They get around

Remember a few months ago, when I blogged about seeing Parasight in Beeston? Well, here I am all settled in my new home in Belper, and the Railway pub down the road has a poster in the window saying they're playing there in a fortnight. I think I'll have to go along, since they've gone to the trouble of following me around the country.

Saturday 1st February, 8:30pm, come along and join the party!

House of Fools

Following the general theme of commenting on television programmes, I saw that the BBC website is wildly plugging Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer's new sitcom, House of Fools. Since I'll enthusiastically watch anything with Vic and Bob in it, they didn't need to entice me very much, but when I played the couple of clips that the BBC chose to show to promote the series, I was left thinking "Well, that's rubbish. How the mighty have fallen. A lame, uninspired, cheap sitcom, who would have thought it?"

But I decided to watch the first episode anyway, just to see how bad it was, and how completely my aging idols have lost the plot... and it was brilliant! Surreal and hilarious, just like everything the two of them have ever done, it's just that the BBC chose to take the few scenes without any jokes or slapstick silliness and highlight those as an example of their new show.

Why didn't they present the opening scene of the first episode? Vic strides into the room, singing (to the tune of Day Trip To Bangor), "Look at my glove, I think I'm in love with my mediaeval gauntlet! I'm happy to say that today, all day, I'll stride around the flat and flaunt it!" And he then has an imaginary fight, shouting "Prepare to die, Doctor Dolittle!"

A simple clip of those few seconds would have got me watching it in a flash, rather than very nearly giving it a miss. Does someone at the BBC just not understand what comedy is?

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

I'm seeing adverts for a new American version of The Tomorrow People and wondering whether I should watch it. I've never seen the original, but I did watch the previous re-imagining of the series, back in the early nineties. It was pretty terrible, but since American remakes are always entirely unlike the original they're based on, we might be on to a good thing here. On the other hand, the original original version is supposed to have been good...

The fun thing about the nineties version was the way that characters just disappeared. A new story would start and suddenly someone would be missing, and everyone talked as if the only Tomorrow People there had ever been were the ones who were still appearing in the series. It was quite disconcerting. It would be nice to get tomorrow-person powers, but not if they come with a sporting chance that you'll vanish and be erased from history altogether...

I should join a gym

I'm feeling restless - not cycling a long way home of an evening takes some getting used to. Perhaps I ought to find some other physical activity to get into. I should really just be memorising things, but I'm still not really in the mood...

The Woman In White's cousin

Reading The Woman In White, I can't help thinking of it from Magdalen's point of view.

Family relationships are a complicated thing in The Woman In White. Magdalen Fairlie is Laura Fairlie's cousin, who doesn't feature in the story at all, just getting a mention in the course of Mr Gilmore's chronicle of who inherits what in the case of Laura's death. We don't know anything about her, other than that her father died quite some time ago, and her brother 'was drowned at Oxford' at the age of 18 at some point in the past. She apparently isn't close to Laura, since there's no mention of her so much as attending Laura's funeral or dropping by to say hello when it turns out Laura isn't dead at all.

Here's what happens in the book from Magdalen's viewpoint - her cousin Laura is reported to have died, very sadly. Then some months later, she reappears in the company of a new husband, Walter Hartright, who explains that Laura's death was all part of a conspiracy carried out by her first husband Sir Percival Glyde and the evil Count Fosco, and it was actually someone else who died. The conspirators are both also dead now - Glyde accidentally killed himself while trying to destroy evidence of his illegitimacy and Fosco was murdered by a secret society for reasons unrelated to the plot of the book. Walter Hartright happened to be nearby on both occasions, but had nothing to do with their deaths.

All this is plausible as long as Laura is around to speak for herself, but then she is 'delicate', and Walter goes out of his way to protect her from talking to people if it might disturb her. If I was Magdalen, I'd find it suspicious. Especially since Walter is clearly very friendly with Laura's half-sister Marian Halcombe, and the two of them are always together while Laura's in bed with a headache...

Thing is, Magdalen stands to inherit Limmeridge House if it turns out that the whole thing is a scam on the part of Walter and Marian. If I was her, I'd be investigating, or else hatching a scheme to discredit and disinherit Laura. There should be a sequel.

Footy

The Premier League has been really exciting this season, hasn't it? It would be great if Arsenal managed to hang on to the top spot and beat the team everyone hates and the team everyone used to hate before Man City came along and became even more hateable.

Memory trophies

Oh, all right then, another blog tonight. I've put my trophies on the mantelpiece in my new living room, just to celebrate the fact that I've now got a mantelpiece. There was probably a fireplace and chimney there once, too, but now it's just a mantelpiecey framework around a blank piece of wall.

Still, it's interesting to look at the array of big impressive trophies and what they're for - for the 2004 world memory championship I didn't get anything at all (Andi having chosen to steal the official WMC trophy the previous year), the 2008 one is an amazingly puny little tiny glass thing that doesn't even say "world memory champion" on it, and the 2009 one is a medium-sized plain and boring-looking glass thing. On the other hand, the trophy for coming third in the 2010 championship is a really big and impressive tin trophy that looks good on a mantelpiece. Not as big as the colossal Memory World Cup 2004 trophy, which is the size of a house, or the really big gold thing for the notable feat of winning the speed cards category of the 2012 Memoriad, though.

As I've mentioned many times before, I prefer my memory competition trophies to be small and tasteful, mainly because I never have room in my bag for the big and ugly ones, but if you're going to put them on display like that as if you care about them (as opposed to putting them on windowsills and cupboard-tops wherever I could find a space, which was my policy in my last two flats), I suppose it's better if they look good, instead. Perhaps in future I can ask the memory competition organisers to award big metal trophies, and to deliver them to my house so I don't have to take the trouble to carry them home? I'm sure that'll make me popular.

The coolest trophy I've ever won is still the stylish and artistic coloured-and-sculpted glass thing from the 2009 UK Championship, though. That's the kind of thing that really does look mantelpiece-worthy!

In the pale light of the morning, nothing's worth remembering

I just haven't been in the mood to do anything today, and I blame the television - I haven't got my TV connected up yet, so the glaring absence of having the telly on in the background has made it impossible to do any work...

Stuff

Can I just point all my blog-followers to the video for "Moped" by someone called Pinkunoizu? Directed by Ewan Jones Morris of that DJ Shadow video we all love, this is just... brilliant.

"Moped" Pinkunoizu from Ewan Jones Morris on Vimeo.

Right!

Memory! I aims to spend the weekend memorisin' things! I really need to get back into some kind of routine of training, just because I know it'll be a lot of fun when I do get into it. So this weekend, let's sit down in my new memory-training location (I think the table in my living room, or possibly the desk in the bedroom) and remember some numbers!

What's in a name?

Yes, we all know I have trouble remembering names, but I really think I shouldn't struggle as much as I do when I meet someone with a really, really memorable kind of name. Valentine Low, for example, the Times journalist who consistently writes by far the best articles about the World Memory Championships - I spent the whole time in Croydon trying to remember what his unusual first name was; I kept thinking he was called Rembrandt, for some reason.

Likewise, Sheldon Lazarus, who's been emailing me lately about a fun-sounding TV show. A perfect name for a zombie-themed supervillain [he's going to read this and be offended now, isn't he?], but I keep thinking his name's Sheldon Moldoff, as in the much-loved superhero comic artist (which is what happens when you read blogs like that Justice Society of America one I mentioned the other day).

I still feel that everybody in the world should be required to wear name-badges. Everyone except me, obviously - everyone knows who I am.

If you can't say anything nice...

Writing a blog entry every night shouldn't be difficult - the lesson I need to learn here is that I need to do something interesting every day, so that I can write about it in the evening! Right, tomorrow I'm going to search for buried treasure. No, actually, it's raining. I'll just go to work.

Arooooooo

Someone came to this blog today by googling "black and purple robo wolf". I'm fairly sure I've never in my life written about a black and purple robo wolf, but I think I'm going to have to now. How would the unusual colour scheme benefit a robo wolf, though? I guess it's not designed to blend in with real wolves, so what is it for, exactly?

Twang

Living as I do now in a big empty house, it occurs to me that I can play musical instruments as much as I like without any fear of people hearing me. This would be a good time to get a drum kit. But failing that, it would be a very good time to get out my ukulele and learn how to play the thing properly.

The strange problem is that I just can't learn things like that. I can't be doing with playing simple 'tunes' that just involve one or two notes, so I always skip those lessons, pick a piece of real music that I like the sound of, try to play that, and give up when I can't get it right.

I don't know why I'm like that with music, when I spent years and years learning memory techniques without having to be the world's best memoriser straight away. Maybe that was more fun because I was inventing my own techniques, but I'd been using the bog-standard major system for more than two years before I started branching out on my own. I need some kind of teacher who'll force me to practice ukulele-ing properly. And also not expect any payment for their efforts.

Poetic Injustice

By virtue of it being on top of the pile of books I unloaded from my boxes, I'm re-reading The Woman In White. You know, Wilkie Collins is someone to be sympathised with - he was quite scathing about Charles Dickens's unfinished final novel, saying people should focus more on the good stuff Dickens wrote when he was younger, and then when Collins realised he wasn't going to live to finish his own final book he hired another writer to finish it for him, giving him full details of what should happen.

And what does he get for this effort? The only books of his that are still in print are the good stuff he wrote when he was younger, and his final work gets grouped into a footnote of his biographies along the lines of 'Collins wrote a lot of other books in later life, but they were rubbish'. Meanwhile, Charles Dickens's complete works, including The Half-Finished Mystery Of Edwin Drood, can still be found in the Classics section of any good bookshop.

Remind me

I do seriously intend to do a lot of memory training this year. I'm going to internettishly reach out around the world to other memory people and set up some kind of routine of comparing training results. And also nagging me to practice, because what I really need in life is a slave-driver.

Without fail

I am determined to keep my sort-of new year resolution and post something here every night, even when I'm tired out after all the house-moving and work-doing of the last few days. But did you know you can see Paul Merton's old channel 4 series on 4OD? I've only just discovered it, and it's still as funny as it was twenty years ago!

Pat it and prick it and mark it with B

Some people might think my filing system is a bit strange, but it made perfect sense for me to mark the cardboard boxes containing my brother's stuff with a big B when I was packing up and moving house, even though my name starts with B and his doesn't. But the system let me down a little bit when for some reason I packed one of my boxloads of kitchen stuff in a box with a B on it and spent ages looking for the box with my kettle and iron in. Still, the day was saved before I had to go to work with an unironed shirt, so there's no need to worry.

New year, new home, new bloggery

It's 2014, bizarre and futuristic though that sounds. The far-flung future world of the year 2000 is ancient history. Transformers: The Movie took place in the distant future of 2005, which was nine years ago. Next year is the year that Marty McFly travelled to, where flying cars and holographic movies are commonplace.

I'm living in a non-futuristic but very nice flat in the attic of an empty guest house in Belper now - I finished moving all my rubbish in here yesterday, so now this new year is most definitely a new start. Since I've been working in Belper for the last year and a half, on and off, this will save me no end of commuting time, and I've already made plans to spend this time in productive ways which if I sit down and think about it seem to be scheduled for at least thirty hours every day. Still, no harm in being optimistic with the new year resolutions, eh? One thing I'm going to do is get back in the habit of writing a mindless, inconsequential blog every day - and for those who are more interested in what I have to say about memory competitions, please head over to Mnemotechnics.org, which I'm planning to make the home of all my waffling about memory subjects.

I'll be doing some memory training, too, hopefully - finishing fifth in the world championship not having done any practice was a pleasant surprise, but I'd rather move back up the leaderboard than keep sinking down. I don't know if I'll go to the world championship 2014 (current plans are for it to be in China, but when did it ever happen in the time and place we thought it would be in January?) but I'll make an effort to get to as many competitions as my funds will allow. The fun one will be the Extreme Memory Tournament at the end of April in San Diego - I'll write more about that shortly. The Extremeness of it relates to the fast-paced, head-to-head format that might actually make it exciting for people to watch!

The Cambridge Memory Championship will certainly happen, at the end of May most likely, although where exactly it will be I haven't decided yet. Belper is possible, or it might stay in Attenborough. It almost certainly won't be in Cambridge.

And if you're interested in old comics (or even if you're not, because take my word for it, you should be), you should check out the blog I've been reading instead of unpacking all my boxes: The All Star Comics Review, a very fun look at the first-ever superhero team comic, featuring the Justice Society of America!

Whatever you want

There's an advert on TV at the moment that uses Status Quo's "Whatever You Want" as its music. I have no idea what the advert's for, because every time it's on I get baffled by the way the song is edited right at the end, so the lyrics go "I could take you home you can't refuse". That sounds a bit like a threat, doesn't it? Maybe that's what the advert's for?