Your latest HSBC savings account statement is available to view

I don't really need an email from my bank to tell me that my latest bank statement is available to view. But if they have to send one every month, do they have to illustrate it with weird staged photos like this one?

I'm almost certain that nobody has ever shown such delight and excitement on reading their bank statement online. Or rejoiced in their bank balance while sitting in a scenic location and enjoying an al fresco cup of tea and bowl of fruit.

Or maybe it's just me. Maybe people do that all the time if they're the sort who can afford a state-of-the-art wheelchair or a height-of-fashion woolly hat? But there's no need for the bank to rub it in like that when they're emailing paupers like me about their meagre balance!

All eyes on Vaduz

 I've mentioned before that I love the Nations League. I mean, I'm not really bothered about whether England can avoid messing everything up against the Republic of Ireland tonight, I'm unmoved by Scotland's crunch game with Poland tomorrow and only take a passing interest in what happens between Wales and Iceland the day after. No, the one that fascinates me is the clash of the titans in group D1 tomorrow night, when Liechtenstein play the mighty San Marino!

Is there anyone in the world who hasn't been blown away by The World's Worst Football Team's amazing run of form this autumn? They won a game in September! Conquering the comparatively high-ranked Liechtenstein (currently ranked 200th of the 210 national football teams recognised by FIFA, and thus ten whole places above San Marino) and recording their first win since 2004 (also against Liechtenstein, in a friendly), bringing the all-time total to two games won! And they followed it up in October by drawing with Gibraltar! The San Marino Stadium in Serravalle has become a fortress, where the Sammarinese are unbeatable!

And now they travel to Liechtenstein knowing another win will put them top of the table and promote them to the unheard-of heights of Group C in the 2026 Nations League! Even a draw will get our heroes a play-off against one of the two best fourth-placed Group C teams (currently the comparatively huge countries of Luxembourg and Latvia) and keep those promotion hopes alive! It's all terribly exciting.

I'm not a knight

 There's been a rash of people asking me for memory advice lately (someone dug up an old post on the Art of Memory forum, and so a lot of other new memory-training enthusiasts discovered it and me), and despite all my polite requests, these people still keep addressing me as "sir".

I really don't like that. I get this from my dad, who would often get a new kid in his primary school class who tried to 'sir' him, and got the inevitable reply "Don't call me sir, I'm not a knight!" But it does bother me unreasonably when people call me Sir, or Mr Pridmore, or anything like that. I don't like honorifics. I don't merit any kind of deference or submission, and if you think I do then you're labouring under a misunderstanding as to how the whole friendly learning environment of memory sports works.

I mean, I know I have plenty of friends who would never dream of calling me sir, and doubtless no end of deadly enemies who would contemptuously refuse to call me sir even if I asked them to, but there's just this contingent of people who insist on doing it. Please don't, everyone! Thank you!

Safari Jo(e) does it again!

 There's a big elephant in the room of my occasional posts about the comics work of people who wrote my all-time favourite cartoon, Thundercats. I do have fun appreciating the varied and fascinating comics produced by the likes of Leonard Starr, Bob Haney, Howard Post and Ron Goulart in the course of their long, productive and successful lives, and I'd like to share more wonders from people who wrote really great Thundercats episodes and contributed in one way or another to really cool comics too. But there's a shortage of people who fall into that very narrow category, and there's just that one name that I haven't really been able to do an article about.

And that's Stephen Perry. I've refrained from writing about him for two reasons. Search for him on the internet, if you can find him among all the other notable people with the same name, and you'll only find one thing - the gory details of how he was horribly murdered in 2010. Maybe with a few added notes to the effect that he was penniless and unhappy before he died. It's the kind of thing that deflates a light-hearted ramble about comics, whether you actually mention it or not.

I might have written something before now anyway, if there was a comic of his I wanted to admire at length, but that's the second problem right there. His Thundercats writing was really, really great! There should be some other work of his out there that could captivate me, right? And I've tried my best to plough through Timespirits, which sounds like a personal project that would give full scope to his creativity, and I can't even finish it. Don't ask me why. Likewise, the opening story of Psi-Force, where Perry had the job of introducing the team of pre-designed new characters - something he should have been very good at - doesn't capture my interest at all. There must be something out there, surely, but I've never found it yet.

But someone has been chatting to me on the internet about their recent discovery of the wonders of Thundercats, including reference to this very specific subject, so having got all that bad stuff out in the open, please join me in scrutinising Safari Joe!

Joe with an E, you'll notice. That's the name that appears in the title card of the cartoon, and when they made a toy of the character, he was Safari Joe with an E too. But for some reason when the cartoon episode was adapted into comic form, with Steve Perry again the only credited writer, he'd changed for some reason into Safari Jo!

That's the title page of the 14th issue of Marvel's Star Comics Thundercats series. A bit of a strange double-credit for Steve Perry adapting the teleplay of Steve Perry, and when it was reprinted in the British Marvel comic they only credited him once, but at least it doesn't leave us in any doubt as to who wrote it!

Apart from a few new narrative captions, the script of the comic is basically identical to the dialogue of the cartoon. And it was a story specifically written for the animated form, which loses something when reduced to a comic. There are just two fun points worth talking about in detail...

In the cartoon version of this scene, Wilykit's line "I thought Panthro fixed it!" is missing. Safari Joe's quip is still there, but is a completely meaningless non-sequitur! I mean, even with the feed line it's still pretty meaningless, but at least it doesn't come completely out of nowhere. I assume it was in the original cartoon script, but somehow ended up being cut out to trim the episode for time, by someone who didn't really think it through. It's good to see the comic adaptation making some sort of sense of it, at least!

And incidentally, this whole spaceboarding scene is a specific reference to the earlier episode The Time Capsule, written by Peter Lawrence. This is intriguing, because Thundercats was a series where individual writers had an amazing amount of freedom to do their own thing without editorial interference! It's very rare to see such continuity between episodes written by different people! Which leads into the second fascinating difference...

The technical details of the Thundercats' powers and weapons are a lot more extensive in the comic than they were on screen. Maybe cut for time or pacing again, or maybe added into the comic script because technical jargon works a lot better in written form? But that's not the really fascinating bit. The bit that's really fun is Tygra's weakness - "Tygra cannot swim."

I don't know if that's something Stephen Perry randomly made up, or if it was a line from the character bible. Cheetara's weakness (can only maintain top speed for short distances) is certainly a defined character trait, used by head writer Leonard Starr elsewhere. But then, that's a standard feature of real-life cheetahs, while real-life tigers are excellent swimmers. So who knows?

The point is, that's not how it sounds on screen. In the cartoon episode, we get the absolutely ludicrous line "Except when he's invisible, Tygra cannot swim."

That was clearly an editorial change to Stephen Perry's script. It's handwaving away the episode The Fireballs of Plun-Darr (written by William Overgard), in which Tygra does a lot of swimming. Most but not all of it while he's invisible. Watching the episode for the first time as a ten-year-old, I thought this line extraordinarily stupid and thought they would have been better off just not lampshading it like that [people didn't say 'lampshading' in those days, but you know what I mean].

Because this is exactly the kind of thing that Thundercats never did! As mentioned above, each writer just did their own thing and nobody changed their scripts to fit with what some other writer had said! Except in this case. Was it Peter Lawrence's editing, or Stephen Perry noticing the discrepancy and fixing it? I'd like to know. One of these days I'll track Peter Lawrence down and bombard him with hopelessly minute questions about a cartoon he made forty years ago, but I'll wait till I've gone completely insane first.

Because Panthro's only weakness ("Panthro fears bats") in the following scene is also contradicted by The Fireballs of Plun-Darr! The comical ending of that episode tells us that Panthro's scared of spiders! And neither Lawrence nor Perry felt the need to add an "and spiders too" to the cartoon or comic script!

So that's the fun of Safari Jo or Joe - rest in peace, Stephen Perry! A great hero of cartoon history!

Return of the Hat

"There is probably no better proof of the accuracy of that definition of man which describes him as an imitative animal, than is to be found in the fact that the verdict of humanity is always against any individual member of the species who presumes to differ from the rest. A man is one of a flock, and his wool must be of the general color. He must drink when the rest drink, and graze where the rest graze. When the others are frightened by a dog, and scamper, starting with the right leg, he must be frightened by a dog, and scamper, starting with the right leg also. If he is not frightened, or even if, being frightened, he scampers and starts out of step with the rest, it is a proof at once that there is something not right about him. Let a man walk at noonday with perfect composure of countenance and decency of gait, with not the slightest appearance of vacancy in his eyes or wildness in his manner, from one end of Oxford Street to the other without his hat, and let every one of the thousands of hat-wearing people whom he passes be asked separately what they think of him, how many will abstain from deciding instantly that he is mad, on no other evidence than the evidence of his bare head? Nay, more; let him politely stop each one of those passengers, and let him explain in the plainest form of words, and in the most intelligible manner, that his head feels more easy and comfortable without a hat than with one, how many of his fellow mortals who decided that he was mad on first meeting him, will change their opinion when they part from him after hearing his explanation? In the vast majority of cases, the very explanation itself would be accepted as an excellent additional proof that the intellect of the hatless man was indisputably deranged." 

So said Wilkie Collins in 1857, the golden age of hat-wearing. If only we lived in that era now, but I'm doing my best to keep the hat-wearing dream alive. I've been sadly hatless most of this year, after the previous one was blown under a tube train in February or thereabouts (which was a refreshingly new way to lose a hat, considering that I normally just accidentally leave them behind on trains), and what with having no money I didn't really want to splash out on another one straight away. But today I couldn't resist the sight of a cool black hat on sale on a market stall, and splashed out a tenner on it. No longer will Victorians think me mad when I invent my time machine and go back to the good old days!

Collins goes on to observe of his hero Andrew Treverton: "Local reports described him as having bought the first cottage he could find which was cut off from other houses by a wall all round it. It was further rumored that he was living like a miser; that he had got an old man-servant, named Shrowl, who was even a greater enemy to mankind than himself; that he allowed no living soul, not even an occasional charwoman, to enter the house; that he was letting his beard grow, and that he had ordered his servant Shrowl to follow his example. In the year eighteen hundred and forty-four, the fact of a man's not shaving was regarded by the enlightened majority of the English nation as a proof of unsoundness of intellect. At the present time Mr. Treverton's beard would only have interfered with his reputation for respectability. Thirteen years ago it was accepted as so much additional evidence in support of the old theory that his intellects were deranged. He was at that very time, as his stockbroker could have testified, one of the sharpest men of business in London; he could argue on the wrong side of any question with an acuteness of sophistry and sarcasm that Dr. Johnson himself might have envied; he kept his household accounts right to a farthing, his manner was never disturbed in the slightest degree from morning to night, his eyes were all quickness and intelligence—but what did these advantages avail him, in the estimation of his neighbors, when he presumed to live on another plan than theirs, and when he wore a hairy certificate of lunacy on the lower part of his face? We have advanced a little in the matter of partial toleration of beards since that time; but we have still a good deal of ground to get over. In the present year of progress, eighteen hundred and fifty-seven, would the most trustworthy banker's clerk in the whole metropolis have the slightest chance of keeping his situation if he left off shaving his chin?"

... and I fully support his views on beardiness, too! I do take personal credit for making beards fashionable again, having worn one since the time when nobody else did, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before once more we live in enlightened times when anyone venturing outside the house hatless is shunned as a lunatic!

By the way, you really should read "The Dead Secret" - it's a criminally overlooked masterpiece of Collins' early days as a writer. Read the book, wear a hat and a beard, or I'll think your intellect is deranged!

Not enough hours in the day

 Except today, of course. Today has the right number of hours, apparently. I don't know if it's the extra hour or just that I've been so busy just lately, but today I've got so much done, I'm really impressed with myself! I've talked to all the people I've been needing to talk to, sorted out everything I've been needing to sort out, generally done everything. And it's only quarter past five now!

I should live on Mars. Days there last 35 minutes longer than days here, I'm told. It's clearly what I need, and the commute to work would be easy enough if I build a fast spaceship.

It's an improvement!

 The first two rounds of the Microsoft Excel World Championship were a lot of fun! I certainly found the first one easier than the second, but I wasn't too disappointed with how I performed in both. And I did say Brittany Deaton is awesome, so I don't mind losing to her. Reaching the round of 64 is a new high for me! Onwards and upwards next year!

This is the important bit of the draw:

But if you want to look at the whole thing and notice that my scores wouldn't have beaten a lot of opponents, the full details can be seen by squinting at this little picture, or clicking on it. The tasks for the morning session (yellow in the left-hand border) were different from the ones in the afternoon session (green), so the scores aren't comparable between the two.

Now I can happily spectate the remaining rounds, especially the climax in Las Vegas at the start of December! Excellent!