A quick rundown

Well, the first round tonight was quite fun. Eight similar matches in a row is probably too much, but they did save the best one till last, so it didn't drag that much.

Tyler Bate is the great character of the bunch, he plays to the crowd in a way that would be really annoying if you're the opponent who has to lose to him, except that he really performs well too and does come across as a really good wrestler. Very athletic, a lot of fun, and that moustache, I love it! He was up against Tucker, who's also very good - one of the couple of people it's a shame we won't be seeing again tomorrow.

The other was Saxon Huxley, who's got the best personality and would do well in the WWE kind of storylines (no stories here tonight, just wrestling), so I hope they get him onto that kind of show in the future. The crowd had great fun with him tonight, calling him Jesus. I laughed.

Wolfgang gets my prize for best wrestler of the night. He's a big man by the standards of this crew (no giants here, it's a pretty shrimpy cast for the most part), but wonderfully athletic and energetic. He talks well, too, he deserves to be a big star.

Mark Andrews might be the best talker of the bunch - some of them sounded horribly stilted and scripted, but Andrews comes across a lot more natural (though the proud Welshman thing would sound better from someone with a Welsh accent...). He also bounces around the ring amazingly well!

Those five are the ones I'd gladly transplant onto the main WWE shows if I was in charge of this kind of thing. Or else set up a regular British series built around them. But let's see what happens tomorrow...

This is now a full-blown wrestling blog

If I'm not careful, I'm going to turn into one of those people on the internet who tell you at every opportunity how great Daniel Bryan was in the indies and use obscure wrestling jargon that only they understand. I'll try not to. But it's the WWE United Kingdom Championship tonight! Another special edition featuring 16 of the UK's (and Ireland's) top wrestlers, hot on the heels of the World Of Sport new year special. It's on the WWE network, which I pay £9.99 a month for and very rarely watch - I really should get round to cancelling my subscription, but while I've still got it, let's have a look at all the fun!

I don't think it's really appropriate to compare the two as if they were rival promotions, because I think these guys are all friends and intermingle freely at live events. But it's probably fun anyway, so here we go. World of Sport was a mainstream ITV production, so the target audience is obviously people who don't routinely watch wrestling, but maybe remember or have heard of the old days when it was a regular feature of Saturday evening telly in the seventies. The WWE championship is on the WWE Network, the internet service for people who don't get enough wrestling from the weekly shows on satellite TV and need even more supporting material. It's a smaller but much more intense audience.

World of Sport had a really cool promotional poster and a colourful set of individual pictures, while the WWE's promotional video mainly featured the group gathering on stage in identical suits, and the individual pictures on the website are all a lot more uniform...

Quite a few of the WWE crowd put across a lot of personality in those headshots though - Tyler Bate's old-fashioned moustache is awesome, Tyson T-Bone wins the prize for most distinctive appearance, Pete Dunne's nervous grin is brilliant and Roy Johnson's friendly smile is a nice contrast to all the other grim faces.

While the WOS special tried to cover the whole spread of different types of bout (four singles matches, one ladder match, one tag match, one battle royale) with an interweaving storyline, the WWE event is a straight knockout tournament of singles fights - so 15 matches in total, spread across two live nights. Unless, of course, there are some surprises in store... I'm curious to see how it'll be scheduled, because if they do the first round on Saturday and the rest on Sunday, that'll mean the finalists have to fight three times on one night, which I don't think wrestlers really like to do (Grado did it on WOS, but one of them was the battle royale and he was able to spend most of it lying in the corner of the ring while other people battled around him). So we'll just have to see what they come up with. I'll write an in-depth review, or maybe even two!

Wrestling, it's like buses

I see the WWE are launching themselves into the UK wrestling market this weekend, just a fortnight after the World of Sport special, with an all-new UK Championship special featuring sixteen wrestlers from the UK or nearby (one of them's from Dublin, but hey, Americans don't know the difference). I've still got a WWE network subscription despite my "I don't watch live TV any more" nonsense, so I'll watch it and blog about it on Saturday or Sunday night, or both. This is turning into some kind of wrestling blog, so I'll try to swerve it back in the direction of memory or something after that...

Easy come, easy go

I'll never make a professional gambler. I thought about cashing out that bet when Cambridge were 1-0 up at half-time, and spending the winnings on something else, but I decided not to bother in the end, and Leeds went on to win 2-1.

The road to ruin

I got an email from William Hill this afternoon, saying that since I haven't used my account for 13 months, they're going to start charging an inactive account fee on my balance. It was news to me that I've got a balance, but I checked it, and sure enough, there was £2.25 in there!

I can't remember where it would have come from - I'm not above occasionally betting on the football, but I normally use Coral. I do remember using the William Hill account once or twice, so I know it must be a real thing, but how did I not notice I'd left £2.25 on there?

Well, there's not much football tonight to bet it on, so I've put the lot on Cambridge to beat Leeds, at 10/3. Big money, here we come.

The Grand Final

Here's some trivia for you - the world of social media thinks it's National Trivia Day today. The internet is full of these national days (I suppose they at least give people something to talk about in their blogs, unimaginative dolts that they all are), but never say what nation it is. I mean, I always assume it's America and so nothing to do with me, but you never know. Maybe it's that glorious nation that is the Internet.

Anyway, Simon Reinhard and Jan-Hendrik Büscher are contesting the grand final of the first Memory League Online Knockout tonight, and it's sure to be an exciting event! The technology doesn't yet exist to let people watch it at home (I can't think how they'd go about making that work without taking the competitors' word for it that they won't cheat...) but it's still been a lot of fun to watch the results. Jan knocked me out in the first round, so the further he gets in the competition, the less bad it makes me look, and consequently I'm cheering for him tonight. But Simon's the hot favourite as always, and having beaten the hot second-favourite, Katie, in the semis, he's looking unstoppable.

The point is, though, I'm still loving the Memory League, and keen to improve my own ranking (number 11 on the leaderboard right now), which can really only be done by fixing my longstanding black spot with names and faces - it's like I'm starting with a handicap of 20% of the available points if I don't learn how to do the things... it's really high time we found out whether an old dog like me can learn some new tricks.

Groggy groggy groggy

Getting up and going to work in the morning after eleven days of idleness is really bad for you. I'm just going to go to bed now. Tomorrow, wide awake again and refreshed, I'll talk some more about the Memory League!

It's finished, Jaga

Thirty years ago today, January 2nd, 1987, the BBC broadcast the first episode of Thundercats. Actually, they broadcast the first two episodes, edited together into one 40-minute story. And it was so good!

Britain lagged strangely behind America when it came to Thundercats - the other big toy ranges of the time, Transformers and He-Man came out more or less simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic, but at the start of 1987 the first Thundercats toys had only recently appeared on the toystore shelves, while America was almost getting bored with them by now. The second range of toys showed up over here a couple of months into 1987, and the third the following year.

The cartoon, though, was something else. Definitely a cut above the other toy-commercial cartoons we all loved back then (at the age of ten, they were pretty much the only things I watched on TV). He-Man used the Hanna-Barbera style of very limited animation, Transformers was also made on the cheap, but this time by taking the attitude of "it's only a kids' show, it doesn't matter if we draw the wrong robot now and then or colour them in wrong...". Thundercats is much more professional and well-made. And the scripts were fantastic, too, and the voice acting!

Couple that with the weather that winter - the heaviest snow I've ever seen combined with the layout of our back garden to give us six-foot snowdrifts to play in - and you've got the perfect childhood experience! Thundercats Hooooooooo!

Big Daddy

It's a new year, and there's sure to be something to blog about every day, right? I haven't deluged the internet with my long-winded thoughts nearly enough these last couple of years.

So let's start by talking about World of Sport Wrestling, the one-off special from last night! As I've mentioned before, I quite like watching American wrestling now and then (although I've gone off WWE since they sacked Damien Sandow...), but the old British World of Sport was before my time - according to the internet it ended in 1985, when I was eight, but I don't recall ever really watching it. I knew Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks, because they were household names, but that was as far as it went.

This new series (because they obviously want to sell it as a regular series, which would be awesome) is entirely modern in tone (looking very much like the WWE but in a slightly smaller-scale way), just interspersed with a few old clips of the original series and reminiscences from minor wrestlers who are still alive and remember it. It was really really good! I was pleasantly surprised, and now I want to see more! It's available on ITV player for the next 30 days, I'd recommend that you check it out. With that in mind, I won't spoil the results (although if you've ever watched any wrestling before, or even heard of the concept, you can probably guess the plotline and winners), just a few thoughts about the wrestlers and the show...

Dave Mastiff is definitely the biggest star, in every way. Amazing physique (how do you pin the shoulders of someone who hasn't got any, the commentator wonders - he's basically a ball), great moves and agility for someone shaped like that, great personality. Everyone loves the bad guy, although the crowd were very obedient in cheering the goodies and booing the baddies. He's not that great an actor, but all he needs to do is look fierce, and he does that really well!

Grado, the plucky underdog hero, is a great actor as well as a great wrestler, so you can see why he got the main hero role. He's very loveable.

Johnny Moss and Sha Samuels are Mastiff's evil henchmen, and they play the part well, especially Samuels, who's got a brilliant costume and personality. We definitely need to see more of him.

The smaller guys - Kenny Williams, Sam Bailey, CJ Banks and Delicious Danny - had the misfortune to be put in a ladder match, something that really never works in wrestling (the winner is the first one to climb up a ladder and grab the prize dangling above the ring - in practice that means a lot of silly scenes of a wrestler very slowly climbing up, looking over his shoulder to make sure the opponent who's supposed to stop him is close enough) but they do a good job anyway. Delicious Danny has the most stylish appearance, CJ Banks is scowly and evil in a very cool way, Kenny Williams is the young hot newcomer and looks great - pink works well on wrestlers, I've never known why, Sam Bailey is sort of lost in the crowd. But they all perform really well, and I definitely want to see more of them all on a regular basis!

There's a women's match, which apparently they never did in the old days, between the really great Viper and the less impressive Alexis Rose, but it's treated like a bit of an afterthought. With that and the rest of the night's lineup consisting almost entirely of white guys, it's not what you'd call inclusive. I'm not sure what they'd do if it becomes a weekly thing; Viper looks like she'd be fine wrestling with the men, but maybe there's a load of female superstars in Britain who we just haven't seen yet...

Tag team action with Ashton Smith and Rampage Brown against Mark and Joe Coffey is a lot of fun too - Rampage is the real character of the foursome who gets all the best moments. To keep it interesting going forwards, I hope there's more tag team stuff, just because it helps develop the characters of the wrestlers.

Then there's Zack Gibson, who's perhaps a bit too similar in appearance and character to CJ Banks, but has the advantage of apparently having a degree in accountancy and finance from Liverpool John Moores University. I like that a lot - we need more wrestling accountants! He wrestles El Ligero, masked Mexican wrestler with a very cool mask, horns and everything, and they both show some cool moves.

The last wrestler to show up is Davey Boy Smith Junior, The British Bulldog, who looks like the traditional square-jawed hero that's otherwise lacking from the show, but since he doesn't do very much I assume he's just there for the olden-days nostalgia. But that's seventeen genuinely good wrestlers in a really really well-designed and written show. It could definitely make an ongoing series, and I'm all in favour!

Memory League!

I'm having no end of fun with the Memory League training site! Not signed up there yet? You really should be! The important thing it provides, for me at least, is targets to aim for and scores to improve. Complicated rankings designed by the ever-brilliant Simon Orton and presented in the kind of dashboard views I create with Excel spreadsheets at work all the time and everyone thinks are awesome, so I appreciate and admire anyone who dreams up the same kind of thing. I'm hoping I can keep up with regular training in that, then transition it into also training for the old-fashioned longer-duration kind of memory competition disciplines, because I'm still hoping to at least turn up at a fair few pen-and-paper competitions in 2017.

And check this out! Memory League Championships in 2017 and beyond! Not only are lots of cool countries planning their own MLCs, including another UK one of course, we can look forward to the World Championship in April 2018 at Silicon Valley Comic Con! I love it when two passions of mine come together like that, and having missed the Las Vegas Memoriad, I've doubly-especially-definitely GOT to go along to this one!

More memory people need to be enthusiastic about comics, there are definite mental connections between the visual storytelling medium of comics and the mental imagery of memory systems. Also, there need to be more people at these things who can understand me when I say it's great that Ivy the Terrible is back in the Beano - as a child of the eighties, I've always had a soft spot for the only eighties-created character to become a Beano mainstay*, so was quietly outraged when she was dropped. We're not quite back to the days when she had a two-page weekly strip drawn by the Beano's best artist, but I'm still delighted to see a three-panel adventure drawn by the great Lew Stringer!


*Edited moments after posting to add... you know, except Calamity James, who was created around the same time and is still going strong and as brilliantly funny as ever. This is what happens when you move onto other subjects after talking about memory for the first two paragraphs, you forget things.

It's WAR! And we're ALL going to DIE!

The long-awaited next random comic from my collection, as chosen by someone I don't remember, is number 3180 - Viz #122, from February 2003!

Does Viz count as a comic, or a magazine? It traditionally describes itself as a comic, so I think it counts as part of my comic collection, but really it's something that stands alone - the only other things that fall into the same category are other magazines that exist solely to publish stuff that's been rejected by Viz because it's not good enough. It's a nice position to be in.

If you're not British, none of this will really make any sense to you - Viz started life as a parody of British children's comics, soon branched out into also parodying British tabloid newspapers and magazines, and by 2003 was well-established as Britain's foremost adult-humour publication in its own right. But if you don't know the kind of thing it started life by making fun of... you won't get the joke, sorry. Still, if this review convinces one foreign blog-reader to give it a try and buy a copy, that might deter them from taking legal action against me for writing about it on the internet. Because they do that kind of thing, I've heard.

Actually, I wish the random number had given us a better issue of Viz if I'm going to be introducing it to people. This one hasn't got a photo story, or a hilarious adventure tale, or a lot of the regular characters, or any especially funny letters... but never mind. It came out at the time when Britain was umming and ahhing about exactly when we were going to do what the Americans told us and join in the invasion of Iraq, so that's the current-affairs theme of a lot of what's inside.

In British comic tradition, Viz doesn't credit the creators - a few of the artists who aren't part of the 'editorial cabinet' do sign their work, but otherwise all we get is a small print list on the first page, saying it's written and produced by Fulchester Industries, with contributors John Fardell, Cat Sullivan, Carl Hollingsworth, Joe Campi, Biscuit Tin, Paul Palmer, Barney Farmer and Lee Healey.

So, the comic starts with a three-page Biffa Bacon strip. Biffa's parents gently break the sad news to him that his grandfather's died, and then call him a big soft shite for crying about it...

Viz is published in Newcastle - when it started out, practically the whole comic was written in geordie dialect, but nowadays it's gone a bit more national; only Biffa Bacon and Sid the Sexist are really broad geordie. Anyway, the Bacons go to the funeral, Fatha and Mutha play friendly jokes on Biffa by slamming the coffin lid on his head and smacking him in the face with a clock, and then the whole family observe a minute's violence in Grandfatha's memory, smashing gravestones over each other's heads in the garden of remembrance. Classic stuff.

Letterbocks covers two pages, without any all-that-funny "readers' letters" this time, and there's only three Top Tips in this one. It's usually a lot better than this! There's also "Miriam answers your problems, translates her answers into German on the internet, and then back into English" and a three-panel "Sly and the Kidney Stone" strip.

Then we have a one-page adventure of Russ Abbot's Dormouse Madhouse - the comedian tricycles around the country with a dolls' house full of zany dormice (one has borderline personality disorder and another is suffering from schizophrenic catalepsy) who would get up to all sorts of crazy misadventures if Russ didn't keep them well-medicated with prozac, lithium, thorazine and largactil. They thwart a bank robbery by weaving a basket quickly. It's great, it really is!

Next page is a competition to win a holiday, sponsored by "Not Another Teen Movie", about which they're hilariously rude, with the editorial slant of not having watched it but knowing it's a load of rubbish. To win, you have to find five synonyms for holiday diarrhoea in a wordsearch.

Then a one-page strip of more schoolgirl bullying with Fatty and Skinny, Susannah and Trinny. Whatever happened to those two, anyway? Not that I ever watched them in the first place, but I haven't heard about them for years. Still, they were regulars in Viz at this time, destroying the self-esteem of girls who can't afford fashionable clothes at school. In this one they go swimming. Sort of a one-joke thing, really.

Next, two pages of Finbarr Saunders and his Double Entendres, another longstanding Viz regular. Mr Gimlet spends the strip trying his best to get a reaction from Finbarr with his usual contrived innuendos, but now Finbarr's only responding to Russian exchange visitor Sergei's hilarious mispronunciations. He also gets to shag Mrs Saunders at the end. Poor Mr Gimlet...

One page strip of Laurel and Hardy the Midwife - wonderful silliness in the traditional style. Laurel and Hardy are a midwife but keep getting distracted by painting the wall and carrying a piano upstairs, with slapstick consequences. In the end the frustrated father calls for an ambulance, but the police escort is the Keystone Cops.

A newspaper article about a graffiti artist winning the prestigious Saatchi Prize for Contemporary Art by scrawling "Suck my nips" on a wall... is a joke they'd done before, multiple times, I'm sure. Then we get a parody advertisement for "Quumf!" - the magazine for men who sniff ladies' bike saddles.

One page of Mrs Brady the Old Lady, whose friend Cissie slips on the ice and breaks her hip, giving Ada the opportunity to talk at great length to paramedics about her own medical problems. It's the kind of thing that never gets old.

Perhaps the highlight of this issue of Viz is the first ever Drunken Bakers strip, the long-running series, still continuing today, of adventures of two bakers who technically still run a shop, but never manage to bake any bread products because of their alcohol problem...

It's so wonderfully unremittingly bleak and depressing, the strip achieves true artistic genius. In this one, they consider making oatcakes, but the thought doesn't get very far.

A page and a half of Boyz R Uz, the parody of manufactured boy bands, is a bit strange really - it's still mired in the 1990s, and hasn't yet twigged to making fun of Pop Idol and X-Factor, or whatever was the big thing on TV at the time. I know for a fact those things already existed in 2003.

The middle-page centrespread gives us our free Rolling Stones It's a Gas Gas Gas Mask! You can cut it out and assemble it yourself, with half a pringles tube and a few odour eaters for the mouth bit, two glacier mint wrappers for the eyes, and a few rubber bands and things! The accompanying text, explaining why we need to be ready with our gas masks for the inevitable war with Iraq, is brilliant - as well as explaining the Rolling Stones connection as "We've teamed up with Britain's fave boy band to bring you this cut out & keep gas mask," and a testimonial from Brian Jones, "If I wasn't dead, this gas mask would probably save my life", the main text takes the traditional British tone: "The Marquess of Queensbury's rules mean nothing to evil Saddam who thinks little of killing Iraqui men, women and children in pursuit of his dastardly plans. But worse than that, this crazed dictator has even set fire to oil wells, destroying millions of barrels of our precious oil. We're facing a man almost as evil as Nasty Nick off the first series of Big Brother in a war he was too cowardly even to start." And there's a classification of the relative strength of gases, with the strongest being "that gas the Penguin squirts at Batman out the end of his umbrella". Classic Viz stuff.

A page of "Have Your Say" letters debating whether it's a good or bad thing that scientists are now able to produce clones of Saddam Hussain is followed by a one-page Tommy Salter's Chemical Capers strip in which the boy genius's mum makes him get rid of his evil baby Saddam Hussain clone.

He eventually flushes it down the toilet, before being told to go and clean up his bedroom, which is full of baby Hitlers and Mussolinis. This is the most traditional-Viz-strip thing in this issue - the kind of thing that would appear in a British children's comic, with a slight twist. The absence of Gilbert Ratchet or Tinribs from this issue is another shocking omission.

Next, a one-page story of "Beautician and the Beast" - Villagers, come quickly! The beast has taken my daughter - a Boots beautician - prisoner in his castle! With the villagers approaching with their flaming torches and pitchforks, the Beast tries to make the beautician fall in love with him, but she just tortures him with painful beauty products while delivering her sales pitch with an expression of contempt and superiority. It's very true to life!

Then we have one and a half pages of "The McBrowntrouts", a parody of "The Broons" that is apparently just different enough, this time, for Viz to get away with it. A few years earlier they invoked the wrath of DC Thomson with a strip called "The McBroons" that was identical to the Broons in every way except that the punchline involved toilet humour. This version is a lot safer; the characters only vaguely resemble the Broons, and the style of the strip is more a general parody of old-fashioned comics, including rhyming captions. This week the McBrowntrouts enter the Biggest Shite In Glasgow Contest. There's a really really funny McBrowntrouts strip in I think the next issue of Viz; it's a real shame I got this random number instead...

Half a page of the adventures of Ben "Bend Over" Dover, who tries to make an innocent film of a wedding only for it to turn into hardcore pornography, then a two-page newspaper-article about henpecked husbands being haunted by the ghosts of their nagging wives. This, again, is the kind of thing there's normally much more of in Viz!

After that we get a one-page strip of The Critics, who buy a non-existent art installation from a modern artist with no name, although he takes payment in the form of a cheque made out to Nigel Ponsonby-Wankwelle, and one page of Otto S. Fixiation, who has zany misadventures trying to satisfy his jaded middle-aged sex needs with a bit of self-strangulation. Both very funny.

Then we get three pages of the Profanisaurus, definitions of unusual rude words, that a lot of people find really funny but I've never liked all that much. I mean, it's schoolboy stuff, but not funny schoolboy stuff like the rest of Viz! And then, crammed into the last page, it's three of the characters who normally get a page or two each - Roger Mellie, Sid the Sexist and the Fat Slags. Roger has a celebrity boxing match against Thora Hird, Sid gives tantric sex (or in his case, tantric wanking) a try, and Baz and Dave discuss the edible knickers he got San for Christmas (he ate as much as he could on Christmas morning, a bit more on Boxing Day and put the rest in the freezer).

For £2, not much more than most of the other comics in my collection, that's a heck of a lot of content! It's no wonder Viz is so popular, considering this is one of the least funny issues I've ever seen and it's still got plenty to laugh at.

If you'd like to see a review of a random comic from my pile, give me a number between 3 and 3333, and I'll oblige! Maybe I'll make it a monthly thing in 2017, set myself some kind of publishing deadline...

Red Dwarf retrospective

I've got the whole week off work (the company I work for now is the very sensible kind of company that completely shuts down between Christmas and New Year), so I'll catch up on all those things I said I'd ramble on about in my blog. First off, Red Dwarf XI!

With hindsight, and having watched all six episodes of the new series multiple times, I think I can safely say it's a very good one. If it's not quite as much fun as watching the episodes from the golden age (series 3-5, say), it still does justify making new ones - there are quite a few laugh-out-loud moments, quite a few clever plots in the classic Red Dwarf style, quite a lot of things that generally make me say 'ha, yes, that was a good one!'

So, let's start by complaining about things (because, y'know, this is the internet, I'm an opinionated nerd, it's what we do) before moving on to talking about the good stuff. Lighting - turn down the blue, people! Seriously, nearly every scene is bathed in harsh blue light and I don't really see the point of it. Every now and then they move into a setting that's lit more naturally, and it's a real relief. Acting - I just don't get the sense that the actors are enjoying it, which is weird. I'm sure they must be, since nostalgia is the main reason for the series existing, but if they are, they should show it more. Go over the top now and then and don't look so restrained! The day job - the Red Dwarf crew's purpose in life now seems to be to travel around the universe, salvaging technology from derelict spaceships. Firstly, why do they need a purpose in life at all? I miss the days when Lister gave his occupation as 'bum'. And secondly, if they're going to have a driving raison d'etre, what happened to Lister's stated purpose of a few years ago of finding Kochanski? Originality - all the episodes are variations on themes of earlier episodes, there's nothing particularly new or different about them, and there's a limit to how long you can do that without it getting old...

Okay, now the good bits - there's some hilarious dialogue, like the Captain Bollocks scene in "Give and Take", and basically everything with Snacky in the same episode. One particularly brilliant visual gag with the 3-D printer in "Officer Rimmer", which might be the single funniest scene Red Dwarf has ever done. Lots of clever dialogue in "Twentica" especially with the technological speakeasy. Ingenious and brilliantly silly time-travel stuff in "Give and Take", not to mention a new character who we need to see again (shame that they filmed the next series at the same time as this one, so if we do see him again it won't be for a long time...) Nice character moments for everyone, even Cat (who spends a lot of time just standing in the background) which really make the most of the dynamic between them. It's all very promising for the future, so here's hoping it goes on beyond series twelve and lasts forever!

Free weekend!

Wow, I don't even remember what I DO when I've not got a memory or othello competition to think about at the weekend... do I go out for a bike ride? I think I will, if the weather stays nice-ish like it is at the moment. In days gone by I'd be spending the whole weekend doing hour cards, hour numbers, 30-minute binary, so maybe I'll give that a try too. A sort of pre-emptive new year's resolution to get back into memory training!

4 ways to avoid running out of money in retirement

For many years now, I've been seeing these internet ads urging 'If you have a £250,000 portfolio, download the guide by Forbes columnist and money manager Ken Fisher's firm. It's called "The Definitive Guide to Retirement Income."'

I don't think I'm really the target audience for this. I have no idea who Ken Fisher is. I have no idea what "Forbes" is. And at the risk of sounding like a socialist radical again, if you have a £250,000 portfolio... then you have TOO MUCH MONEY, and need to give some of it away right now, please.

It's Christmas in Cambridge!

Remember at the start of the year when I said I'd go to lots of othello tournaments in 2016? Well, I did at least get to the Cambridge Christmas Tournament (impressively held in December for a change this year) today. We had an impressive 12 competitors, 75% of them being the combined Plowman/Brand families out in force, but also including me, Imre and Roy. I'm horribly out of practice, but still only lost to Imre and Guy, ending up in third place with wins including a really quite fascinating game against Richard. Okay, NEXT year, more othello tournaments!

But for now, I need to brush up on my Memory League skills, if I'm to have any hope of beating Jan-Hendrik in the first round of the MLOK tomorrow. I actually don't think I have any chance at all, but maybe he'll forget to compete. That's what I'm pinning my hopes on here.

Red Star Robinson

The Peak app has a fun new game on it where you control a turtle, eating jellyfish and avoiding nets and traps. It's all very Ecco the Dolphin, though I don't think he ever ate quite so many jellyfish. But there are bonus symbols on it including a bright red starfish, which for some reason always makes me think "Red Star Robinson", after the young hero from the Hotspur comic in days of old, who fought crime with the aid of his alien robot butler Mr Syrius Thrice.

I need an alien robot butler. Not because I've got a need to thwart bank robberies on a weekly basis, but just to cook my dinner and clean my flat for me.

MLOK your block off!

Anyone at all interested in Memory League competition should know that Clay's organising a big online knockout competition (just for fun) that everybody should sign up to! You can join by letting him know on the Facebook post or the Art of Memory forum - give it a go, regardless of how good you are at remembering things! It'll be fun!

As if my life wasn't stressful enough!

I'm REALLY on the point of a nervous breakdown at the moment - after a whole lot of stress about the preparations for next weekend's memory competition in London (in the course of which I've been needlessly rude to people and caused no end of offence, probably), and then finding out yesterday that next week we've got the big Ofsted inspection at work, which will involve me in a whole lot of extra short-notice number-crunching, probably, NOW I find out that I'm on telly on Wednesday night!

Please don't tune in to ITV at 10:45 to watch How To Remember Everything, narrated by Mr Brown from the recent Paddington Bear movie, Hugh Bonneville (I think he was in Downton Abbey, too, but I think my blog-readers are more the Paddington Bear type). It's the stuff they filmed leading up to the 2014 World Memory Championship, I thought the whole project was long gone and forgotten!

Maybe it's just my state of mind right now, but I'm really quite terrified that the director, annoyed by my habit of making extensive pronouncements about my beliefs and principles and then telling him I'm not being serious and he shouldn't put it in the documentary (as I recall, I did that quite a lot), has dedicated the last two years to making me look bad.

This is quite possibly paranoia on my part. It would take five minutes to make me look bad, and two years to make me look good. But still, nervous breakdown. Big time.

Black Friday

Any British business that talks about "Black Friday" needs to be burnt at the stake and told not to be so American in future, unless they've provided all their customers with a day off work and a roast turkey dinner the day before. It's just not on, I'm afraid.

Whoa!

I've just noticed that my last post was my 2500th on this blog! Talk about quantity over quality! I should have done something special to celebrate it, really, but at least it was a forward-looking post about what I'm going to do in the future.

I also need to keep up a daily blogging routine for the rest of the year if I don't want to fall below 100 posts in 2016, don't I? I'm sure I'll think of something to write about - I've still got my latest randomly-selected comic to talk about, I'll get round to that shortly, although it's not even a particularly good issue of Viz...

What's comic number 2500? West Coast Avengers #24 - that's a pretty good one, actually! Maybe I'll write about that, too. What else have I neglected while I've been doing nothing but memory competitions? I'm sure I'll think of something. I meant to summarise the latest season of Red Dwarf, since it's the only "new" TV thing I've been watching lately, I'm sure you'd all be fascinated by that. Then I could recount the putting-a-red-towel-in-the-washer-with-my-work-shirts incident of the other day. They look better pink, actually.