Well, that was embarrassing

I've been suffering with a cold for the last week, although I seem to have been very brave and noble and not whined about it on my blog. Anyway, still feeling sniffly and tired this afternoon I had a lie down and ended up falling asleep. I was woken up (from a dream about losing the world memory championship by deciding to stay in bed and not compete in large parts of it) by the phone ringing.

Possibly unwisely, I decided to answer it, and had a conversation with an accountancy recruitment agency in Nottingham whom I got in touch with a month or so ago. Lucky it wasn't someone offering me a job, really, since I wasn't really with it throughout the phone call, and probably gave the woman the impression that I was drunk, on drugs or just generally dimwitted. I thought it was probably best not to admit that I'd been asleep at half past four in the afternoon, but I think I'll come clean when I go in to see them tomorrow morning.

I've also hopefully kept my subconscious quiet for a while by doing three speed cards trial runs between football games today - 26.47, 24.97 and 22.28, all perfect - to keep my brain ticking over until I get a chance to do some more serious training next week. Another thing I didn't mention in my blog is that I didn't do the weekend half-hour-disciplines training that I was planning to do, and in fact spent the weekend sitting around, watching telly and occasionally sneezing. So I've been feeling a little bit guilty about it ever since, hence the mid-afternoon nightmare.

I'm also annoyed with Howard Webb the referee. I didn't mention it on the blog (what the heck have I been writing about for the last week?), but I had another bet on the last three days of football, and I had Poland down to win. They were 1-0 up with a minute to go and Webb goes and gives Austria a penalty! It's disgraceful! That reduces my winnings on that bet from a potential £16.46 to a £4.92 return from my £6.30 stake. Still, it's an improvement on the £1.91 I got from the first three days, and it's not going to break the bank at this rate. And yes, I did have Croatia to beat Germany, so I was cheering this afternoon.

Really, this betting on games has added hugely to my enjoyment of Euro 08. I've got a result to cheer for in every game now! I've already got my money on the next six games, and I'll probably have a final bet on the last six group matches too, unless I get all of the next lot wrong. Results to watch out for over the weekend:

Italy to beat Romania
Holland to beat France
Spain to beat Sweden
Greece to beat Russia (rather unwisely put my money on this one before seeing how terribly Greece played in their first game, but hey, Russia are rubbish too, you never know)
Portugal to beat Switzerland
Czech Republic to beat Turkey

Of course, it's Friday the thirteenth tomorrow, so luck probably won't be on my side. For some reason, even though my birthday's on the fourteenth of October and my brother's is the fourteenth of June, whenever they fall on a Saturday it never occurs to me that this means they're preceded by a Friday the thirteenth until the day itself comes along. You'd think after 61 birthdays between us, I would be used to the idea by now...

Discreet customer service

I was in Oxfam today, looking for cheap accessories to supplement the costume I'm wearing at my brother's fancy dress party on Saturday, when I noticed a wig for sale that I could use to make me look even more like the character I'm supposed to be (I was planning to be a bald version - the theme is characters from my brother's stories, and like all fiction writers, he has shamefully few handsome, bald-headed heroes). The wig didn't have a price on it, so I asked the woman on the till how much it cost, and she responded by yelling across the store "Gloria! There's a gentleman here wants to know how much the wig costs!"

So the entire Oxfam shop full of people, and I'm sure quite a few people passing by outside, turned to look at me. It'll be in all the papers tomorrow, I'm sure - memory champion buys wig!

Can't you talk about anything else?

Okay, final football-related post for at least a few days, I promise, but I would like to retract my prediction of Greece to win Euro 2008. They were atrocious tonight! I mean, I know they've got a reputation as a negative team, but they're not normally that negative. What kind of team goes out for their first group game against a team like Sweden and plays for a 0-0 draw? Dear me, they were bad.

Anyway, the interview went well today, so please keep your fingers crossed until some time early next week when I should hear whether they want me or not. It'd be a great job for me to get. And I'm sure the inconvenience of you trying to go about your everyday lives with your fingers crossed is a small price to pay for my eventual job satisfaction for the next nine months or so (it's a maternity leave cover job).

Dang

Well, the embarrassing defeat for France turned out to be a very dull embarrassing draw for France, and the dull 0-0 draw between Holland and Italy ended up being a thrilling 3-0. So I'm never going to make my living as a professional gambler, obviously.

Anyway, enough watching football, time to get a job. Another interview tomorrow, as I might have mentioned, out in Edwalton, a pleasant four-mile cycle from Nottingham station. Or, if it's as hot tomorrow as it was today, an extremely unpleasant cycle. Nonetheless, I'm going to cycle instead of taking a bus. Healthy exercise is good for you. Wish me luck! For the interview, not the cycling. Although you can wish me luck for that too, if you want. I might need more luck for that, actually. There's less chance of being hit by a lorry in an interview room.

Technical question

Why doesn't my internet explorer auto-redirect me on some web pages that really want me to be redirected? I bet it's some kind of security setting. This stupid laptop is riddled with security programs and settings and things. Okay, it stops people using my computer for evil purposes, probably, but it's mildly annoying when it does things like this and I don't know how to stop it.

Speaking of people using computers for evil purposes, I decided to count up all the emails I get in my spam folder from the Bank of Africa in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso offering a share of some vast fortune left in the bank by a wealthy foreigner. I've had five different ones in the last two days, the most entertaining being the "very huge sum of money belonging to a deceased person Mr.Emmanuel Etukudo who died on May 2nd, 2004 in a gassy car accident with his entire family on there way back from Bobo-Dioulasso the formal capital city of Burkina-Faso, and the fund has been dormant in his account with this Bank without any claim of the fund in our custody either from his family or relation before our discovery to this development."

I hope I'm never involved in a gassy car accident, it sounds nasty. You know, I should create phishing emails for a living. I sometimes get some that I think would really work if only the creators had put a little bit more effort into it. I could make a really convincing one and con lots of stupid people out of lots of money. You know, if I had someone else on my team who could do HTML and things, obviously...

Nearly

The first game could easily have been a draw if not for one lucky goal, and Portugal did indeed win easily. See, I'm great at predicting football results. I'm a little less good at making lunch, possibly, having filled the flat with thick, acrid smoke while cooking chicken kievs, but I think the place is mostly aired out now, and the damage to my lungs probably wasn't too severe.

Oh, and Doctor Who tonight was complete gibberish. Complete gibberish that looked on the surface like intelligent, thoughtful and different semi-thriller drama, but think about any element of the plot for more than five seconds and it all falls apart.

Gambolling in the fields

An extra early-afternoon pre-kickoff blog today. In a probably vain attempt to make the England-free European Championship in some way interesting to me, and since I haven't had a bet on a football game since leaving Adams six years ago, and since gambling is the last refuge of the unemployed layabout, I've decided to have a flutter on the first three days of games. My picks are as follows:

Switzerland - Czech Republic draw (all sane logic suggests that the Czechs should win this one without any trouble, but it's the first game, the home fans will be excitable and it'll probably be an anticlimactic 0-0)

Portugal to beat Turkey (they could win this one with their eyes closed, barring any kind of injury to Ronaldo)

Croatia to beat Austria (Austria are hopeless and should lose every game without too much difficulty)

Germany to beat Poland (Poland aren't that bad, actually, but Germany should overwhelm them in the end. I'm thinking a late goal just when the Germans are starting to panic)

Romania to beat France (France have an amazing ability to mess up games like this, and I'm confident they can do it again)

Holland - Italy draw (another game that'll have lots of hype and very little action)

So now you can all follow along and see how wildly inaccurate my predictions are, as a substitute for getting excited about England's failure to win the championship. Yay!

Also, my tip to win - Greece. Nobody thought they had a chance four years ago, and strangely enough, nobody thinks they've got a chance this time either, although they're playing really well, they've still got the same great manager and a lot of the same great team, and they're looking like they could go far.

Boxes

I unpacked my big box of important papers and stuff the other day, and now the contents are sitting in the middle of my living room in a big, densely packed pile at least three times the size of the box they came out of. It's magic. I did find lots of cool stuff while failing to find what I was looking for in the first place - the posh photos I had taken in 2003, so now I can send one to that guy who wanted an autographed picture of me; my copy of Othello Brief & Basic that I thought I must have lent to someone else and lost long ago (maybe I'll donate it back to the BOF, we're running out of copies and can't get any new ones); lots of wild-west-themed cardboard accessories left over from that party many years ago (fun party, we need to have another one); and even my CIMA certificate so that any prospective employer who demands proof that I'm qualified won't have to just take my word for it. All these discoveries are well worth the inconvenience of no longer being able to see my living room floor.

Anyway, a weekend of memory training is coming up. I'm trying to get into the kind of training schedule I would be following if I was working (as, with any luck, I will be before too long - another interview on Tuesday, out Nottingham way this time), and that means long-discipline practice sessions every weekend I haven't got anything better to do. And there aren't many such weekends between now and Tuttlingen - next weekend I have the delights of my brother's fancy-dress thirtieth-birthday party (transvestism encouraged) and then, if I do end up having the money, there are other appointments for at least two of the weekends between now and the end of July. So it's important to get a good bit of training in this weekend in the 30-minute events and also in abstract images, trying to get that system up and running effectively. Let's make 2008 the year of me winning memory competitions, instead of coming second!

My stars!

On the train this morning I read my horoscope in the free paper, and it said something along the lines of "everything's topsy-turvy today, people you expect to be nice to you are nasty, and vice versa". And funnily enough, after I got back home I got a call from the bank - not the department of complaining about people who exceed their overdraft limit (which is apparently outsourced to India) who called me the other day, but the department of calling for a friendly chat and offering long-term customers credit cards and increased overdrafts (based at the local branch) who call once a year or so. I'd sorted out the overdraft miscalculation with some transfer of funds from that credit card I never use, and the guy who called me seemed blissfully unaware that I'd gone over the limit in the first place, calling me a valued and reliable customer and things like that. I didn't take him up on the offer of another credit card or a bigger overdraft or anything-else-we-can-do-to-make-your-banking-experience-more-satisfactory, but he still wasn't unpleasant about it.

So I've had the niceness from people I expect to be nasty (also a cheque from my mother, but if I list her as 'people I expect to be nasty' it would make me seem like a horribly ungrateful son, so I won't - thanks, Mum!) but I'm still waiting for the nastiness from people I expect to be nice to me. The interview today went fine, without any nastiness, so who's going to be mean to me? It's going to be the person I least expect, according to the horoscope. I'm a nervous wreck with anticipation...

Plans for the future

Interview tomorrow morning in, funnily enough, Oadby, just down the road from the church where I've lost many an othello game. Really good job for a company that I couldn't say anything bad about even if I didn't have this self-imposed ban on talking about companies I potentially work for - smallish family company that has a super-professional-looking website with perfect spelling, grammar and punctuation! What more could a friendly and pedantic accountant want in life?

So let's talk memory instead. I did a practice 30-minute cards this evening, attempting 21 packs and getting 14 right. But I really wasn't far off with the other seven, and I'm contemplating trying 21 at the German championship in just under two months' time. Now, some might say that would be unnecessarily risky (and others might describe it as 'ludicrously stupid') when I can attempt 18 and be reasonably confident of only making one or two mistakes and beating everyone else by some margin... but I wanna break records and it's pretty unlikely I'm going to break my new record of 17 if I only attempt 18.

Maybe I'll do a bit more practice and see how it goes. I'd hate to get even more of a reputation as the kind of person who loses big championships by trying to show off...

Drifters!

I've been extremely unhappy ever since Drifter chocolate-toffee-wafer bars stopped being available, so I was absolutely delighted to find them on sale in a newsagent's in Derby today. I think they were new ones, too, rather than leftover stock from last year, so I'm hopeful of seeing a new influx of my favourite unhealthy snack in the shops soon!

Really, I couldn't be happier - unless of course I had a job and money to put in the bank and stop them complaining about me going over my overdraft limit. Anyone got a bit of spare change that you might want to lend me until I'm back on my feet?

Job advertisements I considered

Dog Congratulator
Salary: £50k + car + donkey
Location: Biggleswade
Start date: June 2009

An experienced Dog Congratulator is required for a busy company located directly above Biggleswade town centre. Applicants should have at least three years' experience, preferably of congratulating dogs although experienced metalworkers will also be considered. The successful applicant will be between five foot eight and five foot eleven in height, admire the works of Chopin and disapprove of radio. Holders of a degree in dog congratulation need not apply.

Man
Salary: 3
Location: Biggleswade
Start date: Last week

A man is required to perform certain duties at a hockey stick and artificial dolphin factory in western Biggleswade. No experience necessary, but applicants must have a minimum of three GCSEs grade G or above. Five days holiday per year, uniform provided on Tuesdays. We are an equal opportunities employer, but no applications from women will be accepted.

Horse
Salary: oats
Location: Biggleswade
Start date: December 2037

A horse, a horse, our kingdom for a horse. Needed by a small company of financial consultants/dressmakers in Biggleswade. Duties include eating grass, swatting flies with tail and neighing. Applicants must have legs, tail, eyes and be a horse.

Management Accountant
Salary: none
Location: Giggleswick
Start date: immediate

A qualified and experienced Management Accountant is required for a friendly family company, not located in Biggleswade. Part-qualified CIMA preferred, good Excel skills and knowledge of Sage Line 50 essential. Good package except for lack of monetary payment. The successful applicant will be remorselessly flogged by a cruel slavedriver while attempting to perform his/her duties. All applications must be made by carrier pigeon or via a trained gorilla-impersonator. This job requires the wearing of clothes.

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.