This looks like a job for...

There's a news story doing the rounds that someone involved with one of Stan Lee's charities has stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from The Man himself by means of forged cheques, and really, I don't think they've thought it through. Everyone knows that Stan Lee created all the cool superheroes, but of course Spider-Man and all his amazing friends are basically nice people, and just have bad guys locked up in jail - what people forget is how many cool superVILLAINS there are out there who owe Stan Lee a favour for bringing them into existence! You don't want to steal money from a guy who can just phone up Doctor Octopus and say "Hi, Otto, it's Stan. Remember how I created you and gave you those cool mechanical tentacles and all? I need someone to teach a thief a little lesson..."

There's some people you just don't want to mess with.

Lucky numbers

I'm happy to report I'm now through to the last 65,536 in the Fantasy Premier League Cup (I know you were all fascinated when I mentioned it last). This is a lucky number for elderly users of Excel spreadsheets, and I'm sure that just saying "65536" gives all the old-fashioned number-crunchers out there a happy nostalgic glow. The rest of you will be left in the dark, but don't worry, you're not missing much.

The munchies

I haven't got any sweeties in the house. It's not even as if I'm hungry, I've already had my dinner and there's the materials to make some more if I wanted. But I have a particular craving for those rocky road bites they sell at Tesco, and I might have to venture out into the night just to buy a snack. Does that make me some kind of stereotypical American-TV drug addict?

Also, why isn't "the munchies" a thing for British-TV drug addicts? I feel like there could be some kind of universal truth revealed if I unravelled the answer to that mystery, but maybe that's just the drugs talking...

Memory Leaguing

The new online memory league championship is well underway, and I think I'm going to see if I can make a real effort to go to the actual real live competition in Sweden in April. I keep saying I'll go to memory competitions in Sweden if I can, and then never actually getting there for one reason or another. I definitely owe Gothenburg another visit!

Telling it like it is

If there's one thing that's always been missing from memory competitions, it's high-quality animated cartoons about what it's like to compete in them! But this has been well and truly remedied in the last few months by Joo Sang Jo on Facebook - there really should be some kind of website hosting them, but I think all I can do is urge you to join the World Memory Championships group and see them there.

If you've ever been to a memory competition, you'll know all about the feeling of sitting between two super-fast memorisers at speed cards, or the purgatory of waiting through 550 spoken digits before you can write down the paltry few you managed to memorise... it's genius, it really is.

A new year again

It's getting silly now; before we know it, it'll be 2020, and that's a year that's unquestionably the future. The Machine Man comics that were backup strips in Transformers in 1985 were set in 2020, and in another couple of years they'll be historical documents set in the past.

Anyway, I really should make a resolution to post more regular blog updates. Quantity is, in every case, better than quality, so I'm going to make an effort to post something every night, until I next forget or simply can't be bothered. Look forward to it!