It's just no fun

All this rain. I mean, it's better than if it had been freezing cold and snowing all winter, but I really can't wait until it's summer again...

Drat, I missed a day

But it's not my fault - I had to go out unexpectedly with work people. I'll return to uninformative daily blogging starting today, although I'm not going to write anything worth reading tonight, because I'm very tired.

Transformation

I know I mentioned it a few days ago, but it's only just struck me that it's thirty years this year since Transformers first came along. Perhaps I'm biased, but the 1980s glut of toy-based cartoons and comics was probably the greatest era in the history of the world.

Excitement

I got really quite enthusiastic about practicing 5-minute numbers tonight. This is a good sign, because I never enjoy numbers as much as cards or binary. Maybe if I keep this up, I'll knuckle down and create that 4-digit-image system?

Competitions

I have got to get round to finding a good place to hold mind sports competitions. I've promised to do an Othello regional and a friendly memory championship, and I need to settle on dates for them right now. Well, maybe tomorrow...

Universes

The best thing about the Justice Society of America, which I mentioned in passing several weeks ago and now expect you all to be fully clued-up about, is that it definitively established that all the cool superheroes of the 1940s shared the same fictional universe. Although Superman and Batman were too busy to hang out with the JSA (it was a comic designed to encourage the youth of America to read the comics featuring the less popular characters) most of the time, their couple of appearances in JSA stories prove that the adventures of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Hawkman, the Flash, the Green Lantern, the Spectre, Starman, Doctor Fate, Doctor Mid-Nite, Sandman, Wildcat, Mister Terrific, Hour-Man, the Atom, the Black Canary, Johnny Thunder and, best of all, "Scribbly" (thanks to parody superhero the Red Tornado's cameo appearance in the first JSA story) are all linked in the same reality. It's the foundation of modern superhero comics, only more fun to read.

Actually, the idea of 'fictional universes' would sound strange to the superhero-fans of the early forties. The idea that Superman's adventures in the comic, the newspaper strip, the radio show, the cartoons, the movie serials and wherever else the omnipresent superhero was showing up weren't all part of one giant continuity would have got you a funny look from anyone you tried to explain this point to. That's the kind of attitude that superhero writers in the twenty-first century need to return to.

Time

I'm trying to work out how I used to fit in upwards of seven hours memorising over the course of any weekend I didn't have anything better to do, back in the olden days. I suspect I didn't watch so much football on TV. I'll have to cut down on that...

Be Prepared

It occurred to me tonight that I should be ready, just in case I get the chance to go to Tokyo again and do karaoke, and have a printout of the lyrics to some of the cool anime songs out there. Obviously, the long-term plan is to learn to read Japanese quickly enough to keep up with the writing on the screen, but you never know when I might get shanghaied to Japan unexpectedly, so I'll need to carry those lyrics around with me at all times. Shounen yo shinwa ni nare!

It was twenty years ago today

Well, it was twenty years ago in a week and a half, but it's close enough to get me nostalgic. Twenty years since what, you ask? Sonic the Hedgehog 3!

And in the same way that nobody can really, really, like Transformers unless their first appearance in toyshops coincided with their eighth birthday, nobody can really be a fan of Sonic the Hedgehog unless the original three games were what gave their seventeen-year-old self something to do while they were supposed to be revising for their A Levels, and then all through the summer afterwards.

Sonic 3 is a great game, although it's really obviously incomplete - Sega released what should have been the second half of the game later in 1994 - but it really did feel like an expansion and improvement on the first two (which were both completely awesome too). That was when video games were great! I miss twenty-years-ago.

Tick tock tick tick

I need a clock to hang on my living room wall, and I was wondering whether I should get one of those scary cat ones with the swinging eyes. Or a backwards one that only looks right if you look at it in a mirror. Or a cheap one from Poundstretcher, that's the only kind I can actually afford.

Star Chamber

The STAR (Standards, Technicalities and Rules) sub-Committee of the World Memory Sports Council have conducted the annual review of Millennium Standards resulting in 4 disciplines being revised.

IMPORTANT... PLEASE NOTE and ADJUST YOUR Millennium SCORE SHEETS accordingly
The New Millennium Standards are ...
1. Spoken Numbers ~374 digits (new formula is sqr (score) * 51.71)
2. Abstract Images - 505 images (Quick calculation factor - 1.9802 points per image)
3. 30 Min Cards - 877 cards ~ 17 Decks (Quick calculation factor - 1.1403 points per card)
4. Hour Numbers - 2800 Digits (Quick calculation factor - 0.3571 points per digit)


I've never quite understood why the WMSC needs a sub-committee for every little thing, when there's only four people in it who do anything, and they basically form every sub-committee, but it still sounds cool. Anyway, I can't say anything bad about the latest standards-revision (you know, apart from that rude thing I said in the last sentence), because it moves me down a place in the world rankings, and it'd just look like sour grapes.

Maybe I'll double-check their calculations later...

Let's Get Ready

I mentioned the delights of wrestling a while ago - it's the Royal Rumble this weekend! Now that I've got a working TV in this new flat, maybe I'll watch it. It's always the most fun wrestling match of the year.

On the train

I've done a small amount of memory training these last couple of days, so I'm now going to make the bold pronouncement that I'll be doing a little bit every evening from now on! Until I get bored with it!

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!