Wrasslin'

I quite like a bit of American wrestling now and then, and lately I've been enjoying following the latest WWE goings-on. So I thought we needed a blog post urging my followers to check it out, too!

Wrestling might not be what you think it is, you see - nowadays, they really only pay token lip-service to the idea that viewers are supposed to believe it's "real", and the modern WWE is determinedly suitable for children; the wrestlers don't say naughty words any more, they don't excessively attack each other with pointy things, they don't end a fight covered with blood, they supposedly don't even use steroids any more after a death by heart failure and a particularly nasty murder-suicide a few years ago. Although looking at some of the wrestlers, it's a little hard to believe they got that big by nothing other than hard work and exercise...

Still, all that means that what we're left with is essentially acting by people who by and large aren't actors. There's nothing more fun to watch than that! The wrestling itself is secondary to the 'storylines', but a lot of the matches are still entertaining - not the main events, usually, but the lesser match-ups with the more agile and acrobatic performers. There actually are some really talented and athletic people working for the WWE at the moment.

There are two main weekly shows on Sky Sports, regular Pay Per View events (most of them are only PPVs in America, and on normal Sky Sports channels over here - Sky know that nobody will buy a wrestling PPV unless it's one of the handful of really big ones every year), and I particularly recommend WWE Superstars, on Sky 1 at the weekends, which features a couple of wrestling matches between some of the more entertaining non-main-event stars and the highlights of the storyline from the past week's main shows.

Here's a primer for what's happening at the moment - John Cena, the main hero (wrestlers are heroes or villains - the 'hardcore fans' on internet websites use the terms 'babyface/face' and 'heel', but I prefer to think in terms of goodies and baddies), is having surgery and taking a few months off. In the WWE Universe, that basically means he ceases to exist and people never talk about him. That's a problem, obviously, since John Cena toys sell much better than any others, so they need an exciting storyline to keep the fans interested and buying merchandise while he's gone. In Cena's absence, the evil people who run the WWE have become extra-evil and instituted a reign of terror! Vince McMahon, who genuinely owns at least part of the WWE, is always evil, and a lot of fun - people complain about him on the internet, but I've always thought he was cool. He gamely lets himself be beaten up by heroic wrestlers whenever a storyline requires him to get his comeuppance for his evil deeds. But the main focus is his evil daughter Stephanie, and her newly-turned-evil husband Triple H (retired wrestler who in real life ensured he got the best storylines by marrying the boss's daughter). The latter is particularly brilliant at the moment, playing a corporate villain who's unspeakably nasty to the goodies while insisting that everything he does is for the best.

Heroic Daniel Bryan is the best wrestler in the world (this needs a little suspension of disbelief), but is continually being cheated out of the WWE Championship belt by the bosses, because he's short, ugly and has a silly beard. The bosses prefer Randy Orton, who's big and handsome and extremely evil. The Shield, three unstoppable evil villains, are the bosses' henchmen who beat up anyone who opposes them. The Big Show, a loveable giant, is being forced to do the bosses' bidding because he needs the money. Heroic Cody Rhodes has been fired because the McMahon family don't like the Rhodes family - this isn't the kind of 'fired' that stops him being paid to perform on WWE shows, obviously, and also means that his brother and father, who aren't officially employed either, show up a lot. Ten lesser heroes came to Daniel Bryan's aid recently while he was getting the latest of his beatings by The Shield and Orton, and so the battle-lines are drawn.

In other storylines, CM Punk is fighting with his loony former manager Paul Heyman, who in an attempt to get back at Punk has first employed no-hoper Curtis Axel and then the big unstoppable monster Ryback. They remain entirely unconnected to the evil-bosses story, but it's still fun to watch. The Wyatt Family, a group of hillbilly weirdos, one of whom wears a sheep mask for no obvious reason, are also lurking in the background and threatening people.

There are other title belts that don't matter as much as the WWE Championship - Alberto del Rio, who doesn't seem to have any kind of personality or storyline, is the World Heavyweight Champion, Curtis Axel is the Intercontinental Champion, one of The Shield is the US Champion and the other two are the Tag Team Champions, and there's a women's championship too, although all the women in the WWE are models who look good in a bikini but can't act or wrestle. The only one with any kind of personality is AJ Lee, the champion, who just doesn't like any of the others. Other wrestling organisations have women who actually can wrestle - a few years ago, the WWE hired one of them, the massive and frightening Kharma, gave her a big slow build-up of ominous videos, and then just as she was about to make her big debut, she got pregnant in real life and had to leave. This seems to have convinced the WWE that hiring women is more trouble that it's worth, and they haven't really tried to employ any real wrestlers since then.

The fun characters to watch out for: Damien Sandow, "intellectual saviour of the masses" who thinks he's better than you, is wonderful - he talks a good fight, is contemptuous about all his rivals, gets beaten up a lot and currently holds a contract entitling him to challenge for the World Heavyweight Championship at any time but is apparently scared to use it. Goldust, brother of Cody Rhodes, wears an amazing costume, complete with gold and black face-paint that he wears even when dressed in a business suit, and wrestles energetically even though he's in his forties and hadn't been a regular on the WWE for many years before his latest comeback. (There need to be more wrestlers of distinctive appearance like that - as a casual fan, I struggle to distinguish Randy Orton from CM Punk, and Ryback is basically just a slightly smaller version of The Big Show). Kofi Kingston, though he hasn't got any personality beyond being basically a nice guy, is acrobatic and brilliant in the wrestling ring. R-Truth, the rapping wrestler, has the best entrance music and gets the crowd fired up, though there's not much to him beyond that. Paul Heyman is absolutely hilarious - being a manager, he's an actor rather than a wrestler, and makes the whole thing a lot more fun. The Big Show is always fun to watch; genuinely somewhere close to seven feet tall and hugely muscular, he's a great stage presence, and he can act the part too, and even do some cool wrestling moves! (This puts him light-years ahead of the WWE's other main giant, The Great Khali, who can't speak English and can barely move - he's only used in comedy skits nowadays). El Torito, sidekick of Los Matadores, the bullfighter-themed wrestlers who made their debuts this week (well, actually they're two wrestlers who've been around for years, wearing different costumes), is amazing - a tiny little man in a bull costume, he bounces around the ropes better than anyone, and I'm hoping they do something cool with him in the future. 3MB, the Three Man Band, are my favourite baddies - three dim-witted villains who just hang out together because they like each other's company and help each other cheat in singles matches, they all have the perfect 'evil' look about them, especially Drew McIntyre. The Shield also have that great bad-guy look, or at least Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns do (Dean Ambrose always looks too cherubic, even dressed in their trademark black bad-guy costumes). Finally, Dolph Ziggler deserves to be cheered on - he's been with the WWE for years, paying his dues by playing two terrible characters before he became Dolph (his 'thing' is being a show-off), and never quite seems to get the good storylines despite being good-looking, athletic and a lot of fun to watch in the ring.

So check it out - I'm sure you'll like it, even if (like many of my readers) you're an intellectual memory-man who thinks violence is horrid! The "Battleground" PPV is on Sky Sports in the early hours of the morning, or else there's always plenty of other WWE programmes that'll tell you what happens...

Devil among the tailors

I've spent the last 24 hours not being able to remember the quaint olde-worlde name for that skittles game. I'm recording it on my blog, so if that situation ever arises again, you'll all be able to remind me. Okay?

Lawrentian

Did you know that D H Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire? I find myself in Eastwood today and tomorrow for a training course in the Lawrence Suite of Eastwood Hall hotel. My brother's middle name is also Lawrence, although he was named after our grandfather, who in turn was presumably named after Lawrence of Arabia, because in 1919 T E Lawrence was considered an admirable kind of person to name your son after, and D H Lawrence less so. But I might be wrong. Maybe he and the Lawrence Suite here were both named after someone entirely different called Lawrence. It's still a silly name, anyway. My middle name's George, which was a good name until royalty started calling their offspring it.

The kind of thing that keeps me awake at nights

As I've probably mentioned before, I'm a sucker for anything muppet-related, and surprisingly passionate about TV shows intended for small children. So it's good to see that Jim Henson's Pajanimals have finally made their way onto Nick Jr!

Pajanimals, the internet tells me, started out as a series of bedtime-themed songs performed by the four eponymous animals, and was then expanded into a series of 11-minute episodes in which they don't just sing a song but get advice on the pre-schooler hot issue of the week from a variety of helpful characters.

The Nick Jr version of the show, like a lot of their output, is dubbed into British English, replacing the original American voices. It's generally agreed among the people who decide these things, apparently, that under-fives shouldn't hear American voices, but it's okay for older children. This can have its pros and cons - characters often end up saying the kind of things that only Americans would say, in English accents, which is just weird and confusing. But on the other hand, the British voicing is often rather better - Maggie and the Ferocious Beast, for example, was improved immeasurably by the British dubbing. Pajanimals, on the other hand, is a bit more uneven - for one thing, the actors can't quite decide if the second 'a' is pronounced as in 'pajamas' or 'animals'. It's the same sound in America, you see. And anyway, when did we stop spelling it 'pyjamas' over here?

But what concerns me the most about the series as shown on Nick Jr is the order that the episodes are shown in. Two episodes are shown a night, which is a bad idea for a start, since each episode ends with our heroes going to sleep, thus a perfect moment for watching parents to send their offspring to bed - two 11-minute episodes in a half-hour programming block is the inflexible rule in America, but British channels are allowed to vary that a little bit even nowadays, so you'd think Nick Jr would just show one episode each bedtime. On another tangent, they're shown at 7pm (both episodes uninterrupted one after the other, followed by an amazingly long commercial break before the next programme starts at 7:30), which was my bedtime when I was Pajanimals-watching age. Have bedtimes got later now that there's such a thing as children's TV channels, or are parents videoing it (or the modern-day equivalent) for their toddlers to watch the next day?

In any case, I was talking about the order of broadcast. The first two episodes shown on Nick Jr were two extremely similar ones - both featuring Squacky as the central character, both involving him overcoming fears of abstract things (the dark in general, and then the possibility of monsters under his bed). It's not unheard-of for American TV shows to do this kind of thing deliberately (see Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood - or rather, don't, because it's rubbish), but I checked the internet to see if that really was the way it was originally broadcast, and Wikipedia says it wasn't.

Wikipedia, though, I hope is wrong, because the order of episodes it gives is almost certainly production order - it starts with all the episodes featuring Bedtime Bunny as the guest star who helps the Pajanimals with their latest problem, then all the episodes featuring Jerry Bear, and so forth. I'm sure a reputable production company like Sixteen South wouldn't show the episodes in that order!

So what I'm going to have to do is devise an authoritative viewing order for Pajanimals, once I've seen all the episodes! Incidentally, I'm not the only weirdo who thinks this way - the Wikipedia article has a wonderful footnote saying: "NOTE: It should be mentioned that the episodes of the full series are apparently broadcast out of chronological order in terms of the Pajanimals' experiences because in "Share Day" in the first season, Sweetpea Sue was nervous about Share Day at school. But in "Off to My School Adventure" in the second season, she and Apollo were about to attend school for the first time.". People care about these things!

Besides, it's fun to think about! Does "Under The Bed" come before or after "Tomorrow Is Brand New", for example? In the former, Squacky's favourite ball rolls under his bed and he can't get it out because he's scared of monsters; in the latter, he loses another ball (not the same one as in the other episode) under the bed, and insists that Apollo retrieve it for him. If "Tomorrow Is Brand New" comes second, it rather undermines the ending of "Under The Bed", in which Squacky eventually gets his own ball and learns that there aren't any monsters down there; but if they're in the other order, it makes Squacky pretty uncaring about Apollo's safety - in "Under The Bed", Apollo offers to get the ball back, but Squacky won't let him go anywhere near the under-bed monsters.

So stay tuned when the series has reached its end (are Nick Jr going to show both American series? I hope so, anyway) and I'll tell you all which order to watch them in! You should be taping them now, incidentally, since DVDs of these things usually have the American voices, and British people shouldn't be exposed to such things.

Bless me

I've got a terrible cold. I was going to go into work today, but instead I've only ventured as far as the Co-op to buy some lemsip, tissues and a big bar of chocolate, to make me feel better about having a cold. I just wanted to share this with you all.

Dedication's what you need

When I was at primary school, there was a TV show called Record Breakers, which showcased people breaking world records, and had a very catchy theme tune that everyone in Britain still knows. Dedication, dedication, dedication, that's what you need. If you wanna be the best, if you wanna beat the rest, woh-oh-oh, dedication's what you need. And if you slightly change the words to 'defecation', it's hilarious, because defecation means poo.

Actually, that doesn't seem to be quite so funny now I'm not seven years old. Strange. Anyway, the point of all this is that the new 2014 edition of the Guinness Book Of Records came out yesterday. And, having shunned memory-related records for many years in favour of attaching clothes-pegs to your face and being fat, there's a whole two pages of mind-themed records this year!

The whole page is festooned with photos, of me, Naofumi Ogasawara, Simon Reinhard, Melik Duyar, Priyanshi Somani, Johannes Mallow, Boris Konrad, Freddis Reyes Hernandez and some guy I've never heard of called Dr Amit Garg! We all owe a huge debt of thanks to whoever persuaded the Guinness people to include us all in the book - I suspect Melik, he's good at that kind of thing (and the Memoriad gets a lot of plugs), but he hasn't taken the credit for it. There are lots of other fun records too, and not just on those two pages. Go out and buy the book, it's only £10 at W H Smith!

I'm credited with the record for 30-minute cards, a little strangely (hour cards is, to my mind, the cooler marathon cards record). As the book correctly points out, I did it at the Derby Memory Championship, back in 2008, and I see that the other records that made the book were done at things like the German championship - competitions that are only tenuously connected to the World Memory Sports Council. The World Memory Championship goes unmentioned. It's all politics, but who cares? I'm in the book! And that photo of me, taken in 2004, has never looked cooler!

Bah, work tomorrow

Well, Weird Internet Friend #2 is safely on his way back to America, hopefully (I left him in the capable hands of Another Weird Internet Friend yesterday after some London sightseeing), and now I feel like I need a holiday to rest after my holiday. It's been a bit hectic. Also, my washing machine is broken. It's a hard life.

Can people levitate?

I should have mentioned last night that the Kölner Dom is a really beautiful building. I went along to see it this morning, seeing as it's right next to my hotel, and I really was impressed. Also impressive was the man levitating outside it, but the other passers-by didn't really pay much attention to him, so I assume they've seen it all before.

Anyway, I'm at Frankfurt Airport as I write this, on my way home again. It's a busy life, being an international jetsetter. I've missed this, these last few months.

I always assumed the Dom was dome-shaped

This hotel I'm staying in in Köln really isn't very Handy if you haven't got a mobile phone. To check in, you have to call a phone number, and then they tell you the combination for the miniature safe that your key is in. It's strange, as is the desert theme (it's the Sandmanns Hotel) and peculiar decorations all around the place.

Still, I've had fun on this very brief trip to Germany - I haven't been to this country for much too long, so even if I'm only here for barely 24 hours, it's been fun. The TV people even let me try to speak German a little bit, which people in Germany usually never do. It's no wonder nobody in Britain speaks the language, everyone over here always speaks English to us without giving us a chance to learn it!

So, I get the train back to the airport tomorrow morning, but that at least gives me a chance to watch some cartoons before I leave, and maybe even look in a couple of shops, if I'm quick!

Holidays

Okay, Weird Internet Friend #2 is safely installed here, although he got detained at immigration presumably because they thought he was some kind of weird internet person. Now I can turn my attention to going to Germany and looking forward to the TV spectacular they're putting together in a month or two. I don't think I'm supposed to talk about the details yet, but I assure you it'll be awesome!

I'm flying out tomorrow, and back on Wednesday, so I've just gone through my drawer-of-assorted-rubbish to see how many Euros I've got kicking around. About €22.50, in fact, almost all of it in €2 coins. I need to spend coins rather than notes when I'm on the continent, obviously.

We are the champions, my friend

See, there are two "championships" at the UK Memory Championships - one just for British people, and one for foreigners. Or rather, as far as the actual competitors are concerned, there's only one championship, the UK Open, but by virtue of Jonas coming from Sweden, I got the big trophy and (technically) the prestigious title of UK Memory Champion, even though he was about a million times better than me. I'm not going to put it on my business cards.

Actually, day two went rather better than day one - following the same strategy as I'd used in the 30-minute numbers, I aimed for much lower scores than I normally would, and got them all right without much trouble. Twelve packs in 30-minute cards is perfectly acceptable really, 77 historic dates would have been mind-blowingly amazing ten years ago so I shouldn't feel bad about it, and so on. I did make a mess of spoken numbers, which I haven't practiced for a long time - I was only a fraction of a second slower than I would normally be, but that's time enough to lose track of the digits. But then in speed cards I recorded a time of 28.78 seconds in the first trial and was much closer to recalling it correctly than I thought I would be. So I went at about the same speed the second time, and got it right!

The time was officially recorded as 31.34 seconds, although that might not be as accurate as it usually is, since I apparently broke the timer when I put my hands down on it. It turned itself off, and didn't even save the time in its memory like the things are supposed to do. Luckily, David Sedgwick was watching the display screen at the moment it broke, and he assures us that the time he wrote down is correct, "within maybe a couple of hundredths of a second, anyway". I'm sure I didn't hit the thing particularly hard, although I know I do have a tendency to get overexcited and thump my hands down a bit. Luckily, the time could have been out by a minute or so and I would still have finished second overall, so it didn't matter much.

I didn't notice the problem until about a minute after it happened, incidentally - when I put the cards down and hit the timer, I immediately close my eyes and try to remember what the cards are. I don't open them again and peek around the room at the other competitors until I'm certain my mental images are going to stay in my brain and not disappear before the five minutes' memorisation time has finished.

Meanwhile, I hope you caught Jonas on BBC breakfast TV the following day. I didn't - no TV in the hall of residence, although to be fair it does have free wifi, and I could have watched it on my laptop. It didn't occur to me, mainly because I had a terrible hangover yesterday after only two pints of cider in the pub afterwards. It'll be the mental exertion, I haven't done a two-day memory competition for too many months.

Chris Day spent a lot of time talking to a journalist at the competition, which has resulted in the following in-depth analysis of memory techniques in this memory article:

Chris Day, from the World Memory Sports Council, said the techniques are useful to improve memory.

Mr Day said: "We all have potentially an amazing memory."


If that was the guy he was talking to when they saw me going down the stairs and felt that there was more of my backside on display than is decent (my lucky shirt has a large hole in the back, and my shorts are somewhat loose around the waist), then it's probably my fault.

Silence in the library

Upstairs in the Science Museum in London, there's a really cool-looking little library room, with double-decker bookcases (there's a sort of ledge half way up that you walk along to see the higher-up shelves, I don't know what the technical name is) and antique furnishings throughout. Although today and tomorrow it's got some modern tables and chairs and a stonking great computer screen set up, for the UK Memory Championship!

We've got a healthy mix of competitors from around Britain and the world, as usual - thirteen altogether, and that's not including the various other people who came along and had a go at one or more disciplines. Foremost among these were journalists from the Times and the Independent, who both tried their hand at 30-minute binary. Both attempted four rows, 120 digits, but while the Times man got them all correct, the Independent made mistakes on three rows, and so only got a score of 30. Make your own judgements about the relative merits of the two newspapers.

Incidentally, I could swear that I've met the man from the Times before. As my readers will know, I rarely remember faces, but his is familiar enough that I'm sure I've had an interview with him in the past. He talked as if he'd never met any of us, though, so maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe the article in tomorrow's paper will say "I went to the UK Memory Championship and nobody remembered me, even though I remembered them." Or maybe all reporters from the Times look the same (young, posh, floppy-haired...) and I spoke to another one of them.

My scores in everything were awful, as I confidently expected. I'm going to need to be careful not to end up with fewer points than James Paterson, and so avoid being not the best British competitor in a championship for the first time since (I think I'm right in saying this) 2004. It's so long since I did a half-hour discipline, in practice or in competition, I really made a mess of binary, and ended up with a score of 2000 or so, attempting 4500 or thereabouts. Abstract images followed a similar pattern, and I was already exhausted by the time we sat down to speed numbers. 30-minute numbers followed after that, and I decided to manage my expectations hugely, and just attempt 680 digits. I'd written them all down within 15 minutes of the recall time, so perhaps I was over-cautious, but I'm fairly sure that really was as much as I could do - my mind was wandering terribly, which is just what you can expect if you don't train for these events.

Incidentally, we know our scores for abstract images (first discipline after lunch) already, thanks to some unusually speedy and efficient marking from the team of arbiters. Kudos to Phil, Chris, David, Gaby, Nathalie, Dominic, Peter, whoever I've forgotten to list (there's always one) and whoever I don't even know is there (some arbiters always lurk in the back room and never come out to say hello to me). Phil's machine that beeps after a specified number of minutes seems to have died (which is very tragic; it's been coming to these competitions longer than I have), so disciplines were timed on a digital watch, but nothing's gone spectacularly wrong yet. Tony opened the competition with a lengthy speech that was mainly about royal jelly, which makes a change from the usual one and kept us all entertained, someone was buzzing around taking photos, several spectators came to see what was happening, science museum people were looking at us suspiciously, it's all the fun of a memory competition!

Jonas von Essen is clearly going to be the runaway winner, although he's producing the kind of scores that elite competitors do when they haven't got any real opposition. That, more than anything, is motivating me to do some more training and pose him a challenge at the World Championship! I copied his habit of taking his groovy shoes off, since my less groovy ones (which I nonetheless love, since they were bought for me by someone special) got soaked in the rain, and went around barefoot all afternoon. We're the Zola Budds of memory sports!

The British contingent are led by James Paterson, Wales's finest, who got the highest score at names & faces, although not quite as high as Phil announced - he accidentally read out James's competitor number, 170. The score printouts all have the competitor numbers on them, which is just confusing for everyone - I keep reading my name and thinking I only scored 29, which is bad for names and faces, but downright horrible for binary! There's also Ryan S Smith, who loves his middle initial enough that he added it onto his nameplate in red pen (we all get toblerone-shaped paper names to put on our desks, with the appropriate national flag and, of course, that competitor number again), Mike Outram and Phill Ash, all warmed up at the Friendly Championship and dipping their toes into two-day International Standard competition, and Jake O'Gorman, at his first competition and saying I'm the one who inspired him to compete. I always worry that I'm a sad disappointment to such people when they meet me in real life. "Who's this short, fat, bald oaf?" they no doubt say to themselves, "I thought Ben Pridmore would be a huge, mighty specimen of humanity, with a big deep booming voice and magic mind-powers of some kind, possibly involving telekinesis!"

International guests are Jonas; James's Russian student Sergey; Raj who spends so much time in England competing in memory competitions that he hardly counts as Indian any more; Søren from Denmark; Rick from Holland; Joona from Finland who was at the WMC last year but who for some reason I never got round to saying hello to; and a newcomer from Spain who I'm sure introduced himself to me as Javier, but is called Francisco on the scoresheets and nameplate (with different surnames on each). He might be a spy. Or I might just be bad at remembering names.

I'm on a train

Another thing I'm on is my way to London, and another is cloud nine, because I'm off work for the next week and a half, and I've been working much too much, for not nearly enough money, these last few months. The job, which I'm still enjoying a lot more than I should, was unfeasibly busy for the last month or so, but things have calmed down now and I can safely take time off without worrying that the world will come to an end. And I'll turn my attention to the important things I've been neglecting, like writing about memory on the internet and maybe even training in the use of those memory techniques I used to know about. It might be a little late to get in full match fitness for the UK Championship tomorrow morning, but you never know what I might accomplish between now and the World Championship in December, if it happens. There'll always be more memory competitions out there, anyway - a fun one in 2014, hopefully, that there'll be more news on soon...

Memorable stories

Last week, looking through my bookcases for something to read on the train to work, I grabbed Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King. And then grabbed my rucksack, since the book's too big to fit in my jacket pocket. But when I came to open the book, I realised I'd never actually read the fourth of the four medium-ish-length stories in it. I must have bought the book to read on a plane journey, and arrived at wherever I was going before I'd finished reading.

Either that, or the story (A Good Marriage) is just magically forgettable - today I found myself trying to remember what it was about, and couldn't think of even the slightest detail. The best I could do was a vague idea that it was about a husband and wife somehow. It's not actually a bad story at all, and I'll probably remember it now I've refreshed my memory, but then again maybe tomorrow I'll be oblivious again. Maybe I did read it on that plane journey, and several times again since then. Maybe I wrote it, and maybe I actually am Stephen King? You can never tell with memory.

Fantasy island, all I ever dreamed of

It's always great to have the football back after a long summer without, isn't it? And this season, in addition to enjoying the games and occasionally having a bet on the weekend's premier league matches (I never win, so this is a very, very occasionally kind of thing that I strictly limit to days when I've got quite a lot of spare money kicking around) I'm doing Fantasy Premier League, in competition with people from work.

Fantasy football has moved on since the days when I last did it. No longer do you just pick a list of names and check the newspaper on Monday to see how many points they've scored, now it's interactive with weekly transfers and the ability to pick what colour your virtual team's virtual socks should be. I worry that I could get addicted to it, and that then it'll be even more embarrassing when I come bottom of the league, as I inevitably will. Anyone else out there in zoomyland got a team?

Take a look at the kids on the street, no they never miss a beat

Even though the whole town of Beeston is in the process of being demolished to make way for the trams, it's actually really cool around here. For example, coming into the town centre today and picking my way through the rubble that used to be The Square, I heard the sound of drums coming from the marquee where they regularly have musical events. Actually, I thought to myself, that's really good drumming - the kind of sound made by someone who actually knows what they're doing, rather than someone who's just waving drumsticks around and hoping for the best. Then an equally good guitar chimed in, so I went over to check out what turned out to be Parasight - a really cool band composed of four teenagers, who you should definitely check out if you get the chance. The guitar playing when they did Sweet Child Of Mine was either a recording that they were miming to or genuinely that awesome, I couldn't quite decide. Someone who I assume was the lead singer's mum was singing along to the songs and handing out cards with the website address on, but only slightly diminishing their coolness; that's how cool they were.

Meanwhile, I need to be cleaning my flat up a bit. Or a lot. On Wednesday night I'm going down to London straight after work for the memory competition at the Science Museum, then staying there for the weekend. On Monday I'm meeting a friend who's flying in from America to stay for the week (I think a few years ago I referred to him in this blog as Weird Internet Friend #2, so that's his name for every subsequent mention on here, I'm afraid), then on Tuesday I'm abandoning him to his own devices and flying to Germany for a sort of pre-filming thing for a TV show that will be really totally and completely awesome if it does come about, later in the year. Back here on Wednesday, and not back to work until the Monday after - it's a busy life.

But it doesn't leave me much time to clear up the filth lying around this place, especially since I can't be bothered. Maybe I should hire a cleaner - there's a card in the post office window that really made me laugh. "Cleaning Work Wanted", it says, and follows it up with "I am from Thailand, where we were brought up to keep our homes clean and tidy." I assume the intention was to stress what a good cleaner she is because of her upbringing, but it really comes across as "you filthy English people don't know how to clean your houses, so let me do it for you." Assuming she'll work for free, since I've still got no money, I'll have to give her a call - I could do with a cleaner who'll also give me a stern lecture on how I wasn't brung up right.

The importance of blogging

Yes, I haven't posted anything here for a month, and I'm terribly sorry about that. But I just checked back in the old posts to see if I've stayed in Rosebery Hall student accommodation before, and it turns out I have, so I'm more convinced than ever of the importance of writing on the internet about everything I do.

I realise I could just keep a diary and not share it with everyone on the internet, but it's more fun this way.

So anyway, I'm going down to London at the end of the month for the UK Memory Championship! Yay! And staying in Rosebery Hall, since it seems to have satisfied me three years ago! I'm currently sort-of in training, in that I haven't done any real training for ages, but I'm doing a nightly Online Memory Challenge, at 8pm British Summer Time, so please come along and join me if you want a chat and a quick test of memory or two!

And I'll start blogging more frequently, just in case I need to refer back to it in future.

Win the ultimate sporting experience

Occasionally I see those competitions on ITV football where the prize is excessively huge - a month-long globe-trotting holiday to see the Champions League, Europa League, FA Cup finals and so forth, luxury hotels and spending money and everything. Well, it seems they do the same in Australia, and one person who won a massive extravagant holiday in England to watch the cricket this summer is Russell Bauer, the 2002 Australian Memory Champion! I've just met up with him while he's in Nottingham to watch the first test, and it's always great to meet another memoriser and find the similarities. I'm working on a theory that all the people with the best memories think David Tennant was awesome in Doctor Who...

Where the cool kids hang out

If you're interested in memory talk but hadn't heard the latest news, get over to Mnemotechnics.org, where I'm answering any question people want to ask about memory stuff. And also comparing the personality flaws of two different cartoon pterodactyls, even though nobody asked me to.

I will shortly be posting a full and graphic account of the 2003 World Memory Championship in Kuala Lumpur, so keep your eyes peeled!

Incidentally, while I'm on the subject of memory competitions, it's the UK Championship at the Science Museum in London on August 22-23, and if you like memory competitions but are too scared to take part, why not come and help out as an arbiter? Meet and hang out with new and interesting people and have a lot of fun! I recommend it!

The solution to everything

You've got to feel a bit sorry for David Ferrer. He's really awesome at tennis, but he doesn't get to be Spain's national hero because Rafael Nadal's that little bit better. And he's playing better than ever at the age of 31, but nobody really notices that because Roger Federer's eight months older and slightly better.

What he needs to do, clearly, is wear a stylish hat. Then he can be the world's best stylish-hat-wearing tennis player!

(Ferrer for the last few years has been consistently the world number 5 in tennis - I see him as a kindred spirit)