Only Jerks and Horses

 Do you remember, many years ago, there was some kind of 'comedy night', maybe on Channel 4, which included a series of short sketches mocking the American approach to sitcoms? Matt Lucas might have been involved, somehow. I suppose I could look it up, and not come across as someone with a poor memory, but I'm impressed with my powers of recollection here even if you're not.

The point is, it finished with an "American adaptation" of Only Fools and Horses, with Nicholas Lyndhurst (not the real one, an actor playing him) transplanted into it and being baffled by how they'd removed anything even remotely funny from the whole setup. So naturally it came to mind when watching the first episode of the new Frasier series.

Nicholas Lyndhurst does seem superfluous and pointless, and obviously rather awkwardly performing a script written by Americans (Jane Leeves suffered from the same problem in the classic series, of course), but the rest of it was actually quite good. There are some nice character dynamics among the all-new extended cast, and in fact (proving that that comedy-night parody was being unfair) quite a few funny jokes. It might turn out to be good, you know.

There's another episode to watch, but I don't like binge-watching a show like that, so I'll give it a day or two. And I might get an episode 3 before my week's free subscription to Paramount+ runs out - even if New Frasier is the best thing ever, I'm not paying that kind of money just to watch it.

So on that tightwad note, and since Frasier is all about poking fun at people whose idea of 'sport' is sitting at a computer solving problems on Excel spreadsheets (having paid an entry fee roughly the price of a Paramount+ subscription for the privilege), I should add that the draw for the Microsoft Excel World Championship has been made today!

And ouch, I've been drawn against the sixth seed in the first round...

Michael Clarke got to the quarter-finals last year, having qualified with a perfect score in the second-fastest time in the qualifiers - but I can maybe take some comfort in the fact that this year he's been focused on the Financial Modeling World Cup and hasn't played in this year's more eccentric challenges of the type that feature in the world championship. Unless he's been downloading them and doing them for practice, which he probably has.

But hey, I can still hope I do so well or he does so uncharacteristically badly that I win our match! And then I'm guaranteed not to meet any of the other top eight seeds until I get down to the quarter finals myself! Positive thinking is a major factor in Excel success, I think!

Microsoft Excel World Championship, here I come!

 Actually, as I said, I was already qualified for the world championship, and didn't need to compete in the final qualifying round yesterday - but I wanted to anyway, just to see how I did. It was a 60-minute challenge rather than the 30-minute monthly ones in the "Road to Las Vegas", so a bit different. Five unrelated tasks of different difficulty and point value - I went for the four easier ones and left the highest-scoring (which looked like it would take a lot longer to do), and I think that was a sensible strategy. And I made it to the front page of the results sheet, in eighteenth place!

Last year in the equivalent competition I was 74th, and you had to scroll down quite a way to find me. Knowing how these competitions work is the trick - that's why I always say people should go to a memory competition as soon as they learn such a thing exists, rather than waiting and training until they think they're good enough!

I see from the points I made one mistake in section 1 (I did notice that only 'losing' attempts at the game were divided by 2, but missed that the one 'winning' one needed to be multiplied by 2! Careless skimming of the instructions, but at least it wasn't too costly - I suspect this was designed for the RtLV scoring system rather than the one used yesterday; it would have cost a bigger chunk of points that way), and got one of the bonus questions wrong (just a careless mistake, doing it quickly), but otherwise missed any other pitfalls.

So now it's the first two rounds on October 28th - I just have to hope not to get drawn against any of the REALLY good Excellers, and maybe I can make it a bit further this year than I did in 2022! A paid trip to Vegas is still at least a theoretical possibility...

Scale It Back - the reunion!

When I moved to Redditch, I had no idea it was the national hub of Star Wars figure collectors' events, but it is - a couple of times a year, a huge space in the Kingfisher Centre is dedicated to an astonishing volume of toys, costumes, exhibits and celebrity guests! The one today was particularly special, because the theme was Jabba's Palace!

Return of the Jedi was my Star Wars - it was the first of the films I saw, and the time when I first got into the world of toys, books, comics and all the Return of the Jedi merchandise flooding the shops in the early eighties! And obviously the coolest part of the film was Jabba and his palace full of fantastic monsters!

Which made it especially cool when, twelve years ago, I had the opportunity to star in the fantastic music video to Scale It Back, by DJ Shadow, and meet Toby Philpott, left arm of Jabba the Hutt! Most people who appeared in that video must have found it the strangest collection of costumes they'd ever seen gathered together in one place, but Toby, seen here at rehearsal with the monkey puppet, had a collection of much wilder experiences to tell us all about!

He was a guest at Jabba's Palace today, and I and my brother (memorably represented by a cardboard cut-out in the music video) went along and said hello. It was a great reunion, and maybe we should track down some of the other stars of that day! They should make action figures, in fact, and hold big collector fairs for them a few years later!

I'm now 76% English

 You might remember that DNA test I did last year, and the "Ethnicity Estimate" that it provided. Well, Ancestry have updated their estimating and provide a more accurate estimate of where my (as far as I know exclusively English) ancestors came from. So here's how I'm put together now!

I've lost 3% of Sweden/Denmark, and 4% of Scotland, with that whole seven percent of me now granted English citizenship. Give it another few years, maybe I'll entirely have made it into this country!

I've still got that 1% of Norway lurking in me somewhere, though...

The complete September

 There, see, I told you I could do a blog post every day for a whole month!

Ghost monsters

 

The ghosts in Pac-Man aren't actually ghosts, they're just hiding under sheets. I've always called them ghosts, though, and don't intend to stop now. Anyway, more interesting than what they're called as a group, is what their individual names are...

The original Japanese version of the game gives them each a "character" and "nickname" (although Japanese, the game is all written in Roman alphabet, and all in English except these names), which seems to have caused a bit of confusion in the early years of Pac-Man - "character" is meant to mean a description of the ghost's personality or behaviour, not 'this is the name of the character'. They describe how the red one chases you, the pink one ambushes, the blue one is unpredictable, the orange one is... 'feigning ignorance' seems to be the agreed translation on the internet, I don't know. The "nicknames" are just based on the colours red, pink and blue, and the fourth is the slow one.

If you connect two points on the game's circuit board together, you can change the names to "English" ones, and you can just about see what they were going for - "urchin" in the sense of sticking to you, and so on.

But when the game came to America, they either didn't know about the "English" names or thought they were stupid, so they went in and changed them into all-new character/nickname combinations. Except Pinky.

And the person who had to go in and do the reprogramming at least noticed the alternate names, replacing them with placeholders presumably in case anyone wanted to come up with some alternatives. So, undocumented in the instructions, arcade owners outside Japan could still connect those two bits of the circuit board and show these names instead, if they really wanted to.

But the early guidebooks that soon flooded the market unanimously referred to the 'character' as the name of the ghost, as well as claiming that Pinky is the fastest (he actually isn't) and Clyde the slowest (again, not) and that Inky will run away from you (only sometimes). This one is particularly good, since it calls them Monsters, but gives alternatives of Ghosts, Zombies or Screw-Eyes. Never mind what I said at the start, I'm calling them Screw-Eyes from now on.

I believe I can fly

 Or at least I could in a dream I had last night. Now, I fairly often dream that I can fly, but it's usually more a sort of long jump, running-in-the-air and not going down kind of thing. Last night was the proper Superman style of flying, albeit in a modest, low speed and velocity, kind of way. I should do that more often.

Are you a student or a working professional?

 That's the header of an email I got today, urging people to sign up for the Microsoft Excel Collegiate Challenge if they fall into the first category, or the Microsoft Excel World Championship if they fall into the latter.

Now, while it's true that I am a working professional, I still feel like I'm entering the MEWC in my capacity as a weirdo who likes strange competitions. It's true that it sort of intersects with my professional working life, which admittedly does revolve around Microsoft Excel in a big way... but these competitions are FUN, not work! I personally advise everyone to give it a go, even if they're an idle amateur!

The missing Mildred

 Mrs Henry Wood seems to have named a lot of her novels after the first story hook she thought of, and then written a story to fill it out to the required length of a Victorian three-volume novel. Large parts of "Court Netherleigh" don't feature the eponymous residence or the people who live there at all. The title character of "Mrs Halliburton's Troubles" has resolved her troubles and subsided into a minor background role by the half-way point of the novel. "Bessy Rane" is a terrible title, since Bessy dies early on, and the reader is supposed to be surprised when it turns out much later that she wasn't dead at all.

But perhaps the greatest of these is "Mildred Arkell". You can see that Mrs Wood started with the basic idea of Mildred, disappointed in love, going away and returning many years later to save her niece from suffering the same fate. But this means that the title character departs from the plot quite early on, and is completely absent from the adventures of the book's many other characters until it's built to the final climax (many years later; it's a story of epic length). In fact, a fairly big part of the book is devoted to a set of largely unrelated characters who go on to continue their storyline in the later novel "St Martin's Eve", and the reader could be forgiven for entirely forgetting about Mildred.

If you'd picked up the second volume of the book, you'd find a couple of references to the title character - she sends occasional money to her hard-up brother, she's mentioned in passing in her cousin's reminiscences of younger days, but nothing to give the reader any real idea who she is or why the book's named after her. This is the only scene in volume 2 in which Mildred Arkell actually makes an appearance. And she contributes almost nothing to it:

She arrived in an afternoon at Mrs. Dundyke's, having come direct to London Bridge by the steamer from Rotterdam. Robert was out in London, as usual; but Mrs. Dundyke was not alone: Mildred Arkell was with her. Perhaps of all people, next to his wife, Mildred had been most shocked at the fate of Mr. Dundyke. This was the first time she had seen his widow, for she had been away in the country with Lady Dewsbury.

A young, pretty woman, looking little more than a girl, with violet-blue eyes, dark hair, and a flush upon her cheeks. Mrs. Dundyke marvelled at her youth—that she should be a wife since three years, and the mother of two children.

"I wrote to you to be sure to bring the children," said Mrs. Dundyke.

"I know: it was very kind. But I thought, as Robert was ill, they might disturb him with their noise. They are but babies; and I left them behind."

Mrs. Dundyke was considering how she could best impart the news of the suspected birth to this poor, unconscious young lady. "If you could give her a hint of it yourself, should she arrive during my absence!" Robert Carr had said to Mrs. Dundyke that very morning, with the hectic deepen[199]ing on his hollow cheeks. And Mrs. Dundyke began her task.

And a sad shock it proved to be. Mrs. Carr, accustomed to the legal formalities that attend a marriage in the country of her birth, and without which formalities the ceremony cannot be performed, could not for some time be led to understand how, if there was a marriage, it could have been kept a secret. There were many points difficult to make her, a foreigner, understand; but when she had mastered them, she grew strangely interested in the recital of the past, and Mildred Arkell, as a resident in Westerbury at the time, was called upon to repeat every little detail connected with the departure of her husband's father and mother from their native place. In listening, Mrs. Carr's cheek grew hectic as her husband's.

After that, she disappears into obscurity again.

Memory in Europe

The good old-fashioned International Standard memory competition that is the German Memory Championship is happening in October - details are here, and further to what's on that page, they have just announced that there will be cash prizes! 

- European Open

1. place 600 Euros + IAM trophy

2. place 400 Euros + trophy

3. place 250 Euros + trophy

4. place 100 Euros

5. place 100 Euros

6-10 place 50 Euros

 Having told the organisers that I can't come to the event due to lack of funds, I was quite impressed that they thought this might change my mind. Fifteen years ago, I would have gone there as a matter of course, fairly confidently expecting to take the first prize, and been pleased to cover some of the costs of travel and accommodation. Nowadays, though, I might not even make the top ten, depending on how many other competitors there are. If it's double figures, I've got no chance. 

 But I still wish I could be there, and hope it's a spectacular event for everyone who does go along!

That was fun

Obviously, it's sometimes nice to watch an exciting, evenly-matched game of football on telly on a Sunday afternoon, but it's also entertaining to watch a comprehensive thrashing of an unbelievably bad team, once in a while. Honestly, how Sheffield Utd managed to be so hopeless is beyond me. Coming as I do from a proud Sheffield family of Wednesday fans, I should be jeering delightedly at the red-and-white section of the city, but I'm not really that excited by it.

Besides, it's the kind of game that gets people reaching for the history books, and the first stat that comes to anyone's mind is "Newcastle's best result since they beat Sheffield Wednesday 8-0 in 1999." I prefer "Joint second best league result in history for Newcastle, after a 13-0 win over Newport County in 1946" or "the first time the Blades have conceded eight goals in a league game since their 10-3 defeat by Middlesbrough in November 1933", as provided by the BBC website. It must be nice to be a contributing factor to that kind of statistic.

It is too scientific to explain

 I'm really bad at explaining my clever thought processes. I'm trying to describe the optimum way to solve the puzzles from that maths contest back in May, but find it hard to phrase it better than "Well, I just sort of worked out that this is the answer."

It makes me sound like a bit of a fraud, but I can always take comfort from the fact that Superman would believe me, as shown in Action Comics #236, in 1957:

The scientist is, of course, Lex Luthor in disguise, but Superman isn't at all suspicious of his motives.

Jabba the Hutt is coming to town

 Redditch is the premier venue for Star Wars figure collectors, you know. There's a big festival here a couple of times a year, and the theme of the latest one is particularly cool - Jabba's Palace! Just look at this guest list! I'll certainly be there on October 7th!

You have to be my exact age to appreciate how cool Return of the Jedi, and particularly Jabba and his monsters in their toy incarnations, were! We had the Jabba playset, Sy Snootles and the Rebo Band, the Rancor Monster and indeed the mail-away offer Rancor Keeper, who'll be there to sign autographs in a fortnight! Return of the Jedi was actually the best and coolest Star Wars film, despite what anyone says.

Nothing But Eyes

 I've had this book of poems since time immemorial. The title is a little creepy...

And it comes from this poem, translated from the Japanese by someone who cares nothing for preserving the rules of haikus.

But it's this squirrel-themed page that particularly interests me - I really like squirrels, and wholeheartedly agree with William Butler Yeats (except perhaps for his rhyming 'do' with 'go'.

But this Humbert Wolfe person is just horrid! Grey squirrels are great, and much maligned. I should write a poem about Humbert Wolfe killing trees, eating his relatives and being shot. See how he likes it!

Twenty in a row

 This whole 'daily blog' thing is going very well, although I do seem to be running short of things to write about...

What the L?

 I would never dream of listening to Radio 1 normally. It's for dreadful young people who listen to awful modern music. But having got a lift today with someone who listens to it, I was actually quite impressed. Not only is "I Used To Be Young" by Miley Cyrus really quite catchy, but one of the presenters on the afternoon show (who may or may not be called Vick, but I had to look it up) came out with some great trivia that I didn't know!

There are only five countries in the world that end with L, you know. And (having been provided with Nepal as the one which prompted this apparently unscripted challenge) I did manage to think of them by the end of the song they played, though it was a close-run thing. I won't spoil it for you if you want to try it yourself, but the coolest thing about these five countries is that they're all a hugely long way away from each other! If you live in a country that ends with L, you're well over a thousand miles away from any other country that ends with L! I think that's very cool, and I might have to listen to awful radio stations more often now.

Yellow Cliffjumper

 I think that a blog post looks better if there's a picture to illustrate it. So here's a yellow Cliffjumper, showing Transformers comic readers what they can win if they just send their name and address on the back of a postcard or sealed envelope. Although you'll need to go back to 1984 if you want to do that.

Looking at the descriptions of the mini-Autobots, I'm not sure in what way "force" is an attribute of Windcharger's. I can see how his speed and magnetic arms can come in handy in all kinds of ways, but force is more of an ambiguous quality.

Simple maths

 Far too many people in the world have no idea what to do if you ask them what's fifty-three times forty-seven. Anyone who can't say "two thousand, four hundred and ninety-one" after a couple of seconds' thought is missing the very basic trick that can make people think you're some kind of genius.

Everyone probably did learn at school that (x+y)(x-y)=x²-y², but they don't know that it has practical applications far beyond getting the right answer in an algebra test and then forgetting it forever. It means that if you want to multiply something that's a bit more than a nice round number, by something that's the same bit less than that nice round number, the answer is the nice round number times the nice round number, minus the bit times the bit.

So while 53x47 sounds like you'd have to get a pencil and paper and try to remember how to do long multiplication, it's actually just 3 times 3 (which everyone knows) less than 50 times 50 (which nearly everyone knows; but if you don't, it's just five times five and then add the two noughts on to the end). So it's 2500 minus 9, and it's not too much of a strain to see that that makes 2491.

Try it with other numbers, and check it on your calculator if you don't believe me. Then you'll be able to show off the next time a strange man is roaming the streets asking "What's seventy-two times sixty-eight?" and jeering at anyone who doesn't know.

Suggestions

I have a friend over on the sofa right now suggesting things I could write in my blog today. But now he's talking about how he always chooses yellow pieces when playing a board game, and that very few people do that. Which is true - you get a lot more red, blue and green fans, probably. I think yellow is an intelligent kind of colour, and I'll choose it the next time I play ludo.

Also, did you know there's such a thing as F-Zero 99? The new and exciting multi-player game on the Switch? It's going to become a new addiction, I think!

More literature

 I'm currently re-reading "Rose Madder", one of the many Stephen King books on my shelves. I do love his writings. This one, though, I always feel slightly unsatisfied with, just because I see it as a perfect example of a story that would be better without all the supernatural stuff.

Without throwing out too many spoilers for people who'd take the above paragraph as a recommendation to go out and read it, the book tells the story of Rose who a fair way into the story buys a painting which seems to have magical properties. A couple of little moments of the painting seeming to be a bit magical come and go, and then (well past the half-way point of the novel) Rose goes into the painting and has an adventure. And all I'm thinking at this point is "when is she going to come out of the painting and get back to the real story?"

In a foreword to one of his short stories somewhere, Stephen King has a little grumble that there wasn't a movie adaptation of Rose Madder, and I personally think they could make a good movie of it - if they cut out the whole thing with the painting. Drop it completely and make the rest of the book into a thriller!

It might be just me, though. One book I can never get enough of is "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" by Michael Chabon, and I really just read that one for Sam Clay. I can almost skip the more outlandish adventures of Joe Kavalier; I'm gripped by Sam's unexceptional everyday life. I'm obviously the kind of reader who wants his books to be as boring as possible. Writers should try to cater for this kind of audience!

Memory League sign-up time!

 The 19th season of Memory League is getting underway soon - registration is open now and ends on September 20th, so get yourself signed up here! 

It's great fun, whether you're a beginner or an old-timer, so join the excitement! If you end up competing against me, you'll probably win - I'm just hopeless these days.

Literary studies

 Facing a long train journey recently, with nothing to read and a terminally low battery on my phone, I went into a nearby charity shop to pick up a book, and settled on Moll Flanders. I'd never read it, but heard historically good things. The old man behind the counter said "Moll Flanders, eh?" with a sort of suggestive leer, and I agreed that maybe it's a bit too racy to read in public, but decided to flaunt it anyway.

It turns out it really is a very good book, and only minimally scandalous. You can see why it's stood the test of time! The wide availability of classic novels for cheap or free is one of the great things about our modern time, you know.

Recruiters

 Looking at the Blogger stats, I notice someone has been specifically reading the various posts I've made over the years about looking for a new job, or starting a new job, or otherwise discussing my employment status. I tend to be more circumspect about that kind of thing nowadays, because as we progress ever deeper into the twenty-first century, you're increasingly likely to find yourself working for someone who knows what the internet is. I miss the days when it was a secret community known only to the very cool young people.

But yes, I have been looking for jobs recently online, and no doubt attracted the attention of somebody in the business of hiring accountant-slash-financial-analysts. But the ideal employer and/or recruitment agency for me would be someone who's read and enjoyed all the cool non-work-related things I've written about on my blog! I prefer to be chosen based on my general coolness rather than my financial credentials.

Johnny Ludlow country

 I was a fan of Mrs Henry Wood before I moved to Worcestershire, but her hugely entertaining 19th-century fiction is all the more fun to read in her home county. I was in Evesham today, a town I always associate with Johnny Ludlow, whose adventures take place somewhere near there (well, the geography of the earliest ones suggest he lives somewhere to the north of Alcester, but drift a little southwards and settle around Evesham as the series goes on).

More people should be reading Mrs Henry Wood; I should really write about her more often, just to try to create a new army of fans. She was briefly an enormously popular and well-known writer in the 1860s, you know.

It's much too hot

 This summer has hit acceptable levels of hotness and not-raining-when-I-need-it-not-to-be-rainingness, but now that we're into September, it's suddenly gone all uncomfortable. I really need air conditioning. Still, I'll be complaining even more when it's winter. I wish someone would invite me to live in the southern hemisphere for six months.

Little-known comic trivia

 When Bernard Baily, golden age comic book artist, got the prime assignment of drawing Jerry 'Superman' Siegel's new superhero The Spectre in late 1939, he had to bring his seafaring adventure The Buccaneer to a close to make room for it. The rather unexcitingly-named hero Dennis Stone abruptly retired from the sea to marry his love interest, the beautiful Regina Rashin.

Being in on the ground floor of the new boom in superhero comics was no doubt a great thing for Bernard, but perhaps his wife Regina (nee Rachinsky) missed seeing her namesake in the comics. The Spectre's girlfriend was called Clarice. But it was all right, because as I documented a while ago, Baily's next superhero Hourman soon acquired a love interest called Regina too.

That Regina's surname is Paige in one story and Bannerman in another, but then Bernard Baily had started out with the name Bailynson until he adopted the more catchy pen-name (apparently mainly in order to make his name twelve letters long and replace each number on his Mickey Mouse watch with a letter - one of the best reasons for changing your name I've ever heard!) The Bailynson name was of recent vintage anyway - Bernard's father was Gershon Beilinsohn until he emigrated to America and found himself transformed into Harry Bailynson, six years before Bernard was born.

There's no particular moral to this story, but I think it's rather nice that Regina Rachinsky-Baily/Bailynson was immortalised in the earliest days of superhero comics as Regina Rashin/Paige/Bannerman.

No blog today

 See, I accidentally posted an extra blog entry last night, so if I posted something else this morning, I'd be exceeding my quota of one post per day. I couldn't possibly do that, it would just ruin everything.

The twelve-minute mile

 Doing another "Cooper test" at the athletics track today [well, yesterday or earlier, because I'm writing blog posts in advance here], Runkeeper told me I'd walked a mile in 12 minutes!

It's not true, of course, since Runkeeper is a bit dodgy when it comes to identifying exactly where you are - but I DID walk three and a half times around the 400m track, which while obviously less than a mile is definitely faster than I've done before, and really quite impressive for a brisk walk in scorching heat.

I'm three times as good as Roger Bannister, if you subtly change the definition of 'good' as relating to moving around a track! Or even if he's three times as good as me, I can still walk quite fast, considering my bad legs.

Edit - darn, I posted this one instead of saving it. I've been expecting to do that all this week. Well, this counts as tomorrow's post, all right?

I'd better say my magic word!

 In that Justice League adventure I reviewed a couple of days ago, the Key planned to take over the entire universe - an aim echoed by a similarly ambitious arch-foe, Texas Pete, nemesis of that greatest of heroes, SuperTed!

Although I'm more inclined to agree with his delightfully camp sidekick Skeleton's desires...

This all comes from a book I've had for nearly four decades, and had all but forgotten the very existence of until my brother and I found it in my overcrowded bookcase and rediscovered its wonders - the SuperTed Storybook!

Researching it on the internet, I see that it was originally published as the SuperTed Annual 1985, a hardback book in the traditional annual format (so, naturally, published in September 1984, because that's how British annual dates work), but the version we had was the paperback edition published by Scholastic Publications for the Chip Club (or maybe Puffin Club), that great way for primary school children to get really brilliant books on a regular basis! I don't think those clubs even exist any more, which is probably contributing to the growth of illiteracy, juvenile delinquency and other scourges of modern society.

But just check out the contents! The 64 pages are packed with comic stories, text stories, all kinds of informative features, a board game, a colouring page, a wordsearch and a whole lot of spotty people!

Actually, I should confess that this isn't my book at all - it's quite emphatically my brother's, since he's signed his name on the Texas Pete Fan Club badge...

42062 was our phone number. But I'm sure the baddies had a lot more fans than the rather strait-laced SuperTed himself did - everyone loves the baddies! Although I always particularly loved the Problem Page, in which our hero offers help with the worries of teddy bears, and provides us with some delicious-sounding drinks recipes, too!

Sodastreams were very cool in the 1980s. We had an off-brand knockoff one. Make your own fizzy drinks for only three or four times the expense and trouble of buying them in bottles!

Wasn't SuperTed great? I still can't believe I'd left this book unread on my shelf for so many years!

The Ben Pridmore show

 So, as I hinted earlier, I've been thinking I should do some kind of podcast. That conversation with Tom and Phil about the earliest days of the World Memory Championship would be a lot of fun and (improbable as it may sound) really would interest a lot of people around the world! And it could be followed by a string of reminiscipackages with lots of other fascinating guests, and multi-media presentations about no end of other fascinating subjects!

The main problem with this idea is that I still don't really like podcasts, and any kind of arena where my voice is the central attraction doesn't appeal to me at all. But that's where modern times are heading (or rather, where they headed decades ago and are waiting for me to catch up), so I think it might have to happen.

I've got a microphone that documentary gave me, that seems to be of high quality. I've got multiple laptops with cameras. And a phone. And access to Twitch and/or YouTube, on which I could share things with the world. It's the next phase of Zoomy evolution, I think. Anyone want to be a guest on my show?

Over the Void

 It always amazes me just how much fan-art and fiction is devoted to Undertale. Well, it's understandable, since the game is so brilliant and has such a wealth of characters and ideas - perhaps the surprise is that the fan creations are always so amazingly good!

But there's one that I found years ago, loved, decided to leave for a while until more installments had accumulated, forgot about, and was reminded about by YouTube's algorithms this weekend. Over the Void!

It's a comic, by the amazing AbsoluteDream on DeviantArt, which has been made into a sensational dubbed video series by Sans Comic TV on YouTube, and I really think everyone should be watching it, if you haven't already.

I mean, you probably have. It's hugely popular! And again, I'm sort of surprised - come on, it gives a central role to Monster Kid, who's one of my greatest heroes and role models, but is there really such a universal appeal? I guess so!

This is how good the story and videos are - it switches to monochrome half-way through the fourth video, and I didn't even notice, because I was so wrapped up in the story! Watch them all now - you won't regret it!

The Key-Master of the World!

What was so great about finding a cheap copy of Justice League of America № 41 the other weekend, I hear you ask? Well, nobody has asked, but I still feel I should explain exactly why I think this comic is so very cool. I mean, for starters, just look at that cover!

The gigantic figure of a previously unknown key-themed evil villain shoots a strangely contorted Green Lantern with a key-shaped gun, while Superman, Wonder Woman, J'onn J'onnz and Hawkman fly to the rescue!

Wonder Woman shouldn't be flying. And why are they circling round in single file like that, rather than flying straight towards the baddie? But none of these questions matter, really - the job of the cover picture was to grab the attention of kids in the store and convince them to spend twelve cents to read the exciting story it promised! Mike Sekowsky is the artist, and he knew how to do a great cover.

This is the "December 1965" issue of Justice League of America, although American comics were always published a few months ahead of their cover dates. Fifteen years earlier, in All-Star Comics № 57 (dated Dec 1950 - Jan 1951) the final adventure of the Justice League's predecessor (the Justice Society of America) had featured an enemy called The Key. On the symbolic splash page (but not in the actual story that followed it), he's depicted wearing a keyhole helmet and wielding a key-gun.

In Flash № 129 (June 1962), the Flash recollects that old battle as if the splash page had actually happened. So this new Key would have rung a bell with readers who remembered him from just a couple of years ago, as well as the many adult Justice League fans who remembered reading the Justice Society as kids, fifteen years before!

Those are the old versions of Green Lantern, Atom, Hawkman, Flash and Wonder Woman, who had been established by 1965 as existing on "Earth-2". Superhero comics very nearly completely died out by 1951, and all-new heroes using the old names were created in the late fifties and early sixties - these "Earth-1" heroes are the ones in the Justice League. Although that 1962 Flash comic is very ambiguous about there being two identical Wonder Womans; there hadn't been a definitive ruling on her yet by that point - she'd continued to be published all through the 1950s, so it was a bit confusing to fans who took an interest in this kind of technicality.

But basically, Gardner Fox, writer of the Justice League comic, and/or Julius Schwarz, the editor, is throwing in an easter egg for the benefit of readers who know about the old stories. Fox wasn't the writer of that particular old Justice Society story, but he did write the Flash one, and Schwarz was the editor in charge of both.

So let's get back to the Justice League in the present day (1965) - as was still normal in comics, it starts with a symbolic splash page, a sort of second front cover, before you get to the story...

The indicia at the bottom of the page tells us this comic is published "monthly with the exception of Jan., July and Oct.; (semi-monthly Nov.)" That's a lot of punctuation, and it's also wrong. April was also skipped - there were eight issues a year, plus an extra "80-Page Giant" in November containing reprinted stories.

And before you get to the splash page, you can read the inside front cover, which like most DC comics at the time contained a one-page story "published as a public service", in this case teaching kids about the good work of UNESCO in bringing schools to Africa. It's a bit great-white-god-from-over-water, and I can't see a "please accept this native sculpture" without thinking of Father Ted now, but that's just the cynical 21st-century age we live in, I'm afraid. It's a very worthy page.

As for the splash, there were still no writer and artist credits on DC comics in those days, but we did get the Roll Call for this issue! The Justice League had ten members at this point, plus their teenage 'mascot' Snapper Carr (so called because he snaps his fingers and talks in jive dialogue of the type no sixties teenager would have dreamed of using) and all but two of them are in the Roll Call for this issue.

The exceptions are Aquaman and Green Arrow, who are the two asterisked footnotes to the "no superhero survived the 1950s except Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman" rule. Aquaman and Green Arrow continued all through the decade as backup strips (behind Superboy) in Adventure Comics. But they were gone from Adventure now - Aquaman had his own comic, while Green Arrow had lost his solo strip in 1964 and now could only be seen in Justice League comics.

Nearly all the other heroes (except Snapper Carr, of course) had their own self-titled comic. J'onn J'onnz was the lead feature in "House of Mystery" until recently being shunted to the back of the book by Dial H for Hero. Superman and Batman also appeared in multiple other comics. But Justice League was something different - none of the heroes' supporting cast usually appeared; their adventures just featured the ten heroes (or whichever of the ten had shown up to the meeting this month) and Snapper. And, well... character interaction wasn't a priority in these stories.

DC comics weren't like the Marvel comics that were revolutionising superhero stories in the 1960s. The Gardner Fox Justice League adventures have been described as seeing heroes solely in terms of costume and powers. Individual personality traits were something that Marvel did, and did very well; DC had no time for that kind of nonsense. There's no conflict between the superheroes; they always act in perfect agreement in everything they do. Which makes the opening of the story all the better - in their usual cheerful, friendly, identical-sounding way, our heroes decide to disband the Justice League!

Aquaman and Green Arrow are at the meeting. They're there at the table in the first panel, that green hand holding a cup of punch must be Aquaman, and the Arrowplane is flying away along with everyone else when they all leave. I guess it's Green Arrow or Batman's turn to give Aquaman a ride back to the ocean today. But our two absentees don't return for the rest of this story, and that does raise some questions, which I'll come to a bit later.

But now we find out what's going on - the Key has taken control of the Justice League! His super-genius technology is very 1965; to find out that his plan has worked, he had to instruct Snapper to go to a phone box and give him a call. But he monologues to himself that he has discovered "a certain psycho-chemical" which can give him control over anybody! And now nothing can stop his plan to become the KEY-man of EARTH -- the SOLAR SYSTEM -- the UNIVERSE!

I love this villain. On the next page we see how he did it - by the simple means of causing a rockslide to nearly crush Snapper Carr, rescuing him, giving him a drink of water doped with the psycho-chemical and ordering him to spike the Justice League's punchbowl. Then, by turning the right keys on his giant key-board, he can make the entire Justice League do whatever he wants! Just look at that keyboard, "set into a giant electronic brain"!

I love how forward-thinking the Key is. He's already working on his plan to take over Earth, but he knows that ruling the world will soon get boring, so he lays out the next stage of his scheme to gradually take control of the entire universe! That's why, having tested his control over the Justice League by making them disband, he's going to keep them around - he'll need their help to take over other planets eventually. And meanwhile, he's sent them back to continue their normal business, but made it impossible for them to perceive anybody with a key-symbol on their costume, so his Key-Men underlings can steal all the money and equipment the Key needs without any superheroes getting involved.

And the story depicts this by showing Batman and Robin fighting the Wrecker, while the Key-Men operate under their very noses! Which is fascinating in many ways. Robin doesn't usually get seen or mentioned in Justice League stories. He's included here because it plays into a plot technicality that comes up a little later, but it's great to see - makes the DC universe feel like a coherent whole, which it usually didn't in 1965!

And where on earth did they dredge the Wrecker up from?! As the footnote says, he'd appeared in one Batman story, twelve and a half years earlier! And he wasn't a generic destroy-and-loot kind of villain in that one; he was staging a very elaborate hoax crime wave specifically targeting anyone who liked Batman, in which he faked his own murder so as to get the life insurance money. It was the kind of dull and unexceptional story you'd often see in the early fifties, although the costume is distinctive.

That old story had never been reprinted, and hadn't been worked on by Gardner Fox or Julie Schwarz (it was the work of one David Vern Reed, who never really made much impact on comics history, though he returned to Batman in the late seventies for a while). Is this the same Wrecker? Has he been in prison for twelve years, and now going on a rampage of revenge? Or is it someone else stealing his costume? Or - since it's generally agreed that Detective Comics in 1953 was still telling Earth-2 stories - is this the Earth-1 equivalent of the Wrecker? So many intriguing questions, and they're never going to be answered.

Part 1 of this Justice League adventure (the comics in those days were traditionally divided into three parts) ends with a scene of the same kind of thing happening to the Atom, stopping some crooks and failing to see the Key-Men. Then come a range of adverts (Ultra the Multi-Alien starring in "Mystery in Space"; Rocky and Bullwinkle touting the merits of Cheerios; Tyco model kits boasting their official Petticoat Junction train set like you see it on CBS television; Batman's 80-Page Giant issue) and the letters page (everyone loved the story in № 37, in which the Justice League were all wiped out of existence and the Justice Society took over the comic!), and then we're back with Part 2.

Part 2 opens with Hawkman and Hawkgirl battling "Monarch Butterfly" crooks, who have mechanical flying motors, butterfly wings and cool helmets. We never learn the exact nature of their crooked behaviour, nor the reason for their silly costumes. But Hawkgirl (who, like Robin, never normally shows up in Justice League stories) is still able to see the Key-Men who rob a bank nearby! And this is (by Silver Age DC standards) a sensible and intelligent way to plot the story! Hawkman has been instructed by the Key to slip the psycho-chemical into Hawkgirl's drink and then forget he's done it... but this means that when she doesn't drink her milk after all, that's where the Key's remote-control plan breaks down. It makes sense! I like it a lot. Also appreciate the namecheck of Commissioner Emmett (regular supporting character in Hawkman stories) and the use of Hawkman and Hawkgirl's Thanagarian science to figure out what's going on.

They fix the problem with their alien science and stress that it's the kind of alien science that can only be used once and then never again - if the Key turns the right key again, his psycho-chemical will have a permanent effect. This plot point is repeated multiple times in this issue, to keep the tension going, and that bit doesn't really work, I'm afraid.

So Hawkman and Hawkgirl spring into action - knowing that the entire Justice League must be similarly corrupted, and their sidekicks too. Hawkgirl mentions Kid Flash, who wasn't actually a sidekick but a kid who was friends with Flash, had the same powers and used them mainly in his own adventures, backup strips in the Flash's comic. She doesn't mention Green Arrow's sidekick Speedy, but he was presumably drugged too. Speedy had disappeared into publishing limbo now Green Arrow didn't have a strip of his own anywhere - when he returned in the seventies, drugs would become a central part of his storyline, so it all began here, behind the scenes!

The Married Manhunters get to work filming the other Justice League members as they fight crime and fail to notice the Key-Men. They also somehow fail to notice Hawkman and Hawkgirl fluttering around with film cameras - presumably it's a bit more of that alien science they use, though the narrator doesn't mention it. Flash is fighting the Weather Wizard, a regular member of his rogues' gallery, while Green Lantern battles The Invisible Destroyer, villain of one of his earliest adventures in Showcase № 23 (Nov-Dec 1959). Who was destroyed in that story, returns for one page here, is defeated easily and never comes back.

Then, using more Thanagarian science, Hawkman learns the secret identities of the rest of the Justice League, breaking his promise never to do so, and summons them all to tell them what's going on.

Well, most of them. "Those members of the Justice League not engaged in cases" show up - apparently it doesn't matter if Aquaman and Green Arrow are left under the control of a supervillain. Presumably Hawkman thinks they're useless superheroes anyway. Actually, when the Justice League members developed personalities in later years, Hawkman and Green Arrow were always at each other's throats, so it makes sense with hindsight. I like that he did make sure to include Snapper Carr in the deprogramming, though.

Hawkgirl disappears from the story after this point, leaving the Justice League members to fix things, and Part 2 ends with our heroes discovering that the Key has now set up home in their own secret headquarters!

Let's enjoy some more adverts before Part 3 begins. The Fox and the Crow, last survivors of DC's funny-animal line, are welcoming some new backup strips to their long-running comic. Very shortly, Stanley and his Monster would take over the front covers, and soon after that Fauntleroy Fox and Crawford Crow disappeared forever. DC don't own the rights any more (they were licensed from Columbia Pictures) and they don't seem likely to ever show up in comics again. It's very sad.

Meanwhile, Chuck and his dad, who both look seriously creepy, buy each other a wonderful model car for Christmas - just like you can at home - and Supergirl and Wonder Woman are teaming up in The Brave and the Bold! That's quite exceptional, actually - the Superman characters were jealously guarded by their editor and only allowed to appear in other comics on very special occasions!

Part 3 begins with our heroes finding themselves locked out of their secret sanctuary by an impenetrable forcefield. Even Green Lantern, who created it in the first place, can't break it down without taking some time to concentrate, which seems strange - normally, his magic works based on willpower, and he usually has less of it when someone else is controlling him. But never mind, it gives the Atom an opportunity to do his old trick of travelling along the phone line (the Key hasn't bothered to change the phone number after moving in) and provides us with one of the all-time classic supervillain lines!

"The phone WOULD have to ring just as I was about to turn on the electronic circuits to give me control over those super-heroes!"

And so the Atom gets into the workings of the giant key-board, stopping the big iron keys from turning in their big giant keyholes and making the Key unable to control the heroes after all! In desperation, he unleashes the special individual key-themed weapons he'd held in reserve for if he needs to kill the Justice League, and for a moment they seem to be working.

It's always quite easy to neutralise the super-powerful Justice League. For J'onn J'onnz you just have to set something on fire, which makes him go "OOOOH! Losing my super-powers -- growing weaker...", Green Lantern can't do anything to stop anything painted yellow, Superman falls before the kryptonite that any self-respecting super-villain has an ample supply of. But the weapons for the less vulnerable heroes are quite cool, especially the "black keyhole" which tries to suck the Flash into "some eerie dimensional world!"

But of course our heroes very quickly figure out they just have to take out each other's special keys to save the day...

They way they do it starts out logically enough, but then Flash "grabs up Snapper and whirls him about like a baton"! I'm thinking Flash feels this whole mess is Snapper's fault and is taking out his frustrations. And what exactly motivates J'onn J'onnz to turn himself into some kind of human (Martian) rolling-pin in order to crush the pointy spiked keys that are the Key's last last-ditch defence, I can't imagine.

And then our heroes just beat up the Key-Men, demolish the key-board (what a shame) and reclaim their secret sanctuary. The Key is defeated, but his final thought bubble suggests he's still got one final trick up his sleeve!

Actually, he doesn't come back until nearly three years later, in Justice League № 63, and that story isn't anywhere near as good. That was 1968, by which time DC had decided they needed to scrap the old way of doing comics and move onto something new. With № 66, Gardner Fox was replaced by Denny O'Neil, the heroes started bickering among themselves, and it was never quite the same again.

So let's remember 1965, when DC was still resolutely ignoring the great new innovations of the Marvel Universe, and giving us treats like the Key-Master of the World! And a back cover ad trying to entice kids into re-creating a football game from seven years previously, starring Johnny Unitas - the greatest quarterback in modern pro football!

I can't take Johnny Unitas seriously after that Simpsons episode. This modern cynicism ruins everything, doesn't it?

Dripping with family spirit

 As I mentioned a while ago, there'll be a Pridmore family reunion in November, almost certainly, and although it's not definitely totally confirmed just yet, we have got a WhatsApp group in which I've tried to establish just how many cousins I've got (my dad wasn't big on keeping in touch with all his brothers) and get to know them a little in advance of meeting them. The count comes to 16 first cousins, I think, each of them with dozens of children and grandchildren of their own (they're all a fair bit older than me; the oldest less than a year younger than my baby-of-the-family dad, who was an uncle before he'd even learned what the word meant). But one special family delicacy that everyone seems to know has come up in the conversation...

Non-Yorkshire people probably wouldn't get it. That ever-present jar of dripping in my father's fridge is something I grew up with and just don't see anywhere nowadays. Modern people are just too healthy by far. Look it up if you're too cultured to know what it is.