Christmas Number One

I'm reliably informed that Current TV called me the number one geek-we-all-love last night, and played my 'pod' (which is what they call programmes on Current TV, because Current TV is 'cool' and 'down with the kids') from several years ago. You can watch it here if you haven't seen it before. Disturbingly, I had a lot less white in my beard back then, and it was only, what, three years ago?

The really entertaining bit about that page is the comment-threads. Because Current TV is all about viewer-created content (or, as they call it, 'VC-squared', which to my obviously uncool ears sounds just about the squarest phrase it's possible to make up), everybody who commented did so with some bland 'hey, this is a good pod' thing (although at least they all made some specific reference to the content, to prove they're not just spambots) and followed it up with 'please check out my pod at the following link...'.

This is still quite flattering, because obviously they think that this 'pod', and its creator (who's almost a real TV person, not a member of the public) are among the coolest things on Current TV, and they can achieve fame by attracting its many viewers to come and see their own efforts.

In all seriousness, though, it's completely and totally groovy to be adulated as the coolest geek of them all. As I said in an uncharacteristically snappy soundbite in a newspaper interview at the WMC, "I'm absolutely a nerd, and I'm very proud of it. I'm the nerd who all the other nerds look up to and want to be like, and that's a wonderful thing to be." If that's how I'm remembered by history, I'll be delighted!

Also, Happy Christmas, everyone!

RIP Top Cat

There was an article on the BBC News today announcing the sad news that Arnold Stang, the voice of Top Cat, has died, aged 91. It's a good innings - I'd sort of assumed he'd died years ago, to be honest. Anyway, fanatical cartoon fan though I am, he's not an actor who figures very prominently in my consciousness - Top Cat used 'real' actors, not cartoon voice specialists, and none of them really saw the job as anything other than a one-off, fun little thing they did in between films and TV shows. With one exception...

John Stephenson, playing Fancy (the orangey-brown one with the white scarf, who has one line per episode if he's lucky), was a 'real' actor too, until he was given that minor voice part in 1961, on the grounds that he could do a good Clark Gable impression. But from then on, he became a regular name that would pop up in the credits of EVERY cartoon series you might happen to watch. Always in minor roles who didn't say much - Mr Slate in The Flintstones, Luke in Wacky Races, Thundercracker in Transformers, Beef in Galaxy High... wherever Frank Welker was voicing six or seven lead characters, there'd be John Stephenson in the background, chipping in a "Yes, Boss!" every now and then. He's a hero to fans of minor cartoon characters everywhere, and he's still voicing them even today, every now and then, though he's in his late eighties now.

I'm hoping that he gets a big write-up in the media as and when he eventually passes away. Anyone who gives fifty years' service to an industry that makes millions of people happy deserves recognition!

Ice Ice Baby

I HATE icy pavements! It takes me ten times longer to get from A to B, even if I don't slip over and cripple myself. I'm going to start carrying a flamethrower around with me so I can melt the ice. I'm not sure where you go to buy a flamethrower, but I'm sure they're available on the internet.

Monopolopoly

I'm getting quite sloppy about blogging every night, just lately. I was very tired yesterday, that's my excuse. And I'm working in the Boots store in Newark for the next couple of days, so I'm probably just going to get tireder. Still, on the plus side, I've now got a monopoly set of my very own! (see my post on the subject a few weeks ago if you wonder why that would be a good thing) It really is a fun game. And it also seems like the kind of thing it would be good to spend a drunken evening playing with a whole mob of friends. Anyone fancy a drunken monopoly evening?

Christmas is coming, the Zoomy's getting fat

The whole diet thing seems to have gone out the window this last month or so. I'm eating sweets and junk food more or less constantly at the moment, and I really ought to stop. Maybe I'll make a resolution. Or, and I think this option might be more fun, I'll try to find a way to make everybody else in the world over-eat to a much greater extent than I do, so I can still eat whatever I want, but I'll look comparatively thin!

Pretty smart

I tried to find a link to watch tonight's Central Tonight online, but it doesn't seem to be working at the moment. Still, if you do manage to watch it somehow (my bit is around the middle, fifteen minutes or so into it), you'll have the pleasure of seeing me in my suit and tie (plus hat), since I filmed it very early this morning before going in to work. And the sight of me memorising things in my work clothes really doesn't happen very often, so Zoomy-collectors will really treasure this one.

Tonight on Central Tonight

If you're in the Central TV region, watch the local news at 6pm for more fun with me and Sainsbury's. Also, while you're at it, go and watch that old clip of me on Central Tonight a couple of years ago, on YouTube. That's my favourite one on there.

Central aisle

I'm getting up at some time before the crack of dawn tomorrow, to film some more supermarket-themed memory fun with Central News. And possibly an interview on Radio Nottingham, but I'm not sure about that - I spent most of this afternoon emailing the Sainsbury's person and the Radio Nottingham person on the subject (I didn't want to do it, because I've got a real job that I've been neglecting lately, but Sainsbury's begged and offered me food hampers) until I finally asked them to please sort it out among themselves. I should really have added "... and tell me whether or not I'm going to do a radio interview tomorrow morning", but I didn't, and they didn't, so I don't know. Never mind.

And after that, I'm going to stop blogging about memory and Sainsbury's every single night. It's time to move on to other subjects, I'm sure you must all be as bored with this theme as I am.

It's the sound of Lincolnshire, that special place to live

... It's the sound of Lincolnshire, with so much more to give. Radio Lincolnshire!

I grew up listening to that catchy jingle, although I don't think they still use it nowadays, and they almost certainly don't play it on Radio Solent, which serves Hampshire, Dorset and the Isle of Wight. But despite this, my appearance on Jon Cuthill's morning show was good fun. Click on that link to hear it, about two hours and ten minutes in (you're allowed to fast-forward if you want). He even had me memorise a pack of cards, live on air (which doesn't sound terribly impressive when you're doing a phone interview on a radio show, but I really didn't cheat. I did only memorise the first dozen or so cards, because I knew he wouldn't ask me them all, but I didn't cheat!). And he gave me thirty seconds to memorise it, thirty seconds of dead air, which I didn't think radio presenters were really supposed to do. Most radio people don't want me to do cards at all...

I do enjoy this kind of thing, though - perhaps I should try to spread the word to local radio stations that I'm available for interviews, free of charge, if they want. They don't have to wait until Sainsbury's tell them to interview me. Radio Derby always tell me to tell them when I win a memory competition, and I never do because I disapprove of self-publicity, but perhaps I'll change that policy.

Also, the producer said we were only allowed to mention Sainsbury's a maximum of two times, otherwise he'd have to fill in a BBC form of some kind, but in the end we only mentioned it once. I feel like I'm not completely living up to my contract with Sainsbury's (especially since they were hoping to get me on national TV and in all the newspapers, name-dropping them left, right and centre, but seriously overestimated how big a draw I am to the media), so here's a bit more advertising, courtesy of Zoomy's Thing: Sainsbury's, Sainsbury's, Sainsbury's. It's the place to buy things. Sainsbury's, Sainsbury's, Sainsbury's. Something something something wings.

Okay, writing advertising slogans isn't my forté.

You're listening to BBC Radio Solent

Well, in all likelihood you're not right now, but if you do tomorrow at 11:40, you might hear a brief interview with me, as a follow-up to the Sainsbury's thing.

I can't actually remember right now exactly where the Solent is. Should I look it up before tomorrow, or just hope nobody tests me?

Inside the head of Zoomy

This is a picture of the screen of the brain-scanning machine in Tokyo:

Actually, that's the outside of the head of Zoomy, but you could slice cross-sections of it by careful clicks of the mouse, to examine the brain inside. The marks around my eyes are the space-age goggles I was wearing instead of my glasses, by the way.

The Japanese TV people want me to go back there in January, to do some more memory things in the studio! Hopefully it'll be possible to arrange it - I've only got two more days of holiday left after my Christmas break, but that's probably enough to make a flying visit to Tokyo. I have also supposedly won a trip to Bahrain as a prize in the WMC last month, but nobody's replied to my email about the details of that, so I assume there's no time limit on the invitation to go out there and be shown historic buildings. I was thinking of sending someone else, disguised as me, anyway - it can be my Christmas present to anyone out there who looks a bit like me and likes the idea of historic buildings in Bahrain.

As everyone knows, I'm also bad at replying to emails myself, so I've spent this evening catching up with all the various queries about memory techniques I've had in the last couple of weeks. There have been a lot of them, which serves me right for winning the world championship, I suppose, and most of them have been about how to use memory techniques to pass exams at university and things like that which I know nothing about, so replying to them is a bit difficult. I also had someone today asking for memory tips for her toddler.

Tomorrow, I will devote my time to typing up my transcripts for the Cambridge Christmas tournament, three weeks late, before Geoff summons his Viking hordes from Denmark and pillages me. And then email my brother, which is a full evening's work because we write long emails to each other, but at least that's fun rather than a chore...

Comparisons

Boris, in response to last night's blog, commented that it would be interesting to compare developments in athletics with those in memory sports. The fact that the winner of the 100m sprint in the first Olympic Games in 1896 did a sensational 12 seconds, for instance. Actually, there are other similarities apart from the gradual change in what is considered an exceptional performance - at the first modern Olympics, the athletes paid their own way over to Greece, the competitors were drawn from only those people who could afford the trip and who knew the event existed (C. B. Fry, probably the foremost British athlete at the time, didn't find out about the Olympics until after it had happened), and a lot of the rules and regulations were made up on the spur of the moment as and when they were needed. Memory sport is still very much in this kind of state at the moment, but if the Olympics can go from such humble beginnings to a really big thing, who knows?

Also, the 100m in those days was run from a standing start, on a dirt track, wearing rubber-soled boots and baggy shorts. The way they've improved on the basic principles of running in a straight line as quickly as possible is very much like the way we've improved on the way to memorise a pack of cards.

Actually, the comparison with swimming is even more similar. In 1878, when the first "world records" were published by the Amateur Swimming Association, the world record for the 100 yards freestyle was 76.75 seconds. The modern 100m record has knocked 30 seconds off that - helped by the development of "techniques" like the crawl (which was a brand new thing, distrusted by most Victorian swimmers, in 1878), swimming trunks instead of full-body bathing suits, holding swimming races in pools rather than the sea, modifications to the rules about diving starts, all the way up to the modern day and Michael Phelps's bionic body-suit (without which I suspect he'd drown if you pushed him in a swimming pool).

If there's one way in which memory sport is different (apart from the fact that it's a pointless mental exercise for people with too much time on their hands rather than a display of the awesome physical prowess of the human body at its peak), it's that the developments have been much more rapid, and the records have tumbled down much more dramatically. Who knows what will have happened in a hundred years? I hope I'm still around to see it, anyway...

In 1994, scientists predicted...

I'm genuinely thinking about writing a huge long account of everything that's happened in the world of memory sports between 2000 and 2009. And calling it "Noughty Memories", but you can ignore the title if you think it's silly. The second decade of competitive memory has been crammed full of a whole book's worth of events, after all. And 2000 was sort of a starting point for lots of things, not least Gunther memorising 400 digits spoken at a rate of one every two seconds, confounding those scientists' predictions that nobody would ever memorise more than 30, and giving Tony something to talk about in every speech at every memory competition ever since. Usually twice.

Being in the mood for this, I found an entertaining discussion about the revised championship points standards issued in 2005 (back in the days when there wasn't even any kind of rule about when or how the standards would be updated, it just happened whenever the powers that be thought it was necessary and the standards were altered to whatever seemed sensible to Phil - nowadays, in these more enlightened times, there's a rule about when and how, although everyone ignores it), which included Boris's reaction to setting the historic dates standard to 100 dates: "The standard of dates is much too high. No-one will ever come close to it."

The world record, four and a half years later, now stands at 118.5, and frankly I think the championship points standard needs increasing beyond the 100 mark! It just goes to show how far we've come since those dark and distant days. Maybe we should all mention that in all our speeches at memory competitions from now on.

We also don't seem to argue about the rules as much as we used to. Maybe the 2010s will be the decade when the World Memory Championships has a consistent set of rules from one year to the next, and nobody complains!

Well, that's interesting...

The other day, while drifting aimlessly around the internet, I was reminded of Krypton Force videos (as described in my blog a few years ago here and here). I looked for them on eBay and as luck would have it, there was someone selling off a big video collection, including one Protectors tape and THREE Sci-Bots that I haven't got. 'Splendid!' I thought to myself. 'I'll pick up a few more of those poor-quality British bootlegs of American dubs of ancient Japanese giant robot cartoons!' So I bid 99p each on them and left eBay to work its wonders.

With an hour to go before the end of the auction, just now, I got a trio of emails telling me I'd been outbid on the Sci-Bots tapes. 'Hey, check it out, one of the other three or four people in the universe who like these things has discovered these auctions!' I thought. 'Well, we'll see about that, let's have us a bidding war!'

So I put a maximum bid of £5 in, and when it turned out that wasn't enough, went up to £10, which is way more than these things are worth, but hey, I'm rich. Turns out that was my rival bidder's maximum too, so I went with £10.50 and wondered if he/she wanted these videos (which have probably been taped over with something else long since anyway - Krypton Force often forgot to remove the copy-protection tab from the second-hand video tapes they used) badly enough to outbid me again.

Turns out that he/she did, and is willing to go up to £25 and beyond, on all three auctions! Now, that's just silly. It's not like these videos are valuable. 'Downright awful' is the kind of words most people would use for them, indeed. Only a handful of weirdos, like me, could possibly derive any enjoyment from the things. Well, I've got the bit between my teeth now. I'm wealthy, foolish and curious, which is a very bad combination for circumstances like this. I'm going to see just how high we can make these bids. 38 minutes to go.

If I don't blog again, it'll be because I've had to sell all my posessions, including my video recorder, to pay for a cheap and tacky video of a cartoon series that I don't really like all that much anyway.

Friday feeling

It's nice to have a weekend of doing nothing. Or of catching up with all the things I've been meaning to do for weeks, anyway. I've also decided to use up what remains of my holiday from work to take the whole week between Christmas and the New Year off, and just stay at home, lounging around and doing nothing. I haven't done that for much too long!

I'm sorry that doing nothing and planning future occasions when I'm going to do nothing doesn't make a terribly exciting blog, but maybe tomorrow I will have done something after all and will be able to write about it.

Oh, sorry

Sorry I didn't post anything yesterday, but I was busy doing something staggeringly important - or at least that's my logical deduction from the fact that I can't remember why I didn't get round to blogging.

Anyway, I've been meaning for a few days to mention that I was pleased to see the Popeye-themed Google logo recently. It did confuse me at first, making me think "Wait, is it a Popeye anniversary of some kind? It was January he first appeared, not December. And the cartoons were 1933, surely, so it's not 75 years of those..." It turned out that it was to commemorate Popeye's creator E.C. Segar's 115th birthday.

Now, it's not that I'm complaining, since any Google logo featuring Popeye has to be better than a logo that doesn't, but that seems like a bit of a stretch to me. It's like something that might happen in one of Segar's own comic strips - they decide to do a Popeye-themed logo and have to come up with an excuse for it, so come up with a ridiculously tangential justification. This would be followed by someone exclaiming "Good night!" and fainting.

Anyway, since now we don't need a good reason for this kind of thing, as a continuing tribute to the sad fact that Segar is still dead, from now on whenever I win a memory competition I'm going to let his slightly less well-known creation Professor Wotasnozzle announce the fact for me:

I like Wotasnozzle. I'm going to look like that when I'm a little bit older.

Taffy

While doing my reading-volunteer thing today, I flicked through a book of nursery rhymes at the school and was surprised to find that it contained "Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief". I would have thought that that poem would be out of fashion with modern educational theories, but maybe not. Possibly we're trying to encourage the young folk nowadays to distrust the Welsh and to deal with persistent thieves by flinging a poker at their heads.

Memorising London

The Sainsbury's support office is really very like the Boots one, so it was an interesting experience to be there in my memory-man clothes rather than the suit and tie, being a visiting memory-trainer rather than whatever it is I normally do for a living. My presentation was rubbish, but hopefully they got some good pictures for publicity. Tune in to the Sunday Telegraph... no, wait, I mean the Independent (some memory man I am, I can't even remember what paper I've been talking to) on Sunday to read all about it. Probably. It might still not be in there after all, I can't promise anything.

I'm going to bed. I couldn't get to sleep last night, and I had to get up early this morning to catch my train, so I've been feeling tired all day. That might have been a contributing factor to my presentation being rubbish, but it's probably just because I'm generally rubbish at memory presentations.

Day trip

London tomorrow, teaching people to memorise the locations of Christmas products in Sainsbury's. Rather than preparing my presentation, I've spent the weekend watching the Alan Bennett season on BBC2. This is justifiable, you see, because Sainsbury's is mentioned in passing in "A Chip In The Sugar", which was on today. However, the practical upshot of this is that I'm only just now finishing the tedious preparation work. This is a really good example of why people who say I should do memory stuff for a living don't know what they're talking about.

Scary picture

I finally got round to getting some new passport photos taken today, and...

Okay, I'm not used to seeing myself without glasses (you're not allowed to wear them in passport photos nowadays, and you're also not allowed to smile, which makes me look like some kind of psychopath), but this really isn't a good photo. Is it me, or is one of my eyes higher than the other? Or is my head just tilted? I look quite freakish. Never allow me to see myself without glasses again! See, now I've got another reason not to wear contacts!