(Kent)

Okay, so I wasn't quite as successful in Ashford as Oadby. In fact, I came dead last. But, you see, it's not the winning, it's the taking part, and by doing so badly I probably made everyone else feel a lot better about themselves, so in a very real sense, I'm a winner.

Ashford is a strange kind of place for at least two reasons - it calls itself "Ashford (Kent)" to excess, for one. I walked past the Working Men's Club when I got there on Friday night and the sign outside says "Ashford (Kent) WMC". Would people really not know which Ashford they were in if they looked up at the sign and it only said "Ashford"? For another thing, I found when I daringly decided to walk from the station to my hotel that Ashford is some kind of magical land where however far you walk in any direction, you always end up in the same place at the back end of the town centre. After quite a lot of that, I got a taxi like some kind of big city fat cat.

Fun tournament, though, and lovely weather. I even walked from Charing Cross to St Pancras, taking in all the places I was intending to along the way, on my way back. And without once getting lost. It's official, I can cope with London streets now. Perhaps with a bit more practice I'll get Ashford (Kent) too.

Lazing on a sunny afternoon

There are days when I'm all hyper-productive and get lots of stuff done. There are also days when I just don't do anything. This has pretty much been one of the latter. Although I did talk to the Cambridge local paper. And I, well, expressed enthusiasm on hearing that Ravinder's documentary has officially got the sort-of go-ahead from Channel 5. That counts as memory-related work, right?

Anyway, I'm going to Ashford tomorrow afternoon for the othello on Saturday, rather than getting the early morning train, so I probably won't post anything tomorrow night. Yes, I'm still pointing it out every time I don't intend to post anything here. I have a very inflated sense of this blog's importance in the grand scheme of things.

More reasons to be cheerful

Man Utd won 7-1 last night and it was a great game. I saw the first five goals before turning over to watch the last episode of Life on Mars, which was also absolutely fantastic. I found those raffle tickets today without even meaning to, while looking for something else. I also found the something else I was looking for. Boston Utd did indeed beat Macclesfield on Monday, and are now at the lofty heights of 22nd (out of 24) in League Two. This is important, because the bottom two get relegated. Granted, they're only three points clear of Wrexham, who've got a game in hand, but it's the psychological advantage of not being in the relegation zone that matters. Plus, Boston's last four games are against Hereford and Chester (both comfortably mid-table with no chance of making the play-offs), Torquay and Wrexham (the two clubs below us). We've got a good chance of survival. I'm doing an interview with the Cambridge Evening News tomorrow about the memory championship, and hopefully getting it a nice bit of advance publicity. It's definitely spring, you know - it's been all warm and sunny for the last couple of days.

Hello, sunshine! Hello, birds on the wing!

I've got lots of bunnies! By which I mean that I've got The Tale of the Bunny Picnic, which you may remember me bidding for on eBay last week, in rather more formats than I was expecting. For some reason, the seller has also enclosed a "free gift" of a pirate DVD copied (or "ripped" or "burned" or whatever the technical term is) directly from the official, original VHS that he actually advertised, sold and sent to me. I don't get why he would do this. Did he think "well, if he likes the legal version, he's sure to also like a less legal version along with it!"

Come to think of it, "captured" might be the technical term.

Anyway, I'm glad that I've got it. I've watched it twice today, since that's obviously what the seller wants me to do, and watched a couple of the brilliant songs at least hrair times. I haven't seen the Bunny Picnic for years and years, and I'd forgotten just how great it was. If I had the first idea how to go about doing such a thing, I would burn/rip/capture/sync the wonderful musical number at the end when the bunnies confront the farmer and put it on YouTube for you all to watch, because nobody should go through life without hearing that song.

I find it hard to describe to normal people the feeling of sheer delight and euphoria I get from watching a stirring musical tale of bunny bravery like this. Suffice it to say I've been in a deliriously happy kind of mood all day. It even helps me put a positive spin on things that I might otherwise consider bad - having done a bit of Cambridge championship preparation work today, I've been thinking "well, it's nearly all done now and well ahead of time", rather than "I still need to do the historic dates in multiple languages, and that takes ages, plus I need to arrange stopwatches or timers for the speed cards and I should have done that yonks ago".

And when the charity Cerebra phoned me tonight to ask for money and I suddenly remembered I've got some raffle tickets of theirs that I'm supposed to be selling and have no idea where they are, my thought is "wow, good thing they called or I would have forgotten all about it and then felt horribly guilty when they write to me asking for money", whereas had I been in less of a cheerful mood, I might have been thinking "aw, now I'll have to turn my living room upside down looking for those raffle tickets. How could I have forgotten them, anyway? I'm supposed to be a memory champion. And why are Cerebra pestering me for more money when they haven't finished with this raffle yet, for Pete's sake?"

Everything's better with bunnies. Man Utd are 3-0 up after 20 minutes! It's the bunnies, I tell you! Incidentally, Lugsy is the real hero of Tale of the Bunny Picnic, not Bean. He's the one I always admired.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Woo! Did an hour cards practice today, attempting 33 packs and got 29½ right. And the half (you get half a pack if there's one mistake) was just stupidity on my part - I memorised it right, I just wrote the wrong thing down and didn't notice. I'm still not 100% confident with going for more than thirty packs, but I'm feeling now that I can maybe eventually speed myself up just that little bit more so that I can look at each one three times. Today the sixty minutes ran out when I was just short of the end of the 27th pack for the third time. And my recall was still good on the ones I only had time to look at twice - it was harder work and took longer, with a bit of educated-guesswork, but I got most of them right. The mistakes came on packs 24, 29 and 30, plus the aforementioned annoying blunder on pack 7. And I was finished with the recall with ten minutes of the two hours still to go, rather than frantically scribbling till the end. All in all, I'm happy with that.

And while I'm talking card-memorising (I have quite honestly been told that there are people out there who really like reading things like the above paragraph, you know), I'll throw out a favourite tip of mine for "memory athletes" in training - try to practice things in the exact format of the championships. Between memorising and recall when I practice hour numbers, while I'm putting those fiddly little rubber bands back around the cards and stacking them up neatly, I like to turn the telly or radio on to simulate the talking that goes on at competitions during the hiatus. I also avoid consciously trying to recall any of the images I've seen until the recall time has started, because you never know what distractions are going to come along at the world championships.

When it comes to speed cards, I also always wait the full five minutes until recalling, even though I'm going through the pack in thirty seconds and then just sitting in silence. Sitting still and not saying anything is something I have difficulty with, you see, so it's good to get in a bit of practice. I'm an incorrigible daydreamer, and I can never spend the whole four and a half minutes thinking about the cards I've just memorised without drifting off on a mental tangent, so practicing like that really helps - now I can daydream all I like and still keep the cards bobbing around in my brain until I have to regurgitate them.

When did my hobbies turn into work?

Not only am I wrestling with writing a book about memory and stuff (that's "wrestling" in the sense of doing nothing about it, which is an unusual but quite acceptable use of the word), but I'm also trying to entice people to chip in with some prize money for the Cambridge championship (I'm still hopeful on that front). And if that wasn't enough, I've been wrestling with a question about the British othello rating list that David asked the committee about - should people who don't live here any more still be included?

I can think of lots of sensible arguments both for and against the idea, which is confusing me a bit. I would have expected not to care either way, since the only rating I ever look at is my own, but in fact I seem to be deeply passionate about every possible argument for and against every possible arrangement. Perhaps I just need to get out more. Come to think of it, I maybe shouldn't be posting publicly about this in the first place. Some people might argue that it's private committee business (the committee of the BOF doesn't generally do anything, so it's probably a good idea to shroud anything we do do in mystery, so as to give the impression that we do more). Ah well. They can always excommunicate me, or whatever the expression is.

Heckle and Jeckle

I've been in Nottingham today for the dual purpose of finding out whether the comic mart is still a good thing to visit, and to see Boston Utd travel to Notts County in the hope of getting an essential win to pull them out of the relegation zone. It turns out that it's not, they didn't, and tonight's Doctor Who wasn't all that great either, so I'm in a bad mood.

I saw a freakish number of magpies today, not even counting the two Notts County mascots. From the train window I saw a whole bunch of single magpies and one group of four, which I interpreted as meaning that I was in line for a whole lot of sorrow, but at least would get a boy.

The comic thing, which I used to go to regularly when there were rather more people interested in buying and selling old comics, really isn't what it was. It's no longer taking up the whole basketball court in a leisure centre in the unfashionable end of town, but is now relegated to a smallish back room at the ice rink where four or five dealers try to offload their boxes of back issues at 50p each. Sad, really.

As for the game, the Pilgrims didn't play all that badly. It was just that they never really looked like a team that could score a goal - and sure enough, they didn't. County scored two. But they gave it their best, despite the continuing difficult circumstances - with Paul Ellender suspended again, we could only manage to bring three substitutes, and that included Adam Rowntree from the youth team, who looks about twelve.

Five minutes into the game, the ref noticed that we had two players on the pitch wearing number 17 - Colin Cryan had somehow managed to put on Stewart Talbot's spare shirt instead of his own. That's fairly typical of the way the game went. We're not quite doomed to the Conference just yet - with Torquay hopelessly dead at the bottom of the table and Wrexham also in dire straits, a win against Macclesfield (fourth from bottom) next week might just save us at the last. Fingers crossed...

That's how we use an apostrophe

There's a birthday card on sale in Smith's with the words "Life's to short" on the front (and "...to date ugly men" on the inside). I mean, seriously. What is it with young people* these days? Don't they teach them anything in the schools now that my dad's no longer with us**? He'd be turning in his grave if he hadn't been cremated. Yes, you might say "does it really matter if people don't know the difference between 'to' and 'too'?" You might add "it's perfectly obvious to anyone who reads it what the card means to say, so misspelt or not, the card is doing its job." You might go on to say that in a couple of decades' time, "to" (or even "2") might well be the dictionary-approved spelling of the word we pedants now write as "too". You might question my own grammar and punctuation in the preceding paragraph. And you'd be perfectly correct to make all these points, and within your rights to call me a weirdo for objecting at such length, but I don't care. I hate this kind of thing. With a passion. I'm going to find out who made this horrible birthday card, go round to their house and shout at them.

In less insane news, my mum sent me an easter egg in the post, and for some reason Thorntons decided to package it in a cardboard box that could have fitted a dozen easter eggs of the same size inside it. Seriously, it's the size of a house. I might live in this cardboard box if I ever feel I need a second home in the country. I found this box sitting outside the door to my flat today (someone else in the building must have signed for it) and thought some mystery admirer had sent me a new television set or vacuum cleaner.

*I'm assuming, with no evidence to back me up on this, that everybody involved in the production of this card is younger than me.

**And now I'm apparently assuming that everyone involved in the production of this card is so young that they went to primary school within the last year.

I guess I'm just lazy

This afternoon I got as far as laying out 33 packs of cards on my desk with the intention of doing an hour cards practice, then decided I wasn't really in the mood. So I left them out so I could do it tomorrow instead. A bit later on, after coming back in from the shops, I found that it was unbearably hot in my living room. Possibly, with hindsight, it was a bad idea to turn the heating on on the hottest day of the year so far. But if I opened the window, the wind would blow the cards on the desk all over the floor! I was faced with the choice of either leaving the window closed and the room like an oven (an oven at a temperature of about 30 degrees at the very most, but an oven nonetheless) or putting rubber bands back around each of my 33 packs of cards to keep them together. And I found the latter to be a quite unacceptable use of my time, so spent half an hour in stifling heat before finally giving in. And now I'll have to take all the rubber bands off again tomorrow!

That's if I do the cards tomorrow. Actually, I was planning to devote most of the day to promoting the Cambridge Memory Championship - dig the groovy new website, courtesy of James Kemp and James Ponder! One month to go, start practicing now!

The horrors of commercialism

Blogger tried to persuade me last night to put Google ads on this site. I would, but I gather they don't actually pay you anything until you've amassed a huge number of clicks' worth of money, and I doubt whether very many of my readers would be at all interested in adverts for memory foam mattresses (which is pretty much exclusively the ads you get on memory-related sites). Not that I've got anything against memory foam mattresses. I'd buy one myself if they weren't rubbish.

Ooh! I'm watching Heroes and there's a woman on it whose superpower is a super-memory! Seriously, everyone nowadays is saving the world by remembering long numbers! That's my new job, I've decided.

Land speed record

Ramón Campayo has invited me to the first World Speed Memory Championships, in Spain, on April 28th and 29th. Rather short notice, but since that (I'm almost positive now) is the one weekend in the foreseeable when I'm not doing anything, I might consider it.

"Speed memory" - memorising the maximum possible number of digits or whatever in one second, or three seconds, or half a second or so on - is not really my thing. In fact, it's not really anyone's thing except Ramón's, he's the only person who does it, as a rule. So it might be fun to do something a bit different here. I don't have much spare time to practice what with Cambridge and that loony idea of getting my book finished in the next month, but then the thing about speed memory is that it involves a lot more luck and instinct than 'real' memory competitions - there's no need for fancy techniques and things, it's just a matter of getting your brain used to going quickly.

On the other hand, it means going to Spain, and hanging out with a lot of other people who will presumably be mostly Spanish and complete strangers. As I might have mentioned before, I don't really like going places where I don't speak the language, and I certainly don't have time in the next four weeks to learn Spanish. I can't even watch Dora the Explorer, because I haven't got Nick Jr and it's only on ITV once a week. Also, it's a terrible, terrible cartoon.

It's the holidays!

Or at least it would be if I was a teacher or a schoolboy. It's deeply unfair that I don't get some kind of paid holiday, in fact. I mean, technically, I could go on holiday or just stop doing even the tiny bit of "work" I'm doing at the moment, but it's not the same unless there's some kind of official sanction for me not working.

Anyway, while we're talking about Easter, remember that Tale of the Bunny Picnic video I bid on on eBay even though it was £5? It ended up going for £23! I mean, I didn't really want it all that much, but seeing several other people bid insane amounts of money for it tweaks my competitive impulses. There's another copy on eBay now that I'm bidding on, and I can see me squandering my whole life savings on it.

Brown ale and black pudding

So, last night was Vicky's birthday party. We went for a meal at Soul, a place I've never been before because I had the vague idea that it was all organic food and things, so I avoided it on principle. It possibly is organic food and things, but if it is it doesn't rub it in customers' faces. Now I'm prejudiced against it mainly because it's posh and expensive. On the other hand, the food, though inexcusably posh, was actually very nice. Well, except for the chicken liver parfait which seemed to be the most edible starter on the menu. That wasn't terribly nice. But the main course I had, roast duck with black pudding, some fancy kind of potato with a creamy spinach concoction on top and a blackberry jus, was absolutely delicious. And considering it was posh, which normally means tiny portions on big plates, it was very filling. Big plates, but quite large portions, piled up vertically so it looked like small portions. I approve of this kind of thing. And then rhubarb creme brulee with rhubarb ripple ice cream for pudding, which was really scrummy too. The company was good too - nobody I knew, but a nice bunch of people all round.

Afterwards we went to the beer festival, where the highlight was the live music, provided by a German oompah band. The leader and tuba player, surreally enough, looked exactly like Ulrich Voigt (a comment that will be useful only to the very select group of my readers who not only know what Ulrich looks like but can imagine him dressed in lederhosen and a German army helmet, playing an Abba medley on a tuba). Their music was absolutely brilliant, and everybody got very much into the spirit of it, aided by the wide range of strangely-named beers on offer. They also played happy birthday to Vicky.

Onto other business, I've been "tagged" by a "meme", or by Jemfy, I'm not sure exactly how you phrase these things. So even though I don't do things like this (they make me feel like I'm trying to be a trendy young person), I'll do this one because the answer to it provokes a sort of funny story:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next three sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
6. Tag five other people to do the same.

"Call Lionel, over at the Times, and tell him his press privileges have been revoked. I didn't appreciate his little comment about my earrings. Questions?"

Not a particularly exciting three sentences, sadly - if we'd gone a few sentences further you could have read "What the--?" "Leave the lights off." "Gasp!", which gives a bit more of a clue to what the book is - only in comics do people say "gasp". It's from "Blood and Water", the fourth compilation volume of "Noble Causes", the comic by Jay Faerber. It doesn't have page numbers, so I hope you appreciate the effort it took to count 23 pages into it (when I run out of fingers and toes I tend to run into difficulty).

Jay Faerber is an American comic writer who I have a bit of a complex about. Back in the distant dark ages when I first bought a computer and started discovering the wonders the internet had to offer, I commented on a newsgroup about the upcoming second volume of New Warriors. I was a huge fan of the original New Warriors series until it was cancelled, and I was decidedly unimpressed by the previews of the sequel. I said as much on the newsgroup, and observed that Marvel Comics obviously didn't care about the New Warriors and their small but loyal fanbase, since although they had finally decided to relaunch the series, they'd done so with very little publicity, downright bad artwork, a change in tone to more light-hearted adventure with few of the original characters, and a second-rate writer in Jay Faerber. I was horrified to find that Jay Faerber himself replied to my comments, taking exception to the description. This was the first time I realised that talking about comics on an internet newsgroup was a bit more public than talking with friends in my house. It really hadn't occurred to me that I could bad-mouth someone on the internet and the person in question might actually hear about it.

So ever since then, not only have I been a little more careful to keep my opinion of comic book writers I dislike to myself, but I've gone to great lengths to pretend that I really, really like Jay Faerber's writing, so as to make up for my faux pas. This has been quite difficult at times - New Warriors volume 2 really wasn't very good, and was cancelled after ten issues. Volume 3, by someone else, was much, much worse, so I have high hopes for the upcoming volume 4. Anyway, after years of generally not reading anything by Faerber so I didn't have to say it was brilliant, I just recently decided to try "Noble Causes", his series about a family of superheroes. Flicking through the first collected volume in the shop, I was hooked. By the time I'd bought and read the first two volumes, I was positively ecstatic. Not only is Noble Causes quite genuinely and honestly great, it's by Jay Faerber! I really like something by Jay Faerber! I felt like I'd laid some ghosts to rest and could praise him to the skies without knowing that I was just doing it because I was rude about him eight years ago.

So just last week I bought volumes three and four, and... they're not as good. Volume 4 particularly so. I was quite disappointed, in fact. The story shifts towards more traditional superhero adventures and it's rather more insubstantial and less intelligent than the first two volumes. The artist of "Blood and Water", Fran Bueno, is a step down in quality from his predecessors. All in all, I feel let down after that brief burst of euphoria. And the fact that I haven't yet put the book away, coupled with this "tagging" thing, just brings all these conflicting emotions to the surface.

Well, enough. From now on, I resolve to not only buy more Jay Faerber stuff, in the expectation that I really will like some of it, I won't go out of my way to pretend I like the rest of it when I don't. Honesty is the best policy. I'm sure he's long forgotten the whole second-rate-writer episode anyway, so perhaps I should too.

Ooh, unless he reads this....

No time, no inspiration

Don't you hate it when you're going out to a beer festival and think it's probably best to update your blog beforehand because you're not intending to be in a fit state to type when you get back, but find that you have to leave pretty much immediately so as not to be unfashionably late and can't think of anything to write about?

Actually, I don't hate it as such, and if you do you really need to get your priorities right. I mean, it's only a blog, for crying out loud! What's wrong with you?

Existentialism

Having forgotten what he did for a living, Cecil was participating in an archaeological dig in Middlesbrough when he uncovered the fabled Amulet of Dennis, which confers on its owner the power to become ruler of the world. He phoned Phillip to tell him the news, before getting back to work.

Phillip immediately burst into Samantha's bedroom, kicking the door down and dynamiting the remains in his haste to get inside. "Cecil's only gone and found the Amulet of Dennis," he lamented, "and he's going to end up ruling the world unless we stop him right away."

"But what can we do?" asked Samantha from the dining room where she had been sitting having lunch with Phillip before he ran upstairs to talk to her.

"We have to stop him using the Amulet," explained Phillip. "Luckily, he won't be able to do anything with it until he knocks off work for the night. It seems he's under the impression he's an archaeologist today. That gives us four hours to find him and do him in."

"But surely," protested Samantha, thinking that this whole endeavour sounded too much like hard work, "if the amulet gives him so much power, we won't be able to do anything?"

"No, no," explained Phillip, "it confers on its owner the power to rule the world. By which I mean that what you do is present it to the Prime Minister and he turns over control of the country to you. It doesn't give you super-powers or anything. And it's an Amulet, not an amulet."

"It's not possible to aurally distinguish between a word spelt with an upper-case letter and one spelt with a lower-case letter, so get off my back," commanded Samantha. "So what are we going to do?"

"Well," explained Phillip, "Cecil neglected to tell me where in the world he is at the moment, so I'm going to get Richard to drive me randomly around the country in the hope that we bump into him. I need you to go to London, seduce the Prime Minister and persuade him to go and hide down a hole in Czechoslovakia."

"You mean the Czech Republic," said Samantha, "and what if the Prime Minister is a woman, a homosexual man or a member of a different species such as dog or wolf?"

"We'll have to take that risk," said Phillip firmly. "I know there's no way of knowing who or what the Prime Minister is until you get to 10 Downing Street and meet him, but I think it's statistically likely that he'll be seductible by an attractive woman. And don't bother pointing out that you're not the slightest bit attractive and in fact look less like a woman than I do, beggars can't be choosers and you'll have to do."

Samantha, who hadn't been intending to say anything of the sort and actually considered herself to be quite good looking, shrugged consent, and Phillip stormed determinedly out of the door and down the street to Richard's house. Samantha got to work on her part of the plan immediately, going into the kitchen and putting the oven on. "I'm going to need energy for the trip to London," she reasoned, "and although I just finished a large lunch five minutes ago, I'd better cook some Findus crispy pancakes, just in case..."

Meanwhile, Cecil had left work early, having got permission from his bemused "boss", who of course had no idea who Cecil was. However, on his way down to London, the train was suddenly derailed by a sinister cloaked figure, who abducted Cecil and dragged him up to the top of a perilous mountain in the vicinity of Stevenage. "And now, Cecil," the mysterious stranger intoned, "prepare to meet your nemesis!"

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Cecil. "Uncle Graham!"

"That's right," intoned the stranger, throwing off its cloak. "It is I, your third cousin Brenda, returned to destroy you once and for all as I swore to do seventeen years ago!"

"But you said you'd leave it twenty years before destroying me," whined Cecil.

"I meant seventeen," snapped Brenda ill-temperedly. "It was a slip of the tongue."

"I'm sorry, you did say twenty. I'm free for another three years and there's nothing you can do about it. Now bog off. See you at cousin Steve's wedding next month."

Brenda wandered off, kicking small stones and sheep, and Cecil climbed back down the mountain and headed off towards London again.

Meanwhile, Richard's car was not fifty miles away from Cecil's position and heading in roughly the right direction. "We're making good time," observed Phillip, quite loudly so as to be heard from the roofrack, to which he was fastened with chains (Richard's car had no seatbelts).

"Yep, we're sure to find Cecil before long," said Richard happily. "Oh, blast," he suddenly added, bringing the car to a screeching halt in the middle lane of the M1.

"What's the problem?" Phillip asked.

"I've just realised that an isoscles triangle exhibits reflectional symmetry along one axis, regardless of the size of its internal angles," said Richard, in tones of deep despair.

"Is that such a problem?" Phillip inquired, but Richard was lost in silent contemplation, occasionally muttering to himself that he had wasted his entire adult life, and for what? Phillip freed himself from the roofrack and ran for the safety of the hard shoulder, but was hit by a speeding unicycle-steamroller and sent flying.

By a stroke of luck, he landed on Cecil, who was in the process of hitching a lift down to London. Phillip was rather annoyed to see that the driver who had stopped to give him a ride was in fact Samantha.

"What in the name of Dennis are you doing?" he demanded of her.

"I'm giving Cecil a lift," said Samantha. "Turns out we're both going to see the Prime Minister. Small world, eh?"

"Words fail me," said Phillip, inaccurately, and went on to explain at length what he had told her at lunchtime.

"Oh, that's okay," said Cecil. "I accidentally buried the Amulet of Dennis again five minutes after I phoned you, and then couldn't find it. I was just going to see the Prime Minister to ask him whether I'm actually an archaeologist. I just have a feeling that I might not be."

Torvill and Zoom

I think we should all give a nice round of applause to Boris Konrad for producing the above image. You know, sometimes I worry about the sanity of my friends, but then they go and prove that I've got nothing to worry about by producing a very impressive composite photo of my head on Christopher Dean's body, without me even asking them to.

Back in the real world, have you seen "Desperados"? It's a rather brilliant drama series on children's BBC, about a wheelchair basketball team. I've seen the last three episodes of the series over the last couple of days, and I was enthralled. I've sometimes considered taking up some kind of wheelchair sports - I can't do the non-wheelchair kind on account of my dodgy knees, but the more I get towards middle aged fat-and-laziness, the more I feel like some kind of regular, competitive exercise would be a good thing for me. Although I always find memory competitions physically exhausting, so maybe the solution is just to have more of those in a year...

Figure skating

Yes, figure skating. You and I know that figure skating is the stupidest kind of so-called sport in history, consisting just of people faffing around on ice skates and looking stupid, and that I'm not at all saying that because I'm jealous of people who can skate, look good in sparkly spandex and dance acrobatically on ice. Anyway, I think the rules of figure skating competitions provide an interesting analogy to memory competitions (a real sport, because I'm good at it).

Apparently, in the olden days, 60% of the scores in major figure skating championships came from what they called 'compulsory figures' - skating in such a way as to carve circles, figures of eight and so on into the ice. Judges would examine the figures in afterwards and mark them according to how perfectly circular and evenly-shaped they were. Which was all well and good, but then people outside the figure-skating bubble noticed that spectators weren't at all interested in that bit, which took hours and was mind-numbingly boring, but loved the free skating part. So when it became big and televised, the free skating gradually got a higher proportion of the marks, until the compulsory figures were dropped altogether.

So the world ended up with was a sport that looks pretty but has lost most of the claim it used to have to being based on any kind of technical skill, as opposed to looking pretty and waving your arms in time to the music.

And this is a pretty similar kind of situation to the world of 'memory sports' - there are those who want to introduce shorter events, and more telegenic championships like the US, and those who feel that the hour-long marathon number-memorising sessions are the real test of memory, as well as a big part of what makes memory competitions special. There are arguments for and against that I deeply sympathise with, but when it comes down to it, I really don't want to turn into Torvill and Dean. However handsome and athletic and well-dressed as Christopher Dean might be. Not the slightest bit of jealousy here.

Hectic life

It occurred to me today that it's a good job I'm not gainfully employed, or I'd never get any extracurricular memory-related stuff done. Granted, I'm not getting much of it done as it is, but it would be even worse if I had a real job, because it struck me that I'm fully booked for every weekend for the next seven weeks. What worries me particularly is that having established that to be the case, I now find that I can't remember what I'm supposed to be doing on April 28th. Oh well, I'm sure it can't be anything life-threatening. I just checked to see if it's another othello regional, weirdly scheduled for the week prior to Cambridge, only to find out that it's not, but Mansfield is on May 19th, so that's eight consecutive weekends. I don't know, I thought I was the unsociable type.

For the record (and in case I forget again), it's Vicky's party next Saturday, the Nottingham comic fair the Saturday after that (combined with my grandma's birthday on the Friday and possibly going to see Notts County v Boston Utd if I can fit that into the schedule too), then the Ashford regional (maybe I'll go down there on the Friday, seeing as I've had trouble in the past with getting up early enough to get all the way to Kent in the morning, possibly even hang out in London on the Saturday night and see a show, like some wealthy socialite), my mum's wedding on April 21st (if I forget that one she'll write me into her will just so she can write me out again), some mystery event on the 28th (really ringing mental bells there, but I can't think why the heck it would), the Cambridge MSO with all its attendant othello and memory hoopla, the Bristol comic expo (haven't booked a hotel yet for any of these things, and I really must get round to it - Bristol keep adding really great names to the guest list), then Mansfield. If I had a job, I'd be stark raving mad by the end of it.

True confessions

I bought two medium-sized easter eggs at the supermarket the other day, because they were cheap, and I've eaten one a night for the last two days.

Film And Cult Television

The real highlight of my extremely brief university career was the FACT club. We met once a week and watched Star Trek and things. I've been in a trekkie kind of mood lately, having stumbled across "Memory Alpha", the Star Trek wiki while wandering around the internet. It's always nice to know I'm not the only person who feels that the world really needs an authoritative analysis of every appearance of the ever-present but untalkative Lieutenant Leslie in the original series.

I'm going to have to stop doing these links to whatever website I've been reading. This blog is becoming full of them. It should be full of talk about how great I am, and I'll make sure it is in future.

Meanwhile, I've also lately been watching my way through the "future" series of the Transformers cartoon. It's set in 2006, but that was the future when it was made. It's something I've always had a great affection for - the artwork is generally terrible, and the plots are normally more simplistic than the older episodes, but there's something really compelling about the ongoing storylines and characters that makes it all worthwhile. We didn't just watch it for the glimpse of toys we posessed or wanted to posess, it was exciting space adventures of the kind that you just don't see much of nowadays. Poor youngsters today don't know what they're missing, those who watch Ben 10 excepted.