People will see me and die

Have I been on telly again recently without me knowing it? The number of people hailing me in the street as the memory man had died down a bit, but I've been getting lots of recognition just this last week. Tonight a gang of youngish teenagers in the shopping centre all recognised me, and the following conversation ensued:

Dan: You're that memory guy?
Me: Yep, that's me.
Dan: Ooh, go on then, do me!
Me: Umm... "do you"?
Dan: You know, do a memory thing to amaze me!

I really need to have a performance ready for moments like this. What I should have done, with hindsight, is tell them all what day of the week they were born on - that always goes down well. Or else I should start carrying a pack of cards or a list of FA Cup final results around with me. Actually, that's a really good idea. I will do that.

Stafford ho!

Either thetrainline.com knows something that the rest of the internet doesn't, or it doesn't know something that the rest of the internet does, but it tells me there are very few trains from Derby to Stafford and back tomorrow. Enough that getting there at the right time for the interview and home again isn't a problem, but I'm still suspicious about the whole affair. Last year I noticed that thetrainline seems to have a blind spot when it comes to Mansfield, maybe it's suffering from the same problem with Stafford. You can't trust anything you read on the internet.

Except this blog, of course. You can trust me. There's no need to question anything I write on here, just obey me with blind faith and you won't go far wrong. Oh, and wish me luck for tomorrow, please - I'd really like to get this job.

Bumcivilian

It's just been brought to my attention that the entire series of "Look Around You" is available on YouTube for the world to see. Both series, in fact - the original ten-minute episodes and (although I haven't watched them yet) I think all of the half-hour second series are on there too. Which pleases me no end! Look Around You is possibly the single funniest thing that's been on television for the last decade or so, and it's quite criminal that it isn't better known. It's the kind of comedy that I aspire to write myself and wildly envy when other people do it so well.

But don't take my word for it. Take an hour or so out of your busy schedule and watch the whole bally lot of the things. And when you've finished watching them, notice that the 'related videos' box for the final episode (The Brain) gives you seventeen other Look Around You videos, two random brain-related things and "Maximise the Power of Your Brain - Tony Buzan MIND MAPPING". He really is everywhere!

Go on, check them out. If you like my occasional ventures into mad surrealistic comedy, you'll love these. If you hate my occasional ventures into mad surrealistic comedy, you'll still love these because they do it so much better than I do.

A cry for help

I'm concerned that I'm not going to have enough arbiters for the Derby Memory Championship. I'm also concerned that I'm not going to have enough competitors, but that's a minor problem. The arbiter thing, on the other hand, could be serious. I need to find a couple of helpful people who are willing to spend a weekend handing out, collecting in and marking memorisation and recall papers, generally keeping an eye on competitors in case anyone's cheating, and being quiet for long periods of time. In return, these happy helpers get free accommodation on the floor of my living room, free meals and drinks, my undying gratitude and a favour that can be called in at any time in the future.

If I don't manage to recruit any little helpers, I might have to drop out of the competition myself in order to run it, which would annoy me enormously, because one of my main reasons for organising the championship in the first place is to give me a practice event for the German and World Championships later in the year. So, anyone who's reading this who thinks memory-competition-assistant-arbiter could be a great career move, please get in touch. Undying gratitude, people! You can't put a price on that!

Although if you wanted to put a price on it and demand a tenner or so for your services, I could do that too.

Stafford - like buses

I've got an interview in Stafford on Friday for a really cool job that, for obvious reasons, I'm not going to say any more about. But don't worry, loyal readers, I never learn my lesson permanently, and I'm sure I'll soon be back to the charmingly naive Zoomy you know and love, who imprudently posts his opinions about everyone and everything on the internet for the world to see and cares nothing for the inevitable consequences.

Anyway, shortly after agreeing to this interview (the job's not in Stafford, by the way, it's just down the road in Burton), I had an email from a different agency about a different job in Stafford.

I've never been to Stafford before, nor ever considered any jobs or interviews there. And now all of a sudden the town (or possibly city, I should look into that before I go there) is full of people who might possibly think about employing me! It's a nearly-St-George's-Day miracle!

That's the problem with a to-do list

I did update my CV today and sent it to all the recruitment agencies in the area who haven't got it already, so never let it be said that I've entirely wasted the day in pointless endeavours. However, after doing that, the thought occurred to me that I really need to learn to read Japanese hiragana. It's something I've vaguely intended to do for years and years, after all. So I bumped that up to the top of my things-to-do list, ahead of trivial things like finishing the Cambridge championship preparations, cleaning the flat up, ironing some shirts so I have something to wear for job interviews and don't have to turn up naked, typing up my othello transcripts from London, keeping in touch with various people I'm in danger of losing touch with altogether, confirming the details of the upcoming memory championship sponsorship (there will be prize money, people, I'm just waiting to announce it when the sponsor's website is up and running!), training for memory competitions so I don't make a colossal fool of myself again, writing that book proposal, all that kind of thing.

It's not even as if I made any great strides in the field of learning to read Japanese hiragana. I spent most of my time toying with developing the quickest and most efficient system for memorising them, rather than actually learning them. I have a feeling that I lack self-discipline.

I'm some kind of psychic

I did win two games, as I prophesied (prophesised? prophetted?) yesterday. Lost four, but I think I was playing a lot better than I have been lately, so I choose to see it as being on the road to remembering how to play the stupid game.

Other things worth mentioning - I entertained everyone with my hard-luck stories involving making a ninny of myself on Blue Peter and the like. Some day, I need to acquire some interesting stories about me doing cool and impressive stuff...

Although my former employers didn't appreciate the publicity my blog afforded them, I'm told that Office365.co.uk would really be delighted with anything, good or bad, I might say about them. There's no such thing as bad publicity, so from now on, whenever I want to say anything about my work, I'll pretend I'm working for Office365! This is an arrangement that will work out well for everyone, I'm sure.

The Bath House pub was being run single-handedly by one woman today, and she kept up a cheerful mood throughout. She deserves some kind of prize, except that othello tournaments don't generally have prizes.

David won, and I think Geoff came second, and I didn't come last. I can't remember what happened in any more detail than that. Check out the website when it's updated, if you really want to know.

David also had a fantastic drawn game against someone, I forget who, in which he ended up with no edge discs at all. I've always wanted to see a no-edge win, and this is as close as I've come so far.

Kali is the only person in the history of the Bath House's conference room to know how to work the dumb waiter.

There's a kurnik tournament starting in eight minutes, and I think I'll play in it, even though it's probably a bad idea because my brain's burnt out from all the othelloing today.

London calling

Early start tomorrow to go down to London for the othello. Must remember to bring my clock this time, just in case some disaster means we're short of them again. I'm slightly more confident of winning a game, maybe even two games, this time, I've been playing half-decently on kurnik for the last couple of days.

And once I'm back, really got to get on with the job-hunting! I'll admit I haven't been as pro-active on that front as I really should have been, this past week. I have arranged a guest-speaker gig at a company conference which, in light of recent developments, I'm not going to say another word about, just in case, but that's not a full-time, bill-paying kind of job. And when I say 'arranged' I mean they called me and I said okay, of course. But on Sunday, I'll start pestering all the local companies who are looking for accountants. Won't that be fun?

Autobots wage their battle to destroy the evil forces of the Decepticons

I discovered something extremely cool tonight while randomly channel-hopping - Transformers is being shown on the obscure cable channel POP! And not the rubbish recent version of the Transformers cartoon either, the original classic "future" series from 1986! I flicked over just in time for the second half of "Call Of The Primitives" tonight (a good one - unusually wonderful artwork more than making up for slightly incoherent story).

This is absolutely brilliant news for the youth of today. Young people who watch this channel, and there must be someone watching it because they read out a letter afterwards from someone who said Transformers was his favourite, will get to see what giant-robot cartoons should be like, rather than the awful CGI drivel we get in the 21st century! And, since the old series was set in the far-flung future world of 2006, they might not even realise it's old, and think it's something new and exciting! A whole new generation of 'real' Transformers fans is born! Yay!

Othelloing

The London regional is on Saturday, so I'm playing in the late-night tournament on kurnik (which is now called PlayOK, which I think is a much less cool name). And due to ineffective time-management on my part, I'm blogging in between rounds.

Thus far I've lost three and won one, and that one was only because my opponent obligingly threw away a fairly obvious win a couple of moves after I'd thrown the game away with a similar blunder. This doesn't bode well for the weekend, but possibly it will put my brain in othello mode when I go to bed after the tournament, and I'll dream up some new amazing unbeatable winning strategies. That's my master-plan, anyway - leave it to my brilliant subconscious mind, because the conscious part hasn't got a clue.

Gotta go back, back, back to school again

Wow, lots of people I went to school with are on Facebook, it turns out! It makes me all nostalgic. I was tempted to write a blog reminiscing about my youthful exploits, but I decided that nobody would be interested in it, and besides, these would unavoidably involve talking about various people who might be reading the blog and take offence, and I'm being careful about that at the moment, so I'll give it a miss.

What would be cool, though, is getting the school to invite me back to give an assembly talking about my amazing achievements in the field of memorising useless data slightly more quickly than anyone else - I'll be able to claim that it's a direct result of slacking off and never doing any homework, and undermine everything the teachers are trying to impress on the new generation of QEGSers!

(See, now I've ruined any chance of getting invited there, too. When will I learn to keep my big metaphorical mouth shut?)

How To Be Topp

Hey, look what I found! Someone started up a Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School group on Facebook, and it motivated me to dig up this old class photo from 1992, when I was in the fifth year. That's 15-year-old me at the bottom right, looking down at the floor (and not at the boobies of the girl next to me, despite what everyone says when they see the picture). Yes, I had hair once. No, I never had a good hairstyle, unless you count my brief flirtation with spiky hair in the late eighties. But we do need to resurrect the nickname "Priddy the Hedgehog", don't you think?

Also, could someone please give me some money? Enough to go to Niebüll for the weekend and hang out with memory people at the North German Championship? I've been trying to justify to myself spending the money on the trip, but without a job it's hard to convince myself that it's a good idea. Maybe I'll rob a bank.

Leisure time

Well, since I haven't got any plans for tomorrow, I'll use the day productively - find a new job, finish all those memorisation papers for Cambridge, write a book-proposal or two, maybe even clean up my flat. That's the plan, anyway, or at least that's the justification for having done nothing productive all day today. I can do it tomorrow, you see!

Cartoon Classics

I found a video in a charity shop yesterday, one of those wonderful late-eighties "find four random old cartoons, stick them on a tape, put it in a cheap cardboard cover, sell it to kids" collections. I don't imagine this one went down all that well with whoever bought it in the first place, and I'm quite pleased I bought this before some well-meaning person bought it for a small child who would doubtless be a bit perplexed by some of the contents.

It starts with "The Little Dutch Mill", a Max Fleischer Color Classic, which is nice enough and quite watchable, although as usual for the Color Classics, very bland compared to what the Fleischers could do when they weren't being forced to copy whatever Disney were doing that year. But after that we have "Hollywood Steps Out", a cartoon which I'm sure was very popular in the cinemas in 1941, but since it consists of nothing but cartoon depictions of notable American movie and radio stars of the day, it's pretty much incomprehensible in 2008 to all but the most dedicated film buffs. And that's followed by "Jungle Jitters". How any children's video company, even a cheap and uncaring one, could think that "Jungle Jitters" is a good thing to put on a cartoon collection is beyond me - again, I expect it went down well in 1938, but seventy years later the portrayal of jungle natives in it isn't really the kind of thing Warner Bros Cartoons like to acknowledge that they once made. The collection finishes with "It's A Greek Life", which isn't outdated or offensive, but, like a lot of what the Van Beuren studios churned out in the thirties, just isn't much good.

So, all in all, this video is an interesting snapshot of cartoon history, as well as a fascinating relic of the days when videos were new and cool and people could sell any old rubbish to young folk starved of good, official cartoon releases. It's always fun to find one!

Too Much Information

Well, that just takes the biscuit

Okay, go and read this story on the BBC News site, and then (if you're a taxman or otherwise in a position to know) come back and tell me whether I've been labouring for years under a serious misapprehension about VAT on cakes and biscuits.

I could have sworn that jaffa cakes are subject to VAT. Weren't they the focus of the big legal case, many years ago, that established the whole chocolate-biscuits-are-vatable thing? I thought the definitive ruling of that was that VAT should indeed be paid on jaffa cakes, and have told people that many times over the years, whenever anyone asked me for an anecdote concerning both accountancy and cake.

I've never worked for a company that makes biscuits and/or cakes, and so have never had a reason to know this, but even so, I'm feeling like everything I know is a lie.

Eddy Grant?

Eddy Grant sent me a friend request on Facebook today. Either the actual singer Eddy Grant, or someone using his photo and birthday and things on their Facebook account. I'm quite flattered that he wants to be my friend - I do quite like several of his songs, and assuming he's not dead (I have a vague feeling that he might be), it would definitely be cool to meet up with him some time. However, I never accept friend requests from people I don't know who don't send me any kind of message explaining why they want to be friends with me, so I had to turn him down.

I do have other cool people writing to me, though. Someone asked me for a signed photo the other day - and not just any someone, but a real grown-up who's a successful American lawyer!

In other news, I'd just like to record here that I really like russet apples. I bought a bag of them from the market at the weekend, and although they're over-ripe, they still reminded me how much I like the things. I hadn't had one for years, and I really want some more now. Sadly, I'm pretty sure they're out of season, so I'll have to wait till later in the year. By which time I will have forgotten about it again.

Wörter des Tages (Words of the Day)

I've spent a good part of the evening creating the random words papers for the Cambridge competition. 200 words, randomly picked out and translated into German. Well randomly-according-to-strict-rules, anyway - I decided to make sure there was the right kind of split between concrete nouns, abstract nouns, verbs and adjectives (60%, 20%, 10% and 10% respectively is what I decided, although since they're randomly mixed together and nobody is going to get beyond 120 or so in the five minutes, they won't necessarily get that exact mix). So what I did was sort my random-word list into a random order and go down the list eliminating all the words that were too long and obscure or which become much easier or much more difficult to memorise once they're Germanised, making sure to ignore all the verbs after I'd filled the quota, and then sort the resulting 200-word list into a random order again.

Words I was sadly forced to reject include the wonderful 'eisteddfodd' and 'tatterdemalion'. If I was doing a single-language random words test I would have included them with pleasure, but I don't think there's a German equivalent...

I really must work 'tatterdemalion' into everyday conversation more often, though.

And incidentally, to all the Germans reading this who haven't yet decided whether to come to Cambridge, please do! It will be fun, there will be an announcement about prize money very soon (I hope), and the translations will be guaranteed checked by a real German-speaker and not just done by me, so there's nothing to worry about!

Let's be geeky...

...and talk about the new series of Doctor Who! So take this as your warning if you're foreign or otherwise haven't watched it yet, and skip this blog entry. I won't say anything else of consequence, I promise.

It's always great to see the Doctor back in action, and this is a very promising start for series four. It was a fun romp in what I think by now qualifies as the traditional style, boosted by a really excellent performance by Sarah Lancashire as the baddie. She should play villains more often, she was perfect. See, everyone, you CAN play the villain straight and make it work! (I still haven't really forgiven them for the John Simm Master).

Catherine Tate, on the other hand, was inconsistent - understandably, they've obviously decided to play Donna a bit more seriously now she's a regular, but she delivered some supposed-to-be-serious lines in a very over-dramatic way that didn't work at all. I'm a big fan of hers, though, and I'm sure she'll settle into the role over the course of the series. Also, I hope we're not going to be seeing Donna's mum again (or not until the end of the final episode, maybe) - I don't really get Russell T Davies's belief that the Doctor's companion's mother has to play an important part in the adventures. It'd be nice to have the Doctor not tied down to a family on Earth, just for a change of pace. Hopefully, with returns for Rose and Martha in the offing (the Rose cameo was very nicely done, by the way), they'll make a real effort to make Donna into a different kind of companion with a different kind of relationship with the Doctor. And I think it'll work really well if they do.

A few more little nitpicks, because nitpicking is fun - the effects of Donna dangling from the rope were horribly unrealistic-looking in the close-ups. She looked like she was just standing casually and holding a bit of metal on a string - she didn't even have her arms outstretched, for crying out loud! And the ropes tying the reporter to the chair would quite clearly have slid off it if she'd just stood up. And we could have done with a line of dialogue making it clear that the two security guards who the Doctor apparently floored with a million volts of electricity weren't killed.

And the big one, which isn't really a nitpick as such but is worth mentioning - had the Doctor not interfered, the masterplan of the 'villain' would have succeeded in helping a lot of humans lose unwanted body fat, while saving the population of another planet. A line to that effect in the dialogue would have been nice.

Apart from that, this episode had a lot going for it - the Adipose are adorable, and the special effects were brilliant. I still don't like entirely computer-generated monsters, but these ones worked well, and the interaction with reality was a lot more convincing than it has been before. There was tension and excitement and funny bits, a plot that made sense pretty much all the way through, and some nice setup for the future. Really looking forward to the rest!

Also, it's been snowing here all day.