It's really all about buying things

It's really no fun at all having to work late on December 22nd. I've done it before and not liked it, and I didn't have to work in a shop packed with Christmas shoppers. So I deeply sympathise with all those poor people who have to man the tills for late-night shopping at this time of year. At least, those are the thoughts that passed through my head when I went out late-night shopping tonight. I didn't stay at home to ease their annoyance factor slightly, or anything like that.

Wouldn't it be great if everyone did, though? Not only would you make the lives of a lot of low-paid customer-service-facilitators a whole lot more bearable, but it'd cause a major economic panic and stories in the papers about how Christmas sales are down, even if they aren't, possibly the collapse of capitalist society and the rise of a glorious socialist revolution of the kind I keep going on about! Wouldn't that be something?

The dog of death

I checked the Radio Times synopsis of The Grim Reaper Dog - apparently it has correctly predicted the deaths of 58 residents of a nursing home in Ohio over the last three years, by barking to the staff and then staying with the patient until they pass away. Personally, I think I'd rather end my days in a nursing home that doesn't have a dog that tells me when I'm going to die. It's probably carrying some contagious disease, that'll be how it does it. I'm sorry, this mutt doesn't hold a candle to the Memory Chimp.

It's times like this that I feel I really should find something more worthwhile to blog about...

Ich hasse Toastbrot

Set your videos, or your DVD recorders or Sky+ boxes or whatever the cool people have these days, for 7:30pm on January 29th, for "The Memory Chimp". Actually, that'd be a cool name for a documentary about me, but in fact this is the one about Ayumu the chimp, with a brief cameo by me. It's the seventh in the Extraordinary Animals documentary series - set your videos for the others if you like, but they didn't see fit to ask me what I think about the non-human stars of those ones. The lineup is:

Jan 2 - The Elephant Artist
Jan 3 - The Grim Reaper Dog
Jan 4 - The Smartest Sea Lion
Jan 8 - The Genius Parrot
Jan 15 - The Greatest Ape
Jan 22 - The Super 'Sonic' Dolphin
Jan 29 - The Memory Chimp

The titles all seem more or less self-explanatory, except for The Grim Reaper Dog. What the heck could this extraordinary dog do to merit such a title? All I can think of is that it's a documentary about Joscha Sauer's "Nichtlustig" comics, with particular emphasis on Death's toast-hating pet poodle, but that seems a little unlikely. I hope it is, though.

Tis the season for stocking fillers

I'm always delighted to see how much cheap tat there is in the shops at this time of year. Especially when it comes to toys. Can't afford a Transformer for your whining offspring? Buy them a Transmogrification Robot instead! That's what my brother did for me this year, anyway. The best thing about these cheap and tacky versions of the cool toys is that the packaging is generally made by non-English-speaking slave labour, which means the instructions are always fun to read, and this is a particularly good example:

I love the text:

Discover the magic of transformers GO-ROBOT. These colorful young robot have come to earth to discover the magicalpower inside of them: the power to change! GO-ROBOT transformers are specially designedfor preschoolers with little hands and big dreams. now you can help our young robot learn tofly,run, race...and save the day.

Someone has really put some thought into this - a lot of these toys, if they say anything at all, limit themselves to a snappy phrase like "Special for you of children design. It will give you infinite pleasure!"

How to transform this robot:

1 Demount the weapon.
2 Turn the crura upward .
3 Turn the with an angle of 180º.
4 Impel in the center
5 The arm revolve
6 The arm retroflexion
7 Assemble the weapon

This may be news to you, it certainly was to me, but 'crura' is a real word. It means the parts of the legs between knees and feet. Although the first page you get if you type 'crura' into Google is the Wikipedia entry for 'clitoral crura'. Which made me wonder exactly what part of our young robot I'm meant to be turning.

If you type 'retroflexion' into the Google toolbar, the autocomplete function suggests 'retroflexion uterus'. Is there nothing on the internet except ladies' bits? It's shocking!

The merry Christmas season

I've actually done most if not all of my Christmas shopping. I haven't wrapped anything up yet, but there's plenty of time for that before meeting my brother for lunch tomorrow. It's the thought that counts, and a shoddily, hurriedly packaged present shows you care.

Getting there

(Written last night, but my internet connection died)

After last night's whining about memory training, I found the time and the inclination for a 15-minute numbers practice run today. I ended up with an unimpressive score of 576 (attempting 936), but I didn't have any problems with keeping the concentration going for 15 minutes of memorisation and 30 minutes of recall, and my speed of going through the digits was just fine - it was just the kind of mistakes that come from being a little out of practice, combined with the fact that the numbers threw up a whole lot of small furry animal images and I got them all mixed up.

Also weighed myself in Woolworth's again, and found that I weigh exactly the same, to the tenth of a kilo or pound depending which one you want to read, as I did last month, but my fat index has gone up slightly. Whatever that might mean. Still, I'm not too bothered.

Dedication, that's what you need

Thank you for all the silliness, it's great to know that I can give orders like that and people will obey me. It's like being the King, only without having to wear posh clothes and eat swans.

Right, now that I know people aren't taking me seriously, I'll talk seriously about memory stuff. I really want to get back into proper training, but there's something just missing in the motivation department. I'm not sure why that would be - it's not like I won the WMC this year, so you'd think I'd be motivated to try to win it next time, but apparently not. I haven't even done a speed cards for a couple of weeks now, Blue Peter and OMC last Saturday aside.

It's annoying, because I'm pretty sure from past experience that I'm going to get to a point eventually when I want to get back into it, and I know that the longer I leave it, the longer it'll take when I do start again to get my mind adjusted to long periods of concentration. I know it's much too early to worry about these things, but I feel like if I don't keep the practice ticking over starting around now, I won't be on top form again next summer and autumn in the competitions. Gah, the intricate workings of my brain - I both want to and don't want to practice right now, so I'm never going to be satisfied.

A competition would be good right now, actually - something next month that I could go to and get back in the memory-championship mood. We need more competitions, I'm always saying it, I know, but it's true. It'd be great to revive the Memory World Cup next year, wouldn't it?

Be silly!

I can't help noticing that when I posted a blog entry about global warming, I got three more or less entirely serious comments in response, discussing the extent to which my energy-saving lightbulb would contribute to the crisis. And yesterday when I posted one of my occasional can't-think-of-anything-to-write-about pieces of nonsense (and not even a particularly good one, at that), someone commended it as 'rather imaginative'.

Really, I'm starting to worry that people are taking this blog seriously. So I command everyone who comments on this one to say something completely stupid and not even remotely serious, just to restore Zoomy's Thing's reputation as a totally pointless waste of everyone's time.

Also, you all need to watch Damekko Doubutsu, one of the strangest and funniest Japanese cartoons I've ever seen, about a forest populated by useless animals.

Coventry Ikea

The Ikea store in Coventry is larger than most, being a vast underground complex spanning the whole of the city and parts of the surrounding countryside, plus a small, cramped tunnel leading all the way to Belfast. The complex was built as a result of a mix-up on the part of the architects who redesigned the town hall after the Gulf War - their blueprints got mixed up with a picture one of them had drawn of a revolutionary new hamster habitat he was planning to build. It would have been a terrible hamster habitat, being several hundred square miles of empty cavern, but it made a passable Ikea once a few shelves and tills had been fitted and the hamsters that had quickly colonised the place had been put to work providing electricity by running around on little treadmills.

The real problem with the store is that although it is located directly underneath the car park in Coventry, it is only accessible by means of the small, cramped tunnel from Belfast, there being no other access point. Customers are therefore faced with difficulty in leaving the store with their purchases and staff, given the difficulty of entering and leaving the store, spend their entire lives in the gloomy caverns and have evolved, over the course of the three years the store has been open, into a race of mole-like beings, two feet tall, with no eyes and worm-like appendages that sometimes alarm small children.

On the other hand, it's better than the Tesco in Coventry, which has slippery floors.

More Blue Peter-related remarks

After tonight, I won't mention Blue Peter again, I promise. But I thought I really should say a public thanks to the boy who reassured me that I'm like a million times better than all of them put together, after my rather unimpressive memory performance. If only I could remember his name...

I'm also told, by an unreliable maternal source, that the first proper sentence I ever said was "It was Goldie's birthday and all the dogs came to his party!", so possibly if not for Blue Peter I would never have learned to talk and this blog would consist of disjointed incoherent childish babbling. Oh, wait, that's all it does consist of...

Also, and this isn't really anything to do with Blue Peter at all, have they stopped making Drifters? The chocolate bar, not the vagabonds. It's my choccie of choice and there aren't any in the shops any more!

Here's one I prepared earlier

To be fair, I did tell them I'm not particularly good at memorising names.

Actually that's not being fair at all - while the names-and-presents thing was the Blue Peter team's idea, and they couldn't be talked out of it, it was me who suggested throwing in birthdays as well. The idea was that by adding something numerical to the mix, I could turn it into a challenge that not just anybody could do, while still being confident that it was still eminently doable for a half-competent memory expert like me. And in all honesty, it really shouldn't have been any problem - I attribute my spectacular failure to excitement and unpreparedness, never having done anything remotely like that before and having to take a guess at what would be the best strategy. And having the numbers come up of the few kids who I couldn't remember - I would have been fine with most of the others. And getting the first one wrong really annoyed me, because I did know him - Harold was the littlest one of the thirty and the thought of him playing for Chelsea was a funny mental image that should have stuck in my brain but somehow didn't when I was put on the spot.

But still, it wasn't about succeeding in the challenge or providing watchable entertainment for the nation's youth, it was about going on Blue Peter, meeting the presenters (Zoe and Andy are exactly the same off-camera as on, I'm pleased to report - I've always been worried that Blue Peter presenters are nasty, cynical grown-ups who swear and watch pornography when they're not on air, but in fact they're fantastic people. Although Andy had to be reminded not to say "I'm knackered" like he did in rehearsal after playing on that groovy electronic floor game thing), meeting the pets (as well as Socks sitting on my lap, Mabel decided she liked the taste of my shoes), getting the badge (still haven't lost it again) and having fun! And I certainly achieved that. Too bad nobody's going to want me on any future TV shows after that shambolic performance, but never mind. I was getting tired of celebrity status, anyway.

Up for the Cup

As part of this memory demonstration we're going to do in the unis, in the spirit of memorising something more, well, memorable than numbers and cards, I volunteered to memorise all the FA Cup Final results. Which is easy enough, but proved unexpectedly complicated when it came to finding out what all the results were in the first place. Most reputable internet sources say that the Wanderers beat Oxford University 2-0 in the final in 1877, but Wikipedia (and the various websites who steal their information from Wikipedia), give the score as 2-1, with an Arthur Kinnaird own goal for Oxford.

I wondered whether this was one of those falsehoods people put on Wiki to discredit someone - a great-grandson of someone Kinnaird fouled a century ago, possibly - but no, it seems the 2-1 result is correct, and the other websites share a mistaken source. I checked with the FA website and a real book (because if they put it in a real book, it must be true. Even the real books that just steal their information from Wikipedia).

I'd still like to be absolutely certain, though. Has anyone got a time machine I could borrow? And the price of a ticket to the cup final in money minted at some point before 1877? I'll bring you back a programme and half a 130-year-old meat pie.

When you do nothing all day...

... it's really hard to think of something to write about in the evening. Well, tomorrow I'm going to get off my lazy backside (metaphorically but not literally), sit down and work on my book and our upcoming university memory demonstrations. No, really, I am, because I've planned out tonight what I'm going to do, and writing it in this blog makes it official, so I can't not do anything tomorrow now without being some kind of public liar.

Who knows, I might even find something to blog about tomorrow, too.

Global warming? Yeah, that's my fault. Sorry.

I switched to energy-saving light bulbs a couple of years ago, but the bulb went in my living room last week and I dug up an old non-energy-saving lightbulb to replace it until I could get a new one. And since then I've never remembered to buy a new one while I was in town. So I'm hoping that by writing about it at unnecessary length in my blog tonight, it will stick in my memory a bit better and I'll be able to get back to making an infinitesimally greater contribution to saving energy, and thus saving the entire world from flooding and sunburn.

The Blue Peter Badge, chapter 94

I'm well aware that this blog has turned into "The Saga Of Zoomy's Blue Peter Badge", but I think I have to record that I found it again. It had fallen down behind my armchair, where I briefly dumped my jacket on Thursday night before deciding to be tidy and hang it up instead. So now I'm reunited with my status symbol, and I don't need to mention the thing again. Yay!

So, what else can I talk about? Let's try memory. I've been seriously unmotivated to train my memory lately. I don't know if this is in spite of or because of the fact that I've been doing so many tangentially-related memory celebrity things like This Morning and Radio 4 and the chimps and Blue Peter, but I'm really unable to sit down and practice the long or even medium-length memory disciplines now. I've become a performer rather than a competitor. Which isn't good. I really want to win the WMC again - I'd hate to go down in the history books as someone who only won it once, because I know, all modesty aside, that I can do better than that if I really live up to my potential.

Maybe it's just because it's Christmas. I always get depressed at Christmas.

Oh, I don't believe it!

I've lost my Blue Peter badge! It must have fallen off somewhere yesterday, because it wasn't on my jacket this morning. And still isn't, for that matter. I can't believe I didn't notice it last night when I hung the jacket up - possibly someone broke in to my flat last night and stole it. But this is terrible! I look like a normal person again, someone who's never been on Blue Peter and had Socks the cat sitting on his lap and everything! Well, I'm not going to stay badgeless. I'll buy one on eBay. Or steal one from someone else. Or draw a picture and send it to them.

I didn't wear the badge

At least, not for the interview. But I put it straight back on my jacket immediately afterwards. And in a charity shop in Burton, two people were very impressed by it. A woman in the shop told me that she's always wanted a Blue Peter badge, and that when she was little she sent them a story she'd written, but they wrote back saying that she hadn't written it herself, she'd just copied a story written by someone else. And she swears she didn't. It must have been a terrible childhood trauma, and I felt deeply sorry for her, but if she was hoping I'd give her my badge to make up for all her upset, well, she'll have been disappointed.

The interview went passably well, though - I'm making an effort to write about real life in this blog a bit more, because I'm conscious that I don't do that very much. I wouldn't have given me the job based on that interview, but I'm tougher than most people, so you never know.

Today on Blue Peter, Burgess Meredith memorises things!

I won't talk about the actual contents of the show until it's on telly next Wednesday, but I will say now that I've got a Blue Peter badge! My trousers are absolutely covered with hairs from Socks the cat! I got my own dressing room at Television Centre! I've never had my own dressing room on a TV show before!

I should have thought a bit more about the actual dressing part, though. I decided to wear my black suit jacket and trousers with a predominantly white T-shirt because I thought it would look cool and memorable. What I failed to take into account was the fact that I have a rather large and pointy nose, and the Blue Peter studio is currently festooned with animatronic penguins. I can't help thinking viewers will make comparisons.

Still, all this celebrity stuff is REALLY getting in the way of real life - I got a call from one of the recruitment agencies on Tuesday morning just before leaving for London, arranging an interview with Coors in Burton for tomorrow morning. What with being a nationally famous children's TV entertainer nowadays, I really haven't got a lot of time left to read up on the job and the company in preparation. It sounds like a cool job, though, so I'll do my best.

Should I take the Blue Peter badge off my jacket before the interview? All professional logic says yes, but I want people to see me wearing it. I will brush off the cat hairs, though.

Worst advert ever

I saw an advert on a tube train today for Vicks First Defence, which went along the lines of "A stinking cold is the last thing you want for Christmas. Vicks First Defence fights the cold virus in the early stages and may prevent symptoms developing. In fact, 77%* of people who used First Defence said they didn't get a cold. Happy Christmas."

The asterisk leads to some very small print saying "2006 satisfaction survey of 90 UK users."

So let's get this straight. Out of 90 people who used this product last Christmas, TWENTY of them developed a cold over the Christmas period? What percentage of people would normally get a cold over that kind of timespan? I'd be very surprised if it's as high as 23%. It seems to me that this First Defence stuff actually makes it MORE likely that you'll get a cold! And they're using this statistic for advertising purposes?

Anyway, that rant was the main reason I've come to this internet cafe/barber's shop in the heart of London tonight, but I suppose I should also mention that the chimp memory filming went very well too - I see they made the BBC news tonight, too, so I'm sure it will be old news by the time the documentary makes it to your screens, but you will have the fun of seeing me attempting the same memory test and scoring significantly worse than Ayumu the chimp. It's going to be great!

Make a note in your diaries (and cross out the other one)

See me on Blue Peter on Wednesday December 12th! And not the 5th, as I might have said before! It's being recorded in advance, you see.

Check out my memory chimp friends on BBC News! In fact, the performance you can see by clicking on 'number memory test' is rather more impressive than anything I can do (without practice, anyway), although I think Ramón Campayo, who specialises in split-second memorisation of random digits, could still beat them. Actually, I wonder whether that film's a bit misleading and there's a limited number of positional distributions of digits that the chimp has seen plenty of times before, but that's just me being a sceptic. Still, I think tomorrow I get to have a go at the same test, or something more similar to it than the one they knocked together for this documentary last time - we're basically redoing the whole thing that I filmed with them previously.

The life of a memory man really is groovy, isn't it?