Doomed to stay in Derby

There's a real shortage of decent, affordable flats in Beeston. Maybe I'll just live on the street and carry all my posessions around with me in my trusty rucksack. It'll save me a lot of money in the long run. I'm surprised more people don't do that, instead of moaning about the difficulty of getting on the property ladder.

Hey, it's my blog, I can write what I want

Although the only thing that comes to mind to write tonight is an extensive list of observations about the Thundercats episode "Mandora - The Evil Chaser", by William Overgard. A really great episode, but watching it (as I did tonight) inspires a huge amount of criticism of plot flaws, voice acting problems and artistic issues (although actually, this was one of the better-drawn stories). And as far as I know, there's only one of my readers who'd know what I'm talking about, and he already knows everything I'm going to say.

But maybe I'm wrong. Would you, my readers, like to read a big long blog full of comments like "Why doesn't the Sword of Omens react when Quickpick steals it? When we see it later on, the Eye is wrapped up in rope (the normal way of deactivating it), but even if it was Quickpick who did that, and not the Mudhogs, how does he know to do that before touching it?"

Or "At the end of the episode, when the Thundercats 'all' chorus the final line, everybody's lips move, but only Tygra and Wilykit are audible. Were they just too lazy to overdub the other characters (who are voiced by the same actors)? And why can't we hear Panthro? He didn't share an actor with either of the characters we can hear."

And why does Mandora bellow "They're tying us to the ladders!" when the Mudhogs do so to her and Quickpick? Quickpick, presumably, has noticed this himself without being told, and there's nobody else around.

I've got about a million more of these, from this episode alone. It's a good job I'm going to refrain from posting them tonight.

Attention, viewers!

If you happened to be watching Granada Reports at 6:15 today, you would have seen my friend Gilly and her shop. Sorry I didn't get the message in time to advertise it in the blog, but if you saw it but don't know Gilly, well, now you can appreciate it all the more!

Here's an advance thing to set your video for (assuming you're still using an analogue TV/video setup) - "Superhuman: Genius", a documentary about various clever people and also me, will be on ITV1 at 9:00pm on Monday 11th August. Watch it and be in awe of my superhuman genius!

Mutter, moan, complain

Dagnabbit, I really, really wish I was going to the German championship next weekend. If nothing else, it's always such good preparation for the world championship, but also I want to catch up with all the latest memory gossip, see what everybody's up to, talk about the rest of the competitions to come this year, and so on. There are some things you don't find out just by emailing and posting on internet forums. Besides, I'd rather be just hanging out with fun memory people than working. But hey, it's my own fault for spending so long jobless. And I always under-perform at the German championship and feel annoyed with myself anyway (except last year, when I was brilliant).

Potatoes

Potatoes, which also have a Latin name, are made in factories in the West Country, by a secret recipe which involves beetles. They have been a popular accompaniment to many meals since being reclassified as a vegetable (as opposed to a vehicle) in 1932. Unsubstantiated rumours have it that many celebrities eat potatoes, among them Dennis Waterman, John Travolta and Dutch international hockey player Wouter Jolie.

There are three different ways to cook potatoes - baked, grilled or eaten raw. True connoisseurs of potato-eating believe that washing them beforehand spoils the taste, and indeed often pour handfuls of dirt, mud and worms over the vegetables before cooking and eating them. Baked beans can be eaten with potatoes, but broad beans can not, due to a law passed by Margaret Thatcher's government in 1987 aimed at preventing "unwholesome eating practices".

When not being eaten, potatoes can be used as paperweights, doorstops, tennis balls, DVDs (when sliced to the correct width) and antelopes. Some cheeky bus drivers have been known to take a crafty day off work by dressing a large potato in hat and tie and having it drive their buses for them. A poll of Austrian socialist early-20th-century aeroplane enthusiasts in 2003 listed potatoes as their third favourite thing, after vacuum cleaners and Pakistan. Early-20th-century aeroplanes were ranked a disappointing 27th.

The legends associating Sir Walter Ralegh with potatoes are entirely false - he in fact invented the tomato and the geranium, and sometimes wore a hat that looked somewhat potato-like, but the potato was in fact invented by Rotisserie Vasquez, by accident, in 1657 while he was preparing for the World Memory Championship. Vasquez remained unaware all his life that he had invented the potato, noting in his diary that "my basement is full of strange brown things these days" shortly before his death in 1660.

A new kind of "space potato", launched in 1983, is expected to land on Jupiter in August 2010.

Luxury apartment or stonking great house?

Luckily, all the people who failed to advertise Beeston flats in the paper a couple of days ago have all decided to start putting properties up for rent now. There's a staggeringly expensive "luxury apartment", a slightly cheaper three-bedroomed terraced house, and a reasonably-priced nice-sounding one-bedroom flat in a very handy location. I'm going to see the latter tomorrow, although I'm a little tempted by the luxury apartment. I mean, I quite like the idea of living a life of luxury, and hey, I've got a new job and haven't been fired after my first week, I can pay more than twice my current rent for a really nice place, right?

Nah, I'd become fat and decadent. I'll just go for the non-expensive and doubtless very pleasant one. I hope it's not secretly luxurious too.

Ah, the fun of talking memory with people who are more or less interested in the subject

Today was quite fun. I forgot to ask whether the gathering at the Tamworth Travelodge was officially called a seminar or a convention or a get-together or what, but whatever it was that I was speaking at, it seemed to go down well. People were left with the impression that I know something about memory [or, if you want to look at it a less self-centred way, people were given some useful tips for how to teach schoolchildren to use their brains] and I had the fun of making up a way to remember the workings of the body's circulatory system, which included a digression about how Fat Andy went to the school where Philip Pullman was a teacher.

I had also prepared a snazzy way of remembering that speed equals distance divided by time, which involved Speedy Gonzales and Daffy Duck, but didn't have the time to show it off. Which is a shame, really, because it was cool. Ah well, I'll save it for the next time I'm talking to teachers. I'm sure it'll happen again.

Subtle advertising

In your latest British Othello Newsletter, when you're reading my article on how to win tournaments, cross out the words "during lunch" in the London section and add "before each round", please. That was what I'd intended to write, but I seem to have forgotten it when I sat down to type it up, ending up with outlining a strategy that works perfectly well at every tournament rather than a Bath House-specific one. This occurred to me late one night in bed, a couple of days after I'd sent the article to Adelaide, but I decided it probably wasn't worth emailing her and asking her to stop the presses and change it, especially considering I missed the deadline for submitting it in the first place.

What, you're not a member of the BOF? Well, go and join, right now! £6 a year and you get to read the entertaining newsletter articles of me and others, you get to come to tournaments on a regular basis and hang out with a lot of very nice and entertaining weirdos, and an ability to play othello isn't essential. It's easy to learn, and I'm sure you'll like it. Go on, join the club, even if you're reading this blog in the hope that I'll talk about memory stuff for a change.

Anyway, I've got the day off work tomorrow. Kind of bad form to take a holiday on your fourth day in a new job, but I'd arranged long ago, while I was unemployed and thought I'd probably need the money, to be a guest speaker at the annual convention (or something along those lines) of Maximize Your Potential, up in Tamworth. Not the kind of thing I normally agree to do, I know, but it might turn out to be fun.

The commuter's lament

I'm working in Beeston now, I don't think I mentioned that, which means travelling there by train. Which isn't so bad, but tonight the train was cancelled for no adequately explained reason, so I got the bus instead, which takes longer, and the whole thing cut into my sitting-around-at-home-doing-nothing-of-importance time. I bought a local paper while I was in town to see if there are any nice flats to rent in the town, but it seems there aren't any, nice or otherwise, within a ten-mile radius. I did walk past a four-bedroomed house for rent, but I thought that would probably be a bit excessive.

Hello, I'm the new Jeremy

It's fun being the new bug in an office. You know you've settled in when people stop introducing you as the replacement for your predecessor, but until then you remain a semi-anonymous New Jeremy. In my time I've been a new Kevin, a new Phil, a new Dave and a new Natasha - jokes about that one lasted the longest; it varies proportionately to the physical differences between you and the person who did your job before. One of these days, maybe I'll be the new Ben. That'll keep an office full of people rolling in the aisles for weeks!

Office workers are easily amused, as a rule.

In which I postulate a mediaeval memoriser

You know what there isn't enough of in blogs these days? Poorly-researched theories about 14th-century poetry, that's what.

I'd like to rectify that with a summary of my opinions about the two different prologues of Geoffrey Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women". The Legend is a collection of lengthy accounts of the lives of great women of ancient times, in rhyming couplets, and it's not Chaucer's greatest work. It probably went down better among his circle of poetic friends in the 1390s who wanted to see a new English-language summary of the story of Hypsipyle or Ariadne or Hypermnestra than it does with the casual reader today. The problem with the exercise is that all the great women of ancient legend did nothing of interest - they either nobly refrained from having it off with other men while their husband went out and had adventures, or killed themself because their lover cheated on them. It gets a bit repetitive when you put them all together.

The only bit really worth reading is the Prologue, in which the God of Love takes Chaucer to task for his past translations of antifeminist writings and orders him to make amends by writing about all these Good Women. It's got some funny bits, some beautiful poetry of the kind that only Chaucer could do with an ugly language like Middle English and, to the puzzlement of literary critics of the past six hundred years, it comes in two distinct versions.

The two versions of the Prologue are known as the F version and the G version - the F appears in all but one of the surviving manuscripts (Chaucer lived before the invention of the printing press, when books were all hand-written and thus a lot more scarce. All the surviving manuscripts of the Legend are clearly copies of copies, dating from the 15th century, and none of them is exactly the same), and the G version exists in only one manuscript, MS Gg 4.27.

As an aside, I really feel sorry for old Gg 4.27 (Gg to its friends). It's a really important manuscript - dating from no more than twenty years after Chaucer's death, it was the first known attempt to combine all his works into one volume. It's hugely significant to Chaucerian students, and yet unlike the Fairfax manuscript (after which the F prologue is named), or the Ellesmere, the Hengwrt or dozens of other snappily-named documents, Gg hasn't got a real name, and we just have to know it by the code it was given by the Cambridge University Library.

Anyway, the G prologue is found only in Gg, which is the earliest of the eight manuscripts that contain the prologue, and critical opinion until the 20th century held that G was the original draft, and F was Chaucer's revised version. Victorian editor the Rev Walter Skeat said in his edition that he wasn't aware that anyone had ever suggested otherwise (which probably means that someone had and Skeat wanted to deride their theory in a public forum - Skeat was a very cool guy who thought nothing of describing other editors' editions as "worthless" and much of the subsequent work on Chaucer seems to have mainly been aimed at getting back at Skeat for his opinions). But since then, there has been a lot of writing on the subject arguing that G was the revision, done some years later. A hundred years of heated debate of the kind only academics are capable of and the question is still up in the air.

It's a tricky question, and my theory on the subject is that everybody's wrong. I reckon that the G prologue is nothing to do with Chaucer at all - he wrote the F version, and G came about by virtue of a manuscript being produced by memorial transmission. It looks to me like the scribe of an ancestor of the Gg manuscript had access to the text of the legends, but his exemplar for the Prologue had been reconstructed from memory. I've been known to memorise poetry myself - not many people do this in these modern times when you can record a poem in millions of different technological ways, and modern editors tend not to believe that such a thing was ever possible - and I can see the signs of a not-quite-perfect recall.

The main differences between F and G are rearrangement of various passages, changes to a word here and there, and some pieces omitted in one or the other - most of these appear in F but not in G.

The rearrangements are an easy mistake to make when you're trying to memorise a long text. You remember individual sections, but forget exactly what order they came in. The story does seem to flow better with the sections in the F order - at least one of G's rearrangements seems to break a sentence in half and continue it a couple of dozen lines later.

Where words are changed, the F version is normally more poetic-sounding (lines 12-15 in F go "...Men shall not ween every thing a lie/ But if himself it seeth or else dooth;/ For, God woot, thing is never the less sooth/ Though every wight may it not see..."; in G, lines 13-14 become "For that he say it not of yore ago/ God woot a thing is never the less so..." . I suspect the G-memoriser was no poet himself, and just came up with something that fitted the meaning without thought for how it sounds when you read it out loud. Of course, a lot of differences in the G prologue are probably the fault of the Gg scribe, who was pretty rubbish, so it's hard to say.

The bits that G has and F doesn't are mainly an extra couplet here and there which doesn't add anything to the meaning, except for one lengthy digression on the subject of books. This is entirely Chaucerish in tone and relevant to the discussion at hand (although it slows down the action more than it needs to) - maybe it's from another, lost, poem of his and the memoriser mentally joined them together because they were about the same thing?

Anyway, I could go on at length about this poorly-thought-out theory, which I'm quite fond of, but I probably shouldn't stay up all night writing about it. I should probably go to sleep and wake up refreshed early tomorrow morning for my new job...

Advertisement

It occurred to me that, even though I'm being coy about the details of who my new employers are (regular readers may remember that time, now purged from my blog, when I blogged about a choice between two jobs, listing the pros and cons of each, only for one of the employers to read it, take exception to the cons I mentioned and decide they didn't want to employ me after all), it would be entirely acceptable for me to give a plug to the employment agency that found me the job in the first place.

So, if you want a new job in the world of finance or HR, get in touch with Macildowie Associates! Seriously, I can't praise their service highly enough - they called me after seeing my CV on Monster, I had a useful and entertaining meeting with a friendly guy talking through my job history and the kind of things I'm looking for, they had me do an Excel test to prove to them and their clients that I'm as good at it as I claim to be and then within a week of signing up they'd arranged me a couple of interviews for two really cool jobs that were exactly what I wanted, with big, world-famous companies to boot, and another couple of similar interviews waiting in the wings if those didn't work out. As it happened, they did, and I've got a cool job starting on Monday. So yay for Macildowie, they get the Zoomy seal of approval!

Early to bed, early to rise

I need to get back into the habit of getting up in the morning at an office-worker kind of time, not at some time between nine and twelve (or later if I'm feeling lazy). This is one of the many disadvantages of working for a living, such as having to leave the house, having to sit in an office and play on a computer, having to do what other people tell you to do, all that kind of thing. Still, I'm sure I'll get used to it again soon enough. It's probably good for you, although I've got up early in the morning for most of my life and I'm still unhealthy, flat broke and stupid.

But it's the weekend first, and yay, it's a meaningful weekend because I'm working on Monday! Woohoo!

It's like someone's erased my memory

I don't know what it is, but for the last few days I've felt sort of at a loose end, with lots of time on my hands. It's as if I'd previously been doing something that took up a lot of my time on a daily basis, but now I'm not and I need to find something to fill all the time I'd previously devoted to it. But what is it? I've been sitting around doing absolutely nothing for months now!

Job-hunting? That didn't take up too much of my time, and I seem to have spent a lot of time today anyway fending off calls from people who've seen my CV on Monster and want to offer me jobs. Seriously, they all seem to have come along at once lately!

Memory training? I haven't done too much of that just lately, but I've been pretty good about training at weekends and I don't normally feel vacant after not doing anything for a couple of days.

I think it must just be that I've officially got a job now, so I'm feeling like not working on a weekday is strange and gives me lots of spare time. Or perhaps I've been on secret government work of some kind and my memory has been blanked out. I like that second theory best.

Hmmm

Well, I've analysed my money situation carefully, and even a talented accountant like me can't juggle the numbers to come up with the answer I wanted to get. There is officially no way on Earth I can afford to go to the German Memory Championship in a fortnight.

It's unfortunate, but I can't go jetting off to Tuttlingen before I start getting paid for the new job, which won't be until August. Not without borrowing more money than is at all sensible, anyway. I'll just have to stay at home and memorise numbers and cards here. Maybe if I phone the competition and tell them my scores, they'll still give me a round of applause...

Get a job!

Yes, I'm talking to you, all you scummy unemployed people out there. I can now officially look down on you all again, because I've now got a job, starting Monday, subject to confirmation. Yay!

Feeling very accomplished and in the mood to achieve something else amazing this afternoon, I tried to fix a puncture on my bike. Now, I'm a man of many talents, but few of them involve fixing things. I'm entirely hopeless at fixing anything that's broken. And I can cheerfully report that after a great deal of effort getting the tyre off, finding the hole in the inner tube, patching it up with that glue stuff and little rubber patches, getting the tyre back on and injuring my hand in the process... my rear tyre is still flat as a pancake.

My natural instinct in situations like this is just to buy a new bike and avoid all the hassle, but under the financial circumstances, maybe that's not such a good idea. Let's wait till I get my first paycheque, at least.

Olympics here, olympics there, olympics everywhere!

I won't be going to the one in China, but luckily, everybody always wants to jump on the bandwagon in an olympic year, so there's a couple of other olympiads I'm thinking of checking out.

First off, there's the good old Mind Sports Olympiad, returning this year for the twelfth time. I've just got the schedule, and I'm considering whether or not to go along. I'm inclining towards probably not - I will be in London for the first weekend, for the UK Memory Championship, and that only takes place in the mornings (because it's sharing accommodations with a big chess competition in order to get a free room - hilarious arguments are sure to ensue when the memory competition overruns and hasn't finished by the time the chess players want to come in), so I could go along and join in the fun in the afternoons. But there isn't anything happening just on the Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday afternoon it's just othello, and will anyone else turn up for that? They haven't for the last few years.

Othello and some other competitions are cheaper than previously, just £8 rather than £12, but that's still more than British othello players are used to paying for a tournament (especially since the MSO competitions is shorter than the normal regionals that we pay £5 for). And the full-week, play-anything cost is still £99, and if you add the cost of accommodation to that, it all adds up to more than I can really justify spending on a holiday right now. So, all in all, I'll probably give the MSO a miss, maybe just turning up for the othello.

Olympiad number two is a Memoriad, which is even cooler! It's in Turkey, in November, and it's an olympiad composed of memory, mental calculation and speed reading competitions and promising to pay big prizes for the winners! I'm sort of sceptical about it, just because it's never happened before that a competition has popped up out of nowhere and given people money for memorising things, but I'm all in favour of the principle, naturally, and I'll certainly go along to this one if it doesn't end up being called off. It could actually turn out to be a lot of fun!

Exterminieren!

After just making a passing mention of the final episode of Doctor Who last night, I thought I should probably say more on the subject, since it was actually quite good. Certainly a big improvement on last year's season finale, although it still had its flaws - rather too many technobabbly pseudo-justifications of magic things happening for plot convenience. And the poor old Daleks not quite being the indestructible killing machines we all love (it really shouldn't be possible to make them all blow up by pressing a few buttons on a control panel).

But what it did have was Julian Bleach's wonderful portrayal of Davros! He was amazing, clever, loud and stark raving mad, exactly what a real villain should be! He needs to come back as soon as possible. And exterminate people. Also, the Daleks should win. Daleks are great.

Busy day

Well, there was a lot of tennis and Doctor Who on telly that needed watching, but I still fitted in three hours of memory training, so I feel good about myself. Or I would feel good if not for the fact that I've eaten a big bag of liquorice allsorts and feel sick. But overall, everything is good. Tomorrow I'll do more memory stuff and then win the German, UK, French and World championships. Probably. If I get a job and can afford to go to them.

And any other memory championships I end up going to. There's an Indian one, I understand. Maybe I can hitch-hike out there.

High-five!

Woo, two days, two interviews that both went really well! I'm sure I'll get a job offer out of one or more of them. And there's the added advantage that they're both really great jobs that I'm pretty sure I could do very well, too. So yay! If you're American, celebrate by setting off fireworks tonight in my honour. Got a complex display in the shape of the star-spangled banner? Rearrange it into a gigantic picture of my face!

Or not, if you don't want to. Anyway, it's the weekend and memory training is upon us. Let's see how much I can cram into my brain in a series of half-hour periods. Yay! I'm very excitable today for some reason. Yay!