Liberae scholae de comune sigillum

 

Did you know there's a website called Thousand Castles, which has, or at least aims to have, a page documenting every "castle" in the world? Rather more than a thousand, obviously, especially since they're very broad about the meaning of the word "castle". The front page says there are 56,956 of them, including a lot of things that are a very long way away from counting as a castle if you ask me.

But I was pleased to see that the local castle from where I grew up, Tattershall Castle, was ranked 446th of all the castles in the world, and that you can vote castles up and down to affect the ranking - when I gave the place a vote, it went up to its current position of 434th. It really is quite a nice place, although being made of red brick instead of stone it really doesn't look so much like a castle should. But it's still cool to visit on a cheap school outing if you go to a primary school just down the road.

But the best part of the website was noticing that there's a page for another "castle" about ten miles further down the road - Horncastle!

I went to secondary school in Horncastle. That's the school badge up at the top of this blog entry, with a beautiful illustration of a horn and a castle. Horncastle is ranked only 46,619th on Thousand Castles, and the page describing it is a little lacking in detail, with no pictures. That's because it's a small town, not a castle. As we learnt at school, the name is nothing to do with horns or castles - it derives from 'hyrn' (angle, corner) and 'castrum' (settlement). It was a Roman walled town two thousand years ago, which I suppose just about falls under the website's definition of a castle. There are a few old bits of the Roman wall lying around the place. I assume the library's still got its mini-museum section with a couple of yards of wall on display.

We need to get more of this kind of "castle" added to the site. I've seen chip shops called Castle Chippy before now. Add them in there, and vote them to the top of the world rankings!

I'm five! (times ten)

 Can I just reiterate my shock that these moments are cut from the Bernadette Peters episode of the Muppet Show on Disney+?

And also, can I just say that it's my birthday today? But more importantly, I'd really like to hear Robin's version of "They Call the Wind Maria". I bet it would have been great.

So much for that annual tradition

Longtime bloglings might recall that every October I observe that ancestry.co.uk's DNA analysis thing has increased the percentage of English origin they think I've got. If not, you can go back and read them:

2022 - 69% English

2023 - 76% English

2024 - 77% English

2025 - 78% English

So I eagerly checked out their annual update this year, thinking I might have inched up to 80% English blood this year, but no - the 2026 update has thrown out all the foreignness in my nature, and confirmed what I've been saying all along, that not a single ancestor of mine has ever been adventurous enough to look beyond the borders of England for their marital prospects or fornication!

Yes, 100% English ancestry according to their latest calculations! I'm suspicious of the 2% Devon, of course, but it's getting closer to the very small area where most of my ancestors have remained since time immemorial (plus my mum's father from down south, can't forget him).

They reckon they can identify it by grandparent now, but I'm inclined to think it's all nonsense, and they cheerfully admit that a whole 32% of my DNA can't be assigned to a particular grandparent...

So where does my DNA journey go from here? Maybe next year they'll update again and think I'm more international, but I think we might have settled on England now. Perhaps there'll be more detailed refinements and we'll get to see the very small locality where everyone lived and spent their entire lives. It'll be a tiny dot or two on the map of England. I think my family tree is great, but I have to accept that I've got some rather boring DNA...

The Worlds

The Microsoft Excel World Championship kicks off again on Saturday 10th, with the 256 qualifiers not going head-to-head in knockout format this year, but sorted into eight groups of 32, and having a double-elimination series of online contests over two Saturdays. First two rounds on the 10th, three more on the 17th for people who haven't yet been eliminated.

I do like the sheer intricacy of the process, such that you can draw colourful diagrams of how it works:

At the end of it, there'll be 8 people qualified for the "semi-finals" live in Las Vegas, and another 40 qualified for the "quarter-finals", where they'll be joined by winners of the national competitions from around the world, and people who've come through the "last chance qualification round" the previous day. 15 quarter-finalists go through to the semi-finals to join those eight, plus top seed, reigning champion and European Open winner Diarmuid Early.  And the 24 semi-finalists are whittled down to 12 finalists, and one champion.

But that's very much in the future, and I doubt I'll be coming anywhere near it. Let's look at my group for the online rounds! Each group has one of the top 8 seeds (or seeds 2-9, with Dim Early being already qualified), and then 3 of the remaining top-32, and then the other qualifiers randomly distributed. 

By my count I'm ranked 12th in the group if you put us in order of "XQ" points (an Elo kind of thing based on results since 2023) and 13th if you put us in order of "World Ranking" (based on the results of 2026). That would suggest I should finish in the top half of the first round, and it would be a great achievement if I go on to finish in the top half of the green sixteen in the second round. Although there's still a pretty good chance I'd finish in the bottom half both times and be eliminated.

Honestly, the fun of looking at the competition structure almost outweighs the fun of competing in it. I'm a real geek for that kind of thing.

A Whiter Shade of Pale

 The Northstar limited series from 1994 wasn't all that good, but it did have some nice covers making the best artistic use of his black and white costume.

What always struck me as weird about it is that his face fades over the course of the four-issue limited series from a dark pink to a pallid white, and I've always wondered if that was deliberate, or just sloppy colouring? Probably the latter, but I do like when comics do unusual covers like these ones.

International bright young things

 It's the qualification round for the Microsoft Excel World Championship tomorrow, with 140 more slots available to join the 108 who've already qualified (plus 8 wildcards). I'm already in the privileged pre-qualifier list (albeit only by being the best in the 50+ age category in battle 3, and that despite not being 50 for another three weeks!) and I'm really rather impressed by how worldwide this whole thing is. Just look at that beautiful collection of flags!

An ironic end

Adventure Comics #341, dated February 1966, has an exciting adventure for the Legion of Super-Heroes. One of the Legion, Triplicate Girl, has been killed, and the rest of the team pay tribute to her before launching her urn-craft to its final resting place.

Then after the funeral, Triplicate Girl turns up and asks what all the fuss was about - her colleagues had forgotten that she has the ability to split herself into three identical girls, and only one of them was killed. Entirely unbothered by this, she announces that since there are only two of her now, she will henceforth be known as Duo Damsel, and the story continues on. The Legion stories got a lot less childish a few months after this point, when Jim Shooter (still basically a child himself, but writing much more mature teenage fiction) took over as writer. But here we're definitely still in the Silver Age writing style, as we can see from the inscriptions on those urns.

The Legion seem not to have known it was the done thing to write a bit about the deceased hero on the urn, and include a proper picture, so they just did a sketch of Triplicate Girl's face and signed their names below it. The others we see are much more interesting to anyone who comes to Shanghalla and looks around. Beast Boy had been seen in a previous story, the other four are just made up for the purposes of this scene.

Many people have speculated that Mog Vagor is the big green thing and the horrible space beast is the human, and I definitely agree with them. But everyone who comments on this picture seems to take Leeta 87's urn entirely at face value. Did the friends and relatives of this great superhero really choose to decorate her memorial with a caricature of her ignominious demise? I think not.

The true story of Leeta 87 is obviously that she was her world's greatest superhero, with a very strange sense of humour. Working in her day job at a 30th-century newspaper, she insisted on writing all the articles about her exploits to say that she was a blundering incompetent who always succeeded in defeating the super-villains by sheer luck. When people asked why, she just explained that it was funny! And nobody could argue with the great Leeta 87, even if they really didn't get it.

And so when she finally heroically perished, in the course of saving the entire universe, the people had no choice but to inscribe her urn with the picture and text she'd composed herself. A fitting tribute to a superhero? Well, no, but it's what she wanted. I guess she thought it was funny, even if nobody else did...

Drag city

Fact about The Muppet Show that a lot of people get wrong. The rock band (Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem) consists of Dr Teeth on keyboards, Floyd on bass, Janice on lead guitar, Zoot on sax and Animal on drums. The house orchestra includes Floyd, Zoot and Animal, plus Rowlf on piano, Nigel the conductor and Trumpet Girl on the trumpet.

Trumpet Girl doesn't have a name, and speaks precisely one line in the whole history of the show - "Drag city!" in agreement with Floyd and the others as they express their dislike of the Muppet Show theme. It's interesting that she sides with the Electric Mayhem, leaving Nigel and Rowlf alone to play the closing music.

For season five, Lips joins both versions of the band, playing the trumpet, and Trumpet Girl switches to playing the trombone. She really seems to be into it - we see her eyes for the first time, and she bobs up and down wildly, working the trombone slide. I think she definitely found her calling there.

Which makes it seem more of a shame that although she's back like everyone else for the 2026 revival of the show, she just... doesn't seem so animated now. She stares at the camera quite disturbingly, in fact. Everyone else seems delighted to return to the Muppet Theatre, but Trumpet Girl... I think she's just there for the paycheque. What a drag, man.

The Register

 I've got back in the mood for family tree research lately, and splashed out on a cheap temporary access to the 1939 Register. So to follow up on my posts about the 1911 census and the 1921 census, let's have another look through the register of 29 September 1939 for that wonderful Pridmore family - since I wrote about it a few years ago, some of those 'officially closed' records (people born less than a hundred years ago who haven't been marked off as deceased) have been opened, and there are many interesting things to be seen!

My great-grandparents William and Sarah Pridmore had died in 1932 and 1920 respectively, and most of their thirteen children had predeceased them, in infancy, in the war, and of pneumonia shortly afterwards. There are three particularly significant houses in Sheffield on the 1939 register, starting with the family home.

34 Hunt Street had been the Pridmore family residence since around 1909. Bachelor son Oswald had never moved out of his parents' house, and was now the head of the family, joined by his widowed sister Lilian (her husband John May had died in 1927), her two daughters Flo and Mary Ann, and James Palmer, the son of the other Pridmore sister Florence (who had died in 1920).

Five singles living together in the house. Oswald married in 1944; I haven't found any record of the younger three ever getting hitched. Lilian didn't remarry, but she did relocate to Droylsden before she died. Pridmores didn't tend to move away from Sheffield, except when the army sent them.

10 Brough Street had been the home of the sisters Lilian and Florence, and at least briefly brother Wilfred, since 1918. As I mentioned last week, five of the residents died in the space of just over two years in 1920-22, but it was still occupied by the family in 1939. The house seems to have been officially divided into two homes - there were two separate census forms in 1921 (one for the Palmers and one for the Mays), and two separate entries on the 1939 register. But now one half of the house is inhabited by Florence's widower John Palmer and his second wife Fanny, and the other by John and Florence's daughter Jennie and her husband Alfred Dalziel, plus their blacked-out baby daughter Patricia.

Mr Palmer is calling himself John again, after being James on and off over the years. And it's hard to read the name at the bottom there, but it really doesn't look like "Jennie", does it? The date of birth and the husband match, so it's clearly her...

And the other significant Pridmore home was 72 Robey Street, where youngest son Sydney and his wife Catherine had been living since at least 1926. In 1939 they're there with their eight children (and a ninth on the way) - Mick and Bernie are still blacked out. It's not a big house, and I always wonder how they managed to fit so many kids in there.

Uncle Ted (Arthur E, line 4) was known to quip that most people married and moved out because they'd got a girl pregnant - he married and moved out in 1946 because his mother was pregnant yet again!

The other survivor of the thirteen Pridmores was eldest brother Ernest. His wife Elizabeth had died in 1928, and by 1939 he'd moved into 164 Southey Green Road to live with his oldest daughter Nellie, her husband Joseph Pearson and their children Desmond and Maureen. The 1939 Register kept being updated over the years when people changed their surnames, and Nellie seems to have remarried twice over in the years to come.

Ernest's other four daughters were also married and starting their families at this point:

98 Boynton Road gives us Lilian Littlewood, her husband Raymond and sons Raymond (junior) and Keith. Someone felt the need in later years to clarify which Raymond was the senior and which the junior, though you'd think it was obvious.

At 85 Adkins Road are Elizabeth Stacey, her husband John and the blacked-out lines will be their sons John and Roy. Roy, sadly no longer with us, gave me that wonderful comment on the 1911 census post, reconnecting my youngest branch of the family tree with his the oldest.

86 Dykes Hall Road is home to Hilda Parkinson, her husband John and their daughter Renee.

And 114 Wood Road houses Ernest's youngest daughter Rose Chappell, her husband Charles and newborn baby Dawn.

Ernest's son William, meanwhile, lives at 92 Allen Street with a Lucy Hall, who's married but not to him, and two officially closed records. I don't know what the domestic arrangement was there.

Albert Pridmore died in 1917, leaving a wife and four children. His wife Margaret died in 1931, and their children all have something unusual about their 1939 register forms. George here at 33 Havelock Street had only married Ellen in August of this year, 1939, so it's strange that they have at least one, probably two, children with them and using the name Pridmore. Were they Ellen's, from her previous marriage, and renamed after their new stepfather? Or was it something like Albert and Margaret, who for some reason lived together for thirteen years before they officially got married? It's a thing for future research.

Albert's next son Ernest has defied family tradition and moved down south. We find him here at 21 Sheila Close, Romford, Essex, with his wife Charlotte and behind the black bar will be their first son John. They'd go on to have daughters Pat and Barbara, who also got in touch after that 1911 census blog!

And Albert's other two children are living together at 8 Boundary Road, back in Sheffield. Strangely, youngest daughter Mary is top of the list as if she's head of the household, while her older brother Harold, his wife and two children, are below her.

I can't find 'honorary Pridmore' John William, Margaret's illegitimate son born in 1919, on the register. Possibly he was in the military already, or just transcribed wrongly. I'm fairly sure he was still around.

John Thomas Pridmore died in 1914. His widow Harriet had remarried, been widowed again, and now lived alone at 10 Kyle Close, where she remained for the rest of her life. Their three children all survived childhood, and had places of their own by 1939.

John's oldest son Ernest William (Bill) was at 14 Lamb Road with his wife Lilian, and officially-closed daughter Jean. Jean would go on to give birth to Mick, who wrote the invaluable family history book "Infantrymen" - check it out, if you haven't already!

Daughter Gladys Nicholson has moved to York, living at 15 Kitchener Street with her husband Norman, and children Norman, Alan, Mavis and Sheila.

And back in Sheffield, other son Frederick is at 39 Dryden Road with his two children Maureen and Kenneth, but his wife Doris isn't with them.

She's in the City General Hospital at the time the register was taken. Her daughter Sylvia was born in early 1940, so whatever put her in the hospital can't have been too serious.

Some other branches of the Pridmore family had died out by the time of the register. Arthur Edward Pridmore died in 1914, and his wife Annie in 1934. Wilfred Pridmore died in 1921 and his wife Chloris in 1933. Neither couple had children.

George Harry Pridmore, who died in 1918, also didn't have children, but his wife May went on to have a big family. She had an illegitimate daughter, Barbara, in 1922 and then a son, Ronald, in 1926 - he was blacked out the last time I looked into the register. May might actually have been in a long-term relationship and not able to remarry without losing her war widow's pension (George was an officer, so it was a good bit of money), but she did eventually marry Leonard Elliott and in 1939 is living at 555 Herries Road with him, her two children and her brother Harry Foster.

Now, if only the 1931 census hadn't been destroyed in a fire during the war, we could be looking forward to seeing that released in a few years' time and maybe filling in a few gaps in the family history. But maybe I'll find some more records to dig into, some day...

I like nerds.

Re-watching The Muppet Show has really brought back to me how big a crush I've always had on Scooter. And the continuing talk of bringing back a new series of the classic show has made me really want to be on it.

I mean, even if Disney hadn't apparently given up on the revival idea (what do you mean "difficulties with deciding on a premise for the series"? Are you all idiots? Just make more episodes of The Muppet Show!), I do appreciate I might not be the first choice for celebrity guest star unless I do something a bit more notable. I can see how "won the World Memory Championship three times, the most recent being seventeen years ago" doesn't put you quite at the top of the Hollywood A-list. But it's still a dream that feels like it might not be entirely impossible to happen one day.

I just want to give Scooter a hug, gosh darn it! Is that such an unreasonable thing to ask? Someone arrange it for me, please!

He-Man and the cowardly horse

Quite some time ago, in a charity shop, I found a Ladybird book called "He-Man and the Memory Stone". What with the memory connection, and already liking both He-Man and Ladybird books (and not actively disliking stones, either), it was an automatic purchase.

Then I noticed that instead of being a story book, it was an "adventure game book", and decided to play through it when I had the time. Fast forward to the year 2026, and I noticed the tiny book in my bookcase where I'd put it the day I bought it and never looked at it since. So I really had to give it a go.

Before you start choosing your own adventure, the book tells you you need a die to roll and a pencil to keep track of He-Man's twelve life points. We're making the choices for He-Man here, the book isn't written in the second person like the classic style. The book's previous owner seems to have had a lot of games and lost a lot of life points. But as it turns out, that wasn't really my experience with the book...

The story starts by telling us that Skeletor has got hold of a "brain-draining stone", and intends to use it to wipe He-Man's memory, from the safety of his lair. But "the stone was not perfect" and it's Man-at-Arms whose mind gets blanked. Skeletor's slaves, the Skelcons, feature in a lot of Ladybird's He-Man storybooks, incidentally. In at least one of the books, Man-at-Arms has his own similar horde of "servants", called the Nerlins, but they don't seem to be around in this one. Indeed, since every single vehicle and machine owned by the heroic warriors immediately stops working the moment Man-at-Arms is out of action, he really might want to think about training an assistant or two. Anyway, He-Man has to set out to confront Skeletor and fix things, and we get our first choice of the book. Do He-Man and Battle-Cat [who isn't normally hyphenated, surely?] leave immediately, or wait until nightfall?

Which is actually not a choice at all, because if He-Man tries to leave immediately, Stratos tells him he'd better wait until nightfall after all, and you're redirected to paragraph 69 anyway.

But now we get a wider range of choices. And I figure that He-Man tells Battle-Cat to plunge through the undergrowth.

Yes, I think it might be a trap.

And here we reach the point where I resent the book giving me a heavy hint as to what to do. I don't care that Castle Grayskull doesn't have much time (and indeed, we'll see later that it really has quite a lot of time before anything drastic happens), so I'm going to have He-Man attack from both sides, darn it!

But it turns out that doing that only sends you on to 40 anyway, so it didn't really matter.

Which then sends you on to 77, making this paragraph pretty redundant, really.

And then to 108...

And then to 15. Is this a choose your own adventure book, or just a book that you read in a funny order?

Aha, action at last! Although it wasn't very exciting action, because I rolled a 5, which instantly wins. Incidentally, if you roll a 1 it doesn't lose you a life point, it ends the story right there and then. He-Man doesn't die, but we're told it will be a while before he recovers from the poison, and to go back and start the book again.

And now we're off on our very linear travels once more.

He-Man's looking for a horse now? That's the first I've heard of it. I wondered if the direction to paragraph 81 was some kind of typo, although He-Man did mention before the monkey spider that he's hoping to find a quicker mode of transport than poor old Battle-Cat. Bur I'm not a fan of this mysterious horse with a man's mind, and I don't want Battle-Cat to leave, thank you very much.

And on we go. This really is more of a travelogue than an adventure.

No, I'm not going all this way just to send Battle-Cat home and go back to 139 like it said two paragraphs ago! I'm definitely not a fan of Thunder Horse now, but let's call out to him.

Thunder Horse just looks stupid. And if he's too much of a wimp to come near Battle-Cat, what use is he going to be as a mode of transport? I'm not turning to 139, however many times you suggest it.

Thunder Horse is just a big baby. Good riddance, I say. Let's stick with Battle-Cat and turn to 73.

See, we didn't need Thunder Horse - we're just trudging through the plains perfectly fine without him. But we get an actual choice! I decided to hide in the trees.

And so, having scared Beast-Man away earlier without a fight, now we just avoid Screeech entirely. On to 53!

Ah, here are the Sands of Time that Thunder Horse was going to carry He-Man across. And Battle-Cat has decided to go home anyway. He obviously never wanted to be here in the first place. Is it too late to call Thunder Horse back?

Oh well, He-Man's fine with a long walk. He's the most powerful man in the universe, after all. I just can't help feeling I'm missing all the really thrilling parts of this book.

Oh, it's not a choice this time, it's a roll of the dice to see who's coming. I got a 2.

Ah, it's Zoar, not Screeech. Easy mistake to make - they're the same toy, just painted differently. I notice that the text avoids specifying Zoar's gender - in the earliest He-Man media he's male, then later she became the Sorceress in bird-form. Incidentally, if I'd rolled a higher number, the exact same thing would have happened, except it would have been Stratos bringing the food and drink and then flying away again. And we'd still be turning to 79.

Good thing Castle Grayskull isn't under attack or anything, isn't it? Time doesn't seem to be an issue, even without a Thunder Horse to ride, though it's been at least a day and a half now since Skeletor wiped Man-at-Arms's memory.

And this one again made me wonder if there was a typo. It talks about "the hole" as if it's been mentioned before, but it's news to me. Still, He-Man's down the hole now, and we have no choice but to go down the tunnel. This book isn't very generous with its choices.

I can't even remember the last time I had to make any kind of decision.

At least I get to roll the die again. I got a 5, this time.

If I'd got a lower number, it would have led to a scary giant worm, and maybe even an actual fight, but as it turns out we just get a friendly-looking giant mole.

I don't really think the Skelcons are particularly worm-like, but I'm not going to argue with a giant mole. Not that I get the option to argue, of course, just an instruction to turn to 91. And I note that the mole is a 'he' at first, and then becomes an 'it'. Zoar's gender-confusion is contagious.

We're nearly there, apparently.

Skelcons are afraid of moles. They're even bigger babies than Thunder Horse!

And now it's the final confrontation with Skeletor, Lord of Destruction! Clearly we made our final choice of the entire book a couple of dozen sections ago.

This battle was slightly more prolonged than the monkey-spider. I rolled a 3 and then rolled a 6. What an epic conflict.

And that's the end. He-Man saved the day, without losing a single life point or even having a fight with anyone except Skeletor and a monkey-spider. What a rubbish adventure all round.

Flicking through the book, I see that it's possible to clash with Webstor, Whiplash, Trap-Jaw, Evil-Lyn, Beast-Man, Screeech and other monsters too, but I seem to have bypassed all of that, possibly as a result of refusing to go for a ride on Thunder Horse. The moral of the story is that if you see a horse who's such a big wuss that he's scared of cats, let him carry you across the Sands of Time. It'll maybe be a bit more exciting for you.