3706 down, 46294 to go

And I worked that out in my head, too. And then corrected it when I realised I'd got it wrong. Anyway, I promise that this is the only time I'll start a blog post with "x down, y to go", seeing as everyone else who's doing NaNoWriMo is doubtless doing exactly the same thing in their own blogs (all of which are no doubt much more worth reading than mine). But anyway, I've got started. Not a huge amount, but enough for me to be happy with.

I'm not saying it's good writing, but I am secretly thinking it. It's not as bad as I thought it would be, anyway. And I think I have cracked the whole writer's block thing, anyway (thanks Josh for the advice!)

I'm still not going to let anybody read the finished product, though. It's not THAT good.

Act Naturally

Okay, check THIS out! "Paramount Pictures has acquired screen rights to the Joshua Foer book "Moonwalking With Einstein" in a preemptive deal and will develop it as a potential directing vehicle for Nacho Libre scribe Mike White.

Variety says the book is set for publication by Penguin in late 2009, and the rights to it were auctioned on the basis of a proposal.

Foer is writing his own story. A young journalist who discovered there was a world of competitive memorizers, Foer spent a year learning the techniques and became a competitor who won both the U.S. and World Memory Championships."

Now, if we ignore for a moment the involvement of the Nacho Libre guy, who would presumably interpret it as a hilarious gross-out comedy subtitled "War of the Nerds", I think there's definitely potential in turning that (future bestselling) book into a movie. Obviously, as the paragraphs above suggest, we'd need to make a few alterations to the way things actually happened, such as changing things so that Josh in fact won the World Memory Championship last year, and to make it more realistic there'd have to be a bit of added action, drama and sex, of course. And I'd have to be the bad guy, because in American movies it's the law that the Englishman is the villain. So I think it would go something like this:

Intrepid reporter Joshua Foer (Brad Pitt) uncovers evidence of a major terrorist conspiracy within the World Memory Championship. To investigate, he enlists the help of eccentric scientist Edward Cooke (Eric Idle) and gorgeous Austrian memory expert, swimsuit model and part-time secret agent Astrid Plessl (Nicole Kidman) to train as a memory master. [I don't think Josh has ever met Astrid, but every movie needs a love interest] After a variety of high-speed car chases, naked wrestling and reciting pi to 100,000 places, it turns out that the villain isn't sinister cult leader Tony Buzan (Ian McKellen) or macho German mastermind Clemens Mayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger), but snide nasty English memory man Ben Pridemore (Alan Rickman) who has memorised the zillion-figure code to hack into the world's nuclear arsenals and blow up the President of the USA. Fortunately, in a tense finale, Joshua recalls that during training he memorised the zillion-and-three-figure code to turn the nuclear missiles back off again. He recites it flawlessly, and in the process wins the World Memory Championships as well as saving the world.

I expect royalties for this.

I can't write!

Dagnabbit, this whole NaNoWriMo thing was meant to be a fun little exercise in breaking down my inhibitions and forcing myself to write a serious book, but I've got a terminal case of writer's block. Or do you have to actually have written something before it counts as writer's block? Okay, possibly I've got non-writer's block, but whatever the diagnosis, my muse is clammed up like... well, like a clam, I suppose. When did you last see a book written by a clam on the Sunday Times bestseller list? 1997, I think it was. And that was only at number six.

See, I can write things like that with no problem, but the idea here was to write something in a different kind of style, to broaden my interior horizons and make me a more well-rounded writer. And it's not working. Okay, technically it's only the 9th of November and I've got plenty of time to get cracking and still churn out the required word count, but the outlook is pretty bleak at the moment.

Other things I did on my holiday

I woke up on Monday morning realising that I'd composed a truly beautiful tribute song to Peter Cook, to the tune of "Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs" as background music for a dream. I should maybe record it and make millions, although the lyrics I can remember didn't actually make any sense and certainly didn't relate to Pete Cook's life in any way.

Also while I was in Germany, I found a couple of minutes to write a side and a half of A4 of my NaNoWriMo novel. Narrow ruled paper, and I write quite small, but it's still quite a way behind schedule, especially since I haven't written anything since I got back home. I'll start on it properly once I've written this blog entry, I promise.

What I did on my winter holidays

As best I can recall, the whole adventure started last Thursday. The flight was at 9:20, which meant getting up early in order to get down to Birmingham in good time, but not excessively so. For some reason, I was unusually nervous about getting on the plane, and I have no idea why. On the train, I was contemplating going back home until a magpie persuaded me otherwise (I'm superstitious about magpies in a way that I've made up myself - if I see a single magpie while I'm thinking of doing something, I don't do it. If I see two, I do it. You'd be surprised how many major decisions in my life have been influenced by magpies. But apart from that, I'm perfectly normal). At the airport, there seemed to be a lot of announcements calling for people who hadn't got on the planes and were about to have their luggage taken back out of the hold and dumped somewhere, so perhaps nerves about flying was being caused by a virus going around. Anyway, I did get on the plane and nothing happened, so nyah.

I travelled down to Gießen with no problems - as I've mentioned before, I love German trains, and especially the multilingual ticket machines that tell you not just which trains to get, but even which platform they'll all leave from. It's just so much cooler than the British system of just pulling into a random platform and leaving the passengers to guess. I had the afternoon to look around, and concluded that Gießen is a really great city. It's small but has a big university, which presumably accounts for the disporportionate number of bookshops. And yes, I like German bookshops. I can read the language quite well, I just can't speak it. Discovered the most absolutely hilarious series of books - "Nichtlustig", by Joscha Sauer. There's a website too. What there isn't, and really should be, is an English edition - I'm going to make it my mission to translate all the cartoons and try to get it published over here. It wouldn't be too difficult - only a handful of them are based on untranslatable plays on words, and I think people the world over need to be introduced to the stark raving mad Herr Riebmann and the unfortunate man whose wall he lives in, the mad scientists, the creatively suicidal lemmings, the yetis and Frank the octopus, the poodle of Death and the array of other characters who populate it.

But I was talking about what I did in Germany, rather than what I read. And I thought it was a lovely city, very pretty and scenic. I seem to be in the minority in this, because even the tour guide the next day seemed to think it was some kind of concrete nightmare. I obviously have no taste for architecture - I like Coventry too, if it comes to that. Anyway, I was staying in a pleasant hotel called the Hotel Köhler, as were pretty much all the other competitors in the Mental Calculation World Cup. Three of them said hello to me when they saw me, forcing me to have a cheerful conversation with them without giving away the fact that I couldn't remember their names. Things got a lot less socially awkward when we got to the Mathematikum and got our name badges.

The Mathematikum is something that the city of Gießen apparently takes great pride in - it's a mathemuseum, I suppose you'd call it, basically full of exhibits designed to persuade children that maths is fun. I liked it, but then I've always liked maths anyway (and a lot of the exhibits were only very tangentially related to anything mathematical). There's a very cool chaos pendulum. Also, there's a big conference room, where the World Cup was to take place. It started with a meal on the Thursday night, refreshingly not consisting entirely of potatoes this time, then a magical mystery tour of the city on Friday.

This tour was long and often surprisingly interesting. We circled the town centre a couple of times in the bus while the tour guide pointed out the few bits and pieces that weren't destroyed in the war (I felt like I should apologise on behalf of the Allies), then went out to the ruined monastery and castle on top of two of the surrounding hills. Those were extremely cool. Although the most entertaining part of the tour was Beate Bischler's guide dog, who is the work hard, play hard kind of working dog and spent the tour running wildly around with a stick the size of a small tree, daring people to try to take it from him.

Then it was back to the Mathematikum for Ralf Laue's lecture on memory techniques (preceded by me trying, and spectacularly failing, to memorise 270 binary digits in a minute), and then the Freestyle Show, where various brave competitors and visitors demonstrated a trick involving calculation or numbers. I had another go at the one minute binary, and didn't do any better this time round. There were about thirteen other performances, including Boris Konrad (who was there as a judge in between organising the memory competition for Sunday) doing speed stacking, Matthias Kesselschläger doing calendar calculations faster than is humanly possible, Ulrich Voight demonstrating pi memory and finishing with Rüdiger Gamm doing by far the most impressive act.

I've seen it before, at the last WCMC, but it's still darn cool. He asks the audience for a two-digit number and raises it to the tenth power. Then another one to the 13th, then another to the 20th, then another to the 50th. By which time we're talking dozens of digits in the answer. It always goes down well with the crowd. What's more, it's something I could do - and by that I mean it's something that I couldn't possibly do, but could do if I had the time, dedication and attitude you need for something like that, because it's not a calculation trick like it looks, it's memory. And it involves memorising fewer digits than I did of pi, it looks a lot more impressive, and it's the kind of thing I should look at doing when someone next asks me for a performance, rather than live memorisation in front of an audience, which I quite clearly can't do.

There was a prize for the best performance, based on audience applause. Rüdiger being there made it easy for the spectators - since everybody in the room was clearly in agreement that he was best, they could just give everybody a big hand and then double it for him.

That just left the actual competition to do, on the Saturday. I overslept and missed the photo session at the start, but got there in time to catch the first round. I wasn't the only memory guy competing this time - there was also Melik Duyar from Turkey, who competed in the WMC in 1994 and 1999, and Alexander Drygalla, who like me was doing the insane two competitions, two cities, two days thing. Also there were Robert Fountain, the only other British competitor (like last time - we really need to get more British people out to these things), plus Gert Mittring and Jan van Koningsveld, who between them are pretty much the elite of the mental calculation competition world. 26 competitors in all, which is a lot more than the first one. Hopefully it'll continue to grow.

I did really badly, but then I hadn't been practising as much as I did in 2004, so I've got a sort of excuse. An interesting thing about mental calculation competitions like this one is that it's expected that there will be 'suprise' tasks, where you don't know what kind of mental calculation will be involved. Compare that to memory competitions, which always lay out in advance exactly what will be memorised, and in what format. The first surprise task this year was addition and subtraction of fractions (very uninspired - that's one of the examples of surprise tasks listed in the rules!), but the second was a cool idea - you're given random four-digit numbers and have to name the lowest prime number higher than each. I liked it, although I wasn't any good at it.

Mental calculators, much more than memorisers, like to wander around talking to each other about their own particular speciality, and can often be seen scribbling numbers on pieces of paper to illustrate their point. Everyone has a different area of interest, but there's enough overlap that everyone else finds it fascinating too. It's a very social kind of thing.

Anyway, I ended up 13th out of 26 - top half, which is the kind of thing I was aiming for. Alexander was 12th, Robert won again (and said he was just lucky, presumably for the second time in a row). So after the prizegiving it was straight down to Stuttgart for part two of the weekend's entertainment. Well, almost straight down - one of the trains was late by about ten minutes! I was horrified. The Holiday Inn is about fifteen minutes out of town by the local trains, in Weilimdorf. The S-Bahn ends in "Weil der Stadt", which makes me think "Because the town what?". I got there at a reasonable kind of time and got a good night's sleep.

The first MemoryXL Open Memory Championship, as opposed to the German Open Memory Championship which didn't happen this year (politics), had twenty competitors, including Clemens, Gunther, Boris, Cornelia and Johannes, which has to count as a world-class field. Also Corinna from Austria, and my regular blog-readers Mike Smauley and Simon Reinhard, among others. Actually, as it turned out practicallly all of the mental calculation and memory people are avid readers of this thing now. Fame at last.

Boris had set everything up, but because he was competing himself the task of creating the stuff to be memorised, and generally running the show, fell to Phil Chambers and Gabby Kappus, who did a fantastic job, aided and abetted by a team of volunteers. We had some major delays towards the end, just when I was thinking we were doing really well for being only an hour behind schedule, but nothing out of the ordinary. My performance was surprisingly awful. I was never really in contention, and ended up a long way behind the leaders. I don't seem to be able to bring out my best in a competition any more. That's something I'll go into more detail about at a later date, because I think it merits a whole post to itself (I like talking about myself, you see).

The real excitement of the competition was Cornelia versus Clemens - although in fact Johannes took the early lead in five minute words with 81, Cornelia had 80, which after she'd done a really impressive 751 in five-minute binary gave her a clear lead. Gunther wasn't on his best form either, but he did 726. Clemens struck back with names and faces, one of his specialist subjects, and a new world record of 71, followed by a 680 in 15-minute numbers. Cornelia was right behind him in both though, and still safely in the lead. This isn't the kind of thing Clemens is used to lately, and maybe the pressure affected him for once in ten-minute cards, when he only got two packs. In ten-minute cards I produced my only good score of the competition, doing six packs without any difficulty. That actually pushed me up to third place, but it didn't last. I had a disastrous 140 in speed numbers (Clemens got 260 and Cornelia 258, with Gunther top-scoring with 320), then Clemens had the top score in abstract images, and again outpointed Cornelia in historic dates (although Johannes notched up a fantastic 86 to steal the show), before getting the best result in spoken numbers, albeit with a low-by-his-standards 100. That left Cornelia a mere 50 points or so ahead with just speed cards to go.

While I was faffing about trying 33-second packs and making a mess of it both times, Clemens did 49.8 seconds to really throw down the gauntlet, and although Cornelia managed a one minute pack in the second attempt, it still wasn't quite enough to keep up with him. So Clemens's winning run continues unabated, Cornelia's second place suggests that she might be a candidate to finally end it next year, Gunther came third, Boris fourth and Johannes fifth. I was sixth, which gets me a medal with a 6 on it (there's always lots of prizes at German competitions), but not a trophy to squeeze into my rucksack. And Boris said they'd got small ones just for my benefit, too. Ah well. Simon was just fractionally behind me in seventh. It could have been worse, I suppose.

Proper travelogue or disorganised ramblings?

That's the dilemma facing me at the moment. It's ten past nine and I've just found out that South Park is on telly for the next hour, and two episodes I haven't seen before, too. Balanced against that is the fact that I really need to write about what I've been doing for the last five days, and if I'm going to do it justice I really ought to spend some time actually writing, rather than letting my fingers bounce randomly around the keyboard while I've got both eyes on the idiot box.

Nope, sorry, TV too compelling, got to get up tomorrow morning and go to stupid work. Tomorrow I'll write proper stuff. Rather than writing that book that I'm already so behind on.

Anyway, coming back today the woman at the security bit saw something suspicious sticking out of my badly-packed rucksack - a cheap detective kit that came free with a Fix & Foxi comic I bought (I always like to check out what Fix and Foxi are up to whenever I'm in Germany, and I bought the latest ones this time mainly because I wanted to make fun of the rather badly-translated English-language story included in one of them. That's another thing I'll do tomorrow). Anyway, this detective kit contained a cylinder of some unidentified grey powder for dusting for fingerprints, so she confiscated it. I mean, I'm all in favour of preventing people from blowing up planes, but a Fix and Foxi detective kit? That's just mean.

Oh, and if you were reading this in the hope of finding out what happened in the competitions I was in at the weekend, good has triumphed over evil. But only because I'm not allowed to refer to other people as evil any more - I came 13th out of 26 competitors in the mental calculations, which could have been a lot worse, and 6th out of 20 in the memory competition, which is absolutely awful. Still, the whole experience has given me a new perspective on the whole memory thing, which I think is quite significant. I'll tell more in due course.

Sorry if anyone feels just slightly short-changed by this blog entry.

Door-to-door kidneys

I need to pay more attention to what I'm agreeing to do. Kidney Research UK asked me to help raise money for them, and I thought it was selling raffle tickets. Turns out it's putting little envelopes through doors on this street, and then going round a few days later to ask for them back, preferably bulging with money. I'm not sure I can do this. Pestering people I know to buy raffle tickets is fine, but going round to strangers' houses and demanding money?

It'll have to wait till I get back from Germany, anyway. I'm busy working out how I'm going to write this 50,000 word novel before the end of November - I've been busy tonight getting my stuff ready for tomorrow, then I'm up at the crack of dawn to get the plane, the next four days are crammed with wholesome activities, then Monday I'm coming home, and Tuesday I'm back at work. I'll take a pen and paper with me and do some frantic scribbling, but I'm going to be playing catch-up on the 1667 words a day for the rest of the month.

I know what I'm going to write though. It's tentatively called "Sympathy", and it's a proper serious book. I can't write things that aren't silly and nonsensical - when I try, I always hate how it comes out, so this exercise will hopefully cure me of the tendency to give up just because what I've written is rubbish. This is an important ability for any writer.

Trick or treat?

I've never been trick-or-treating, actually. Some kids did it even back in the olden days when I was young, but I lived in the middle of nowhere, and you really need neighbours if you're going to successfully demand sweets with menaces. I'm not sure I like the idea of threatening mischief if you don't get goodies - the more zoomy way to go about it is to be so incredibly cute and lovely that people give you sweets anyway. I do have a really cool rubber monster mask, though. Grr!

Anyway, I've got to pack for my trip to Germany some time. Tomorrow night, probably, because I'm very busy watching football at the moment. I should be doing a bit of mental calculation practice, really, because I haven't done enough (concentrating on the memory), but never mind. It wouldn't make a lot of difference, anyway. This involves the eternal dilemma of which T-shirts to take with me. You'd be surprised how much thought I can put into what to wear when I go away. It mainly involves remembering what I was wearing last time I met whoever I'm going to see, and picking something else. I don't own many clothes, so by carefully keeping track of what people have seen me wearing what, I can create the illusion of having a full wardrobe. Of shirts, anyway. I've only got one really wearable pair of non-work trousers at the moment, seeing as the hole in the crotch of my grey ones has reached the kind of level where you don't really want to be seen outdoors wearing them. Perhaps I should buy some more.

You'd better believe me, I'm a great big deal

I'm undecided about whether or not to be famous. By which I mean, I'm thinking about going in for self-publicity, to see whether I like it or not. Radio Derby asked me to let them know what happens with these competitions in Germany back when I was doing the Alzheimer's interviews, and I normally wouldn't bother, but I'm thinking that maybe I should. The logic behind it is that if I'm actually going to sit down and write this How To Be Clever book like I've been saying I would for ages, it would probably stand a better chance of being published if someone had heard of me. And I really could get into newspapers and on the local telly and things just by dropping them a line to say I'm great, write about me. It doesn't take much to get into the news around here.

Trouble is, I can't really get past the idea that it's horrifically big-headed to do something like that. It really isn't me, anyway. And I have the delusion that people look up to me as a shining example of self-effacing modesty, so I'd hate to lose the imaginary respect of this mass of adoring non-existent fans just to see a bad photo of me in the local free paper. What I need, in fact, is a publicist - someone who will send out press releases and things about my exploits, and ignore me when I tell them not to, for my own good. That way I can still convince myself that I'm not doing this kind of thing for glory's sake, and yet still become a real semi-celebrity and sell anything up to a couple of dozen copies of my book.

Trevor McDonald

The Royle Family special was very good, but I hope they don't do any more. I'd hate to see it become another Only Fools And Horses and keep getting resurrected every couple of years in increasingly awful last-ever-episodes. I hate seeing a great sitcom stretched out beyond its natural lifespan. Last Of The Summer wine is the exception, obviously, but then it was never all that funny to start with, so it's not such a big deal if it isn't funny today. And there's still plenty of time to stop doing the Royles before it becomes an Institution with a capital I.

Sorry for the brief and unilluminating post tonight, it's late and I've got to go back to rotten old work tomorrow.

Lochaber no more

I wanna go to America. I heard the Proclaimers song "Letter From America" today and it's made me feel like a visit over there. Not that the song's supposed to inspire that kind of feeling in people, but it did it for me. I don't think I can really do it this year, though, however much I rearrange my schedule, what with going to Germany next week and everything. I suppose I shouldn't complain.

Anyway, am I going to do any good in the various competitons and record attempts over the next week? I'm quite hopeful of successfully memorising 270 binary digits in a minute on the Friday, if all goes well. Which will be nice. I'm sure I'll do very unexceptionally in the mental calculation world cup itself, but in that it really is the taking part rather than the winning that I enjoy. As for the memory, it could go either way. I'm more interested in getting good scores in the numbers and cards rather than defying the odds and the lack of English translations to win the competition outright, but I'm really still not sure at all how well I'll do. It'll just have to take me by surprise, like all good things.

Went down to see Grandma today, and she gave me seven new pairs of socks. She (quite correctly) always assumes I don't own any socks that aren't full of holes. I seem to wear the things out at an astonishing rate. Perhaps I should learn how to darn. Another thing I should do is get a video camera. Whenever I see Grandma I always have the idea that someone should tape her telling her life story - I honestly think it would make great TV, because she tells it so well (she can talk for hours, uninterrupted) and because it really is fascinating in a real-person's-view-of-history kind of way. It's another thing on the things-to-do list, anyway.

Happy birthday, Jenny!

And for that matter happy birthday yesterday to my neighbour Andi, who it turns out reads my blog. And I thought I was living here in peaceful anonymity. That's a different Andi from the one I normally write about here, by the way.

I'm feeling rather short of inspiration for things to write about tonight, as you can maybe tell by the many happy returns of days that aren't necessarily exactly today. Although that does remind me of something I haven't mentioned on here yet - while lying around the place playing on the internet the morning after my birthday party, we discovered that I was born exactly fifty years to the day after the publication of Winnie-The-Pooh! This is quite significant, since most of us at the party met as a direct result of Pooh's existence. That's the kind of numerical statistic that leads some people out there on the internet to believe that they're the second coming.

This internet-browsing session was also notable for Ace shouting "Pooh links!" quite loudly while two normal people were in the room delivering a hamster to Crispy and Sleepy. Well, comparatively normal, anyway, probably. I don't know them, they might have been complete weirdos, but they probably weren't.

The importance of little yellow squares

I've been playing quite a bit of othello on Kurnik just lately, and trying to stop my rating from plunging to new depths. For the uninitiated, your rating goes up when you beat someone and down when you lose, and how much it goes up and down by is based on the rating of the person you're playing. It got down as low as 1399 today, which is horrible. I try to keep it above 1500, because then you get a little yellow square next to your username instead of a green one. Of course, if you're even better than that you can get a little orange square or even a red one like Ben Seeley, who was hanging out there today, but I think that kind of lofty goal is beyond me at the moment.

I generally only play people rated over 1500 so as to get a good game, but since my rating's so low at the moment most of them don't want to play me, so I've lowered my standards. Meanwhile, my tournament rating has been quite good just lately - you get a separate rating for games in official tournaments, and for some reason or other that's generally lower than normal ratings. Mine struggled up just above 1250 in time for the exclusive 1250+ tournament on Tuesday night, which was brilliant. Like being allowed to play with the cool kids. But now it's dropped back down to lowly levels again. Ah well.

Spoiler alert

Wow, I sound like one of those nerds who post to message boards about comics. Granted, I sound like that when I post nerdy things to message boards about comics myself, but I'm pretty sure I've never used jargon like 'spoiler alert' on my blog before. Hopefully I never will again.

But I think it's now acceptable for me to talk Torchwood. As I'm writing this I'm watching the repeat of the first episode on proper telly, so nobody in Britain has any excuse for not having seen it before reading this. As for the rest of you, well, that's what the alert was for. It's not just window-dressing.

Actually, all I wanted to say, apart from the fact that it was really, really great, is that the BBC's advance publicity was brilliant. This is the spoiler part - one of the Torchwood team dies at the end of the first episode as part of the final (really cool) plot twist. In all the hype, including a big feature in the Radio Times, they talked about this character as if they were going to be one of the regulars, so as not to spoil the surprise. I was impressed. Especially since the Radio Times spoiled the surprise death of Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer for me. They're back on my Christmas list now.

As for Torchwood, I should just add that there were so many little funny lines and cool moments that I lost count. Very Russell T Davies. It's going to be a highlight of the week from now on.

It's a steady job, but he wants to be a paperback writer

Did you know November is National Novel Writing Month? No, neither did I until today (thanks, Kitty!). What it is, if you're too lazy to click on the link and work out what the slightly unfathomable website is talking about, is a kind of challenge - write a 50,000 word novel from scratch during the month of November. The idea being that you're going to write a load of drivel, but at least it will get your creative juices flowing. Really, it's exactly the kind of impetus I need! The I'll-do-it-if-you-do-it-too attitude always motivates me to do stuff.

I think everyone should do it. In fact, I COMMAND all my loyal readers to join in and write their own masterpieces! Go on, don't be shy, you don't have to show your novel (or navel) to anybody if you don't want to, but I think everyone in the world should try to tap into their muse as much as possible. It's good for you. And don't give me that "I haven't got time" nonsense - I've got a trip to Germany packed with mental calculations and memorising, a semi-full-time job, a non-novel book to write and a whole pile of cartoons that need watching (thanks Mike!), and I'm still going to write 50,000 words.

I haven't got a title yet. Or rather, I have, but I'm not sure if I'm going to use it or not. I'll see what kind of novel I feel like writing. Look me up on the website - I'm Zoomy.

I am the music man, I come from down your way

I'm endeavouring to learn how to play the piano. I have tried before, several times, but this time I'm taking a different approach from my usual tactic (find a piece of music I'd really like to be able to play, sit down with it and try to work out how to play it, fail to do so, give up) - I've got a book. I don't think it's a particularly good book (Piano For Dummies), but playing through the exercises in it might at least get my fingers nimble enough to cope with a concerto or two.

If I have the patience to learn how to memorise thirty packs of cards in an hour, surely I can find the time and inclination to sit down and play scales until I can do it right? Dominic O'Brien can play the piano, after all, so logically I should be able to play it even better than him. Learning the guitar is also high on my list of priorities, but that's a bit more difficult to get started on - I've got a clever electric keyboard with headphones so nobody can hear what I'm playing on it, whereas if I got a guitar, all my neighbours would be able to hear me mangling it while learning to pluck and strum. And I'm not sure I like the idea of other people hearing me play an instrument, at least not until I'm the best player of it in the entire universe. This attitude is of course why I picked a silent hobby like memorising things.

I also need to learn to play something obscure and classical, so that I can join an orchestra. It'll need to be an instrument that nobody else plays, of course, so that even if I'm not very good at it, the orchestra boss (I also need to learn the proper terminology for these things) will say "well, we need a Venezuelan nose-flute for this performance and you're the only person in the world who can play one (since very few people are prepared to have the necessary nostril enhancement surgery) so you get the job. Go and sit next to the bassoons."

You don't have to be crazy to work here...

I forget why I agreed to work next week when I could be staying at home and practicing for the two competitions I'm doing in a couple of weeks. I'd rather not have to go in tomorrow, anyway. I'll see if I can wriggle out of it. That said, I haven't been doing any practicing today (or is it 'practising'? That's one of the only words in the English language I'm never sure how to spell right), I've been watching telly and aimlessly wandering around cyberspace. Although I prefer to buy my old cartoon videos from charity shops, I found one on eBay that I couldn't resist - it's titled "Sniffles the Mouse"! I had no idea he'd ever got a tape named after him. It's got two Sniffles cartoons on it that I've already got, and a few other random non-Sniffles ones that I haven't. The opening bid of £2.99 (plus postage and packing) is so ridiculously high for this kind of thing that I almost didn't bother, but I thought what the heck. I might as well run out of money sooner as later.

Anyway, Torchwood is on in ten minutes, and I'm still entirely unclear on whether it'll be any good or not. I hope it will.

Bless me

I have got a terrible cold. But despite that, I'm feeling more or less pleased with myself, because I've done a full day's memory practice even though I really had to force myself at metaphorical gunpoint to sit down and do it. Got 960 in 5-minute binary, which is a personal best, but fairly unexceptional scores in everything else. I'm faced with a dilemma about ten-minute cards - I can do six packs comfortably in that time, it's exactly the length of time I need to run through each pack three times, with a few seconds left over at the end to check anything I'm not sure on, so I get them all correct nine times out of ten. So the last couple of times in practice, I've just done that - six packs is a very good score in that discipline. But I have a feeling that I should be stretching myself a bit more in training, if not in competitions - should I go for nine packs and just look at each one twice? That leads to much more difficulty recalling them, and it seems unnecessary to try so many when I can get a good score safely. But I think I'll try it next time, anyway. So there.

Over on James Kemp's blog, he's inventing new systems, which makes me all nostalgic. I've been using the same memory techniques for a good three years now without any more than the most infinitesimal modifications. It's not that I feel I've attained perfection, but I can't really think of anything I could do to improve the systems I'm using - I can certainly win the world championship again with them if I get my act together. But it would be nice to have a moment of inspiration and discover something new and exciting I could to to suddenly improve my results. That might get me more in the mood that I was in back in 2003 and 2004.

You can ignore this last little bit if you want. To the extent that this blog of mine is about anything, it's not about finding something funny on YouTube every single day and linking to it, and I seem to have been doing that kind of thing quite a lot lately. I'll give it a rest after today, I promise. But I stumbled across this one tonight somehow, and it's filled me with a whole new level of respect for the things you can find on the internet. I don't even like Backyardigans, it's uninspired, generic-children's-cartoon stuff that just screams out with unrealised potential. But that someone would go through all the episodes and compile a montage of Pablo's crises like that is awesome. This is the kind of thing that just wasn't done before the 21st century. It's great to be at the forefront of a revolution like this.

New job, same as the old job

And I had to work late today, on a Friday, and my first day back at work! And not for any sensible reason either - my boss had arranged an interview with someone for my job, forgotten about it and then taken a day off to move house, so I had to interview the poor guy myself.

But still, it's the weekend now, so I'll stop complaining and share something fun - Clemens has got a website!

You people have held me back long enough

I'm getting another hat. I've decided. The world expects a certain amount of hat-wearing from me, and I've been a sad disappointment this last couple of months. I did think about remaining hatless and looking vaguely like a normal person for once, but I've changed my mind. I'm no good at looking normal, but I'm great at looking eccentric, even when I'm not trying to. Besides, without a hat I haven't found anything that can prop my stopwatch up reliably while I'm memorising things.

I did go to Lincoln yesterday, by the way. It's hardly changed at all since the last time I was there. I found an excellent video in a charity shop too, which highlights exactly what I find so entertaining about these old public-domain-cartoon collections. This one clearly contained cartoons that had come to the packagers second-hand, with the title cards already removed, so the people making the packaging had to invent titles! They mainly stick to simple titles based on what's happening in the cartoon (although coming up with "Pussy Cat In Boots" to describe a cartoon originally called "Puss In Boots" made me giggle), but how do you get "Something For The Birds" from "Inki and the Minah Bird", which despite the name is mainly about Inki hunting a lion, with the Minah Bird carrying on in its usual inscrutable way in the background. There aren't any other birds in it.

Also, I need to move to a bigger flat. I've got the longest maze book in the world (thanks James!) to find my way through, and it opens up to 20 feet in length. Which is longer than my flat from one end to the other. I really want to see the whole extent of it stretched out in front of me, so I'm going to have to move to some kind of mansion.