There are a whole lot of scans of old newspapers on there now - on 4 July 1891, my great-grandfather was mentioned in the Sheffield Independent, in a list of people fined various sums for infringements of the Education Act. The scoundrel. Although he had five school-age children at the time and two younger ones, and I'm sure they had more important things to do than go to school...
Hmm, and again on 19 March 1892. Really, don't these people have better things to do than prosecute truanting Pridmores?
Friday, November 30, 2012
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
In the abstract
If I'm going to be serious about the world championship this year, I realised today, I'm going to need to practice abstract images. And not just practice them, sit down and remember what my images for the patterns are supposed to be. Which is a bit of a chore.
I still don't like abstract images. And by that I don't mean I don't like memorising them in competitions, I mean I don't like the whole concept. We need to get rid of it and replace it with something else. Like actual abstract images, rather than the learn-the-patterns game that we've got now. I don't think I've whined about it quite enough these last seven years; I'll whine more loudly from now on. But first, I'll go and re-learn my images in preparation for the competition.
I still don't like abstract images. And by that I don't mean I don't like memorising them in competitions, I mean I don't like the whole concept. We need to get rid of it and replace it with something else. Like actual abstract images, rather than the learn-the-patterns game that we've got now. I don't think I've whined about it quite enough these last seven years; I'll whine more loudly from now on. But first, I'll go and re-learn my images in preparation for the competition.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
A few more memoriadditions
Andi said that the highlight of his weekend was finding that he and I both use our stopwatches to tell the time - it was a classic memory-geek moment, but I can't help thinking his entertainment threshold is a little bit on the low side. Andi, although he stuck firmly to his usual pattern of coming to the event with the expectation of winning piles of prize money and then giving up quite quickly when he didn't do as well as, was quite enthusiastic about the new spoken number-memorising system he's been working on, which is a bit different.
It involves creating locations using some of the numbers, as well as his person-action-objects, and Andi feels that this saves time and gives him an extra couple of seconds to think - I don't quite see how it does that, unless it involves some clever distortion of the laws of space and time, but Andi genuinely believes that the time spent on the locations doesn't count, and believing something like that is a major, important part of success at memory competitions. It could well be that the three-time-world-champion-who-isn't-me might be making a surprise comeback at some point in the future! (At a competition that has prize money, naturally).
Speaking of prize money, I haven't mentioned yet that the prizegiving ceremony was held in a small room with a huge pillar in the middle that prevented about 50% of the audience from seeing what was happening. I think it was a last-minute change because the competition in the main room ran so late. It was hosted by someone who had the traditional difficulty with pronouncing everyone's name - Akshita Shailesh Shah seemed to give him the most problems; whenever her name came up (which was often; she was one of the foremost small Indian mental-calculator-geniuses, often finishing in the top three of the adult competitions as well, and one of the few kids who entered the memory events too, and so finished in the top three junior rankings of those too) he eventually gave up on trying to get it right and called her "Akshita Sh-um-mumblemumblemumble Shah" over and over again.
I might return to blogging about something else now...
It involves creating locations using some of the numbers, as well as his person-action-objects, and Andi feels that this saves time and gives him an extra couple of seconds to think - I don't quite see how it does that, unless it involves some clever distortion of the laws of space and time, but Andi genuinely believes that the time spent on the locations doesn't count, and believing something like that is a major, important part of success at memory competitions. It could well be that the three-time-world-champion-who-isn't-me might be making a surprise comeback at some point in the future! (At a competition that has prize money, naturally).
Speaking of prize money, I haven't mentioned yet that the prizegiving ceremony was held in a small room with a huge pillar in the middle that prevented about 50% of the audience from seeing what was happening. I think it was a last-minute change because the competition in the main room ran so late. It was hosted by someone who had the traditional difficulty with pronouncing everyone's name - Akshita Shailesh Shah seemed to give him the most problems; whenever her name came up (which was often; she was one of the foremost small Indian mental-calculator-geniuses, often finishing in the top three of the adult competitions as well, and one of the few kids who entered the memory events too, and so finished in the top three junior rankings of those too) he eventually gave up on trying to get it right and called her "Akshita Sh-um-mumblemumblemumble Shah" over and over again.
I might return to blogging about something else now...
Monday, November 26, 2012
PS
Dai said he can't get past the word verification, so I've turned it off again and will just put up with the occasional spam - it doesn't show up on the blog, but I do get an email to tell me there's a new comment, even when the spam filter has zapped it automatically. There's probably a setting I can change to fix that, but I can't be bothered to find out what it is. So please, Robot Dai, and any other robots out there who haven't been able to post, go ahead and comment!
Disclaimer
I thought I should mention it, since the organisers of most memory competitions are used to me by now and just ignore me, but the Memoriad is new territory for me... I really like my competitions to be endearingly shambolic. I like to make light of their foibles, but please don't think that means I don't love all memory competitions everywhere!
For example, if the only thing I mention about my hotel room is that there was a pair of pants (not mine) under the sofa that had been missed by the cleaners, you shouldn't assume I was in any way unhappy with the hotel. Indeed, you should assume it was completely and totally awesome, if that's the only negative thing you see me say about it! And besides, they looked clean, and I can always use extra underwear. I see it as another free gift.
So, the Memoriad - I'd like to know the logic behind the seating arrangements, if there is any. Was it random? Everyone was assigned a different seat at a different computer for each discipline, but I was somewhere near the front for all the memory ones and somewhere more towards the back for the mental calculations, so maybe there was some kind of seeding involved, I don't know. Perhaps the super-computer decided everything, as part of its plan to take over the world.
We also had a name-sign to put on our desks, and an appropriate national flag along with the Memoriad flag - one of the British flags was upside-down until I fixed it, while one of the German flags was upside-down throughout the Memoriad; in fact, Jan van Koningsveld seemed to make a point of having that one on his desk every time, so perhaps he did it on purpose as some kind of cunning joke. He has got a Dutch name, after all, maybe he's subverting Germany from the inside?
We all also had T-shirts; one white and one blue, and an instruction to wear the former on Saturday and the latter on Sunday, with a note that anyone who didn't wouldn't be allowed to compete. The white ones had the sponsor logo, the blue ones just had the Memoriad logo. Boris's was upside-down. I think that one was intended for the Australian competitor.
And did anyone notice that there were two different designs of the Memoriad logo? It's five multi-coloured brains in the Olympic rings pattern - the T-shirts and the computers had them red-black-blue-yellow-green, and the nameplates and big posters had yellow-black-green-red-blue. Or something along those lines. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what colour the Olympic rings are, so perhaps they change colours too, when we're not looking.
Okay, that's all out of my system now. Oh, and one more disclaimer - the money I won goes towards paying off the massive debt I accumulated during my latest not-working-for-a-living adventure; I'm really not financially stable, so you shouldn't come asking me for money, please.
Tomorrow - a few more of the really great things about the Memoriad!
For example, if the only thing I mention about my hotel room is that there was a pair of pants (not mine) under the sofa that had been missed by the cleaners, you shouldn't assume I was in any way unhappy with the hotel. Indeed, you should assume it was completely and totally awesome, if that's the only negative thing you see me say about it! And besides, they looked clean, and I can always use extra underwear. I see it as another free gift.
So, the Memoriad - I'd like to know the logic behind the seating arrangements, if there is any. Was it random? Everyone was assigned a different seat at a different computer for each discipline, but I was somewhere near the front for all the memory ones and somewhere more towards the back for the mental calculations, so maybe there was some kind of seeding involved, I don't know. Perhaps the super-computer decided everything, as part of its plan to take over the world.
We also had a name-sign to put on our desks, and an appropriate national flag along with the Memoriad flag - one of the British flags was upside-down until I fixed it, while one of the German flags was upside-down throughout the Memoriad; in fact, Jan van Koningsveld seemed to make a point of having that one on his desk every time, so perhaps he did it on purpose as some kind of cunning joke. He has got a Dutch name, after all, maybe he's subverting Germany from the inside?
We all also had T-shirts; one white and one blue, and an instruction to wear the former on Saturday and the latter on Sunday, with a note that anyone who didn't wouldn't be allowed to compete. The white ones had the sponsor logo, the blue ones just had the Memoriad logo. Boris's was upside-down. I think that one was intended for the Australian competitor.
And did anyone notice that there were two different designs of the Memoriad logo? It's five multi-coloured brains in the Olympic rings pattern - the T-shirts and the computers had them red-black-blue-yellow-green, and the nameplates and big posters had yellow-black-green-red-blue. Or something along those lines. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what colour the Olympic rings are, so perhaps they change colours too, when we're not looking.
Okay, that's all out of my system now. Oh, and one more disclaimer - the money I won goes towards paying off the massive debt I accumulated during my latest not-working-for-a-living adventure; I'm really not financially stable, so you shouldn't come asking me for money, please.
Tomorrow - a few more of the really great things about the Memoriad!
The Memoriad Memory Money List
I came away with a generous wad of money from the Memoriad - quite literally, the prize money was paid to us in US dollars at the prizegiving ceremony, in front of any potential muggers and villains, but luckily everyone there was honest and decent and I'm almost sure that everyone got home safely with their cash. In contrast to the first Memoriad four years ago, when the only 'real' memory athletes competing were Boris, Andi and Gunther and they basically split all the prize money between them, there was a lot more competition this time for those top-three places. I'm sure in 2016 there'll be even more!
Results are now available here for the world to see.
By my calculation, it went:
Simon Reinhard $3,000 - two first places
Johannes Mallow $2,500 - one first and two thirds
Ben Pridmore $2,250 - one first and one second
Tsogbadrakh Saikhanbayar $1,500 - one first
Jonas von Essen $1,500 - two seconds
Christian Schäfer $1,250 - one second and one third
Akjol Syeryekkhaan $750 - one second
Boris Konrad $500 - one third
Lukas Amsüss $500 - one third
Which is a nice sharing-out of the hugely generous prize money, don't you think? Tsogbadrakh also got another $250 for the world record in flash numbers - probably. I don't honestly remember, because I'd fallen asleep by that part of the prizegiving. It was very long, as these things always are. And I got a new trophy that was too big for my rucksack (although I got it home somehow anyway) and medals and certificates and everything!
The Mongolian invasion was the most interesting part of it - well, also the Swedish invasion, but Jonas already did that at the Friendly - because it means the upcoming world championship might be more multinational than I was expecting. I'm excited about it now! Akjol was also fourth in binary, with more than 3000, and fifth in hour numbers, so he's obviously an all-rounder. Both Mongolians are young, too, like so many people seem to be nowadays. If they don't make the next Memoriad earlier than four years from now, I'll be 40 years old! That just doesn't bear thinking about...
Results are now available here for the world to see.
By my calculation, it went:
Simon Reinhard $3,000 - two first places
Johannes Mallow $2,500 - one first and two thirds
Ben Pridmore $2,250 - one first and one second
Tsogbadrakh Saikhanbayar $1,500 - one first
Jonas von Essen $1,500 - two seconds
Christian Schäfer $1,250 - one second and one third
Akjol Syeryekkhaan $750 - one second
Boris Konrad $500 - one third
Lukas Amsüss $500 - one third
Which is a nice sharing-out of the hugely generous prize money, don't you think? Tsogbadrakh also got another $250 for the world record in flash numbers - probably. I don't honestly remember, because I'd fallen asleep by that part of the prizegiving. It was very long, as these things always are. And I got a new trophy that was too big for my rucksack (although I got it home somehow anyway) and medals and certificates and everything!
The Mongolian invasion was the most interesting part of it - well, also the Swedish invasion, but Jonas already did that at the Friendly - because it means the upcoming world championship might be more multinational than I was expecting. I'm excited about it now! Akjol was also fourth in binary, with more than 3000, and fifth in hour numbers, so he's obviously an all-rounder. Both Mongolians are young, too, like so many people seem to be nowadays. If they don't make the next Memoriad earlier than four years from now, I'll be 40 years old! That just doesn't bear thinking about...
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Woo!
I knew the organisers were tempting fate when Melik said we absolutely had to stick to the schedule today, because we had to be out of the main room by 4:30, on the dot. This was the cue for a major software problem to set us back hugely before we could start the flash numbers, and eventually the day finished at six.
Which is good, because with the gala dinner at 7:30, I have time to come up to my hotel room, watch most but not all of the Chelsea-Man City game that's conveniently available on TV, and update my blog too!
Just two memory events left today - I did pretty badly with the flash numbers, but Turkish-man-whose-name-I-need-to-learn did very well, getting a perfect 300! Jonas was second, if memory serves, and Johannes third, all with excellent scores that would have been unthinkably good just a couple of years ago.
I had a go at the mental additions - managing to get six of them right in ten minutes (the task is to add up ten ten-digit numbers, and the top scorers do it in an instant). Japanese-man-whose-name-I-need-to-learn (blast these newcomers with long names! I think his is Naofumi, actually, but I'll make a point of learning it at the dinner) blew everyone away in this and the flash anzan later on.
I skipped the mental calendar, though, seeing as I'm so out of practice, and just joined in the second flash anzan trial before deciding early on that it was more fun to just watch the other competitors (the eight-year-olds I mentioned earlier, for the most part) adding up lots of numbers very very quickly, waving their fingers in abacus-like ways while they do it.
And so we finished with binary. Johannes, playing devious German mind games, assured me before we started that a score of 3500 or so would be enough for me to win. I, in an entirely innocent underestimation of my abilities, assured him that I wasn't going to get such a good score, since I'm out of practice. It went pretty well, and I ended up with a score of 3870, which is as good as I could have expected from the genuinely minimal training I've been doing. Johannes won with 4095, neeeeearly but not quite beating my ancient world record 4140, and Christian came third, just behind me.
So I end up with one gold and one silver, which is probably more than I deserve. Roll on the world championship! Roll on even more the next Memoriad!
Which is good, because with the gala dinner at 7:30, I have time to come up to my hotel room, watch most but not all of the Chelsea-Man City game that's conveniently available on TV, and update my blog too!
Just two memory events left today - I did pretty badly with the flash numbers, but Turkish-man-whose-name-I-need-to-learn did very well, getting a perfect 300! Jonas was second, if memory serves, and Johannes third, all with excellent scores that would have been unthinkably good just a couple of years ago.
I had a go at the mental additions - managing to get six of them right in ten minutes (the task is to add up ten ten-digit numbers, and the top scorers do it in an instant). Japanese-man-whose-name-I-need-to-learn (blast these newcomers with long names! I think his is Naofumi, actually, but I'll make a point of learning it at the dinner) blew everyone away in this and the flash anzan later on.
I skipped the mental calendar, though, seeing as I'm so out of practice, and just joined in the second flash anzan trial before deciding early on that it was more fun to just watch the other competitors (the eight-year-olds I mentioned earlier, for the most part) adding up lots of numbers very very quickly, waving their fingers in abacus-like ways while they do it.
And so we finished with binary. Johannes, playing devious German mind games, assured me before we started that a score of 3500 or so would be enough for me to win. I, in an entirely innocent underestimation of my abilities, assured him that I wasn't going to get such a good score, since I'm out of practice. It went pretty well, and I ended up with a score of 3870, which is as good as I could have expected from the genuinely minimal training I've been doing. Johannes won with 4095, neeeeearly but not quite beating my ancient world record 4140, and Christian came third, just behind me.
So I end up with one gold and one silver, which is probably more than I deserve. Roll on the world championship! Roll on even more the next Memoriad!
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Well, that went as well as could be expected
In fact, probably a bit better!
In the way of such things, the opening ceremony was half an hour late starting, and an hour late finishing - photos by the pool take up more time than anyone would expect - and the whole thing fell further behind schedule as the day went on. This is the way memory competitions always work, so it's good to see we're keeping with tradition. Apart from that, the whole thing was impeccably organised and wonderfully technological! All done on computers, which all worked fine (bar one little hiccup) and made everything very smooth and easy.
All in all, the Memoriad is an absolutely wonderful event that really needs to happen more often than once every four years. Can we have a mini-memoriad next year, please?
We started with speed cards, and I did a "safe" time of 33.61 seconds (safe in the sense that I only make mistakes about half the time when I go at that speed) and got it all right without too much difficulty. Nobody else had done a fast time without mistakes, but I expected them to in the second trial. I set out to do something faster, but got stuck half way through the memorisation, and didn't go much faster at all. A drawback with the Memoriad software is that you can't see your time after you stop the clock, which would be nice, but it turned out after I'd tried to recall it but got it wrong that my time was 33.56 - 0.05 seconds improvement is hardly worth all the effort.
But as it turned out, everyone trying for fast times had made mistakes again, so I won! Yay for me - lucky, I know, but I'll take what I can get. Someone who I don't even know and whose name I can't remember came second, and Lukas Amsüss was third, both with times of 50-something seconds.
After that nice start, we had mental multiplications. Fifteen minutes to multiply ten pairs of eight-digit numbers together - the best people do it in a lot less than fifteen minutes, but I'm happy if I get through five in that time. In the two trials this time, I got two right and three wrong in each one. I'm never going to be the mental calculation world champion.
Most of the top contenders in mental calculations nowadays, by the way, are around eight years old and mostly from India. It's a bit scary, really, but memory sports isn't currently showing any signs of such a youthful invasion.
Names and faces came next, and it took me a while to get into the mood to concentrate on it. I actually stopped after a couple of minutes, thinking I'd use the time to prepare my journeys for the afternoon, but then decided that was being silly, and made some kind of effort. I got 54, I think it was - Simon probably won with 150 or so, although there was a technical problem with the computer recognising the Turkish keyboard layout, so we'll get the final results tomorrow.
I decided to skip the mental square roots, since I didn't get round to looking up how to do it, and I was feeling a bit eyestrained after all that looking at computer screens. Instead, I went back to my room and had a relaxing jacuzzi. I could get used to this kind of thing, I really could.
Incidentally, I haven't mentioned yet just how awesome the Belconti Resort Hotel, Belek, Antalya, is. It's an amazing place, and if you need a relaxing holiday, it has my huge recommendation. There's the beach, swimming pools, fitness centre, lots of other great stuff, and the food is wonderful - I was worried that the meals at a place like this would be either posh or healthy, but no, it's just really really great food!
Anyway, we finished the day's entertainment with Hour Numbers - which I haven't practiced at all for at least a year and a bit. And it went really well! Somehow, being in a real memory competition gets me into the right mindset, and I don't have a problem with my mind wandering at all. I went for nine journeys, 2106 digits, with my method of reading through a journey, closing my eyes and making sure I know it, then moving on to the next one, followed by two or three more revisions of the whole lot at the end, and it worked splendidly! I ended up with a score of 1876, which is either a personal best or very close to it, and was able to think "if I'd only got the nun and the cigarette the right way round, I would have been over 1900!"
I know I could also have said "if I'd got them all correct, I would have got 2106," but I kept swapping that blasted nun and her fag around, unable to decide which order they came in. Oh well.
Anyway, I wasn't under any illusions that that might be the best score - my German enemies might have messed up the speed cards, but they're consistently better than me at hour numbers - but I wasn't expecting just how good they'd be! Simon ended up with 2440, Christian with 2343 and Johannes with 2280. Wow. So I was fourth, and just out of the prize-money places, but it's no shame to be beaten by that kind of performance. And 1876 is very much the kind of score I'd want to get in the world championship if I was going to win it, knowing that I always gain on my rivals in events like hour cards and 30-minute binary. I feel motivated again now!
In the way of such things, the opening ceremony was half an hour late starting, and an hour late finishing - photos by the pool take up more time than anyone would expect - and the whole thing fell further behind schedule as the day went on. This is the way memory competitions always work, so it's good to see we're keeping with tradition. Apart from that, the whole thing was impeccably organised and wonderfully technological! All done on computers, which all worked fine (bar one little hiccup) and made everything very smooth and easy.
All in all, the Memoriad is an absolutely wonderful event that really needs to happen more often than once every four years. Can we have a mini-memoriad next year, please?
We started with speed cards, and I did a "safe" time of 33.61 seconds (safe in the sense that I only make mistakes about half the time when I go at that speed) and got it all right without too much difficulty. Nobody else had done a fast time without mistakes, but I expected them to in the second trial. I set out to do something faster, but got stuck half way through the memorisation, and didn't go much faster at all. A drawback with the Memoriad software is that you can't see your time after you stop the clock, which would be nice, but it turned out after I'd tried to recall it but got it wrong that my time was 33.56 - 0.05 seconds improvement is hardly worth all the effort.
But as it turned out, everyone trying for fast times had made mistakes again, so I won! Yay for me - lucky, I know, but I'll take what I can get. Someone who I don't even know and whose name I can't remember came second, and Lukas Amsüss was third, both with times of 50-something seconds.
After that nice start, we had mental multiplications. Fifteen minutes to multiply ten pairs of eight-digit numbers together - the best people do it in a lot less than fifteen minutes, but I'm happy if I get through five in that time. In the two trials this time, I got two right and three wrong in each one. I'm never going to be the mental calculation world champion.
Most of the top contenders in mental calculations nowadays, by the way, are around eight years old and mostly from India. It's a bit scary, really, but memory sports isn't currently showing any signs of such a youthful invasion.
Names and faces came next, and it took me a while to get into the mood to concentrate on it. I actually stopped after a couple of minutes, thinking I'd use the time to prepare my journeys for the afternoon, but then decided that was being silly, and made some kind of effort. I got 54, I think it was - Simon probably won with 150 or so, although there was a technical problem with the computer recognising the Turkish keyboard layout, so we'll get the final results tomorrow.
I decided to skip the mental square roots, since I didn't get round to looking up how to do it, and I was feeling a bit eyestrained after all that looking at computer screens. Instead, I went back to my room and had a relaxing jacuzzi. I could get used to this kind of thing, I really could.
Incidentally, I haven't mentioned yet just how awesome the Belconti Resort Hotel, Belek, Antalya, is. It's an amazing place, and if you need a relaxing holiday, it has my huge recommendation. There's the beach, swimming pools, fitness centre, lots of other great stuff, and the food is wonderful - I was worried that the meals at a place like this would be either posh or healthy, but no, it's just really really great food!
Anyway, we finished the day's entertainment with Hour Numbers - which I haven't practiced at all for at least a year and a bit. And it went really well! Somehow, being in a real memory competition gets me into the right mindset, and I don't have a problem with my mind wandering at all. I went for nine journeys, 2106 digits, with my method of reading through a journey, closing my eyes and making sure I know it, then moving on to the next one, followed by two or three more revisions of the whole lot at the end, and it worked splendidly! I ended up with a score of 1876, which is either a personal best or very close to it, and was able to think "if I'd only got the nun and the cigarette the right way round, I would have been over 1900!"
I know I could also have said "if I'd got them all correct, I would have got 2106," but I kept swapping that blasted nun and her fag around, unable to decide which order they came in. Oh well.
Anyway, I wasn't under any illusions that that might be the best score - my German enemies might have messed up the speed cards, but they're consistently better than me at hour numbers - but I wasn't expecting just how good they'd be! Simon ended up with 2440, Christian with 2343 and Johannes with 2280. Wow. So I was fourth, and just out of the prize-money places, but it's no shame to be beaten by that kind of performance. And 1876 is very much the kind of score I'd want to get in the world championship if I was going to win it, knowing that I always gain on my rivals in events like hour cards and 30-minute binary. I feel motivated again now!
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Luxury.
Hello from Antalya, where I'm in a hotel room that, to put it mildy, is palatial. There's enough wardrobe space to easily contain all the clothes I've ever owned. The bath is a jacuzzi. There's one of those couch things that I think is called a chaise longue. And I'm lying in a FOUR POSTER BED! For the first time in my life. I'm wearing a T-shirt proclaiming "A working class hero is something to be", and it seems a tiny bit out of place.
Now for the hand-written blog I wrote on the plane to pass the time:
The man sitting next to me recognised me, which is always nice and is probably a good omen for a memory competition, but wanted to talk about my opinions on string theory, the nature of the universe, the brain, perception and so forth. I'm always a sad disappointment to the inquiring mind - all I can really offer on the subject is a vague intention to one day learn what "string theory" is. I keep hearing people talk about it. I need to somehow change people's perception of me as a genius who likes that kind of thing - I, and all the memory people I know, are basically normal people with a weird hobby. There are bricklayers with the same creativity and passion for what they do, and I bet nobody asks them about string theory.
Then there's the embarrassment that Mohammed was able to chat about such things, fluently, in his second language, while here I am merrily on my way to Turkey and not speaking a single word of Turkish. I can't help thinking that this makes me a terrible person. As the pile of "Teach Yourself" books-and-CDs on my bookshelves will testify, I normally have the decency to try and fail to learn the basics before I go somewhere new, but I just haven't had the time this time around.
Well, to be fair, I've had plenty of time, I just haven't done it. I say it again - I'm not much of a genius.
I arrived at the airport at around 9:15pm, local time (two hours ahead of GMT), intending to get a taxi to the hotel by means of miming and waving a piece of paper with the address on it. Most people had arranged for the hotel to pick them up in a minibus, but I wasn't aware of anyone having arranged it for my arrival time, though I was secretly hoping to bump into someone and hitch a ride.
And I tell you, it's a good thing I wear a hat, or at least that I consort with people who can remember names and faces, because I'm going to admit here on my blog something that I didn't admit to the people concerned at the time...
In the arrivals place, I was greeted with "Hi, Ben!" by someone who didn't look at all familiar, but who had travelled from far away and was waiting for the rest of his group. No idea who it is. Maybe from the Phillipines, possibly from Hong Kong, I don't know. But they weren't leaving the airport immediately, so I said see-you-later and went outside to where the taxis were.
"Hi, Ben!" said someone else. I enthusiastically said hi back, and luckily the conversation very soon told me that I was talking to Jonas von Essen - who, you will remember, I saw a month ago when he came to my memory competition - and that he was waiting for Matteo Salvo to get their hotel minibus. I hitched a ride. Matteo arrived shortly afterwards - again, someone I really should recognise by now but whose face rang no bells with me - and we were brought here by our extremely friendly and helpful Memoriad host, who did tell me his name but not how to spell it, and I've seen millions of variations of it in the past so I'm not even going to try. But he was great, really.
I did recognise Boris when he said hello in the hotel lobby, even though he's changed his hairstyle, and I recognised Johannes by the wheelchair and Christian by the wild hair, so I feel better about myself now. Really, it normally only takes me two or three meetings to remember what people look like, I should be fine with Jonas and Matteo next time.
I'll be super-honest here - I didn't remember what Johannes looked like the second time I met him, and he looks quite distinctive on account of his medical condition, but I apparently didn't notice that the first time we met. Possibly I just don't look at people.
So, anyway, here I am at the Memoriad 2012, so let's see what the schedule holds for us. Tomorrow I intend to spend as much time as possible asleep in my four poster bed - I haven't spent enough time asleep lately, what with work and things, and a day of feeling like some kind of princess would be just the ticket.
Then on Saturday, we start at 10:00 with Speed Cards! That's the last event of a standard memory competition, but here we start with a bang! Two trials, all on computer software like everything else here (which is different but great), and how will I do? I've been able to do around 26-27 seconds in practice and get it right about half the time. Simon will certainly go faster than that, and there might be another couple who'll try it, but if I go for a safe-ish 30-second first attempt, and then go for something faster the second time, I should be in with a chance of a top-three place. Top three places in each event get the prize money, you see.
10:45 is mental multiplications. Yes, I'm doing the mental calculation events too, although the last time I practiced any of them was two and a half years ago - I won't do well.
12:00 we get names and faces, and well, see above. You get to choose the names of your own language, rather than having international ones, but that won't help me get a half-decent score.
After lunch, at 2:00, it's mental square roots. I've never been able to do that - I used to know in principle how it works, but I can't even remember that now. I'll try to revise tomorrow, but don't expect me to get a big score.
And at 3:15 it's hour numbers. I haven't practiced the hour-long memory disciplines for a very long time - when I'm at my best, I wouldn't expect to be in the top three among the field we've got here, so it would take an unexpectedly good performance and some disasters for the favourites for me to get anything out of this one.
Sunday starts at 9:00 with flash numbers - like spoken numbers, only they flash up on a screen instead. I'm not expecting big things here; I don't usually do spectacularly well at spoken numbers, but with an only-score-up-to-your-first-mistake rule, anything's possible. Two trials again, best score counts.
10:15 is mental additions. A bit of fun that I won't do very well at, again.
11:20 is mental calendar dates, which again I will just try my best at and see if I can still remember how to do it. I'm nowhere near the level of the world-beaters in any of the mental calculation events.
At 1:00, after lunch, we get Flash Anzan, an all-new thing where numbers flash up on screen very quickly and you have to add them together. Fun, but my score will be somewhere in the region of zero.
And finally at 2:50, we get 30-minute binary. Now, by all rights I should be the best in the world at this and win it comfortably. But I haven't done any proper regular training for a long time, so it's not impossible that I'll have a bit of a disaster. Even so, if I don't get in the top three here I'll be very disappointed, and if I don't win I'll be more than slightly annoyed with myself. I probably won't win, if I think about it logically, but I'll still be annoyed.
Right, now I'm going to have a bath, or a jacuzzi. I was going to do that as soon as I got up to my room, but then I saw I was staying in Buckingham-Palace-only-without-the-smell-of-corgis-and-royalty, I just had to blog about it. Hope you enjoyed!
Now for the hand-written blog I wrote on the plane to pass the time:
The man sitting next to me recognised me, which is always nice and is probably a good omen for a memory competition, but wanted to talk about my opinions on string theory, the nature of the universe, the brain, perception and so forth. I'm always a sad disappointment to the inquiring mind - all I can really offer on the subject is a vague intention to one day learn what "string theory" is. I keep hearing people talk about it. I need to somehow change people's perception of me as a genius who likes that kind of thing - I, and all the memory people I know, are basically normal people with a weird hobby. There are bricklayers with the same creativity and passion for what they do, and I bet nobody asks them about string theory.
Then there's the embarrassment that Mohammed was able to chat about such things, fluently, in his second language, while here I am merrily on my way to Turkey and not speaking a single word of Turkish. I can't help thinking that this makes me a terrible person. As the pile of "Teach Yourself" books-and-CDs on my bookshelves will testify, I normally have the decency to try and fail to learn the basics before I go somewhere new, but I just haven't had the time this time around.
Well, to be fair, I've had plenty of time, I just haven't done it. I say it again - I'm not much of a genius.
I arrived at the airport at around 9:15pm, local time (two hours ahead of GMT), intending to get a taxi to the hotel by means of miming and waving a piece of paper with the address on it. Most people had arranged for the hotel to pick them up in a minibus, but I wasn't aware of anyone having arranged it for my arrival time, though I was secretly hoping to bump into someone and hitch a ride.
And I tell you, it's a good thing I wear a hat, or at least that I consort with people who can remember names and faces, because I'm going to admit here on my blog something that I didn't admit to the people concerned at the time...
In the arrivals place, I was greeted with "Hi, Ben!" by someone who didn't look at all familiar, but who had travelled from far away and was waiting for the rest of his group. No idea who it is. Maybe from the Phillipines, possibly from Hong Kong, I don't know. But they weren't leaving the airport immediately, so I said see-you-later and went outside to where the taxis were.
"Hi, Ben!" said someone else. I enthusiastically said hi back, and luckily the conversation very soon told me that I was talking to Jonas von Essen - who, you will remember, I saw a month ago when he came to my memory competition - and that he was waiting for Matteo Salvo to get their hotel minibus. I hitched a ride. Matteo arrived shortly afterwards - again, someone I really should recognise by now but whose face rang no bells with me - and we were brought here by our extremely friendly and helpful Memoriad host, who did tell me his name but not how to spell it, and I've seen millions of variations of it in the past so I'm not even going to try. But he was great, really.
I did recognise Boris when he said hello in the hotel lobby, even though he's changed his hairstyle, and I recognised Johannes by the wheelchair and Christian by the wild hair, so I feel better about myself now. Really, it normally only takes me two or three meetings to remember what people look like, I should be fine with Jonas and Matteo next time.
I'll be super-honest here - I didn't remember what Johannes looked like the second time I met him, and he looks quite distinctive on account of his medical condition, but I apparently didn't notice that the first time we met. Possibly I just don't look at people.
So, anyway, here I am at the Memoriad 2012, so let's see what the schedule holds for us. Tomorrow I intend to spend as much time as possible asleep in my four poster bed - I haven't spent enough time asleep lately, what with work and things, and a day of feeling like some kind of princess would be just the ticket.
Then on Saturday, we start at 10:00 with Speed Cards! That's the last event of a standard memory competition, but here we start with a bang! Two trials, all on computer software like everything else here (which is different but great), and how will I do? I've been able to do around 26-27 seconds in practice and get it right about half the time. Simon will certainly go faster than that, and there might be another couple who'll try it, but if I go for a safe-ish 30-second first attempt, and then go for something faster the second time, I should be in with a chance of a top-three place. Top three places in each event get the prize money, you see.
10:45 is mental multiplications. Yes, I'm doing the mental calculation events too, although the last time I practiced any of them was two and a half years ago - I won't do well.
12:00 we get names and faces, and well, see above. You get to choose the names of your own language, rather than having international ones, but that won't help me get a half-decent score.
After lunch, at 2:00, it's mental square roots. I've never been able to do that - I used to know in principle how it works, but I can't even remember that now. I'll try to revise tomorrow, but don't expect me to get a big score.
And at 3:15 it's hour numbers. I haven't practiced the hour-long memory disciplines for a very long time - when I'm at my best, I wouldn't expect to be in the top three among the field we've got here, so it would take an unexpectedly good performance and some disasters for the favourites for me to get anything out of this one.
Sunday starts at 9:00 with flash numbers - like spoken numbers, only they flash up on a screen instead. I'm not expecting big things here; I don't usually do spectacularly well at spoken numbers, but with an only-score-up-to-your-first-mistake rule, anything's possible. Two trials again, best score counts.
10:15 is mental additions. A bit of fun that I won't do very well at, again.
11:20 is mental calendar dates, which again I will just try my best at and see if I can still remember how to do it. I'm nowhere near the level of the world-beaters in any of the mental calculation events.
At 1:00, after lunch, we get Flash Anzan, an all-new thing where numbers flash up on screen very quickly and you have to add them together. Fun, but my score will be somewhere in the region of zero.
And finally at 2:50, we get 30-minute binary. Now, by all rights I should be the best in the world at this and win it comfortably. But I haven't done any proper regular training for a long time, so it's not impossible that I'll have a bit of a disaster. Even so, if I don't get in the top three here I'll be very disappointed, and if I don't win I'll be more than slightly annoyed with myself. I probably won't win, if I think about it logically, but I'll still be annoyed.
Right, now I'm going to have a bath, or a jacuzzi. I was going to do that as soon as I got up to my room, but then I saw I was staying in Buckingham-Palace-only-without-the-smell-of-corgis-and-royalty, I just had to blog about it. Hope you enjoyed!
Sunday, November 18, 2012
I'll fly away
So, on Thursday, while the Americans are preparing to eat their turkey, I'll be jetting off to the country of Turkey, and sunning myself in Antalya, where the temperature is going to be around twenty degrees! As I might have mentioned before, I hate cold weather. If I had the money, I'd spend my life travelling around the world and living permanently somewhere warm.
The whole money thing would be helped if I'd practiced memorising over these past few months, and won the actual prize money at the Memoriad, but I suppose it's too late to do anything about it now. Great Davis Cup final today, though - well worth the time I spent not practicing hour numbers. Anyway, I've got yet another TV appearance coming up in December, and that comes with a fee (a "we don't know how much it'll be" fee, but a fee nonetheless, and since my TV stardom is invariably done on a just-for-the-fun-of-it basis, anything is fine with me), so I'll be able to cope with joblessness for the remainder of the year - I'm finishing my current contract immediately before the world memory championship starts on December 14th.
The whole money thing would be helped if I'd practiced memorising over these past few months, and won the actual prize money at the Memoriad, but I suppose it's too late to do anything about it now. Great Davis Cup final today, though - well worth the time I spent not practicing hour numbers. Anyway, I've got yet another TV appearance coming up in December, and that comes with a fee (a "we don't know how much it'll be" fee, but a fee nonetheless, and since my TV stardom is invariably done on a just-for-the-fun-of-it basis, anything is fine with me), so I'll be able to cope with joblessness for the remainder of the year - I'm finishing my current contract immediately before the world memory championship starts on December 14th.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Oh, this is funny
Ray Keene's email address has been hacked. I just got the classic "Dear unnamed friend, I'm on holiday somewhere exotic and had my money stole" email from him. Nobody send Ray money, please!
Monday, November 05, 2012
Happy beardday!
You know what it's the anniversary of? My beard! Ten years ago, give or take a week or so, I decided that shaving every morning was too much of a hassle, and I'd probably look better with a beard, and I've never looked back ever since. Down with razors! I'm like some kind of person who insists on everyone having beards - there must have been someone like that in history, but the only one I can think of is Peter the Great, who insisted that no-one have a beard. Who was his pro-beard equivalent?
Sunday, November 04, 2012
Britain's Brightest
The TV filming was fun - something like five hours of filming for a 2½-minute segment on the show, but that's how these things always work out. No hints about what it involved, you'll just have to wait until next January/February, I'm afraid. But it'll definitely be worth it, I assure you.
Saturday, November 03, 2012
Try try try
Being old, I don't like the kind of music that's in the pop charts nowadays, but the other day I heard "Try" by Pink in a shop, and found it really catchy in a gets-stuck-in-your-head kind of way. I actually quite like it. In fact, Pink quite often does songs that I think are okay, and I should probably stop categorising her as "one of those awful manufactured modern singers whom I despise so much" and start thinking of her as a 'real' musician. Maybe I'll even listen to her albums. It seems only fair.
And while I'm being a grumpy old man, let me observe that a week on Thursday there are elections for the Police and Crime Commissioner for the county. Electing people to this kind of position is an extraordinarily stupid idea that I'm sure the Americans are somehow to blame for (so shame on you, all my American readers. Shame on you.) and the Nottinghamshire Police's website impressively tells visitors that "Exactly how the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) will work in practice is yet to be finalised," so it's good to know that the £75,000 salary will be well-spent. I should have stood for election, shouldn't I? I'm always on the lookout for people who will pay me for doing nothing. And since 99% of the people in Nottinghamshire don't know the election's even happening, I'm sure I could have drummed up enough support to win in a landslide.
I wholeheartedly endorse the only candidate who's so far bothered to put a leaflet through my door, and thus the only one I know exists - Dr Raj Chandran. He's a former Police Surgeon, Mayor of Gedling, Territorial Army Major and recently retired GP, which doesn't sound like a particularly great CV for someone wanting to be in charge of the police, but it's probably better than the other candidates. And more importantly, I've scanned the whole leaflet, and the spelling and punctuation are all correct, though he does seem fond of using Capital Letters more than most sane people do. His ideas seem more or less sensible, although I'm not sure about the insistence that the police need more horses, in order to "bring back the honour of Nottinghamshire".
If and when any other candidate sees fit to let me know they're running, I might change my recommendation, but until then, I urge everyone in Nottinghamshire to go out and vote for this guy - remember, if you don't vote, then some other uninformed idiot will, and it'll be your fault!
Right, I'm going to London to be a TV star. It won't be on telly until some time early next year, but I'll let you know in plenty of time to set your video recorders. Being old, I assume everyone still uses video recorders.
And while I'm being a grumpy old man, let me observe that a week on Thursday there are elections for the Police and Crime Commissioner for the county. Electing people to this kind of position is an extraordinarily stupid idea that I'm sure the Americans are somehow to blame for (so shame on you, all my American readers. Shame on you.) and the Nottinghamshire Police's website impressively tells visitors that "Exactly how the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) will work in practice is yet to be finalised," so it's good to know that the £75,000 salary will be well-spent. I should have stood for election, shouldn't I? I'm always on the lookout for people who will pay me for doing nothing. And since 99% of the people in Nottinghamshire don't know the election's even happening, I'm sure I could have drummed up enough support to win in a landslide.
I wholeheartedly endorse the only candidate who's so far bothered to put a leaflet through my door, and thus the only one I know exists - Dr Raj Chandran. He's a former Police Surgeon, Mayor of Gedling, Territorial Army Major and recently retired GP, which doesn't sound like a particularly great CV for someone wanting to be in charge of the police, but it's probably better than the other candidates. And more importantly, I've scanned the whole leaflet, and the spelling and punctuation are all correct, though he does seem fond of using Capital Letters more than most sane people do. His ideas seem more or less sensible, although I'm not sure about the insistence that the police need more horses, in order to "bring back the honour of Nottinghamshire".
If and when any other candidate sees fit to let me know they're running, I might change my recommendation, but until then, I urge everyone in Nottinghamshire to go out and vote for this guy - remember, if you don't vote, then some other uninformed idiot will, and it'll be your fault!
Right, I'm going to London to be a TV star. It won't be on telly until some time early next year, but I'll let you know in plenty of time to set your video recorders. Being old, I assume everyone still uses video recorders.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
It's all kicking off
It's been a while since I was asked to do a memory-celebrity kind of thing, but the offers are coming thick and fast all of a sudden! There's an Italian TV show that I'm probably not going to be able to do, a BBC show that I'm going to be filming on Saturday, and a real movie that'll be shown in cinemas and everything (I'm told by the people making it, anyway) about this year's world championships. The latter two will both involve some kind of animated cartoon representations of memory journeys, too, which is awesome! There should be a lot more cartoons about memory.
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Fun fun fun
The new series of Red Dwarf has been uniformly and embarrassingly awful... until this week's episode, which was really really good! Clever in a silly way and funny just like it used to be, however many decades ago it was when it was at its best! I'm looking forward to more now!
Monday, October 22, 2012
Weight off my mind
I hadn’t realised just how much time I’d spent making sure everything was ready for the memory championship these last few weeks, but I got an amazing sense of job-done when it was finished, and devoted a lot of time to planning what to do now that I’m not so busy.
The plan is to prepare for the Memoriad, which is only a month away. Practice 30-minute binary in the evenings if I can, and the hour numbers at weekends. If I’m to have any chance of not embarrassing myself horribly, I really need to get into the habit of doing marathon memory disciplines again.
Someone, possibly Jonas, reminded me on Saturday that when I was first starting out practicing memory, I only ever practiced the marathon disciplines. This is true, but it’s something that I’d completely forgotten - it comes to something when other people you’ve never met before remember more about your daily doings than you do yourself. Even so, it’s a sensible thing to do, and I think I’d like to revert to that habit. If you can do an hour numbers, you can do a five-minute numbers too, and quite fast at that. Getting accustomed to long periods of concentration is the key.
I’m talking as if I’m really back to regular, enthusiastic memory practice, but don’t get too excited yet. We’ll see how it goes.
The plan is to prepare for the Memoriad, which is only a month away. Practice 30-minute binary in the evenings if I can, and the hour numbers at weekends. If I’m to have any chance of not embarrassing myself horribly, I really need to get into the habit of doing marathon memory disciplines again.
Someone, possibly Jonas, reminded me on Saturday that when I was first starting out practicing memory, I only ever practiced the marathon disciplines. This is true, but it’s something that I’d completely forgotten - it comes to something when other people you’ve never met before remember more about your daily doings than you do yourself. Even so, it’s a sensible thing to do, and I think I’d like to revert to that habit. If you can do an hour numbers, you can do a five-minute numbers too, and quite fast at that. Getting accustomed to long periods of concentration is the key.
I’m talking as if I’m really back to regular, enthusiastic memory practice, but don’t get too excited yet. We’ll see how it goes.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Friendly!
And what a great Friendly Memory Championship it was, too! I had the usual mix of nationalities staying at my place on Friday night - Dai and John up from the Welsh valleys, and newcomer Jérôme all the way from Rennes, plus other newcomer Nick all the way originally from Greece, although he lives in England nowadays.
Dai, in typical Dai fashion, had invited Nick to sleep in my flat on the strength of a couple of messages exchanged on Facebook - "I'm not sure if it's a man or a woman," he cheerfully confessed. But in typical Me fashion, I said that was fine, and in typical memory-competitor fashion Nick turned out to be a perfectly nice person and not some kind of brutally-murder-you-all-while-you-sleep type, so everything was okay. He's a man, by the way.
Team Sweden, meanwhile (Idriz and two relative newcomers Jonas and Marwin who'd been really impressive at the Swedish championship last month, plus two embedded journalists) had got to their hotel at four in the morning, five hours before the competition was due to start. It seems to have affected Idriz, who was driving, more than the other two, so I assume they had more chance for forty winks here and there. And finally, Matteo was staying in the Rockaway hotel just over the road from my place, which he says is quite extraordinarily nice and friendly, so I'll be recommending that as a place to stay for any future competitions!
Dai and John had brought collapsible sunbeds to sleep on, although one of them turned out to be more permanently collapsible under the weight of three people sitting on it on Friday night. But still, it was perfectly serviceable, and with my little settee and my nice spare bed, nobody even had to sleep on the floor!
Phil drove down on Saturday morning to complete the set, and we all gathered at the always-wonderful Attenborough Nature Centre for the competition! Nobody at the centre knew there was a competition happening, but soon enough the always-awesome guy in charge (whose name I'm fairly sure is Tim, but I think I've met him too many times now to ask him to confirm his name, so I'll just have to hope somebody else says "Hi, Tim," within my earshot, so I know for sure) arrived and sorted everything out. As always, great hospitality, great lunch, great everything!
The whole competition went perfectly smoothly, and even finished well before six o'clock - I'd been confidently expecting to run late, because the recall times have been extended here and there since last year, as has the number of digits in spoken numbers. But it was all quick and flawless, we finished the fifth discipline exactly five minutes before the time we'd ordered lunch, and we finished the speed cards with plenty of time for congratulations and Swedish TV interviews afterwards!
The star of the show was the seriously awesome Jonas von Essen, who won by a country mile. He particularly excelled in abstract images, attempting the whole 475 of them and ending up with a nearly-record-breaking score of 354, and also a 204 in the spoken numbers. He ended up with 5930 points, which could have been even better had he managed to record a time in speed cards at the end - like I often do in this kind of situation, he made tiny but annoying mistakes in both attempts. Still, that moves him up to 13th in the world rankings, with a definite threat of breaking into the top ten at the WMC in December.
Between him and Marwin, who broke a Swedish record or two, even Idriz was nearly getting tired of enthusing that it was the first time a Swede had achieved such-and-such. Nearly, but not quite. Everyone should also congratulate Jérôme, who memorised a pack of cards in just over two minutes in his first ever competition!
After the championship, we followed the time-honoured tradition of going to the pub and talking about memory, before going to bed. Team Sweden, for whom sleep is clearly an optional kind of thing, had to leave at about one o'clock in the morning to catch their plane home from Stansted, while the journalists were last seen heading to a hotel in Oxford somewhere - I'm sure they all got back fine in the end.
Next year's competition will probably move back to its May spot in the schedule, if that doesn't clash with anything else. Book your plane tickets now!
(Not really)
Dai, in typical Dai fashion, had invited Nick to sleep in my flat on the strength of a couple of messages exchanged on Facebook - "I'm not sure if it's a man or a woman," he cheerfully confessed. But in typical Me fashion, I said that was fine, and in typical memory-competitor fashion Nick turned out to be a perfectly nice person and not some kind of brutally-murder-you-all-while-you-sleep type, so everything was okay. He's a man, by the way.
Team Sweden, meanwhile (Idriz and two relative newcomers Jonas and Marwin who'd been really impressive at the Swedish championship last month, plus two embedded journalists) had got to their hotel at four in the morning, five hours before the competition was due to start. It seems to have affected Idriz, who was driving, more than the other two, so I assume they had more chance for forty winks here and there. And finally, Matteo was staying in the Rockaway hotel just over the road from my place, which he says is quite extraordinarily nice and friendly, so I'll be recommending that as a place to stay for any future competitions!
Dai and John had brought collapsible sunbeds to sleep on, although one of them turned out to be more permanently collapsible under the weight of three people sitting on it on Friday night. But still, it was perfectly serviceable, and with my little settee and my nice spare bed, nobody even had to sleep on the floor!
Phil drove down on Saturday morning to complete the set, and we all gathered at the always-wonderful Attenborough Nature Centre for the competition! Nobody at the centre knew there was a competition happening, but soon enough the always-awesome guy in charge (whose name I'm fairly sure is Tim, but I think I've met him too many times now to ask him to confirm his name, so I'll just have to hope somebody else says "Hi, Tim," within my earshot, so I know for sure) arrived and sorted everything out. As always, great hospitality, great lunch, great everything!
The whole competition went perfectly smoothly, and even finished well before six o'clock - I'd been confidently expecting to run late, because the recall times have been extended here and there since last year, as has the number of digits in spoken numbers. But it was all quick and flawless, we finished the fifth discipline exactly five minutes before the time we'd ordered lunch, and we finished the speed cards with plenty of time for congratulations and Swedish TV interviews afterwards!
The star of the show was the seriously awesome Jonas von Essen, who won by a country mile. He particularly excelled in abstract images, attempting the whole 475 of them and ending up with a nearly-record-breaking score of 354, and also a 204 in the spoken numbers. He ended up with 5930 points, which could have been even better had he managed to record a time in speed cards at the end - like I often do in this kind of situation, he made tiny but annoying mistakes in both attempts. Still, that moves him up to 13th in the world rankings, with a definite threat of breaking into the top ten at the WMC in December.
Between him and Marwin, who broke a Swedish record or two, even Idriz was nearly getting tired of enthusing that it was the first time a Swede had achieved such-and-such. Nearly, but not quite. Everyone should also congratulate Jérôme, who memorised a pack of cards in just over two minutes in his first ever competition!
After the championship, we followed the time-honoured tradition of going to the pub and talking about memory, before going to bed. Team Sweden, for whom sleep is clearly an optional kind of thing, had to leave at about one o'clock in the morning to catch their plane home from Stansted, while the journalists were last seen heading to a hotel in Oxford somewhere - I'm sure they all got back fine in the end.
Next year's competition will probably move back to its May spot in the schedule, if that doesn't clash with anything else. Book your plane tickets now!
(Not really)
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Ben Pridmore's birthday is today
That's what Facebook tells me, anyway. But after a moment of confusion, I realised it was talking about that other Ben Pridmore I'm friends with, the one who's ten times cooler than me and is a fireman who used to have dreadlocks (we've never met, I only know him from occasional snippets of information in his Facebook status). I always forget his birthday is practically the same day as mine until I get this annual reminder.
My birthday is tomorrow. You can give me a present if you want.
My birthday is tomorrow. You can give me a present if you want.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Ra ra ra
It's not something that's really featured in my life recently, but I felt the need to vent my annoyance with books that tell you how to pronounce Japanese. Specifically, the Japanese r-sound, which I'm reliably told is sort of half-way between a 'r' and a 'l'.
That's just silly, isn't it? There isn't some kind of sliding scale with 'r' at one end and 'l' at the other. It's either one or the other. After some experimentation, involving saying "ra la la ra" to myself repeatedly, I can say with some confidence that you touch the roof of your mouth with your tongue to say 'la', and don't to say 'ra'.
In my experience, Japanese people either say 'r' or 'l', depending what they feel like at any given moment, and then insist that they make the same sound every time. Or that's how it seems to my English-speaking ears, anyway. I just say 'l', seeing as I always have a problem with that other sound. And saying 'w' instead of 'r' in Japanese is at least 50% more likely to lead to saying an actual different word, probably. I haven't checked, but it's best to avoid it anyway.
That's just silly, isn't it? There isn't some kind of sliding scale with 'r' at one end and 'l' at the other. It's either one or the other. After some experimentation, involving saying "ra la la ra" to myself repeatedly, I can say with some confidence that you touch the roof of your mouth with your tongue to say 'la', and don't to say 'ra'.
In my experience, Japanese people either say 'r' or 'l', depending what they feel like at any given moment, and then insist that they make the same sound every time. Or that's how it seems to my English-speaking ears, anyway. I just say 'l', seeing as I always have a problem with that other sound. And saying 'w' instead of 'r' in Japanese is at least 50% more likely to lead to saying an actual different word, probably. I haven't checked, but it's best to avoid it anyway.
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