Don't touch the sleeping pills, they mess with my head

 Just as a follow-up to the post the other day, when Simon and Florence do their duet it should really be Ship To Wreck. The general feeling of it fits nicely with Simon's sleep issues...

Recommendation

 I'm writing this more to remind myself than to inform the world of blog-readers, but if anyone needs an emergency plumber in Redditch, their first call should be to Plumbfix Solutions.

(Writing this kind of thing in my blog is the one and only way to preserve it for next time I'm trying to remember "who was that really good plumber?" This blog is eternal, and any other attempt to make a note for future reference will always get somehow lost. I know this from experience.)

Welcome to the House of Secrets

My blog posts about comics have been getting a lot of attention from people and/or robots just recently, so here's another! Golden Orbit comic & sci-fi fairs, as the website proudly boasts, have been running in the north of England and the midlands for over forty years. Although the Nottingham one, which I used to personally love more than thirty years ago, doesn't happen any more, I live near Birmingham now, so I always like to go along to the latest one here.

And even if like me you've got no money, there's always something wonderful to be found there - just look what I picked up yesterday, for only £1!

House of Secrets no.78, cover-dated June 1966, actually on sale at the start of March, about a week before Bob Haney's fortieth birthday, about a month before Bernard Baily's fiftieth and about three months before Jack Sparling's fiftieth. So let's celebrate these three great comic creators by reading through this great comic! (Although this blog post is more about the adverts than the stories themselves, because I just find them fascinating. Believe me, though, the stories are both really wonderful too!)

A note on the cover - the solar eclipse in the story is not in any way "secret". How do you have a secret solar eclipse, anyway?

But House of Secrets, at this point in its history, contained every two months one adventure for Prince Ra-Man, and one for Eclipso. Or sometimes there'd be just one big adventure in which the two title characters battled each other. Prince Ra-Man is a hero, but Eclipso (very unusually for the time) is a comic about a super-villain!

And both were apparently written by Bob Haney. The internet (or the user of it who researches uncredited comic writers and updates the Grand Comics Database with his findings) seems to have decided now that Haney did write Ra-Man, although it used to be attributed to someone else. And I can believe it - actually, Prince Ra-Man feels a lot more like Haney's typical writing than Eclipso (unarguably Haney's creation) always did. I've mentioned a few times before on this blog just how cool Bob Haney was, but it can't hurt to mention it again. He was amazing.

Also super-cool and happening were the Go-Go Checks! This is from that era of DC where all their comics had the checks at the top of the covers! Groovy, man!

The inside front cover tells us that Superman's on TV! And helpfully lists the local TV stations that are showing it! I've never understood why American television and radio have those four-letter codes starting with W or K. I suppose I could find out in a matter of seconds if I just looked it up on Wikipedia, but I like to preserve a little bit of ignorance here and there. Anyway, this wasn't even a new TV series; it was made in the fifties, but was being repeated, in colour, at this point in time.

We start this issue with Prince Ra-Man's adventure - uncredited, but written by Bob Haney and drawn by Bernard Baily. Sometimes Eclipso was the first story in the comic, sometimes Ra-Man was. Prince Ra-Man had only recently taken over this half of the comic - previously it chronicled the adventures of Mark Merlin, who investigated occult mysteries. Then in House of Secrets no.73, Mark ended up in the dimension of Ra, died, and came back to Earth reincarnated as Prince Ra-Man, complete with super mind-over-matter powers and a more superheroic look. He inherited Mark's supporting cast and girlfriend Elsa, but it was stressed that Mark Merlin was in fact dead, and Prince Ra-Man was something different. But also the same. If you see what I mean. It was all rather weird and ambiguous.

In this issue, we open with a wealthy playboy named Whitney Hargrave announcing that he challenges Prince Ra-Man to a contest of occult powers. Ra-Man does indeed show up and accept the challenge, which Hargrave thought he could win with the help of rigged props and some beginner-level genuine magic powers he's learnt. Ra-Man wins easily and stresses that he only showed up to teach Hargrave that amateurs really shouldn't meddle in this kind of thing. The audience all leave, jeering at Hargrave for being a bungler and faker.

So Hargrave vows to get revenge - in the course of his playboy globetrotting, he's acquired a servant called Jambo (by throwing himself in the path of an attacking bull gorilla in the Mountains of the Moon, which is a little hard to picture, but was enough to oblige Jambo to serve Hargrave forever). Jambo reluctantly tells Hargrave how to summon and control Lord Leopard, a magical being of enormous power. His powers, sadly, include the ability to hypnotise Hargrave before Hargrave can say the magic words to put himself in control.

The Leopard Lord makes Hargrave summon all his wealthy friends back to his mansion, and then takes control of all of them too. But Jambo has escaped and warned Prince Ra-Man and Elsa! That's the first six pages, and now it's time for some ads.

Our "Published as a public service" page for this issue (there was one in every DC comic) is about debunking health myths. Despite this, I'm pretty sure a steak continued to be the standard treatment for a black eye in every more humorous comic for many many years to come.

And that weird looking Kat was in every DC comic of the time too, talking about model kits. Did kids of the sixties like this kind of thing? I'll never understand it myself. That 80-page giant Superboy comic is fun, though, reprinting a lot of old classics. And now we resume with the final six pages of Prince Ra-Man and Lord Leopard...

Lord Leopard turns out to be more powerful even than Prince Ra-Man. He puts Elsa under his spell too, and fights off all of Ra-Man's telekinetic attempts to subdue him with contemptuous ease. Ra-Man flees back home to Mystery Hill, where he adopts more subtle means. Luckily, he still retains Mark Merlin's old power to put his mind into his black cat, Memakata, and still retains his new Ra-Man powers when he's in the cat's body. So in cat form, he manages to elude the Leopard Lord long enough to free Hargrave, who quickly says the magic words to give him control over the all-powerful leopard man. Hargrave then banishes the Leopard Lord back to where he came from, and renounces his desire to impress people with such dangerous powers.

Well, until the next issue, anyway, as the narrative caption at the end of the story tells us! Some playboys never learn.

And at the bottom of the page, we have a rather strange advert for two consecutive issues of Strange Adventures, each of which contained three short one-off twist-ending stories with no recurring characters. Maybe someone really liked the cover of the previous issue (to be fair, it really is awesome) and thought it needed to be seen again before it disappears from the comic shelves!

Cap's Hobby Hints, another constant feature of DC comics in those days, teaches boys like Jimmy a plausible excuse they can use if their mother catches them experimenting with women's hair clips.

And the Direct Currents feature - a new innovation - highlights the Go-Go Checks branding and constant use of the DC initials at the heart of the 1966 marketing strategy. And also lists a selection of the comics that were coming out in the next week or two. We've got Superman, Wonder Woman and the Teen Titans for superhero fans; Lois Lane for her devoted followers and Jerry Lewis for his; two war comics and Sea Devils for whoever read those; and this month's Showcase gave us the really excellent debut of the Inferior Five!

The letters page (another new innovation, replacing the throwaway text feature that was still showing up in comics like House of Secrets until just recently) is mostly about the enthusiastic reader response to the 'Eclipso versus Ra-Man' issues. There will indeed be another one next bi-month, but then the issue after that will be back to separate adventures. And that, strangely enough, will be the final time we see either of our heroes in this comic! With no.81, House of Secrets reverts to those twist-ending stories that flooded so many other comics of the time. Eclipso and Ra-Man both vanished into obscurity, which is a terrible shame.

And now it's time for Eclipso! This one's written by Bob Haney and drawn by Jack Sparling. Eclipso was 'hero and villain in one man' - he's an evil villain, within the body of Bruce Gordon, who was cut by a black diamond during a solar eclipse and found that he transformed into Eclipso whenever another eclipse happened.

The exact mechanics of how this worked kept changing over the course of the series (which had been running since House of Secrets no.61) as Bruce, his girlfriend Mona and Mona's dad Professor Simon Bennet tried to remove the curse of Eclipso from him. By this point, Eclipso physically emerges from Bruce's body whenever an eclipse happens anywhere in the world, and can only be disintegrated again by a blinding flash of light.

And so, with an eclipse due apparently at the North Pole (it's watched by an eskimo and a seal), Bruce seals himself in a container in his lab, equipped with bright lights set to vanquish Eclipso as soon as he emerges. But Eclipso is too clever to be trapped like that, and uses his power to cloak himself in black light and escape again.

But this time, instead of immediately launching his latest evil plan to take over the world, Eclipso just goes into hiding. He doesn't reappear until the next eclipse happens, in England this time. He wants to expose himself to another eclipse, hoping this will permanently separate him from Bruce and leave him in existence forever. That's the end of our first seven pages - time for some more ads!

You have to turn your comic sideways to read this one. 100 magnets, for 79 cents! That's enough money to buy six and a half comics in 1966 America, but they do look fun. Amaze your stupid-looking yellow-haired friend by holding a magnet to a piece of paper! Build a dog or a tank out of magnets! The fun never ends!

And you can find some more comics here - The Brave and the Bold, which had team-ups of two superheroes every issue at this time, pairs the Flash with the Doom Patrol. And there's a gorilla on the cover. It was universally understood at this point that a gorilla on the cover vastly increased the sales of any comic. DC were careful to sparingly apportion the gorillas across the titles that needed it, not wanting to overuse the gimmick but wanting to maximise the sales. And meanwhile, Batman fights Death-Man. Not an all-time great foe for the caped crusader.

But Superman and Lois are more impressed by the new comic Swing With Scooter - strangely described as "a Showcase presentation", which is a holdover from the way it was intended to debut in Showcase, the try-out comic for new ideas. But the Beatles were so cool, that Scooter ended up being granted his own ongoing comic straight away! It wasn't actually all that great, but he looks like Paul McCartney and has adventures like Archie, so what could go wrong?

Back to six more pages of Eclipso. The second eclipse actually turns him into a big red monster, but he retains his intellect and powers, and gets to work with his latest master-plan - to uncover the secret treasure of Stonehenge. Unfortunately, the treasure (buried by ancient Britons) turns out to be a magic meteorite which strips the villain of his new powers and leaves him vulnerable to Bruce's photon grenade. Foiled again, until next time!

Next time, he'll tangle with Prince Ra-Man and Whitney Hargrave, so don't miss it!

Now this is a fascinating page. A silly half-page filler comic basically tells the exact same story as the Prince Ra-Man adventure, but makes a joke of it! Was it a coincidence, or a deliberate thing? The magic words to control the genie were Abra-Zabra, while the magic words to control the Leopard Lord were Simba Yenah, but the same thing happens when the magic being takes over.

And the ad at the bottom of the page is particularly badly planned. By now, we're reading every set of DC initials, and we naturally see "Don't Choose" the Go-Go Checks. The "hesitate" in between the two words is very easily missed. So everyone go out and choose something without Go-Go Checks on it, right now!

Or go out and buy some G. I. Joe toys. And join the G. I. Joe club! Offer good only in the USA and Canada, which makes me wonder if all that many Canadians really wanted to pretend to be American soldiers. Or maybe I'm just envious because it isn't open to me. Andy and George are having fun with it, anyway!

And the back cover gives us a plug for the brand-new Batman TV show (which is about to take over all DC comics with its staggering popularity) while advertising hobby kits with all your favourite heroes!

They don't make them like this any more!

Seville and Garfunkel

Facebook saw fit to show me this post today, which I thought was strange. I've barely said anything on Facebook about my all-consuming obsession with Simon the chipmunk, and even less about my great fondness for Simon and Garfunkel, so perhaps the algorithms just think I'm into "Weird Hollywood"...

Much as I appreciate "Joe" for drawing this, I'm not sure it's as clever or original as he seems to believe it is. But even so, I think it's great to see what would probably make a rather nice duet. Simon has the deepest voice of the three Chipmunks, and he might mesh very well with Garfunkel's high harmonies. I want to hear it now.

The single panel cartoon resonates with a lot of the history of Simon and Art, in fact, so here are a few things you might not know if your only reaction to seeing it is 'Oh, yes, Simon and Garfunkel, I get it.'

"Mom! There's a singing moose in front of the house!"

Art Garfunkel has previous experience of singing to cartoon animals. Back in 1998, he narrates in song the really excellent episode of Arthur, "The Ballad of Buster Baxter". Buster returns to the series at the start of season 3, having spent the previous year travelling the world with his father and starring in a spinoff show, Postcards from Buster. This episode chronicles Buster struggling to fit back in with his friends, and for some reason Art Garfunkel the moose is hanging around and singing about Buster's feelings. In the picture above, Buster complains that the verse about him being sad is played to much too cheerful music, and so Art complies by making it more melancholy. The whole thing really does work, believe me!

"Why would they come to our concert just to boo us?"

I'd also like to see this great performance with Lisa Simpson, of course ("Lisa's Rival", 1994, although more of my readers here are likely to know this one already...). Which leads us nicely into the subject of Simon, since being consistently overshadowed by Alvin is very much part of his character!

"Naturally!"

Although (as everyone should know) Simon isn't in the habit of wearing a shirt with a big S on the front, that has only been the exclusive preserve of Alvin since 1961. Before that, all three chipmunks were invariably depicted with their first letter, which certainly made it easier to tell which was which before they had any kind of settled character model. Perhaps in his duet with Garfunkel, Simon is just harking back to the days of "The Chipmunk Song", 1958?

"She's really cool and unique."

In this really quite awesome interview from 2019, Simon says he'd like to duet with Florence + the Machine. You've got to admire his taste. In the same interview, Simon says he'd like to have a mohawk, which I agree would look great, but I must say I can't really picture how well his voice would work paired with Florence. Everybody squeak? I'd still really like to hear it, though!

Little and Large

 Let me introduce you to a pair of great characters of Victorian fiction. Our first, in Wilkie Collins' 1871 novella "Miss or Mrs.?" is Lady Winwood, the diminutive cousin of the central character:

'Lady Winwood's brisk blue eyes looked brightly up in despotic command from an elevation of four feet eleven (in her shoes).' If there's one thing Wilkie Collins was great at, it was summing up a character in a simple sentence. Another thing he was known for (way ahead of his time, in this and a lot of other things) was creating a lot of characters who don't fit the standard Victorian archetypes - unusually small and large women (for the latter, there's the wonderful Mrs Wragge who 'towered to a stature of two or three inches above six feet' in "No Name"), deaf and blind characters in central roles, diverse ethnicity, there's a bit of everything in Wilkie Collins.

Lady Winwood takes charge of the situation in this story - Natalie is being forced to marry, very much against her will, Richard Turlington ('Aged eight-and-thirty; standing stiffly and sturdily at a height of not more than five feet six' - we're certainly left in no doubt about people's relative sizes in this one!) although she loves Launcelot Linzie, twenty-three and a lot less unpleasant all round. Natalie herself is fifteen and the wedding is to take place immediately after her sixteenth birthday. It's up to Lady Winwood to get them to work finding a way around it!

This is another thing that fills Wilkie Collins' fiction - a fascination with the intricacies of Victorian marriage laws. For a man who himself never married and scandalised nineteenth-century society by his relationships with women, he was amazingly well-informed about what you could and couldn't do if you wanted to tie the knot! Luckily, it turns out while that Launce and Natalie can't get a marriage licence without falsely declaring they have her father's consent and risking prosecution, they can secretly marry by banns on condition Natalie stays with her father after the wedding until she's old enough that Launce can't be charged with abduction. It's all very technical, but great fun to read, I promise!

Our second great character is 'a lady of a great deal more importance--in size, at any rate.' Barbara Fauntleroy features in "Mildred Arkell", the 1865 novel by Mrs Henry Wood.

Barbara is not just large ('looking as big as a house' is among the complimentary descriptions of her scattered throughout the book), she's loud, cheerful and shows little regard for the conventions of Victorian decency. She and her sister Lizzie are very independent as they make their way through life. 'Strapping, vulgar, good-humoured damsels, these two, as you have before heard; with as little refinement in looks, words, and manner as their father had possessed before them.' Barbara wears bright clothes and 'no end of gold trinkets', having ditched the black crape exactly twelve months after their father died - 'It was not fashionable to wear mourning long now, said the Miss Fauntleroys.'

I like Bab and Lizzie, but Travice Arkell, one of the heroes of the novel, doesn't feel the same way. There are a lot of people called Arkell in this book - it spans nearly thirty years and three generations - and Travice is in love with and wishes he could marry his second cousin Lucy Arkell. But Lucy is poor, Travice's father is on the verge of bankruptcy, and Barbara Fauntleroy is very wealthy. Travice's scheming mother gets to work convincing Lucy to reject Travice because marriage would ruin them both and anyway Travice likes Barbara Fauntleroy, and convincing Travice to marry Barbara because Lucy doesn't like him anyway and is going to marry someone else.

Mrs Henry Wood was of course married, to the extent of choosing to be published under her husband's name, but wasn't quite as fascinated with the intricate details of marriage law as Wilkie Collins. She was more interested in the moral side of things.

Travice, heartbroken, feels he might as well help his father's business by sacrificing himself to marriage with Barbara, even though he finds her horrifying and repulsive. Then, after proposing and being accepted but delaying setting the date because of his horror of a miserable life doing his marital duty to Barbara, he finds that he's waited too long to save the business, that Lucy has loved him all along and had no intention of marrying Tom Palmer, that Travice's aunt Mrs Dundyke is wealthy enough to restore Arkell & Son anyway, that Lucy's aunt Mildred is also wealthy and will leave Lucy plenty of money, and that everything would be happy if only he hadn't already agreed to marry Miss Fauntleroy.

'Of a sensitive, nervous, excitable temperament, the explanation of that evening, taken in conjunction with the dreadful tension to which his mind had been latterly subjected, far greater than any one had suspected, was too much for Travice Arkell. Conscious that Lucy Arkell passionately loved him; knowing now that she had the money, without which he could not marry, and that part of that money was actually advanced to save his father's credit; knowing also, that he must never more think of her, but must tie himself to one whom he abhorred; that he and Lucy must never again see each other in life, but as friends, and not too much of that, he became ill.'

Travice - who, it has to be said, does not really impress a modern reader with his mental stability - falls into a brain-fever that seems likely to kill him. The legal requirement to marry Barbara after having proposed doesn't come into it; Travice is morally obliged to go through with it and spend his life shackled to the terrifying woman! He's just lucky that Barbara is a bit more sensible than the other characters in the book.

Since Travice's delirious ravings seem to have circulated all around the town, Barbara can't help noticing that he's not too keen on marrying her after all. She comes to him and cheerfully tells him to stop being silly, and go and marry Lucy. Cutting short his wailing that he's got no choice but to marry Barbara and will do his best to be a dutiful husband even though he hates her, Barbara (probably thinking she's dodged a bullet) puts her foot down and insists on breaking off the engagement.

It's a very modern way to resolve a very old-fashioned Victorian plotline, and the final scene of the book reads like a final scene of a modern-day TV series, all thanks to Barbara Fauntleroy and her good-humoured common-sense!

My time machine works!

You might remember my blog post back in 2009 in which I said that the first thing I'd do if I had a time machine would be to watch episode 3 of The Daleks' Master Plan. If you don't remember it, you might have found it in a google search recently, because I know quite a lot of people or robots have. I would have forgotten I'd ever written it if not for that, actually.

But we've now reached the point in history where episodes 1 and 3 can be seen again, for the first time since 1965, and woohoo! They are REALLY good! Like I said seventeen years ago, The Daleks' Master Plan (unlike really quite a lot of old Doctor Who if we're being totally fair) is brilliantly written, directed and performed, and a real thrill to watch! Terry Nation was absolutely at his best right then, and it's so fantastic that they've finally recovered these gems. It's a great Easter treat!

And by the way, that Time Twisters story, from 2000AD prog 324 in 1983, is an Alan Moore classic that never fails to make me cry. You should check out the collected edition, although I'm lucky to own the original printing and somehow feel like the red ink bleeding through from the competition on the previous page makes it even better this way. You could win a BMX bike, or a runner-up prize of a Firefox electronic game. All you had to do was send in a Sherbet Fountain wrapper, count the number of Sherbet Fountains in the picture and in not more than twelve words complete the sentence "I like Sherbet Fountains because..."

Sherbet Fountains are great.

The Chess Master

 Or "How to qualify for the Microsoft Excel World Championship without being particularly good at Microsoft Excel"

Today's Excel battle, titled "King's Gambit", turned out to be a fine example of the kind of challenge I can do relatively well at despite my lack of really advanced Excel technique and cleverness. So I thought it would be good to write up a walkthrough to give ideas for anyone else who's hoping to do well in these things using only the most basic guesswork and formulas.

Because I did better in this one than I have in any of the cases so far this year - even good enough to get into the second slide of top non-streamed players!

(Four players are streamed live solving the case after the rest of the competitors have finished, and one of them got a higher score than me, so I was 32nd overall today - I've been live-streamed once, and it was really surprisingly nerve-wracking! I'd assumed I'd be fine with it, since I've done memory challenges live plenty of times before, but it turns out it's not quite the same thing...)

But more importantly, there's the slide for the top competitors in the "Masters" category!

Yes, of all the people born in 1976 or earlier ("Mastery" of Excel competitions is a prize for being too old), I was number one, and got my ticket to the online early stages of the World Championship in October!

They've also redesigned the picture I shared last time, to make it a bit clearer, so here's what it looks like now - I'm officially one of the 108 who qualify through the Road to Las Vegas:

So how do I get an impressive 825 points out of a more difficult than usual task? (The top score was 1100, by someone who really knows what he's doing!) Let's go through it, level by level.

In the five minutes before the timer starts, we get to watch a brief video describing the case, and make some last-minute preparations. The video this time didn't tell us much, except that it's about chess, and gave us a glimpse of the instructions and the chess board layouts and notations being used:

I put together a quick list on a blank spreadsheet of board positions (a1, a2 etc) and the Old English Notation of the pieces that start on them, in case such a thing would come in handy, and then it was time to download the case and start the 30-minute timer!

The questions always start out easy and get progressively harder. The first level is a simple request - what's white's 11th move, and so on?

And I used VLOOKUP. There's a running joke among Excel athletes about that extremely popular formula, which has been surpassed by XLOOKUP and other newer, more versatile things, but this is one of those cases where I didn't need to think beyond VLOOKUP, which tells Excel to look ahead a specified number of columns and find what's there.

It needs to look ahead double the specified number, plus 1, since there are separate columns for white and black moves, so it's =VLOOKUP(G71,G71:AL71,G71*2+1)

I mean, you could have done it other ways, but VLOOKUP is still my first go-to in this kind of situation. Quick and easy.

Level 2 introduces us to "long algebraic notation", and asks which piece has moved in each case:

So if it starts with a capital K, Q, B, N or R, it's that piece. If it starts with a lower-case letter, it's a P.

The elegant way to do this would be to use the new-fangled Excel formula REGEXEXTRACT, which can pick out capitals from text strings, and tell it to default to "P" if there aren't any. I'm sure a lot of people went straight to that, but I just did it the quickest way that came to mind, taking the first character using the LEFT formula. =LEFT(G113,1)

And then I manually ran down the list of answers and changed all the lower-case letters to an upper-case P.

It's really not good form to do things manually like that. Easy to make silly mistakes. But this was such a simple task, I just sped through it and did it the quick way. I should probably stop that.

The last easy section is level 3, introducing us to the Old English Notation for pieces:

Look up the name of the piece that starts on the specified square. I started to write a formula to look it up from the chess boards on the other tab, and then I remembered that I'd already written that list after watching the video and before downloading the case! So I just did another VLOOKUP to that list, which I'd added to my handy-dandy 'Alphabet lookups' spreadsheet full of all the other similar lists I've created before these battles. This is the first time one of them has really come in useful...

I did have to quickly add W or B as appropriate to the pieces' names in the list, but =VLOOKUP(G156,'[alphabet lookups.xlsx]Chess'!$A:$C,3,0) still only took a split-second to do.

 Having really raced through three levels, I was having fun with this. But now we move on to the more tricky puzzles, with Level 4. Now we've got a whole string of moves, and we want to know the final resting place of the white queen.

There are a lot of moves in some of these games - the longest of them takes up 214 columns (and I've almost never played a game of chess with more than a hundred moves myself, I don't know about you). So we need to find the last white move to start with a Q, and pick up the final two characters from that cell.

There's sure to be an easier way to concatenate every other column (so as to only get the white moves), find the final Q and pull out the fourth and fifth characters after it, but rather than figuring out what clever formula could do that, I added a whole lot more columns out to the right, after all those moves.

(I remember the days when Excel could only deal with 256 columns, and only went up to IV. Luckily, we've moved on since then...)

So these new formulas (all the way up to column PT or thereabouts), say in every other column =IF(LEFT(G195,1)="Q",G195,"")

That gives us all the white moves of the queen, and there in column HM it concatenates them all together and tells me the final two characters, with =RIGHT(CONCAT(HN195:PT195),2)

 

There's an easier way to get that, all in one formula, no doubt, but I'm happy if I can get an answer in a reasonably fast time without stopping to think about how to do it...

Level 5 complicates things a little bit more - now we want to know which piece has captured the black queen!

This is more tricky, since the algebraic notation doesn't specify which piece was captured, only the piece that does the capturing. But having already set up the formulas for the previous level, I just copied them down and one cell to the right, to establish where the black queen finished up. And then underneath those cells, I put another one, picking out every time when a white move involved a capture on the position that was the black queen's final stop. =IF(RIGHT(K258,3)="x"&$HM258,K258,"")

And then I concatenated all of those, and put it next to the question, back to the left of the spreadsheet, to see what it looked like.

Obviously, this isn't a foolproof method. There were multiple captures on the place where the black queen ended up, mostly, and it might not have been captured at all. But I could see from the hints for the first three questions which one was the correct one to pick, and that the third question must be an "X" for "not captured at all". For the others, I just plucked the final capture on that square, hoping at least some of them would be correct.

Tracing the exact movements of the pieces would have been much more complicated. And as it turns out, 14 of my 20 answers on this level were correct, so that worked out quite nicely.

But now, with time ticking away, I moved back to the 'bonus questions' at the start, to hopefully pick up a few extra points.

The first three are relatively easy. The other two require keeping track of what's moved where all through the game, so are impenetrable to the way I've worked things out so far.

The first is just a question of counting how many times the letter N shows up in the level 1 moves. The second is just a matter of copying the first moves from levels 4-7, pasting them into one column and counting how many times each appears. And for the third, counting how many castling moves there are, I typed in a ridiculously unwieldy formula. We're not about being elegant here, just about doing the thing the first way that comes to mind. =COUNTIF(G197:DI216,"0-0")+COUNTIF(G197:DI216,"0-0-0")+COUNTIF(G241:HF260,"0-0")+COUNTIF(G241:HF260,"0-0-0")+COUNTIF(G293:FE312,"0-0")+COUNTIF(G293:FE312,"0-0-0")+COUNTIF(J337:HO356,"0-0")+COUNTIF(J337:HO356,"0-0-0")

So, with time ticking away (although I actually still had at least five minutes; I always panic a bit too early) I had a look at levels 6 and 7 to see if I could pick up a few more points by guessing the answers. And level 6 seems quite good for that - it wants to know where the black king is at the end of the game:

Actually figuring this out, with the added complication of writing into the formula where the king ends up after castling, would take too long. But the hints for the first three tell us that the answer is in column g, c and c respectively.

Now, it seems to me that a black king is going to end the game, more often than not, in rank 8 where it starts. So I might score a few cheeky points by putting g8, c8 and c8, and then (why not?) copying down c8 into all the other answer boxes too!

And this strategy proved to be the best one! (Well, maybe the second best, after actually solving the question, but hey) - as it later transpired, no fewer than seven of the twenty games ended with the black king on c8! And the first one was in g8 too, so that's eight questions on level 6 I got "correct"! See, this is a way to pick up a LOT of cheeky points, and I almost feel guilty about it, almost.

Level 7 is less hopeful - they want to see the entire movement history of a given piece!

Yeah, I'm not going to do that in anywhere near the time left to me. But hey, I reasoned, there might be some cases where a piece doesn't move at all, so the entire answer will be that piece's starting position!

And I'd already got that lookup list of all the pieces' starting positions, and this time I used XLOOKUP, just to show how up to date I am. =XLOOKUP(LEFT(G337,1)&H337,'[alphabet lookups.xlsx]Chess'!$C:$C,'[alphabet lookups.xlsx]Chess'!$A:$A)

And what do you know? Question 132 does indeed give us a game where the white king's bishop pawn doesn't move all through the game. So I picked up an extra nine points for that one, too! I bet white ended up getting trapped in a back-rank mate, behind those three pawns. I've done that many times myself.

So that's how to get an above-average score, by a fair bit of luck, a bit of quick-thinking, and not all that much Excel expertise! I just hope there'll be a few more cases to come that cater to my unique approach to these things...