Friday, September 05, 2008
Another suitcase in another hall...
Moving tomorrow, won't be back in internet land until Monday, still got to pack things, can't talk now, see you later, bye.
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Gah!
Stupid cheap shoelaces! Bought them last weekend, one's broken already! I'd take them back to the shop if I could remember where I bought them and if they'd cost more than a pound. That does it, I'm going back to my bad habit of not untying my laces, ever, and just treating my shoes like slippers.
Also, I'm sorry if this blog has been unspeakably trivial just lately, but all I've been doing is working and packing. Not that that hasn't been fun - work is still going really well, and I've even been persuaded to use my memory skills for good rather than evil and perform memory tricks to attract people to our department's stand at the Boots Healthcare Conference at the end of the month. So make sure to book your tickets (if you're a Boots healthcare manager and have access to a time machine, since the registration deadline was three days ago). Funnily enough, shortly after agreeing to this, I had an email from a non-work person who wants me to perform memory tricks to attract people to his stand at some kind of computer retail exhibition, a week after the Boots thing. Something about me must just suggest 'corporate memory man'. There might be a career in this, if not for the minor stumbling block that I don't want one.
Also, I'm sorry if this blog has been unspeakably trivial just lately, but all I've been doing is working and packing. Not that that hasn't been fun - work is still going really well, and I've even been persuaded to use my memory skills for good rather than evil and perform memory tricks to attract people to our department's stand at the Boots Healthcare Conference at the end of the month. So make sure to book your tickets (if you're a Boots healthcare manager and have access to a time machine, since the registration deadline was three days ago). Funnily enough, shortly after agreeing to this, I had an email from a non-work person who wants me to perform memory tricks to attract people to his stand at some kind of computer retail exhibition, a week after the Boots thing. Something about me must just suggest 'corporate memory man'. There might be a career in this, if not for the minor stumbling block that I don't want one.
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Boxes upon boxes
In early 1998, I moved from a rented attic room into a tiny little room in a shared house, and my friend Karen helped me move my stuff. She observed "Ben, for someone who's had a short little life like yours, you haven't half accumulated a lot of shit." I miss Karen and her colourful expressions, actually. I must look her up some time.
Anyway, it's ten years later, and I would estimate that I've got about ten times as much junk piled up in cardboard boxes now. Moving house is a terrible inconvenience, especially if you find it impossible to throw anything away, ever. Half the stuff in these boxes is probably just going to be unpacked, put somewhere and never touched again until the next time I move. Maybe I should just dump it all outside the Oxfam shop and make a fresh start? But then what would happen if I find that I really need that half of an issue of Autosport magazine from 1997?
Anyway, it's ten years later, and I would estimate that I've got about ten times as much junk piled up in cardboard boxes now. Moving house is a terrible inconvenience, especially if you find it impossible to throw anything away, ever. Half the stuff in these boxes is probably just going to be unpacked, put somewhere and never touched again until the next time I move. Maybe I should just dump it all outside the Oxfam shop and make a fresh start? But then what would happen if I find that I really need that half of an issue of Autosport magazine from 1997?
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Warning!
I've got a new bike, did I mention that? Yes, I know it's no more than a couple of years since I last got a new bike, but it was falling to bits through lack of care and maintenance, and I felt like splashing out rather than keep fixing the thing. Anyway, it came with a little sticker on it that says "Warning: For safety reason. All bolts must be checked for tightness before every ride. Failure to do so could result in serious and/or/fatal injuries."
I ask you. I could nitpick the unusual punctuation and grammar, or wonder whether it really means to imply that you can have injuries that are fatal but not serious, but I'm more interested in the instruction that I have to test every bolt on the bike, every time I want to ride it anywhere. I mean, I'm all in favour of safety (except for wearing a silly-looking helmet, I'm still not going to do that), but that seems a little excessive. And does this mean that if the bike spontaneously falls apart, I can't sue whoever made it, because I didn't check all the bolts?
I suppose I could lie in court and claim that I had, but they're probably monitoring me with CCTV cameras, just in case. Or I could be honest and say that the sticker fell off, which it quite genuinely did on the way home tonight. I hadn't noticed it until then. I'll keep it and stick it onto something else, just to confuse everyone.
I ask you. I could nitpick the unusual punctuation and grammar, or wonder whether it really means to imply that you can have injuries that are fatal but not serious, but I'm more interested in the instruction that I have to test every bolt on the bike, every time I want to ride it anywhere. I mean, I'm all in favour of safety (except for wearing a silly-looking helmet, I'm still not going to do that), but that seems a little excessive. And does this mean that if the bike spontaneously falls apart, I can't sue whoever made it, because I didn't check all the bolts?
I suppose I could lie in court and claim that I had, but they're probably monitoring me with CCTV cameras, just in case. Or I could be honest and say that the sticker fell off, which it quite genuinely did on the way home tonight. I hadn't noticed it until then. I'll keep it and stick it onto something else, just to confuse everyone.
Monday, September 01, 2008
But wait, if I leave Derby...
I won't walk past that chip shop on my way home, the one with a sign saying "You are welcome to breastfeed here" on the door! I won't be able to quip "Well, thanks, but I think I'll stick with the haddock and chips..." and entertain whoever happens to be with me at the time!
And next door to it, I won't be able to giggle at the sandwich board outside the Discount Furniture Warehouse that says "BED'S FROM £79" on one side and "SOFA'S FROM £49" on the other. Some punctuation-conscious employee of the DFW sellotapes little bits of white paper over the unwanted apostrophes, but they keep blowing off or getting rained off and rendering the sign all ungrammatical again. Perhaps I'll buy them a bottle of tippex as a going-away present.
And a bit further down the road, in the somewhat more shabby furniture-and-miscellaneous-junk shop, I won't be able to admire the stuffed fox-with-rabbit-in-mouth tableau and wonder whether I admire the taxidermy skill and want it to decorate my living room or feel repulsed by the whole thing.
Nor will I walk past the most badly-planned traffic lights in the country, with a pedestrian crossing not synchronised with the traffic lights at the roundabout fifty yards away, so if someone presses the crossing button at the wrong time, no cars can get on to the roundabout ever, and the queue stretches back for miles.
Nor the corner of Hartington Street, next to where the Discount Furniture Warehouse people live and park their vans in an impossibly tight space, that serves as one of my memory locations and for some reason has a tree in my mental journey that isn't there in real life.
It's the little things I'll miss.
And next door to it, I won't be able to giggle at the sandwich board outside the Discount Furniture Warehouse that says "BED'S FROM £79" on one side and "SOFA'S FROM £49" on the other. Some punctuation-conscious employee of the DFW sellotapes little bits of white paper over the unwanted apostrophes, but they keep blowing off or getting rained off and rendering the sign all ungrammatical again. Perhaps I'll buy them a bottle of tippex as a going-away present.
And a bit further down the road, in the somewhat more shabby furniture-and-miscellaneous-junk shop, I won't be able to admire the stuffed fox-with-rabbit-in-mouth tableau and wonder whether I admire the taxidermy skill and want it to decorate my living room or feel repulsed by the whole thing.
Nor will I walk past the most badly-planned traffic lights in the country, with a pedestrian crossing not synchronised with the traffic lights at the roundabout fifty yards away, so if someone presses the crossing button at the wrong time, no cars can get on to the roundabout ever, and the queue stretches back for miles.
Nor the corner of Hartington Street, next to where the Discount Furniture Warehouse people live and park their vans in an impossibly tight space, that serves as one of my memory locations and for some reason has a tree in my mental journey that isn't there in real life.
It's the little things I'll miss.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Match of the Day
It's nice that the football season's started again, but it would be nicer if they'd show the highlights of Sunday's games a bit earlier in the evening. Don't they realise I'm working now and have to get up early on a Monday morning?
Yes, I can't think of anything to write about tonight. It's been dull and rainy all day, just for a change, and I haven't really done anything worth mentioning.
Yes, I can't think of anything to write about tonight. It's been dull and rainy all day, just for a change, and I haven't really done anything worth mentioning.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Actually, it might have been a cheetah
Lord Aberystwyth rang the bell and called for his butler, Hopkinson. "Ah, Hopkinson, there you are," he said, as soon as the butler came into the drawing room. "How was your day at school?"
"I believe you're confusing me with your son, who is also named Hopkinson," said Hopkinson.
"That's the last impertinence I'm going to take from you, Hopkinson," said Lord Aberystwyth, sternly. "If I ask you how your day at school was, then by Brahma you will tell me how your day at school was."
"Very good, sir," said Hopkinson, respectfully. "My day at school was most pleasant. We learnt about fractions and Shakespeare."
"Splendid," said Lord Aberystwyth. "Now, I remember why I called you here. There's some kind of big cat, possibly a jaguar or maybe a leopard, eating me. Would you do something about it, please?"
"Very good, sir," said Hopkinson, picking up a poker and jabbing at the wild beast tentatively. It turned around briefly and gave Hopkinson a reproachful look, before turning back and continuing to devour Lord Aberystwyth's left arm.
"No, no, no," tutted this worthy peer. "You'll never do any good like that, Hopkinson. Grab the thing by its tail and pull it away."
"Very good, sir," said Hopkinson, attempting to catch the presumed jaguar's tail, which was flicking from side to side in a manner more reminiscent of a domestic cat than a member of the panthera genus. "It seems a little elusive, sir... ah, there we are," he said, seizing it and pulling the animal away.
"I don't need a running commentary, Hopkinson," said Lord Aberystwyth. "Now, get rid of the thing and then fetch a bandage. Maybe two bandages, it seems to have eaten most of my internal organs."
"It appears to be eating me now, sir," Hopkinson protested apologetically. "I'm afraid I'm not in a position to fetch bandages."
"Well, for Buddha's sake, if that doesn't just take the biscuit," snapped Lord Aberystwyth. "Honestly, I expect better service from you, Hopkinson. I hired you on the basis of the most impeccable references, and my wife was in labour for thirty-two minutes giving birth to you. If you can't do it yourself, ring for the first footman and have him bring me my bandages."
"Very good, sir," said what was left of Hopkinson. Unable to ring the bell owing to a shortage of remaining arms, he shouted "Ding-a-ling-a-ling!" at the top of his lungs, at the right pitch to indicate that the first footman and several bandages were required.
The footman, whose name was also Lord Aberystwyth, arrived promptly and bandaged his lordship deftly. "You've suffered extensive blood loss, sir, and your lungs, kidneys and appendix are absent, although it's possible that the last-named organ had already been removed prior to the cat incident. In my medical opinion, although I haven't been a practising doctor for three days now, you will pass away in another twenty seconds or so."
"I think I had my appendix taken out as a child," mused Lord Aberystwyth. "Although it may have been my tonsils. Go and consult my childhood diaries, Lord Aberystwyth, and let me know."
"Very good, sir," said the first footman, taking his leave. Lord Aberystwyth did indeed pass away exactly twenty seconds after Lord Aberystwyth had finished pronouncing the word 'twenty', which would have proved the footman right in a wager he had recently undertaken with another doctor-turned-domestic in the household regarding his diagnostic abilities, if only anybody had been present to witness the exact moment of the master's demise. However, Hopkinson had by that time been entirely devoured by the still-not-positively-identified animal and was unable to be of any use in the matter.
Of course, if he had been alive and had been an accessory to an unlicensed gamble among the servants of a peer of the realm, he would have been a disgrace to the world of butlering, so it's probably best for everyone concerned that he wasn't.
"I believe you're confusing me with your son, who is also named Hopkinson," said Hopkinson.
"That's the last impertinence I'm going to take from you, Hopkinson," said Lord Aberystwyth, sternly. "If I ask you how your day at school was, then by Brahma you will tell me how your day at school was."
"Very good, sir," said Hopkinson, respectfully. "My day at school was most pleasant. We learnt about fractions and Shakespeare."
"Splendid," said Lord Aberystwyth. "Now, I remember why I called you here. There's some kind of big cat, possibly a jaguar or maybe a leopard, eating me. Would you do something about it, please?"
"Very good, sir," said Hopkinson, picking up a poker and jabbing at the wild beast tentatively. It turned around briefly and gave Hopkinson a reproachful look, before turning back and continuing to devour Lord Aberystwyth's left arm.
"No, no, no," tutted this worthy peer. "You'll never do any good like that, Hopkinson. Grab the thing by its tail and pull it away."
"Very good, sir," said Hopkinson, attempting to catch the presumed jaguar's tail, which was flicking from side to side in a manner more reminiscent of a domestic cat than a member of the panthera genus. "It seems a little elusive, sir... ah, there we are," he said, seizing it and pulling the animal away.
"I don't need a running commentary, Hopkinson," said Lord Aberystwyth. "Now, get rid of the thing and then fetch a bandage. Maybe two bandages, it seems to have eaten most of my internal organs."
"It appears to be eating me now, sir," Hopkinson protested apologetically. "I'm afraid I'm not in a position to fetch bandages."
"Well, for Buddha's sake, if that doesn't just take the biscuit," snapped Lord Aberystwyth. "Honestly, I expect better service from you, Hopkinson. I hired you on the basis of the most impeccable references, and my wife was in labour for thirty-two minutes giving birth to you. If you can't do it yourself, ring for the first footman and have him bring me my bandages."
"Very good, sir," said what was left of Hopkinson. Unable to ring the bell owing to a shortage of remaining arms, he shouted "Ding-a-ling-a-ling!" at the top of his lungs, at the right pitch to indicate that the first footman and several bandages were required.
The footman, whose name was also Lord Aberystwyth, arrived promptly and bandaged his lordship deftly. "You've suffered extensive blood loss, sir, and your lungs, kidneys and appendix are absent, although it's possible that the last-named organ had already been removed prior to the cat incident. In my medical opinion, although I haven't been a practising doctor for three days now, you will pass away in another twenty seconds or so."
"I think I had my appendix taken out as a child," mused Lord Aberystwyth. "Although it may have been my tonsils. Go and consult my childhood diaries, Lord Aberystwyth, and let me know."
"Very good, sir," said the first footman, taking his leave. Lord Aberystwyth did indeed pass away exactly twenty seconds after Lord Aberystwyth had finished pronouncing the word 'twenty', which would have proved the footman right in a wager he had recently undertaken with another doctor-turned-domestic in the household regarding his diagnostic abilities, if only anybody had been present to witness the exact moment of the master's demise. However, Hopkinson had by that time been entirely devoured by the still-not-positively-identified animal and was unable to be of any use in the matter.
Of course, if he had been alive and had been an accessory to an unlicensed gamble among the servants of a peer of the realm, he would have been a disgrace to the world of butlering, so it's probably best for everyone concerned that he wasn't.
Friday, August 29, 2008
For those who are keeping track of my movements
I'm not moving this weekend. I'm moving next weekend, and to a different place from the place I was going to be moving to. I found a slightly nicer flat that costs the same, so I decided to take that one instead. So, unless I find a nicer flat still, it's next weekend for the big move to Beeston. Which is good, because I've still got a lot of packing to do...
Also, I need to do some memory training. I haven't done any for a while now, and I had a dream about abstract images last night. That's a sure sign my brain wants me to memorise things.
Also, I need to do some memory training. I haven't done any for a while now, and I had a dream about abstract images last night. That's a sure sign my brain wants me to memorise things.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Largeness
The somewhat inaccurately named 99p Shop in Derby is selling 2-litre bottles of Pepsi for 79p. This is a bad thing for those who are trying to lose weight but can't resist a bargain or a sugary drink. I mean, diet Pepsi is the same price, but that tastes like wee, so I'm forced to buy the unhealthy stuff.
I really should be making an effort to be slender and beautiful right now, because I quite literally can't set foot out of doors at the moment without being recognised. Every time I go out in public, somebody is waiting to compliment me on my amazing memory abilities. Everybody seems very impressed by it, funnily enough, although I didn't think I came across as much of a genius. Nobody's stopped me in the street to say "Ha ha, you're the one who's got no job!" yet, either.
I really should be making an effort to be slender and beautiful right now, because I quite literally can't set foot out of doors at the moment without being recognised. Every time I go out in public, somebody is waiting to compliment me on my amazing memory abilities. Everybody seems very impressed by it, funnily enough, although I didn't think I came across as much of a genius. Nobody's stopped me in the street to say "Ha ha, you're the one who's got no job!" yet, either.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
An open letter to the people of the world
Hi, people. I really am touched by your generosity, but I've got a job now, and don't have any money problems at all (well, I won't in a month or so, anyway). So there's really no need to offer me money or a way of using my amazing memory talents to earn money. By the way, this particularly applies if your plan involves card-counting in casinos with the aid of your cash investment. That really wouldn't work out well for you if we did try it, I promise. (Oh, and distinctively-voiced journalists whom I spoke to 18 months ago about a similar subject especially need not apply, using a fake name and claiming to be some vague kind of businessman).
On the other hand, a big thanks to all the people who've recognised me on the street or on the trains lately and complimented my amazing abilities! It's great being a celebrity.
On the other hand, a big thanks to all the people who've recognised me on the street or on the trains lately and complimented my amazing abilities! It's great being a celebrity.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Grab your coat, don't forget your hat
Moving house is a big inconvenience. You have to pack all your videos and books and comics into big cardboard boxes that are too heavy to carry, tell the cable, water, gas and electric people you're leaving, change your address with the bank and credit cards and everything, arrange for someone with a van to help you move, clean your current flat so it's a little less filthy when you leave... and probably a lot of other things that I can't think of right now.
And I bet I'm going to end up leaving something behind. The toys under my bed, or whatever I keep in my Forbidden Closet Of Mystery (the cupboard in my bedroom without a door handle so you can only open it by prying the door open with a knife. I don't use that cupboard very much). Or my toothbrush, like I do most times I go away for a night. But I do need a new toothbrush anyway, so that wouldn't be such a huge disaster. I don't know why I'm making a fuss about it. In fact, maybe I'll leave my toothbrush behind deliberately, and cut down on the heavy lifting while I'm transferring all my other rubbish to Beeston.
And I bet I'm going to end up leaving something behind. The toys under my bed, or whatever I keep in my Forbidden Closet Of Mystery (the cupboard in my bedroom without a door handle so you can only open it by prying the door open with a knife. I don't use that cupboard very much). Or my toothbrush, like I do most times I go away for a night. But I do need a new toothbrush anyway, so that wouldn't be such a huge disaster. I don't know why I'm making a fuss about it. In fact, maybe I'll leave my toothbrush behind deliberately, and cut down on the heavy lifting while I'm transferring all my other rubbish to Beeston.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Catching up
Let me see, what happened to me last week while I was drivelling on about the UK Memory Championship weekend? Well, on the Wednesday we had our Team Challenge (no relation to an old friend who goes by that unusual moniker) and went out to renovate the playground of a community centre creche, spreading the good word of Boots community spirit wherever we went. (Yes, Boots are the mysterious people I'm working for. I can't blog about what I did on Thursday without mentioning them by name, so the secret's out.) I "helped" my boss make a new gate in the fence, by handing him tools and occasionally hammering things when he told me how to do it. I'm bad at DIY, as everyone who knows me is well aware.
Then on Thursday I had my been-there-a-month induction session, which turned out to be more interesting than I expected, because of the revelation during the "history of Boots the Chemist" part that in 1935 they commissioned a cartoon, animated by none other than Ub Iwerks, called "See How They Won"! It chronicles the fight against evil germs by the heroic Boots army. I knew there were perks to working for a big company like Boots, but I didn't expect them to include getting to watch classic-era cartoons! I'm all the more convinced that I picked the right job now.
And somewhere along the way I confirmed that I'm moving to Beeston next weekend. Nice little flat, much closer to work, and hopefully the transition will be smooth and uncomplicated. But if I disappear from the internet for a while, you'll know why. Unless I've been abducted by Bulgarian anti-memory crusaders, in which case you'll believe you know why I'm not blogging, but you'll be wrong.
Then on Thursday I had my been-there-a-month induction session, which turned out to be more interesting than I expected, because of the revelation during the "history of Boots the Chemist" part that in 1935 they commissioned a cartoon, animated by none other than Ub Iwerks, called "See How They Won"! It chronicles the fight against evil germs by the heroic Boots army. I knew there were perks to working for a big company like Boots, but I didn't expect them to include getting to watch classic-era cartoons! I'm all the more convinced that I picked the right job now.
And somewhere along the way I confirmed that I'm moving to Beeston next weekend. Nice little flat, much closer to work, and hopefully the transition will be smooth and uncomplicated. But if I disappear from the internet for a while, you'll know why. Unless I've been abducted by Bulgarian anti-memory crusaders, in which case you'll believe you know why I'm not blogging, but you'll be wrong.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
One more thing
Yes! Not content with an extra-long post earlier tonight, I'm going to write an extra blog entry too! I found something else that I can't resist blogging about. That chess game I briefly mentioned in passing, between Jan Smeets and Nigel Short, can be played through on the internet here. And you can read commentary about it here, where it says that the game is "A brilliant effort by Smeets, who later described the game as one of his best ever."
Well... I don't claim to be a grandmaster (a real grandmaster, anyway. I am a memory GM, for what it's worth), but I wouldn't describe this game as brilliant. It's... simple. I understand what's happening, and I'm rubbish at understanding chess positions. It's Ruy Lopez, for goodness' sake! That's the most basic, overused opening in low-level chess games across the world! It's the opening that people figure out for themselves as kids and play exclusively for years because they don't dare attempt something more complicated like a queen's gambit.
And it's not like these two giants of chess do anything exciting with it! Threaten and defend the pawns, exchange a few pieces to make the position more simple, bring the queen out, zoom it into that little undefended space in the corner, chase the king around the board a bit until you contrive a position to take a rook, win.
I've played this exact game a zillion times with my former fellow nerdy teenager best friend David (perhaps it's not just the MSO and othello worlds that are overcrowded with Davids, maybe it's my whole life). And yes, I was the loser in these games more often than not, but still. If that's what passes for a brilliant game between two GMs these days, maybe it's time I came out of retirement...
Well... I don't claim to be a grandmaster (a real grandmaster, anyway. I am a memory GM, for what it's worth), but I wouldn't describe this game as brilliant. It's... simple. I understand what's happening, and I'm rubbish at understanding chess positions. It's Ruy Lopez, for goodness' sake! That's the most basic, overused opening in low-level chess games across the world! It's the opening that people figure out for themselves as kids and play exclusively for years because they don't dare attempt something more complicated like a queen's gambit.
And it's not like these two giants of chess do anything exciting with it! Threaten and defend the pawns, exchange a few pieces to make the position more simple, bring the queen out, zoom it into that little undefended space in the corner, chase the king around the board a bit until you contrive a position to take a rook, win.
I've played this exact game a zillion times with my former fellow nerdy teenager best friend David (perhaps it's not just the MSO and othello worlds that are overcrowded with Davids, maybe it's my whole life). And yes, I was the loser in these games more often than not, but still. If that's what passes for a brilliant game between two GMs these days, maybe it's time I came out of retirement...
UKMC, episode five: Escape To Victory (or a bronze medal, at least)
After the speed cards, there was only time for a very quick speech from Phil and Tony thanking everyone for coming and asking them to get out of the room and let the chess players in. I missed it because I was talking to the Sun on Phil's mobile phone, but I'm sure it was a fitting end to an excellent weekend's memorising. I gave Phil his mobile back, burbled something quickly into the microphone about how great it was to see everyone and how the organisers are all great, while trying to keep hold of my non-closing rucksack full of speed stacks timers and packs of cards that were falling all over the floor. You can see it on the Sun website if it's still there and if you really want to. I don't think it shows that I was in a hurry, knowing I was going to be late for the othello if I didn't dash quickly. All that remained were a few closing conversations:
-Phil: Your cards from yesterday are through here, follow me.
-Me (following him): Okay. Thanks again, great competition, etc...
-Lots of other people: Congratulations!
-Me (repeatedly): Thanks! You too! Well done on the [insert anything I could remember about whatever whoever I was talking to had done well]!
-Boris: Hey, Ben, where does a score of 6350 put me on the ranking list?
-Me: I have no idea. I never remember the ranking scores. [I had to keep asking what score I needed to get to number one over the course of the weekend. I seem to have a real blind spot with ranking points memory] James Paterson's the one to ask. James, where's Boris on the rankings now?
-Sun journalist with camera (not the one I was talking to on the phone, another one): Ben, got time for that quick chat?
-Me (seeing Phil had by now disappeared out of sight): Sure, why not? Talk and walk?
-Sun guy: Let me just quickly put this radio mike on you...
-Me (after extensive attempts to clip the thing on my shirt, only for it to fall apart): Can I just hold it in my hand?
-Sun guy: Sure. So, happy with the result?
-Me (holding radio mike): [burbled something about the competition. You can also see that on the Sun website, same video clip, same provisos as before]
-Sun guy: Great, thanks.
-BBC camera crew: Ben, got time for that quick chat?
-Me: Um, yes, sure, just a minute, let me get my cards back first, I'm really in a hurry.
-BBC presenter: Sure, I just have to go and [do something I wasn't paying attention to] first. Talk to you in a minute.
-Me (seeing Phil being hassled by even more people than were hassling me, but noticing a box full of packs of cards sitting near some chess people): Ah, my cards!
-Raymond Keene OBE: Ah, Ben, this is Jan Something and Someone Else, he's the Something of the chess tournament.
-Me (finding my cards, dropping the contents of my rucksack again and trying to pick them up): Oh, great, look, I've really got to dash, I'm playing in a...
-Raymond Keene OBE: Ben's just won the memory competition.
-Jan Something: Ah. You are a competitor in the memory?
-Me: Yes, that's right.
-Jan Something: Ah. And you are the winner?
-Me: Yes.*
*[conversation edited for comic effect. I'm sure Jan Something (possibly not his real name) is a great conversationalist, it's just that I was really in a hurry to get away and not arrive at the othello more than 15 minutes late]
-Jan Something: Ah.
-Me (thinking if I'm going to be talking to chess people, I might as well do what I'd been meaning to do all weekend, and say hi to Nigel Short): Is Nigel Short anywhere around here?
-Someone Else (gesturing to a man sitting right next to him): He's right here.
-Me: Oh. You don't wear glasses any more. [thought to myself: Why, considering that I'm in a tearing hurry, did I just take the time to tell Nigel Short he isn't wearing glasses? He probably knows that already.] Um, I just wanted to say hi. Back when you were in the world championship match with Kasparov, I was a nerdy teenager and I was following the games with rapt attention.
-Glasses-less Nigel Short: Um, thanks.
-Me: Big fan. Got to go, nice to meet you.
-BBC presenter: Ben, have you got five minutes to talk?
-Me (leaving): No. Not even five seconds. Really in a hurry.
[for the record, Michael Adams won the chess, as usual. Nigel Short lost his Sunday game to Jan Smeets, possibly alarmed by the conversation with me, and ended up joint seventh with Jan Werle and Jon Speelman. And yes, everybody at the chess tournament was called Jan - three of the competitors and also the sponsor Jan Mol, who I suspect was probably the Jan Someone I was speaking to.]
I dumped my stuff in my hotel over the road without losing anything, cleverly fitted in an in-depth interview with the BBC while walking to the tube station (they offered to get a taxi, but I refused on working-class-hero grounds), said my goodbyes and hot-footed it to the Royal Horticultural Halls.
I was only ten minutes or so late, and the othello hadn't started yet. There were six of us there - me, Imre, David B and Geoff plus MSO regulars Bharat and David P. The MSO, like the othello world, is overrun by Davids, and another one of them, David Kotin, was running the othello tournament. We played a double-round-robin of ten-minute games, and Imre was on the kind of everybody-squishing form that he seems to reserve for tournaments that don't affect the British rating list. He won all his games, and I managed to win six out of ten, beating Othello David once and Geoff once to end up in bronze medal position.
They don't do actual medals at the MSO any more, but they do do stylish little mini-trophy/plaque things, which look really nice. Of course, they hadn't made the othello ones yet, so I didn't get it before dashing off again, but I'm hoping to collect it some time.
The highlight of the othello was the game against Geoff that I didn't win - I was already well and truly dead, but also running out of time, and so I was playing my moves at a frantic rate. I played my penultimate move, Geoff played his and Imre quipped "Ah, so now Ben can't lose on time."
Not paying attention to this, I played what I thought was my only available move and started flipping discs, only to notice from the giggles of the spectators that this actually wasn't a legal move, and in fact I didn't have any legal moves and should have tapped the clock to signify that I had to pass. This made sense of Imre's comment, but it sank into my brain just a second too late, and I didn't manage to unflip the discs I'd wrongly flipped before my time ran out. So I lost on time in a position where it's not possible to lose on time, which is quite an achievement.
And so that was the weekend. Hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as I enjoyed living it. I doubt you did, since I'm not THAT great a writer, but never mind. I got criticised for not blogging enough about the world memory championships last year (even though I spent it in a hotel without internet access), so I wanted to make up for it here. Normal bloggery resumes tomorrow with a precis of what's been happening to me over the last five days.
-Phil: Your cards from yesterday are through here, follow me.
-Me (following him): Okay. Thanks again, great competition, etc...
-Lots of other people: Congratulations!
-Me (repeatedly): Thanks! You too! Well done on the [insert anything I could remember about whatever whoever I was talking to had done well]!
-Boris: Hey, Ben, where does a score of 6350 put me on the ranking list?
-Me: I have no idea. I never remember the ranking scores. [I had to keep asking what score I needed to get to number one over the course of the weekend. I seem to have a real blind spot with ranking points memory] James Paterson's the one to ask. James, where's Boris on the rankings now?
-Sun journalist with camera (not the one I was talking to on the phone, another one): Ben, got time for that quick chat?
-Me (seeing Phil had by now disappeared out of sight): Sure, why not? Talk and walk?
-Sun guy: Let me just quickly put this radio mike on you...
-Me (after extensive attempts to clip the thing on my shirt, only for it to fall apart): Can I just hold it in my hand?
-Sun guy: Sure. So, happy with the result?
-Me (holding radio mike): [burbled something about the competition. You can also see that on the Sun website, same video clip, same provisos as before]
-Sun guy: Great, thanks.
-BBC camera crew: Ben, got time for that quick chat?
-Me: Um, yes, sure, just a minute, let me get my cards back first, I'm really in a hurry.
-BBC presenter: Sure, I just have to go and [do something I wasn't paying attention to] first. Talk to you in a minute.
-Me (seeing Phil being hassled by even more people than were hassling me, but noticing a box full of packs of cards sitting near some chess people): Ah, my cards!
-Raymond Keene OBE: Ah, Ben, this is Jan Something and Someone Else, he's the Something of the chess tournament.
-Me (finding my cards, dropping the contents of my rucksack again and trying to pick them up): Oh, great, look, I've really got to dash, I'm playing in a...
-Raymond Keene OBE: Ben's just won the memory competition.
-Jan Something: Ah. You are a competitor in the memory?
-Me: Yes, that's right.
-Jan Something: Ah. And you are the winner?
-Me: Yes.*
*[conversation edited for comic effect. I'm sure Jan Something (possibly not his real name) is a great conversationalist, it's just that I was really in a hurry to get away and not arrive at the othello more than 15 minutes late]
-Jan Something: Ah.
-Me (thinking if I'm going to be talking to chess people, I might as well do what I'd been meaning to do all weekend, and say hi to Nigel Short): Is Nigel Short anywhere around here?
-Someone Else (gesturing to a man sitting right next to him): He's right here.
-Me: Oh. You don't wear glasses any more. [thought to myself: Why, considering that I'm in a tearing hurry, did I just take the time to tell Nigel Short he isn't wearing glasses? He probably knows that already.] Um, I just wanted to say hi. Back when you were in the world championship match with Kasparov, I was a nerdy teenager and I was following the games with rapt attention.
-Glasses-less Nigel Short: Um, thanks.
-Me: Big fan. Got to go, nice to meet you.
-BBC presenter: Ben, have you got five minutes to talk?
-Me (leaving): No. Not even five seconds. Really in a hurry.
[for the record, Michael Adams won the chess, as usual. Nigel Short lost his Sunday game to Jan Smeets, possibly alarmed by the conversation with me, and ended up joint seventh with Jan Werle and Jon Speelman. And yes, everybody at the chess tournament was called Jan - three of the competitors and also the sponsor Jan Mol, who I suspect was probably the Jan Someone I was speaking to.]
I dumped my stuff in my hotel over the road without losing anything, cleverly fitted in an in-depth interview with the BBC while walking to the tube station (they offered to get a taxi, but I refused on working-class-hero grounds), said my goodbyes and hot-footed it to the Royal Horticultural Halls.
I was only ten minutes or so late, and the othello hadn't started yet. There were six of us there - me, Imre, David B and Geoff plus MSO regulars Bharat and David P. The MSO, like the othello world, is overrun by Davids, and another one of them, David Kotin, was running the othello tournament. We played a double-round-robin of ten-minute games, and Imre was on the kind of everybody-squishing form that he seems to reserve for tournaments that don't affect the British rating list. He won all his games, and I managed to win six out of ten, beating Othello David once and Geoff once to end up in bronze medal position.
They don't do actual medals at the MSO any more, but they do do stylish little mini-trophy/plaque things, which look really nice. Of course, they hadn't made the othello ones yet, so I didn't get it before dashing off again, but I'm hoping to collect it some time.
The highlight of the othello was the game against Geoff that I didn't win - I was already well and truly dead, but also running out of time, and so I was playing my moves at a frantic rate. I played my penultimate move, Geoff played his and Imre quipped "Ah, so now Ben can't lose on time."
Not paying attention to this, I played what I thought was my only available move and started flipping discs, only to notice from the giggles of the spectators that this actually wasn't a legal move, and in fact I didn't have any legal moves and should have tapped the clock to signify that I had to pass. This made sense of Imre's comment, but it sank into my brain just a second too late, and I didn't manage to unflip the discs I'd wrongly flipped before my time ran out. So I lost on time in a position where it's not possible to lose on time, which is quite an achievement.
And so that was the weekend. Hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as I enjoyed living it. I doubt you did, since I'm not THAT great a writer, but never mind. I got criticised for not blogging enough about the world memory championships last year (even though I spent it in a hotel without internet access), so I wanted to make up for it here. Normal bloggery resumes tomorrow with a precis of what's been happening to me over the last five days.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
UKMC, episode four: Am I Still Writing This Thing?
Seriously, I'm going to have to spend next week catching up with blogging all the things that have happened to me this week. And then the week after that blogging all the exciting things that will happen to me next week. And the week after the week after that... well, you get the idea. Maybe I'll just spend all day blogging tomorrow instead of packing up my stuff because I'm moving house next weekend.
That's something I haven't blogged about yet, because I've been writing about the UKMC.
Anyway, last Sunday morning, it was the final day of the competition. After another very nice full English breakfast at the swanky hotel, I went over the road to find that I was comfortably in the lead. So in five minute numbers I went for a "safe" 360, only to forget an image half way through the final line, so I only wrote down 339. And had a mistake in a previous row, so ended up with a score of 299. Which is still pretty good, really. Wasn't long ago that 280 was my safe-ish score and 324 was my risky second attempt. Which just goes to show how the standard at these competitions is going up at a staggering rate, like I always say.
I was reasonably confident of a halfway acceptable score in abstract images, having done a bit of practice before the competition. I said to Boris that he was going to get 200 or so, wasn't he, and he replied that no, he wasn't going to do that, 150 would be a good score for him. Accordingly, he got 205, while I ended up with 144. Which is still a personal best, and a halfway acceptable score by any standards.
Around this time the media throng started arriving, in the form of that BBC documentary I've probably unwisely agreed to allow to film me, and also another person with a camera from the Sun. I spent most of the time in between disciplines (and there wasn't much time, since we were hurrying to finish before the chess players moved into the room) talking to people and not really being sure who I was talking to.
So, we got on with the historic dates, which went pretty well, and the spoken numbers, in which I got a quite acceptable 99 in the first trial (Boris got a perfect 100, but I always struggle with that last digit, since I memorise them in threes and have one left over that I have to remember by just repeating it to myself). It's always fun to watch memory competitors after a spoken numbers - everyone stands outside the room in a group, reciting the number to each other and exclaiming "Drat!" or "Woohoo!" depending on whether what they remembered agrees with the group consensus.
Which left us with speed cards. I had a lead of around 1200 points, so I was safely the UK champion unless I failed to memorise anything and Boris did a pack in 25 seconds or so. But I was in with a good chance of knocking Gunther off the world number one spot, with a time of (according to my rough calculations) 50 seconds or so. So the sensible strategy was a safe, slow first pack to make sure of that, followed by an amazing world record to blow everyone away.
And so I went through the pack twice, really really quickly, in 47 seconds or so, which should have been safe, but my brain wasn't really up to speed, and I didn't pay attention to the last few cards both times I looked at them. So I got the recall wrong and was torn between attempting another safe time or saying to heck with it all and going for that world record. I really wanted to break the world record and make "Superhuman Genius" out-of-date before it was even broadcast. Besides, it annoys me that they bullied me into making a record attempt outside the competition and ending up with a sort-of-semi-official-but-not-counted-as-a-100%-real world record.
In between speed cards trials I escaped the cameras long enough to get my historic dates score corrected (the arbiter had somehow stopped marking my recall paper about a third of the way through the final page, possibly distracted by a butterfly)* and recalculated that a speed cards time of about a minute would still be enough to take that number one spot. And, on the advice of James, I decided to refrain from attempting the world record anyway, and just play it safe.
*[see my post of three days ago. The arbiters were great. Really they were. Just ignore me.]
So, I did 56.41 and recalled it without a hitch. Woohoo, UK Champion, World Number One, Really Great Memory Person, and so on. Woohoo! Boris did 54.41 to ensure his second place and to move back into the world top ten (at the expense of Dominic O'Brien! That's a cool achievement to put on your CV!), and Gaby did 54.50 to narrowly snatch third place from Katie.
James Ponder won the battle of the Jameses to take fifth place and the coveted third-best-British-entrant trophy and prize (another thing I forgot to mention about the arbiters - arranged lots of sponsorship and some extremely cool prizes again!). Jürgen, Ameel (have I mentioned Ameel Hoque? Another excellent newcomer to watch out for in future competitions!), Mark Channon and Mia rounded out the top ten. Two-time Polish champion Tomek Krasinski was a close enough eleventh that I'd feel like I'm being rude not to give him a namecheck too. Mark Aarøe Nissen (who I haven't mentioned here before, but who was competing in his first real-life competition after taking part in the Online Memory Challenge) got an excellent 87.11 seconds in his first ever real life speed cards. Everybody else, I'm sure, had good reason to be proud of their performance. Give them a round of applause, if you're reading this!
Of course, by the time we ended we were overdue to clear out and let the chess players in, so they were huddled outside muttering dire imprecations in Russian (most of the competitors were British, but I assume chess players of all nationalities curse in Russian), and I was decidedly overdue for an othello tournament quite some distance away elsewhere in London.
Final episode tomorrow! Thrill to my attempt to make a quick getaway from Simpson's!
That's something I haven't blogged about yet, because I've been writing about the UKMC.
Anyway, last Sunday morning, it was the final day of the competition. After another very nice full English breakfast at the swanky hotel, I went over the road to find that I was comfortably in the lead. So in five minute numbers I went for a "safe" 360, only to forget an image half way through the final line, so I only wrote down 339. And had a mistake in a previous row, so ended up with a score of 299. Which is still pretty good, really. Wasn't long ago that 280 was my safe-ish score and 324 was my risky second attempt. Which just goes to show how the standard at these competitions is going up at a staggering rate, like I always say.
I was reasonably confident of a halfway acceptable score in abstract images, having done a bit of practice before the competition. I said to Boris that he was going to get 200 or so, wasn't he, and he replied that no, he wasn't going to do that, 150 would be a good score for him. Accordingly, he got 205, while I ended up with 144. Which is still a personal best, and a halfway acceptable score by any standards.
Around this time the media throng started arriving, in the form of that BBC documentary I've probably unwisely agreed to allow to film me, and also another person with a camera from the Sun. I spent most of the time in between disciplines (and there wasn't much time, since we were hurrying to finish before the chess players moved into the room) talking to people and not really being sure who I was talking to.
So, we got on with the historic dates, which went pretty well, and the spoken numbers, in which I got a quite acceptable 99 in the first trial (Boris got a perfect 100, but I always struggle with that last digit, since I memorise them in threes and have one left over that I have to remember by just repeating it to myself). It's always fun to watch memory competitors after a spoken numbers - everyone stands outside the room in a group, reciting the number to each other and exclaiming "Drat!" or "Woohoo!" depending on whether what they remembered agrees with the group consensus.
Which left us with speed cards. I had a lead of around 1200 points, so I was safely the UK champion unless I failed to memorise anything and Boris did a pack in 25 seconds or so. But I was in with a good chance of knocking Gunther off the world number one spot, with a time of (according to my rough calculations) 50 seconds or so. So the sensible strategy was a safe, slow first pack to make sure of that, followed by an amazing world record to blow everyone away.
And so I went through the pack twice, really really quickly, in 47 seconds or so, which should have been safe, but my brain wasn't really up to speed, and I didn't pay attention to the last few cards both times I looked at them. So I got the recall wrong and was torn between attempting another safe time or saying to heck with it all and going for that world record. I really wanted to break the world record and make "Superhuman Genius" out-of-date before it was even broadcast. Besides, it annoys me that they bullied me into making a record attempt outside the competition and ending up with a sort-of-semi-official-but-not-counted-as-a-100%-real world record.
In between speed cards trials I escaped the cameras long enough to get my historic dates score corrected (the arbiter had somehow stopped marking my recall paper about a third of the way through the final page, possibly distracted by a butterfly)* and recalculated that a speed cards time of about a minute would still be enough to take that number one spot. And, on the advice of James, I decided to refrain from attempting the world record anyway, and just play it safe.
*[see my post of three days ago. The arbiters were great. Really they were. Just ignore me.]
So, I did 56.41 and recalled it without a hitch. Woohoo, UK Champion, World Number One, Really Great Memory Person, and so on. Woohoo! Boris did 54.41 to ensure his second place and to move back into the world top ten (at the expense of Dominic O'Brien! That's a cool achievement to put on your CV!), and Gaby did 54.50 to narrowly snatch third place from Katie.
James Ponder won the battle of the Jameses to take fifth place and the coveted third-best-British-entrant trophy and prize (another thing I forgot to mention about the arbiters - arranged lots of sponsorship and some extremely cool prizes again!). Jürgen, Ameel (have I mentioned Ameel Hoque? Another excellent newcomer to watch out for in future competitions!), Mark Channon and Mia rounded out the top ten. Two-time Polish champion Tomek Krasinski was a close enough eleventh that I'd feel like I'm being rude not to give him a namecheck too. Mark Aarøe Nissen (who I haven't mentioned here before, but who was competing in his first real-life competition after taking part in the Online Memory Challenge) got an excellent 87.11 seconds in his first ever real life speed cards. Everybody else, I'm sure, had good reason to be proud of their performance. Give them a round of applause, if you're reading this!
Of course, by the time we ended we were overdue to clear out and let the chess players in, so they were huddled outside muttering dire imprecations in Russian (most of the competitors were British, but I assume chess players of all nationalities curse in Russian), and I was decidedly overdue for an othello tournament quite some distance away elsewhere in London.
Final episode tomorrow! Thrill to my attempt to make a quick getaway from Simpson's!
Friday, August 22, 2008
UKMC, episode three: Interlude
With the competition only taking place in the mornings because we were piggybacking a chess tournament's rooms, I had Saturday afternoon free. Eventually, anyway, because as mentioned I was talking to Canadians while everybody else got to wander off for lunch - and that was only after waiting around for them to finish talking to Tony (who is one of the world's great talkers, as everyone knows, and can go on for hours if you give him half a chance). Meanwhile, Ray Keene did his best to persuade me to come to the prizegiving/gala dinner on Monday evening and I said I would (mainly because of my usual difficulty in saying no to people), despite having to work in Beeston on Tuesday. Then after leaving Simpson's, it occurred to me that I was on telly on Monday night and I would much prefer to be at home for that. So I made a mental note to tell them that I wouldn't be going to the dinner after all. But I decided to wait until after the competition had finished, just in case anyone had the idea of rigging the result so that the winner would be at the prizegiving.
Not that anyone would do that, of course. I'm joking. Please don't rig the result of any future memory championship to teach me a lesson, arbiters.
Anyway, I went to Victoria station for a late lunch - I love the food court there, a couple of times when I went to the MSO and stayed in a hall of residence nearby, I had my tea there every day. And then I went down the road to the Royal Horticultural Halls down the road, where this year's somewhat smaller-scale MSO was taking place. The Horticultural Halls are surprisingly devoid of any plant life, but a nice place for an MSO, featuring rooms of various sizes spread around the building, just right for all the various competitions.
There wasn't anything happening there on Saturday afternoon that I could compete in, but I went along anyway, just to say hi to all the usual MSO suspects - the dozen or so people who can still be found there every year. Everyone seems to still think of me as a usual suspect, too, even though I've barely shown my face at the MSO for the last few years. But after that, I decided to see a few sights, seeing as I was in London. I got a tube to Oxford Circus, intending to walk down Oxford Street to Charing Cross Road, check out all the bookshops, go down to Trafalgar Square and admire that big column thing, then walk back along the Strand to my hotel.
This was a pretty ambitious plan for me - I can't cope with London streets, even if I'm only planning to walk along three really big and well-known ones. I get confused and lost if I try to travel anywhere in London that isn't within sight of a tube station. I have taken the tube from Euston to King's Cross in the past.
However, on Saturday I set out on this adventure with great confidence, which was only slightly dented when I realised after quite a bit of walking that I'd turned the wrong way out of Oxford Circus and was headed down Oxford Street in the wrong direction. Never mind, I thought, I'm still seeing the sights, and I haven't really been down this end before very much, and when I get to Marble Arch I'll get the good old tube down to Tottenham Court Road. But when I got there, it turned out that Central Line services were seriously disrupted due to what the tannoy described as "a person under a train". So I got a bus instead. I practically never take London buses, and I should do it more often. And I got off at Tottenham Court Road and successfully completed the rest of my planned walk, so I felt hugely accomplished and metropolitan.
Then it was just back to the hotel to enjoy some abstract images practice and rather a lot of Sky One. Being a Virgin customer, I really miss being able to see some Simpsons episodes other than the handful that Channel 4 keep endlessly repeating with all the funny lines edited out, and even better, I got to see the new series of Gladiators!
New Gladiators is basically exactly the same as old Gladiators, which is exactly the way it should be. I'm hugely in favour of this! And I still want to be a Gladiator when I grow up. Maybe once I've won the world memory championship I'll turn my attention to bodybuilding.
Not that anyone would do that, of course. I'm joking. Please don't rig the result of any future memory championship to teach me a lesson, arbiters.
Anyway, I went to Victoria station for a late lunch - I love the food court there, a couple of times when I went to the MSO and stayed in a hall of residence nearby, I had my tea there every day. And then I went down the road to the Royal Horticultural Halls down the road, where this year's somewhat smaller-scale MSO was taking place. The Horticultural Halls are surprisingly devoid of any plant life, but a nice place for an MSO, featuring rooms of various sizes spread around the building, just right for all the various competitions.
There wasn't anything happening there on Saturday afternoon that I could compete in, but I went along anyway, just to say hi to all the usual MSO suspects - the dozen or so people who can still be found there every year. Everyone seems to still think of me as a usual suspect, too, even though I've barely shown my face at the MSO for the last few years. But after that, I decided to see a few sights, seeing as I was in London. I got a tube to Oxford Circus, intending to walk down Oxford Street to Charing Cross Road, check out all the bookshops, go down to Trafalgar Square and admire that big column thing, then walk back along the Strand to my hotel.
This was a pretty ambitious plan for me - I can't cope with London streets, even if I'm only planning to walk along three really big and well-known ones. I get confused and lost if I try to travel anywhere in London that isn't within sight of a tube station. I have taken the tube from Euston to King's Cross in the past.
However, on Saturday I set out on this adventure with great confidence, which was only slightly dented when I realised after quite a bit of walking that I'd turned the wrong way out of Oxford Circus and was headed down Oxford Street in the wrong direction. Never mind, I thought, I'm still seeing the sights, and I haven't really been down this end before very much, and when I get to Marble Arch I'll get the good old tube down to Tottenham Court Road. But when I got there, it turned out that Central Line services were seriously disrupted due to what the tannoy described as "a person under a train". So I got a bus instead. I practically never take London buses, and I should do it more often. And I got off at Tottenham Court Road and successfully completed the rest of my planned walk, so I felt hugely accomplished and metropolitan.
Then it was just back to the hotel to enjoy some abstract images practice and rather a lot of Sky One. Being a Virgin customer, I really miss being able to see some Simpsons episodes other than the handful that Channel 4 keep endlessly repeating with all the funny lines edited out, and even better, I got to see the new series of Gladiators!
New Gladiators is basically exactly the same as old Gladiators, which is exactly the way it should be. I'm hugely in favour of this! And I still want to be a Gladiator when I grow up. Maybe once I've won the world memory championship I'll turn my attention to bodybuilding.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
UKMC, episode two: London On £80 A Night
I stayed in the Strand Palace Hotel, which is posher than any hotel needs to be, and rather expensive, but is just over the road from Simpson's. My justification for this is that I've now got a job, and I've got a credit card, and if a fellow can't splash out on an expensive hotel once in a while (or even every single time he goes to London, despite asserting that he always stays in cheap places), what is the world coming to? And it was quiet and peaceful, and since I'd brought my abstract images crib sheets with me and spent the evenings practicing (as well as watching telly), that's a good thing. Besides, the eighty quid includes a full English breakfast, and a good breakfast is an absolutely essential part of good preparation for any memory competition.
And, as I mentioned yesterday, this was a very good memory competition! 22 people competing, old-timers including Mark Channon who competed in the world championship back in 1995 before even I had heard of these things, and new-timers including Leong Hoo Tan who turns out to be one of Graham Brightwell's students at the LSE (proving beyond scientific doubt that it really is a small world) plus a wide range of usual suspects, among them Boris, Gaby, Jürgen and Mia from Germany, a couple of Jameses, a Katie and a Dai from England and Wales, lots of other international visitors and lots of other British people too!
We started out with five-minute random words, in which I attempted 104 but blanked in the recall on most of the fourth column and on just one word of the fifth ('bluebell', and for some reason I was sure it was either 'lily' or 'lilac'). 74 is still a pretty good score, and I know I could do quite a bit better if it goes really well for me some time. It did go really well for Boris (as indeed it always seems to do), and he broke the world record with 106.
Eventually his score settled on 106, anyway - there were a lot of mistakes in the marking and misunderstandings of the scoring rules, and all the scores had to be re-checked and adjusted a couple of times before we'd settled on the final results.
But while the words were still being marked for the first time, we were doing five-minute binary. My record in this of 795 was just waiting to be broken - I set it last year knowing that I can do a lot better in practice on a good day, and Saturday turned out to be one of those good days. This despite the fact that it turned out to be four-and-a-quarter-minute binary - a mix-up in timings led to us being told to stop memorising fifteen seconds early (we had a lot of that kind of thing this weekend - Phil was running in and out of the room all weekend doing three or four things at once, and none of the arbiters in the room seemed to be keeping track of the time. In the 15-minute numbers we were told to stop a full minute early and then told to carry on again, and a couple of other times I told the competitors to stop myself when time was up, seeing as I was sitting right next to the microphone and nobody else wanted to say stop).
[At this point, can I refer you to yesterday's post when I make it clear that the arbiters do a really great job and don't deserve to be publicly criticised like this. I've got it out of my system now, more or less. Sorry.]
Anyway, my recall was unusually perfect. Literally. And I ended up with a really groovy 930 digits! New world record, and by a long way too!
So, with the competition running more or less to schedule still, we moved on to five-minute names and faces, which of course I'm rubbish at, but I produced a quite acceptable score of 41 (once I'd got my score double-checked and corrected from an even more acceptable but clearly impossible 51) to stay in a good position overall. This is Katie's specialist subject, and she duly got the highest score, but only with 65 this time. Which is a bit strange, really, seeing as I thought the names here were quite a bit easier than the ones I made up for Cambridge, when she scored a sensational 82.
Anyway, by this point it was clear that, as expected, Boris was my main rival - he dropped out of the world top ten after Hannes's performance in Tuttlingen, and was eager to get back in - with Katie, James and James fighting it out for second-best-Brit (trophies and cash for the top three British competitors) and Ameel Hoque as a dark horse newcomer doing extremely well.
After that, we just had to finish off the day with the two 'marathon' events, at least by the standards of these short-discipline championships - 15-minute numbers and 10-minute cards. I tried for four journeys' worth of digits in the first (936, plus an extra three for luck) and ended up with an excellent new-world-record 819 (ie three rows with mistakes). Which is great, because before this I didn't hold ANY of the decimal-numbers world records and it was really annoying me. As I've mentioned before, my system isn't particularly exceptional with numbers, and I wish I could think of a way to improve it.
And in the cards, I contemplated attempting a daring eight packs, but in the end they just didn't seem to be sinking into my brain as clearly as they could, so I played it safe with just seven. And I finished the recall with minutes to spare, so possibly I could have gone for eight and been just fine, but never mind. I got the seven all correct, for another world record, so I can't complain.
So, lunchtime arrived - or at least it did for the other competitors who weren't dragged away to talk extensively to Canadian television - and the end of the first day's play. I really wanted to keep memorising, I was really in the mood. Too bad I had to wait until Sunday morning to keep going.
So, at the half-way point, I had a very comfortable lead, as well as three world records to my name. Second was Boris, then tightly packed together behind him were James Paterson, Katie, James Ponder, Jürgen, Gaby, Ameel, Mark and Mia. Stay tuned for what happened next!
And, as I mentioned yesterday, this was a very good memory competition! 22 people competing, old-timers including Mark Channon who competed in the world championship back in 1995 before even I had heard of these things, and new-timers including Leong Hoo Tan who turns out to be one of Graham Brightwell's students at the LSE (proving beyond scientific doubt that it really is a small world) plus a wide range of usual suspects, among them Boris, Gaby, Jürgen and Mia from Germany, a couple of Jameses, a Katie and a Dai from England and Wales, lots of other international visitors and lots of other British people too!
We started out with five-minute random words, in which I attempted 104 but blanked in the recall on most of the fourth column and on just one word of the fifth ('bluebell', and for some reason I was sure it was either 'lily' or 'lilac'). 74 is still a pretty good score, and I know I could do quite a bit better if it goes really well for me some time. It did go really well for Boris (as indeed it always seems to do), and he broke the world record with 106.
Eventually his score settled on 106, anyway - there were a lot of mistakes in the marking and misunderstandings of the scoring rules, and all the scores had to be re-checked and adjusted a couple of times before we'd settled on the final results.
But while the words were still being marked for the first time, we were doing five-minute binary. My record in this of 795 was just waiting to be broken - I set it last year knowing that I can do a lot better in practice on a good day, and Saturday turned out to be one of those good days. This despite the fact that it turned out to be four-and-a-quarter-minute binary - a mix-up in timings led to us being told to stop memorising fifteen seconds early (we had a lot of that kind of thing this weekend - Phil was running in and out of the room all weekend doing three or four things at once, and none of the arbiters in the room seemed to be keeping track of the time. In the 15-minute numbers we were told to stop a full minute early and then told to carry on again, and a couple of other times I told the competitors to stop myself when time was up, seeing as I was sitting right next to the microphone and nobody else wanted to say stop).
[At this point, can I refer you to yesterday's post when I make it clear that the arbiters do a really great job and don't deserve to be publicly criticised like this. I've got it out of my system now, more or less. Sorry.]
Anyway, my recall was unusually perfect. Literally. And I ended up with a really groovy 930 digits! New world record, and by a long way too!
So, with the competition running more or less to schedule still, we moved on to five-minute names and faces, which of course I'm rubbish at, but I produced a quite acceptable score of 41 (once I'd got my score double-checked and corrected from an even more acceptable but clearly impossible 51) to stay in a good position overall. This is Katie's specialist subject, and she duly got the highest score, but only with 65 this time. Which is a bit strange, really, seeing as I thought the names here were quite a bit easier than the ones I made up for Cambridge, when she scored a sensational 82.
Anyway, by this point it was clear that, as expected, Boris was my main rival - he dropped out of the world top ten after Hannes's performance in Tuttlingen, and was eager to get back in - with Katie, James and James fighting it out for second-best-Brit (trophies and cash for the top three British competitors) and Ameel Hoque as a dark horse newcomer doing extremely well.
After that, we just had to finish off the day with the two 'marathon' events, at least by the standards of these short-discipline championships - 15-minute numbers and 10-minute cards. I tried for four journeys' worth of digits in the first (936, plus an extra three for luck) and ended up with an excellent new-world-record 819 (ie three rows with mistakes). Which is great, because before this I didn't hold ANY of the decimal-numbers world records and it was really annoying me. As I've mentioned before, my system isn't particularly exceptional with numbers, and I wish I could think of a way to improve it.
And in the cards, I contemplated attempting a daring eight packs, but in the end they just didn't seem to be sinking into my brain as clearly as they could, so I played it safe with just seven. And I finished the recall with minutes to spare, so possibly I could have gone for eight and been just fine, but never mind. I got the seven all correct, for another world record, so I can't complain.
So, lunchtime arrived - or at least it did for the other competitors who weren't dragged away to talk extensively to Canadian television - and the end of the first day's play. I really wanted to keep memorising, I was really in the mood. Too bad I had to wait until Sunday morning to keep going.
So, at the half-way point, I had a very comfortable lead, as well as three world records to my name. Second was Boris, then tightly packed together behind him were James Paterson, Katie, James Ponder, Jürgen, Gaby, Ameel, Mark and Mia. Stay tuned for what happened next!
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
UKMC, episode one: In Praise Of Arbiters
Okay, FINALLY I can get round to writing about the UK Memory Championship weekend! As I said yesterday, this is going to be split into multiple episodes over the next... four or five or three days. I'm not sure exactly how many. It might also be postponed if something exciting happens to me in the next few days. But it would have to be really exciting, because I spent today, uncharacteristically, doing DIY and things with tools and paint, and I'm not going to write about that, even though it would make for a fun blog. Because I really want to write about this.
So, before I start recounting the events of the weekend, it occurred to me that my account of the memory competition is going to involve observations about arbiting mistakes, and that this is really, really rude of me, because nobody ever mentions the things that go right with the organisation and running of memory competitions. I think I mentioned before that it's like being a football referee - you get no credit for getting it right, and no end of grief for getting it wrong. So, rather than just not saying bad things about the arbiters, who work unbelievably hard for little or no financial reward and never get recognised for it, I thought I would do a prologue-post in which I list all the many, many things that went right last weekend!
First off, the venue was excellent! The rooms above Simpson's-in-the-Strand had been booked for all the previous week's afternoons for a very, very major chess tournament (the kind that attracts Adams, Short, Speelman, Timman and many other recognisable names even to someone like me who's not really interested in chess all that much) and thanks to Ray Keene (OBE, chess grandmaster, buddy of Tony Buzan) we memory people were able to borrow the room, for free, in the mornings. And the room was classy, spacious, entirely silent and perfect for a memory competition! Also, there was a constant supply of water and glasses from the restaurant, which somebody behind the scenes presumably organised without any thanks from the competitors.
Or at least not from me. It's possible that all the other competitors are more polite.
Furthermore, all the memorisation and recall papers were prepared perfectly, which is a major headache to do - the abstract images, which take Phil a huge amount of time, were printed clearly and with very good quality (and, importantly, were exactly the same quality in each copy - it's a major problem if bad photocopying or empty print cartridges make some pages different from others). The historic dates, which also take a huge amount of time to write, were done just right. And the dates and the words were translated into LOTS of languages, and I didn't hear a single complaint about the quality of the translations. That's impressive.
The scores for each discipline were announced promptly - marking papers is a tiresome and tedious process that, just to make the point again, was done by mostly unpaid volunteers just helping to make the event possible. These markers were also always accommodating to competitors questioning their scores and demanding that they be double-checked.
In a related note, and something that isn't done enough at memory competitions, the memorisation papers were available for competitors to look at after the recall period had ended and the recall papers had been collected in. This is important because memorisers know what they've written down and, once they've looked at the memorisation papers afterwards, they know what score they've got, more or less. So if there is a mistake in the marking, they can challenge it with confidence and not waste everybody's time. It makes the whole thing go more smoothly.
The cards were all shuffled, and shuffled well and repeatedly, whether the competitors had brought their own or were using the cards provided. It's another thing that takes a lot of time, isn't any fun at all, and never gets any thanks.
The spoken numbers worked perfectly, without a technical hitch, and they'd tested the sound system beforehand to make sure. This is the number one discipline for things going wrong or competitors being dissatisfied, and it all went well this time!
And, as a major tribute to the organisation, there were TWENTY-TWO competitors! This is huge! Much more huge than any competition in this country for ages, bigger than the German championship, many more than I expected, not too far off the number I was expecting for the World Championship in Bahrain in October! Excellent work with the publicity and the press releases.
So, here's a special Zoomy thank-you to Phil, Chris, Ray, Tony, Warren (whose name I am really, really going to try to remember in future), Françoise, Neil, Jamie, Dionne, and whoever else was involved with the organising and arbiting but whom I've forgotten or never even noticed in the first place because they were doing such a good job. I really, really do appreciate all the unbelievable amount of hard work and effort! Thank you!
So, before I start recounting the events of the weekend, it occurred to me that my account of the memory competition is going to involve observations about arbiting mistakes, and that this is really, really rude of me, because nobody ever mentions the things that go right with the organisation and running of memory competitions. I think I mentioned before that it's like being a football referee - you get no credit for getting it right, and no end of grief for getting it wrong. So, rather than just not saying bad things about the arbiters, who work unbelievably hard for little or no financial reward and never get recognised for it, I thought I would do a prologue-post in which I list all the many, many things that went right last weekend!
First off, the venue was excellent! The rooms above Simpson's-in-the-Strand had been booked for all the previous week's afternoons for a very, very major chess tournament (the kind that attracts Adams, Short, Speelman, Timman and many other recognisable names even to someone like me who's not really interested in chess all that much) and thanks to Ray Keene (OBE, chess grandmaster, buddy of Tony Buzan) we memory people were able to borrow the room, for free, in the mornings. And the room was classy, spacious, entirely silent and perfect for a memory competition! Also, there was a constant supply of water and glasses from the restaurant, which somebody behind the scenes presumably organised without any thanks from the competitors.
Or at least not from me. It's possible that all the other competitors are more polite.
Furthermore, all the memorisation and recall papers were prepared perfectly, which is a major headache to do - the abstract images, which take Phil a huge amount of time, were printed clearly and with very good quality (and, importantly, were exactly the same quality in each copy - it's a major problem if bad photocopying or empty print cartridges make some pages different from others). The historic dates, which also take a huge amount of time to write, were done just right. And the dates and the words were translated into LOTS of languages, and I didn't hear a single complaint about the quality of the translations. That's impressive.
The scores for each discipline were announced promptly - marking papers is a tiresome and tedious process that, just to make the point again, was done by mostly unpaid volunteers just helping to make the event possible. These markers were also always accommodating to competitors questioning their scores and demanding that they be double-checked.
In a related note, and something that isn't done enough at memory competitions, the memorisation papers were available for competitors to look at after the recall period had ended and the recall papers had been collected in. This is important because memorisers know what they've written down and, once they've looked at the memorisation papers afterwards, they know what score they've got, more or less. So if there is a mistake in the marking, they can challenge it with confidence and not waste everybody's time. It makes the whole thing go more smoothly.
The cards were all shuffled, and shuffled well and repeatedly, whether the competitors had brought their own or were using the cards provided. It's another thing that takes a lot of time, isn't any fun at all, and never gets any thanks.
The spoken numbers worked perfectly, without a technical hitch, and they'd tested the sound system beforehand to make sure. This is the number one discipline for things going wrong or competitors being dissatisfied, and it all went well this time!
And, as a major tribute to the organisation, there were TWENTY-TWO competitors! This is huge! Much more huge than any competition in this country for ages, bigger than the German championship, many more than I expected, not too far off the number I was expecting for the World Championship in Bahrain in October! Excellent work with the publicity and the press releases.
So, here's a special Zoomy thank-you to Phil, Chris, Ray, Tony, Warren (whose name I am really, really going to try to remember in future), Françoise, Neil, Jamie, Dionne, and whoever else was involved with the organising and arbiting but whom I've forgotten or never even noticed in the first place because they were doing such a good job. I really, really do appreciate all the unbelievable amount of hard work and effort! Thank you!
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Hey, look! It's a superhuman genius!
Okay, I've finally seen it. Here's a bit of "the making of" dialogue, just for my loyal bloglings...
Director Matt: Can you say that again, but say "Marti Pellow out of Wet Wet Wet"? Because if you just say Marti Pellow, people won't know who you're talking about.
UK Memory Genius Ben: Okay. Should I explain who Elmer Fudd is, too?
Director Matt: No, everybody knows who Elmer Fudd is.
Poor Marti. Also, for the record, can I just stress that I HAVE now got a job, and money, and everything else anybody could want. I'm very grateful to my neighbour who put a friendly letter and £10 through the door this morning, but I'm not actually in imminent danger of starving to death for want of money. For that matter, can I make it clear that when I quit my job it was always with the intention of just having fun and then going back to the office in a year or so, not an attempt to make a career out of being a memory genius? I just worry that the wrong impression's going to come across there, and I seem like a slightly more hopeless case than I really am.
Apart from that, it was good fun. Ariel the pianist looks like he'll be fun to hang out with in a few years' time, he's almost certainly going to grow up into a long-haired, extremely cool, piano-playing hippy dropout celebrity who's actually a genuinely nice guy. Akiane the artist rather less so, but great paintings. Would've been good to see her sketching something, though - I know it's hard to capture the artistic process on a brief TV segment, but the scenes of her pretending to put the finishing touches to a painting didn't really put across how she goes about creating her pictures.
Anyway, that's the last you'll be seeing of me on telly for a while, to the best of my knowledge. A similarly-themed BBC documentary early next year, most likely - they filmed me in London over the weekend, and will be pestering me a bit more in the future.
And now I've got that out of the way, I can finally get round to writing the story of the UK Memory Championship and the MSO and the impressive way I found my way around the streets of London without getting excessively lost, and how I told Nigel Short I was a big fan of his when I was a nerdy teenager. I think I'll break it into chapters and blog it over the next few days.
And on an unrelated note, I just want to say hi to Jason. Hi, Jason!
Director Matt: Can you say that again, but say "Marti Pellow out of Wet Wet Wet"? Because if you just say Marti Pellow, people won't know who you're talking about.
UK Memory Genius Ben: Okay. Should I explain who Elmer Fudd is, too?
Director Matt: No, everybody knows who Elmer Fudd is.
Poor Marti. Also, for the record, can I just stress that I HAVE now got a job, and money, and everything else anybody could want. I'm very grateful to my neighbour who put a friendly letter and £10 through the door this morning, but I'm not actually in imminent danger of starving to death for want of money. For that matter, can I make it clear that when I quit my job it was always with the intention of just having fun and then going back to the office in a year or so, not an attempt to make a career out of being a memory genius? I just worry that the wrong impression's going to come across there, and I seem like a slightly more hopeless case than I really am.
Apart from that, it was good fun. Ariel the pianist looks like he'll be fun to hang out with in a few years' time, he's almost certainly going to grow up into a long-haired, extremely cool, piano-playing hippy dropout celebrity who's actually a genuinely nice guy. Akiane the artist rather less so, but great paintings. Would've been good to see her sketching something, though - I know it's hard to capture the artistic process on a brief TV segment, but the scenes of her pretending to put the finishing touches to a painting didn't really put across how she goes about creating her pictures.
Anyway, that's the last you'll be seeing of me on telly for a while, to the best of my knowledge. A similarly-themed BBC documentary early next year, most likely - they filmed me in London over the weekend, and will be pestering me a bit more in the future.
And now I've got that out of the way, I can finally get round to writing the story of the UK Memory Championship and the MSO and the impressive way I found my way around the streets of London without getting excessively lost, and how I told Nigel Short I was a big fan of his when I was a nerdy teenager. I think I'll break it into chapters and blog it over the next few days.
And on an unrelated note, I just want to say hi to Jason. Hi, Jason!
Monday, August 18, 2008
Tell you later
Tonight's blog was going to be a huge mega-epic account of all the weekend's goings-on, but then I got a call telling me that Grandma had had a fall coming out of the pub this afternoon (she swears she only had a cup of tea) and ended up in hospital. She's fine, just an impressive-looking black eye and lots of bruises, but I even ended up missing Superhuman Genius. I'll catch the repeat tomorrow, and I'll let you know what happened at the UK Championship too. Or you could read the Sun tomorrow, or the Derby Evening Telegraph, or whatever other newspapers pestered me for an interview, I forget.
But right now, I'm completely exhausted, and I've got to work tomorrow. Going to be a long day...
But right now, I'm completely exhausted, and I've got to work tomorrow. Going to be a long day...
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