Fine and Dandy

The Co-Op down the road was sold out of the newly-relaunched Dandy when I went in on Wednesday night, so I only had a chance to read it today. And since one page of it made me laugh out loud in the middle of W H Smith's, I thought I'd buy it and subject it to a full critical review on my blog too!

A very quick summary of what I'm talking about, for the benefit of foreigners: The Dandy is a children's comic, first published in 1937 and still going strong-ish today. It was very popular among kids at the time, but ever since the 1950s it's for one reason or another played second fiddle to its sister title The Beano, which launched in 1938 as a companion to the Dandy but ended up becoming the most popular and well-known kids' comic in Britain.

The Dandy, meanwhile, chugged on cheerfully in its own way, and by the time I learnt to read in around 1980 had settled into a role as the slightly louder and less subtle of the two comics, which absorbed the best characters from DC Thomson's other comics when sales of those comics slumped low enough that they weren't making money any more. I never really read it - I was a Beano fan through and through.

For the last few years, the Dandy's life has been one of constant reinvention and relaunches as the publishers frantically try to get kids to buy it again. The latest incarnation, a fortnightly half-comic-half-magazine called "Dandy Xtreme" seems to have been unsuccessful somehow (gosh, I wonder why? I mean, "Xtreme"? Fifteen years after it stopped being possible to use that word unironically?), and so the new launch this week has gone (sort of) back to basics!

The Dandy is now weekly again, has 32 pages of cheaper paper (I still can't think why anyone believes kids would pay extra for glossy paper, but that's been the official DC Thomson policy lately), of which only one page is an advert and the rest is all funny pictures. And what's more, it's hugely influenced and dominated by the work of Jamie Smart!

Jamie Smart, who's been mentioned on my blog a fair few times in the past, is the funniest thing to happen to British comics in a long, long time. He joined the Dandy about five years ago with a side-splittingly hilarious strip called "My Own Genie", surreal and silly and so much better than everything else in the comic (which at the time, following the latest 'new direction', consisted almost entirely of fart jokes and bogeys), and was funny enough that he eventually was handed the Dandy's most enduringly popular character Desperate Dan, to reinvent in his own style. And for the last couple of years, the only things worth reading in Dandy Xtreme have been Desperate Dan and usually Cuddles and Dimples.

But now, well, the whole comic is like a Jamie Smart strip. Rather than self-contained stories, there's doodles around the pages, joke adverts, silly puzzles and a sort of unifying theme of insanity running through it. It's excellent stuff. Although there's another unifying theme that isn't really a Jamie Smart hallmark and which knocks the comic down a notch or two in my estimation - pop culture references. This comic makes reference to Harry Hill (in a big way), Simon Cowell, Cheryl Cole, Ant and Dec, comparethemeerkat.com, the Queen, Noel Edmonds, Jeremy Clarkson, the Stig, Kylie Minogue, Aled Jones, Alan Sugar, Bruce Forsyth, the Go Compare singer, Wayne Rooney, Paul Scholes, Gary Lineker, Alan Hansen, Mark Lawrenson, Jamie Oliver, three other TV cooks, Kat and Alfie, Barack Obama and Peter Kay. Some might say that's a little bit excessive.

The Beano and Dandy have always done this to a lesser extent, and half the time when I was actually a child rather than a grown-up who reads children's comics, I had no idea what the reference was to. In the new Dandy, they're everywhere! Well, not quite everywhere - Jamie Smart's own stuff is refreshingly free from them, but still. Also, there are still quite a lot of left-over farts and bogeys from the Dandy's previous incarnation. Seriously, people, kids don't actually like that stuff in comics. Grow up.

Let's look through the comic in detail! The cover - the new "Dandy" logo is excellent, a sort of modern version of the classic logo. Jamie Smart's brilliant little doodles are dotted all around the cover, but it's dominated by a big picture of Harry Hill (drawn by Nigel Parkinson), with the words "Exclusive! HARRY HILL! Read his new comic inside!" just to highlight the main appeal of the comic to people who've never even heard of Jamie Smart. Other little captions draw attention to the fact that Cowell, Clarkson and Edmonds can be seen inside, that the comic is now "100% funny!", that it's "New!" and that it's "Only £1.50!" - still more than a comic needs to cost, but an improvement on the recent pricing policy. This week's Beano is £2.25 and packed full of adverts.

Pages 2 and 3 depict the launch party of the all-new Dandy, with a contents page, more assurances that you won't find Harry Hill's new story anywhere else, cameos of most of the other new characters making their debuts here, and lots and lots of Jamie Smart silliness to giggle at.

Pages 4 to 7 are the main feature - Harry Hill's adventures in TV Land, written by the man himself and drawn by the always funny Nigel Parkinson. It's really quite good - Harry Hill is a funny man, although I'm not sure whether the target audience really know who he is or like him all that much, seeing as he's more of an adult comedian who just thinks he appeals to children. It's still funny - jokes about Simon Cowell's trousers were passé ten years ago, but his trouser factory staffed by "boy-band slaves" is a great scene. It might catch on.

Page 8 is "The Mighty Bork", in which a little blue alien comes to Earth and demands ice cream. Artist not credited. It's filler stuff, and this is an introductory story which doesn't give much clue as to what's going to happen in future issues.

Page 9 is the first of several pages of quarter-page, 3-panel strips - a feature of the Dandy in its very earliest days, but not the kind of thing that have been seen lately. "Simples! 101 Ways To Use A Meerkat" is funny, the Phantom Pharter isn't, "Noel Or No Noel" over the course of the issue uses up three of the limited number of ways to contrive a phrase that rhymes with 'Deal or no Deal', so I hope it's not going to reappear in every issue, and "Dr. Doctor!" is an old doctor-doctor joke with weird artwork that doesn't really match the joke that the words are telling.

Page 10 is "Kid Cops" by Lew Stringer (another comic creator I've mentioned once or twice before as being one of my heroes). Bobby and Sergeant Nick are the titular characters, who take revenge on the man from the council who's designed a new fun-park that's safe but no fun. Reminds me of "Kids' Court" in the Whoopee in years gone by, which was funnier, but this is good too. Lew Stringer seems to be working with someone else's character designs for the lead characters, it doesn't look like something he's made up himself, which is a bit strange. I think this is going to be one of the more readable parts of the comic, all in all.

Page 11 treats us to a full-page wanted poster for the Phantom Pharter. Enough said, but there's some non-toilet-humour Smart-style silliness around the edges at least.

Page 12 is "The Bogies", a carry-over from Dandy Xtreme which the new-look comic could frankly do without.

Page 13 sees a new take on Dandy stalwart Bananaman. Artwork by him-whose-name-I-can't-remember is not good, and it's not really funny. Maybe it'll improve, because old Mr X can be funny when he really tries.

Page 14, "Count Snotula" by Duncan Scott is, well, more bogies. It does end with the title character being punched in the nose and bleeding, which is quite surprising.

Page 15 is a fake advert of the new iDad, which is actually quite funny. Something different that the Dandy hasn't done before!

Page 16-17, the middle pages (usually reserved for the most hyped strip in a comic bar the front-cover star) is Jamie Smart's "Pre-Skool Prime Minister", which is wonderful. Premise: When everyone grew tired of grown-up politics, a radical new approach was taken... In this issue, the entire world declares war on Britain because they think it's a bit ridiculous to have a four-year-old PM. So does the Defence Minister, but the PM resolves this by launching him out of a big cannon. It's a must-read, believe me.

Page 18 is a Halloween-themed Jamie Smart puzzle page. His art alone makes it worth reading. A maze (Scary Cynthia owns four snakes, but which one is eating her foot?) winds its way around the page, mixing up the other puzzles. You don't get this kind of thing in other comics.

Page 19 is more of those 3-panel strips. Use a meerkat to clean your chimney (not many kids live in houses with chimneys that need sweeping any more, you know), more Phantom Pharter, "squeal or no squeal", and a fun fact about the chicken that crossed the road. Incidentally, the black banners containing the title of each of these strips have lots of little speech bubbles saying ha-ha, hee-hee etc written in black on a black background, which I suspect might have been intended to be more visible than they are.

Page 20, "Shao Lin Punks", a sort of manga-style silly strip is another piece of bland filler by an unknown artist.

Page 21 gives us "Little Simon", the adventures of a young Simon Cowell, by Nigel Parkinson again. It's okay for what it is.

Page 22 is cut-out Celebrity Halloween Disguises, without as many doodles around the edges as I might have expected.

Page 23, "Robot on the Run" is the page that made me laugh in the newsagent's - the artist is Alexander Matthews, but if it's not written by Jamie Smart then it's a perfect and hilarious imitation of his unique sense of humour. The world's first robot is reactivated in the year 5173 (in Ipswich) and, on learning that crisps don't exist any more ("Do you still have crisps in the year 5173? I can't eat crisps being a robot, but I like to look at them. Especially the ones with ridges." "I'm afraid not. Crisps were banned more than a thousand years ago when a really big one fell on the President of the World and slightly hurt him."), goes on the run. I love it.

Page 24 is Lew Stringer's "Postman Prat", who attempts to deliver a skateboard, a dozen eggs and a priceless vase, with predictable results. Slapstick is always funny, but you have to wonder if this is going to be the theme of every week's story...

Page 25 is a peculiar "What's in Cheryl's Hair today?" picture - Harry Hill's style of comedy that I suspect will be a bit lost on young readers.

Page 26 is the funniest advert for subscriptions to a comic that I've ever seen, by far (and Viz has done some good ones over the years). It's that man Smart again, permeating the whole Dandy with his silliness.

Page 27 is "George vs Dragon" by Andy Fanton of occasional-Viz-artist fame. A sort of Road-Runnerish chase strip, which might become a bit of a classic.

Page 28, "Pepperoni Pig" by what's-his-name is the adventures of a pizza-delivery-pig pursued by the Big Bad Wolf. Rather silly, if unexceptional.

Page 29 is our last page of three-panel comics, notable for featuring no Phantom Pharter, his place being taken by "Korky the Cat". Korky is an interesting character - his popularity peaked in the early-forties heyday of funny-animal comics, but he's hung around the Dandy in one form or another ever since, somehow. This latest version, reduced to a quarter of a page, bad art and the kind of joke that was old when the Dandy was new, is weird.

Page 30 is Desperate Dan, unchanged from the Dandy Xtreme but now fitting in much better with the rest of the comic. He desires a giant sausage. It's silly and funny, as always. I honestly can't get enough Jamie Smart.

Page 31 tells us what's coming next week, with more silly doodles running around the page.

And the back cover is the comic's only advert - for a Ben 10 video game. Even this page is invaded by a meerkat doodle in the bottom corner.

All in all - good stuff! I think this has made me a Dandy buyer (as opposed to a reader-of-the-Dandy-in-newsagents'-so-I-can-complain-that-it's-not-funny-any-more), and I'm sure it'll do the same for jaded youngsters around the country! Just phase out the Bogies, the Pharter and the celebrities, and we've got a winner!

More news from China

I can't remember whether I linked to the awesome promotional video for the World Memory Championship. I have a feeling that I forgot to, but you can see it if you go to the website here. While you're there, go on, register to take part in the championship if you haven't already - the hotel is inexpensive, and you can probably get cheapish flights, too (I'm supposed to be getting my flights and accommodation for free, so I haven't checked. I have accountants who pay for it all.)

I also notice that I've had lots of pageviews from China today - beating perennial second-placers the USA into third (although the majority of my blog's views come from my dedicated army of weird British friends, as always). I thought you couldn't even see Blogger from China, but maybe I was wrong. Hello, China! I'm looking forward to visiting you! I'm going to do really terribly in the competition, but this is not down to any kind of disrespect for your country!

(I really do worry about offending people by coming to a memory competition and not winning in spectacular style. I'm not sure whether that's vanity or excessive politeness.)

Ukulele, I kelele, we all kelele

I tell you, I'll be the World Ukulele Champion yet. But perhaps not the World Memory Champion this year. Still, maybe I'll get back into training tomorrow. I did shuffle some cards yesterday in preparation...

Time to dig out the hot water bottle

Cold today! Can we have the World Memory Championship this weekend instead? It's 25 degrees in Guangzhou at the moment, apparently. I mean, I'd lose horribly and be embarrassed about it, but at least it'd be hot outside.

Anyway, I feel that I have to wildly rave about today's episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures, featuring Jo Grant. It was just awesome, and Doctor Who fans everywhere are loving it, I'm sure.

Rude words

The TV channel 'Gold' bleeps out the word "bastard" whenever it appears in the old seventies/eighties sitcoms they repeat. I just think that's weird - I thought swear-words were less offensive nowadays, not more. It's just "bastard", too, they leave "sod off" and, I think, "bugger" intact. Perhaps someone at Gold is just over-sensitive about that word. Perhaps the editor-in-chief there is in fact a bastard themself? I should write to them and ask.

News from Germany

Okay, I'm sorry for the hiatus in bloggery. I didn't want to blog anything until I'd done some proper memory training, as promised in my last post, but now I've just given up on the whole idea, because it's obviously not going to happen. I'm almost as bad now as I was in 2005, when I didn't look at a pack of cards or a page of binary digits for a whole year, and it's all the more unfortunate since I've already agreed to take part in the two major memory competitions of the year, in Germany and China, over the next couple of months. I'm just going to "pull a Doctor Mindbender"* and then maybe find some motivation to win the title back next year.

*"Pull a Doctor Mindbender": To only fail and humiliate oneself - a phrase in common use among me and my brother, ever since we saw the Action Force cartoon 'Arise Serpentor Arise' in which Cobra Commander predicts that Doctor Mindbender will do just that. I sometimes use the phrase in everyday conversation, forgetting that it hasn't yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. See also:

"Tune in the geo-analyser": To take credit for an action that has in fact been carried out by someone else - after the scene in the Thundercats episode 'Lord of the Snows', in which Tygra proclaims "I'll tune in the geo-analyser" and then stands motionless in the middle of the room while Panthro, seated at the controls, tunes in the geo-analyser. This phrase can (and should) be used in the most highbrow and educated discussions - for example: "Magellan posthumously tuned in the geo-analyser, but in fact the first people to circumnavigate the globe were those members of his crew who didn't die half-way around."

But to return to more sane topics, can I please urge everybody to take part in the German Memo Masters, on 12 and 13 November in Heilbronn, Germany? You don't have to be German, nor a Memo Master, to take part, but it's a huge, important and fun memory competition, it's usually the one single event in the calendar with the most world records and the closest competition between the world's best memorisers, and translations into the language of your choice are available at request. Drop an email to Klaus at info@ggk.de for any details (in German, English or maybe even another language or two if you're lucky) and once again, please do come along. They're looking for more international participants!

Meanwhile, here's something fun - Japan are now the Unofficial Football World Champions, having beaten Argentina in a friendly game, and it seems likely that this prestigious and fascinating title will be passed around small Asian nations for the next few months, which is quite awesome. Sadly, you can't really do a UFWC-style thing with memory competitions - or rather, you can, but it's no different from the official world champion.

In other news, I'm suffering cherry coke withdrawal symptoms. I think I'm going to have to go out and buy some.

News from China

Sorry I haven't blogged for the last few days - I've been either wallowing in clinical depression or just being lazy, I'm not quite sure which, and haven't been getting anything done.

But anyway, Yuan Wenkui has kindly sent me the full results from the Chinese Memory Championship, and it makes interesting reading. The Chinese, in a very sensible policy that other countries should adopt, have a national championship in exactly the same format as the world championship, so it's easy to see who's on form and likely to do well in December.

The only world-championship-threatening score was from Wang Feng, who won comfortably with 7723 points (ever-so-slightly worse than my winning scores in 2008 and 2009 but better than anyone else has ever done, I think) - his closest rival was Yuan, more than two thousand points behind. The likes of Su Ruiqiao (who, even though he finished behind Wang at last year's WMC, I tend to think of as the biggest danger) don't seem to have been there.

Although it's hard to be 100% certain who was there, because the results spreadsheet and website, naturally enough, use Chinese characters, and I can't find a website that translates Chinese names into the Roman alphabet. So I used a couple of online translators designed for translating text, which naturally render any Chinese name that's also a common word as that word rather than the name. One competitor is apparently called either 'front blue' or 'Blue expensive', while another is 'the week presently to advocate' or 'Zhou is now the main', depending on which translation service you use. The entrant who one translator sensibly calls Fang Zijie is called 'prescription outstanding' by the other. Still, I managed to work out who all the top competitors really are without too much trouble.

Anyway, Wang Feng (who is young, handsome, cool and would be adored by the Chinese media if he does win the world championship in December) was apparently satisfied with his performance in everything except the hour-long marathons. He was aiming for a world record in hour numbers but only ended up with 1480 (which is exactly the kind of thing that I always do, too), and attempted 22 packs of cards but finished up with 15½. These are both perfectly acceptable scores, especially the hour numbers, but we can probably safely assume that he could do better. In binary he got 3048, which is significant because few people get over 3000, for some reason; in names he got 99, which is of course better than I ever get (and judging by the relatively low scores, the names and faces weren't particularly easy ones); 249 in images, 340 in speed numbers, 70 in dates, 132 in words, 136 in spoken numbers - a very consistently good performance all round - and finished with a flourish with 25.73 seconds in speed cards!

This is the kind of performance that I can beat if, and only if, I'm at my very best. And, as I keep whining, I'm nowhere near my very best at the moment. If I can buckle down and do some really heavy training from now until December, then it's possible, but I'd have to work really, really, really hard at it. So let's see how I get on...

No, that sounds too negative. Positive thinking from this moment on! I WILL do lots of training this weekend, and I'll tell you all about it in my blog!

I should also be Liverpool manager

Or else a sports journalist. Everyone's quoting the statistic that they're having their worst start to a season for 57 years, meaning 1953-54 when they finished bottom of the old first division and were relegated, but to my mind their worst start was the following year, when they were in the second division and, struggling with the novelty of being outside the top flight for the first time since 1905, ended up in 11th place.

The really fun thing is that for the following six years after that, Liverpool fell frustratingly short of being promoted back to division one. It was two-up-two-down in those days, no play-offs, and they came 3rd, 3rd, 4th, 4th, 3rd and 3rd before finally getting back up in 1962. Imagine if history repeated itself! Would the Man Utd fans be able to sustain their jeering for so many years?

The annoying thing, statistically speaking, is that they've only been in the top flight for 47 consecutive years, rather than the 48 that it was last time round. Unless they survive the drop this season but do even worse next year, I suppose.

I used to be a Liverpool fan when I was young, because they always won. Consequently I feel betrayed now.

Cheesecake and cherry coke

I'm sadly and hopelessly addicted to these comestibles at the moment. It's not a good thing. Perhaps I should move to Sweden, where cherry coke seems to be unheard-of. I occasionally go through lengthy spells of just drinking water - the first time, I think, was back in 2003 or so, when I had no job and even less money and realised I was spending a small fortune on coke - but I always end up getting back into the habit again. There should be carbonated-caffeine-patches that you can stick on your arms.

I'm also extremely fat, and I still haven't got all that much money (been spending too much on books and Sweden lately) and coke does give me heartburn and is probably ushering me into an early grave, and I'm fairly sure there's an inverse correlation between the amount of coke I drink and the amount of memory training I do, but I don't seem able to stop. Cheesecake is yummy too.

I should be England manager

Watching the tail-end of "Can England Win The Next World Cup", and Gary Lineker thinks we need to invest in coaches and things to develop new players for the future. What nonsense. We've got plenty of good players, we just need to pick a team based not on who's an individual superstar, but on the best combination of eleven players who can work together well. I'm telling you, give me the job and we'll win every time. Also, it will save money, because I work for peanuts.

On another note, I should be prime minister. I could do both jobs, international football tournaments are held during the parliamentary summer recess.

Trousers

There are a couple of trouser-related things I felt that I should record in my blog. Because let's face it, there isn't nearly enough information on the internet about my trousers, and we urgently need to redress the balance.

On Thursday, as part of the team-building exercises that have been taking up a lot of my time at work lately (and which I won't comment on in case someone from work is reading this), we went out to a pub for lunch, and I had the hottest, fresh-from-the-microwave lasagne I've ever been stupid enough to put in my mouth. "Gah! It's melting my tongue!" I quipped after noticing the temperature just after putting a forkful in my mouth, much to the amusement of my colleagues. I then put my knife down in a way that somehow caused it to cartwheel up in the air and flick a huge amount of lasagne down my shirt and onto my trouser leg. "Gah, now I've got lasagne all over my trousers!" I observed. "AAAAAH! BOILING HOT LASAGNE!" I then yelled quite loudly as the temperature penetrated the thin fabric and forced me to wipe it off in a painful panic. Really, you can't take me anywhere, and my boss would be well-advised to remember this in future.

Another thing about my good work trousers is that there's a big hole in the bum, and people were starting to notice it at the office. So today I put on my best casual trousers (which incidentally have an even bigger hole in the bum) and went to the finest purveyors of clothing in Nottingham (excluding shops that don't give all their proceeds to cancer research) to buy myself some new ones. I found a nice and stylish pair of work trousers in a shade that matches my jacket, and a good pair of casual jeans-type-things-that-aren't-technically-jeans-as-such to wear in non-working situations. However, the latter turn out to have huge holes in both pockets, so I either need to fix them (not really going to happen) or only wear them on occasions where I don't need to carry any money, keys etc with me.

I would take them back to the shop and ask for my £3.65 back (along with maybe an explanation of how they chose that weird price), but the till was manned today by a woman who seemed to be in her eighties and who couldn't work the fancy electronic till, despite the alternately helpful and unhelpful instructions from two other workers crowding around her, so the simple sale transaction took about half an hour and I dread to think how long a refund process would have taken.

Still, a woman in Burger King recognised me from the telly and said hello, without even commenting on the state of my trousers, so perhaps I'm just attaching too much importance to the role that trousers play in every aspect of my life.

Curse the Swedish Mafia!

My bank saw fit to stop my debit card working, because I'd gone to Sweden without telling them and spent somewhere in the region of £25, so they assumed my card had been stolen. I did explain that going into the bank and explaining that I'd still got the card had caused me a lot more inconvenience than I would have suffered if the card had really been stolen by Swedish master criminals, but they assured me that the swift and decisive action by the fraud team (judging by the phone call made by Charlotte at the bank, this team is based in India and speaks very little English) was for my own protection and I should be jolly well grateful. I feel like I ought to demolish the bank with a bulldozer or something, just to show them how annoyed I am. I'd close my account and move my money somewhere else, but I'm pretty sure that every bank in the country uses the services of the same non-anglophone fraud team.

Also, there's a TV advert for Andrex that describes it as "soft, strong and unbeatably long," with small print at the bottom of the screen saying "excluding longer lasting/double roll products". So, it's unbeatably long if you exclude anything that lasts longer? I'm going to describe myself as the world memory champion, excluding those with better memories, from December onwards!

And what's more, it's the weekend and a friend in America has sent me DVDs of all but two episodes of Pocket Dragon Adventures to watch! And I've got the other two on video, so as and when I get round to working how to convert videos into DVDs, I'll be able to circulate a complete set around all the other Pocket Dragon fans in the world! (Except that there are only the two of us, as far as I know)

I know that last one wasn't really a complaint as such, but I wanted to finish on a more cheerful note.

Hold that tiger

Just for those readers who come to my blog hoping to find posts championing racism in reprinted comics, I thought I'd share another minor-adjustment-for-logistical-reasons from the Oor Wullie compilations, which came to light as a result of my recent splurging on old comicky things.

Original from February 9, 1941 (as reprinted in a 1989 wartime souvenir special I found on eBay)

As reprinted in "The Broons and Oor Wullie - The Early Years" in 2006:



I mean, really. Is this any the more acceptable for tippexing out the words "Hold dat tiger"? Judging by how often it shows up in Betty Boop cartoons, the Tiger Rag was a very popular tune of the time, and I hadn't really thought of it as being one with any racial connotations until I saw this comic. But the inclusion of a black kid in this one is interesting, because by this point Wullie's gang had settled down to just Bob and Soapy, and we very rarely saw them hanging out or forming bands with anyone else. For a while, a year or so earlier, it looked like Joe (who wore glasses and a flat cap) would become a permanent sidekick, but he didn't quite have enough staying power, and the gang remained exclusive until Wee Eck muscled his way in a bit later on. And nowadays, political correctness being what it is, Primrose is a fully paid-up gang member too - how long before Scotland's modern multi-ethnic society demands representation again?

The Glass Box of Gothenburg

So, I flew into Landvetter airport on Friday afternoon, to find someone waiting for me with a sign saying "Mr Ben", who chauffeured me to the tournament venue. As venues go, it was just plain awesome - just inside the main entrance to a gigantic book fair full of people who crowded around our glass box to watch what we were doing. It was like being in a zoo, or at least in the kind of zoo that Ayumu lives in. There was also full coverage in Swedish newspapers and radio broadcasts and things, so perhaps everyone in Sweden will want to take part next year!

Here's an interesting thing about Sweden, incidentally - they show a lot of British and American programmes on TV over there, subtitled. And funnily enough, on the Simpsons, even Bumblebee Man's Spanish is translated into Swedish! So any watcher unversed in both languages would think that Bumblebee Man is speaking the same language as all the other characters.

Anyway, suffice to say that I was hopeless all throughout the competition, much as I'd expected. And Simon Reinhard was entirely non-hopeless, so he beat me hands down. This is probably a good thing for me, because while I was generally poor in London, I didn't have any complete disasters, and I did have at least one in Gothenburg - in ten-minute cards, I tried for eight packs and ended up only getting one.

They arranged the speed cards for maximum spectator entertainment, with me, Boris and Simon in one group, lined up in front of the glass windows, and all the others (nine of them) thereafter. It was still technically possible for me to win if I did under 30 seconds and Simon didn't memorise anything, but we all just went for fast times without any of this namby-pamby "playing it safe" stuff. However, we possibly disappointed the watching masses when we all three of us failed to remember a pack of cards twice in a row. They were cheered up again, though, when Swedish newcomer Florian Minges did a pack in an extremely groovy one-minute-nineteen or so.

Full results can probably be found on the all-new statistics website here, along with the world ranking list and all the awesomeness of statistics from 19 years of memory competitions!

I must say, that I'm really hugely fired up, enthusiastic and motivated today... about playing the ukulele. Last night has really put me in the mood to be musical. I don't seem to have any enthusiasm about memory training, though...

A lapse of memory

Actually, my account of the Swedish memory championship will have to wait until tomorrow, because I'd forgotten that tonight's the night I was planning to go to the first meeting of the Nottingham Ukulele Club. Who would have thought that there were so many people in Nottingham who are interested in ukuleles? The room was jam-packed! I'll become a musician yet!

The Swedish Book Store

My account of the Swedish Memory Open will have to wait until tomorrow, because it's late, but the innovative venue in the middle of Scandinavia's biggest book fair certainly got us more spectators than any memory competition in history! It's just a shame I was so rubbish, really. Still, I picked up enough Swedish from all those books to be able to communicate with any Swedish dog (voff! vov!) or cat (mjau!). Next time I visit, I'll try to improve my grasp of the language to two-year-old human levels.

Unprepared

Flying to Gothenburg tomorrow (must make some effort to call it Göteborg while I'm there), haven't packed bags, worked out where exactly I'm going or done any training. So can't blog at length. See you Tuesday, unless you're going to be there this weekend.

Ultimate Grand Master!

You become a 'Grand Master of Memory' by memorising 1000 digits in an hour, 10 packs of cards in an hour, and a single pack of cards in two minutes. It's comparatively easy, and lots of people have done it.

What nobody has ever done, yet, is become a Double Grand Master (a title which I have just this moment made up), by successfully memorising 2000 digits, 20 packs of cards and a 1-minute pack. That should be my ambition, really. I'm constantly frustrated by my inability to get 2000 in hour numbers, and it really gets annoying after a few years. So perhaps I'll devote my every waking hour to achieving that. Or maybe I'll just spend all my time lying around doing nothing, as usual. We'll see.

Possibly I'll change the definition of "Double Grand Master" by making it 1000 digits in 30 minutes, and 10 packs in 30 minutes, because if I do that, I'm one already. I'll put the initials after my name.

(Having written that, I had to go and look up who else is a DGM. It's me, Gunther, Hannes and Cornelia. Simon, the Deutsche Gedächtnis Meister, only has a best of 985 in 30-minute numbers)

In other news, I need new trousers. The pair of trousers that I think of as 'my only decently wearable pair' are actually decidedly indecent in the rear, thanks to a big ripped hole where I caught them on something sharp protruding from my bike. I ought to get some more before I go to Sweden. I don't like buying clothes, I tend to just hope that people will buy them for me...

But you're such a charming, handsome man

A reader has complained that it's a long time since I blogged about being handsome. I actually don't think I've ever blogged about that, but if that's what my loyal readership want, who am I to complain? I am, after all, quite devastatingly handsome. And an article in the Washington Post agrees! Well, the (mostly) flattering article doesn't technically call me handsome, but it does say I'm "smartly clad in a fedora and a faded cartoon T-shirt", which shows a degree of sartorial appreciation unusual in anyone, let alone American newspapers!

Anyway, if I haven't mentioned it before, I'm taking my handsomeness and cartoon T-shirts to Gothenburg on Friday, there to test my faded memory techniques against some people who are really quite good at it and will doubtless kick my ass, metaphorically speaking. It promises to be a great weekend!

Groundhog Day

It's a really wonderful film. One of those ones you can watch over and over again, appropriately enough.

Actually, life is just like that when you're voluntarily unemployed. I was just thinking that I've been a productive member of society for much too long now - I'm starting to come across as a normal person. Perhaps I ought to abandon all worldly posessions and go and live in a cave for a while. A nice warm cave with central heating and an internet connection, obviously.

On the other hand, someone mistook me for a student today - I was out cycling this morning and noticed huge swarms of people crowding into the university campus, so I rode through there and someone with a microphone asked me if I was a fresher just moving in. Which was quite flattering. Must have been the Blue Peter badge.

Speaking of which, I suspect my new nice badge fell off the back of a lorry - the person who sold it to me on eBay is obviously selling lots of them under multiple alisases, it's some kind of master criminal organisation, I can tell. But still, I don't care, I've got a badge again!