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...