(Very) Old Memories

 A few people on Facebook have been enthusiastic about discussing the olden days of memory competitions - some of them even before my time! It's hard to find talk about the memory championships of the 1990s on the internet, but you can still find the Olympiad News from the early days of the MSO if you know where to look (use the Wayback Machine on msoworld.com), to give us the first I will have ever heard about the World Memory Championship - a few articles focusing almost entirely on Dominic O'Brien, mentioning Andi Bell too and not mentioning any of the other 18 competitors in 1997.

It didn't immediately excite me when I read about this event, but it did eventually penetrate my skull and become a lifelong obsession, so here is how it all began...

Tuesday 19 August 1997

MEMORY MAN

Dominic O'Brien, the current World Memory Champion, is hot favourite to retain his title this year. Here he talks to the Olympiad News production team.

What is your impression of the Mind Sports Olympiad?

It's a big event! It's also rather worrying - I feel as if I am being fattened up for the kill. But I hope to do the killing myself! Of course the Mind Sports Olympiad is an excellent event.

You're competing in the memory championship, any other events?

No. I am just concentrating on trying to retain the memory title (the competition is on Thursday and Friday) and am directing all my efforts in that direction.

In the future do you fancy your chances in other events?

Maybe the IQ or perhaps the speed reading. I am not fast at the moment but when I have some spare time I will devote my attention to it.

What other events interest you?

Mainly the chess and backgammon but I have spent most of my time doing interviews with national newspapers and television.

How long have you been preparing for the memory championships?

Six weeks. I have been dealing out lots of cards and flashing lots of numbers up on my computer screen. I have devised my own program to do this.

What other things have you been doing recently?

I have been writing a memory course, comprising four books and 12 audio tapes, which will be published in the autumn by Linguaphone, the language people. They want to get involved in memory and this should be a good vehicle for them. The series will be called Super Memory Power.

How do you see the future for memory competitions?

It seems to me that they could become very popular as they are completely egalitarian - something everyone can do. Anyone can scribble numbers down and try to remember them. You don't need a chessboard, or Scrabble set, or backgammon board. If you know the right techniques anyone can do it. By getting involved in this publishing work I am, in a sense, digging my own grave. I eventually see myself perhaps devoting all my time to teaching, becoming the David Leadbetter of memory.

What did you do before concentrating on memory?

I used to have a job extracting silver from photographic waste. Unfortunately the price of silver plummeted, so I had to do something else.

And what got you started on memory?

About ten years ago I saw Creighton Carvello on Record Breakers, memorising a pack of cards in 2 minutes 59 seconds. I though this was fascinating and looked into it. It took me three months to beat this time, and it was a further four years before it became a profession for me.

What are the practical applications?

If anything is good for the mind, it is memory training. Memory training develops all cortical skills and trains the whole of the brain, using both hemispheres. The techniques of using association, imagination and location employ all elements of the brain.

Are alternative techniques possible?

This is difficult, because the established methods are the most natural (the Greeks were using them 2,000 years ago). You can tinker with the details but the basic technique remains the same.

How has your memory work helped you in other areas?

I am generally more switched on and more focused and my concentration is much improved. Recently an EEG was taken on my brain, while I was memorising cards, and it reported that my brain went into the alpha state (7hz), which is the perfect learning state. It is also the state achieved when you meditate. I suppose this is logical, because if you are concentrating hard for 38 seconds, you can't afford to start wondering if you've left the cooker on.

The events in the 1997 World Memory Championship are:

1. Memorisation of a 4,000 digit number in one hour.
2. Memorisation of 100 names and faces in 15 minutes.
3. Memorisation of 500 random words in 15 minutes.
4. Memorisation of a 300 digit spoken number, one digit every two seconds. This is scored by sudden death. If you get the second digit wrong, you score 2.
5. Memorisation of as many packs of cards as possible in an hour.
6. Memorisation of a random number, five minutes allowed.
7. Memorisation of images on screen: 40 images are shown and memorised. 80 are then shown again and the previously seen ones then have to be identified.
8. Memorisation of a 1,000 digit binary number in half an hour.
9. Memorisation of a 500 word poem, with punctuation, in 15 minutes.
10. A surprise competition, 20 minutes.
11. Memorisation of one pack of cards, in the fastest time possible. The competition world record is held by Andy Bell (41.37 seconds). Dominic's world record (outside competition) is 38.29 seconds.

Friday 22 August 1997

MEMORY MATTERS

One of the media darlings of the MSO has been reigning World Memory Champion Dominic O'Brien. His amazing skills are readily accessible to the public - everyone can understand the magnitude of the feats performed in this event. O'Brien started today's championships with a record-breaking performance. At the same time, rival Andy Bell made it clear that this year's Memoriad will be a vicious battle.

The first of the 12 challenges is the memorisation of a multiple digit number in an hour. This year the test number totalled 4,000 digits since the customary 2,000 was considered too low(!). O'Brien shattered his own world record of 1,392 by raising the mark to 1,512. Incredibly, Bell took an early lead in the competition by toppling Dominic from this list for the first time - the world record is now 1,620 digits!

O'Brien then resumed his customary spot at the head of the leader table by winning the 100 names and faces event, as well as the 500 random words (with another world record). Bell moved closer by winning the 300 spoken numbers - another O'Brien speciality - and another double world record, Andy raising the bar in this competition to 228.

The tension escalated as these titans continued to vault over earlier mental landmarks. In the one hour recall of packs of playing cards another double world record ended in a new theft of an O'Brien speciality. Bell managed an astonishing 1,170, eclipsing Dominic by over 200 cards. Nevertheless, O'Brien managed to extend his slender lead with an unmatched world record in the speed numbers.

After the seventh event, the recall of screen images, the first day of competition ended, and the warriors could retire to tend to their aching brains. O'Brien took another first, and must still be the overall favourite. Nevertheless, with Bell scoring remarkable successes in some of O'Brien's favourite events, tomorrow should provide further drama. As O'Brien remarked somewhat shakily early today: 'I'm a good each-way bet, but I wouldn't put any money on the nose.'

'I memorise ten packs of cards a day. When it's over, I usually have a headache.' - Dominic O'Brien,

Saturday 23 August 1997

THE £1 MILLION BRAIN

'Yes, I was worried - I was worried before the event and I was worried after the first round. But when I went home after the first day, after Andy (Bell) had crashed out, I knew I was safe. Andy knew he couldn't win then. You just can't crash out and still win.' - Dominic O'Brien

Dominic O'Brien retained his title as World Memory Champion yesterday after a tough battle. His win was celebrated in great style when the sponsors, Skandia, presented him with a certificate insuring his brain against accident for a year, to the tune of £1,000,000. Dominic accepted the award in evening dress and a blue crash helmet, demonstrating both elegance and due care for his valuable equipment.

This year O'Brien had to fend off a determined challenge from Andy Bell, who set three new world memory records before stumbling in the sixth event, speed numbers. Until this moment Bell and O'Brien had been neck and neck, but when O'Brien set another record here and Bell crashed out, the duel was effectively over.

Bell explained that he had lost his rhythm in the speed numbers (five minutes to recall as many digits as possible), having accomplished after three minutes what he felt he should have managed in one. Andy refused to post a low score: 'On the spur of the moment I walked out. I was very disappointed.' He added that he felt he would have moved ahead of O'Brien here.

Asked if he had concentrated his training on his rival's specialities, Bell offered a flat 'no'. 'That's just the way the cards fell. I think I could have done even better; there is huge room for improvement. It wouldn't surprise me if someone new came out of the blue next year and won this event at their first attempt. All it takes is a good technique.'

Watching the final event, speed cards (one deck, best of two attempts), it was clear that the rivals were both straining to set a new world record but, sadly for the spectators, both fell short.

This event illustrated a clear contrast in style between these two great memorisers. O'Brien speeds through the deck methodically, rarely pausing. When finished, Dominic sits with his eyes closed as he burns the sequence into his brain. Bell does bursts of several cards at a time, repeating this after a brief delay. He appears to fix his images while staring into space.

'Yes, I do them three at a time, Dominic does two,' Bell explained. 'I form an image like a kangaroo through a pineapple, and then assign a location to it.'

Record-Breakers

Six new records were set at the MSO:

One hour random numbers
A. Bell 1,620 digits; D. O'Brien 1,512 (Old Record: 1,392 D. O'Brien)

500 words
D. O'Brien 155 words

Spoken number
A. Bell 228 digits; D. O'Brien 207 (OR: 200 D. O'Brien)

One hour multiple decks of cards
A. Bell 1,170 cards; D. O'Brien 936 (OR: 780 D. O'Brien)

Speed numbers
D. O'Brien 240 digits (OR: 200 D. O'Brien)

Binary number
D. O'Brien 2,385 digits; A. Bell 2,058 (OR: 1,926 D. O'Brien)

Podcast away

 Check out this interview with me on The Human Podcast - brand new, hot off the presses, recorded last weekend!

I still don't like podcasts, but I can tolerate the ones that come with videos. I don't think anything with ME in it is worth watching, and certainly not this one, but there are other interviews with much more interesting people on his channel, so please remember to like and subscribe, like all YouTube people are very keen for you to do!

A question of chronology

 Here's another Nicholas Fisk I've acquired - Leadfoot!

Like Space Hostages, this wasn't the edition I read when I was young, but unlike Space Hostages, this one is (according to the small print at the start of the book) a "revised edition". Revised in what way?

Leadfoot (another favourite of mine) wasn't one of the earliest Fisk books I read; I can't really fix a date when I did read it, but I'm sure it must have been before 1992. And I would have got it from the library, so it probably wouldn't have been a brand new copy - I really must have read the original 1980 text.

So what's changed? Well, all I can see is that first page, and the line "built in 1926: so it was about six times Rob's age." Rob, as we're told a couple of pages later, is "aged about eleven", and to quote Sherlock Holmes, the calculation is a simple one - the current year is 1992.

This one isn't a futuristic science-fiction story, it's set in the present day and grounded in reality, but there aren't any precise references to what year it is. The plot, a camping trip in the Highlands, could happen in any year in the latter half of the twentieth century. I don't remember the book word for word, obviously, but I remember all the best scenes and cleverest lines, and those are all exactly as I remember them. Does the 'revised edition' really consist of a single change to how many times older than Rob the Alvis is, on the first page? Or have I missed something? I'll have to track down a first edition now...

Space Hostages!

I decided to splash out and buy a pile of old books on Wob (which used to be World of Books, but seems to have decided "wob" sounds somehow cooler). It's mainly the fault of my brother, for buying a complete DVD of the BBC Tripods series, which just reminded me how long it is since I read the books - and having got into the children's science-fiction mindset I just had to do what I've been talking about for many many years, and stock up on Nicholas Fisk books.

 Space Hostages was the first Nicholas Fisk I ever read, and as it turns out it was the earliest of his works that I ever read, first published in 1967. I found it in Horncastle library nearly twenty years later - I must have been around eight years old the first time I read it, which is a bit below the recommended reading age of 10 that this edition comes with, and even if I didn't entirely get the more subtle aspects of the plot it still absolutely hooked me. I think it took a couple of years to develop into a full fixation, but I was soon eagerly searching any library or second-hand book stall for anything with the Fisk name on it, and enjoying every one!

The Fisk name, incidentally, was a cool pen-name. Stephen King once said that the ideal name for a writer of sensational fiction is one with seven or eight letters in the first name and four letters in the surname, allowing the book to print the first name in a smaller font and the surname below it, twice the size. "Nicholas Fisk" follows that rule, and sounds somehow very cool and edgy with it. His real name, David Higginbottom, was obviously completely unsuitable to put on the covers of children's books...

The story of Space Hostages is simple enough - it's a 1967 perception of the near future (a moon base has been established within the last year or so, but everything else feels very contemporary. The Beatles are mentioned in passing as something you'd turn on a radio to hear) and a huge flying saucer lands unexpectedly on the cricket pitch of a small village, population around 170 people. So quite the metropolis compared to the place I grew up, but still the kind of setting I could easily identify with! It turns out not to be aliens, but a British military construction, designed to evacuate the privileged people of the country in the event of a global nuclear war (international tensions are running high, but seem to consist entirely of endless talks that the average people of the world are bored with). The ship is manned by a single Flight Lieutenant, who has found out about it, been outraged and decided to take matters into his own hands. Unfortunately, he exposed himself to the nuclear engines in the process of stealing it, and is rapidly dying of radiation poisoning. He invites a group of village children to come and see inside the ship, and then takes off with them on board as part of an incoherent plan to either hold them hostage and demand world peace, or failing that have them rebuild the human race after its destruction. His mind is essentially gone already, and he dies shortly after, leaving the children adrift in space with no idea how to fly the ship.

That's the set-up for what turns out to be not at all an exciting outer space adventure, but a fascinating character study of the conflict between Brylo (the clever one) and Tony (the self-proclaimed leader). We see things mainly from Brylo's perspective, but it becomes clear that Tony is deeply insecure, and others don't recognise how surprisingly sharp and intelligent he really is precisely because he's so desperate to make everyone think he's the best. He's a wonderful character, and the way the story develops is absolutely gripping - especially if you've never read anything quite like it before! You should all go and read it if you can find a copy (Wob might have another one, maybe? Open Library have a few Fisks, but not that one, sadly - or you could find it in a charity shop, perhaps? It's worth hunting for, anyway!)

I'm well and truly back in the Nicholas Fisk mood, it's great!

The Obelisk has jumped from the ground

 This little comic - one of the many that came free with He-Man toys in the mid-1980s - is, in the considered opinion of at least two people in the world, the best and most influential of them. It's the thrilling story of the Obelisk!

The comic uses its 14 pages to tell a classic story of good versus evil. What distinguishes it from most stories using that theme is that 'good' and 'evil' are the names of two groups who try to achieve exactly the same thing, by exactly the same means. The He-Man cartoon always made a point of hammering home an important moral about the right way to behave towards others, but there's none of that in this comic. I've always said that it's a problem with this kind of toy range - in most of the fiction, the evil villains threaten innocents in some way, and our heroes thwart their dastardly plans. But they don't sell toys of innocent civilians, so when children are creating their own adventures, all they can really do is line the two sides up and have them batter each other senseless!

Writer Karen Sargentich isn't exactly a household name, but there is some information available about her on the internet. She was a senior copywriter for Mattel Toys, but writing the accompanying fiction doesn't seem to have been a major part of her job description. A website about her brother Lewis Sargentich, a noted Harvard professor, describes Karen as the 'author of The Obelisk and "Dad Turned 90 on the 4th of July: Daniel Milo Sargentich"'. The latter was an article published in "Serb World USA" magazine in 1999, so The Obelisk would seem to have been her only published work of fiction.

I'd always assumed from the bizarre and sometimes borderline incomprehensible dialogue in The Obelisk that its writer spoke English as a second language, and it seems the Sargentich kids were born in the USA to a Serbian immigrant father, so that might explain wonderful phrases like "Teela, warn us if Skeletor comes."

Artist Alfredo P. Alcala, meanwhile, originated in the Philippines, but had a lengthy career drawing comics in America in the seventies and eighties. He did a fair few Conan the Barbarian comics for Marvel, and DC's bare-chested hero Arak, Son of Thunder, so he was an obvious choice to draw He-Man comics. He does a fantastic job here, making the toy-based characters recognisable and cool-looking, and as we'll see on page 13, inventing some wonderful monsters!

Does Buzz-Off not know how to read, or does it just not occur to him to fly a little closer?

"Now Tri-Klops will keep you from reading the words on the Obelisk!" is a line that has always stuck with me over the years. It's a slightly strange thing for He-Man to say while hitting Tri-Klops in the face, but I guess it gets the point across.

The classic lines keep coming. "Then we'll use the power of the Obelisk to do him in!" "Gadzooks. It says OOOGLE GALUMP GALEE. What's that?"

Skeletor and his gang are sitting outside an accurate representation of the Snake Mountain toy - it must be a nice sunny day, so they don't want to go indoors.

Perhaps the greatest moment in this comic is the Sorceress telling He-Man "Do not let him learn about the words," which is followed immediately by the caption "Skeletor has heard everything..."

And really, is it any wonder Skeletor has heard everything? The Sorceress is flying up in the sky, about half a mile away from He-Man, and shouting this confidential secret message down to him!

He-Man and Mekaneck grab photon rays thrown from the Obelisk. These seem to make He-Man's hands glow for one further panel, but otherwise do nothing. Drat, he says, to make clear his horror at the idea of an evil power being released.

And then we get these wonderful creations! "I can escape horrid situations" is a wonderful way to introduce yourself, isn't it? And "I search and destroy" from the 'good' one makes it pretty clear that there's no moral distinction between 'good' and 'evil' in this world.

But no sooner are these new monsters released than the Obelisk falls apart, and that's the end. The Obelisk never does come again.

And the back page shows the toys you can buy - although strangely this one still shows the previous year's line-up, instead of giving us pictures of Mekaneck, Buzz-Off and the other most recently released figures. I wonder if Karen Sargentich was also responsible for such snappy phrases as "Evil & sees everything"? If only she'd written more adventures like this for the toy-buying kids of the 1980s to enjoy!

Not as cool as Dr Crippen

 If you do get lost looking for me and end up in Australia, as detailed yesterday, then I suppose you could do worse than checking out the black sheep of the Pridmore family, as seen here on the "Twisted History" website. I don't know if they actually do 'murder tours' to see the site of what seems to be a fairly unexceptional murder - they seem to mainly focus on ghost tours and the like - but you never know.

It's not a particularly pleasant or even exciting story, is it? Still, he's a relative, and one in a much more exotic location than you'll normally find for my family tree. Moving from Bourne to Sheffield was the biggest relocation for my branch until I came along...

There are quite a lot of branches of the Pridmore family that come from my fertile great-great-great-great-grandfather, James Pridmore (1777-1848). He had around sixteen children with his two wives - the four most notable from the second marriage are:

Jane (born 1816), my great-great-great-grandmother, who kept the Pridmore name intact by having an illegitimate daughter who in turn had an illegitimate son;

Thomas (born 1820), the great-great-great-grandfather of Robert Craig, who has a really great website full of family tree detail and is a very nice person all round;

James (born 1821), the patriarch of the other family of Pridmores who moved to Sheffield, who really make family tree research more confusing than it needs to be;

And the youngest of the big family, Henry (born 1830), who emigrated to Australia with his baby son John, future author of the Brunswick Tragedy.

It would be nice if I had relatives who'd done really cool things that made them famous, but you take what you can get when you're researching family trees.

What three words?

 If you want to get to my house (or at least to a convenient parking space near to my house) and for some reason you don't want to use the postcode like normal people, then you can use the what3words thing that advertises on TV and seems to think it's really great. When my new washing machine was delivered, they asked for that, and I gave them the key words 'barn-packet-mass'.

But you've got to be careful if you're using that system - 'barn-packets-mass' takes you to eastern Bucharest. 'bran-packet-mass' puts you on the east coast of Australia. 'bran-packets-mass' sticks with Australia but dumps you absolutely in the middle of nowhere in the Northern Territory. It's inherently dangerous, and I'm surprised the washing machine got here at all!

Lost media

Here's something I did last year - recovered something that was thought lost forever! Maggie and the Ferocious Beast, a wonderful cartoon that I've talked about many times before, had a redubbed version broadcast by Nick Jr in the UK, using British voices (it's generally agreed among TV people that very young children should be protected from hearing what foreigners sound like; from about the age of seven it becomes acceptable to hear the sound of Americans, Canadians and other undesirables).

These UK versions are immeasurably better than the originals, so it's a shame that they disappeared from our screens a while ago. The DVD release in this country for some reason used the original voices. So when I looked on YouTube to see if the few episodes missing from my taped-from-the-TV VHS collection were on there, I was pleased to see that they were - and it turned out there were some missing ones that nobody else had a copy of!

So I uploaded the missing ones, and now you can see a complete playlist of the entire series! Go and watch it, it's really great!

There was a page on Lost Media Wiki and everything, you know, and now it's been officially marked as Found!

A pitch to Dragon's Den

Bright sunshine, and summer by the pool. A man on a sun lounger, wearing swimming trunks and sunglasses, fans himself with an ornate peacock-feather fan. A second man enters, carrying a tray with two glasses of drink and a tray of ice cubes.

 

FIRST MAN: Gosh, it’s hot today!

 

SECOND MAN: You know what’s nice in hot weather? A nice cold glass of dandelion and burdock!

 

He hands a glass to the first man, who takes it and drinks.

 

FIRST MAN: Mmm, that’s nice, but it would be nicer if it was just a little colder…

 

SECOND MAN: No problem! I made a tray of ice cubes! Say when!

 

Second man starts putting ice cubes one at a time into the first man’s drink. The first man just smiles at the camera as if the scene is over. This goes on for quite a long time before fading out to a black screen.

 

 

NARRATOR: A common everyday scene. But what happens when the weather is cold, rather than hot?

 

 

Fade into the same summer scene, but the first man, still on the sun lounger, is now wrapped up in thick coats, scarves, hats, mittens and so on. He shivers, as the second man enters again, carrying a tray with two steaming mugs.

 

FIRST MAN: Gosh, it’s cold today!

 

SECOND MAN: You know what’s nice in cold weather? A nice hot mug of camomile tea!

  

He hands a mug to the first man, who takes it and drinks.

 

               FIRST MAN: Mmm, that’s nice, but it would be nicer if it was just a little hotter…

 

               SECOND MAN: Sorry, that’s as hot as it gets.

 

They stand awkwardly, looking at the camera, until the scene eventually fades to black.

 

 

               NARRATOR: Clearly, something needs to be done about this.

 

 

Fade into a school chemistry lab, in which a group of interested twelve-year-olds are watching a teacher demonstrating the workings of a pair of taps on a sink.

 

 NARRATOR: As we all learned in school, there are two kinds of water: “hot” and “cold”.

 

 

Cut to a kitchen, where a woman fills an ice cube tray with water from the cold tap. As the narrator talks, she carefully carries the tray out of the kitchen, through a dining room, through a living room where a family are sitting on a sofa watching darts on TV, through another dining room, and up a small flight of stairs to a freezer on the landing. She opens it and puts the ice cube tray inside.

 

NARRATOR: And most of us have one of these in our household too: an “ice cube making tray”. After we give it a drink of water, we take it to the freezer, put it inside, wait for a little while, and open the freezer to find that the tray has made cold ice, for us to put in our drinks!

 

The woman waits by the freezer, tapping her foot and looking at her watch for a few seconds, then opens the freezer again, takes out a tray of ice cubes and shows it to the camera.

 

 

Cut back to the same kitchen. The woman this time fills the tray from the hot tap, carries it out of an external door, across a lawn and over to an oven, which she opens and puts the tray inside.

 

NARRATOR: But what happens when we try to use the same technology to make hot ice? Well, our housewife is going to be sadly disappointed when she opens the oven…

 

The woman opens the oven door and reacts with disappointment. The camera closes in to find that the oven is entirely empty, with no tray or ice in evidence.

 

 

Cut to a laboratory full of bubbling test tubes and beakers of colourful liquid. The narrator, dressed in scientist clothes and a large false beard, stands behind the table and addresses the camera. She picks up an empty ice cube tray and shows it to the camera, then repeatedly ducks under the table to reappear with a series of other objects – small radio, television, large model vehicles – which she holds up to the camera as she mentions them.

 

NARRATOR: Ice, as we know it, only comes in one variety: “cold”. Technology has not yet reached the point where we can enjoy hot ice in our drinks on a cold winter’s day. The problem, you see, is that the old-fashioned ice cube making tray is like a radio – it can only make sounds, and not pictures. So to get pictures as well as sounds, we invented the television. It’s like a car, that can only go along the ground and not in the air. So to get in the air as well as on the ground, we invented the aeroplane. Or it’s like a boat, which can only go on the water. So to go on the water and also on the ground, we invented the hovercraft.

 

The narrator ducks down underneath the table again and doesn’t reappear, as another narrator dressed as a scientist walks in, holding a collecting tin and jangling the coins in it.

 

SECOND NARRATOR: It is clearly possible for scientists to invent a hot ice cube making tray. It will probably cost about a million pounds, give or take. I mean, it might be less – how hard can it be to invent things, once we’ve already told them what they need to invent? Coming up with the idea is the difficult bit. But if you give us a million quid, and there’s anything left over at the end, we’ll buy you a drink with the change. And put some ice in it, too! Hot or cold!

 

The narrator laughs extensively until the scene finally fades to black.

Mandora the Evil Chaser

The winter of 1987 will forever be associated with two things - the heaviest snow you can ever imagine and the exciting debut of Thundercats on the BBC! The two will always be inextricably linked in my mind, at any rate.

Thirty-five years ago today, Thursday 26 February 1987, the snow was just a fond memory, but Thundercats was launching into its golden age. The first eight episodes (or nine, technically, since the first two were shown as a 40-minute compilation to British audiences) had been the world-building original stories, introducing the characters and settings, and chronicling their early adventures. With those out of the way, the series recruited a team of talented writers to create the main bulk of the episodes, and the first of them was broadcast today - Mandora the Evil Chaser.

It must have been the half-term holidays. We can use the BBC genome website to confirm the date, and for once I can use my own memory to provide the details without needing to ask my brother - we definitely watched this one at our grandma's house. It would have been our mother's birthday the previous day, so we probably all went to Toton for the whole week. I don't really remember anything else about it, but watching Mandora there has definitely stayed with me.

It's a fantastic episode, it really is. You should go and watch it - and watch it as a ten-year-old in 1987, because that's the best way to experience the wonders of Thundercats. I fully intend to celebrate a whole series of 35th anniversary viewings on Saturdays going forwards. It's The Ghost Warrior next week, and that's quite possibly the best one of them all!

The internet knows a lot about me

There's a website out there that pretends to know the net worth of celebrities. I found it ages ago, and I've just rediscovered it tonight - I'm worth eight million dollars at the moment. I'm pretty sure it was ten million last time I looked, and I see Google's cached version of the page had it all the way up at seventeen million at one point. Who keeps pinching my money?

(Just in case anybody was wondering about the truth, my net worth is absolute zero).

There's another website that pretends to know where everybody fits on that stupid Myers-Briggs thing. It's got me down as INTJ, which seems to be where it puts all the nerdy chess-players and similar. Having looked that up on a website that seems to quite passionately believe in the whole system, that apparently makes me an "architect". On the one hand, that's quite cool because it was the stock description of Tygra in Thundercats, but on the other hand it's the exact opposite of an "entertainer", ESFP, and surely I'm an entertaining kind of person, right?

Derbyshire Runaround

Here's a thing that even primary school children excited by these new "computer" things thought was a little odd - Derbyshire Runaround! A game in which you traverse the roads between Derbyshire towns, at 30mph, trying to get from one place to another in a certain amount of time. It's quite often impossible to win at this game, depending on the random obstacles it places in your way. Why it ended up in a school in Lincolnshire, nobody could ever say. But I'm pleased to have rediscovered it after all these years, anyway!

  

I'm well below par (which is a good thing in golf)

 At the start of the Wordle craze that gripped the world (the portion of it that waste a lot of time on the internet, anyway) a month or so ago, I saw someone say that in golfing terms, par for Wordle is 4, so if you're averaging better than that, you're doing well.

So since I played it for the 36th time early this morning, just before it was swallowed up by the New York Times, that seems like an appropriate time to stop playing the silly thing, and move on to other more exciting wastes of time. And after the full 36 holes, I can proudly say I'm 5 under, which is usually enough to make the cut, isn't it? Eat your heart out, Tiger Woods (and any other golfers whose name is made up of five-letter English words).

The League is on again!

It's a new season of Memory League! This is season 14, although I'm not sure exactly when the numbering started - I could go back and look, or, you know, just use my memory which is supposed to be so good, but I prefer to just stay satisfied with my vague recollection that we had sort of less official seasons before it properly started with season 1.

Anyway, I've got my first match on Wednesday at 10:00 GMT, against Emanuele Regnani, and I might try streaming it live somewhere, somehow. We're supposed to record it anyway, to minimise cheating, so why not do a live broadcast to the world? It might be fun to watch how badly I do, since as usual I'm wildly out of practice...

More cornflakes airliners, more creative editing

The people at Kellogg's really had a lot of model airliners on their hands in 1985. Hot on the heels of all the ones they gave away with the Transformers comic, as documented in my blog here, they stuck a whole load more the next week to the cover of Secret Wars no. 10.

Secret Wars, from Marvel UK, was the same kind of thing as Transformers - fortnightly, half colour and half monochrome, containing reprints of American comics. But this one was printing Secret Wars, the big epic 12-issue limited series featuring all the coolest Marvel superheroes and supervillains in one big epic storyline! They do one of those practically every week in American comics now, but in 1984 it was a brand new concept and very exciting!

And, like Transformers, the British comic needed a backup strip to pad out the American material. They sensibly chose Alpha Flight - a comic that didn't feature any of the superheroes who were involved in the main story. As luck would have it, in fact, the only significant guest stars in the first twelve issues of Alpha Flight were the Invisible Woman and the Sub-Mariner, neither of whom were in Secret Wars, so it worked out very nicely!

Also like Transformers, Secret Wars was about to move up to weekly publication. This seems to have caused a bit of confusion for the editors and awkward juggling of the available pages. Unlike Transformers (which at the same time as going weekly switched to 24 pages and full colour), Secret Wars remained at 32 pages until no. 19, and so someone decided it needed another backup strip.

This issue, no. 10, was the last to follow the pattern of roughly twelve pages of Secret Wars and roughly twelve pages of Alpha Flight (American comics of the time usually came in at 23-24 pages). For the weekly issues, it changed to eight pages or so from each of Secret Wars, Alpha Flight and Iceman. Trouble is, no. 10 started new American issues of both its stories, so splitting them up was going to be a little complicated...

And so Secret Wars no. 10 proudly boasts a whole fourteen pages of the American Secret Wars issue #6, backed up by the first ten pages of Alpha Flight issue #4 - with just a bit of fiddling from those ingenious British comic editors.

Alpha Flight #4 was cover-dated November 1983, six months before the first issue of the American Secret Wars series. It was written and drawn by John Byrne, who was also doing Fantastic Four at the time, hence the crossover. And it starts by referencing what was happening in the concurrent Fantastic Four comic, naturally enough...

Which is pretty easy for the UK editor to adjust, since Secret Wars was also about Mister Fantastic being mysteriously abducted (it happens to him a lot) - only the last line of Sue's speech bubble needed to be altered, to give British readers the impression this was happening simultaneously with the Secret Wars story in this issue!

The change in handwriting was always so obvious when UK comics made these alterations - the Planet Terry ones were less glaring, weren't they? But that's the only dialogue change that was necessary to reprint this issue of Alpha Flight. There's just the problem of the page count to deal with. Most of the early Alpha Flight comics had a 17-page main story and a backup strip of 6 pages detailing the origin of one of the heroes. This one issue is the exception to that - the main story takes up the whole comic, clocking in at 22 pages. And it does rather look like John Byrne stretched it out to that length with a bit of unnecessary padding, so for the UK comic to trim it down a bit might have been a quality judgement as well as a practical one! These are pages 10 and 11:

Yes, that's what it looked like in the original American printing, with the colours messed up on the second page and a big white border between the two halves of what was supposed to be one big panel at the bottom. The UK reprint, which ended the episode at this point, decided the first half of that big panel was quite enough to establish the scale of the Master's base, and cut out a couple of panels from the top row to give us this cliffhanger ending:

I think that looks rather better than the original! So, just one week later, we get the next UK issue of Secret Wars!

Now weekly! And really crammed with comics! The 32 pages (which, unlike American comics, includes the covers) contain 10 pages of Secret Wars, 10 pages of Alpha Flight and 8 pages of Iceman! There's barely room for a couple of text pages explaining the changes to the readers, and certainly no space for the usual number of ads and other filler!

I don't really see why it was necessary to add the Iceman limited series to the comic - Secret Wars maybe needed to go down to 8 pages to avoid catching up with the American printing, but Alpha Flight was old enough that they could have increased the pagecount of that without a problem. They probably just didn't want it to be two-thirds of a comic that was meant to be about Secret Wars.

Anyway, we've already stripped out one page from the Alpha Flight story. Is there anything else we can cut, to make sure everything fits in this UK reprint? Oh yes, it seems John Byrne's got a bit lazy towards the end...

That's pages 19 and 20 of the original comic. And while you might say it's justified and necessary to show the sheer scale of the explosion, I think filling two pages with it is a bit much. Still, it made it easy to trim another page out for the UK reprint!

And so, once again, the day is saved, thanks to Alpha Flight and some clever editing!

Nice to know that people are still talking about me

Or at least about Ben Pride-more, from Durby in the UK. Starting about four minutes into a video otherwise dedicated to people born with unusual medical conditions, we get a brief feature of a memory man so extraordinary, you won't believe he exists.

 

I wonder that that guy will think when he hears about the many mnemonists nowadays who are much, much better than I am?

The robots have landed!

 What a lovely day! The sun's shining, it's almost warm outside, and I saw on Facebook a couple of days ago that the Golden Orbit comic fair is in Birmingham today, so I went along to see what was on sale...

These things have been going on since I was very young, and the little A5 flyers have always been in exactly the same format - the whole thing is very nostalgic! And what's more, there's always some treasure to be found in the many cardboard boxes full of comics being sold there - but today, I actually found EXACTLY the kind of thing I'd gone there hoping to get! New 'reading copies' of early Transformers comics from a 20p box! Including a copy of no. 2 that's superior to the one I've already got!

That's a great cover, by John Ridgway. I do love the little girl resolutely playing with her doll and paying no attention to the giant robots marching towards her! It's true - Transformers were very emphatically "boys' toys" in those days.

The original owner of these comics (2, 4, 5, 7 and 8) has punched holes in them to keep them in a ring binder, but that's not really a problem, because these comics had very wide white margins around the artwork, so the holes mostly don't affect it. Most importantly, this copy has the centrespread poster still intact! My other copy for some reason has the right hand half of it cut out.

This is another great example of how the British comic adapted the American source material (I assume everyone reading this has already read and enjoyed my excessive posting about Planet Terry in recent weeks). In the American version of Transformers #1, this double-page spread is part of the story - the British comic takes the pages out of sequence to put them in the centrespread, blacks out the two story panels at the top of the first page and (most fascinatingly) rewrites all the speech bubbles! They're replaced with more legible typewriting, and convey the same basic information, but often in slightly different words. Here's the American original for comparison:

The new copy of this comic I bought today isn't entirely complete, though - the original owner has cut out a picture of Ravage's roaring face from page 20!

Lucky I've still got that other copy, so I can assemble a complete story! I wonder what the previous owner did with that picture. Probably stuck it to the front of a school book, or maybe a private diary to scare off intruders!

Well worth 20p of anyone's money!

In another dimension, with voyeuristic intention

Okay, this is a thing - 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel. You can move pieces back in time and create alternate universes in a staggeringly complex way. Do people actually play this and know what's going on? I'm working on it, but I'm still not at the level of comprehension just yet. It does take me back to my schooldays, when we loved to play strange variants of chess games and fairy pieces. I'm sure I'll get the hang of time travel with a bit more practice, and then I'll use my new powers to take over the world!

I am Ben, son of George

 That's the best way to introduce yourself at Pridmore family gatherings, it seems - helps everybody keep track of the family tree. And I'm very glad I went to this one, and had the opportunity for a lot of family talk with Andy (son of Mick), Pete (son of Bill) and Alan (son of Syd).

Did you know that Walter Millership, who played for Sheffield Wednesday in the 1935 cup final, was a relative?

Continuing the theme

Want to get a lot more readers for your blog all of a sudden? Use a Simpsons quote and get shared on the sub-reddit Unexpected Simpsons! That really was an unexpected pleasure! Welcome to everyone who found my blog through that, and I'm sorry that this post isn't at all Simpsons-related.

But continuing the theme of things I'm not good at but occasionally feel I should try to become good at - driving a car. I'm going to a funeral tomorrow, down south, and have hired a car for the occasion. I really don't like driving, but once I've done it for a little while, I get back into the mood. And I only very rarely crash into things, so I'll probably be all right.

Or I could still chicken out and get the train. I'll see how I feel.

Why must I fail in every attempt at masonry?

 Among the things I've been trying to do lately is It, Myself. I'm not what you would call great at DIY, but I'd quite like to be more 'handy', and occasionally make attempts to do ambitious home-improvement projects.

The windows in my bedroom, you see, are skylights in a sloping roof. They've got roller blinds fitted, but the springy thing (I think that's the technical term) in one of them broke, and both of them are pretty useless at keeping light out - almost entirely transparent, in fact, which makes me wonder what the point of them is in the first place - so I decided to be practical and replace them.

It's harder than it sounds, you know. You can't just buy blinds of that unusual size off the shelf. But I got some inexpensive ones from Argos that cover the whole of the window area, and by means of bits of plastic and cardboard I had lying around the house improvised a way that they can be pulled down, stay in place, and block out maybe 90% of the sunlight. And it only took, well, a huge amount of getting things wrong, giving up, tearing it all down and starting again. But they're working now, more or less! And don't look completely ugly!

I'm cheering for Čilić

And not just because of the nice alliteration. He was really impressive against Rublev yesterday, and I always do like to see people who've been written off as past their best make an impressive return to top form against younger opponents. On the other hand, now Čilić is up against Félix Auger-Aliassime, who I also like to cheer for on the grounds that he's young and cool, so it'll be very conflicting.

It's all about date of birth, of course - I've described before how fascinated I am by the continued dominance of tennis players born in the 1980s, to the total exclusion of the younger generation, and it's still continuing now. There's still that total gap with men born in the first half of the 1990s, but there are quite a few top players now born in 1996 and later, so the interestingly small number at the bottom of this chart might yet get rather more boring and relatively large.

But on the other hand, there are also good players born in the early 2000s coming through now - Auger-Aliassime and also Jannik Sinner in the last 16 of the Australian Open. I'm hoping, for the sake of having an interesting piece of trivia, that these 21st-century boys will entirely squeeze out the nineties gang in years to come!

Feeling... unproductive

 This really is something I should know about myself after forty-five years, but whenever I set time aside to do all the cool "this would be a great thing to do if I had some spare time at my disposal" things in my head, I never actually manage to do anything. But never mind! With perseverance and forgetting about the whole concept expressed in the first sentence there, I'm sure I'll eventually get all those things done!

Shocking family secrets exposed

A sequel to the previous post, in which I wondered who the Barbara Pridmore in the 1939 register might be. Well, the answer is simple and obvious enough, as it turns out.

Just to recap, May Foster married my great-uncle George Harry Pridmore in 1917, shortly before he was killed in the war. By June 1921, she was a boarding house keeper in the census. By the following year, it seems she'd had to give that up, because she had a daughter, Barbara, on July 29th, 1922.

I'm thinking the registrar is a little unreasonably judgmental here - in the box for 'Name, surname and maiden surname of mother' he's just put "May Pridmore, of no occupation". Too obsessed with those empty father's name and occupation boxes to put 'nee Foster', or 'noble widow of gallant officer tragically killed in His Majesty's service', I assume.

Anyway, what May did for the next decade I'm not sure - a boarding house might not have been possible - but she married one Leonard Elliott in 1934, and as seen in the previous post was living with him and Barbara and also May's younger brother Harry Foster in the 1939 register. There's another name blacked out there, who'll just have to remain the subject of curiosity for now.

Barbara then married a John Foster in 1943. He must have been a connection of May's, you would think, but doesn't seem to be a close relative; I've tried to follow their family lines back through the old censuses, and I can't see where the two Foster families join up.

Barbara gives her father's name as George Harry Pridmore on the marriage certificate. Which isn't technically correct, what with him having died four years before she was born, but never mind. John is a lance sergeant in the army, and they probably had at least one baby after the war, but it would take more research of a type that I really won't allow myself to spend the time and money on right now to be sure of it. Nor am I going to dive into investigating who the 'May Pridmore' who witnessed the wedding could be! Surely Barbara's mother was still going by the surname Elliott at that time?

Still, Barbara officially joins the ranks of 'honorary Pridmores', like Billy (John William) Pridmore, the son of Albert's widow Margaret! It's an uncommon surname, it's nice to see it get an infusion of new blood here and there!

Detox

 I've said it before, once or twice over the years, but I really need to break my addiction to cherry coke. The amount of it I'm drinking has steadily increased just lately, so I'm going to go sort of luke-warmish-turkey and reduce my intake to much smaller and healthier levels for a while. We'll see how it goes...

Ahhh! A happy ending!

I'm sure you all remember my post from a week and a half ago about the fascinating adaptation of Planet Terry for the British Transformers comic, and have been eagerly awaiting the sequel ever since.

Well, I've finally acquired a copy of Transformers no. 25, and it's intriguing in many ways!

It came with a free gift of a Kellogg's Corn Flakes model airliner. So every copy of this comic you find in the wild, like this one, has a big rip on the cover and a strip of decaying 36-year-old sellotape. All the airliners no doubt fell apart and were thrown away within a few days of getting them, but at least some of the comics still survive!

Apart from all the intrusive cornflakes, this cover uses the cover of the American Transformers #6, the second half of which is reprinted inside. The speech bubble is a UK original addition, though; there isn't one on the American original. Simon Furman, at a guess, enlivening the cover with his characteristic speech patterns and tying in to the cornflakes airliner theme with the call-sign CF-one. It's those little attentions to detail that made the British Transformers comic so special!

Inside the comic, as it winds down towards the big new weekly full-colour relaunch, we find the penultimate two-page Chromobots episode, the final eleven pages of the American Transformers #6, the final five pages of Machine Man #19, the letters page, Robo-Capers, Matt and the Cat, fact files for exciting new toys Warpath and Ramjet, a mega Kellogg's Corn Flakes competition, and of course the final three pages of Planet Terry! The first year of British Transformers comics were mega!

The British Transformers no. 26 printed the entire American Transformers #7, incidentally - a whole 23 pages of Transformers in the Transformers comic! British readers had never seen the like - and never really would again...

But to return to the final appearance of Planet Terry, he's squeezed into the final three inside pages of this issue, all of them in monochrome. Here's how it starts:

We get an extra title at the top, which weirdly calls this story "The Saga of Princess Ugly, part 6". That was the title of the American Planet Terry issue #2, which was spread over the British Transformers nos. 20-23. The way it was spread over them was also interesting, so if your eye has been drawn to the much more interesting part of the pages above, feel free to skip the next couple of paragraphs, but...

"The Saga of Princess Ugly" in the American comic was split into three chapters, as per the old American comic tradition, but those chapters were of very irregular length - the kind of thing that's a real inconvenience for British reprint comics. Part 1 was six pages, part 2 was a whole nine, and part 3 was seven. The way they dealt with it is a great indication of how the British Transformers comic worked - for no. 20, they didn't have any American Transformers material available to them, and were printing the British-original "Raiders of the Last Ark". There were six pages of that in the British comic, backed up by the usual filler material including the last part of Machine Man issue #18, and the first part of Planet Terry issue #2.

With no. 21, they had a mere five pages of Transformers content, concluding "Raiders of the Last Ark", and so ample room to print the full nine-page part 2 of Planet Terry, if they dropped Machine Man for one issue, allowing his next story to be spread over nos. 22-25. The other pages of Transformers no. 21 were filled with the usual kind of stuff, including a thrilling four-page historical comic about Erik the Red.

Then for Transformers no. 22, the long-awaited American Transformers #5 was finally available, and the Transformers content could go back up to 11 pages per issue of the British title! The third part of "The Saga of Princess Ugly" could be chopped in half and spread over two issues, with a "part 4" added to the top of the first page of no. 23.

As we saw in the last blog post, the American Planet Terry issue #3 was titled "Secret of the Space Warp", and that was the title shown in the British Transformers no. 24, which printed five pages' worth of material from the first 19 American pages. So why they reverted to "The Saga of Princess Ugly" for the title of these final three pages (in which Princess Ugly neither appears nor is mentioned) is hard to fathom.

But that's just a sideline to the most interesting part of this British printing. Not only is the dialogue rewritten to explain what the Devourer is, the second panel is entirely different! I didn't remember that at all, but it came back to me as soon as I looked at this comic. It's been lifted from the bottom of page 9 of the American comic - part of the large chunk that was chopped out for the British Transformers fans!

A scene that really happened in the American original has been repurposed as a flashback to Terry playing a video game! Now that's some clever editing! Although it does raise the unanswered question of why this Devourer knows who Planet Terry is, and specifically wants to eat him!

Slightly less clever is the way the page number has been very clumsily scribbled out at the bottom right of the British printing, but with that excitement out of the way, there's not much to note about the final two pages...

Ahhh. From the British comic-readers' perspective, Terry has found his long-lost parents at last, and everybody's happy!

From American comic-readers' perspective, next issue they turn out to be statues, and Terry's quest continues for nine more issues. And he never does find his parents; it ends with him still endlessly searching. I prefer the British one!

トロン・ボーン

 "The Misadventures of Tron Bonne" is a PlayStation game from 2000. Someone mentioned the character and the game to me in passing twenty years or so ago and I hadn't thought about it since then, until it popped back into my mind yesterday morning for no reason at all. So I had to look it up and find what it was all about, and it does look like fun. Someone should re-release it on the Switch.

Rhyme chime

Have you ever noticed how many songs use the word 'again' as a handy rhyme for pain, rain and all the other things that song-writers like to agonize about, but the singer invariably pronounces it 'agen' so that it doesn't rhyme at all? Lots of songs that I really like do this, so I probably shouldn't be too horrid about the whole thing, but even a wonderful piece of music like Don McLean's "Castles in the Air" is very slightly marred by a sequence of pain/agen/remain/plain.

But on the other hand, the Victor Meldrew song in "The Beast in the Cage" rhymes 'then' with 'again', but John du Prez pronounces 'again' to rhyme with 'rain'.

Following the herd

It's "trending" on "Twitter" and all kinds of other "new-fangled" and "cool" things, but I have to admit Wordle is a really great game nonetheless. Not only do you only get one puzzle a day, avoiding the likelihood of getting hopelessly addicted to it, but it's a real brain-stretching kind of exercise, searching your vocabulary for a word that can fit the letters you know. Plus I got it in three guesses today, and that's way better than anyone else I know!

Overthinking it

 Okay, the Simpsons episode "I'm Spelling As Fast As I Can" was on TV today, and I've always had a serious problem with it, which I will now discuss at great length, because I've got nothing better to do with my time on a Sunday night.

Lisa Simpson is competing in a spelling bee and the evil organiser wants an adorable little boy to win it for publicity reasons, so offers Lisa a bribe of a college scholarship to throw the contest, and she refuses. And then it goes like this:

Evil organiser: All right, your word is 'whether' [or 'weather']

Other contestant: Which one? Can you use it in a sentence?

Evil organiser: Certainly. "I don't know whether the weather will improve."

Other contestant: Umm... W... E...

Evil organiser gleefully presses the 'wrong answer' button. Adorable little boy comes to the microphone.

Evil organiser: Your word is 'rigged', as in "this contest is rigged!"

Adorable little boy: R-I-G-G-E-D. Wigged.

Evil organiser: Bravo, my pet! You shall be champion! Assuming Lisa misspells this next word... The word is 'intransigence'! As in "the little girl's intransigence cost her the college of her choice!"

Lisa: Attention, everyone! I was asked to take a dive, but I won't do it! I-N-T-R-A-N-S-I-G-A-N-C-E!

Evil organiser: You fool! It's E-N-C-E!

Lisa: Oh my god, you're right!

Evil organiser: And now you lose everything! And I go back to whatever it is I do!

Okay, George Plimpton as the evil organiser is hilarious, and the whole scene is brilliant, but it annoys me. If he could eliminate another competitor with the weather/whether gag, he could have done that to Lisa too! Much better, and funnier, would be to have the first competitor be given the word 'sellout', spell it X-J-Z-Q-T and be cheerfully thrown a huge sack of money with a dollar sign on it, adorable Alex get 'rigged', then have Lisa be given the whether/weather gag and the evil organiser realise that she got it right because he hadn't noticed there are two words that sound the same, adorable Alex get another hilarious word, and then have Lisa get 'intransigence' wrong. That would be much better all round, and not an insult to the viewers' intelligence!

I have made this point before, every time the episode has been on telly. One time, I was in Cambridge the next day for an othello competition, and a very intelligent person, an actual Cambridge University professor and everything, who doesn't normally watch the Simpsons, was still laughing about having seen that episode and saying how brilliant the whole weather/whether bit was. It almost makes me think that the episode wasn't so much an insult to intelligence as to pedantic quibbling, but no. It's the rest of the world that's wrong.