Crabbit auld girn

Just to complain a little bit more about the new Broons/Oor Wullie collection, because I can't read an extremely entertaining and enjoyable compilation of long-out-of-print comics without whining that I want more from it... This latest volume is larger than the fourteen previous ones, in the sense that the pages are physically bigger. I have no idea why - the reprinted comics are the same size as ever, there's just more white space around the edges. But the number of pages is sharply reduced again - the first one, back in 1996, had 126 reprinted Dudley-Watkins-drawn strips, then they settled into a pattern of roughly 120 every year until 2006, when it shrank down to around 100 per compilation. This year's has 83. Yes, I counted them.

I mean, are they trying to test just how little work they can put into these books and still get people to buy them? If so, I'm worried, because I'll continue to buy them however small they get, and I'm sure everyone else who buys the things will do the same. It's not like they're running short of comics to reprint, because Watkins drew a LOT of them - by my count there are about 1800 still to appear in these annual collections. Aren't they satisfied with another fifteen-to-eighteen years of income before they have to test the waters with a Watkins-themed Beano or Dandy compilation? Heck, by that time I'll be crying out for a Ken H Harrison tribute book...

Well, there'd better be more than a hundred in next year's book, or I'll have no alternative but to whine in my blog again. And I don't think anyone wants that!

Did you know...?

That in pole vaulting, there's no rule specifying how long your pole has to be? I would have thought there would be.

Svenska

I've got a 'teach yourself Swedish' course, but I haven't got round to trying it out yet. I'm pessimistic about my chances of being able to make myself understood in Gothenburg at the end of the month - from what little I know of the language, I'm pretty sure I won't be able to get my tongue around the vowel sounds or tones. Maybe I'll just speak Japanese to everyone there. I've got quite good at Japanese.

One last stat attack

People persistently find this blog searching for cartoon-related topics on Google. I need to write more blogs about old cartoons, and especially the ones released on cheap knockoff videos, fast! I haven't toon-blogged for years, actually. Right, from now on, this blog is nothing but cartoons!

Return of the ukulele

I went into Nottingham today for no particular reason, and was walking through the Victoria Centre when I heard the sounds of ukulele music. It turned out that the music shop were having some kind of ukulele event, including free lessons/singalongs with the guy who wrote my teach-yourself-ukulele book. He even recognised me, too, although he seemed doubtful when I suggested he might have seen me memorising things on the telly and asked whether I do cabaret or anything like that.

Still, I know an omen when I see one, and clearly this means I should stop wasting time practicing memorising things, and start practicing the ukulele. I might even join the Nottingham Ukulele Group, which is probably going to be formed shortly by someone else who was there today.

I appreciate that I'm probably never going to be the World Ukulele Champion, both because no such title exists and because my fingers are generally clumsy and useless, but it would almost certainly be fun anyway...

Drat those logistics!

The latest collection of classic Broons and Oor Wullie comics is in the shops now! Well, according to Lew Stringer, who knows about these things, it's been out for a month, but this is the first time I've seen it. Anyway, once I'd read the comics, my eye was drawn to the small print on the first page - "While every effort has been made to preserve the authenticity of the pages reproduced here, for logistical reasons, certain minor adjustments have been made."

That's strange, I thought - previous collections haven't had a disclaimer like that. And what are "logistical reasons" when you're reproducing old newspaper comics? Well, I had to investigate further, and here's one of those minor adjustments that were logistically necessary! Here's one of the reprinted strips from this year's collection:

And here's the strip as it originally appeared in 1937:





Spot the minor adjustment? Now, don't get me wrong here. As a general rule, I do think racism is a bad thing, all in all (I would hope that goes without saying, but you never know). But I don't like the idea of reprinting old comics and whitewashing out the offensive racial stereotypes. Besides which, that unfortunate black member of Wullie's old gang (I've seen him referred to as 'Ezzy', but he's unnamed in all the comics I've seen - Wullie's original gang were a nameless horde, hugely indebted to the Our Gang movies, for the first couple of years) wasn't there in an attempt at racism, he was an attempt at political correctness, 1930s-style, and inclusion. He's drawn like that because that's how you drew black people in those days.

And okay, there were some Oor Wullie strips where his purpose is to play up the usual comedy-nigger clichés, but he's always just one of the gang, and a valued member at that. Here's one of his greatest moments, where he's elevated from the ranks of the horde to become Wullie's most loyal sidekick:



(Note the fat one called 'Sandy' in that strip, by the way - after a couple of months as 'Geordie', he became 'Fat Bob', shoved the rest of the old gang aside, and the comic evolved into the familiar lineup we know and love today)

So here's to Ezzy, or whatever his name was, and I want you all to go and draw him back into your copies of "The Broons and Oor Wullie - Family Fun Through The Years"! For logistical reasons!

"Are, in retrospect, glorious..."

Someone found my blog by googling "The follies of men's youth" today. I'm going to have to stop reading that stats page, it's terribly addictive.

Anyway, looking back at 2006 to see the blog entry I wrote with that title, I noticed just how much of this blog is devoted to whining that I'm not sufficiently prepared for memory competitions. Now I come to think about it, I don't think I've ever felt that I've done enough training, since the world championship in 2004. Perhaps I should just give up on the subconscious desire to recapture the downright obsessive practicing I was doing before I won the world championship for the first time, because it's never going to happen.

Really, I'd settle for forcing myself to do just a little bit of speed numbers and binary training to get my speed back up again, between now and the Swedish championship. I'll see if I can muster the enthusiasm tomorrow...

An aid to memory

I feel that I should record for posterity that my favourite poem is Rudyard Kipling's "If". The subject of favourite poems came up recently in a conversation, and for some reason I couldn't think of one on the spur of the moment. So in accordance with the well-known mnemonic principle of 'write it down and even if you never look at the writing again, you'll remember it', let me just say that I absolutely worship and adore that poem, and it's always going to be the one that springs to my mind when asked for a favourite.

Then I'll follow it with an apology for choosing the poem that everyone lists as their all-time favourite, but it really is. Sorry.

Stats!

Hey, this is something new! Or maybe it was always there and I just didn't notice, but it's new to me! Blogger comes with stats telling you who's reading your blog and why!

Today, my viewers come from:

United Kingdom 70
United States 45
Australia 9
India 6
Sweden 4
Latvia 3
Canada 2
Germany 2
France 2
Hong Kong 2

Who's reading me in Latvia? I don't know any Latvians. I mentioned Lithuania the other day, but not Latvia. Perhaps they were offended! If I'd known I had Latvian readers, I would have pretended to think Latvia was great!

Furthermore, I've had a visit from the New Zealand version of Google, searching for "how to give myself food poisoning". I hope my blog was instructive - open a tin of tuna yesterday, save half of it until today, assume it'll be fine.

And people have been looking for Krypton Force again! I haven't done a blog post about Krypton Force videos for ages. I must devote another blog to Marc's artwork again soon. And people have been sent here by recordholders.org, too - I didn't know that site even still existed, let alone had a link to my blog. You learn something new every day. And, thanks to Blogger, the things I'm going to learn revolve around the question of who's reading my blog!

A need for speed

The only real problem I had at the UK Championship was that my brain was running too slowly. It was taking me more time than it should have done to look at the numbers/cards/whatevers and translate them into images. Once I'd done that, my recall was excellent and my mind really wasn't wandering at all, which surprised me a bit, because I haven't done very much marathon-memory training in the last year or so. So really, I just need a bit of regular evening practice going as quickly as possible, and hopefully I'll be back up to somewhere close to my best, possibly...

On the other hand, I was really super-fast with the random words last week. The first three or four columns of words just sunk into my brain with no trouble at all, it really struck me as weird. Maybe there's a reason behind that, or maybe they were just easy words.

Book report

While in London, I came across the most completely awesome book - "Find Chaffy", by the completely awesome Jamie Smart. It's like Where's Wally, but mixed with Jamie Smart's trademark weird and wonderful sense of humour, and you all really should go and buy it now.

I also found a copy of the first G-Man collection by Chris Giarrusso, which I've been meaning to buy for ages - it's also quite screamingly funny and clever and recommended to everyone. Also, it steals my ideas, but it's probably a coincidence.

And I also bought something by Charles Dickens, but he hasn't got a website yet. It's no wonder he's not cool.

My life is an action movie

As I was walking to the MSO the night before last, in the still-pouring rain, a lightbulb fell from a theatre poster and missed me by a fraction of an inch before shattering on the ground. In fact, either on the way down or as the bits bounced back up, it burnt my arm just below the elbow! I have a feeling that this is the kind of thing I could sue someone for, but luckily my life isn't a courtroom drama, so I won't. And then as I was heading back to the hotel, I was halfway down to the platform at the Tottenham Court Road tube station when the fire alarms went off and the whole station was evacuated. Fire engines and everything, and I had to get the bus back. It was all terribly exciting, and also wet.

Anyway, I did end up winning the UK Championship after all, although I was quite some way off my best in everything except random words (don't ask me why, but I got a personal-best 200 in that). All the other disciplines, though, I was somewhere around 80-90% of the kind of scores I expect from a safe, unexceptional result. Boris took issue with that, saying that I could have come really quite close to my best-ever score if I hadn't messed up the speed cards, but I know how good I can be, and how good I wasn't all through this competition, and I need a big improvement if I'm going to do any good at the WMC. Still, it could have been a lot worse.

And the speed cards wasn't because I couldn't memorise them, it was just either tiredness or general stupidity - the first trial I came close but got mixed up with the images somewhere in the middle of the pack, but the second trial I remembered perfectly with almost no trouble at all. But then when I was re-ordering the recall pack I somehow put the first two cards down in the wrong order. Sigh. I still don't know how I did that, I've never done it before.

So, with a bit of training and some more 'practice competitions' in Sweden and Germany, I might be able to get back to my best results. I hope so, anyway, because even though I didn't lose this one, I'm feeling more in a memory-training kind of mood now.

There might be an article about the competition in the Washington Post, if you're a reader, because I did a big long interview with an enthusiastic journalist after the championship. Then we had a big international meal at an Italian restaurant, with at least ten or eleven nationalities represented among the nine people who were there - I had thought that Enrico would be chatting with the staff there, but our waitress turned out to be Lithuanian, so Robertas did the talking instead. All in all, it was a fantastic competition, and I'm looking forward to more!

Now, should I play Texas Hold'em tonight, or go and see Avenue Q?

The best way to prepare for a memory competition

Blogging from London! I love this internet cafe next to Charing Cross. Anyway, I got the train down here yesterday afternoon in the pouring rain, found my hall-of-residence-cum-hotel with a minimum of getting lost, then set out on a reconnaisance mission to find the venue of the UK Memory Championship and the MSO.

If you're ever trying to find MWB Business Exchange's Paddington offices (and you should, it's awesome, I can't recommend them highly enough), you really should follow the map on their website. It's a bit tricky to navigate, but don't give up on it and use Google Maps instead, because the address is "1 Kingdom Street", which Google Maps thinks is about a mile away from where it really is, and the London A-Z thinks doesn't exist at all. Luckily, London has internet cafes for weary and wet travellers (did I mention that it was pouring with rain all day?) to turn to after an hour or so of fruitless searching.

Having established where the memory championship was going to be, I made my way to the easily-found Soho Theatre for a bit of poker before getting an early night. The nightly poker tournaments at the MSO run from 6:30 to 10:30 every evening, but I'm a terrible player, so I figured I could count on being knocked out within an hour or two at most. But I'd forgotten I'm also a naturally lucky player, and by a combination of dreadful play and ridiculous luck I ended up coming second and being there until eleven o'clock at night.

Also luckily, it had stopped raining by that point, which was particularly lucky since I got lost on the way back to the hotel and ended up going to bed at a bit after midnight.

But after a couple of hours' sleep, I was all ready and raring to go for the fourth UK Memory Championship (and the first to be an 'international standard' event instead of a shorter and easier 'national standard'). I managed to find "Kingdom Street" without any real difficulty this time (although it's not really a street as such, just two enormous office blocks on a business park) and got to the completely wonderful venue of the championship bang on time.

I really can't enthuse enough about the venue - it might just be the best place we've ever had, and it's all thanks to the generous sponsorship of MWB Business Exchange. If you ever need an office or a meeting room, check them out, you won't regret it. Now, memory competitors don't ask for much from a venue. A quiet room, basically, but there are certain optional extras that are nice too, like an extra room for arbiters, a place for competitors to go and chat out of earshot of the competition room while others are still recalling, plentiful drinks, and so on. This venue has all of those, it's a huge spacious competition room, and it's completely and totally silent. Even though Paddington Station is right next door, you genuinely can't hear a thing.

It's a gorgeous modern building, made almost entirely of glass, with super-fast zippy lifts without buttons on the inside (you press a control panel outside and it sends a lift to take you where you want to go - only ever seen these once before, and that was at the South German championship. They're very groovy.)

We had 14 competitors turn up - less than was on the list of registered competitors, as usual (I didn't really expect to see "David Duchovny, USA", but it's a real shame that Simon Reinhard wasn't able to come along after all) but with a huge wide range of countries represented. Off the top of my head, it's England, Wales, Germany, Austria, Holland, Slovenia, Italy, wherever Robert comes from (somewhere Baltic, I think) and the Phillipines. The latter team consists of two players and a coach who have travelled about 7000 miles just for this championship, so yay for them. They also called me "Sir Ben" until I told them to stop it.

I did surprisingly well, considering my lack of training and sleep. In abstract images I got a passable 158, then an entirely acceptable 3650 or so in binary. We haven't had the scores for the other disciplines yet, but I think I got about 90 in names and faces, which is as good as I ever get. Then in speed numbers (tiredness and lack of training catching up with me by this point) I was thrown into extreme confusion by Warren saying "Neurons on the ready... get set... go!" instead of the standard formula without the "get set" in the middle and spent about two minutes thinking of nothing but the "get set" and not memorising any numbers. I eventually pulled myself together and got 216, by guessing and luck, and then in the second trial attempted 360 and probably made enough mistakes that I won't improve on my score.

Finally it was 30-minute cards, and I laid out my 18 packs on the table, but as soon as I'd started to memorise I could tell it was going to be an unmitigated disaster if I attempted to look at them all. I decided to play it ultra-safe and just do 12, and I think I got them all right. With 25 minutes of recall time to spare, so obviously I was playing it a lot safer than I needed to, but never mind.

So I'm in actually okay shape to maybe win the thing after all, touch wood. My main rival is Boris, and I will need to do something fairly good tomorrow to beat him, but we'll see. Anyway, time for more poker. It's London Lowball tonight, and I'll try my best to lose more quickly.

No more pencils, no more books

Hooray, no more work until next Tuesday! Down to London tomorrow for some good old-fashioned MSOing and memorising and not watching telly (that always used to be an important part of a week at the MSO, although of course it was more of a big thing in the olden days before BBCi and things like that). I won't be blogging, either, so you'll all just have to do without my daily updates yet again. But when I come back, well, I'll start blogging again. Hooray.

Decamentanniversary

I didn't bother to check the exact dates until tonight, thinking it was later in the week, but in fact the Saturday and Sunday just gone were the 10th anniversary of the first memory competition I ever took part in. It was the World Memory Championship 2000, and the scores are still hanging around on the internet here!

I think 16th out of 21 competitors was pretty good, all in all, considering that I had never used a memory technique before the evening of the first day. Let's be nostalgic and look back a decade to see what things were like back then...

The first thing of interest is that the WMC was just a two-day event back then. Starting at 10am and carrying on until 7:30 in the evening each day. The hour-long marathon disciplines had shorter recall times - I think it was 75 minutes, but I'm not 100% certain - which cut the overall championship length down a bit, and of course there were fewer competitors, so less organisational hassle for everyone. It expanded to a three-day event with longer recall times in 2002.

Dominic O'Brien won quite easily, as he always did back then, with Andi Bell coming second, getting great scores in some disciplines but bad ones in others, which was also quite traditional by that time. And Gunther won the binary and spoken numbers on his way to third place, which he also always did in those days. The World Memory Championship was a little bit stuck in a rut in 2000. It shook itself out of it in 2002 and 2003 with some status-quo-smashing performances.

Whatever happened to... Well, Dominic is still hanging around, albeit as an organiser rather than a competitor (although he still hasn't "officially" retired, you know), Andi pops up from time to time (he won't be in London this week, but apparently he's still planning to be in China), Gunther is still ever-present and still at the very top of the memory world, but what about the rest of those 21 participants ten years ago? Daniel Corney now calls himself Daniel Tammett and writes books about how great he is. Rob Carder last competed in 2002, but kept in touch with things on internet message boards until a few years ago. You never know, he might pop up again some time. Dr Yip is still teaching small Malaysians about memory skills and is sure to turn up at a competition again one of these days. Tom Groves I saw in New York a couple of years ago, and Graham Old has a blog on the internet somewhere that I should go and check out while I'm thinking about it. It'd be good to see them both at another championship. Michaela Buchvaldova is now Mrs Dr Gunther Karsten, and so still involved with championships interspersed with motherhood. I haven't actually heard anything from Christiane Stenger for quite a while, but I think she's still technically a memory celebrity in Germany. Then we have four Malaysians - Dr Yip's class of 2000. I know nothing about them and none of them ever came back to a memory competition. The next year, though, there were some really really talented youngsters who came along with him! I'll write about that next year, maybe. Tatiana Cooley was the American champion - we haven't heard from her for a while, and I have no idea what she's doing now. That great berk Ben Pridmore is still turning up to competitions, but nobody likes him, so that's enough about that. Hew Kian How got the booby prize from Dr Yip that year, then we have Harald Lammermeyer who I think I know, but I can't remember what he looks like or what kind of person he is. I've got a bad memory. Edison Hong won a trip to London by coming third in the US Championship, he was a friendly and fun young high school student, but he didn't carry on with the memory sports thing after this. And the last two are more Germans, I think, but I don't remember them.

And look at how rubbish those top scores and world records were! Except the poem one, that was really really cool, until the likes of Astrid came along a few years later and blew it away.

I'm still meaning to write a book called "Noughty Memories" about all the memory competitions of the 2000s, you know. I'll get round to it one day, possibly after I retire.

Get your kicks on Cycle Route 6

I'd assumed it was going to be rainy and miserable again today, but in fact it was sunny and hot and just plain gorgeous all day long. It's real MSO-week weather - when I used to go to the MSO regularly, it was always baking hot for the whole week. I don't think the MSO saw a drop of rain until it had been running for five or six years.

So after a really quite fun photo session and interview this afternoon, I went out for a bike ride and followed the cycle route all the way from Beeston to Derby without getting lost this time. It's really great, it takes you on a long, winding scenic route through all the nice parts in between the two cities and almost none of the nasty parts. I'd recommend it to visitors who want to see the beauty of England at its finest but can't afford the DVD.

And then I got the train back home, because there is such a thing as too much exercise.

Pearly, where's your milk-white skin?

I think I'm getting wrinkles around my eyes. What with that and the white hair that pretty much dominates my beard nowadays, it's increasingly hard to convince myself I'm still youthful and devastatingly handsome.

This is the kind of thing that concerns me mostly when there's someone coming to take photos of me tomorrow. I'm not sure what for, some kind of news article most probably. But I'm going to look fat and bald and old and hideous, you can rest assured.

And now the news

I'm back, or at least I'm back in a non-cohabiting kind of situation where I don't need to worry about being a bad host by sitting here writing my blog while my house-guest is hanging around. And I felt that several of the news headlines you get shown when you log into Yahoo mail were interesting enough to blog about. Mainly because the only people who've been commenting here lately are the type who just read my blog for memory tips, and I wanted to annoy them.

But "Brigade in industrial action ballot" is a weird one. I mean, can't we specify which brigade we're talking about? I'm sure they've got number-of-characters limits, but they could have substituted 'strike' for 'industrial action'. Because if it's the fire brigade then yes, I can see how that might be a bad thing. If it's the Boys' Brigade, then they can feel free to go on strike as far as I'm concerned. If it's the Teen Brigade, the fictional group of teenage American radio hams who appeared in Marvel comics in the early sixties, then quite frankly the world would probably be better off if they went on strike.

And "May authorises marches ban in city" is really quite groovy, because it has two different months in it, and because however many times I read it I find myself automatically thinking it's the verb 'may' instead of Theresa, and getting confused trying to make sense of the rest of it.

And as for "Cenotaph outrage woman flees court", I just find myself wondering what that story was and why I didn't hear about the cenotaph outrage when it first happened. And thinking that "Cenotaph Outrage Woman" would make a great name for a supervillainess. Much better than "Bigot Woman".

"Students scramble for university places" is a rubbish headline though. For one thing they use exactly the same headline, and story, every year, and for another thing only idiots go to university. Posh, wealthy idiots for the most part. There should be a law against it. So if you've found this blog because you googled 'memory tips for university' or something like that, then go on, bog off and get a real job, you'll get no advice from me.

The secret to harmonious co-habitation

My brother was away in Leamington Spa last night, and he's away in Bingham or somewhere tonight, and just paid a flying visit here on his way between the two while I was out today. I came home to find the only change was a pair of cowboy boots had replaced the flip-flops in the hall (he has unusual tastes in footwear), and a pack of newly-developed photos had appeared on the kitchen table, containing lots of drunken pictures from his first Saturday night back in the country.

These photos were taken (a little unprofessionally - this is about the only one without a thumb over the lens) just before the immortal phrase "Hey, there's a webcam on my laptop that I never use..." sprang to my lips. Next time, hopefully, the phrase "And there are people I work with who follow me on the internet, so we'd better not post anything embarrassing" will spring up too, but that's another matter.

Still, this picture of a bad day for He-Man is quite artistic. The blurry book in the foreground is "The Remains Of The Day", which sort of sounds appropriate for the scene depicted. And it has the advantage of showing my bare foot. I often mention to people that I've got freakishly long toes, and offer to show them, but most people object to me taking my shoes and socks off and sticking my feet in their face, on grounds of hygiene and general good taste. But now I can just show them this photo, and have them react with disgust and horror!

Anyway, the brother's going back into Chinese exile in a couple of days, so I can miss him again, but until then, I'm just lying back, enjoying the peace and quiet and the return of football highlights on a Saturday evening. Ahh, bliss.

On me!

The only thing I genuinely wanted to be when I was young was The Milkybar Kid. So this latest campaign of encouraging adults to audition for the part is quite disturbing to me in many ways. Perhaps it's still not too late for a change of career...