somehow remembered nearly all of the 50 words much more smoothly than I ever have before, getting 47 of them right and not being too far off with the others (along the lines of remembering at least what letter they started with...). 47 is a staggeringly huge score of the kind that only the real words experts manage to produce - it didn't quite top the leaderboard, since Simon had done a 48, but it was sitting proudly up there in second place. I heard later that the Mongolian translations weren't very good, with misspellings and such, but my conscience is clear there - my freakish result would have won against pretty much anyone, even if they had the best translation the world has ever seen.

Still in a buoyant mood about that, I went into a double-header against Alex in high spirits, only for him to comfortably beat me in names and then in numbers with an excellent table-topping 25.70 seconds. Looking at our league table, I consciously registered for the first time that even though I'd achieved pretty much everything I'd been aiming for, Alex had been good enough to beat me into first place - all he had to do in the final match was beat Tsogo at words to confirm it, leaving me and JZ fighting mainly for pride (my tie-break was good enough that even if he beat me, I would end up second if I didn't get an amazingly disastrous score). Alex did win, and so did JZ (36 to 35), leaving the final group standings like this: 

Johannes M knocked Alex's score off the top for numbers with 21.01 in his final match. Simon, to nobody's great surprise, took three of the best-score prizes, just like last year - cards, names and words. In images, though, it was Enkhjin who blew everyone else away - having tried super-fast times twice and not quite got the recall right, he successfully did 14.40 seconds on his final attempt; nearly a full five seconds better than anyone else had managed! This was a little bit concerning, because my second place in Group F meant I would be facing him in the round of 16. My group-of-life pick, Alex, would go up against my other group-of-life pick who had exceeded expectations, Annalena.

All the results can be seen on the excellent website, which I hope you were following all the way through the day (or night, if you're in Europe). Katie had triumphantly gone through to the round of 16 in second place in her group; Marlo and Lance had sadly narrowly missed out in theirs, on tie-break score in Marlo's case. My Excel analysis of everyone's best scores showed my opponent Enkhjin as the fourth-best performer, although I couldn't feel too bad about finishing second, because the top three were the usual suspects Jonas, Johannes and Simon, who Alex could expect to meet in the quarters, semis and final if he could win through!

It's time for me to get back to England, though - all the thrills and spills of day two will be reduced to boring bloggery for your reading displeasure when I get back home!

Go Diego Go!

Here I am in sunny San Diego! Well, it's night-time, but tomorrow it will be sunny, I'm assured. The Extreme Memory Tournament happens this weekend, and I hope you're all ready to tune in to the XMT Live website! As I said last year, click on everything, it's a Simon Orton masterpiece of clickability - in fact, I think it's even clickier this year than it was in 2014! Follow all the action, live!

Unless you're in bed. I do appreciate that it's four o'clock tomorrow morning back home.

Beware the red moon!

It does exist!

Big thanks to Gilby1385 for pointing me to an eBay auction for the one Krypton Force Force Five video missing from my collection! I'm not sure that I particularly want the tape for any reason other than completism - as I've mentioned in my various Krypton Force blogs, I don't really like the Grandizer cartoon, and the artwork on the Orion Quest covers doesn't even seem to be by Marc, so is missing all the so-bad-it's-good qualities you get with his artwork. But hey, from the picture of the box alone I've now got the subtitle, the text on the back and some pretty solid confirmation that it contains the first two episodes of the series, so I'll update the master blog page with the new details!

And let's hope I win the auction and nobody tries to extort money out of me by bidding thousands of pounds...

Let's go skating!

I'm sure you all remember the blog post I wrote eight years ago in which I compared memory competitions to figure skating. Or at least the picture that followed it. It's interesting how things have changed since then. Back in 2007, "national standard" competitions with their shorter disciplines were still a bit of a novelty, the US championship was the only really different kind of memory tournament, and the XMT didn't exist even in people's wildest imagination.

The XMT, of course, is exactly the kind of free-skating thing I was burbling about eight years ago, and I'm pretty sure it now gets the general memory-athlete community more excited than the world memory championships do. But things like that and the Memoriad and the multiple other competitions going on (I haven't even mentioned the cool things happening in Los Angeles, been so wrapped up in Extremeness...) have all sort of combined into a really quite cool whole. The WMSC isn't as big a deal as it used to be when those were the only memory championships in the world, but while the world championship with its hour-long disciplines is still something people aspire to, it's not going to be swept aside. I like the balance we have right now!

Glossary

An additional note to tonight's blog - Yanjaa has given me a good telling-off for referring to names and words as 'nurds' instead of 'nards', so I do apologise for any confusion caused. The official ruling is now that 'nards' means 'names and words' or the people who are good at memorising them, and 'nurds' means 'numbers and cards'. So now there can't possibly be any mix-ups!

The draw is done!

And hmmmmm, not the group of death I was most worried about, but it's going to be tough. Check out the group draw here!

Let's have a look at the groupings, starting with Group A: Simon, Yanjaa, Anne, Katie. Poor Katie, she was hoping to avoid Simon, and I'm sure she would have preferred not to go up against Yanjaa either. But I don't think that's a problem - Katie really is better than those two at the crucial names and words (nurds), and I think she could spring a surprise or two. In fact, Simon could be in a little bit of trouble here! This is the nurdiest group of all, with four experts fighting it out. If he slips up on numbers or cards (which, I'll grant you, he seldom does), it might not be plain sailing for the reigning champ.

Group B: Jonas, Enhkjin, Lance and Marlo. I'd certainly give Marlo a chance here of reaching the knockout stages. (I'd really love to see Team Britain do well in the XMT). It does look like Jonas will be favourite to top the group, but I can see a fierce battle developing between the other three.

Group C: Mark Anthony, Boris, Tuuruul and Akjol. That's a good draw for Boris, I think he'll do well here. And I can see Akjol being his closest rival; he's got a sort of all-round consistency on the big occasions, I think based on my admittedly limited knowledge of the guy. By the way, is it me or does that photo look nothing like Boris? Are we sure it's him?

Group D: Johannes M, Ola, Enkhmunkh, Marwin. This is going to be a real ding-dong; all four of them are likely to be evenly matched and producing some impressive results. It'll be down to who can do it with the most consistency, and I think that's probably going to be Hannes. Marwin is my dark horse to do well at the XMT this year; he's improved a lot since 2014.

Group E: Christian, Johann, Annalena, Johnny. Interesting in that Christian and Annalena are a couple, and will be head-to-head against each other for the first time; that's something to talk about in the press. But I can see Christian coming out on top of this group quite easily, maybe with Johann in second place.

Group F: And finally, it goes Ben, Johannes Z, Tsogbadrakh, Alex. The good thing about this is that at least three of the group will probably be blogging extensively about it - Tsogo might too, although if he does it'll most likely be in Mongolian. I'm going to face some tough challenges from all three of the others here, and it really depends on how fast and reliable everyone can be with cards, images and numbers. In my training lately I've been pretty good at getting 100% correct in a reasonably good time, but we'll just have to see how it goes in the competition...


And if I win my group and my round-of-16, I'm liable to face Jonas in the quarter-final. Finish second, and it'll be Simon. But I'll cross those bridges if and when I come to them.

A different kind of death

Okay, I need to rethink exactly what the worst XMT group draw for me could be, because they've rejigged the seedings so I'm in the first pot and introduced rules limiting how many people from each country can be in a group. See the post here for details!

We have 6 groups (A-F), that will have 4 competitors each. The top 6 rankings will own a top spot in the first 6 groups (so, Simon (A), Johannes (B), Jonas (C), Mark Anthony (D), Christian (E), and Ben (F)). Then we will split the rest of the competitors into 3 pools:

Pool 1 (rankings 7-12)

7. Ola Kåre Risa
8. Boris Konrad
9. Johannes Zhou
10. Yanjaa Altansuh
11. Enhkjin Tumur
12. Johann Randall Abrina

Pool 2 (rankings 13-18)

13. Enkhumnkh Erdenebatkhaan
14. Annalena Fischer
15. Tsogobadrakh Saikhanbayar
16. Anne Reulke
17. Lance Tschirhart
18. Tuuruul Myagmarsuren

Pool 3 (rankings 19-24)

19. Alexander Mullen
20. Marwin Wallonius
21. Marlo Knight
22. Akjol Syeryekkhaan
23. Katie Kermode
24. Johnny Briones


GER: 7 competitors - no more than 2 in each group
MNG: 5 competitors - no more than 2 in each group
SWE: 3 competitors - no more than 1 in each group
UK: 3 competitors - no more than 1 in each group
USA: 3 competitors - no more than 1 in each group
PHL: 2 competitors - no more than 1 in each group


So, I'm now in group F, and who'll join me? Well, from pool 1 I think the name that instils the most terror in me is Boris - he'll beat me in names and words most likely, and everything else quite possibly too. The 'easy' option would probably be Enhkjin, who's in the top group thanks to some super-fast times in images and numbers in the qualifying tournament that he might not be able to replicate in a one-off situation.

I've thought about pool 2 since I did my previous Group of Death predictions and decided that Enkhmunkh is slightly more deathy than Lance is, so he moves to the top of my most-feared list today.

And now that I can't be paired with Katie or Marlo from pool 4, that I think leaves Marwin as the one to most make me tremble.


Revised Group of Death: Me, Boris, Enkhmunkh, Marwin. Revised Group of Life: Me, Enhkjin, Anne, Alex. Fingers crossed!



And then, of course, we have to think about who I'll play in the knockout rounds if I manage to get through the inevitable group of death I'll be drawn in. They're using the knockout phase structure from Euro 2016, apparently, but that doesn't strictly tell me who I'd be up against if I win my group, because that seems to be arranged so that groups A and D are the top two seeds (they're the ones who play runners-up rather than group winners in the quarter-finals), so there'll probably be a bit of re-jigging of the alphabet. But E and F do seem to be fifth and sixth seeds in that structure too, so I guess I'd be playing the runner-up of group E (Christian's group) in the round of 16. After that I play a group winner - it's logical to have 3rd seed against 6th in the quarter-finals, so that would mean... Jonas again. Should I say "yikes" or "aha, my chance for revenge!"?

Tell you what, I won't say anything until I've got through the group stage. It's seriously dangerous to start planning things as if I'm going to win my group, isn't it?

Let's get extreme!

The most exciting part of the Extreme Memory Tournament that happens in advance (except for the qualifying competition) happens on Wednesday 15th, at 12 noon EST, which means 5pm here in Britain! It's the draw for the groups, and I would really prefer not to end up in the most horrifyingly difficult group again, if it can possibly be avoided...

So here's how it works. The names are in four pots, and I'm in pot 2:

1. Simon Reinhard
2. Johannes Mallow
3. Jonas Von Essen
4. Mark Anthony Castaneda
5. Christian Schaffer
6. Ola Kare Risa


7. Ben Pridmore
8. Boris Konrad
9. Johannes Zhou
10. Yanjaa Altansuh
11. Enhkjin Tumur
12. Johann Randall Abrina


13. Enkhumnkh Erdenebatkhaan
14. Annalena Fischer
15. Tsogobadrakh Saikhanbayar
16. Anne Reulke
17. Lance Tschirhart
18. Tuuruul Myagmarsuren


19. Alexander Mullen
20. Marwin Wallonius
21. Marlo Knight
22. Akjol Syeryekkhaan
23. Katie Kermode
24. Johnny Briones

Now, being in the second pot isn't so bad, because it means I don't get put in the same group as Boris, Johannes Z or Yanjaa, who are all experts at what Alex Mullen called 'nards', meaning 'names and words'. As an aside, that's not a good thing to call names and words. Not when 'numbers and cards' is another combination that people talk about. Let's call them 'nurds' instead; that should remove any possible confusion.

Pot one contains reigning champion and hot favourite Simon, who I would really prefer to avoid at all costs. It does include last year's 4th-placer Mark Anthony, who looks the most tempting prospect, for all that he did so well last time round. I'm fairly sure I can beat him if things go well, and finishing first in the group would give a big advantage when it comes to the knockout rounds.

Pot three contains a selection of scary Mongolians, who are more of an unknown quantity to me than the Europeans and so make me nervous with their occasional extremely good scores in numbers and cards. Tsogbadrakh, though, I know to be someone who concentrates on numbers more than anything else, and Tuuruul hasn't competed very much lately. Enkhmunkh is the one who's most worrying of the three, with his cards expertise; but Lance is concerning too, just because he's the kind of person who could pull an amazing performance out of nowhere. Hard to say which of them is the group-of-deathiest. The undeathiest in the pot would probably be Anne, though nothing's ever easy here.

Pot four, on the other hand, has the name of Katie jumping out at me. Just like with James Paterson last year, she's the big nurds expert in the bottom six, and I really want to avoid her. Marwin is improving a lot too, and he's got the advantage of having been there last year. I would say my preferred opponent out of those six is Alex - excellent memoriser and all-round-nice-guy though he is, I see him as someone who's not quite up to my level yet in all the disciplines (except names, of course).


So, the Group of Death that I really don't want to end up facing: Simon, me, Lance, Katie. Group of Life: Mark, me, Anne, Alex. Let's just see how it goes...

Othelloadby

Saturday was the traditional clashing-with-the-US-Memory-Championship othello regional in Oadby, and since a trip to New York is too expensive (it's still open to Americans only), I took the train to Leicester and the bike out to the traditional Baptist church venue. The pub down the road where we always used to go to lunch has closed since I was last there (apparently it was also closed last year, when I must have been doing something else that weekend), but otherwise very little changes. Eight competitors, including organiser Steve Rowe - Imre Leader, Phil Marson, Iain Barrass, Roy Arnold, Ken Stevenson and Ken's son Neil, who was the British Champion in 1985 and hadn't played for around 25 years. I played pretty terribly throughout, which is what happens when you don't play a single game since the nationals last year (the two othello tournaments in between happened on the two weekends I was in China), though I somehow beat Phil in a way that I'll have to analyse on Zebra to see what happened.

The thing about that list of competitors is that they've all been coming to othello tournaments for a fair bit longer than I have (Steve I think predates me by a year or so; the others by at least a decade), and I've been around for quite a long time now. Like 16 years or so, in fact. I can't help wondering if our attempts to encourage new players to take up the game need a bit of work. While we've got Imre with his unfailing excitement over every game, pointing out great moves and playing through possible alternate lines for hours thereafter, I don't think the game's ever going to die out from lack of interest, but we really could do with attracting a few more newbies...

Imre won, 7 out of 7, Phil beat Iain in the last game to put them both on 5, Neil obviously wasn't too out of practice on 4, me and Steve on 3, Roy on 1 and Ken on 0. I need to get back in the habit of playing online, that'll get my brain working again.