Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy

Okay, I didn't post anything last night. I was still recovering from the party. For that matter, I'm still recovering from the party now. It was great!

Could it possibly be described as a party of geeks when you do something like this - Jack got dropped off by a taxi at number 49 instead of number 429, and to get her to the right place involved co-ordinating maps and directions using two laptops and at least three mobile phones. It was like mission control at NASA. Although all the technology also came in handy when we urgently needed to track down an off licence that sold midori.

We also spent quite a long period of time tracking down an old friend of ours who we suspected might be dead. It turned out he probably isn't, or at least that if he is, nobody's changed his answering machine message.

This has been my first official day of not working, but it doesn't technically count as such, because this was a recovering-from-party day that it was quite legitimately okay to spend mostly in bed. Tomorrow is the real start of the big adventure.

Best present ever

Crispy has bought me a Zoom-Zoom T-shirt! From eBay! You know, like my favourite shirt that I've worn so much over the past seven years that it's all full of holes and a dingy grey colour and almost unwearable even by my standards. And somebody out there has acquired one of these things that you had to spend £30 on pocket dragon figurines to get and kept it in its original packaging for all this time, just so I could have it for a birthday present this year. Yay!

It's about quarter past midnight and I'm drunk. But it turns out this house has wireless internet access, presumably stolen from the neighbour. I'll go into more detail tomorrow, by which I mean today, when I'll probably be more sober and able to write correctly-spelt words first time without going back and correcting myself.

Can you change your age by deed poll?

It's not that I'm disturbed about turning thirty. It's just that it sounds so, well, grown-up. It's like overnight I'll turn from a young man-about-town in my twenties into a thirtysomething fit only for a sitcom about not being young any more. It's getting to the point where my favourite complaint that I'm ten times older than I want to be STILL makes me sound really quite old, comparatively speaking.

Is it still possible to become famous after thirty years as a nonentity? Well, almost a nonentity. I've got a wildly-inaccurate stub on Wikipedia nowadays, after all, that's fairly famous. And a full entry on the German version. And five shiny tropies sitting on top of my kitchen cupboard. And the genuine intention of writing a best-selling book at some point in the future. That surely counts as being famous. I still want to be a pop singer and a racing driver and a football player and the Pope, though.

Educating Marmalade

Just to keep you up to date on my academic endeavours, I'm still going to college on Thursdays. One of the lecturers or teachers or whatever you call them (probably 'learning facilitators' or something stupid like that) is what you'd have to call an old-fashioned type. Hand-written transparencies on the overhead projector, writing on the blackboard (well, whiteboard, it's not THAT old-fashioned), presenting each lesson by the time-honoured technique of mumbling continuously about whatever the subject is without acknowledging the existence of the students in any way.

Then he's followed by a guy who can only be described as insanely multimedia. Home-made and very professional-looking Powerpoint slideshows via a laptop and projector, then a video to watch before class discussions. He even uses Mind Maps! I don't think I've ever encountered anyone outside memory circles (which often comes with Tony-Buzan-worship as part of the package). It's like stepping from the 1970s into the 21st century!

Chicken Soup passed away

A variety of trains of thoughts collided tonight. I'm reading Rose Madder by Stephen King (I find that I can reread almost any Stephen King book any number of times without them getting old), which repeatedly refers to "Rosie Real", the musical cartoon apparently much loved by everyone except this cartoon fan who's never seen it. If it made it to Britain, I didn't pay any attention to it when it did. I had, however, a couple of years ago heard the song "Chicken Soup With Rice", when Scotty Arsenault put it on his much-missed Commander Kitty website (if I put a link in here anyway it'll force him to bring Kitty and the gang back!). And by 'heard the song' I mean 'listened to it over and over again because it's so brilliant and indeed still sing it to myself at odd moments even now'.

So having been reading Rose Madder I went on to read Jemfo's blog, complete with links to Muppet snippets on YouTube (three cheers for Captain Vegetable!), and that got me to wondering whether Chicken Soup With Rice might also be found on that wonderful YouTube thing that I don't pay nearly enough attention to. And it is!

Not only that, the whole darn Really Rosie is on there too (cut into three bite-size chunks), and I've just spend the last 25 minutes watching it. Sheer genius, the whole thing. Isn't the internet an amazing place?

Sideswipe's got nothing on me

Having bent my own rules yesterday, I'm bending them even more today. Seriously, the rules are almost doubled over now, at an angle of maybe 167 degrees to the vertical. But you see, even though the worst thing you can possibly do on a blog is just find a funny article on the BBC news website and link to it, I'm rather entertained to read here that my old home town of Boston, Lincolnshire has the highest obesity rate of any town in the country. I'd like to think that I used to be the one keeping the average weight down to a respectable level, and since I moved to Derby I've put them over the top.

I think Boston should take great pride in this, in the style of an unexceptional Simpsons episode, and celebrate its fatness. Any publicity is good publicity, and if they really hype the place up as Britain's Obesest Town maybe some day those copycats in Massachusetts will be saying "I'm from Boston - not the one in England, the other Boston..." like they should have been all along.

Ruby anniversary

Have I really written 409 blog posts, not including this one? What the heck did I write about? My mind's a blank tonight, I'll tell you.

Ah, that'll do, thanks, Jemfo! I've learned a new thing all of a sudden - it's Sukkot! Happy Sukkot! Do you wish people a happy Sukkot? It sounds like one of those festivals that's automatically happy, so maybe there's no need.

I do have a rule here about not mentioning religion in case it offends anyone, but this is a self-imposed rule, and I've broken it several times before without getting in trouble, so obviously the authorities just aren't going to do anything about it. I do sometimes get the feeling that it might be fun to be religious in some way. Atheism's all well and good, but it's rather lacking in traditional ceremonies and rituals and things you have to dress up in special outfits for. And I did have a strange dream a few months ago in which I converted to Judaism and it gave me a great sense of inner peace and fulfilment. Maybe it was a message from God. But on the other hand, I'm quite attached to my foreskin.

Naturally I do worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but then, who doesn't?

Five more days to go, five more days of sorrow

Although I'm not properly leaving work at the end of next week, it's still a symbolic kind of ending (I've persuaded everyone that I don't need a leaving do until I actually leave, at least). And I'm not hugely looking forward to next week because I've got more work to do tomorrow than is humanly possible, but never mind. I'll cross that bridge when I can't run away from it any more and it tracks me down and jumps on me like bridges do.

Also, I watched the first episode of the new Robin Hood last night and I didn't think it was very good. I don't see why they needed to devote the whole first episode to setting up the story - everyone knows the plot already, they could have just hit the ground running and done flashbacks throughout the series. Then we might have had something a bit more exciting to start off with. You really need to get the merry men on screen before the last two seconds. And the dialogue is pretty terrible - the writer in an interview said "most of the time they talk in believable medieval", which he seems to think means talking in normal English without contractions (will not instead of won't, and so on). Which of course sounds like stilted dialogue without conveying any sense of the medieval.

And there's no excuse for dropping Friar Tuck.

Whoops, Mrs Miggins, You're Sitting On My Artichokes

I'm wearing an old pair of jogging bottoms with big holes in the knees and somewhat loose elastic (what, you expect me to be a model of sartorial elegance when I'm on my own at home? Sorry to disappoint you) and just now as I was walking towards my kitchen sink, the arm of my sofa caught in the hole in one of the knees and pulled my trousers right down around my ankles. It was a perfect slapstick moment that just needed the vicar coming round unexpectedly for tea to make it complete.

Anyway, the World Othello Championships. It has ended up with three Japanese players in the semi-finals - Makoto Suekuni v Tetsuya Nakajima and Hideshi Tamenori v Ben Seeley. Tamenori, in fact, is the making-up-the-numbers extra player from the home nation this year (qualifying for the Japanese team is notoriously difficult, there are dozens of really, really, REALLY good players there), and is almost as impressive in that role as I was in London in 2004.

But slightly more controversially, the organisers have unilaterally decided that the Japanese should be allowed to have a team of three women as well, rather than the one that other countries are allowed (you can have a woman as part of your normal team of three as well, of course - I went into all this in detail last year some time, I think). There is a bit of a history in the world of international othello of Japan, since they always win everything, doing things their own way and not caring what the rest of the world thinks. Personally I think the whole thing's funny, but there are those who take it seriously. Which, of course, only makes it all the more entertaining. Controversy is a fun game for all the family.

Saddlesore

The saddle on my bike came loose on the way to work, and kept tilting back while I was riding along. So I had to sort of park my whole (considerable) weight on the front bit to keep it level, and then it tilted downwards the other way. You could pay to see circus clowns riding bikes like that, probably.

Anyway, it's the weekend, and I've got things that need doing. I'm going to go for that master plan of memorising all those six-digit square numbers, to aid my square-root calculations at the MCWC. I'm still no good at square roots, but at least this way I can get a few quick points for the first three digits of each question (you have to give the answer to eight significant figures). I'm also still going to do the one minute binary record attempt with a full 270 digits, even if, just for example, someone who previously held the record tries his best to claim that the new record set earlier this year shouldn't count, and argue that I should only try for 170 or so so that other memorisers can then beat that and get the great publicity that our sport deserves. The way I see it, there's no point trying to beat a much less impressive record when someone has done 240, and I won't be at all offended if I do manage 270 (or even 300!) and Gunther argues that that doesn't count as a real record either.

Ben Seeley's on top at the world othello championship after the first day - he's won seven out of seven, beating Makoto Suekuni (who beat Tamenori earlier in the day) in the last game. Seeley v Tamenori first thing tomorrow, quite literally, I think it's half past midnight British time. Nicky van den Biggelaar is doing well too - he looks like having the best chance of stopping there being three Japanese (plus Ben Seeley) in the semi-finals. I really wish I could play that well. Ah well, that's another thing to work on over the next year...

Curses, Moriarty

My arch-nemesis, Akira Haraguchi, has been up to his old tricks again. It seems that he's recited pi to 100,000 places, over a sixteen-hour period last night. That's just much too many numbers. I'd still like to beat the record some day, but I can see I'd have to go up to something like 150,000, just to make sure he doesn't pre-empt me again.

Of course, he doesn't really count as an arch-nemesis - or at least I don't count as even a lesser nemesis of his, seeing as I've never publicly recited any digits of pi, barring a couple of dozen in a pub every once in a while if I want to show off. Still, it's nice to imagine that I'm an adversary of his in the pi-memorising stakes, however inaccurate the idea might be. Besides, I should refrain from talking about people as if they were my enemy - certain misunderstandings arose from a comment I made after the WMC, although how anyone could think that when I described Clemens as 'evil' it might mean that I don't like him, I can't imagine.

What is a shame is that I didn't qualify for the world othello championships - if I had, I would be in Mito, Japan, right now, and would be able to hunt Akira down and... well, say hello, I suppose. But it would also be cool to be playing in the championship. It kicks off tomorrow, they've already done the draw for the first round in the traditional way the evening before - you can see it here, if you really want to. Team Britain are missing a few of our brightest stars this time round, but I'm sure they'll put up a good fight. You wouldn't want to bet against Hideshi Tamenori on his home turf, though.

I've just been watching a repeat of Pie in the Sky on ITV3, but now it's finished and they've moved on to "Another Audience with Freddie Starr". This is exactly the kind of situation for which the phrase "from the sublime to the ridiculous" was invented.

@ BCC 34 750

I've got a pair of corduroy trousers that I don't wear very often, but I've had them for years - I bought them for a seventies night quite some time ago, a very memorable evening to which the only people who turned up were me, my brother and his friend Takanori. Anyway, I've just noticed today that written in black marker on the inside of the seat is "@ BCC 34 750". You'd think I would have noticed that before, but then I'm not terribly observant. I could speculate as to what it means, but I can't think of any interesting things that BCC might stand for except Big Cool Cords.

Rather than doing anything useful tonight, I'm watching a charity football match between old fogies who played for Liverpool and Celtic twenty years ago. I was a Liverpool fan back in 1986, for the simple reason that they always won. This made it possible to pour scorn on fans of other teams for being so stupid as to support one of the teams who didn't win all the time. Which really makes you feel superior. Of course, my social group of nine-year-olds were also all Liverpool fans for exactly the same reason - this was Lincolnshire, and there weren't any good local teams to support - so we generally had to restrict our scorn to people we assumed looked like they might be Man Utd supporters.

Nowadays, of course, I feel superior to all those fans who are so stupid as to support a team that wins games occasionally. Poor Boston are still languishing second from bottom of league 2, despite a great win against Lincoln and a draw away at Swindon. If we can beat Bristol Rovers on Saturday it will catapult us up the table a bit, and then it'll just leave the speculation about our manager decamping to Darlington to worry about.

One minute binary

I've discovered that I have no trouble at all with reading through and memorising 270 binary digits in exactly one minute and six seconds. Getting it down to under a minute seems to be more of a challenge. The current record is 240, so technically I could do 250, or for that matter 241, but I prefer to do binaries in multiples of 30, because it's somehow less confusing that way. And doing eight thirties and a ten would take as long as doing nine thirties. Still, with a bit of practice I can probably do it. Or make a sufficiently impressive attempt that I don't get laughed out of the Mathematikum.

I've been attempting to do my homework from college, but it involves reading sixteen pages of horrifically tedious nonsense about financial strategy and the theories advanced by Modigliani and Miller in 1961 regarding dividend policy and the hypothesis of dividend irrelevance. Why couldn't it have been Victor Vroom and his theories? I can always remember those, because he had such a silly name and I automatically imagine him as having had a motorised unicycle instead of legs (and, for less obvious reasons, a hairy chest, big beard and tendency to wear fewer clothes than is generally considered decent). He fights crime with his assistants Porter and Lawler in a way that illustrates a lesson every week about motivation and cognitive theory.

He grew fat and then grew thin again

I think I'm putting on weight. Not that I care about such things, of course, but perhaps it would be a good idea to join that gym I've been talking about joining and getting a bit more exercise on a regular basis. I suppose you might say that I should stop eating so many sweets and things, but then I might reply that you should mind your own beeswax, and I like sweets and things, so leave me alone.

I'm watching Grease on Sky at the moment. I've seen it about seventy buhundred times before, and I've got it on DVD so I could watch it any time I like without adverts or anything, but I don't think it's possible to see that Grease is on TV and not watch it. Besides, I want to see what the Sky people edit out of it. The BBC chop out the naughty words from 'Greased Lightning', whereas ITV leave that intact but cut the slumber party scene out entirely.

I should really be memorising things, or calculating things, but never mind. A wella wella wella!

I'll talk when I want to.

It's probably a good thing I haven't written anything here for the last couple of days, because I had an email that I was tempted to write about. And when I say write about, I mainly mean poke fun at the person who sent it to me and publicly mock the contents of the private letter they sent me. Which probably wouldn't have been very nice, but it was very tempting because I could have said all kinds of funny things about it. It's difficult sometimes, being so ethical.

Still, it's October. Birthday month! The party's going to be a meal and drinking session in Nottingham on the 14th, and anybody reading this who would like to come, drop me a line. You'll be very welcome!

Go to the top of the class and give out the penguins

That was one of my dad's favourite sayings - he would have been sixty today. 59 is a really stupid kind of age to die at. Anyway, interestingly enough, one of my teachers at the uni is also the financial controller of the Crich tramway museum, which was one of my dad's favourite places for a day out. In fact, I have a feeling I met this guy the last time we went there - he gave us a lecture on the effects of recent tax laws relating to charities that was very similar to one I've heard before from a tramway person.

Another of the three lecturers didn't turn up at all - he had some good excuse, I forget what, but it meant we got to go home early. I was pleased to note that my reaction to that was "yay, I get out of school early" rather than "tch, I've paid good money for this course and the teacher doesn't even show up". The third was a rather dull guy who pronounces 'finance' differently from anyone else I've ever met. You'd think a career as an accountant would persuade someone to say the word the same way as everyone else, but obviously not.

Pot Noodles are two for a pound at Sainsbury's at the moment, so I bought a couple for the first time in years. That takes me back to my student days a lot more than going to university did (my university career wasn't really characterised by me showing up to classes very much, but it did involve a surprising number of pot noodles). I had one for my tea tonight, and while I'll admit it wasn't what you'd call nice, they do still have a certain something.

Anyway, my brother's coming round this weekend, so I might not write anything for the next couple of days. Not that I think anyone would really care, but I'd hate to have people logging excitedly onto the internet over the weekend specifically to see my unique perspective on world events.

But if I wore a cap, they'd never let me back in the university

It's back to school tomorrow, the first day in my weekly course of learning lots of useful accountancy-related things that nobody in the history of the universe has ever found a use for in the real world. It starts at 3:30 and goes on till 8:45. I'm also going to work in the morning, so I'll be well and truly worn out by the end. Still, having this qualification will come in pretty handy when I run out of money and need to sweet-talk my way back into the world of the wage-slave. And even if I don't, I'll get to impress a classful of impressionable youngish accountants with how clever I am. Besides, it'll be fun to be learning and preparing for exams again, probably. I need to remember all my old excuses for not having done my homework.

Ntl have changed the numbers on all their channels, for no earthly reason. The letter explaining it even says "we've also decided that channels on a revolutionary digital TV service such as ours are bound to grow a bit so we're changing to three digit numbers to allow for ongoing additions."

They already used three-digit numbers on quite a lot of their channels! The only difference now is that they're all three digits, so basically in order to allow for expansion they've changed from having the choice of any number from 0 to 999, to any number from 100 to 999. Weirdos.

Nerdy rant

It's kind of old news now, I know, but I've just been watching the Doctor Who episode "The Satan Pit", and I feel I have to say to the uninterested world that you can't do a story in which a space station's crew are composed of six major characters who work and interact extensively onscreen together, and two extras who say and do nothing and then die at dramatic moments. It just looks really weird. They could have at least given them names - that doesn't mean you have to pay them extra, does it? Or heck, just mentioned them in the dialogue so the whole production doesn't scream at you "hey, we need to establish that the Ood can kill people, but we need all the characters for later on, better throw in a couple more cannon fodder at the last moment..."

They didn't need to kill two people, anyway, the second one was completely pointless. Couldn't they have splashed out on one more speaking part instead of two walk-ons?

Sorry about that, I just fancy myself a drama critic from time to time. Anyway, it's not like I've got anything monumentally interesting I could be talking about instead, it was basically that or the football because since there's too much stuff on telly tonight that I want to watch, I've taken an executive decision to give the memory and calculation training a break. Describing it like that means it qualifies as effective time management instead of laziness.

Could have been embarrassing...

The zip's broken on my work trousers. Luckily, it didn't come open until I was taking them off tonight, or I really would have had a chance to see if anybody would notice a striking trouser-related change in my appearance like I threatened the other day.

The boss wants me to come in part-time now until the middle of December. On the one hand, this is good, because I'm not sure I want to leave anyway. Although I'll soon change my mind when I get to the annoying part of my monthly routine again, of course. But on the other hand, that'll be four months from the time I told them I was leaving, and it seems to me that any competent company would have had me replaced and things running perfectly smoothly by that point. And this whole voyage-of-self-discovery sabbatical thing isn't quite the same if I'm going in to work every now and then through it. Still, I just do what the universe throws at me and enjoy the ride.

Jings!

When I have nothing better to do, or at least don't have the inclination to do anything better, I can occasionally be seen browsing the children's section of a bookshop. As an aspiring children's author myself, it reassures me to see some of the rubbish that gets published these days - makes me more confident that some of my own rubbish could still find its way into print eventually.

The only drawback to this confidence-building exercise is that occasionally I stumble across a piece of work so brilliant that I could never in a month of Sundays hope to produce anything like it. And then I get all depressed again. One such book, which I came across today, is "The Giggler Treatment", by Roddy Doyle. It's sheer genius from start to finish. It features, among other things, a seagull which hates fish and if it had its way would round them all up and dump them in the sea, a character called Billie Jean Fleetwood-Mack, a man who's in a bad mood because his sandwiches and flask of chicken soup at lunchtime were robbed by a vulture, a short cut from his house to the train station via the Sahara Desert, the river Nile and the Eiffel Tower, and a chapter written by the dog in which, without advancing the plot at all, he describes the difficulty of using the computer without his owner noticing, and mentions that his girlfriend Lassie recently moved to Galway and he thinks he misses her more than she misses him.

"Measure a mouse's eyelash. Not down. Across. That was how far Mister Mack's shoe was from the poo. And his rescuers were in Egypt! In North Africa! They'd never make it on time."

The whole book, in fact, takes place in the time it takes for Mister Mack's foot to descend towards the dog poo. He's wearing new and very stiff trousers, so it takes longer than you'd expect. Seriously, this book reaches heights of excellence that I could never hope to aspire to, even in all the months of Sundays I've got in store for the next year.

In other news, I also bought the new Oor Wullie book yesterday. I'm more of a Broons fan, but I still get the bi-annual Wullie collection too, and this bi-year I did laugh out loud at least a couple of times, so I think I've got my money's worth as well as keeping up with tradition.

And speaking of traditions, I seem to be making one of critically analysing each new Coco Pops advert I see, but I can't help it - this latest one raises deep issues that need to be explored.

It's an advert for Coco Rocks, actually, the horrid-looking crunchy-and-soft-choc cereal that Coco Monkey and his gang also advertise. In it, the villainous Croc steals the Coco Rocks and expresses the intention of scientifically analysing them to discover the secret of what makes them so delicious. Coco observes that "all will be lost" if he does crack the secret, but doesn't elaborate on exactly why. What, exactly, would be the consequences of Croc learning the secret? All I can think would come of it would be that Croc would be able to make his own Coco Rocks without needing to steal them (he can afford the lab equipment and gorilla henchmen, so you'd think he'd be able to buy his own, but perhaps he's barred from the local jungle supermarket), and surely that would be better for everyone except the Kellogg's cereal corporation.

At worst, his plan could be to market his own Coco Rocks clones and make a fortune. And although this would maybe be unethical, I think that frankly Kellogg's could use some competition to their monopoly in this market. Coco Monkey's urging of consumers to help him thwart Croc's plan smacks of brainwashing innocent children into tools of corporate propaganda. I think it's disgraceful, and should be stopped. I've lost all respect for Coco. And Ozmelda Ostrich can forget about me asking her out on another date.