The complete September

 There, see, I told you I could do a blog post every day for a whole month!

Ghost monsters

 

The ghosts in Pac-Man aren't actually ghosts, they're just hiding under sheets. I've always called them ghosts, though, and don't intend to stop now. Anyway, more interesting than what they're called as a group, is what their individual names are...

The original Japanese version of the game gives them each a "character" and "nickname" (although Japanese, the game is all written in Roman alphabet, and all in English except these names), which seems to have caused a bit of confusion in the early years of Pac-Man - "character" is meant to mean a description of the ghost's personality or behaviour, not 'this is the name of the character'. They describe how the red one chases you, the pink one ambushes, the blue one is unpredictable, the orange one is... 'feigning ignorance' seems to be the agreed translation on the internet, I don't know. The "nicknames" are just based on the colours red, pink and blue, and the fourth is the slow one.

If you connect two points on the game's circuit board together, you can change the names to "English" ones, and you can just about see what they were going for - "urchin" in the sense of sticking to you, and so on.

But when the game came to America, they either didn't know about the "English" names or thought they were stupid, so they went in and changed them into all-new character/nickname combinations. Except Pinky.

And the person who had to go in and do the reprogramming at least noticed the alternate names, replacing them with placeholders presumably in case anyone wanted to come up with some alternatives. So, undocumented in the instructions, arcade owners outside Japan could still connect those two bits of the circuit board and show these names instead, if they really wanted to.

But the early guidebooks that soon flooded the market unanimously referred to the 'character' as the name of the ghost, as well as claiming that Pinky is the fastest (he actually isn't) and Clyde the slowest (again, not) and that Inky will run away from you (only sometimes). This one is particularly good, since it calls them Monsters, but gives alternatives of Ghosts, Zombies or Screw-Eyes. Never mind what I said at the start, I'm calling them Screw-Eyes from now on.

I believe I can fly

 Or at least I could in a dream I had last night. Now, I fairly often dream that I can fly, but it's usually more a sort of long jump, running-in-the-air and not going down kind of thing. Last night was the proper Superman style of flying, albeit in a modest, low speed and velocity, kind of way. I should do that more often.

Are you a student or a working professional?

 That's the header of an email I got today, urging people to sign up for the Microsoft Excel Collegiate Challenge if they fall into the first category, or the Microsoft Excel World Championship if they fall into the latter.

Now, while it's true that I am a working professional, I still feel like I'm entering the MEWC in my capacity as a weirdo who likes strange competitions. It's true that it sort of intersects with my professional working life, which admittedly does revolve around Microsoft Excel in a big way... but these competitions are FUN, not work! I personally advise everyone to give it a go, even if they're an idle amateur!

The missing Mildred

 Mrs Henry Wood seems to have named a lot of her novels after the first story hook she thought of, and then written a story to fill it out to the required length of a Victorian three-volume novel. Large parts of "Court Netherleigh" don't feature the eponymous residence or the people who live there at all. The title character of "Mrs Halliburton's Troubles" has resolved her troubles and subsided into a minor background role by the half-way point of the novel. "Bessy Rane" is a terrible title, since Bessy dies early on, and the reader is supposed to be surprised when it turns out much later that she wasn't dead at all.

But perhaps the greatest of these is "Mildred Arkell". You can see that Mrs Wood started with the basic idea of Mildred, disappointed in love, going away and returning many years later to save her niece from suffering the same fate. But this means that the title character departs from the plot quite early on, and is completely absent from the adventures of the book's many other characters until it's built to the final climax (many years later; it's a story of epic length). In fact, a fairly big part of the book is devoted to a set of largely unrelated characters who go on to continue their storyline in the later novel "St Martin's Eve", and the reader could be forgiven for entirely forgetting about Mildred.

If you'd picked up the second volume of the book, you'd find a couple of references to the title character - she sends occasional money to her hard-up brother, she's mentioned in passing in her cousin's reminiscences of younger days, but nothing to give the reader any real idea who she is or why the book's named after her. This is the only scene in volume 2 in which Mildred Arkell actually makes an appearance. And she contributes almost nothing to it:

She arrived in an afternoon at Mrs. Dundyke's, having come direct to London Bridge by the steamer from Rotterdam. Robert was out in London, as usual; but Mrs. Dundyke was not alone: Mildred Arkell was with her. Perhaps of all people, next to his wife, Mildred had been most shocked at the fate of Mr. Dundyke. This was the first time she had seen his widow, for she had been away in the country with Lady Dewsbury.

A young, pretty woman, looking little more than a girl, with violet-blue eyes, dark hair, and a flush upon her cheeks. Mrs. Dundyke marvelled at her youth—that she should be a wife since three years, and the mother of two children.

"I wrote to you to be sure to bring the children," said Mrs. Dundyke.

"I know: it was very kind. But I thought, as Robert was ill, they might disturb him with their noise. They are but babies; and I left them behind."

Mrs. Dundyke was considering how she could best impart the news of the suspected birth to this poor, unconscious young lady. "If you could give her a hint of it yourself, should she arrive during my absence!" Robert Carr had said to Mrs. Dundyke that very morning, with the hectic deepen[199]ing on his hollow cheeks. And Mrs. Dundyke began her task.

And a sad shock it proved to be. Mrs. Carr, accustomed to the legal formalities that attend a marriage in the country of her birth, and without which formalities the ceremony cannot be performed, could not for some time be led to understand how, if there was a marriage, it could have been kept a secret. There were many points difficult to make her, a foreigner, understand; but when she had mastered them, she grew strangely interested in the recital of the past, and Mildred Arkell, as a resident in Westerbury at the time, was called upon to repeat every little detail connected with the departure of her husband's father and mother from their native place. In listening, Mrs. Carr's cheek grew hectic as her husband's.

After that, she disappears into obscurity again.

Memory in Europe

The good old-fashioned International Standard memory competition that is the German Memory Championship is happening in October - details are here, and further to what's on that page, they have just announced that there will be cash prizes! 

- European Open

1. place 600 Euros + IAM trophy

2. place 400 Euros + trophy

3. place 250 Euros + trophy

4. place 100 Euros

5. place 100 Euros

6-10 place 50 Euros

 Having told the organisers that I can't come to the event due to lack of funds, I was quite impressed that they thought this might change my mind. Fifteen years ago, I would have gone there as a matter of course, fairly confidently expecting to take the first prize, and been pleased to cover some of the costs of travel and accommodation. Nowadays, though, I might not even make the top ten, depending on how many other competitors there are. If it's double figures, I've got no chance. 

 But I still wish I could be there, and hope it's a spectacular event for everyone who does go along!

That was fun

Obviously, it's sometimes nice to watch an exciting, evenly-matched game of football on telly on a Sunday afternoon, but it's also entertaining to watch a comprehensive thrashing of an unbelievably bad team, once in a while. Honestly, how Sheffield Utd managed to be so hopeless is beyond me. Coming as I do from a proud Sheffield family of Wednesday fans, I should be jeering delightedly at the red-and-white section of the city, but I'm not really that excited by it.

Besides, it's the kind of game that gets people reaching for the history books, and the first stat that comes to anyone's mind is "Newcastle's best result since they beat Sheffield Wednesday 8-0 in 1999." I prefer "Joint second best league result in history for Newcastle, after a 13-0 win over Newport County in 1946" or "the first time the Blades have conceded eight goals in a league game since their 10-3 defeat by Middlesbrough in November 1933", as provided by the BBC website. It must be nice to be a contributing factor to that kind of statistic.