Let's get memorising!

The Memory League World Championship is kicking off once more! I'm not in it, on account of not being good enough, but it's still very worth watching! And the matches are streamed live on Memory Sports TV, so tune in and watch over the next month! It really is fun and exciting, even if you know little or nothing about memory sports! (See, this is the exact opposite of my post two days ago - this is getting the comic fans who read this blog to start liking memory competitions!)

I really like the double elimination format. It really adds to everyone's enjoyment of the event! And makes it all look more complicated and clever, which can only be a good thing.

Am I ever going to scale the lofty heights of the ranking list, and qualify for future world championships here? Probably not, but I'm going to start by getting back in practice at the whole Memory League thing, and then just maybe work on improving my scores in the Images and Words disciplines - because you can't really get by in competitions here just by being pretty good at Cards and Numbers, even if my scores in those still count as 'pretty good'. I could probably improve my performance all round with a little more dedication, so maybe I'll give it a try...

A Methuselah of a blog

I've been blogging here for a long time now. In fact, it's been more than twenty years, if you count the couple of silly things I posted in October 2004 when I first heard about the concept of "blogs" and created one. And in July of this year, we'll reach the twentieth anniversary of when I actually started posting things here!

I only think of this now, because one of my favourite blogs to read on the internet, Dirty Feed, is celebrating its comparatively measly fifteen years of existence - a mere Jared of a blog compared to mine, and the name sounds a bit, well, dirty, but you should really check it out anyway! It's mostly about the production of TV comedy, and there are so many wonderful and fascinating pieces of writing there, you can get lost in it for days! I don't think you can say that about my twenty years of rambling on whatever subject comes to mind.

But perhaps I should follow that example and list the most popular things I've written here? Or maybe just one of them - because by far and away the most read article here on Zoomy's Thing is the Krypton Force videos! It's been so consistently popular over the years, attracting actual human people who've contacted me about it and not just robots, that I'm rather impressed. I think it's played a big part in increasing awareness of those British bootlegs of American bowdlerisations of Japanese cartoons, which can only be a good thing!

So here's to another twenty years, if I and Blogspot both live that long!

No Place To Run

 I should write more about old comics I like but that my readers might not have heard of. It's all part of my plan to get people who read my blog hoping I'll share some kind of memory secret reading comics and watching cartoons too. I won't rest until everyone reading this blog is fully conversant in all my weird hobbies and interests!

So I was just re-reading Marvel Team Up Annual #7, from the summer of 1984. It's an extra-long story in which Spider-Man teams up with five members of Alpha Flight to try to escape the clutches of The Collector. It's great. But tucked away in the back pages, there's a little five-page backup strip, and I'd forgotten just how cool it is!

"No Place To Run", written by Bob de Natale (who wrote a handful of backups and fillers for Marvel around this time; this one was his first) and drawn by David Mazzucchelli (who was drawing Daredevil at the time, and was probably used to having his name spelt wrongly, like in the credits box here) is a story about the ordinary people who live in the mad world of the Marvel Universe.

It's a long-established law of superhero comics that the presence of people with godlike powers waging constant war with each other somehow doesn't prevent the normal human world from existing. Readers just have to ignore the logical inconsistency. But around this time, people started to write about what it's like to be a normal human in this crazy universe. It was a central theme of the definitive text Watchmen in 1986, and reached its pinnacle with Astro City in the nineties - but this five-pager filling up the space at the end of a Marvel annual predates those, and captures the feel perfectly!

There's an ad for war games between pages 1 and 2, and an ad for comic subscriptions between 2 and 3. The reader isn't really encouraged to stick with this story. But please do read it here, and enjoy!

Playing the Aasvogel

 I thought I'd quote Adrian Mole as the title of a blog post, to create a sort of theme of new year's resolutions. I remembered a funny section of his diary in which he resolved to "learn a new word and use it every day", which was followed by something like:

January 2nd - I'd like to go to Africa to hunt an aardvark.

January 3rd - And then I'd go south and hunt an aardwolf.

January 4th - How interesting that aasvogel should be a kind of musical instrument.

After which he gives up. So I looked up the passage, which I haven't read for twenty or thirty years, and found that it goes:

Saturday January 2nd 

How interesting it is that Aabec should be an Australian bark used for making sweat. 

Sunday January 3rd 

I wouldn’t mind going to Africa and hunting an Aardvark. 

Monday January 4th 

Whilst in Africa I would go south and look out for an Aardwolf. 

Tuesday January 5th 

And I would avoid tangling with an Aasvogel

What? It STARTS with "How interesting..."?! I always remembered that the whole joke was that on the third day he gave up trying to work the new word into any kind of sentence and just wrote the dictionary definition! And it isn't! There's not a proper punchline to the series of diary entries at all, it just stops!

My version is funnier. I think we need to rewrite The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ to make it right, and give me credit as the co-author. It would be only fair. People used to jeer at me for looking like Adrian Mole, as I've probably mentioned several times before. Although I'll probably never write anything funnier than the entry for January 7th:

Thursday January 7th

Nigel came round to look at my racing bike. He said that it was mass produced, unlike his bike that was ‘made by a craftsman in Nottingham’. I have gone off Nigel, and I have also gone off my bike a bit.

And yes, I do know that "Vogel" means bird, and that "Aasvogel" is unlikely to be a musical instrument if you think about it. But I never have thought about it, and just kept my mistaken memory in my mind all these years. In my defence, though, I probably read the book for the first time before learning German, so it's understandable that I never made the mental connection. Luckily, we have the internet now, and I have just today, for the first time in my entire life, looked up the word "Aasvogel" to find out what it means. An archaic South African word for vulture, apparently. So now you know.

I was going to half-heartedly suggest resolving to write a new and interesting blog post every day in 2025, but now that I've actually learned something this morning, improved my general knowledge when it's not even half past nine yet, I feel very accomplished already. I don't need any resolutions. I can just go back to bed.