And speaking of memory

When I booked my flights and hotel tonight, I booked them all for next weekend instead of the weekend after, had to cancel everything and start again, and thought "I'll write something witty about that on my blog when I write about going to this competition..." And then I forgot to mention it. They shouldn't let people with terrible memories go to memory championships, it's a disgrace.

I love Paris in the springtime!

I haven't really mentioned it before, but 2017 for me is dedicated to living economically and paying off the vast debt I accumulated over the course of my last "career break", as I call those times when I spend a year and a half not bothering to work for a living. Because it took me longer than I expected to get back into a proper job that pays me decent money, I've ended up with a lot to work off before I can get back to financial liberty and not need to work any more. But now I'm working for an undeservedly high salary and living in a perfectly nice cheap bedsit down the road from the office, I'm in a position of earning much more than I spend, allowing me to devote huge sums of money every month to paying off my credit cards and loans and things.

And because I really have been good about not spending money to excess just lately, I've decided to reward myself by spending money to excess, and going to Paris in a fortnight's time for the French Memory Open 2017! Blog-readers with good memories (I'm sure there must be some of you who fall into that category) may recall that the first ever memory competition in France happened in 2008, and I was there. Now, nine years later, there's another open championship in that much-neglected-memorywise country, and I'll be there again, along with the cream of European (and American) memory talent!

I've done no training, of course, except for a whole lot of Memory League rapid-fire stuff, but this is deliberate, in a way. Going to a competition, as I've said before, is the best way to get me in the mood to practice for the next competition!

I really must try to see the Eiffel Tower this time. I've been to Paris something like four times before, and never actually seen the thing. For all I know, it doesn't really exist, but since everybody asks me if I've seen it every time I come back home, I ought to make the effort this time round.

Memory sports 2017 is go!

Yes, this year's memory competition season is in full Korea (career), with the weekend's competition in Seoul now completed, and Johannes Mallow the champion - it was a thrilling event, he fought off not just his usual arch-rival Simon Reinhard, but the latest threat to emerge from Ulaanbataar, the sisters Munkhshur and Enkhshur Narmandakh. Six people did a pack of cards under 30 seconds!

I wrote a full account of it, or as full as can be done by reading the scores and everyone's Facebook and Twitter posts, which might appear on memory-sports.com at some point in the future. Check it out, I promise it won't contain any terrible puns like the one I started this blog entry with.

I could be the Middle-Aged Memory Master!

An update from the upcoming Korean Memory Championship made me giggle...

"Announcement about Awards and prize.

2017 KOMC have announced that the competition would have 6 categories of age groups.
But we revised a couple of days ago.

To sum up, we concluded that the competition will have 5 categories with binding two junior parts (middle school + high school juniors)

So we have
1. Kids (- 12)
2. Juniors (13-17)
3. Adults (18-39)
4. Adults (40-59)
5. Seniors (60- )

In fact, this action occurred due to the mistaken knowledge of the international age.

As a korean, People think of themselves as adults at the age of 19.
Therefore, a high school student, who is 18 years old, does not think that anyone is an adult in Korea.

However, some countries, not Korea, recognize it as adults from the age of 18.

And as we will have an open memory championships for international competitors, we have to apply age system according to global common sense.

As you know, in last memory competitions, we applied age system like below:

1. Kids (- 12)
2. Juniors (13-17)
3. Adults (18-59)
4. Seniors (60- )

We, organizers thought that it was very unfair to compete between 18 and 59.
So we split the division as young adults and middle ages adults.

Also, we wanted to split Juniors into 2 parts, middle school's and high school's.
When it happened, we concluded that the match just between the ages of 16 and 17 was not reasonable.

And it could be confusing for foreign competitors who have joined to other competitions before.

We have 5 age categories in this competition with dividing the adults category.
(The Junior section is still likely to need discussion forward)

It will be applied to events awards also.
(Gold, Silver, Bronze medals in every events in every age categories)

Your age will be counted as this year minus year of the birth like other memory competitions.

Sorry for confusion and thanks for your participation!

Thanks.

Gyewon Jeong,
Organizer of Korea Open Memory Championship."

I'm still as firmly opposed as ever to the silliness of awarding prizes in memory competitions based on age, gender, nationality and so forth - to my mind, the single biggest selling point of these championships is that everybody competes on equal terms! I think it makes the whole thing just laughable when there's a million different gold medals to be handed out at the end of the day.

But... I'm 40 now. The really good memory people at these competitions are, by and large, still under 40. This would be the perfect time to compete somewhere that gives prizes for these age groups, and then make myself a set of business cards proclaiming myself to be the Middle Aged Memory Champion! I need to do that, and fast, before all my 30-something rivals catch up with me.

Novel ideas

I woke up this morning from an excessively-detailed dream about reading a book with such an extremely cool final plot twist that I might just have to write it myself. It was a bit vague about details such as the basic plot or setting, so maybe I'll wait and see if I dream those as well before I get to work...

Organised crime is looking for me

LinkedIn have jumped on the bandwagon of sending me stupid emails - today's has the subject line "Ben: National Crime Agency (NCA), UPS, and British Airways are looking for candidates like you.", and it lists jobs that LinkedIn thinks I'm suitable for, based entirely on the words 'finance' and 'analyst' being in the job description.

Second on the list (after an Executive Director of Finance in County Durham, which is the kind of job for rich people who know nothing about finance but have 'connections', so I don't think I'd qualify on any of the criteria) comes the intriguing-sounding Crime Analyst / Assistant Crime Analyst, with the National Crime Agency in Bristol.

Now, I've never heard of the National Crime Agency, and since I know they can't be the people who prevent or investigate crimes (because I've heard of the people who do that, and they're called 'the police'), I can only assume they're a national agency devoted to committing crimes. A Crime Analyst must be the person who analyses banks and jewellery stores to see how easy it would be to rob them (and an Assistant Crime Analyst must be the person who carries the Crime Analyst's briefcase so his arms don't get tired). I think I'll apply, it sounds like a good career move.

Baaaaaa!

Just to continue the sporty theme that this blog has developed lately, Federer beats Nadal in the final of the Australian Open? Just as if it was 2004 again? [Okay, technically he beat Marat Safin in the final that year, but I don't intend to let statistics stand in my way. Point is, Federer won in 2004 and again in 2017.] Clearly there's hope for me to come back and win the World Memory Championship in 2017! Assuming somebody organises a World Memory Championship in 2017, obviously, which doesn't seem exactly certain to happen at the moment...

But still, if Federer and Nadal are injury-free and match-fit, this is going to be a great year for tennis, isn't it! That pair, Djokovic and Murray, new bugs like Dimitrov... exciting prospect! And then there's the question of the greatest player of all time, of course. Or, as is trending on Twitter (because old-fashioned blogs that ramble on for pages and pages before they get to the punchline just aren't cool any more, you have to make your point in 140 characters or fewer, so you have to invent acronyms), the GOAT. Complete with emoji of a goat. The official consensus of the internet is that Federer is the goat, but all I can think when I see that is how reassuring this new term must be to good ol' Charlie Brown...

Up For The Cup

Back in ancient times, when I was at primary school, you could get a special FA Cup poster magazine, that opened out into a giant poster where you could fill in the results of all the FA Cup games, from the third round all the way to the final. It came with little rectangular stickers with the badge and name of each club. Hey, there was no internet then, you had to find something to do with your time. The cool thing was that there were enough stickers for the top division clubs to get to the final, but only enough for the fourth division as it was then to get to round 4. And after the first year, they didn't do stickers for the non-league clubs at all, so if anybody got unusually far in the competition, you had to use a lot of the blank stickers that came with the chart for just that purpose.

This made it extra-special when Telford United got to the fifth round in 1985 - you can cheer especially hard for a blank-sticker team; it just emphasized how much they'd surpassed expectations! And now Lincoln City have done the same thing, so I think they deserve extra commendation, especially since a lot of the people I was at primary school with were Lincoln supporters. In those days they were the closest we had to a local team who were in the league. Come on you imps!

Good game, good game

It looked like Leicester were going to walk all over Derby at the start, when the Derby defenders somehow contrived to put the ball in their own net under no pressure at all, but then they came back strongly for a well-deserved 2-1 lead at half-time, only to concede an equaliser at the end when they'd got tired. Fair result, and great atmosphere in the stadium, despite the rain!

Football aggro

I've been feeling run down this week, and decided I needed a change of scene at the weekend, just to wake myself up a bit. So I had a look around the internet for a cheap hotel somewhere in the Nottingham kind of area for Friday and Saturday nights, and after considering the B&B right next to the place I used to live in Beeston (but rejecting it because it doesn't have wifi access, which is sort of indispensable in this day and age), I checked out the Travelodge website and found that their cheapest hotel in the east midlands was the one on Pride Park. Ooh, that's a good place to visit, I thought - next to the train station, I can see the sights of Derby and Nottingham and maybe Beeston too at the weekend! So I booked a room there for the two nights, nice and cheap too.

Then shortly afterwards I got an email from Derby County football club (who send me emails now and then, I'm never sure exactly why) with pre-match information for the big Friday night FA Cup game against Leicester! Wait, I thought, have I really just booked a hotel across the road from the Pride Park stadium on the night of a big local derby? How does the Travelodge still have rooms available? Are all the Leicester fans going home after the game? I know it's not far, but I would have expected a fair few of them to book rooms at the hotel and stick around after the game for a drink and a fight with the Derby fans.

Oh well, since I'm there now, what else could I do but buy a ticket for the match myself? My subconscious mind obviously remembered that the game was happening on Friday night, even if the rest of my brain didn't. So I'll be there, in the Derby section, if you want to watch out for me on the telly. And if there's a riot and the stadium or the Travelodge get demolished, well, it was nice knowing you.

Images images everywhere!

The IAM have come up with a new discipline to replace images - it's "images", only these ones are pictures of things!

5-minute Images

This will consist of colourful pictures and symbols.

We have decided to use a large, open database of images, which will be continually expanded. The most current version of the database (January 18, 2017; 2,315 images), split into two parts, is available for download on Facebook in the Files section of the IAM group (www.facebook.com/groups/1753538928199295/) and the World Memory Championships group (www.facebook.com/groups/123077091106550/). We will also soon provide further download sources.

In a competition, there will be 5 minutes to memorise the images, which are presented in rows of 5. For recall, which will be 15 min, each row will be shuffled and competitors will attempt to write down the correct sequence number (1–5) for each image. 5 points for each correct row, penalty of -1 for each wrong row.

Right now there are 10 training sets available on the IAM stats homepage at

http://iam-stats.com/images.php

for you to download, print and try out. There are also marking sets to allow you to get your score easier. More training sets will follow.

We have decided to offer two different rule sets and let you determine which you like best:

1. Sets 1–5 have 250 Images and time-based rules (250 = 1,000 pts / if and only if all 250 are correct, the time counts: if time is under 5 mins, score is then 1,000 * 300s / time in s). You will need a timer for this.

2. Sets 6-10 have 350 Images and amount-based rules (250 = 1,000 pts; score is 1,000 * raw score / 250).

We want to get an idea of which rule set works best and if the standard holds up to practice, so we would be very interested to get your feedback on this discipline on as many things as possible (regarding the standard, if the recall time is too short, in particular for the 350 sets, etc...) and would love to hear your training scores!

Certainly better than "abstract images" (where all you actually have to do is pre-memorise the very limited number of background patterns), in that it's not something that people can adapt a system to as easily, but logistically it's maybe got a few problems - can the united forces of memorisers around the world provide enough clipart-style images to use? The database needs to be at least ten times as big as it it now, really, just for starters...

Still, as long as there's always the knowledge that images in any given competition could be things you've never seen before, it works. I'll do some practice at the weekend and see how it goes - I decided to focus on Memory League in January and use that to transition into old-fashioned memory practice afterwards, and I'm still more or less on track there. We have competitions coming up in Korea in February, which I can't really justify the expense of going to, and France in March, which seems a lot more doable, then Germany in March-April (two-day tournament straddling the two months) which I really will make the effort to attend!

I can't even remember the last time I went to a memory competition in Germany. I used to be over there a couple of times a year...

One last bit of wrestling

At the risk of having my wrestling-prediction skills proved to be rubbish, after the quarter finals, it's pretty obviously going to be Tyler Bate to win the tournament, beating Pete Dunne in the final. But it's nice to see my three favourites going through to the semis, and Pete Dunne deserves an honourable mention too, he's a good performer and a great villain!

I should probably wait till it ends before summarising it, but there's been enough action in the first three hours to keep anyone happy - give these guys a weekly show and I'll refrain from cancelling my WWE Network subscription!

Right, next week, this blog goes back to memory sports and comics and more nerdy things again...

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!