Turned out nice again

After all my whining yesterday, the weather was actually quite nice today, and almost warm - certainly nice enough to cycle from Leicester to Oadby without dropping dead. The othello was fun, too, we had eight players, more clocks than we knew what to do with (we could have built them into a little tower, now I come to think of it, but that didn't occur to me at the time) and I won most of my games, drawing with Iain in the first round and just making a mess of things against Andrew to ensure that I ended up second instead of joint-first.

There was also the traditional lunch in the excellent pub down the road (The Old Library, which is right next door to the current Oadby library, so I don't understand why they bothered to move it), where I impressed our newcomer Rob with my status of world memory champion, and then even more so when a stranger at the bar recognised me and said hello.

And, since it's so nearby, I got home nice and early and didn't have to get up early in the morning. All othello tournaments should be like this.

Winter sports

It's the Oadby regional tomorrow, and I traditionally (ie for the last two years) take my bike on the train to Leicester and cycle out to the Baptist church where the competition is traditionally (for the last four or five years at least) held. But it's still really cold out there, and it's been spring-like for the last couple of years by this time. It's disgraceful. Still, I'm sure the tournament will be fun. I'll also make an effort to break with tradition and remember to bring my clock.

Drat those Germans

England lost to Germany in the semi-final of the hockey world cup today. You'd think they would have been more considerate, knowing how I love to find bad omens in minority-interest sporting events and relate them to the world memory championships. I tell you, if I don't win this year it won't be because I haven't done any training, it'll be because of bad omens. Evil spirits, that kind of thing.

Weight a minute

I've been trying to lose weight for the last couple of weeks, in a half-hearted, still-eating-lots-of-sweets kind of way. But it just occurred to me today that the one time in recent memory when I did genuinely lose a lot of weight and become really quite slender was back in early 2003, when I was particularly devoted to memory training and developing my systems. It's apparently true that mental athletes' exertions make them lose weight, and obviously I just need to mentally exercise some more to get the pounds falling off...

I'm bored!

I haven't been on TV for ages. This must be what it's like to be a normal person, instead of a major celebrity. Unless that other Japanese company decides to go for it, there's nobody even considering making a documentary about memory competitions at the moment, is the point I'm seriously making here. It's about time somebody came along and wanted to film the 2010 world championships. Come on, TV producers, the public wants to see the exciting spectacle of a group of people sitting in a basement looking at numbers!

Unclean!

I got a computer-virus thing on my laptop today - one of those fake security tool things that takes over your machine and tries to persuade you to download bad things and/or give people money. Luckily, I'd heard of them before when someone I know got something similar last year, but less luckily the thing stopped me getting onto the internet and finding out how to get rid of it. But it all worked out happily in the end, because I could still get Yahoo Messenger to work and I got a helpful friend to look it up on Google, and now I've got a clean bill of silicon health again. But I've never had a virus/trojan/whatever before, and now I can't be scornful towards people who get them and say that only stupid people are at risk from computer viruses. Well, I can, and will, but I probably won't sound so convincing.

Also, congratulations to Ron White for winning the US Memory Championship, and Nelson Dellis for nearly winning it and achieving some really cool-by-the-standards-of-American-memory-competition things. I expect both of them to become even more cool, memory-wise, in the future. Let's have an American invasion of top-notch memorisers, to fight off the Chinese and Europeans!