I made this!

I was joint runner-up employee of the month in September, you know. That's quite impressive for someone who does so very little work, and so ineptly, as I do. But that means I got £50 worth of Compliments Vouchers to spend in a wide range of high street stores, so I took them into Argos and bought a little desk and chair, and an oscillating fan heater that'll probably come in handy in my new flat when it really gets cold.

The desk, though, will definitely come in handy right now, because being without one has been a minor inconvenience ever since I moved in! So I spent this evening with screwdriver in hand (did you know I've got a screwdriver? I didn't think I had, but one turned up when I was rummaging through my box of miscellaneous rubbish looking for the electric screwdriver I thought I did own but which seems to have disappeared entirely) putting together big heavy pieces of wood and only occasionally saying things like "There's no holes where it says there are holes! Wait, it's upside-down. No, there's still no holes... oh, wait, there are holes but they're tiny little pinpricks, how am I supposed to get a screw into those?" and "Two people are needed here? You can't get to step 6 of the instructions before you tell me two people are needed! I'm six-seventeenths of the way through putting it together and I'm on my own! Actually, though, I don't need two people at all, I'll just prop it up like this..." and so on. And it looks really nice! The top's a bit loose, and has a hole in it that's not meant to be there, but it's out at the side so it won't get in the way. Now I've got a thing I can sit at and draw pictures or write things or memorise things in a non-computery way! Or even in a computery way when it comes to filming my qualifying sessions for next year's XMT (or whatever it gets called; the name's changing). I feel quite accomplished now.

On further reflection

This week's episode of Red Dwarf, "Give and Take", actually made me laugh out loud, which is something Red Dwarf hasn't done for years! I approve, and officially recant my 'not as funny as it used to be' complaints. Well, like 90% of them, since it's still not actually as funny as the funniest episodes of the early series, but the point is that now I feel bad about saying it's not.

The greater concern is with the "I don't watch live TV any more" thing, since I'm actually watching it on UKTVWatch, or whatever it's called, the week before it's on live TV. That means I'm watching it even more up-to-dately than I would be if I had a telly, and might be seen as violating this recently-acquired but deeply-held principle. But since the TV Licensing people have written me a nasty letter, I've changed my principle to "just not watching anything that would require a TV licence for me to watch". That'll teach them.

Eighteen googly years

The google doodle for today says it's their 18th birthday (though when I do a google search for google, it tells me they were founded on September 4th). Remember the days when you couldn't just type anything into google and see what the internet says about it? There were search engines with names like WebCrawler, but they were rubbish. The world was very different before 1998.

On mature reflection

You know, I think I was unduly harsh on Red Dwarf the other night. Watching it again, Samsara has some great moments. It's probably the best new episode we've had for a long time!

Genome

There's a cool thing that I just discovered last night - The BBC Genome Project, with all the Radio Times listings of BBC radio and television programmes from 1923 onwards! It's really cool, even if it is scanned in with text-recognition software that doesn't always get it right. So, after staying up all night researching and cataloguing all the BBC broadcasts of Thundercats cartoons and cross-referencing it with my own taped-from-the-TV video collection (because, I'm sorry, there are some things that are vastly, top-priority important and you really have to be me to understand it), today I had the idea of seeing how many times the name Pridmore shows up in the history of the BBC. Turns out it's seven.

Really? Seven? From 1923 to 2009, people with my surname can only muster seven mentions in the Radio Times? I know we're not exactly a foremost-in-the-land kind of family, but that's a bit bad, isn't it? One of them's me, from that "Make Me Smart" thing, the others are a fascinating mixed bunch...

Saturday 20 May 1933, 9:15pm, BBC Regional Programme - "The Bottle Imp". A radio adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's story, with the list of characters including "Pridmore, a young American in Honolulu". This is a bit strange, really, since there isn't a character called Pridmore in the original story. From his position in the 'in order of appearance' list, I assume Pridmore is the originally-unnamed idiot who bought the cursed bottle for two cents (it grants you great powers, but if you die owning it you're damned to Hell for eternity, and it can only be sold at a loss). What made James MacGregor, the radio adaptor, call him Pridmore? Maybe he had an enemy of that name.

Friday 14 June 1940, 8:00pm, For the Forces - "Thirsty Work". An evening of country singing recorded by the BBC Mobile Recording Unit. Singers: Bill Pridmore , Peter Wilson , Thomas Hendrie , Luke Webster , Bill Prodger , Frank Smart and other regulars of The Exeter's Arms, Wakerley, Northamptonshire. Hmm, Uncle Bill would have been 17 then, and in Sheffield, so it's probably not him. June 14th is my brother's birthday, too.

Sunday 15 March 1964, 6:15pm, BBC TV - "Meeting Point". "This is My Story - Faith on the River Kwai". How important is faith in conditions where all else which usually makes life acceptable— comfort, security, even human dignity-have gone? Neil Matheson, Leonard Morrison, Robert Pridmore who in the Second World War worked as prisoners on the ' railway of death' —the Burma-Siam railway-give their own answers in the light of their experiences, in a conversation with William Purcell. I don't know of any relatives on the Pridmore side of the family who were in Burma during the war. I assume Robert's answer was along the lines of "very important", because it was that kind of TV programme.

Friday 20 January 1967, 2:40pm, BBC Home Service - "Brave and Bold", a radio poetry programme with, down at the bottom of the listing, "also poems by Jane Pridmore, Zoe Bailey and Hal Summers". I've come across the name Jane Pridmore in books of poems before, but I don't know anything about her beyond that.

Thursday 20 August 1988, 11:30pm, BBC Radio 4 - "Fresh Air Media", A four-part series of feature-making by non-professional broadcasters. 3: Voices Four pieces with a common interest in the voice. Presenter Geoff Pridmore. Never heard of him.

Sunday 9 August 2009, 7:00am, BBC Radio 2 - "Good Morning Sunday", Aled Jones talks to that John Pridmore who I've come across in Google searches before, who seems to make a comfortable living for himself claiming to be a former gangster who found God.


Quite a motley crew, I must say. We really need to get more Pridmores on the BBC. Family pride is at stake!

DADDY! You KILLED her!

Number 910 in my comic collection, as randomly picked by my loyal blogling who goes by various aliases involving Dominic O'Brien's internal organs, is the first issue of the 1986-87 limited series "Fantastic Four versus the X-Men". (The cover says February 1987, it was actually published in late 1986; this is how comics work in America) Funnily enough, that makes two comics in a row involving team-ups of two superhero groups, and a whole lot of heroes crammed into one comic. To be fair, I like groups much more than I like solo heroes, so my comic collection is a bit biased that way anyway...

 Okay, this is a good one. After a not-all-that-special issue of Alpha Flight from the first random choice, we get something really quite cool here. Just look at this atmospheric, eerie opening page and that unmistakably Chris Claremont narration!

 So, this series is written by Chris Claremont, who at this point had been chronicling the adventures of the X-Men for more than a decade, and in that time had taken them from fringe characters in the Marvel universe up to the point where they were the most popular superhero comic in the world. Actually, this crossover series came out just at the point that modern fans, with hindsight, have pinpointed as the moment when "Marvel screwed up the X-Men" - just starting to cash in on their huge popularity with spin-off series, which was followed by insisting the writers give prominent roles to the 'cool' characters, and then there was a huge surge of popularity of certain artists, so they were given a bigger say in what happened, and eventually Claremont quit, and so on and so forth. But that was 1990, we're just at the start of the buildup to that here, and everything's going swimmingly. (Frankly, the fans who say things like that are a bit on the weird side, anyway)

Art is by Jon Bogdanove, who was young and still new to comic work at this time, and he does a wonderful job. He quite nicely emulates the look of John Byrne, the artist legendary for his work on both X-Men and Fantastic Four, and captures really well the haunting dream sequences, domestic life scenes and action moments that Claremont's script demands of him. It's a great comic to look at. Terry Austin's inks probably help a lot - he was a regular inker for Byrne. Tom Orzechowski is the letterer, Glynis Oliver the colourist, and there's a surprising number of editors. Ann Nocenti was the regular editor of X-Men, Don Daley was the editor of Fantastic Four, so it makes sense that he'd be a consulting editor. I've been searching the internet to try and find what Mike Carlin was doing at that time and why he was involved in this one too, but to no avail. Jim Shooter is the editor-in-chief.

The first five pages consist of a nightmare suffered by Franklin Richards, the young son of Reed and Sue, Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Woman, who form half of the Fantastic Four. Franklin is a somewhat troublesome character. For one thing, the problem of superheroes not aging (because nobody wants to read about a 70-year-old Spider-Man, do they?) come across much more strongly in him than in anyone else - his age has boomeranged inconsistently backwards and forwards over the years; he's around five years old here, which is his sort of default status. But more importantly, writers have tended to give him infuriatingly omnipotent universe-altering powers, to the extent that it became really easy to justify anything people want to happen in any Marvel comic by saying "Franklin Richards did it". On the other hand, Chris Claremont always liked him, and he's used well in this series - his powers here just involve prophetic dreams and astral projection, which isn't so bad.

In the dream, Franklin sees his father carrying his mother's corpse and tearfully demands to know why. "It was logical, Franklin. It was necessary," says Reed, adding that he's always certain, because he's a scientist. The bodies of the rest of the Fantastic Four - the Thing, the Human Torch and even the She-Hulk (who had filled in for the Thing a little while ago) are lying around too, and looking pretty gruesome. Along comes Wolverine, carrying the dead Shadowcat in his arms, and points out that Reed has killed the X-Men, too - they're all impaled through the chest on dead trees. The X-Men line-up here is Havok, Psylocke, Storm, Longshot, Rogue, Magneto and Dazzler. Ignoring Franklin's begging, Wolverine lunges at Reed, then drops dead. Reed, callously dismissing his son, ascends a flight of stairs and opens a book, "Reed Richards - Journal - State University" and although Franklin implores him not to, turns into Doctor Doom. It's great stuff, it really is.

Franklin wakes up, and in a nice touch his bedroom is decorated with a poster of the Thing, a photo of the FF during the She-Hulk era, a photo of the Power family (with whom Franklin has adventures in the much-better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be Power Pack comic about a family of child superheroes), a photo of the Avengers' butler Jarvis who usually ends up babysitting Franklin whenever the heroes are busy, and Franklin's own drawings of Kofi and Friday, from Power Pack. He goes to find his father, who (typically) is busy working on scientific stuff, with his trademark pipe in his mouth, and hasn't time to listen to Franklin, calling Sue on the video screen and asking her to deal with the child. Sue (a spotted kerchief on her head, just to show she's busy with housework - the Richards family really do live in the 1950s) does so, creating an invisible forcefield to bring Franklin to her. She comforts him with a hug, and gets on with what she was doing - unpacking some old boxes she's recently found. In one of them, naturally, is Reed's State University journal! Franklin is terrified and urges Sue to throw it away!

Then we cut to the X-Men, currently hanging out in their friend Moira McTaggert's lab on an island off the coast of Scotland (Chris Claremont is one of those unfortunate Americans who think Britain, and especially Scotland, is really really neat-o). We're filled-in on their current situation; with Nightcrawler and Colossus comatose and Shadowcat reduced to an intangible collection of molecules gradually drifting apart in a tube, they've roped in new members Havok (who, as he protests to Rogue in a scene that takes up a whole page but has no other bearing on what happens in this comic, was an X-Man in the old days before any of the others and feels he should be treated with more respect), Psylocke, Dazzler and Longshot. Their old leader, Professor X, also isn't around at this point - he's living up in space right now - and their arch-enemy Magneto, the former evil villain, is now on their side. He has been looking into ways to save Shadowcat's life, and found out about a device of Reed Richards's - he tells Storm he intends to contact Reed, even though the Fantastic Four still consider him to be an evil villain.

Dazzler and Longshot are out on a boat, and Longshot rescues a strangely sinister drowning fisherman, to take him back to Muir Isle. This is just something to remember if you read the rest of the series, nobody mentions it again in this issue.

Sue, back in New York (the narrator, with unusual accuracy for this kind of comic, points out that it's still night there, though it's dawn in Scotland), furiously confronts Reed with the journal! She's found out that it contains horrible revelations! "Especially the pages relating to the rocket flight that transformed you, me, Ben and Johnny into the Fantastic Four!" Franklin, in his astral form (wearing his Power Pack uniform, in another nice touch for regular readers) is horrified!

Elsewhere, the She-Hulk (who has the honour of being the only hero to appear in both of the comics I've reviewed here so far!) is busy researching; she's going to go back to her previous lawyer career for the sake of "a weird sort of fund-raiser" in which the trial of Magneto is re-staged. She's the defence counsel. The Thing also happens to be in the library (reading a book of Federal Aviation Regulations, just to remind us of his previous pilot career), and the two chat for a while before being interrupted by a series of massive explosions at a construction site. The comic gives no suggestion whatsoever of what's caused these explosions - the Thing and She-Hulk, being both defined as "the big, strong one", just get to work preventing the building from completely falling down and harming anyone. They're soon joined by Magneto, who helps out with his magnetic powers, despite the Thing not unreasonably suggesting "creep probably blew this place up inna first place!" and the Human Torch, whose impromptu welding comes in handy too.

Once that's dealt with, they all go back to the FF's headquarters, Four Freedoms Plaza, where Magneto (sealed in one of Sue's forcefields to stop him causing trouble) explains the situation. Reed apologises to Sue, but says he has to go and help. She stays at home while the others jet away - She-Hulk too, taking the time to change into her old FF uniform (do they keep it at the base?) for the occasion. On the way across the Atlantic, Reed asks Ben "Am I ruthless?", to which Ben replies that Reed is always certain in his convictions, and pretty much always right to be - with the exception of that rocket flight, when he didn't account for those cosmic rays...

They arrive at Muir Isle, with Reed now racked with indecision, thinking to himself that having made that significant mistake in the past, maybe he's wrong here too? With Franklin's astral form still watching, he decides not to use his device on Shadowcat. It might go wrong. The X-Men are not happy, and Wolverine attacks Reed - save her, or you die! To be continued!

It's a great story, it really is. Classic X-Men stuff from the late Claremont era, with a nice take on the Fantastic Four too (although it feels much more like an X-Men story, as is only natural). The whole limited series is really hugely worth reading and highly recommended! I leave you with the kind of thing that would give anyone nightmares:

Next up, we have number 2, selected by an anonymouse, which (in my sort-of-alphabetical but also category-based list) gives us 1602 #1, from 2003! If you want to see another random comic from my collection here, just give me a number between 2 and 3333!

Red Dwarf returns!

Having watched the first two episodes (which is totally not a breach of my who-wants-to-watch-live-TV-nowadays-anyway rule because I watched them on catch-up internet stuff and not quite immediately as soon as they became available), I have to say it's not as funny as it used to be. And after getting used to Kryten's new make-up and considering why, it seems to be a deliberate choice - the actors are playing the parts now as if they're in a serious science-fiction show, rather than a comedy. Did someone tell them to do that, or are they just too old to tell jokes these days?

Look at the scene in the latest episode when Kryten illustrates a point by strangling Lister - afterwards, he says "Thanks for the demonstration, Kryten!" in a seriously underplayed way. Compare it to the similar scene in "Justice", many years ago, when Rimmer does the same kind of thing, and Lister reacts with overblown sarcastic outrage, and the audience howls with laughter! All through this episode, in fact (which is quite up-front about re-using old ideas, and there's really nothing wrong with that unless the writer pretends they're not), Lister especially delivers lines so flatly, when he used to be so much more exaggerated in the way he said things. The other three are all more subdued than they once were, too, it really jumps out at me when I think about it. I should probably stop thinking about it...

Astounding Science Fiction

My favourite writer of the moment is H. Beam Piper. Well, I say "of the moment", he died in 1964, but from my perspective he's new and exciting. Most of his works can be found for free on the internet (a concept his future worlds couldn't imagine; they still use a lot of film reels and radio) and I heartily recommend them! Try Police Operation as a starter - the first in the wonderful series of "Paratime" stories, written in 1948 and providing a creative explanation for the flying saucer mania that had gripped the USA in the previous year. The exploits of Verkan Vall, policing the countless alternate universes, are my favourites, but you should also check out the extensive series of future-set adventures, creating a whole universe and describing its progress over the millennia.

I'll admit there's nothing strikingly original about Piper's works, but the appeal lies in the way he tells it, and the detail he goes into; far beyond the call of duty for a 1940s pulp sci-fi writer. And there's a great kitsch value to the worlds he depicts where men are real men, always with a pipe or cigarette in their mouths and a wide range of guns in their hands and holsters, getting the job done in the face of namby-pamby bureaucrats. Women are 'girls' and exist solely to be lusted over; atomic energy is the be-all and end-all and the most important development in history, even in stories set thousands of years in the future; and democracy is a silly idea that would never really work. A clear preference for a hereditary feudal system of government is perhaps Piper's most distinctive quirk. But all his works are well-written, imaginative and creative, and hugely enjoyable. Check them out, do!

Faster, Pussycat! Memorise! Memorise!

After really quite a long time of hoping I'd manage to get obsessed with something memory-related again, I've finally managed it this last week - someone pointed out that I was down to position 10 on the Memocamp speed cards high-score list. Tenth? I mean, I never really used Memocamp with any kind of regularity, but I DID do a sub-30-second time on it once, and that's now only good enough for tenth? What is the world coming to?

So I set myself a target of getting back up towards the top of the list, and because I'm approaching it in a slightly different way, it seems to have circumvented the ennui effect of memory practice I've been suffering from of late. For possibly the first time ever, certainly the first I can remember, I'm not having the official one minute of mental preparation time and then waiting for the whole five minutes of memory time to elapse before starting the recall - my aim isn't to practice the way I'm going to be memorising in a competition, it's just to get a good time on this website, by hook or by crook.

(But not by cheating; that would sort of defeat the object.)

And I have so far managed to get a very impressive 22.21 seconds! I'm trying to get used to going at that kind of speed, because mostly I have more gaps than filled-in-spaces when I do that, but I think I'm gradually getting better. A little more of that, another unusually-memorable combination of cards, and I'm sure I can edge just slightly closer to the golden 20-second mark.

Because 22.21 seconds is still only good enough for 5th, nowadays! I still have Alex, Simon, Lance and Marlo all sitting there above me, with times under 20 seconds (something I never managed to achieve, even in my heyday), so I've got them in my sights now. My enthusiasm is back! Ssssssh, don't scare it away...

Walk for memory

Biking up to Birmingham today, I found that part of the cycle route clashed with the Alzheimer's Society Walk for Memory; oodles of people walking along, wearing white T-shirts with the "Walk for Memory" logo on them. I've got one of those shirts, from years ago when I did some kind of promotional thing for the Alzheimer's Society, and it's found its way into my regular rotation, so I thought it was a good thing that I didn't happen to be wearing it today. Imagine, wearing a Walk for Memory shirt while riding my bike and overtaking all the walkers! Someone would take a photo and it'd end up in all the papers. That's the kind of scandal that could bring the Alzheimer's Society to its knees.

2 Scantily-Clad Interstellar She-Warriors

Welcome to the first in a series of reviews of comics randomly picked from my collection based on random numbers thrown at me by blog-readers! Today we have number 175 - Alpha Flight #99, from August 1991!

Written by Fabian Nicieza, pencils by Michael Bair, inks by Chris Ivy. Letterer Janice Chiang, colourist Bob Sharen, editor Bobbie Chase, editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco

The first thing you notice about this comic (apart from the scantily-clad interstellar she-warriors promised on the cover) is that it's part three of a four-part story, designed to climax with the double-sized hundredth issue of Alpha Flight next month. And it really makes little or no concession to readers who have picked the comic up without having read the first two parts of the story! This is part of an interesting long-term trend in comics - in the sixties, when superhero comics were at an all-time high of popularity, each issue tended to be a self-contained story, with continuing subplots retaining the reader's interest. This seems such a logical way to do things, it's rather strange that by the eighties it was the norm to see comics like this one, which can only really appeal to people who have read the previous few issues as a bare minimum. It's a strategy that would seem to practically guarantee declining sales numbers with every issue! But then, by this point Alpha Flight, like most superhero comics, was only available in specialist comic shops, not in newsagents' - the only people who would get to see it would be people who already liked superhero comics and were looking for it specifically.

Nowadays, all the superhero comics are also published as paperback books containing usually six issues, so the approach of spreading a story over multiple monthly installments works fine, but in 1991 we still had this strange halfway house situation - these Alpha Flight comics were never reprinted (except that issues #97-100 were, bafflingly, simultaneously released, unchanged except for the number on the front cover, as #1-4 of a "limited series"), but you did have to have at least a fair understanding of what had happened in previous comics to know what's supposed to be going on in this one.

The opening page gives us a brief recap of what has happened so far - Her, one of those interstellar she-warriors, crashed in Toronto on the run from a vast intergalactic army called The Consortium, and Alpha Flight, joined by the Avengers, are helping to fight them off. There are a LOT of superheroes in this one. Alpha Flight at this point (as the text box on the splash page tells us) consist of Guardian, Vindicator, Sasquatch, Northstar, Puck, Diamond Lil, Windshear and Box - most of them are named in the dialogue of this issue, and if you really concentrate, you can figure out who is who. But a lot of them only show up in one or two panels, so it's not easy...

The Avengers lineup in this comic is Captain America, Quasar, Sersi, the Vision, Hercules, She-Hulk and the Black Widow. That's seven, although the cover promised us a dozen. Add Her to the mix, and we've got sixteen heroes fighting innumerable aliens of many different kinds! Enough to fill 23 pages of comic, you'd think, but instead we start off with the secondary plot of this comic, not mentioned on the opening page narration...

Nova (the scantily-clad interstellar she-warrior who serves as herald to Galactus the planet-eating giant) asks the Quwrlln (big pink space squid-things) what's going on - she was just arriving at their planet to announce Galactus's coming, when all of a sudden she, it, and everyone on it, were teleported into another dimension. The Quwrlln explain that their entire civilisation has for millennia been based solely on avoiding being eaten by Galactus, which Nova thinks is ridiculous - a strange argument, since Galactus WOULD have eaten them by now if not for the nifty dimensional-teleport - but which was anyway unsuccessful, as Galactus can home in on Nova and teleport himself across dimensions. He does so, and gets a full-page drawing to emphasize how big he is.

Only then do we go back to Toronto, where a huge number of Consortium spaceships are on the attack, aliens are on the streets, chaos all over the place. Guardian takes a moment to briefly explain to Captain America what's going on, while Alpha Flight and the Avengers fight aliens in, around and above the city.

Michael Bair isn't a great artist. He's not a terrible one either, and compared to some artists who'd recently graced Alpha Flight with their work (I'm looking at you, John Calimee), he was wonderful, a real breath of fresh air. But he's not one of those artists who can tell a story - he draws disconnected pictures of characters standing in weird, unnatural poses (the cover is a good example) and he's entirely incapable of making a visual story flow from one panel to the next. But this particular comic actually uses that artistic style to great effect! It captures the vast, city-wide nature of the battle with the Consortium by cutting away with each successive panel between what's happening up in the sky and what's happening elsewhere on the ground. It really works, and I'd be fascinated to know whether that was a deliberate decision by Fabian Nicieza or Bair himself, to get the most out of the artist's limitations. Deliberate or accidental, this might actually be the best comic Michael Bair ever drew.

In the back streets of Toronto, Diamond Lil has been chasing one particular little alien. She corners him and explains that since his gun proved able to penetrate her skin (last issue), she's going to take it. As she mentions briefly in passing later on in this issue, this is because she's got a suspicious lump in her breast and doctors aren't able to get a good look at it because of her uncuttable diamond-hard skin. This gun would therefore be a big help to her. The alien protests that the gun is biocybernetically attached to his body and mind, and removing it would kill him - Lil calls him an idiot and says she's going to take it anyway.

Back in that other dimension, while Galactus assembles his planet-devouring equipment (he doesn't actually take big bites out of planets, he converts them to energy and consumes that), the Quwrlln decide they need to activate Plan B - contact their agent on Earth and have the super-heroes of the only planet ever to repulse Galactus come to their aid. That agent, as people who've read the previous issues know but new readers are not told at all, is Vindicator. He's in Toronto, in the middle of the fight, when there's a momentary lull and the heroes all regroup on the ground. They beat up a few stray aliens, Diamond Lil rejoins them with the alien's gun but doesn't describe how she got it, and Her briefly recaps the events of Marvel Comics Presents #35, the comic from two years previously in which she got on the Consortium's bad side and started this whole mess. The Chief Executive Officer of the Consortium offers the heroes three options - they can hand Her over, or, "honor barring such a transaction," she can just leave the planet and the Consortium will chase her in space. Alternatively, they'll take over the entire planet Earth.

Her decides to surrender, to minimise the danger to anyone else. But just at that inconvenient moment, the Quwrlln signal reaches Vindicator, the machine parts of his body take control, and he teleports all the most powerful nearby heroes (Vision, Her, Quasar, Guardian, Sersi, Box, Hercules, Windshear and himself) away to save the Quwrlln from Galactus. Thus the remaining seven less-powerful heroes are left to face the furious Consortium, while the others find themselves face to face with Galactus - the issue ends on another full-page picture to show us how big he is!


And so that's that. To be concluded in #100. We don't get a letters page in this issue; it looks like they had to add an extra page of story to squeeze in all the action. There are the usual adverts, but nothing interesting enough to be worth mentioning. It's a fun story if you take it in the context of the Alpha Flight series as a whole, but as a one-off read I just can't recommend it, it's much too impenetrable to the new reader, and there are way too many characters to understand what's going on unless you already know who everyone is.

Fabian Nicieza is one of the all-time greatest writers of Marvel Comics, but his short run as Alpha Flight writer never entirely clicked (at the same time, he was writing New Warriors, which was so much better). I think he was over-burdened with characters (the eight Alphans we see in this issue are just the tip of the iceberg), and had too many ideas that he never had the time and space to develop. He left the comic after #101, and it meandered on under two more writers I hugely admire, Scott Lobdell and Simon Furman, without ever quite reaching any great heights. Are Alpha Flight so difficult to write about?


Bonus trivia that doesn't come into this single issue at all - this is the second consecutive issue of Alpha Flight in which half the team are abruptly teleported away to another dimension by one of their own. In #98, Alpha's comatose associate Laura Dean woke up from the coma she'd been in for the past year and suddenly used her teleportation power to disappear along with almost all of Alpha's supporting cast - Persuasion, Shaman, Aurora, Witchfire and Laura's parents. And nobody so much as mentions it in this one, nor in the big celebration #100! I don't know if Nicieza had plans to follow it up, or if he was just asked to clear the board of a lot of extraneous characters so the new writer didn't have to deal with them, but it's very strange. Don't worry, they did come back eventually...

Okay, okay, you wanted two scantily-clad interstellar she-warriors, and I haven't given you a picture of Nova. Here she is, striking a few more of those weird poses that only Michael Bair could draw...

Give me a number between 2 and 3333, and I'll pull that comic from my collection and write about it for you!

Let's get blogging!

First of all, if you haven't seen the Facebook event page for the Friendly Memory Championship, please go and check it out now! Facebook pages for all those other competitions will follow shortly!

Or, if you're not one of those blog-readers who cares about my memory competitions... tell me what you do care about! I need to get back in the habit of writing this thing more often, so I'd love it if people would ask me questions and things in the comments section below, please!

Or if you can't think of a question, you could give me a number. You may recall that I've got thousands of comics lying around the place that I was meaning to get rid of before I moved house. I didn't, but I did make the effort of listing them all in a spreadsheet. There's 3332 of them (a few more turned up while I was moving, but there's 3332 on the spreadsheet anyway), so if you pick a random number between 2 and 3333 (the top row is column headers), I'll write an extensive review of that comic in my blog! I've been meaning to write more random comic reviews, and this is an exciting way to involve my bloglings!

They just use your mind and they never give you credit

Flicking through the Beano at lunch today, I noticed a new innovation - the names of the writer and artist of each strip, unobtrusively written in the white border of the page! It's a very welcome break from eighty years of traditionally not crediting the creative talent, and I heartily approve! I should really have bought a copy in celebration, and extensively reviewed it on my blog, shouldn't I? Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe I'll wait and see whether David Sutherland has permanently stopped drawing the Bash Street Kids, because it really won't be the same if he has.

The world of the MSO

I'm down in London, having popped in to the Mind Sports Olympiad tonight to join in the nightly poker tournament, only to get eliminated practically immediately, and it's really great to see how many people are at this 20th annual MSO who were also at the first one, back in 1997. Next year I'll definitely be along for the whole thing - maybe I'll get a wig and go with the stylish moustache look I was sporting back then, too!

A bit about me

Because, let's face it, I've rather neglected this blog just lately. I'll try to get into the habit of blogging every day again and deluging you all with trivia related to my life! Here's all the trivia I can think of right now.

I've developed a huge liking for stilton cheese just lately. How can something full of blue mouldy stuff taste so good? It's a bit worrying, really, because my normal diet consists of junk food and sweets, so maybe I'm secretly acquiring cultured tastes? What's next, caviar?

Tomorrow I'm going to go down to London and check out the tail end of the Mind Sports Olympiad. I haven't done the whole week this year, because I'm trying not to spend money to excess, but I found my 1997 official competitor badge while I was moving house, and I need to wear it to this year's event. I'll go along for the whole week in 2017, I think, just to celebrate the 20th anniversary. Wow, that makes me feel old.

Speaking of money, Barclaycard have written to me today to say they're increasing my credit limit by another £4000 unless I tell them not to. They're clever, are Barclaycard, they've obviously got me on their list of 'people who if we periodically increase their credit limit will continue to use it to the full', but I've got one over on them - the chip on my card is broken somehow, so it doesn't work in card readers. Thus the only way I can use my Barclaycard is online, I can't impulse-buy things from shops or nights in hotels with it, which works out nicely for me.

And speaking of moving house, I haven't got a television at the moment. Well, I have got a television (two televisions, actually; I've also got my brother's portable among all his possessions squeezed into my small new flat), but not even so much as a freeview box to allow me to watch live TV with. I figure that my infinite supply of video tapes and video games, and the existence of YouTube and things are more than enough to keep me entertained. Who watches live TV nowadays, anyway? There's never anything on.

British Memory Competitions 2016!

2016 is the tenth anniversary of the first ever memory competition I organised, with the aim of doing something to fill out what was then a minimal calendar of memory events and make a few more people aware that there's such a thing as competitive memorisation of numbers, cards and more - maybe even getting a few more regular competitors their first introduction to a lifelong obsession!

It's been quite a success, in a small way, over the last ten years, and I had been thinking at one point that now we live in an age where there are memory competitions all over the world practically every week, I might give it a rest and save myself the cost and trouble of running an event like this in future. So how I've ended up persuaded to do the following list of things in the tail-end of 2016 is beyond me, but there you go.

On Saturday November 12, at the scenic Broneiron Lodge in Wales, we'll have something new and, in a way, old as time:

A competition all about system-based memory - numbers and cards, the classic memory tests! Memory competitors with good memories might recall the Memory World Cup in Weinheim in 2004 - this is a similar kind of beast. With a 'marathon', 'short' and 'speed' discipline of each, the winner will be the one whose all-round grasp of memory technique is the best!

A tentative schedule might look like this...

9:00 - Five-Minute Cards, trial 1. Five minutes to memorise, 15 minutes to recall. Best of two trials in the day wins.

9:30 - Five-Minute Numbers, trial 1. Five minutes to memorise, 15 minutes to recall. Best of two trials in the day wins.

10:00 - Half Hour Numbers. Thirty minutes to memorise, followed by one hour recall time.

12:00 - Lunch break

1:00 - Five-Minute Cards, trial 2. Five minutes to memorise, 15 minutes to recall. Best of two trials in the day wins.

1:30 - Five-Minute Numbers, trial 2. Five minutes to memorise, 15 minutes to recall. Best of two trials in the day wins.

2:00 - Half Hour Cards. Thirty minutes to memorise, followed by one hour recall time.

4:00 - Speed Numbers. A 100-digit number, memorised as fast as possible (5 minutes max), with 5 minutes recall time. Best time of two trials wins.

5:00 - Speed Cards. A single pack of cards, memorised as fast as possible (5 minutes max), with 5 minutes recall time. Best time of two trials wins.

Scoring is based not on 1000-point standards, but on the classic model of 100 points for the best score in each discipline on the day, with everyone else's score proportionate to that.

This championship will happen if enough people are interested in taking part, so please let me know if you want to come! It's something I've been talking about doing for many years now (people call it "Ben's Baby") and I would really like to see it catch on as a new part of the ever-growing memory world. Please give it a try, it would make me very happy!

You may then want to stay overnight at Broneiron, because the following day, Sunday 13 November, we have our much-loved...

It's a Sunday this year, to facilitate any brave competitors who want to jet back from the Memoriad in Las Vegas (November 8-10) and try their luck at the Friendly Championship too!

So as not to fill up this blog post with the details, I urge you to look back on previous years' posts on this blog for full and extensive descriptions of the ten disciplines involved in the competition - I will dedicate a separate post to this year's Friendly when I get a chance.

However, the main, most important thing about the competition is the sheer unadulterated Friendliness of it all! This is the one to come to if you're new to memory sports or if you've been around for sixteen years or more, just for the sake of getting to know everybody and having fun!

Entry fees for the two competitions above will be £20 (each, I'm afraid), with the usual dispensation of free entry for brand-new people who've never competed before. There have been a couple of very generous people who have offered to chip in for the costs of running these things, so if so they will have my enormous gratitude and praise, and prices may yet drop! And the very next weekend, something exciting is happening, too.

On November 19-20, in central London, there will be a competition that may or may not be called...

The logo needs to be made a bit more extreme, but you get the idea. It's pronounced Brex-M-T, and my obsessiveness about capital letters is being deliberately subverted in extreme ways!

If you don't know about the Extreme Memory Tournament yet, click on that link!

Anyway, the point is, I'd like to officially publicly announce that there's probably going to be an event in the style of the XMT, using the same software, here in Britain, later in the year. It's fully approved, authorised and designed by XMT creators Nelson Dellis and Simon Orton! The date will be Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 November, 2016. It'll be invitation-only and limited to sixteen British competitors, but it'll be a prototype for other events of that kind around the world, and a whole lot of fun! Here's how it will work:

Mini-qualifiers
The first order of the day will be to sort the sixteen competitors into four groups. Seeding for these groups will be determined by a qualifying session - all at the same time, the sixteen competitors will have one attempt at each of the five disciplines, trying to record the best score they can. Just like the Big XMT qualifying, only this time you only get one try at it!

With scoring based on 100 points for the current world record, this will give us a ranked list of our sixteen players. They'll be sorted into four pots - 1-4, 5-8, 9-12 and 13-16, and one drawn from each pot to form the four groups!

Group stage
Now that we have our groups, each player will play their three opponents in turn in a best-of-five match, like the knockout stages of the Big XMT. The first discipline will be randomly chosen... but each competitor gets up to two vetoes, so the discipline they eventually settle on will be a compromise between the two of them! The loser of that discipline gets the choice of the next, and after that it alternates. Three points for a won match, one for a draw, and the top two in each group qualify for the quarter-finals.

Knockout stage
Quarter-finals, semi-finals and final! The first two are best of five, the final is best of seven - all three start with a surprise event. Just like the Big XMT, this part, just a teensy little bit smaller.




And that's not all. The same venue, on December 3-4 will host...

The As Yet Untitled UK-based Memory Championship!

 It'll have a name once details of sponsorship and so on have been finalised, I promise. It'll get its own blog post and Facebook page and international publicity and everything!

This is, by popular demand, an international standard event, the same format as the UK Memory Championship which has just happened in London (congratulations to new UK champion James Paterson and overall winner Pan Ziqi!) Disciplines are the same as the Friendly Championship, but in many cases longer in memorisation and recall times.

This will be the second time I've organised an international-standard, two-day competition, and I'm assured that the time is right for it now (the world just wasn't ready for it the first time round, obviously, since it only attracted about four people) and we will be positively deluged with enthusiastic and world-beating memory folk from all around the world! Absolutely teeming with world champions past, present and future, it'll be! Stay tuned for more details soon, and let us know if you want to be there too!

Is that all? Yes, I think so. I mean, I have got a real job as well. It's lucky I've got a lot of holiday days still to book, really, because I'm going to have to use them all in November...

Memory Competitions!

Lots of them! Coming soon! I will 100% definitely announce anywhere up to four memory competitions at the weekend! Stay tuned! Something for everyone! Maybe even a special "Tall German People With Cool Beards" prize for Simon, since I seem to have spent a lot of time taking the opposite side to him in various memory-themed debates lately, and arranging competitions on dates that are inconvenient for him, so I feel like I should apologise with some kind of special trophy. But then I'll feel like I have to get trophies for absolutely everyone else, too, and my original resolution for this year was to save money (which I still haven't got any of) and hassle, and it's all turned out quite the reverse somehow...

Premier League 2016-17 predictions

Everybody got the pre-season Premier League predictions so totally wrong last year, I can safely do my own soothsaying act without fear of looking any more stupid. And since last season proved that anything can happen and probably will, as long as it's totally unexpected...

1. Bournemouth - hey, if Leicester can do it, why not?

2. Liverpool - no Europe to distract them, it'll be another good year that they'll make a mess of at the end.

3. Man City - splashing out lots of money without any concrete plan in mind is good enough for third place.

4. Leicester - see, nobody's expecting them to get into the Champions League again, but they'll do it anyway.

5. Southampton - 8th, 7th, 6th the last three seasons, and I know a pattern when I see one.

6. Tottenham - a disappointing season always follows a good one, but the silver lining is...

7. Arsenal - people have been expecting the mythical 'bad season for Arsenal' for so long, it might take us by surprise when it actually happens.

8. West Brom - due for a good year.

9. Burnley - the newly-promoted side who'll do better than expected.

10. Swansea - safe but boring season.

11. Watford - settling down to a role as the mid-table team.

12. Chelsea - it'll be a confident start followed by a calamitous crash, this time.

13. West Ham - caught up in a Europa League campaign, their league form suffers.

14. Stoke - flirting with relegation most of the season, they pick up at the end.

15. Man Utd - headline-grabbing disaster, all season long!

16. Middlesbrough - just about stay out of danger all year.

17. Sunderland - it's traditional now, under 40 points but staying up.

18. Everton - they've lost their way quite a bit of late, but this year's results will be unexpectedly terrible and down they go.

19. Crystal Palace - never look like being in it.

20. Hull - even worse than Palace.


Wonder what kind of odds I could get on that?

Get your kicks on Cycle Route 5

Remember when I lived in Beeston and National Cycle Route 6 went right past my front door? Well, now I'm in Redditch it's a whole different ball game. Now I work in an office that's on Route 5, so while the weather's nice, I'm going to have to spend some time exploring its twists and turns! I've already been down to Alcester, and up to Birmingham (via the short-cut route 55 that avoids going via Bromsgrove), I think tomorrow I'll go to Stratford-upon-Avon, and see if Shakespeare's still there.

The route goes all the way to Reading, where I'm actually planning to go next month, but I probably won't cycle the whole 90 miles or so. In the other direction it ends up in Holyhead (and has to stop there because otherwise you'd end up in the sea), which might be a fun place for a holiday. I should really get my brakes fixed before I do too much more biking, but on the other hand it does get me where I'm going all the quicker...

Killed by a bad review

You see a lot of negative criticism on the internet nowadays. I think people need to learn the lesson taught us by Mrs Henry Wood in her 1869 novel "Roland Yorke" - bad reviews can be very harmful to the health of sensitive creators.

Hamish Channing writes a wonderful book (the narrator explicitly assures us that it is objectively very good, and that Hamish has a rare genius for writing), while Gerald Yorke writes a very bad one (again, there's no question of personal preference coming into it here; it's a terrible book) but takes advantage of his career as a literary reviewer to fill the newspapers with good reviews of his own work and scathing criticism of Hamish's. The shock of this ruins Hamish's health, and he dies a long, lingering death as a direct result of the bad reviews.

Mrs Wood (generally known nowadays as Ellen Wood, which seems a little unfair of modern literary types - she herself firmly believed that a married woman writer should be credited under her husband's name) might just possibly have been speaking from experience when she wrote this particular subplot; she was one of those writers who peaked too soon, never again reaching the heights of her first and best novel, "East Lynne". Popular though she was throughout the 1860s, her follow-up novels always had 'by the author of East Lynne' as their major selling point. Let's look at the two novels in particular that probably led to the tragedy of Hamish Channing, "The Channings" and "Mrs Halliburton's Troubles".

After the huge success of East Lynne (much deserved, too, it's a really great book) in 1861, readers didn't have to wait long for more Mrs Henry Wood novels; early the next year, they got The Channings. Set in Helstonleigh (thinly-disguised Worcester, Mrs Wood's home town), it chronicles the lives of the virtuous and hard-working Channing family, who suffer hardship and unjust accusations of stealing a twenty pound note but eventually end happily, and the Yorke family, wealthy but proud, lazy and unvirtuous, who eventually come to no good. It's not up to East Lynne's standards, but it's a good read, largely thanks to the breakout character Roland Yorke, who's much more likeable than he was probably originally intended to be. A scant few months after that, out came Mrs Halliburton's Troubles, also set in Helstonleigh, also involving one virtuous and one unvirtuous family, but without the charm and subtlety of The Channings. While the Channings are rounded and human (the reader is invited to suspect Hamish of stealing a twenty pound note, although of course he's innocent), the Halliburtons are nauseatingly perfect (when in a very similar subplot a cheque goes missing and William Halliburton is the only one who could have taken it, nobody considers for a second that he might be guilty). The Yorkes aren't entirely a bad lot, especially Roland, while the Dares are uniformly repellent and evil-spirited.

Not that Mrs Halliburton's Troubles is an especially bad book, but it's such an obvious hasty re-write of The Channings, there's a real sense of deja vu in reading it. Readers must have started compiling a list of Mrs Henry Wood idiosyncrasies - not just her strange fondness for surnames starting with Halli, but the repeated plot points that will go on to feature in all her later novels too. There'll be a woman who suffers terrible shame or hardship and has to bear (italicized and intransitive) and trust in God to sort things out in the end, which He always does. There'll be at least one character who has a protracted illness (usually consumption) and eventual death, which they meet with pious patience (in adults) or beautiful simplicity (in children) and an unwavering belief in the blissful afterlife to come. Issues of rank and status will certainly come into play, as will a lack of money and the need to work hard at demeaning jobs below one's station in life.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I would imagine that the reviews of Mrs Halliburton's Troubles were the first that Mrs Wood found hurtful. There's a lot in the book that she clearly cared about - the Halliburton family are shining moral examples in every possible respect; the book lays out a detailed proposition for how to prevent the working classes from falling into evil ways; there's a huge amount of fascinating detail about the glove manufacturing industry (Mrs Wood's father's trade), and so on. She might well have thought it a masterpiece, and been surprised that not too many readers agreed with her. I would expect that there were more than a few people in 1862 who came to the book hoping for the scandal and sensation of East Lynne, only to get a hefty helping of moral improvement and gloves, and went away disappointed.

That's the background to the writing of "Roland Yorke", a direct sequel to "The Channings", chronicling the further adventures of Roland, last seen giving up his office job and setting sail for Port Natal with two dozen frying pans (having vaguely heard that it's possible to make a fortune selling them out there), despatching a letter along the way confessing that he was the one who stole that twenty pound note all along (after having spent the entire second half of the book passionately defending his good friend Arthur Channing, who is accused of the crime and suffers extensive shame and hardship as a result). Roland is a truly wonderful character, so unlike most Mrs Wood heroes - he's not even religious, barring a last-page resolution to live his life in a more Christian way from now on, and he cares nothing for his station in life, gladly taking a job as a clerk for twenty shillings a week (with selling pies on a street corner being his backup plan) and dreaming of earning three hundred pounds a year (if his prospective wife doesn't mind working as a governess or whatever to bring in a hundred or so). Roland's idea of work is to get to the office, put his feet up on the desk and chat with his colleagues all day, occasionally stopping to complain about how hard the bosses make him work. He's a real joy to read, the best of the many examples of Mrs Wood's wonderful gift for character and personality.

As a subplot to the book, we have Roland's younger brother Gerald (who has grown and developed from the smarmy, annoying, unpleasant schoolboy of the first book into a smarmy, annoying, unpleasant adult) and Hamish Channing, and their book-writing careers. At the end of "The Channings", Hamish revealed that he had made a little extra money as a writer, but he has spent most of the intervening time between the books as the manager of a bank, which had recently failed. As the narrator is at pains to explain, this is not in the slightest way Hamish's fault: "Had a quorum of the wisest business-men in the world been at its head, they could neither have foreseen its downfall nor have averted it." He has moved to London (like a surprisingly large number of Helstonleigh residents) and started to write his wonderful book. The contents of the book are never described in any detail, we're just told, over and over again, that it is wonderful. "Hamish possessed in a great degree that rarest of God's gifts, true genius." His wife Ellen (a strange thing about "The Channings" is that the minor characters include a sister and brother called Ellen and Henry) worries that he's working too hard, but loves and encourages him faithfully. Gerald, meanwhile, has a talent for writing book reviews, but none at all for writing novels; the one he's working on is terrible in every way, although once again we're not given any details. Believing it to be a work of genius, he gives it to Hamish and asks for an honest opinion - when Hamish tells him the truth, Gerald secretly vows a horrible revenge.

Hamish, model of goodness that he is, has secretly been helping out Gerald's wife with money to pay off Gerald's enormous debts, and otherwise depriving himself of all but the barest essentials, so his health is already not the best, but it's Gerald's reviews of his book that finish him off. He's forgiving - when on his deathbed he finds out that Gerald was to blame, he's only anxious to make sure Gerald knows he forgives him. He's sorry to be leaving his wife and daughter, but knows he'll see them again in Paradise, and so on. But let's look at what we know about the two books, and see if the narrator is right to so rigidly tell us that one is genius and the other is awful...

Gerald's book is "full of mistakes and faults," which is a little vague. The most concrete accusation against it is that there isn't enough content to fill a three-volume novel (when published, it uses very large print). The massive, lengthy, Victorian three-decker has long since gone out of fashion - the length of Gerald's novel is probably much more to modern tastes than Hamish's (which, we're solemnly informed, is lengthy even by three-volume standards). Maybe in 1869 it was "utterly worthless and terribly fast," "offending against morality and good taste," but perhaps it was just ahead of its time! Hamish's book, meanwhile, is "rare, excellent, of unusual interest; essentially the work of a good man, a scholar and a gentleman." It sounds suspiciously heavy on the Victorian morality - "While enchaining man's deepest interest, it yet insensibly led his thoughts heavenwards." It is "one that a man is all the better for reading," it has "not a line that, for purity, might not be placed in the hands of a child." It's very like Mrs Halliburton's Troubles, I suspect.

The writers get their just deserts at the end of the book - Hamish, we assume, gets his eternal reward in Paradise; Gerald, we're more concretely informed, ends up in debtor's prison - but I have a sneaking suspicion that when the BBC are next looking for a book to make into their latest costume drama, they would go for Gerald's worthless book and leave Hamish's languishing in obscurity. So don't give anything a bad review, whether the thing you're reviewing is good or bad! And go and read the works of Mrs Henry Wood, even Mrs Halliburton's Troubles! You won't regret it!