Censorship

I've moaned before about E4 cutting funny lines out of Friends, but tonight's episode really takes the biscuit. They cut out the exchange between Chandler and Phoebe's new fireman boyfriend in which Chandler quips that he and Joey could play with matches and bump up the fireman's total of people rescued from burning buildings to a round 100 when he boasts that it's currently 98. "Fire safety isn't a joke, son," says the fireman, sternly, in reply. I mean, really, does E4 think we live in the kind of society when kids are going to hear that dialogue and immediately commit acts of arson? Channel 4 need to either start showing Friends (and for that matter the Simpsons) in that good old nine o'clock on Fridays slot, uncut, or just leave them alone before the watershed. They're in cahoots with the DVD people, is what it is, forcing us to buy the DVDs in order to get the complete episodes.

You might have noticed, I've got nothing interesting to write about tonight.

Reality TV

I get to spend the second half of next week being filmed again, for this ITV Genius-related programme. This leaves me struggling to find something to blog about - you might have noticed I've been uncharacteristically quiet on the subject, because this one had the sense to get me to sign a contract beforehand promising not to say bad things about it. That's where The Mentalists went wrong, obviously - I didn't sign anything there until late in the day, and then there wasn't a 'no bad-mouthing us on your blog' clause.

So, since I'm not capable of writing about being filmed without moaning at length about the process (it's all part of not wanting to sound like some kind of big-headed TV star more than actually not liking it), my blogs might be a bit on the skimpy side, if they exist at all - there are a couple of people staying with me on Friday and Saturday for the memory competition, so possibly I won't write anything.

Sorry about that. Perhaps I'll email people privately and bad-mouth the documentary. There's not anything in the contract about that, is there? ... Damn. They thought of everything.

Interesting demographic

Well, it seems that four out of five commenters who expressed a preference agreed with me that contact lenses are a horrible, horrible idea. I'm pretty sure this is well above the national average, even though the sample size is roughly equivalent to the number of people they generally survey for those polls of what 'the public' thinks about things.

So what does this show us? That people who read Zoomy's Thing are generally squeamish sissies who go around arranging flowers and holding hands more than is socially acceptable when they should be doing manly things like sticking things in their eyes? Or that my readers are intelligent types who appreciate that wearing glasses is the best way to show the world how clever you are? Or that the majority of people who follow my blog are scared of incurring my violent and sardonic wrath if they venture a different opinion to mine?

Ewwwwww. Seriously, ewwwwww.

The official reason I don't wear contact lenses is that my astigmatism means I'd have to wear fiddly and expensive toric lenses and I'm not made of money. The actual reason is that I'm horrifically squeamish about touching my eyes. The very idea makes me shudder. However, while I was having my eyes tested last week, the optician persuaded me to try the free five-day trial they've got going at the moment, so I went in today for a fitting. If you have 'fittings' with contact lenses, and you probably don't.

The contact-lenses-optician examined my eyes in detail, got a pair of lenses and said "Okay, now I'll put them in for you." But despite my best efforts, every time she attempted to poke the little things into my eyes, I found myself jerking my head away violently. I thought I deserved congratulations for not hitting her with the eye-testing machinery and squealing "Get away from my eyes!", but she didn't seem terribly impressed. So they resorted to plan B, which was getting someone to show me how to put them in myself.

After a lot of time and difficulty, I got the things in and (after even more time and unpleasantness) out again, but by that point I'd decided that there wasn't any need to carry on with the rest of the trial. I mean, ewww, touching my eyes! Ewww! I'll stick with my glasses, thank you very much. Astigmatism, you see. Toric lenses. Cost a fortune and you have to get the top part pointing up and the bottom part down, and who has time for that in a morning?

Do I sound like the worst kind of nerd if I say......

There is literally nothing in the world more satisfying than doing an hour cards practice, recalling carefully for two hours and filling in the final blank space on the recall paper just as the stopwatch shows 1:59:59! I was very happy with myself, not just for spending the morning doing an hour cards practice for the first time in yonks, but for doing it well and perfectly time-managed like that. Although of course in a competition I'd need to go a bit faster, because there are more distractions caused by other competitors finishing their recall earlier.

Anyway, I was attempting 33 packs and although I haven't checked them, I hopefully got about 30 right. It did go well. I don't normally do long practice sessions on weekdays, seeing as people might be phoning me about jobs, but since I hadn't been able to make myself do anything this weekend, I unplugged the phone and got on with it. Nobody called me, anyway. It's becoming increasingly clear that nobody wants to employ me, ever again.

Still, ne'mind, eh? Here's a link to Mahmut in Australia's blog - he asked me to give him a plug, so please go over there, check him out and wish him luck at the Australian Championship in September!

Nothing

I've done nothing all day, so I'm going to blog about nothing tonight. Tomorrow, I will do things and then write about them.

Boooooo

I was sort of hoping that Reading would avoid relegation, if only because I don't particularly like Fulham or Birmingham, but never mind. At least Man Utd, who I marginally prefer to Chelsea, won the title.

Anyway, I'm still unemployed and out of practice at memory, so I'm sure I've got more important things to do than watch football now that the season's almost over. I'll just have to find another excuse for not doing anything.

Doctor Doctor

Let's talk about Doctor Who again. Well, I haven't done anything else today, so we might as well. And what with last weekend's excitement, I only got to watch last Saturday's episode yesterday, so I've had two in two days and I thought I'd share my thoughts on them.

"The Poison Sky", the second part of the Sontaran story, was a real rip-roaring, thrilling episode, with no end of action and entertainment. I looked at the clock half an hour in to it and thought "Cripes, we've had at least two movies' worth of things happening so far and it doesn't even feel rushed!" Great writing, and mostly great acting too. It's always fun to see Rupert Holliday Evans, and I hope he shows up again, he works well with the Doctor.

It was also a very good episode for a New Doctor Who Drinking Game - it ticked all the boxes for the plot cliches that keep on showing up. We had modern technology in the form of GPS systems and cars turning against humans; the entire world coming under attack at once with maps displaying affected areas and British and American news reporters commenting on it; the companion's mother being at odds with the Doctor's approach to solving the problem; the Doctor being briefly separated from the Tardis and lamenting that he was going to have to live like a normal person now; a whiny American genius bad guy... but despite all this, it was fantastically fun to watch. The Sontarans were great, so were Martha and Donna and the Doctor, and the plot made some kind of sense too. Only the final resolution was a bit flawed - okay, hindsight is always 20-20, but I bet the Sontarans were really kicking themselves about the way they didn't bother to go after Rattigan and kill him, even though they knew he had a device that could thwart all their plans.

Some really great moments from the Doctor ("People with guns are usually the bad guys"), and I hope we're going to see the Sontarans and UNIT again.

Tonight's episode, "The Doctor's Daughter", on the other hand, I think suffered from being a single episode. It had the kind of plot that would have worked spread over four 25-minute episodes, using as it did the old sci-fi cliche of a war between two factions that's been going on so long nobody remembers how it started (with a nice and very Doctor Who twist that I genuinely didn't see coming). It would have gone down very nicely in the Tom Baker era, and not just because of the similarities to "The Face Of Evil", but it felt like the pacing had been compromised to fit all the action into 35 minutes (with the final ten minutes being a lengthy epilogue). It felt rushed and disjointed, although it did avoid clunky exposition in setting the scene nicely.

I take issue with a couple of details of this society of people bred for the sole purpose of fighting the war and discovering the holy grail they've been searching for all their lives - firstly, having decided that the Doctor and Donna are threats to their society and of no genetic use to them, why do they lock them in a cell rather than just killing them? And why, having discovered the map to the thing their entire lives revolve around finding, do they decide to go to bed and set out to find it in the morning? I mean, I know a good night's sleep is important, but I'm surprised at the patience they're showing here.

Still, it was a good story, introduced an interesting character (although the silly handsprings-through-the-lasers bit is so not what Doctor Who is all about), making intelligent use of sci-fi staples (great costumes on the Hath too). It was just a bit bland and ordinary.

Still, I'm loving new Doctor Who, even half way through the fourth series. David Tennant needs to stay in the role for the rest of time. Best Doctor ever.

Nobody wants to play with me

Okay, so the situation for the Derby championship is like this. There will be certainly one, possibly two, TV crews filming the event, half a dozen competent arbiters, nice scenic location, admirable organisation of the whole weekend... and, if we're lucky, three competitors.

This is not a good thing, all in all. The whole thing is going to look a bit silly. 66.7% sillier than the UK championship last year, assuming that silliness is inversely proportionate to the number of competitors who turn up for an event. Don't get me wrong, I'm delighted that Gaby is coming from Germany and Dagfinn from Norway, just to take part in the championship, but I would be more delighted if the entire population of Britain didn't have better things to do that weekend. Or if the entire population of Derby wasn't happy to point me out on the street (even the Big Issue salesman in the city centre) but reluctant to try their collective hand at memorising a few numbers.

Okay, we might also have the likes of Nikita from possibly Russia or possibly Stoke-on-Trent, I've never asked, and other-Ben from down south somewhere and Nico from London-I-think-but-I'd-have-to-check-up-on-that and make a half-respectable turnout, but I'm still very worried that I'm going to end up looking extremely silly here.

There's a £100 top prize, remember, people - and I'm not eligible to win it, so you have a decent chance of covering your expenses if you want to come along. But I'm seriously considering taking a full census of exactly who's coming, and if the silliness level is below UK Championship 2007 levels (possibly using a more sophisticated assessment method involving world rankings), I might cancel the event while it's possible to escape with some dignity and my deposit for the room.

Please come to the Derby Memory Championship! Or give me a good excuse why you can't!

Mapped into abstraction

I'm embarking on a campaign of getting to grips with abstract images. The memory competition discipline, you know, I'm not turning into a modern artist. Although that would be cool.

No, what I'm doing is finally putting aside my dislike of the whole event and trying to work out a good system. So I'm going through the quite tedious process of identifying all the different background patterns - I think there are about a hundred of them, although I've never examined them in detail - and associating each one with one of my images. Then I think I'm going to memorise the images by reading them DOWN the columns, rather than across the rows. I don't know if that'll work, but in theory it should make recall easier, because I'll be able to pick one of five options for each image at each point on the journey. I might be able to just go through all the images once, and if that does turn out to be possible, 250 images in 15 minutes should be very easy.

I wonder if that's the system Gunther uses? I'm still going to call it the Ben-Images-System anyway, if it works. BIS for short. Like the extremely cool pop group.

The cake is a lie

As you know (or as you would know if you'd memorised every detail of my life like I expect you to), I disapprove of basically every new computer game developed in the last fifteen years or so. Consequently, I'm a little out of touch with what modern games are like. However, someone made a passing reference to the game "Portal" today, which intrigued me enough to look it up. And, well, I've seen unanimously raving reviews, lots of screenshots and youtube clips, no end of buzz about it, and now I really, really want this game! Enough to abandon my long-held belief that video games reached perfection with the Sega Mega Drive. So, before I spend a lot of money that I really can't afford on a game that the most enthusiastic reviews concede will only take about five hours to complete, I thought I'd ask my loyal blog-readers if you've played it, and if it really is as clever, funny and entertaining as the masses of internet people make it sound?

It really seems worth the £15 it costs in HMV just for that brilliant song at the end...

Non-interview-related post

As I might have mentioned once or twice before, I'm not going to say anything at all about the job interview I went to today, in case I accidentally say something that would prejudice my chance of getting the job. But please keep your fingers crossed for this one, because I still hope I get it.

Instead, let me announce that before going to the interview (it was a late afternoon one) I did a half-hour binary practice in the morning and a half-hour numbers in the afternoon, and despite the fact that my brain was working significantly slower than usual - I didn't quite get to the end of my sixth journey in binary, and I normally come close to completing seven in 30 minutes - I ended up with pretty accurate recall and scores of 3715 and 1222. The latter would be a world record (just barely) if I did it in competition, and the 3715 would be an entirely acceptable and almost certainly winning score in any championship. I'm happy with myself for being able to keep the mental concentration going for two 90-minute sessions, and hopefully I can expand further on that and get really up to peak performance by the time the German championship comes round. I'd really like to win that one this year.

Drat!

Well, I managed to get home, laden with my big heavy rucksack and four bags of miscellaneous othello-related equipment, without losing anything that doesn't belong to me, my hat or my only posession of any monetary value (my laptop), but (and brace yourself for a tale of tragedy here) somewhere along the way the rucksack or the bags slung over my shoulders must have knocked the Blue Peter badge off my lapel! I'm afraid it's really lost and gone forever this time.

I'm going to buy another one on eBay.

CMC '08

That's Cambridge Memory Championship 2008. I don't think anyone's ever called it the CMC before, but I think we should start. Anyway, the day was fun. I got to Trinity College a bit before our optimistically scheduled starting time of 9:00, carrying two tons of memorisation and recall sheets, packs of cards and timers in my big rucksack, plus Adelaide's handmade "The MSO Is Nigh" sign to wave around at anyone who looked like they might be looking for the MSO. It even worked, luring in all our newcomers to the memory competition world (and there were four of them, too) while we waited outside for Imre to bring the keys to the room. We got into the room just fine, which is more than can be said for the go players in the Junior Parlour, since the stratego players yesterday hadn't returned the key. Everything was sorted out in the end, I gather.

Our room, on the other hand, was one of the Wolfson seminar rooms, nicely away from the street in the middle of the campus, and which I thought would be an ideal, quiet location. It nearly was, with just a few minor exceptions, the major one being the lift just outside the room which bleeps very noisily whenever it goes up or down. The room is basically an enormous glass cube - all windows, even half the floor is glass, allowing you to look down at the concrete two storeys below. Not a room for vertigo-sufferers. The room also didn't have an openable window or working air-conditioning system, so at first we decided to move over the corridor into the room allocated to the shogi players, planning to invoke the time-honoured law of first-come-first-served, but found that the electric sockets weren't working and I couldn't plug in my laptop. So we decamped back to the original room and put up with the hot, sweaty, airtight surroundings.

The seminar rooms are oddly positioned on the second floor of a building that otherwise serves as a hall of residence for Trinity students. There are rooms either side of the seminar rooms, kitchens, showers and toilets at the far ends, and people occasionally wandered back and forth during the day, able to look in through the entirely glass wall of the room as they passed by. The competitors didn't mind the goldfish-bowl feeling, except possibly when a young man wearing nothing but a towel strolled by in the middle of one event. There were only occasional noisy distractions, such as when another pair of students dragged a double bass and cello over to the lift and tried to work out how to fit them both inside, with all our competitors watching.

As for the competitors, we had, as I've said, four newcomers, which is excellent. We also had two Jameses and Gaby from Germany lending the beginners the benefit of their experience. Katie Kermode, however, clearly wasn't in need of much experience - she started off with an excellent 68 in the 5-minute words, and followed it up with a new world record in 5-minute names and faces, of a pretty staggering 82! That's about the score I normally get in 15-minute names and faces... Katie also has the honour of being the first British woman to take part in a memory competition since the early days of the world memory championships. Dagfinn from Norway has the honour of being the first Norwegian to come to the Cambridge championship, which I think is something to be proud of, whereas John and Dave have the honour of joining the very select group of British memory people, and I hope to see them all again soon!

I'd planned to go to the Mitre for lunch, but it turned out not to be open when we got there a bit before twelve (the schedule for Cambridge calls for an early lunch, working on the assumption that there will be major delays. Today, there weren't), so we went into the pub next door, which has a strange name like the Duke of Beef, or something along those lines, I can't really remember. The food was very nice, unless you ordered the Kentucky Burger like James Kemp did and expected a chicken burger like the menu promised. Due to a confusion in the kitchens, he got a fish burger with salsa and the usual chicken-accompaniments. He still ate it.

For the spoken numbers, we took drastic precautions - Jenny went and stood in the lift, holding the doors open, to stop it beeping in the middle of the recitation, and Phil and Rosie took up positions down the corridor to try to head off any noisy or nude students who might be heading our way. We just about managed an acceptable background noise level.

Gaby won in the end, with a just-over-one-minute speed cards to finish off with. I also had a go at the speed cards, joining in on the second trial, but got distracted by some noise right at the start, could only manage 34 seconds and got the recall mixed up. But Gaby's 3963 points bumps her up to 32nd on the rating list, knocking James Ponder down a place, which will serve him right for not being able to come today. James Paterson's third-place score, contrary to what he was saying this evening afterwards, does move him up a place or two too.

Thanks to Science House, our kind sponsor, there was prize money for Gaby and Katie, which is always nice for morale-boosting among competitors. I dutifully plugged the website to all the competitors, or at least I suggested that they check out "sciencehouse.com, or is it sciencehouse.org? Just type 'science house' into google and you'll probably find it". During the course of the day I also discovered that I am completely unable to say "seventh place" without it coming out as "seventh plathe".

After the competition we escaped the glass cube and fled back to the pub, where Gaby gave me a wonderful gift of a German Hagar the Horrible comic and Jenny introduced me to raspberry gin fizz, which is delicious and might become my regular drink of choice from now on. And now I'm back in my hotel and have to lug all my cards and timers, plus all the BOF's othello boards and clocks, back to Derby in preparation for the competitions there in the coming month. It keeps me fit, probably.

Yay for othello!

I ended up with an extremely respectable 4½ out of 7 today, which while admittedly not at the dizzy heights of last year's performance, is a definite step in the right direction. I might have left it a bit late to seriously challenge for the BGP (looks like being a close contest between David Beck and Iain Barrass this year), but I'm aiming to continue improving as time goes on.

Also, I've had too much to drink considering I need to be up early tomorrow morning to run a memory competition, and I probably should go to bed.

Cambridge could do with another Cam-bridge

This hotel would be slightly closer to the city centre if you didn't have to go a long way round to get over the river. Still, it does have wireless internet in my room, even though it isn't supposed to - the wi-fi is officially only in the conference rooms.

So, othello tomorrow, memory on Sunday. I've got a big pile of brown envelopes containing more numbers, words, faces, dates and images than anyone could ever hope to memorise in the time allowed - enough for twenty competitors as long as precisely fifteen of them speak English, three speak German and two speak Norwegian. I'm not expecting more than twelve people to turn up, but it'd be nice to have more. Still time to come along, if you're in Cambridge this weekend!

With any luck, talking to people about memory will get me all fired up to practice for Derby, Germany, Bahrain and anywhere else I might get to test my memory later this year. I'm still looking for that elusive motivation.

As for othello, this was the one I did really well in last year. Can I do it again? Probably not. I've been playing better on the internet just lately, but I don't think I'm in what for me qualifies as good form. Still, I'm more optimistic than I have been going into the last couple of tournaments.

Oh, and in the field of real life, I've got another interview on Tuesday, this one in Tamworth, for another cool-sounding job. Wish me luck!

You wouldn't believe all the tedious stuff I've been doing today

Well, you would, but you'd be bored with it. So I'll spare you the tiresome details and just tell you I'm going to bed. And I'll see you (in a manner of speaking) either tomorrow, or when I get back from Cambridge on Monday, depending on internet access over the weekend.

Gah! Too much work!

I'd forgotten just how long it takes to create all the memorisation papers and associated paraphernalia for a memory competition. I thought I could just wrap everything up quickly today and be all ready to lug everything down to Cambridge on Friday, but instead I've been messing around with things all day, keeping on finding new things that needed to be done... it's hard work, I tells ya. Still, now at least there's no danger of getting to the day itself without something vitally important. I've made a checklist and everything.

See you there on Sunday, everyone! Or on Saturday if you're an othello player instead of a memoriser. Or not at all if you're neither. In which case shame on you!

Also, cats are fighting noisily outside. Someone do something about it.

I broke my glasses

But this did lead to an exciting voyage of discovery deep down to the bottom of my Big Box Of Miscellaneous Junk, looking for my spare pair. The following interesting things turned out to be in it:

Two old, broken pairs of glasses
An old, broken pair of prescription sunglasses
Three old Beanos from 2000
A broken bike lock
A Birmingham A-Z that I don't remember buying or ever using
Various medals and nametags from various MSOs
A few handwritten pages of The Adventures Of Jayce And Alex
A Simpsons jigsaw, still wrapped in cellophane, which must have been a birthday or Christmas present
A 2001 Simpsons calendar
My collection of old coins that some relative, possibly Auntie Cath, sent me out of the blue many years ago
A box of 3½" floppy disks, mostly blank, one containing my work and an assortment of computer games from when I was at Holland Training back in 1995/6
My spare pair of glasses

This last is particularly interesting, because a) I didn't expect to find them in the place where I knew I'd left them - my posessions are rarely so well organised - and b) because they were somehow right down at the bottom of the Big Box, underneath all that more ancient stuff, even though I only bought them less than three years ago. Still, I've found them now, and apart from a vague worry that they make me look somewhat nerdier than my other pair and a slight disorientation caused by the fact that my other pair were a little bent out of shape and these ones aren't, everything is good.

Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry

Now I come to look at it, that quote is much too long to use as a blog title. Oh well, never mind. I just wanted to observe that an election is coming and the Labour and Lib Dem candidates have been pestering everyone in the area with newsletters stressing why they're great or why the others are evil incarnate. Without wanting to get all political, I really would rather they didn't waste resources and money on this kind of thing. Judging by the newsletters, their policies are as identical as their surnames (the Labour candidate is Shiraz Khan, the Lib Dem is Farhatullah Khan. Possibly they're brothers.)

I think the Conservatives should take advantage of this similarity - they don't bother to campaign in this ward, as a rule, knowing a lost cause when they see one, but they should go out of their way to appeal to those who aren't necessarily in tune with what the other candidates are supporting. The Derby congestion charge, for instance - I think it would make a refreshing change to have a candidate who says "Yes, Derby residents WILL have to pay lots and lots of money!" That way, those of us without cars will be able to laugh at everyone else!

Hey, I like this idea. I might run for the council myself, and go out of my way to offend and horrify everyone! Bulldoze the Arboretum! Encourage crime and drugs! Turn off the streetlights!