Fix! Fix!

I bought a lottery ticket today, which I don't normally do (I was feeling a bit depressed, and thought that since money is the secret to true happiness, a lottery win would solve all my problems), so I watched the lottery numbers being drawn on BBC2 tonight after the tennis. And I noticed that while there were references to the tennis, the fact that they were running late, and a couple of time checks, these were all spoken by the voice-over guy. Tim Vincent and the people on screen didn't say or do anything that they couldn't have said or done if the show had been taped a week ago! I sense a conspiracy theory. I bet they tape fourteen million different shows for every week, one with each combination of numbers, and then broadcast the one that guarantees the most profit for Camelot. It's disgraceful.

Actually, it would be a lot more than fourteen million, because there's the bonus ball, too. 686 million, by my mental calculation. Still, Tim Vincent hasn't been on TV for years, he's had plenty of time for all that filming. And the guy with the white gloves is a robot, so he wouldn't have a problem.

Still, the tennis was fun, and almost certainly not rigged by sinister gambling syndicates. I've been cheering for Venus Williams all the way through the last fortnight, so if only I'd thought to mention it on this blog, I could be boasting about how right I was all along right now. Note to self, always write everything down. It's the only way to beat the government/alien/freemason conspiracy. I'm not paranoid, everyone really is out to get me.

Tut tut

It's just occurred to me that I really should book flights and accommodation for the German Memory Championship in three weeks' time, in Tuttlingen. A quick internet check suggests that there is exactly one hotel in the town, and no way to book a room online. Wonderful. You know, I miss the days when people would organise memory championships in some place other than the heart of a vast uncharted desert, five thousand miles from the nearest reliable public transport and ten squillion miles from the nearest internet-accessible hotel. Once upon a time, they even held these competitions IN hotels! See, that's convenient.

Of course, I shouldn't complain too much. Phil has, after all, booked me a hotel within hitch-hiking distance of Highley, and I'm sure I could just ask any one of half a dozen obliging Germans to find me a room somewhere close to Tuttlingen if I can't manage it myself. But still, it's fun to complain from time to time. Incidentally, my Cambridge championship was equally inaccessible, being a long way out of town, and starting on a Sunday morning before the buses start running. Maybe I set a precedent and everyone decided to copy me?

It's all about the money, it's all about the dum dum dada dum dum

I turned down a job offer today on purely financial grounds. I feel like such a money-obsessed miser. Well, mostly financial grounds, anyway - it was a temp job with the prospect of applying for the role permanently after six weeks, in Nottingham, and the job description made it sound good, but the pay was dreadful. Two-thirds of what I was getting in my previous job. And in all fairness, I can't believe it was as good a job as it sounded if they were only paying that amount - nobody with my qualifications would touch that with a bargepole. But I still feel bad about it.

But hey, there'll be other job offers (though probably not through SF Group, because agencies don't like it when you turn them down like that), and I really do want to make sure I pick something that I can stay at for a long time, until I become an institution in the office. A well-paid part of the furniture.

We could be Heroes

The TV series, Heroes, is really much better than it has any right to be. I love it to bits! They really have taken comic book superheroes and turned it into a proper adult drama series. I wouldn't have believed it possible, but I'm still watching it and I haven't forgotten it was on once (although that's made easier by the way the SciFi Channel shows each episode three or four times a week - I usually forget it on Mondays, but catch the Wednesday showing). Save the cheerleader, save the world! If you haven't seen it, and if it's possible to buy it on DVD, then you should. Even if you don't like superheroes.

Sorry I haven't got anything more, well, interesting to say tonight, but I'm fresh out of ideas. Ooh, did I mention I did 25.88 seconds on the cards the other night? Gradually, glacially, getting there. The only trouble is doing it in competition - I seem to be making a lot of mistakes in recall, going at that speed. And getting one in three packs correct isn't a lot of use at the world championships. Still, we'll see what happens...

Blasted Virgin Media

I bought a book about Jack the Ripper at the weekend, which makes entertaining reading. It's not really my kind of thing, normally, but I'd been re-reading Alan Moore's "From Hell" and wanted to know some more of the facts behind it. And this book, which is called "Jack the Ripper: The Facts", seemed like it would probably fit the bill. So now that I'm in a ripperological mood, I noticed tonight in the Radio Times that there's a programme on called "Vic Reeves investigates Jack the Ripper". Well, great, I thought. Vic Reeves is funny and Jack the Ripper is on my mind, I'll watch that. But then I noticed it's on Sky, and Virgin Media stopped carrying Sky several months ago. This is the first time it's really annoyed me. Although the Radio Times review calls it 'workmanlike', and Vic is never much good when he's not doing his own surreal material, so it probably wouldn't have been worth watching anyway.

I suppose I could watch "The Thick Of It" on BBC4 instead. The Radio Times says it's the funniest thing since Fawlty Towers, which is the kind of praise that's only going to leave you disappointed however good it is. And it's Alison Graham who's saying that, and I never like what she likes. But then again, if I'm going to judge everything on TV like this without seeing it, I'll never turn it on again. Actually, that would probably be a good thing. Opium of the masses, and all that. I could become one of those people who listen to the radio and have an ancient black and white portable TV for watching occasional nature documentaries.

Potters Bar

Ah, the Mind Sports Olympiad returns! I got the schedule and entry form in the post today. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to bother with it this year, though. All the really fun events either aren't there any more or have been shrunk down to nearly nothing. Othello is only one little 15-minute tournament, taking up 3½ hours, for which anyone who wants to just play in that will have to pay £12. What would be good there, actually, would be a memory competition. It'd be great if there was a full world-championship-standard event, for people who can't get to Bahrain a couple of weeks later. I wonder if I could organise one, if I could get a gang of people to help?

I'm great! Sort of.

I did 1224 in 30-minute numbers today, and possibly 18 packs in 30-minute cards (I couldn't be bothered to check them, but I'm pretty confident what I wrote down was all correct. Allowing for a few stupid mistakes here and there, it should still beat the world record). This is great, obviously, but on the other hand I first tried to do a 30-minute numbers this morning and gave up on it after a minute or so twice in succession, because I wasn't really in the right kind of mood. I didn't feel like the big practice session I was meaning to do today until five o'clock. That's not the kind of attitude that would get you very far in a real competition. But then again, I've never not been in the memorising mood at a competition - it happens here at home quite a lot, but when I'm there, I think the atmosphere and the adrenaline gets me all hyped up. So I probably haven't got anything to worry about. I didn't have time to do the 30-minute binary practice I was intending to do, but that one wasn't so important - I already know how many digits I can go for on that in Tuttlingen. Could probably do with one more practice session before the championship, though, to keep me at match fitness, so to speak.

But now I can concentrate on the short little disciplines of the Highley championship (less than two weeks away!). Still need to firmly decide how much to go for in 15-minute numbers - four journeys feels right, but I need a practice run or two to make sure.

I'm also officially good at othello again - I was up to my usual mediocre standard in the kurnik tournament last night. It's strange how my abilities seem to fluctuate like that. Ooh, and I also haven't mentioned here yet that I did decide to leave my temp job - I'm finishing at the end of the week. Then I'm going to throw myself into finding a real, permanent position, and choose carefully so I end up with one that I can work at for the next couple of decades quite happily. I'm fed up with chopping and changing jobs, I need stability and boringness.

Doctor, doctor, I'm feeling a little hoarse

I've got a sore throat from talking too much. This is what happens when I get chatting about memory to someone who knows nothing about it but is keen to learn. Actually, the most fun idea to come from talking to director Nick was the suggestion that we could come up with Team Britain shirts for the UK and world championships. Wouldn't that be cool? We could compete with all those Germans in their MemoryXL T-shirts!

Aren't you him off the telly?

Nobody has ever said that to me on the street. I wish they would. Well, I did use to get "Hey, it's Adrian Mole!" shouted at me when I was younger and had hair and no beard, but that's not the kind of thing I'm looking for. But, as I mentioned, the channel 5 documentary is definitely all systems go, and the director is coming round here tomorrow afternoon, so maybe in a few months' time I'll be able to deny being that weird memory guy when total strangers ask me if I'm him. Since my phone's still broken (repair man coming on Monday), I've been arranging things by email, which is probably a recipe for disaster, because he'll get lost on his way here and won't be able to call me. But never mind, what annoys me more is that I'll have to spend the morning tidying up my flat to improve its status from 'filthy' to 'eccentrically untidy'. I hate cleaning.

I also need to establish who Dave is. Ravinder, the, um, person in charge of the project (I'm not sure if he's a producer or something else) told me he'd found a director for the film, and then I got an email from this Dave person talking about working with me on it and sounding very directorial. But then he told me he'd passed my details onto the director, Nick, who's coming to see me. So I have no idea what purpose Dave serves in the whole food chain. It all seems very complicated.

I also want to spend a lot of weekend time practicing for the upcoming competitions, so I'd rather not spend too much time in front of the cameras. Some time this weekend or next, I need to do a half-hour binary, half-hour cards and half-hour numbers, all in the space of six hours, like you have to do on the first day of the German championship, so I can fix in my mind exactly what I'm going to attempt there. I don't want to do that the weekend before Germany (which is the weekend after Highley), because memorising so much in a short space of time sort of makes your brain blow up, and I wouldn't be fully recovered by the day of the championship. And I also want to do a last full practice run of the UK championship next weekend, spread over two days so as not to destroy too many brain cells. You know, in many ways, planning memory training is even more fun than actually doing it. I'm weird.

Stop the presses

Until ten minutes ago, I had a definite plan for this blog entry. In fact, I had the whole thing just about written in my head, and I was just waiting till I'd finished the othello tournament on kurnik to type it out. It was going to be about how for the last month or so, I've been really, really terrible at playing othello. I keep losing games stupidly, and basically seem to have forgotten how to play. But then after a tournament with lots of examples of that, I won my last two games in ways that I thought were rather clever, so that rather scuppers my plans to lament about my inabilities.

I suppose I could talk about how great I am, but that would be pushing it a bit. And anyway, I do that practically every day. No, tell you what, here's a subject - I saw an advert on telly the other day for a thing you put into your washing machine to stop colours running. Or rather, and I have no idea how this is supposed to work, to soak up all the running colours so that they don't dye your other clothes accidentally. Since all my clothes are a dingy shade of grey thanks to some black socks and my inability to sort them out from my whites, this is an invention that appeals to me. But their slogan at the end of the advert, displaying this little white sheet of whatever-it-is now a pink colour, is "the proof's on the sheet!" (or words to that effect). How in the name of sanity is that supposed to be impressive? I could get any old bit of white fabric, stick it in the wash with my socks and demonstrate that it's changed colour. That's what running colours do! I ask you. Pfah. Go along with you. The world is full of fools.

Everything I had to know, I heard it on my radio

Ah, now I'm really in the memory-championship-season mood! Radio 4 want to interview me! I assume it's because they know the UK championship is only a fortnight away, although it might be that they stumbled across my name somewhere and haven't the faintest idea. They asked the Alzheimer's Society for my details, which seems to be a popular way of getting in touch with me for BBC radio these days. You'd think they'd know my contact details already, anyway - I turned them down for an interview a few years ago (I had to work that day) and then more recently they turned me down for one, having originally planned to talk to me but then decided James would be more interesting (can't really argue with that).

Hopefully this one will actually happen - it's a good time for a bit of publicity, it might just help with Team Britain's efforts to get someone to pay for our plane tickets to Bahrain. Not to mention the possibility of getting a few more British people interested in competitive memory - I'm still determined to outnumber the Germans one of these days. Oh, and I nearly forgot, Ravinder's documentary is definitely going ahead, there's a director eager to, um, direct me who I need to get in touch with (they tried to call me, but my phone's still dead - repair man coming on Monday evening). Ah, fame and fortune. If only I could do this all year round. And if only some of these people would pay me. And if only I had a stunt double who could go and pretend to be me and do the interviews when I don't feel like it.

That's very personal!

I really can't think of anything to write about. Or rather, I can, but the one observation I want to make is an extremely rude and offensive and unnecessary comment about the appearance of a famous tennis player, and I like to think I'm above that kind of thing.

Anyway, I always preferred playing badminton, back in the days when I was almost capable of playing any kind of active game. I don't see why nobody watches badminton and everyone turns out in the rain for two weeks every year in the hope of seeing a couple of minutes of tennis between downpours at Wimbledon. They're essentially the same game, after all. I think the badminton authorities just need to get some PR guru to help them out and make the game more popular with the masses.

I was actually quite good at badminton. At least, that's my recollection. I wasn't terrible, anyway.

Do you want the good news or the bad news?

By which I mean that I've got several things I want to grumble about, and also something to enthuse about that I think is just great. I'll start with the grumbles, because nobody wants to end with a downer.

My phone's not working. I'm trying to cast my mind back to remember when I last used it - I know I unplugged it at the weekend while I was memorising, but I didn't pick it up and hear a dialtone before or after doing so. And yes, I did plug it back in again. I probably had a call some time last week from Hays the accountancy agency, but then again perhaps I didn't, since they mostly email me like I always ask people to do. It might have been not working for a week or so, at a pinch. So if anyone has tried to call me, sorry. But if you did, why didn't you email me? You know I prefer emails. You've only got yourself to blame.

I noticed the phone wasn't working when I tried to call in sick for work today. I've either got the mythical kind of stomach bug that people claim to have when they want a day off work, or food poisoning. I'm feeling better now, but I was decidedly indisposed this morning, ever since waking up at half past five.

Still, at least that meant not having to cycle to work in the atrocious weather. It's blowing a gale out there and it's been pouring down most of the day. All in all, today has been out to get me. It's just plain picking on me, is what it is, and I need a cuddle.

But on the other hand, Simon Reinhard won the South German Memory Championship, beating Clemens into second place! This is great, because it's the first time Clemens has been beaten since about 1736, and I think all of us (possibly excepting Clemens himself) were getting a bit bored with it. Even though it was a competition with only three quick "technique" memory disciplines (four if you count historic dates, which I normally don't), Simon has clearly been practicing - he got a 320 in speed numbers, which is fantastic, and without looking it up possibly better than anyone other than me has ever done before. (Just had to get a plug in for my own abilities there, I feel better now, thanks).

So it's going to be fun to see what happens in terms of the big German championship in a month's time. With any luck there'll be a battle royal between Simon, Clemens, Gunther, Boris, Cornelia and many more - hopefully Clemens will be all fired up and determined to get back on top, because I've been worried that he'd suffer the same been-there-done-that lack of motivation that I did, and I'd end up finally beating him when he was somewhere short of his best. Which would be much less fun than beating him when he's better than ever. Ooh, even though I didn't go to Munich, it's put me in memory-championship mood! Roll on Bastille Day!

Is it me, or

... has it started raining all the time just when I've started having to cycle to and from work on a daily basis? Actually, that's one of at least two reasons why I'm regretting taking the temp job. For another, it gets in the way of looking for something permanent - I've never had a temporary position before without the prospect of it becoming a long-term thing, and it's inconvenient when it comes to interviews and things. I know I wanted to get back to working fast, but it was a bit silly to go and take this one, I think. Still, I'm not sure whether to quit (which would probably look bad) or carry on and assume I'll still be able to find a real job (it doesn't really take that much effort).

Highley memorable

I haven't really hyped the UK Memory Championship here before, as far as I can remember, and today seems like a good time, since Phil's just announced the prizes they 'hope' to provide. It's in Highley, Shropshire, and I'm still not entirely sure where that is. But I was hoping to go there on the Severn Valley Railway (I did miss going to the Butterley steam railway place on father's day this year), only to find it's been washed away in the floods the other day. I'm not sure if that's a bad omen or not. Anyway, the first prize is flights, accommodation and entry to the WMC in Bahrain, which is nice. I did say a while ago that if I ended up with a free trip I'd give it to someone else, if I had the money to pay my own way, so if I do end up winning, I'll check my bank balance and see what I can do. There's a bottle of champagne for the winner too! I don't like champagne, but I've always wanted to spray it around in celebration. Hopefully I'll get the chance. July 14th, mark it in your calendars!

Bill Mantlo

If you happen to be passing a comic shop this weekend, go in and pick up a copy of Mantlo: A Life In Comics. It's a magazine/book/something all about Bill Mantlo, one of my all-time favourite writers of superhero comics. Even if you're not a fan, buying the book is a good thing - Mantlo was knocked down and nearly killed by a hit-and-run driver fifteen years ago, suffered permanent brain damage and all the proceeds from the book are going to the costs of his care.

Bill Mantlo, if you look at his work objectively, was never the greatest writer in the world. His dialogue is much too long-winded and stilted, and his stories are often more miserable and depressing than most people are happy with. Characters, when they're not being summarily killed off, will often spend pages lamenting about their own shortcomings and anxieties. None of the comics he wrote is hailed today as a landmark in the history of superheroics. But what he did do is write a heck of a lot - nowadays when a writer misses his deadline, the comic just comes out late. The publishers don't seem to care any more. In the seventies and eighties, if a Marvel writer didn't turn in a script on time, the editor called Bill Mantlo. He seemed to have an endless capacity for producing superhero stories that were always readable, and often exciting, funny and clever too. And his run on Alpha Flight was something that really struck a chord with me and played a big part in making me a comic fan today.

Picture the scene - it's the late eighties, or early nineties, I can't remember exactly which, I'm a young teenager and my comic experience has been limited to Transformers and whatever series had been the backup strip in Transformers. And a Spider-Man annual or summer special here and there. One day in WH Smith I found one of the paperback collections of the Marvel Universe handbooks, profiles of Marvel's characters from the Abomination to the Circus of Crime (it was only volume 1). Alpha Flight were in it, and they sounded like fun. A bit later, I can't remember exactly how or why, I ended up with a catalogue from the Nostalgia and Comics shop in Birmingham (or somewhere like that) and decided to order the latest issue of Alpha Flight, to see what it was like.

Actually, I didn't like it all that much. It was the penultimate issue of Fabian Nicieza's run, and that was the kind of comic you really had to sit down and study to make any sense of. Or I did, anyway. But I could see it had potential, stuck with it, and kept with it through the start of Scott Lobdell's run, which was a completely different style, still not a classic, but again compelling to a superhero-comic-newcomer. But after a year or so of this, I discovered the existence of back issues, and the wonders of the Bill Mantlo issues of Alpha Flight. And THAT was the kind of thing I'd been looking for!

For a couple of years, my aim in life was to collect the entirety of Mantlo's run on Alpha Flight - thirty-something issues of death, misery, characters recapping the events of the last twenty issues every time they opened their mouths and un-put-downably compelling stories. Yes, I also liked John Byrne's acclaimed original run on the series, but Mantlo's stories struck a chord with teenage me like nothing ever before. I got my brother reading and collecting them too, forced them on my best friend in return for having Judge Dredd forced on me, read them out of sequence, one or two at a time with months in between. I liked them a lot.

So this book describes a pretty significant person in my life. He wrote a lot of other great stuff, as I've discovered since - Spider-Man, Micronauts, Cloak and Dagger, many many more. A lot of them are long out of print and never collected, but I'm hopeful that one day we'll see a lot more graphic novels of his classic works. When it comes to people I admire in comics, the five people I wouldn't be the same without are Simon Furman for those wonderful Transformers comics that hooked me since the age of eight, Tony Isabella for an obscure Marvel Team-Up comic that found its way into a Spidey summer special and showed me that superhero comics could be something very much more than hero-fights-villain (it chronicled the supervillain Blacklash suffering a nervous breakdown), Kurt Busiek for dragging me back into comics in the late nineties when Alpha Flight had been cancelled and I'd given up on finding a new series that wasn't terrible, Alan Moore for just writing such amazingly, staggeringly good comics, and Bill Mantlo for those thirty-odd issues of Alpha Flight. Go out there and check it out!

No, I don't think I will

I think I'd be better off not splashing out on two German trips in two months, all in all. I'll stay at home this weekend and practice for the UK championship (three weeks and a bit to go! Woo! Even though I still don't really like the one-day events!).

Late

Sorry I didn’t post anything last night, I had a headache and went for a lie down at around eight o’clock, and didn’t wake up till two in the morning. And at that point there wasn’t much motivation to get up just to write a blog entry. I tell you, working for a living is much more tiring than sitting at home on one’s fat backside all day. Who would have thought it? So as a bonus, I’m writing from the office on my lunch break.

Anyway, I still haven’t decided whether to go to Germany for Sunday’s competition. On the one hand, I can’t really claim it would be good practice for the bigger championships coming up next month – it’s just speed numbers, speed binary and speed cards plus four disciplines in German – but it’s still a fun social thing, getting to hang out with the German memory contingent and see what everybody’s up to nowadays. Although I’ll get to do that on a bigger scale anyway in a month at the German national championship.

I don’t have a problem justifying to myself the expense of travelling to Munich for a weekend just to hang out with German memorisers for a day – I probably should, but I’ve got seriously reckless when it comes to spending my non-hard-earned cash these last few months. The main reason not to go is work, because I’ve only been here a week, I’ve already taken an afternoon off to go to an interview for a better job (and I feel terribly guilty about that), and I feel like I should at least try to give the impression that I’m taking the job seriously.

Hmm, sitting here typing this right now, that doesn’t seem like a compelling reason not to go. Well, I’ll think about it and make up my mind tonight. Assuming I manage to do my regularly scheduled blog post, maybe I’ll even tell you about it.

Why don't you get a job?

Thanks to the people who were going to remind me about the interview tomorrow, but I forgot to tell you that they changed it and made it today instead. It was funny - I knew it was in the same business park as Nord Anglia where I used to work, but I didn't realise it was in what used to be their Leapfrog nurseries head office before they closed it down and moved it all into the new place! I've been in that building plenty of times while they were still gradually relocating! In fact, when I got that job I had my interview in that very building (but not in the same room, which I was kind of hoping for).

Anyway, I think it more or less went well. They're interviewing loads and loads of people, according to the agency, but I seemed to make a good impression on the guys who were interviewing me. Or at least at the end of the interview they were still taking in ways that suggested they hadn't written me off as completely unsuitable. Although they mentioned (without being asked, I'm not that bad at interviews) that the work hours are 8:45 to 6:00, which seems a bit long. And it's only 20 days holiday a year, when 25 is normal for that kind of position. Still, perhaps I shouldn't complain about the job before I've even got on the second-interview shortlist. And it's still a great job, I'd be in charge of the whole accounts department, involved with every aspect of the bean-counting business, with three, count 'em, three underlings, and reporting directly to the really big bosses. So I still want it.

I probably won't get it, though.

To all the anonymice out there

I'm fairly certain the plural of anonymous is anonymice. 'Anonymouses' doesn't look right. Anyway, I seem to be getting quite a few comments on the blog just lately, which is great - there was a period when nobody was commenting at all, which makes me feel alone and unloved - but I would appreciate it if you'd put your name on the comments when you do! You don't have to use your real name if for some reason you don't want me to know who you are, just pick an alias and use it consistently. That way when I read my comments I can think to myself "ah, that Herbert Etheridge and his habit of mis-spelling the word 'a' every time he uses it...", rather than just feeling like I'm being shouted at by some unseen stranger in the shadows. I see the Zoomy's-Thing-comment-posting community as a friendly, social kind of gathering where everybody knows your name and we're all friends.

Of course, I would probably get more friendly comments if I made the kind of blog post with some kind of interesting and informative content, wouldn't I? Well, maybe tomorrow.