The robots have landed!

 What a lovely day! The sun's shining, it's almost warm outside, and I saw on Facebook a couple of days ago that the Golden Orbit comic fair is in Birmingham today, so I went along to see what was on sale...

These things have been going on since I was very young, and the little A5 flyers have always been in exactly the same format - the whole thing is very nostalgic! And what's more, there's always some treasure to be found in the many cardboard boxes full of comics being sold there - but today, I actually found EXACTLY the kind of thing I'd gone there hoping to get! New 'reading copies' of early Transformers comics from a 20p box! Including a copy of no. 2 that's superior to the one I've already got!

That's a great cover, by John Ridgway. I do love the little girl resolutely playing with her doll and paying no attention to the giant robots marching towards her! It's true - Transformers were very emphatically "boys' toys" in those days.

The original owner of these comics (2, 4, 5, 7 and 8) has punched holes in them to keep them in a ring binder, but that's not really a problem, because these comics had very wide white margins around the artwork, so the holes mostly don't affect it. Most importantly, this copy has the centrespread poster still intact! My other copy for some reason has the right hand half of it cut out.

This is another great example of how the British comic adapted the American source material (I assume everyone reading this has already read and enjoyed my excessive posting about Planet Terry in recent weeks). In the American version of Transformers #1, this double-page spread is part of the story - the British comic takes the pages out of sequence to put them in the centrespread, blacks out the two story panels at the top of the first page and (most fascinatingly) rewrites all the speech bubbles! They're replaced with more legible typewriting, and convey the same basic information, but often in slightly different words. Here's the American original for comparison:

The new copy of this comic I bought today isn't entirely complete, though - the original owner has cut out a picture of Ravage's roaring face from page 20!

Lucky I've still got that other copy, so I can assemble a complete story! I wonder what the previous owner did with that picture. Probably stuck it to the front of a school book, or maybe a private diary to scare off intruders!

Well worth 20p of anyone's money!

In another dimension, with voyeuristic intention

Okay, this is a thing - 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel. You can move pieces back in time and create alternate universes in a staggeringly complex way. Do people actually play this and know what's going on? I'm working on it, but I'm still not at the level of comprehension just yet. It does take me back to my schooldays, when we loved to play strange variants of chess games and fairy pieces. I'm sure I'll get the hang of time travel with a bit more practice, and then I'll use my new powers to take over the world!

I am Ben, son of George

 That's the best way to introduce yourself at Pridmore family gatherings, it seems - helps everybody keep track of the family tree. And I'm very glad I went to this one, and had the opportunity for a lot of family talk with Andy (son of Mick), Pete (son of Bill) and Alan (son of Syd).

Did you know that Walter Millership, who played for Sheffield Wednesday in the 1935 cup final, was a relative?

Continuing the theme

Want to get a lot more readers for your blog all of a sudden? Use a Simpsons quote and get shared on the sub-reddit Unexpected Simpsons! That really was an unexpected pleasure! Welcome to everyone who found my blog through that, and I'm sorry that this post isn't at all Simpsons-related.

But continuing the theme of things I'm not good at but occasionally feel I should try to become good at - driving a car. I'm going to a funeral tomorrow, down south, and have hired a car for the occasion. I really don't like driving, but once I've done it for a little while, I get back into the mood. And I only very rarely crash into things, so I'll probably be all right.

Or I could still chicken out and get the train. I'll see how I feel.

Why must I fail in every attempt at masonry?

 Among the things I've been trying to do lately is It, Myself. I'm not what you would call great at DIY, but I'd quite like to be more 'handy', and occasionally make attempts to do ambitious home-improvement projects.

The windows in my bedroom, you see, are skylights in a sloping roof. They've got roller blinds fitted, but the springy thing (I think that's the technical term) in one of them broke, and both of them are pretty useless at keeping light out - almost entirely transparent, in fact, which makes me wonder what the point of them is in the first place - so I decided to be practical and replace them.

It's harder than it sounds, you know. You can't just buy blinds of that unusual size off the shelf. But I got some inexpensive ones from Argos that cover the whole of the window area, and by means of bits of plastic and cardboard I had lying around the house improvised a way that they can be pulled down, stay in place, and block out maybe 90% of the sunlight. And it only took, well, a huge amount of getting things wrong, giving up, tearing it all down and starting again. But they're working now, more or less! And don't look completely ugly!

I'm cheering for Čilić

And not just because of the nice alliteration. He was really impressive against Rublev yesterday, and I always do like to see people who've been written off as past their best make an impressive return to top form against younger opponents. On the other hand, now Čilić is up against Félix Auger-Aliassime, who I also like to cheer for on the grounds that he's young and cool, so it'll be very conflicting.

It's all about date of birth, of course - I've described before how fascinated I am by the continued dominance of tennis players born in the 1980s, to the total exclusion of the younger generation, and it's still continuing now. There's still that total gap with men born in the first half of the 1990s, but there are quite a few top players now born in 1996 and later, so the interestingly small number at the bottom of this chart might yet get rather more boring and relatively large.

But on the other hand, there are also good players born in the early 2000s coming through now - Auger-Aliassime and also Jannik Sinner in the last 16 of the Australian Open. I'm hoping, for the sake of having an interesting piece of trivia, that these 21st-century boys will entirely squeeze out the nineties gang in years to come!