If you're roughly my age and from the same country

You'll be pleased to see that this is available on YouTube.

If you're the wrong age or the wrong nationality, or if you were hoping for a more interesting blog tonight... sorry.

Othello transcripts

This is a public apology for not typing up my transcripts from last Saturday yet, like I said I would. I seem to have spent the whole of the last three weeks or so not typing transcripts, and it's inexcusable. I'll do it tomorrow, if I can be bothered.

Hamburger Sammich & Sum French-Fried P'tatoes!

With Cambridge out of the way, I can start planning for the German championship in Hamburg! July 31st and August 1st! And if I'm going to do well in this, the second-most-important memory competition of the year, I'll need to spend the next few weekends getting back into the habit of 30-minute memorising. A half-hour cards, half-hour numbers and half-hour binaries, all in one day, really takes it out of you, but once I've done it a few times, my brain remembers the knack of keeping the concentration going for that length of time, and before you know it I'm all ready for the world championship and the hour-long disciplines.

I really want to do well in Hamburg - historically I always used to do badly at the German championship, but then I had a great one in 2007, couldn't afford to go last year, and I think it'd be nice to win it this time...

It's gone!

SAS Furniture, down the road! That shop's been there forever, and now it's turned into Bubble-It! I don't even know what Bubble-It sells! Maybe it... bubbles things. Anyway, it doesn't sell furniture, probably, and it's an outrage!

As I mentioned in a blog only a month or so ago, SAS Furniture has always been on the corner there. Whenever we used to drive into Beeston on the way to Grandma's house (being modern, and keen to avoid big bad wolves, we took the car via Beeston instead of skipping through the woods), we'd go past the place. What with that and Woolworth's, I'm getting extremely fed up with the modern age. When I work out exactly who's responsible for the entirety of the world's problems, I'm going to go around to his/her house/bungalow and shout at them. Loudly.

He hits ye and ye gang tae the hospital

One interesting thing you notice when you watch enough cartoons and read enough comics from the olden days is that plagiarism isn't as modern an invention as you might think. Even in the thirties, when it was still possible to think up a new gag that hadn't been done before, you'd still see examples galore of stealing a joke from a rival and hoping to get away with it.

Even so, it surprised and entertained me to find the original (or maybe just an earlier iteration) of an Oor Wullie strip in an earlier Popeye comic:

Thimble Theatre starring Popeye, December 18, 1932

Oor Wullie, January 30, 1938


Five years and the Atlantic Ocean between them - I wonder if there's a missing link here? I don't think Thimble Theatre had made it to British newspapers yet at that point, huge though it was in the USA, and I don't think that gag was ever used in the animated Popeye cartoons...

See, this is the kind of thing that really fascinates me, so I thought I'd share it with the world in general.

Further news from the weekend

I realised today that while I was trying to make the attendance at the CMC sound as international as possible, it didn't occur to me that one of the English competitors had an Indian name. And now I'm worried that people think I'm either some kind of racist, or some kind of excessively politically-correct berk, or both.

Another thing I forgot to mention is that although I didn't see fit to provide any prizes for this year's competition, I did get some extremely cool gifts from competitors - Dai gave me several cool and interesting coins to add to my collection (an old-style 5p to add to my 10p and 50p!) and Christopher presented me with a giant chocolate gold medal, by far the best and tastiest medal I've ever got from a memory competition!

I should also mention the fun with the window in the competition room - it had been recently broken and patched up with brown tape, and half way through the championship we found out why. It seems the window has trouble staying open and slides down closed of its own volition. Luckily, my screeches of "Catch it!" and James and Jenny's quick reactions saved it from shattering any more panes.

And just to save the best till last, I heard today that Marco proposed to Jane in the evening after the competition, and she said yes! So, you see, memory competitions lead to romance! Another reason for everybody to come along and take part!

Ahh, Cambridge

It makes all the tedious preparation work feel worthwhile when we have a fun and successful Cambridge Memory Championship at the end of it! I'm back home again now and looking forward to catching up with the various things I haven't been doing just lately, like not ignoring everybody unrelated to the Cambridge Memory Championship who's been wanting to talk to me.

Anyway, here's what I've been doing this weekend. It was othello on Saturday, and lots of people turned up again - 15 of them, plus a non-playing Adelaide and Aubrey, who was in the country for once and able to organise the whole Cambridge MSO. Which all seemed to be a roaring success, except that there were too few events on the Saturday (the stratego was cancelled) and too many on the Sunday (the draughts was extended to cover both days). This led Aubrey to greet me with ominous questions like "Do you actually need tables for the memory competition?" and "There's no real reason why it has to be indoors, right?"

The othello itself went reasonably well, all in all. I beat Geoff in the first round, which I seem to be making a habit of lately, then lost to Imre and David, who are both much, much better than me, but who I manage to beat once in a while and was hoping to this time as well. Still, I was on four wins out of six before the final round, and just needed to beat Jeremy to end up in joint third with Geoff (who beat Imre, who in turn beat David - if you're interested in the statistics that don't involve me, you should probably check out the British Othello website instead, I'm too self-centred) and keep my undeserved comfortable lead in the BGP. But I lost the decisive game 33-31, ended up a comparatively rubbish joint fifth with Ian (not that Ian is comparatively rubbish compared to Geoff, although I can see how you might draw that inference from my last two sentences), and am now only seven points clear of David. Still, maybe I'll win or be the only person who turns up to the last two tournaments.

After the othello, I decided it might be a good idea to check out the possibility of alternative venues for the memory the next day, to avoid sharing a room with backgammon players or sitting outside in the courtyard on those chairs with little wobbly mini-desk attachments. In the spirit of nothing-ventured-nothing-gained, I went into the Royal Cambridge Hotel at half past seven on Saturday evening to ask the receptionist if there was any chance of getting a cheap conference room for nine o'clock on Sunday morning. Funnily enough, they didn't seem to think there was anything at all unusual about this request, and provided us with a perfect venue - much more swanky than the usual location, and not at all expensive, especially since Aubrey chipped in with a part of the cost from the MSO funds.

The international turnout of the memory competition was extremely impressive - two Swedes (one of whom has an Albanian name), four Germans (one of whom has a French name), an Italian (who lives in London and whose accent veers between Italian and cockney at random), one Welsh and even two English participants! We really need to get more British people involved in memory competitions.

We also had a huge and me-very-grateful-making turnout of helpers who ran the competition and marked papers promptly and accurately, ensuring everything worked out exactly the way it should, ran on time and suffered no major disasters and hardly any minor ones either (slight technical hitch or two with the spoken numbers, but nothing worse than usual) without me having to do much real work at all!

Star of the show was Dennis Müller, who's only been doing memory stuff for six months and is already confident enough to attempt a 20-second pack of cards and talk in terms of beating me next time we go head-to-head (Hamburg, end of July). It's a bit worrying, but on the other hand, really great. I look forward to seeing how well he does after a bit more training!

Dennis joins the illustrious list of Cambridge Memory Championships winners (Clemens Mayer, Ed Cooke and Gaby Kappus), while Mattias Ribbing joins the equally illustrious list of Best Beginners at the CMC (James Paterson, Fan Kai Yoon, Katie Kermode), who have all (except Fan Kai Yoon, who never came to any memory competition ever again) gone on to great things.

So, a good time was had by all! Now I'm going to go to bed, because it tires you out, organising events. Normality resumes tomorrow!

The loveliness of Leicester

Getting to Cambridge from Beeston tonight took less than three hours, which only happens on very rare occasions when you can change at Leicester without waiting more than a few minutes and get a direct train to Cambridge. But the 17:08 tonight was one of those times, and I managed to leave work early despite having to cover someone else's Friday-afternoon report that always takes ages to gather various different people's input.

So I was already in a good mood when I went in to the cafe at Leicester station for something to eat, and it only got better when it turned out that the till wasn't taking cards and I didn't have quite enough money to pay for my crisps, ham salad roll and bottle of coke, only for the man behind the till to cheerfully chip in 50p from his own pocket to make up the difference!

And then, if that wasn't enough to convince me that Leicester station is great, the announcer over the tannoy described the next train to arrive as "the chronologically disadvantaged 17:30 to London" and got a chuckle from the crowd of people waiting for it. Most big stations like Leicester have a robot announcing the trains, or else a low-paid, non-English-speaking temp. Hooray for the traditional British sense of humour and the traditional British sense of giving someone 50p to pay for a sandwich!

That's made me all cheerful and chirpy about the weekend ahead, and was just what I needed after lots of busy-ness at work and lots of running around frantically for the last few evenings getting everything sorted for Sunday (I still need to create the spoken numbers program on Powerpoint, but I can do that in the comfort of my hotel room. All the memorisation papers are printed out and safely stored in my small rucksack - which I was carrying on my front, like some kind of baby harness thing, because my big backpack was on my back. And in a way, these memorisation and recall papers are my babies. A strange way that only a certifiable lunatic would use, but a way nonetheless. I laboured over the things and printed them out, using the very last drop of ink my Lexmark cartridges would allow me. Wait a minute, I opened a set of brackets about 500 words ago, let's close them before we go any further). That's better.

On my journey down here tonight, I must have given people the impression that I'd recently come from Bahrain - I was wearing my souvenir Bahrain T-shirt, and my big rucksack has still got the little white band around it saying "Bahrain International Airport Security" from my trip there six months ago. People probably concluded that I'd been to the grand prix. Perhaps that's why the guy gave me that 50p - he must have assumed I'm a millionaire playboy and would reward him with gold bars and mansions!

Anyway, I'm rambling. I think I'll go to bed now. Othello tomorrow, memory on Sunday!

If you're a man and you want to be healthy

Then you could probably do worse than buying the latest issue of Men's Health magazine, available now for £3.95 from all good newsagents. Or just ask me if you can borrow the free copy they sent me. I'm on page 108, the fifth in the series of profiles on 'superhumans', incongruously sandwiched between Lance Armstrong and Sebastian Coe. "The Genius", they call me - I won't disillusion them if you don't.

You can also find that interivew I did with the Canadian news agency on the internet with a quick Google search, if you really want to. It covers essentially the same ground as the Men's Health article.

I'll leave you with a quote attributed to Tony Buzan in an email I got from some Australians:

Quite Simply...
"Good Food = Good Brain
Junk Food = Junk Brain”

Tony Buzan

And an alternative quote from someone whose brain is generally held to be not too shabby:

Junk food is great! What are you talking about, Tony?

Ben Pridmore (genius)

Cambridge? Yes, I probably should do something about that.

Haven't booked a hotel for the weekend yet. If I end up having to commute from Beeston and back every day, I'm really going to be worn out by Monday...

There just aren't enough puns in the world!

On BBC2 tonight, there was a trailer for a programme about Kew Gardens, followed by the snooker. And nobody made a "and now a different kind of cues..." quip! What is wrong with everybody nowadays? Don't they know there's some kind of depression happening, and the best cure for depression is jovial banter from BBC continuity announcers?

A thought occurs

Do you think that some fervently anti-Communist heraldist has ever reworked the old 'Better dead than red' slogan to make it 'Better ghouls than gules'? If not, do you think I could trademark it somehow? Because it really makes me giggle.

Anyway, tonight I'm going to do something productive for once - a bit of memory training, a bit of finishing off all that printing for Cambridge, maybe even a bit of typing up my othello transcripts from London, like I've been meaning to do for quite a while now. And a minimum of snooker-watching.

I work for MI5

I spy on people, memorise what they say and do, and repeat it with roughly 85% accuracy. They hired me for my binary-digit-remembering skills, obviously, but we're still waiting for the first terrorist attack (or whatever it is that MI5 investigate, if indeed MI5 still exists and is still called that - I don't keep up with the news as much as I should) that somehow involves a need to memorise up to 4000 1s and 0s in 30 minutes. The bosses were thinking of letting me go, but then someone realised that I'm quite a bit cheaper and easier to secretly install in someone's house than a hidden microphone.

It's a printing-things-out weekend

I always forget how long it takes to print all the papers for even a tiny little memory competition like Cambridge. It does give me a much greater admiration for those wonderful people (ie Phil and maybe a couple of other helpers if he's lucky) who do all the preparation work for the world championships.

I also forget how much paper and expensive print cartridges it takes - I had thought I'd be able to use my Boots staff discount this year (it's got to be good for something - normally the only thing I buy at Boots is earplugs, which cost £1.99 for five pairs, so my discounts are pretty negligible), but I left it to the last second as usual, and the big Nottingham store had run out of the kind of cartridges I need, so I had to buy them for full price at Dixons.

As a tangent, why does every type of printer take differently-shaped print cartridges? Is there any reason why all Lexmark printers couldn't be made so that they use a universal kind of cartridge? It's all a big conspiracy, I tells you.

As another tangent, yes, I still call it Dixons. If they're too lazy to change their colour scheme along with their name, they've only got themselves to blame. The general public's collective brain just processes the colours and doesn't look at the words.

Crash! Shatter! Tinkle!

Some of the lights in this place have sort of strange frosted glass globe lampshades instead of normal ones. I was just sitting down to eat tonight when there was suddenly an almighty crash-shatter-tinkle kind of noise from the kitchen. The lampshade thing had spontaneously fallen to the floor and shattered into a zillion pieces! I was standing roughly directly underneath it not more than a couple of minutes beforehand, too! I could have been killed! Well, actually, the thing weighed practically nothing and seems to have been fairly fragile, but I might have got Bond-villain kind of scars on my bald shiny head. I'd sue the landlord if not for the fact that I changed the bulb a couple of weeks ago and clearly didn't put the stupid lampshade back properly.

Weight a minute

To celebrate the launch of a scary-sounding miracle weight loss pill in pharmacies, there were weighing machines at work today, inviting everyone to come along and see what they weigh. Just like the one that used to taunt me at Woolworth's before I engineered the closing down of the entire company just to shut it up. Only this Boots one was even nastier to me - it tells me that anyone with a Body Mass Index over 28 can benefit from a weight loss plan, and mine is 28.6.

I'm being forced to the conclusion that I need to start making an effort to eat properly. This last couple of years, I genuinely have got much too chubby. It's just that the very thought of trying to lose weight sends me scurrying to the Co-op for a bag of Tangfastics. The idea of dieting seems to be against all of my principles, somehow. Like wearing a cycle helmet or sunscreen. It's the kind of thing that a certain kind of person does, and I don't want to be that kind of person, however sensible it would be. It's hard to explain.

Character-building

Watching some snooker player trying to conceal his annoyance as he snappily answers questions like "What's your favourite colour" in the BBC's attempt to convey the personalities of players makes me think about the marketability of memory competitions.

It's a regular complaint nowadays that there used to be "characters" in snooker, whereas now the players are all interchangeable, boring young men. This complaint is generally made by old men who forget that the old players were also boring. But I think "The Mentalists" showed that we could do a big feature about all the top memory athletes, sum up each of their personalities and quirks in a soundbite and make the general public genuinely interested in us. You know, Gunther's the German mastermind, Ed's 'the upper-class chap' (as someone I met in the street a while ago repeatedly described him), and I'm the working-class hero. Or maybe the weird nerd with the beard and hat, take your pick.

I bet I could describe the whole top twenty in the world in their own unique phrase, if I put my mind to it. But I don't think I will - I'd only end up offending everyone by using some harmless phrase like "the big fat idiot who can't remember anything".

Lots of phone calls

Well, two of them, anyway, which is two more phone calls than I like to deal with of an evening. But hopefully they'll result in an article appearing in the Cambridge newspaper about the upcoming memory championship, and in Canadians coming to film the UK and World championships later in the year, so it's worth it.

Meanwhile, to make up for me not replying to Florian's email because I haven't got round to it yet, have I plugged memory-sports.com on my blog before? I don't think I have, but you should all go and look at it anyway.

The things I do for memory

A journalist from a local Cambridge newspaper said he'd call me at some point tonight for an article about the Cambridge Memory Championship, and I needed to go out to the supermarket, so, with great reluctance, I had to change the message on my answering machine.

It's not an actual answering machine, you understand, it's the normal 1571 service, but I've got an outdated vocabulary. Anyway, it used to say something like "Hi, I never check this thing, but leave me a message and if you're lucky I might hear it some time and call you back. Or you could just email me like a normal person." I don't like phones.

But so as not to offend this intrepid reporter, I changed it to a bland hello-I'm-Ben-I'm-not-here-right-now thing. And did he call? Did he heckers. That'll teach me to compromise my principles just for the sake of not being rude to people.

Pound for pound

As I think I've mentioned, I've been browsing around coin-related sites just lately, and in the process discovered something I didn't know - there's one different design of pound coin for every year from 1983 to 2008, but from now on they're sticking with the same shield design along with the new versions of all the other coins. So, naturally, this means I need to collect one of each, just for the sake of having a complete collection. 26 of them, you see - one for each location on one of my journeys, it's fate. The minor problem is that some years' pound coins weren't manufactured in bulk because there were already enough of them in circulation, so I'd have to buy one of those official Royal Mint collection sets from some official Royal Mint coin collector, and that seems like an excessive length to go to just to satisfy a 'hey, I should get hold of one of each kind of pound coin' urge. Maybe I'll just limit myself to what I'm doing at the moment, and putting aside a kind that I haven't got yet every time I get one in my change...

An interesting side-effect of paying attention to pound coins is that I can now spot a forgery if need be. You know how there are stories in the news every now and then saying that 10% of pound coins in circulation are forgeries, or something like that. I got one in my change today - it's quite obvious, if you're paying attention; the writing on the edge is wobbly and not deep enough, the heads and tails sides aren't lined up with each other right and it's slightly the wrong colour. I'm not sure whether to start a collection of fake pound coins alongside the collection of real ones or just to buy something with it next time I'm in a shop. I think it's probably illegal to knowingly spend fake money, but I think that's a monstrously unfair rule, punishing you for being clever enough to know a forgery when you see it. Fair laws should punish stupid people and give extra money to clever people. That's how things would work if I ruled the world, anyway. Also, cleverness would be legally defined in some way that includes me and excludes anyone I don't like.

I'd make a really great evil dictator, wouldn't I? Maybe that should be my next career move. Anyone want to be my henchman? I'll pay you a pound!