Right, job-hunting time

I've had more than enough of being unemployed. I'm going to spend tomorrow applying for jobs left, right and centre. I don't care how vaguely related to management accounts they are, if it's a job, anywhere in the country, it's going to get my CV. I'll probably end up as a window cleaner by accident and discover that it's the perfect job I've always been looking for.

Darkness and light

Hmm, I might take back what I said about it being good that Steven Moffat is taking over as executive producer of Doctor Who - "Silence In The Library" makes it look like he's really running out of ideas. It was a sort of mishmash of elements of the previous stories he's written, it wasn't scary like it was trying to be, and it was all very base-under-siege.

Still, to look on the bright side, we had a fun day of othello today here in Derby. Eight players, which is just perfect for a seven-round tournament because it doesn't need me to faff about with pairings and Swissness and byes. Everything worked out the way it should - the venue was very nice as usual (although rather more expensive than the income from entry fees), I hadn't forgotten to bring the boards, pieces, clocks, transcript sheets, list of people whose membership had expired, pens, round-robin pairings table or anything important. I had forgotten to bring tea and coffee, but since I don't drink the stuff, I wasn't inconvenienced. And since there's a Happy Shopper just down the road, neither was anyone else.

I beat David, which I always seem to do these days, and lost to Roy, which I also invariably seem to do, and ended up with four wins out of seven in total. I seem to have settled back into a happy mediocrity at othello tournaments now, which I'm perfectly happy with. David and Iain ended up tied for first place, with 6 wins each, and Geoff third with 5. The BGP is really quite exciting this year, even though I'm not in contention, with Iain a mere 20 points ahead of David going into the last regional in Farnborough on June 21st. Which I may or may not go to, depending on whether I've got any money by that time.

Classified ad

I got this wonderful little A6-size piece of card through the letterbox this morning:

I'm really thrilled to know that the first man to combine the powers of spirituality lives as nearby as Leicester. Maybe I'll pop round there tomorrow morning and get him to cast a spell to give me luck in the othello. I need a new lucky charm of some kind - ever since tidying my flat up last week, I've been unable to find my lucky Zoom-Zoom T-shirt. For the last day of the memory competition, I had to wear the original Zoom-Zoom shirt, which I retired a couple of years ago because it's sadly more hole than shirt these days and doesn't so much cover my torso as hang in rags from my neck.

Ooh, maybe Mr. Wahab can cast a powerful spell to help me find my lucky shirt!

Dedication, that's what you need

I have a feeling I might have used that title before, but I'm too lazy to check. One thing I'm not too lazy to do, though, is memory practice! I'm very much in the mood for it now, and I'm quite keen to go to Germany in July and break some world records. Specifically, I think it would be rather groovy to break the world record in the three half-hour disciplines that traditionally make up the first day of the competition - binary, cards and numbers, not necessarily in that order (I'm also too lazy to look up the timetable). I think that's an achievable goal, just about, if I'm really on super-top form, and it'd certainly get people talking. Talking about how great I am, too, which is the best kind of talking.

In all seriousness, I do really want to get the record for half-hour numbers or speed numbers. It bugs me that I don't hold any of the numbers records any more - I see it as a failing of "the Ben system" that it doesn't give me any kind of advantage over my rivals when it comes to numbers (unlike binary and cards, where it's really really great). But I've never been able to think of a way to improve my system and give myself an edge over the likes of Gunther and Andi. Maybe it'll come to me in a flash of inspiration some day. Or maybe I'll just work at it the old-fashioned way and beat the Gunthers of this world by dint of traditional elbow-grease. I'm sure I can manage to be only selectively lazy if I really put my mind to it.

Tello

It's the first-ever-as-far-as-I-know Derby Regional othello tournament this Saturday. Yay! And with any luck, there'll be more competitors at that than turned up for the memory competition last weekend. In fact, if you're reading this, I command you to come along and play othello! No excuses!

All good Things...

I've been thinking. I've been told off more than once just lately for certain ill-advised blog entries of mine, and it's making me think that I should either a) stop occasionally saying cruel and hurtful things about people or institutions; or b) start blogging in a slightly less public way.

So I'm considering moving Zoomy's Thing to my LiveJournal account (which exists solely in order to access certain people's friends-only journals), setting it to friends-only and accepting friend requests from anyone who chooses to make one. That way everyone who wants to read my ramblings will still have a chance to, this site will still be here so new readers will still be able to stumble across it and then read the further adventures on LJ, and if I, for example, choose to mercilessly mock a school's website's punctuation and philosophy, I'll be able to do so without them relaying reprimands to me via Phil at memory competitions.

What do my loyal readers think about the pros and cons of this approach? I know some of you are the shy, retiring types who might not want to create a LJ account, friend me and thus identify yourself, but I assure you it won't be any trouble. Besides, this is post number 976 on Blogger, and I think it would be cool to finish here on a nice round 1000, and move over to a brand new adventure.

Making up for lost time

Okay, I've done very little blogging for the last several days, for various reasons, so tonight you get a whole lot. Before I start talking about something that some of my readers might possibly want to hear, could I please direct your attention here? It's the E Nesbit short story "The Cockatoucan", which I've just discovered is available online and read for the first time. I've been looking for it (in my usual passive way of looking for things, which means I've been sitting around and waiting for it to fall into my lap) for quite some time, since I heard that it is practically the only work of fiction in the English language to feature a character called Pridmore.

Now that I've read it, I can say that it's not Nesbit's best work, but I urge you to go and read it anyway, just for the unusual Pridmore-content. She's an unpleasant nursemaid who gets turned into an Automatic Nagging Machine.

And while we're talking about children's books, I noticed today that my copy of "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" has an obvious edit in it that I've somehow never spotted before - on page 53, "This is not good and I know why. A mouse has cut the wire. Good-bye!" The 'good-bye' is in a slightly different font and has the tell-tale faint rectangular outline around it that shows it's been literally cut-and-pasted on top of the original text.

A quick Google search for "a mouse has cut the wire" shows that roughly half of the results say "Good-by" after it. Have any of my readers got an original edition and can confirm that the recent edition amended the outdated spelling? I'll feel very clever if you can tell me I'm right to make that deduction.

Right, was there something else you wanted to know about? Oh, yes, the Derby Memory Championship. The excitement started on Friday night, when Nik (who was born in Russia, lived most of his life in Norway and is now over here studying) and Dai (who's Welsh) arrived at my place, after an extensive and very enjoyable day's filming with the ITV people. It's going to be a very fun programme. I had successfully cleared just enough floor space to accommodate them both, and even though I'd never met either of them in real life before, neither of them turned out to be the kind of person who'd murder me in my bed, which was nice.

We set off for the community centre bright and early, which was a good thing since we went in Dai's car and I gave some very bad directions. But when we eventually found the place, everything went smoothly from then on. We were joined by our very select crowd of competitors - Gaby and Dagfinn, who can take credit for the competition not being cancelled when it became clear that nobody else was going to turn up, since they'd already booked their flights and hotels and in Gaby's case her week-long sightseeing holiday in Britain - and Phil, bearing a big box of memorisation and recall papers provided by James Paterson. My gratitude to both of them is overwhelming.

The actual competition went pretty well for me. I'm completely out of practice at spending a whole weekend memorising, but I managed to keep the right mental state going anyway, once I'd warmed up a bit - I only managed mediocre results in the random words and binary, but after skipping names and faces to do a final set of interviews with the TV crew, I produced a quite respectable 995 in 30-minute numbers, which I haven't practiced at all. I'm sure I can do 1200 or so in Germany with just a little bit more effort in the meantime. Then I did the TV-special world record attempt with Ray Keene and various spectators in attendance, which I'm going to refrain from talking about since the TV people want it to be a surprise. Although the show won't be on TV till later this year, by which time there will hopefully have been other memory-related headlines.

That was the end of the first day's excitement, and we went to Burger King to celebrate. Nik was reluctant, since he tries to eat healthy food as much as possible (people with that attitude should probably stay away from me at memory competitions), but faced with not only my insistence that junk food is very much the way to go if you want to be a great memoriser, but also Dagfinn's enthusiastic agreement and reportedly his psychologist wife's wholehearted condoning of my 'eat food that makes you happy and you'll do better in life' philosophy, he gave in and had a bacon double cheeseburger. A victory for the forces of fast food! We'll soon have wiped all that omega-3 stuff out of existence!

Sunday, being free from the stress of TV cameras, was quieter and simpler, but no less interesting. I started off with a new record of 17 packs in 30-minute cards (attempting 18 and the only problems came right at the end of the 18th pack), I gave my new abstract images system its first trial run and got a personal best of 142 - with a bit more work, it's going to be really good, I'm sure - and followed it up with an acceptable 320 in speed numbers and a decent 90 in historic dates. I still want to get those two world records back, but it'll have to wait until later this year. I had to skip the spoken numbers event - there'd been a problem with the file James had sent to Phil, so I had to create some new numbers myself at short notice on Saturday night - and we had our only delay of the competition before it, waiting for the noisy cistern in the otherwise perfectly quiet venue to finish filling up before we could begin.

That only left speed cards, but despite having two chances to break my own record, I didn't manage to do it. I recorded a snazzy time of 22.88 in the first attempt but the recall was pretty awful, and the second time round I took it just a bit too slowly, stopped the clock at 26.58 and failed to remember it properly anyway. Still, I'm sure it'll all go right at some competition in the near future.

So, I won, Gaby came second and claimed the prize money. Oh knickers, just now as I type this I remember that I promised James J that I'd get him photos of the prize-winners. And I didn't. Hmm, Gaby did take some pictures, we might be able to come up with something to go on the Science House website... Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Dagfinn came third and took the second-place-apart-from-Ben prize and Nik scooped the best (and only) beginner money. So it's a good thing that only four people came to the competition, because everybody was able to leave with significantly more money than they arrived with!

Except me, obviously. My monetary state is really, really not good at the moment. If I don't get a job and/or a big pile of money some time soon, I'm going to have serious problems here. Still, never mind, something'll turn up, I'm sure...

A memorable weekend

...which I'm too worn out from memorising to write about tonight. Sorry, and also sorry for not blogging at all for the last two days due to Dai and Nik staying with me. But in brief, we had a great international turnout at the Derby Memory Championship (a German, a Russian Norwegian and a Norwegian Norwegian) and an awful British turnout, a great competition, at least one world record (17 packs of cards in 30 minutes) and one non-competition world record attempt for the benefit of the TV crew who were only there on Saturday (see the result when the programme is broadcast!), and I'll tell you about it all at more length tomorrow.

Sorry, sorry

It seems that with all the fun filming today and everything (which I would really love to write about - possibly I'll break my rule and tell all the backstage secrets after all), I underestimated how much time I'd have to get my flat into the kind of state that two guests can sleep in tomorrow night. So I'm taking a two-minute break from a frenzied process of shovelling rubbish into the corners to clear a bit of space, in order to post this quick blogging instead of the lengthy and fictional entry I promised for tonight. Sorry about that.

Little girls from Sweden dream of silver-screen flirtation

As I've mentioned before, I'm being filmed extensively for the next three days. Some of the stuff we're doing sounds like fun, but this time round I won't talk about it that much, I'll leave it as a surprise for when the "Super Genius" documentary airs. Of course, that leaves me a little short of something to actually write about, but I'm well overdue for another outpouring of unusual fiction, so brace yourselves for another burst.

Funny money

At some point on my travels today (been up to Matlock, pitching our teaching-memory-skills-in-the-schools scheme) I've acquired a 1949 shilling coin passed off as a 10p piece. Quite nice condition, too, apart from a little scratch on one side that makes it look like George VI had a duelling scar on his cheek. They're being sold for two or three pounds on eBay, although whether anyone's buying them at that price is another matter, but I think I'll keep it, just in case I ever end up travelling back in time and need some money to finance my inaugural world memory championship several decades early.

I would love to know how this coin ended up coming to me in change - shillings haven't been legal tender for about 15 years now, so surely it can't have been passed around by mistake all this time? Maybe it's magic.

And speaking of taking the King's shilling, it's a great shame that Russell T Davies is leaving Doctor Who, but if he really had to go, Steven Moffat (who of course wrote Press Gang many years ago, thus making sense of that really quite brilliant "King's shilling" segue back there) is probably the best choice for a replacement. Hopefully it'll still be good and will still feature David Tennant in 2010 and beyond!

What did you do in the war, Daddy?

I had a dream last night that my father (still alive) had published his memoirs, and that they consisted mainly of entertaining anecdotes about his time as a soldier fighting in the Vietnam War. I worry about my brain, sometimes.

Discipline

I'm feeling quite optimistic about abstract images now. With any luck, and any practice, I'm aiming to get a reasonably high, Gunther-worrying kind of score maybe not at the Derby competition this weekend, but at the German, UK and World championships.

I'm not sure, all in all, how I'll get on at the Derby championship (assuming I'm able to compete rather than having to arbitrate, which still isn't certain). I'm not going to get much more chance to practice this next week - lots of documentary filming, a trip to Matlock to talk about schools memory demos, probably an unnecessary trip to Cambridge to return some clocks I've ended up with, maybe if I find a spare moment even some job-hunting. But I think I'm in half-decent form, and it'll be good practice to spend a whole weekend memorising - it's the long-lasting concentration I really need to work on. Assuming I get to compete, that is.

Censorship

I've moaned before about E4 cutting funny lines out of Friends, but tonight's episode really takes the biscuit. They cut out the exchange between Chandler and Phoebe's new fireman boyfriend in which Chandler quips that he and Joey could play with matches and bump up the fireman's total of people rescued from burning buildings to a round 100 when he boasts that it's currently 98. "Fire safety isn't a joke, son," says the fireman, sternly, in reply. I mean, really, does E4 think we live in the kind of society when kids are going to hear that dialogue and immediately commit acts of arson? Channel 4 need to either start showing Friends (and for that matter the Simpsons) in that good old nine o'clock on Fridays slot, uncut, or just leave them alone before the watershed. They're in cahoots with the DVD people, is what it is, forcing us to buy the DVDs in order to get the complete episodes.

You might have noticed, I've got nothing interesting to write about tonight.

Reality TV

I get to spend the second half of next week being filmed again, for this ITV Genius-related programme. This leaves me struggling to find something to blog about - you might have noticed I've been uncharacteristically quiet on the subject, because this one had the sense to get me to sign a contract beforehand promising not to say bad things about it. That's where The Mentalists went wrong, obviously - I didn't sign anything there until late in the day, and then there wasn't a 'no bad-mouthing us on your blog' clause.

So, since I'm not capable of writing about being filmed without moaning at length about the process (it's all part of not wanting to sound like some kind of big-headed TV star more than actually not liking it), my blogs might be a bit on the skimpy side, if they exist at all - there are a couple of people staying with me on Friday and Saturday for the memory competition, so possibly I won't write anything.

Sorry about that. Perhaps I'll email people privately and bad-mouth the documentary. There's not anything in the contract about that, is there? ... Damn. They thought of everything.

Interesting demographic

Well, it seems that four out of five commenters who expressed a preference agreed with me that contact lenses are a horrible, horrible idea. I'm pretty sure this is well above the national average, even though the sample size is roughly equivalent to the number of people they generally survey for those polls of what 'the public' thinks about things.

So what does this show us? That people who read Zoomy's Thing are generally squeamish sissies who go around arranging flowers and holding hands more than is socially acceptable when they should be doing manly things like sticking things in their eyes? Or that my readers are intelligent types who appreciate that wearing glasses is the best way to show the world how clever you are? Or that the majority of people who follow my blog are scared of incurring my violent and sardonic wrath if they venture a different opinion to mine?

Ewwwwww. Seriously, ewwwwww.

The official reason I don't wear contact lenses is that my astigmatism means I'd have to wear fiddly and expensive toric lenses and I'm not made of money. The actual reason is that I'm horrifically squeamish about touching my eyes. The very idea makes me shudder. However, while I was having my eyes tested last week, the optician persuaded me to try the free five-day trial they've got going at the moment, so I went in today for a fitting. If you have 'fittings' with contact lenses, and you probably don't.

The contact-lenses-optician examined my eyes in detail, got a pair of lenses and said "Okay, now I'll put them in for you." But despite my best efforts, every time she attempted to poke the little things into my eyes, I found myself jerking my head away violently. I thought I deserved congratulations for not hitting her with the eye-testing machinery and squealing "Get away from my eyes!", but she didn't seem terribly impressed. So they resorted to plan B, which was getting someone to show me how to put them in myself.

After a lot of time and difficulty, I got the things in and (after even more time and unpleasantness) out again, but by that point I'd decided that there wasn't any need to carry on with the rest of the trial. I mean, ewww, touching my eyes! Ewww! I'll stick with my glasses, thank you very much. Astigmatism, you see. Toric lenses. Cost a fortune and you have to get the top part pointing up and the bottom part down, and who has time for that in a morning?

Do I sound like the worst kind of nerd if I say......

There is literally nothing in the world more satisfying than doing an hour cards practice, recalling carefully for two hours and filling in the final blank space on the recall paper just as the stopwatch shows 1:59:59! I was very happy with myself, not just for spending the morning doing an hour cards practice for the first time in yonks, but for doing it well and perfectly time-managed like that. Although of course in a competition I'd need to go a bit faster, because there are more distractions caused by other competitors finishing their recall earlier.

Anyway, I was attempting 33 packs and although I haven't checked them, I hopefully got about 30 right. It did go well. I don't normally do long practice sessions on weekdays, seeing as people might be phoning me about jobs, but since I hadn't been able to make myself do anything this weekend, I unplugged the phone and got on with it. Nobody called me, anyway. It's becoming increasingly clear that nobody wants to employ me, ever again.

Still, ne'mind, eh? Here's a link to Mahmut in Australia's blog - he asked me to give him a plug, so please go over there, check him out and wish him luck at the Australian Championship in September!

Nothing

I've done nothing all day, so I'm going to blog about nothing tonight. Tomorrow, I will do things and then write about them.

Boooooo

I was sort of hoping that Reading would avoid relegation, if only because I don't particularly like Fulham or Birmingham, but never mind. At least Man Utd, who I marginally prefer to Chelsea, won the title.

Anyway, I'm still unemployed and out of practice at memory, so I'm sure I've got more important things to do than watch football now that the season's almost over. I'll just have to find another excuse for not doing anything.