Thursday

I got up earlyish, knowing that I'd have to finish (not to mention start) packing before leaving to catch the 8:34 train down to London. I'd sort-of-calculated that that would get me to Heathrow in plenty of time for the flight at 1:20pm. I haven't flown anywhere from London for a while, but on this occasion it was somehow much cheaper to go from there than Birmingham. So having thrown all the important things into a bag, leaving only a couple of other things to sort out at some point in the journey (finish writing a letter to my brother - we keep up an old-fashioned correspondence so we can draw silly pictures - and pick up a new book to read, to go along with "Sex And Other Changes" by David Nobbs which I was re-reading. My strategy on plane journeys is to get something new and exciting, plus something I've read before and know I'll like in case the new and exciting one turns out to be terrible). Things didn't go entirely to plan. I'd forgotten to write my brother's new address on the envelope and couldn't remember what it was, so when the train got into St Pancras I tried emailing him and phoning my grandma to find it out, but got no reply in either case. I ended up carrying the letter around with me all weekend, and just posted it today.

I took the tube from St Pancras to Heathrow, and I'd forgotten how long it takes. My vague calculations had told me that I'd get there in plenty of time for the suggested two hours before takeoff (I get paranoid about missing planes, I think I've mentioned that before, so I always like to get there very early. Besides, I like hanging around departure lounges), but in fact by the time I got there there was only a bit over an hour's leeway! Still, I only had carry-on luggage, so check-in wasn't a problem. I used the machine and it presented me with an interesting option. Upgrade to business class for £330? What the heck, I thought, and decided on a whim to do it.

I hate having money to waste on things like this. My new job pays me frankly much more than I want or need. So I felt guilty all through the flight, thinking of all the people in the world who could really have benefitted from that £330, if I hadn't wasted it on an imperceptibly more comfortable seat, lots of legroom and complimentary cocktails if I'd wanted them (I don't drink when I'm on my own, so I didn't). Still, the legroom was nice. I'm five foot eight and I feel cramped in economy class, so I dread to think what it must be like for big people.

The guy sitting next to me wore sunglasses throughout the journey, even though it was quite gloomy in the cabin. He spent his time making notes about a treatment for a movie, and flirting with the stewardesses, but my worries that he'd be the type to talk to me (I hate being trapped for long periods next to a sociable person) were unfounded - talking with men didn't seem to interest him at all. The other passengers in business class seemed to mostly consist of business types. A couple of men wearing suits and ties and tapping on laptops, and that was it, there were plenty of empty seats. I was trying not to mentally criticise them for being pretentious, since I'm obviously the kind of person to waste money on seat upgrades myself. It was nice to avoid all the queueing at security, boarding and getting off the plane, though.

The journey was not one of those that went quickly. I hadn't had time to buy a new book, the movies were all awful, bland, American family entertainment and the Disney channel was just showing American teen comedy rather than cartoons. Thinking this to myself, I realised that I only use the adjective 'American' to describe the things I don't like, and resolved to make a real effort not to do that in future, especially while I was a guest in the country. The audio entertainment was good, though - there was a sixties station and a seventies one, both of them with a great range of songs from their respective decades. But I was still sufficiently bored that I had to pass the time with a bit of memory training, something I don't like doing in public with people wandering around. Nobody asked me what the heck I was doing, which I was sort of hoping for.

Anyway, we finally arrived at JFK airport. The immigration guy was a very friendly sixty-something man who was making jokes with everyone whose forms he was stamping and fingers he was scanning with those scary devices. I still decided not to risk making jokes back, just in case, and got admitted into the country without any difficulty. I bought a book to read while I was there - 'Black House' by Stephen King and Peter Straub. You can't normally go wrong with Stephen King, and I did like 'The Talisman', their previous collaboration, but I haven't really got into this one. My tourist schedule didn't leave me much time for reading, and I've still only read the first couple of paragraphs.

Public transport turned out to be surprisingly easy, I got to Penn Station in the heart of the Big Apple in no time and without any fuss. I was marvelling at all the cool buildings I saw in the suburbs from the train on the way. There's always something fascinating about foreign architecture, I love those wooden houses they have in American, and even the brick ones were somehow distinctly different from the ones you see in Britain. And the skyscrapers! Woo! I absolutely adore big shiny buildings, and New York is (unsurprisingly enough) absolutely packed with them!

The walk from the station to the hotel was also very easy. The numbered streets really do help you find your way from A to B. The Carlton hotel on 29th and Madison (I got really into the habit of giving US-style street addresses) turned out to look much posher than I'd expected considering it was fairly cheap. The room up on the 9th floor was very nice, but I just dumped my bags and went out to look around. I'd deliberately not arranged to meet anyone on the Thursday night so that I could wander the city in the dark and go to bed when I got tired, and that's just what I did. Lots of shiny lights and exciting city streets, it was great! Ate in McDonald's, which is perfectly acceptable because it counts as sampling the local cuisine.

Anyway, the really interesting things happened over the next couple of days, which I'll fill you all in about tomorrow. I went to bed as late as I could manage, which turned out to be about 9pm, local time.

I Heart New York

I'm back! And it's true, I heart that city to little bits. I was sort of planning to find an internet cafe while I was there and blog about how great it was, but I decided I'd rather spend the time actually seeing the sights rather than writing about them. But now I'm home and have just had a lengthy afternoon nap to try and make up for the missed sleep (overnight plane journeys are a killer), I'm going to share my thoughts with the world. Instead of sticking to my usual format of one entry per night, I'll do a separate post for each day's adventures, some time between now and tomorrow evening - I've got tomorrow off work to recover, and I think I'll need it.

Start spreadin' the news...

...I'm leaving tomorrow. And okay, that's a very unoriginal way to start a post about going to New York, but I'm excited so I don't care. Haven't packed yet, but I've got a pile of clothes to take with me. Not sure whether to squeeze everything into my little rucksack or take the big one and have to lug it around with me - I think I'll go for the small one, it'll just about be small enough to go as hand luggage, but on the other hand maybe the American customs people will be suspicious of me if I haven't got much luggage with me. I get paranoid about that - I got held up in customs one time (only about five minutes, not like I was arrested and sent to Guantanemo Bay) and asked why I was travelling so light, among other things. I probably shouldn't have told them I'd just quit my job and was aimlessly wandering the world. But I never take much luggage with me when I travel. Three changes of underwear, three shirts, a pair of trousers and a jumper, plus what I'll be wearing on the flight, pair of pyjamas, toothbrush and paste, alarm clock, couple of books, a few packs of cards, pens and paper and that's it.

Turns out it's going to be warm in New York after all, so I might not even bother with the spare jumper, actually. My leather jacket's nice and warm, even if the zip doesn't work any more (my fault for stretching it out of shape by stuffing my briefcase inside the jacket while I cycle to work). Wishing I hadn't agreed to meet and be filmed by Nick while I'm there - I want to go and see the sights, especially since Josh is going to show me around the big city (so much easier than finding the cool places by yourself). I'll try to get rid of him as quickly as possible. Nick, not Josh.

In other news, I think it's rather cool that Arsenal have got through to the quarter finals of the champions league. I quite fancy them to win it this year, they've somehow been amazing in Europe all season, and mediocre at home. Arsenal for the CL, Liverpool for the Cup and Chelsea the League would be cool. Poor old Man U.

Letter From Genius

Doppelgänger

There's a guy who works in sales ledger or something like that who's just moved over into our building from the old one down the road, who looks EXACTLY like Sam. It's not just an ooh-they-look-quite-similar kind of thing, it's a really freaky identical-twins-separated-at-birth kind of situation. I'd take a photo, but that would probably alarm him even more than me staring at him all afternoon already has.

The Truth About Joel Blackmur

Joel Blackmur is an othello player from Norwich, aged almost certainly over twelve, and probably under fifty unless he's unusually well-preserved. He's of very average height and has dark hair, nostrils that serve as a portal to an alternate universe where Winston Churchill is still alive, brown eyes and may or may not wear glasses.

Joel has contributed a great deal to othello opening theory over the years; openings named after him include the Aubrey, Leader's Tiger and the Octopus (the latter is seldom played nowadays as it involves a deliberate flipping error at move 1, and white illegally playing three consecutive moves at move 10). The Horse opening is named after Joel's pet horse, Terence. Terence is a talented othello player in her own right, with a particular talent for complicated midgames, although she's had little success in tournaments due mainly to her lack of opposable digits forcing her to make moves by kicking the table and hoping that the correct discs flip.

Joel is married to the supermodel Claudia Schiffer (no relation), who objects violently to the game of othello, believing it to have been invented by a man of lax morals. In order to attend tournaments, Joel has to employ an actor to impersonate him at home, and another actor to impersonate the first actor at his own home for the benefit of his own wife who disapproves of acting. The second actor is a bachelor.

Joel made history last night by becoming the first person ever to specifically request that I mention him in this blog thing. I pointed out that I don't do requests, and that anyway I mentioned him about a month ago, just before the Cambridge International. So for future reference, if anyone thinks they can get me to write about them just by asking me, they should think again.

Big Ben Strikes Ten

I love a new cartoon series. At least, when it's a good one, which doesn't happen all that often. Ben 10 has finally made its way onto Cartoon Network (it's been going in the USA for a couple of months now, and I've been seeing ads in comics and thinking 'hey, that looks like it might be good'). I like it a lot, and not just because of the name of the title character - it's a kids' action-adventure cartoon in the traditional style, free from the forced irony and self-referential humour that American cartoon makers feel obliged to put into their shows nowadays (it's something that can work if you do it right, but practically nobody does).

The story: Ben Tennyson is looking forward to spending the summer holidays travelling around the country with his grandfather. He's less thrilled when he finds that his cousin Gwen will be sharing the trip with them, but minor things like that and their granddad's tendency to serve bowls of live mealworms for dinner pale into insignificance when a space conflict up above sends a useful trinket crashing by Ben's feet. To cut a long story short, it bonds itself to Ben's arm, and he finds that it gives him the ability to change into any one of ten alien superheroes, all with their own cool appearances and abilities.

Of course, the aliens who were trying to steal the thing want it back, and send killer robots after Ben (and anyone else in the vicinity). The leader of the aliens, incidentally, suffers some horrific injuries during the space battle, and ends up floating in a life-support tank with several limbs and tentacles missing or mutilated. Rather graphic for a cartoon aimed at the younger end of the action-cartoon-watching audience (eight-to-twelve-year-olds seem to be the target market. And no, I don't feel at all strange for not fitting into this range).

The central characters are great - Ben has natural heroic tendencies even before gaining his amazing abilities, so clicks quite comfortably into a life of saving the world, but he also can't resist occasionally using his powers for his own benefit too - he's a normal guy rather than a perfect hero. Gwen serves an interesting dual role, alternating between the screaming heroine for Ben to rescue and someone who's surprisingly capable in a fight and ends up saving the hero half the time. The banter between the two of them is classic, too - they have a great mutual respect but don't like to admit it. And Grandpa Max is the inscrutable authority figure who clearly knows more about the whole situation than he's letting on, assuring Gwen in the first episode that Ben's turned into an alien, not a monster, and in the second (while chasing a giant mutated parrot across the city) musing that it takes him back to his younger days before he retired (Gwen: 'What kind of plumber were you, anyway?'). The voice acting is excellent too, as it very often is in American cartoons. Tara Strong is as brilliant as usual as Ben, and Meagan Smith deserves a mention for some first-rate screaming as Gwen.

The second episode introduces us to Doctor Animo, a bad guy who, refreshingly enough, is completely and utterly insane in the most traditional way. He's a scientist who was so enraged when his experiments on animals failed to win him an award that he's decided to reanimate dinosaurs and demolish Washington DC just so that he can steal the cheap trophy from the scientist who did win it. The episode begins with his landlord coming round to complain that he hasn't paid his rent for the last six months. He justifies this by explaining that all his money goes into his research, and illustrates the point by having a giant mutant frog eat the landlord ("Sorry, I can't hear you. You sound like you've got a frog in your throat. Or is it the other way around?"). I appreciate this kind of villainy in my cartoons.

Another thing I really like is the Kaiser Chiefs album, Employment, which I just bought today. So many great songs - I haven't been so instantly hooked on an album since Keane's Hopes And Fears. I've been singing "What Did I Ever Give You" to myself all afternoon.

Thank Crunchie

And before our regularly scheduled blogging, I think I should point out that I was originally going to call this post 'That Friday Feeling'. After starting to type it, it occurred to me that 'Thank Crunchie' would be a much better title, so I deleted the three letters I'd already written and replaced them with the new heading.

This pretty much sums up the way my mind's been working today. I've been really industrious at work all week, getting well ahead of myself in preparation for my holiday, but I just wasn't with it at all today. I spent an alarming amount of time staring into space and daydreaming, and had to really force myself to look at the computer screen and get something done. So all in all, it's good that it's the weekend. And even better that it's a three-day week for me next week, followed by six days off, several of them in an exciting big city that I haven't properly been to before!

I'm really all excited about this trip (although it'll be more exciting if I remember to get some dollars tomorrow, as I still haven't got round to it yet...). I haven't been to America since last February, and the time before that was in, what, 2002? Something like that, anyway. I need to travel more. I should get a job that involves a lot of world travel and very little doing anything work-like when I get there.

Work in Progress

The builders have just got round to putting doors on the little side offices downstairs, but haven't yet fitted the door handles. Which escaped the notice of a group of people who went into one of the offices for a meeting this afternoon and found that they couldn't get out again. It's fun working in a building site.

In other news, I've just this second noticed that there are two little buttons on this laptop that I'd never paid any attention to before. They're black on a black background, you see. Apparently one of them mutes the sound and the other one is set up to 'select an external display, which is connected to your computer', whatever that means. You can make them do other things if you want, too. I don't, particularly. What's the point of putting things like that on a laptop, and not buttons to change the volume, which would be actually useful?

It never snows

At least not in Derby, it doesn't. For some reason, whenever the rest of the country is buried under six feet of snow, we get sunshine and the occasional drop of rain. It's not that I particularly like snow (it annoys me that I can't go out and play in it on account of my bad knees), but I just feel left out when I see the reports of blizzards in the news.

In other news, I've got another email today from someone wanting to make a documentary. I'll turn them down, I've got more than enough of that kind of thing going on already, but it's nice to be popular.

Yes it's pa-pa-pa-pa-pancake day

However, I have no idea how to go about making pancakes, and haven't got the time to learn, so I haven't had any. In fact, I've been unusually busy tonight - not only was the train 40 minutes late due to a medical emergency on the train at Tamworth (the third time in the last couple of months that this has happened on that particular train at that particular station - what's going on there?), but I've been deluged with emails to reply to about that memory competition I've been organising. I barely have time for my usual fun evening activities, like practising memory things and producing an in-depth critical analysis of preschool cartoons. And I'm going to be busy at work for the next week or so, getting everything done before I go jetting off to New York. Woo, that's next Thursday!

It's only just occurred to me to check the weather forecast before I go - I've just been assuming that the weather there will be either pleasantly warm or baking hot, because that's what it's always been like when I've been to America before, but now I come to think of it, March in New York is actually quite likely to be fairly cold, I would think. Maybe I'll take a jumper after all.

Many Happy Returns

Sam is wishing his mum a happy birthday via the modern miracle of bloggery today, which makes me feel guilty about not doing the same for mine two days ago. So thanks a bunch, Sam, and happy birthday mum.

And that's had the side-effect of blanking out of my mind whatever the heck I was originally planning to talk about, but never mind. It can't have been all that important. I've just been watching the last episode of Life On Mars, which I enthused about a few weeks ago, and it was great. I still have no idea why such a weird idea would work, but it somehow does. Roll on the second series!

Busy busy

Lots of things to sort out for this memory competition in May, not least recruiting people to help out with it (taking up people on vague offers of assistance in the distant past and cajoling friends to lend a hand in return for drinks), plus advertising in non-memory circles to attract beginners, and come to think of it emailing the organisers of the Cambridge MSO with the details, which I haven't done yet, but I can't be bothered with any more of that tonight.

Other things weighing on my mind today include Tooty Frooties. They come in purple, red, pink, yellow and orange, and while it's not difficult to tell what flavour most of these are, according to the ingredients list the red and pink ones are strawberry and apple in some combinations, and I have no idea which is which. Neither of them taste particularly appley.

Advertisement

THE CAMBRIDGE MEMORY CHAMPIONSHIP 2006

DATE - Sunday 7 May 2006 9:00am - 6:00pm

Part of the Cambridge Mind Sports Olympiad (website updated soon -
http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/msocam/), which takes place on Saturday 6 May and
Sunday 7 May. There are many other board games and mental skills
competitions to take part in on the Saturday, so please do come for the
whole weekend if you can!

LOCATION - Netherhall Upper School, Queen Edith's Way, Cambridge, UK CB1 8NN

HOW TO GET THERE -
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=netherhall+school+cambridge&output
=html&latlng=52202544,131236,12366996939064976519

Or see details on the Cambridge MSO website

FORMAT - This competition will follow the all-new 'National Standard', with
ten short disciplines as follows:

Discipline Memorisation time Recall time Millennium
Standard

Words 5 min 10 min
100
Binary 5 min 10 min
750
Names & Faces 5 min 10 min
80
Numbers 15 min 30 min
800
Cards 10 min 15 min
250
Speed Numbers 5 min 15 min
375
Abstract Images* 15 min 30 min
TBA
Historic Dates 5 min 15 min
92
Spoken Numbers 100 x 1 sec 5 min
200
200 x 1 sec 10 min
Speed Cards <5 min 5 min [2 trials]
30 sec

* Abstract Images is the new discipline, replacing the Poem/Text in this
year's World Championships. The attached file gives details, an official
standard will be announced soon.

PRIZES - For the winner and the highest-scoring beginner, plane tickets,
hotel accommodation and entry fee for the World Memory Championship 2006 in
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia! Plus other cash prizes!

(If you win and you're rich enough to pay for your own trip to Malaysia,
perhaps you could consider passing the prize on to a poorer runner-up? I
hate to think of people not being able to go.)

ENTRY FEE - £5, free for beginners (a beginner is somebody who has never
competed in ANY memory championship before)

TRANSLATIONS - Spoken numbers will be in English only (sorry - the
technology to run the discipline in multiple languages isn't available).
Words and dates can be provided in any language requested in advance.

CARDS - If you wish to use your own playing cards, it would be a help if you
could bring them on the Saturday so that they can be shuffled in advance.
But if that's not possible, it's okay.

RECALL PAPERS - You may use your own recall papers for all disciplines if
you wish, with the usual rules (they must be handed in at the start of the
competition).

HOW TO ENTER - Email me! [edited so as not to stick my email address on the internet for evil machines to grab - post a comment if you don't know it] As soon as possible,
please, so that I know how many people are coming.

HELP! - If you would like to help as an arbiter/card
shuffler/paper-hand-out-and-collector/recall checker/stopwatch holder
instead of competing, it would be appreciated. I don't know how many we'll
need just yet, but it's better to have too many than too few!

Hope to see you there!

Ben

Something slightly concerning that just occurred to me

Nord Anglia plc's financial year ends on August 31st. They'll want the annual accounts done as quickly as possible after that date, no doubt. The World Memory Championships start on September 1st, in Malaysia. I'll be wanting time off to go there and get back, and recover from jetlag, and after I get back I'll inevitably be pestered by newspapers and things (who always refuse to leave me alone for the week or so after the competition, especially if I win). There's going to be a serious conflict of interests here.

Actually, I've always kind of wanted to hand in my notice because my job was getting in the way of my hobbies. It's possible that I might have a chance. I'll leave it a while before I discreetly enquire about how cool the bosses are likely to be about the whole thing.

On the other hand, I'm in a really great memory mood today - I've been properly training the long events for the first time in a while, and I beat my world record in binary (with 3845), and almost certainly beat the world record in hour cards too, although I haven't had a chance to check them yet (trying for 30 packs, and there's at least a chance that I recalled them all correctly). More importantly, if I do an hour numbers tomorrow, and maybe something else like names and faces too (if I'm really feeling good), I'll have done the kind of weekend routine that I was doing a couple of years ago but haven't been able to fully get back in the swing of since then.

I know there aren't many people in the world who enthuse about their ability to sit down for three hours memorising and recalling playing cards, but hey, each to his own. And I think it's pretty darn cool.

Ugh

This is the second time in two weeks I've lamented about drinking too much, so I apologise, but obviously I'm turning into one of those comical drunks who everyone laughs at on the street in old movies.

It's not like I even had all that much in the pubs in Burton last night (okay, four pints of Stella which is always one too many for me, a bottle of Smirnoff Ice and a couple of swigs of other stuff), but for some reason today I had the worst hangover of my life. Obviously I'm getting old. But I got up at the normal time today fully intending to go to work, and staggered as far as the bathroom (about three steps from my bed - very small flat) before realising that walking around really wasn't going to be an option. So I called into work and asked if I could have a day's holiday (boss's response: "Of course you can!" in the usual tones of astonishment that I felt it necessary to ask rather than just not turning up) and then spent the whole day in bed, apart from one quick vomiting interlude.

I've still got a headache. Possibly it's a virus of some kind - that sounds much more socially acceptable than just making myself very ill after a night out with work people.

Felix

On the train home tonight a twenty-something woman got on at Burton behind me carrying a cat in one of those cases you carry cats around in, I don't know if there's a name for them. She was talking to it in a squeaky voice, "Where shall we sit, Felix? Let's go down here, Felix..."

She sat further down the carriage and continued to squeak a conversation with Felix all the way to Derby. Meanwhile, I was craning my neck and trying not to look too obvious, but trying to see whether there was actually a cat in the box at all. I could only see through the slats in the plastic at the back, but I could see all the way through and couldn't actually spot any sign of Felix in there at all. Maybe he was lying down, covering his ears and pretending to be asleep like any self-respecting person would when faced with someone like that, or maybe he only existed in the mind of that woman.

I hope it's the latter. Talking to a cat in a box like that is just plain annoying. Talking to an IMAGINARY cat in a box takes real style.

The Armstrongs

An extra post tonight, because I've just watched the first episode of "The Armstrongs", the BBC2 fly-on-the-wall documentary about a double-glazing company in Coventry. I wouldn't normally have watched it, but one of the stars is othello player Michael Handel, and I'm glad I heard about his appearance in advance, because the whole show was very funny. It's played for laughs, hyped as a real-life version of The Office, and actually comes very close to living up to the hype. It's well worth checking out next week - Michael is particularly good (getting plenty of plugs in for othello tournaments), and the Armstrongs themselves are the kind of people you really have to admire.

Stretching a point

I'm going out to the pub with work people tomorrow night, to celebrate Colin's 21st birthday, and I choose to count this as being invited to a 21st birthday party. Regular readers will know that I consider this a mark of being cool and not over the hill and nearly thirty.

Granted, it's sort of a blanket invitation to everyone in the finance department, and not technically a party as such, but elderly people like me will take every remotely-like-a-21st-birthday-party-thing they can get.

A horrible dilemma

Tonight's European football matches kick off in fifteen minutes, and I still haven't decided which one to watch. Arsenal or Liverpool? Arsenal will probably be the more exciting game, but on the other hand Liverpool will either win conclusively and get anyone watching it feeling all patriotic, or lose embarrassingly and provide perverse entertainment for me tomorrow with my Liverpool-supporting colleagues.

But then, I watched Liverpool on Saturday, against Man U, so in the interests of impartiality I probably should watch Arsenal tonight. But then again, I generally prefer watching Liverpool for some reason. And yes, I watched a whole football game while my football-hating brother was my guest. I'm a terrible host, aren't I?

Seeing as there's footy on telly, I've skipped my usual memory practice tonight. I don't know if I've mentioned it here before (as that would involve remembering things, which I'm surprisingly bad at), but I'm definitely organising a memory competition at the MSO in Cambridge on May 7th. All I need to do now is finalise the format - I'd made up a six-discipline, suitable-for-complete-beginners kind of competition, mindful of not having enough time for a full championship-standard event, even the quickest kind, but it turns out there's a new-style event that has recently been invented by Gunther, with lots of five-minute disciplines.

Had Gunther been the only one to point this out to me, I would just have ignored it (he irritates me a tiny bit, so I tend to be prejudiced against his ideas - and besides, I objectively don't like such short disciplines anyway), but Simon Orton, who doesn't irritate me at all and whose opinions I respect, suggested it too. So I put it up as a poll on the memorysports forum, confident that the regular posters there (who are all the people I think of as 'my gang') would vote for the choice I said I preferred. But it turns out that the majority seem to like the horrid new event better than my idea, so I'm just going to have to go along with that and organise the nasty thing. Ah well...

Come along and we can cross the bridge together

As I've previously mentioned, my favourite website in the world is offline at the moment. And Captain Vegetable, the owner and creator of Virtual Pooh Sticks, is impossible to contact, so nobody knows what's happening, except that his reassuring message has reappeared on the VPS website, promising to get it fixed as soon as he finds the time. Which I suppose is better than nothing. Fractionally.

The Farmer's Wife

Apologies for not posting anything over the weekend. As I've mentioned before, it's kind of inhibiting to write this while I've got someone staying with me.

It's not a shortage of trivial thing to talk about, of course, I'll never run out of those. For one thing, we moved down into our real office on Friday afternoon. It's great, we've got all the latest technology like flat plasma screens and wireless mouses and keyboards hooked up to our obsolete PCs. I like the idea of tail-less mouses. It fits with my theory that all technology is in fact magic and doesn't conform to any scientific logic. I'll explain it in detail some time if I'm really bored, or else write a book about it, but basically the idea is that anything's possible if enough people believe it is.

What's more interesting is that Campino have started selling a different assortment of fruit sweets - peach, raspberry and blackcurrant. Not all mixed together in one sweet, separate sweets in each flavour, all mixed together in a bag. I wholeheartedly applaud this idea, because previously they've just sold peach, raspberry and blueberry, and blueberry sweets taste horrid. Blackcurrant isn't very nice either, but at least it's a British flavour that more people like over here. It offends me when sweet manufacturers don't tailor their product for each international market - keep that up and we'll be eating grape-flavour skittles, which is just wrong.

I like Campinos. They're like eating real fruit, only with a delicious chemical aftertaste.

Come on everybody, let's clean up the house

I'm trying to motivate myself to tidy up a bit around here. I think it's a losing battle, but it does need doing. I've washed my bed sheets tonight for the first time in about... well, it must be four months at least. People tend to find that a quite unpleasant detail, for some reason. It's not like the Queen's coming round, it's just my brother, but it's nice to clean up every once in a while - for one thing, if I end up moving out of here it'll be less of a job to pack up and get the flat more or less into the kind of condition I got it in. Not that I think I have any hope of getting my deposit back, it's just not in me to clean things that thoroughly.

I'm feeling under pressure to write something entertaining at the moment, because Jeremy Dyer has kindly posted a link to this blog on the British Othello mailing list. I hate the idea of people I know actually reading this thing, for some reason. Which makes you wonder why I'm writing it at all, but hey, I'm a complex character. Or completely insane, one or the other. I can only write interesting entries when I'm not imagining anyone reading the end product.

The ice beam

Watching an unexceptional game of football tonight, Bolton v Marseille in the Uefa Cup (the European competition for teams not good enough to play in the Champions League), which has been enlivened by the commentators' efforts to find something interesting to talk about. In the first half, a Marseille player went down injured, and the physio treated him with a strange-looking device that caused some extensive debate between Colin Murray and Pat Nevin:

"What is that, some kind of machine gun?"
"It looks like something out of Doctor Who, doesn't it?"
"I mean, what is it, what does it look like, I've never seen anything like it before..."
"Looks a bit like one of those speed guns."
"Oh no, he's not going to get a ticket, is he?"

And so on for quite some time, even after the game had resumed. It turns out it's some sort of contraption for spraying cold stuff onto someone's injury. The Channel 5 commentators, being people who aren't good enough to get jobs on the BBC, are always fun to listen to. Tonight's game also included the disclaimer "Of course, we try not to be biased. We do want the British team to win, obviously..." Makes a dull, bad-tempered 0-0 draw quite entertaining, really.

Back in the real world, the office is nearly finished. We'll be able to move downstairs from the mezzanine level where we're occupying unfinished boardrooms and corridors, and into the actual office space soon. It looks quite pretty now, all new flatscreen monitors and shiny new phones. I don't really like open-plan offices, though, I prefer each little department to have its own little office - makes it much easier to play on the internet or have a quiet nap without anyone noticing.

What's in the mail today?

Well, since nobody thought to send me a card or present (shame on you all), I've been trying to decide what the most romantic thing anybody's ever said to me is. And the conclusion I came to is that nobody's ever going to beat "Want to come and kill humans and bathe in their blood with me?" Wolf can be such a sweetie when he wants to be.

What I did get today, on the other hand, is fan mail, which is always nice. It happens about once a month, somebody who I've never heard of looks me up on the internet to ask me something about memorising playing cards. The latest guy actually describes himself as a 'huge fan', which is great for the ego. I just have to avoid disillusioning him somehow (possibly by relocating to Antarctica before he notices how bad I am at giving memory advice). Still, he even praised the chapter of "How To Be Clever" that I sent him, and encouraged me to write the rest of the thing, which is cool. I'm almost in the mood to sit down and do it, too.

But before I do, and even though I seem to have been talking about othello much more than usual just lately, I should mention that the French ranking list has been updated, not including last weekend's tournament, but counting a couple of foreign ones before it. I've dropped down from 141st to 143rd, but only because of the unfairness of alphabetical order. The two people on the same number of points as me are listed as 141 and 142. Now, normally I'd just get around the problem by changing my name to Aaron A. Aardvark, but even that wouldn't work this time, because the current number 141 is Jens Aagaard-Hansen, who I bet just made that name up in case this situation ever happens. I need to rename myself something starting with a number, or possibly a punctuation mark of some kind.

Hey, maybe I could call myself ?

Winning othello strategies

I've just been looking at my games from the weekend, using Zebra the othello program. Oh, and hey, it's called Zebra because it's about black and white, I suppose. I never thought of that before. Anyway, I'm still none the wiser as to why I did so terribly on Sunday and so comparatively well on Saturday (I beat Josbert van der Zande, Elisabetta Vecchi, Roman Kraczyk and Roel Hobo, who are all better than me). I tend to just make moves up as I go along - there's some kind of analysis going on in my mind, but it's generally a pretty subconscious kind of thing. When I sit down and go through a game, I generally have no idea why I made a particular series of moves, whether the computer says it's genius or insanity.

I'm still planning to try memorising oodles of positions and correct moves, but I have no idea when I'm going to fit that into my busy schedule. Training for the WMC comes first until September at least. Unless I get bored with it.

Less beer, more sleep

That seems to be a recipe for success in othello tournaments. Although that's based on a very dodgy premise, assuming that I would have done better today had I not been hungover and tired. But I did really quite well on day one, winning four out of seven and not losing the others too spectacularly.

But I'm too tired to write about it now, and Father Ted's on telly (Chirpy Burpy Cheap Sheep), so I'll write more tomorrow. Unless I write an extensive critique of Bear In The Big Blue House instead, I'll see how I feel.

My Own Genie

The Dandy isn't generally worth reading. It never has been, really, although it's had its moments over the years, it's always been second best to the Beano somehow. But there's a strip in it nowadays called My Own Genie which is absolutely freaking hysterical every single week. It outshines everything else in there by a long way, with its genuine wit and perfectly-timed comedy. The artwork's unconventional, in keeping with modern Dandy policy, but in this case it still manages to put the point across like it should. And the writing is in a class of its own.

I just thought I ought to mention that. No time to say anything else, off to Cambridge. I'll be back on Sunday, bloglings!

Good grief

The US Memory Championship has just announced (at rather short notice) that it will be adopting a radical new format, with different events and a focus on things that look good on TV. I'm all in favour of this kind of thing if it gets a bit of publicity for the event, even if it is completely different to the way the big memory championships work.

Gunther, on the other hand, has suggested that the World Memory Sports Council might like to take legal action against the organisers of the US Championship to stop them doing it. It takes me back to the summer of 2004, when he was suggesting similar sanctions against Andi's Memory World Cup (although Andi was the first one to threaten other people with lawyers there). I don't see why anyone takes the whole thing so seriously, I really don't. It's just a bit of fun, for crying out loud!

Still, Dominic made the very valid point that some of the budding American memorisers would probably want to get onto the world ranking list, for which we need standardised competitions all over the world (something they've never yet had in the USA, preferring a shrunk-down version in the previous years). Not that there even is a world ranking list at the moment, because the WMSC haven't got round to working one out yet, but still. It is cool to be able to say "I'm Number X in the world!". It's even cooler to be able to say you're the number one in the world, of course, so I hope I end up on top again when they do release the new list, however they work it out (I have my own world ranking list based on past WMC performances, and I'm number two on that, after Andi).

After the 2002 world championship, I really enjoyed going around telling people I was number sixteen in the world of memory competitions. Of course, there were so few people taking part in those days that it was really easy to get into the world's top twenty, not like today. But you didn't have to tell people that, did you? For some reason, I was less inclined to boast about it when I got up to number four, and then number one - probably because I'm just completely unable to boast without turning it into self-mockery of some kind, and it's hard to do that when you've got an achievement you're genuinely proud of.

What I do like telling people is my position on the othello ranking list. If only someone would manage to put together a proper world ranking list including all those great players from Japan and elsewhere, it would be even better, but Number 141 with a bullet on the French European Rating List is still pretty cool. I had to look it up to see where I was, by the way. I was thinking 142, so now I'm quite happy with myself. But I notice I'm one place behind Joel Blackmur, on 1708 points to his 1709. I'll have to do something about that this weekend...

Why I'm not a good accountant

I really don't care whether the company I work for makes a profit or not. I care about accurately reporting how much profit or loss it's made, as a matter of professional pride, but I don't give a monkey's whether it's making millions or going bust. The really good accountants genuinely do care about that kind of thing.

Also, I don't feel more than a tiny bit guilty about leaving on time tonight while my underlings work late (one of them's on holiday for the next few days, the other was late in because she had to pick up a bag she left on the bus, and anyway I'm going to have to start early and finish late tomorrow to get everything done, I just couldn't be bothered with it tonight).

Anyway, I've got Friday afternoon off work, which is nice. Only because I had half a day's holiday accrued that I need to take before the end of the month, but it'll let me get an early start going down to Cambridge for the weekend othello tournament. I have a tradition at the Cambridge International in February every year of going down there on Friday night and writing a diary entry in my room in Sleeperz. Of course, now I've got a blog and write about my life every day, that's kind of redundant. But on the other hand, I tend to get more into deep introspection than I do here for the world to read, so it's probably still beneficial, psychologically speaking. I don't know why, but it's fun to sit down at a prearranged time every year and write down what's happened to you in the twelve months previously, and what the heck you think is going to happen in the year to come.

Having written this essay every year, incidentally, I keep the bit of paper in my bag for a couple of weeks, then lose it or throw it away. That's probably psychologically beneficial too.

Work sucks

Actually, it really doesn't. I've just spent the day doing the most complex, tedious part of my regular monthly job, and I still quite enjoyed it. I feel kind of guilty about enjoying being an accountant, sometimes.

Of course, doing nothing but work does leave me without much to write about in this blog. A main reason for doing this thing is so that I can look back on it in years to come and see what I was doing. Do I want to see that I was doing nothing but work, all week, every week? I should skive off occasionally and do something exciting instead.

I'm definitely, absolutely, thinking about finding a flat in Burton now. Just as soon as I get round to it. Also on the getting-round-to-it-eventually list is getting some dollars for my trip to New York. Hey, maybe I could fill the blog with things I haven't done yet but really intend to!

Non-famous

I know I didn't want anybody to see me on telly, but I'm a bit annoyed by the fact that nobody saw me on telly. Doesn't anyone in the whole company watch Child Of Our Time? Sheesh.

Never mind. What's more annoying is that I'm listening to Virgin Radio and it's just the idiot DJ Geoff talking. They don't normally do that - I turn the radio on if I want to listen to music, and Virgin are normally quite obliging like that. Can't be bothered with skipping around the stations until I find something I like, I've just turned it off. Time I was in bed, anyway.

I'm never going to be a TV personality

I wasn't going to watch it, but in the end I couldn't resist it. Could have been worse, I suppose - it could have gone on longer than the couple of minutes it was. But that was more than enough of me shyly mumbling about impwoving your memowy to put me off doing anything like that again. Apart from the thing like that that I'm still doing at the moment, with Nick. And I had no idea I rolled my eyes up into my head in such a scary way while I'm memorising. I'll have to watch that, it makes me look really weird.

Anyway, this Child Of Our Time is a funny kind of series. I've never watched it before, and probably won't again, but it's quite fun in its way. Although one of the bits involved giving one group of children a new toy and another group nothing, which seems a bit on the cruel side, and they actually made one little girl cry in another bit when she and her family got a test wrong. That's just nasty. Isn't there a law about being mean to small people in the name of entertainment?

A cool bit on now about gaze aversion, though. I've always found that fascinating, seeing as I have real trouble looking at people's faces at all. This is why I'm so bad at the names and faces discipline at the WMC (well, that and the mental conditioning I've given myself by going around saying I'm so bad at it - my scores in that one event have got progressively worse over the years, because I've convinced myself I can't do it. I really need to break that habit). And if you look at me on that bit on today's programme, I keep averting my eyes and looking around the room while I'm talking. I do that all the time when I'm nervous.

Anyway, enough science stuff. Topped 2000 in hour numbers today for the first time. I think I really am better now at the memory stuff than I ever have been. If I don't win the world championship this year, it'll be because someone else has got even better, not because I haven't done my best. So I'm going to be happy whatever happens.

What kind of butterflies grow from trains?

That's the final line of a Tony Buzan poem. It just about qualifies as 'profound', as per my promise of the last couple of days. If you're still not satisfied, you might like to read this down a really big hole. Anyway, it leads in to what I actually wanted to talk about...

So, one of the traditional events at memory championships is memorising a poem. Usually a Tony Buzan one nowadays (he's the founder and leading inspiration of the world memory championships, has done a lot of great things in the field of learning and education and expanding the mind's capabilities and believes he's a great poet too), but the first few world championships had poems specially written by Ted Hughes, and it was one of the few disciplines with some kind of real-life application. But since the world championships became genuinely international, and especially now that all the good memorisers are German-speakers, it's become increasingly difficult to translate the poem in a way that's equally difficult to memorise in multiple languages.

Because of this, the World Memory Sports Council, which basically consists of Tony and the couple of people who do the actual work of running the world championships (god bless 'em), has decided to replace the poem with something new. So Phil Chambers, the guy who does 99% of the work (and I'm never sure what exactly he gets out of it, putting in long nights shuffling cards, calculating the scores, arranging a million and one little details, but I'm very grateful) contacted the top five competitors of the moment (me, Clemens, Gunther, Astrid and Joachim) and the rest of the WMSC to ask for ideas and suggestions. We kicked around lots of different ideas for new disciplines, and in the end put it down to a vote between four different ones.

I don't think this was intentional, but Phil in all good faith suggested a simple enough idea - everyone involved in the discussion would vote on their favourite new discipline, with Tony having the casting vote in the event of a tie. This of course created the possibility of all the competitors voting for one thing and still losing out to the WMSC's favourite choice. And that's exactly what happened. After some wrangling, we all voted for Gunther's word-pairs suggestion, while Tony, Phil, Dominic O'Brien (eight-times champion who's not actively competing any more), Chris Day (the other person-who-does-the-actual-work) and Ray Keene (chess grandmaster who if he actively does anything for the WMSC besides being Tony's friend, I don't know what it is) picked Dominic's "abstract images" idea.

So now we have a situation where the WMSC have 'consulted' the leading competitors and then ignored them. Doesn't create much good feeling all round. Not that I really mind in principle - I don't actually like the idea of the competitors being able to choose the rules in the first place (what other 'proper' mental sport does that? But it's been the norm in the world of memory in the past, especially during Dominic's heyday) - but what bugs me about the whole thing is the part of Phil's results-announcing email saying "Tony Buzan has asked me to thank you on his behalf and let you know how pleased he is with the extremely high level of mentally literate discourse."

Tony has a tendency to think of himself as a god-like figure, revered by all, and no doubt really feels that those patronising words would be well-received by people who are being told that their views have been acknowledged and ignored. And Phil genuinely does revere Tony, so that thought no doubt never crossed his mind. That's the thing about this - nobody's setting out to do anything but be considerate of others, and it's still ended up with all-round bad feeling. Not Andi Bell levels of bad feeling, but Gunther especially is in a bad mood over the whole thing. Coupled with the decision to hold the WMC this year in Kuala Lumpur, the WMSC aren't hugely popular at the moment.

It'll all blow over, of course. But it's fun to watch while it's going on...

Profound and fascinating

I promised to be profound and fascinating tonight, but I forgot that I'm going out with work people, so I haven't got time. Tomorrow, definitely.

Twelve for a pound, not six

I turned my computer back on specifically to say that.

A moral dilemma

Should I eat those hot cross buns in my kitchen cupboard? I've got three of them left - they were six for a pound in Sainsbury's, so I bought two packs. But then I felt more like my usual bacon butties for breakfast the last few days, and stuffed myself with my usual teas in the evenings, so I haven't eaten them all yet. They're a bit past the sell-by date now, and a tad on the stale side, so I really should have them tonight if I'm going to. But I can't decide whether I really want to or not. I don't generally eat things for the sake of eating them - I could always feed them to the birds tomorrow morning, although the pigeons round here get more than enough already, and they bully the little sparrows and things so they don't get anything.

I kind of object to hot cross buns being on sale in the first place, at this time of year. Things are less special the longer you stretch out the period of time when they're available. Of course, I endorsed the sale of them by my purchases, but you see I respond to simple commands like "Buy these things! They're cheap!" Not that six for a pound is really all that cheap, come to think of it, but the supermarket made a big deal out of it as if it was. I can't resist a big red sticker.

There are more important things I could be talking about, I know. I was planning to go on at length about the new event at the memory championships, and the various competitions to come this year, but I like to strike a balance between interesting things like that and pointless drivel like this. Tomorrow I'll be more profound and fascinating. Probably.

They need all the help they can get

Boston United's website is lamenting that the team is 72nd (and last) in the Coca-Cola "Win A Player" league table at the moment. It's not entirely surprising - we have fewer fans than any other league team. In fact, the town of Boston has a significantly smaller population (I'm talking about a factor of ten or more in most cases) than any other with a team in the league. Except for the tiny little village of Rushden, but they're going to get relegated anyway so they don't count. So really, it's quite impressive that we're doing so well at the moment (on what the manager optimistically describes as the fringes of the playoff places).

What really pleases me at the moment is the transfer window activity. Or lack of it - the most important thing is that the board had the foresight to turn down a very generous offer from Milwall for Julian Joachim. Getting Joachim to sign for his home town's club on a free transfer was one heck of a coup - his Premiership days are behind him, but he's still way too good for Boston United - and it shows intelligence to refrain from cashing him in to make a bit of quick money, in favour of hanging on to him and letting him bring in the extra money that comes from the team winning a game every now and then.

We still have a stupidly small squad, especially with Noel Whelan and Nathan Abbey being released from their contracts (Whelan to go and get help for his alcohol problems and Abbey because we somehow ended up with three goalies and he was never much good anyway), but that's probably a good thing for team spirit, and always means the youth squad get more chance of a first-team game than at any other club in the country.

My great claim to fame is that my mum taught Julian Joachim at school, you know.

Just a band, you know

One thing I don't think I've mentioned enough on this here blog before is that I really, really love the Beatles. I'm listening to "With The Beatles" at the moment, my little collection of CDs is roughly 50% Fab Four, and I'm quite certain I spend as much time listening to their music as to every other piece of music ever recorded put together. I'm never any good at explaining why I like or dislike things, so I'm not even going to bother here, but the wonderful, imaginative music just strikes a chord with me - the early stuff that the band themselves were embarrassed by after a few years just as much as the genius later works. The whole collected musical history of the group just has a unity to it that seems too perfect to be accidental.

And yes, John Lennon is very high on my list of idols. My good friend Jimi summed it up very nicely once - he said that Lennon was, at heart, a complete bastard who really tried his hardest not to be. I think that's something we can all aspire to.

I've got a dirty mind

So I was just about to start blogging about journeys, mindful that I keep dropping memory-jargon like that into this thing without bothering to explain it for the benefit of my overwhelmingly too-sensible-to-know-all-about-memory-jargon audience, when the phone rings. Nobody calls me at ten o'clock at night, because they know I go to bed early a lot of the time, so I was wondering who the heck it was, but it only turned out to be filmmaker Nick. And maybe it's just the thought of late night and phone conversations, or maybe I'm just in a silly mood tonight, but at one point he said "Another thing I want to do with you is...", and I suddenly thought "He sounds like he's talking on a phone sex line!" and had to spend the rest of the conversation trying not to giggle at everything he said. I think he's just got the kind of voice that you'd expect to hear on one of those lines, not that I'd know.

That's mean. I say all kinds of horrid things about Nick in this blog (the word 'evil' crops up quite often, doesn't it?), but it's just my way of mentally dealing with the idea that I'm quite excited despite myself by a film being made about my mnemonical exploits. And he's a very nice guy to work with too - if I didn't want him hovering around me with a camera, I wouldn't have told him I was going to New York, would I?

Anyway, when I said 'journeys' last night (the first time in that sentence, not the second time. God, I'm a terrible writer), I was talking about the mental journeys I use to keep the information I'm memorising in sequence. What I do is have a series of backdrops, in order, pre-prepared in my mind, and at each one of these settings, visualise images that I've made from the numbers or cards I'm looking at. These images, of course, are also pre-prepared, and I'll go into detail about how that works another time.

But what it all boils down to is that I have lots of these journeys, each consisting of 26 different points. Some of them are around houses or buildings I've worked in, one point in each room, and some are around streets, with a point at each corner or place of interest. I have twenty-five-and-a-half journeys at the moment (the half is one where for some reason I could never remember what the last few points look like, so I eventually gave up and just used it as a half-length journey for whenever I need one. It's around the little villages between Boston and Tumby Woodside, taking the scenic route - through Anton's Gowt to Gipsey Bridge and down to Bunker's Hill. Don't you love those Lincolnshire village names?), but I need a minimum of 34 for a full world championship, so I need to dream up some more, or I'll have to use some of them twice (which causes problems because if I reuse them too soon, I remember the images I put in them last time).

I've come up with three more today - one around the new office at Burton (which might be a problem in the future, because half the building is still, well, a building site, and I don't like it when my mental journeys no longer match what the places look like in real life), one around Meadowhall in Sheffield and one in and around Ace's parents' house in Nottingham. But while racking my brain for other places I know that I haven't made a journey from yet, I thought of Peterborough, and dragged something up kicking and screaming from the dark crevices of my long-term memory.

I used to have journeys around Peterborough, and I'd completely forgotten them. After the 2004 world championships, when I stopped practising, a lot of my newer journeys faded out of my mind. Several others I extended and used for pi, which kind of ruins them now so I can't use them any more, but a few I just forgot completely. Going into the world championships last year, I remembered a few of them, but the Peterborough ones had slipped my mind completely. I'm trying now to put them together again, and it's hard work. I remember individual locations on them, and a few short sequences, but not how it all fitted together. I can't remember how many there were, but it might have been as many as three - I think there was one based on the route into town on my motorbike, from when I used to go to college there from Boston (an hour on a little motorbike in winter is no fun at all, by the way). It's coming back to me now as I write this, which is part of the reason I'm babbling on at such great length.

And another two, I think, around the Queensgate centre and around the town. It'll come back to me. Of course, I could just think up a new journey that wouldn't exactly match the old one, but where's the fun in that?

Broody

I'm now the age my dad was when I was conceived. This isn't just a mathematical curiosity to me, it makes me think about how I'd always assumed my life would go. I've always thought that the age of thirty is about the right time to have children, and just always had it in the back of my mind that I would at that age. Now that I've got there, of course, I still don't feel grown-up enough, even if anyone wanted to help me out with the technical details of procreating right now.

It kind of bugs me, actually, that I'm probably never going to have offspring. Although the idea horrifies me on lots of different levels, there's still part of me that likes the idea of passing on my accumulated wisdom and ideals to some poor impressionable child. A sort of drive to make some kind of concrete contribution to making future generations not quite as unpleasant as they would otherwise be.

And it's Monday tomorrow and I've got to go back to work. I haven't done a lot of memory practice this weekend - just a half-hour binary (3650, a bit below the record but better than anyone else has ever done in competition). I'm going to dream up a few more journeys this week, on train journeys (effective time management, you see), and drum them into my head with a bit of training in the evenings. With a night out with the work people on Friday and then othello the next weekend, I'll not have a free and non-hungover weekend for a while, so I'll need to keep in shape.

Peter's Friends

I noticed that the brilliant film "Peter's Friends" is on Channel 4 tonight, at 1:45am. I had a vague memory that my video of it was broken, but when I checked it it turned out not to be, so I watched it this afternoon. If you haven't seen it before, I'd advise anyone reading this to set their videos tonight - it's one of those obscure movies that I think everyone needs to watch at some point in their lives.

Stephen Fry plays Peter, who after inheriting his father's huge mansion and fortune invites his best friends from university around for a party. And over the course of a weekend they talk, argue, break up, get together and generally entertain. It's funny and moving and compelling, and the acting from all the central characters is top-notch. Tony Slattery is actually really great as the hapless middle-class boyfriend of Alphonsia Emmanuel, who just doesn't fit in with the friends any more than Slattery fits in with the likes of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson in real life. And the film added Rita Rudner to my list of people I must check out some day (it's been about ten years since I first saw the film, but I'll get round to it eventually). She co-wrote it as well as appearing as Kenneth Branagh's awful American wife who he's deeply embarrassed by. All this and Hugh Laurie's musical talent on full display, a beautiful scene where everyone sings "Just the way you look tonight", and a soundtrack of great hit tunes. One of my all-time favourites.

Ah, the weekend

And not a moment too soon. I'm all worn out for some reason. Can't even think of anything to blog about tonight. Well, I can, but when I actually came to sit down and type it (the astute readers among you will notice that I'm sitting down and using my laptop, not lying on the floor to use my inaccurately-named desktop), it occurred to me that it was boring, whiny and offensive to both my parents, so I won't bother.

Conflict of interests

I've just noticed that the World Memory Championship clashes with the British Othello Championship - they're both currently planned for the first weekend in September. This is really, really annoying, and not just because it's taken me a good two weeks to notice. It's not like I've got a difficult choice to make between the two, I can't miss the WMC after all the work I've put into it, but I really like the othello nationals and it'll bug me, being half a world away while they're taking place.

Also, that means my only chance of qualifying for the world othello championship is winning the Grand Prix - which in othello circles means getting the best results from the five regional tournaments in the year. And I can't go to Oadby because that's the weekend I'm in New York, and another one's in Salisbury, which I normally don't bother with because it's just too far. And Geoff will be going to all of them and he always beats me anyway. I've only got myself to blame for there being one in Salisbury, by the way - it would be in Derby if I'd agreed to host it, but I'm just too darn busy this year.

Also, my back hurts. I think I've sprained it or something. Probably when I woke up in the middle of the night for some reason and thought I saw someone standing in my bedroom. I can't recall whether I actually screamed out loud, but I jumped about ten feet in the air, and was suddenly wide awake with my heart going like the clappers. It was just a shadow or something like that, possibly a ghost, but I'm still kind of freaked out about it. I've never done anything like that before.

Going Underground

I'm reading "The Secret People" by John Wyndham at the moment. I found it in my pile of books, and I have no idea how long I've had it or why I haven't read it before. Maybe someone sneaked it in among my belongings with some kind of sinister purpose in mind. It's good, though. Ancient science-fiction is always fun to read. There's something quite charming about the opening chapter, in which our hero, flying his rocket plane from France to South Africa, stops in Algeria to refuel.

I need to get some more books. It's not like I spend all that much time reading (just half an hour or so in bed every night, as a rule), but I seem to get through them really quickly, and I feel like I've read every book in my posession so often that I could recite it off by heart. I can't really rely on keeping on finding ones that I didn't know I had. I need to go to Oxfam and buy a shelf-full.

No one knows what lies behind the masquerade

I might be going to a masked ball in September. It's at a place called Ingestre Hall, and it does sound like quite fun. It sounds like what I think of as a typically Jenny kind of affair (which isn't meant to sound nearly as insulting as it does now I come to read it) - pre-1900 costumes preferred and masks compulsory, workshops on how to dance in the afternoon and a proper ball in the evening. I've never done anything remotely like this before, and I was lying in bed last night thinking of the kind of outfit I could wear for it. The trouble is, it would be staggeringly expensive, not just for the tickets (which will cost about £60), but for a proper mask (I'd have to get a really good one, a dragon of course, and they cost a lot of money) and an outfit to go with it (dark green velvet Victorian evening dress isn't the kind of thing you can pick up from Oxfam, in my experience), considering I'd only wear the get-up once. But on the other hand, you only live once, and it's fun to splash out and do something different and extravagant every once in a while. And why should my brother be the only one in the family with a range of stylish costumes for every occasion?

So little time...

I very nearly forgot to write this tonight. I was about to go to bed. I seem to be suffering a lot of memory lapses - after waxing lyrical about Life On Mars last week, I would have missed it entirely if I hadn't turned the telly on just as it was starting, with the intention of watching a cartoon on video. And what with all that confusion, I forgot I was going to write my blog next on the schedule.

Not that I was going to talk about anything earth-shattering, just that I was feeling lazy this morning and decided to get the 8:38 train (which gets me to the office bang on nine o'clock if it's not delayed), rather than the 8:27 like I normally do. So I got to the station at half past eight, only to find that the 8:38 had been cancelled and the 8:27 was just pulling away from the platform, only three minutes behind schedule for a change. So I was half an hour late for work this morning, which annoyed me enormously.

I'll get the 8:06 tomorrow. I need to get something as a thank-you present for the Cheadle people who are all finishing tomorrow, having stayed on a bit longer than originally planned to help with the transition. They've all been very helpful, rather more so I think than we Parkhouse people were when the same thing happened to us. Having decided to buy the three who trained me a big bar of chocolate each, I was irritated to hear my boss talking on the phone about her intention of doing something similar. She'll think I stole the idea from her now.

I should mention that my boss is great, actually. A couple of previous times when I've been two or three minutes late because of trains, she's said "don't worry about it" in tones of complete astonishment that I would feel any need to apologise. I think I'd rather be told off, actually - I don't take my job seriously, but I expect the people who get paid lots of money to do so. Still, I've just about resolved to move to Burton. There seems to be a real scarcity of cheap flats there - I haven't seen one that costs less than my current rent plus my monthly train season ticket yet! I know this place is extremely cheap, but it's still surprising. So I don't know why I'm so set on moving - the hassle of trains would be cut out, but the hassle of relocating would be a whole lot more hassly (if that's a word). I'm accustomed to the stench of fermenting beer that pervades the town now, though. I don't notice it any more.

Should I rethink my "no editing" policy?

I've just noticed that a character in last night's drivel is called Waterfield in the first paragraph and Wilberforce in the second. This seems like a pretty basic memory lapse, and possibly something I should be worried about, but I'm not going to bother to change it after making a big fuss the other night about how I don't like to go back and edit old posts. I'll just make the excuse that I wrote last night's entry a few words at a time, in between games in an othello tournament on Kurnik, so there was probably at least ten minutes between the first time I wrote the guy's name and the second.

In other news, I seem to be getting a heck of a lot of those scam emails about millions of dollars in a bank account in Burkina Faso, just lately. Do they think that if they send me dozens of the things, I'm more likely to think that one of them is genuine? They don't even seem to put as much effort into the things as they used to - I had a personalised one once, in which the millionaire who'd died overseas had the same surname as me. That was the kind of friendly touch that I appreciate - it makes the thing seem more like a finely-crafted work of art rather than purely a cynical attempt to con people out of their hard-earned cash.

Another thing that annoys me, while I'm in the mood to whine about anything and everything, is that guy who presents the snooker on the BBC. I forget his name. I try to avoid seeing premiership football scores at the weekend until I've watched Match of the Day in the evenings, and normally it's safe to watch snooker on Grandstand, because although they put latest scores up on the screen every now and then, they give you advance warning first so you can look away (or in my case keep watching but over the top of my glasses so I can't read the writing on the screen). But at the mid-session interval today, this presenter, whatever he's called, started off talking about someone else, and then apropos of nothing changed subject and rattled off the score in one of today's games. I'd send him hate mail, only that might upset him.

Hey, it's fun complaining about trivial things! I'd do it some more, but I'd worry about becoming one of those people who write in to newspapers. Assuming people still do that - I don't read newspapers, so I'm basing my assumption on the fact that people still make jokes about the kind of people who write in to newspapers. Possibly nowadays they've all got the internet and they just put it in their blogs.

How to tell the difference between horses and cows

When horses were introduced to Britain in 1873, there was great public outcry. Among the protestors were every member of the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the Royal Family, but nobody was able to prevent Jason "Horrible Martin" Waterfield importing five thousand of the creatures by ferry from Hungary. Taking advantage of the fact that none of the police and army officers stationed at the docks with the express purpose of keeping horses out of the country had ever seen a horse before, Waterfield was able to convince them that his large wooden boxes contained an unusual kind of land-based porpoise.

Even though Wilberforce, whose knowledge of equine biology was limited to hearsay and a badly-translated Latin text, had imported almost exclusively male horses (as well as three cats, eight trees, a Bulgarian woman and, ironically, an unusual kind of land-based porpoise, believing them all to be horses), they still managed to breed and spread around the country, causing most confusion among cattle-farmers who found it difficult to distinguish between their cows and the stray horses that wandered into their fields and climbed into cowsheds through the skylights.

To ease this agricultural crisis, the government issued a book entitled "How to tell the difference between horses and cows", and passed a law making its purchase compulsory for everyone in Britain over the age of nine and a half. The first edition of this book was of limited use to anybody, although it is now a very desirable collectors' item. Written by junior minister for colonial development Hamish Zmed, who had never in his life dared to leave London and had had little experience of either horse or cow as a result, the book limited itself to recounting anecdotes about parliamentary life and the activities of Zmed's next-door neighbours.

Following a series of public protests and assassinations of authority figures, a second edition of the book was issued. Although it again provided no help to anyone wishing to tell the difference between horses and cows, it provided a comprehensive list of the ways in which the two animals are similar. There is some repetition (the fact that both have four legs is mentioned twenty-seven times) and no sense of structure or order to the lists, but the information is entirely accurate, and remains popular today among those who for whatever reason need to enumerate ways in which horses can be compared to cows.

The author of this second edition can not be definitively identified. It was published under the pseudonym "Of Plaintive Griven", which may be a printing error, some kind of code, or the unusual real name of someone who otherwise made no impact on history. Every Prime Minister for the past century has claimed to be the author, but none of these assertions can be given any real credence. The most likely answer is that there was in fact no author, and the book was not in fact written at all.

A third edition is to be published next year, promising to answer at last the much-vexed question of how one can tell the difference between horses and cows. Although modern technology and more than a hundred years of experience have made it possible to do so with ease, the publishing house Gossamer Tripe believe there is still a market for a volume describing in detail the ways in which the species can be told apart. Parliament is currently refusing to answer any questions on whether this new edition will have government backing or whether it is a private enterprise. The identity of the author is also unknown, from which it must be assumed that the book will be written by a trained octopus, as happens all too often nowadays.

Edited to add

Two posts in one night? Well, it's Friday. Anyway, I just went back and edited a post from a couple of days ago so it says "I disagree quite violently with that", like it was supposed to, rather than "I disagree quite violently like that".

I don't really like having the ability to edit my previous posts - it's all a bit 1984, being able to change past ramblings whenever I feel like it. I've only done it three times before today, I think - twice to correct embarrassing spelling mistakes and once to insert a word in the thrilling story titled "Adventure" (which was the one post here that I've written on paper first and then typed up when I next got to a computer). And I wouldn't have bothered with that, only it was the word that made the sentence actually funny (well, I found it funny, I make no promises that anyone else would) - "Wigginsford-on-the-Sands, which while it isn't actually at the seaside does have the world's third-largest artificial pebble beach!" It took me a couple of months to notice that I'd omitted the word "pebble".

But that's the absolute limit that I'm prepared to go to with editing previous posts. I have to be careful, do it once and the power will start to go to my head, and soon I'll be rewriting past entries wholesale to reflect my new opinions, or make it look like I predicted something that has just happened so that people will think I'm cool. That way lies madness.

Does that star-spangled banner still wave?

There are times, if you're me, when a thought comes into your head and you can't get rid of it until you've sat and thought it through at length. In this case, for no reason whatsoever (except maybe that the Simpsons was on telly), the question occurred to me "How would they arrange the stars on the US flag if they added another state?"

Fifty-one stars is kind of awkward, you see. They like to do it in a pattern that's more or less square, in rows of roughly the same number of stars. The current one goes 6-5-6-5-6-5-6-5-6, from top to bottom, or 5-4-5-4-5-4-5-4-5-4-5 from left to right. It's pretty. But you can't do that with 51 and make it work out evenly - the best you could do is six rows of alternately nine and eight stars, and that would look more rectangular than is really desirable. Well, I wouldn't find it aesthetically pleasing, anyway, and I think my opinion is the most important one to take into account here.

And while I'm looking at old flags, good God that 31-star flag is ugly. Who the heck designed that thing?

Twenty-eight point three four

Am I good or what? Sorry, I'm just extremely happy with myself tonight - I just beat my personal best time at memorising a pack of cards by more than a second. Which is a big deal to me, because I've been struggling to get under thirty seconds for the last couple of weeks - it's really hard to cut down on split-second hesitations coming up with the right word for the right combination of cards. Also, I was having trouble physically turning over the cards fast enough, but I'm definitely improving with that now. I think a couple of other people have got down as low as 25 seconds in practice, which is the kind of thing I'm aiming for, but as long as I keep very gradually improving, it keeps my interest. I'm determined to break the 30-second barrier this year.

Back in the real world, I got an email at work today saying I'm coming up to the end of my three-month probationary period, after which I'll be a proper employee, needing to give a month's notice and everything. It seems to have come round fast, but at the same time it feels like I've been working there forever. The job sort of feels like an actual part of my life, which I suppose means I'm going to stay there. I'm not particularly good at it, but good enough to keep my reputation of a genius anyway - as I say in that book I haven't written yet, it's not actually about being good at anything, it's about giving the impression that you're brilliant.

So this really means I should move to Burton. Just to save the hassle and expense of the trains, really. Although it's not too bad, commuting at the moment, and it'll probably be even nicer in the summer (although it's been very warm and pleasant today). So I'm not in any desperate hurry to move, but if I see something nice in Burton, I might take it. I'd quite like a little bungalow or something, if there's one up for rent that's not too extortionate. God, I must be getting old...

I seem to have been "tagged"

I'm not sure exactly what that involves, because I'm hopelessly uncool, but I think it boils down to Sam wanting me to answer the following questions. Now, this isn't really the kind of thing I normally do, since it falls into the category of "things that everybody else does in their blogs", but on the other hand Sam's blog is always a lot more interesting to read than mine, so what the heck.

They're not really questions, if we're going to be picky, so much as things that I'm expected to list four of, so here we go:

4 jobs I have done - no real choice here. In a life of staggering lack of variety, I've had four paid jobs in all. All as an accountant or something similar - six and a half years at a cooked meat factory in Frampton, near Boston, six months at a sweetie factory in Skegness, two years with a recruitment company in Derby and two and a half months and counting accounting for various learning services in Burton-on-Trent. Or Burton-upon-Trent, different people and signposts seem to call it different things. I must find out what the town is actually called some day.

4 films I watch again and again Hmm, more difficult. First ones that come to mind are Grease, Transformers: The Movie, Reservoir Dogs and 12 Angry Men. Don't ask me why they particularly appeal to me, but I never get tired of watching them.

4 places I’ve lived I do have a bit more choice with this list than with the jobs, but only a bit. My life has been so... settled. A little house in Tumby Woodside, a tiny village in Lincolnshire, about ten miles from Boston (and just a mile down the road from New York. No, really. Look it up on a map if you don't believe me!) is where I spent my formative years. For a few months I lived in Kingston Bridge House, which was then a brand-new hall of residence in Hampton Wick, just over the river from Kingston Uni. My favourite ever home was my lovely little flat in Boston where I lived from 1998 to 2003. And just for a change, I lived for a month in a rented room in Cambridge while I was taking my TEFL qualification. That was quite nice too.

4 TV shows I love Pocket Dragon Adventures, Maggie and the Ferocious Beast, Thundercats and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

4 places I’ve been on holiday Butlins in Skegness, when it was still a great place to go on holiday. Center Parcs in Sherwood Forest. Las Vegas (can't beat it). Butlins in Filey, the year before it closed down.

4 websites you visit daily Sam's blog, the memory sports forum, Neopets (I'm a stock market millionaire) and Virtual Pooh Sticks (which I don't visit daily just at the moment, but I will when it's back online. If it ever is.)

4 favourite foods Spaghetti bolognese. I've heard it said that Italians don't eat spaghetti bolognese, and that therefore only stupid people would eat it, but I disagree quite violently with that. When I eat spag bog (as my dad likes to call it), I'm not thinking "wow, I'm eating what people in Bologna eat!", I'm thinking "mmm, this stuff tastes good!" Chicken pie and chips from the chip shop. Mint humbugs. Death By Chocolate. There are many, many other favourite foods that should be on the list too. I'm a gourmet. Or a gannet, I can't remember which it is.

4 places I’d rather be right now Hmm. Very difficult. Maybe I'm happy with my current situation after all? The Gold Coast casino and hotel, Las Vegas. At the final day of the World Memory Championships. In a cartoon. In bed.

That's all, folks. I'm not going to "tag" anyone else, but anyone reading this can feel free to list their own fours if they want to. I'm not going to stop you. And for those keen on following my television career, by the way, the BBC people emailed me today (maybe they've been reading my blog?) to tell me that my Child Of Our Time appearance will indeed be on programme four, Sunday 5th February. I must repeat that I don't think I come across very well. I'm certainly not telling anyone at work about it, but you blog readers are privileged.

Pygmies, budgies, Kuala Lumpur

It's been officially confirmed that the World Memory Championships will be in Malaysia again this year. Well, as official as these things get, anyway - last-minute drastic changes of plan are part of the tradition, and you can't really start making travel arrangements based on what has been announced as early as January, because it might all fall through yet. Still, presumably someone there is offering money to someone in order to get the championship there, which is always a good sign.

The problem with Malaysia is that all the best memorisers are German or Austrian, and several of them are young and not particularly wealthy. Being old, and rich enough to buy my own plane tickets if need be, I'd hate to win the WMC because someone else couldn't afford to go there, so I hope everyone important will get their flights paid for them one way or another. We'll have to see what develops.

This, in conjunction with New York, will mean I'll be visiting three continents in 2006. That's really very cool and jetsetterish, isn't it? And yes, I'm counting a trip to Germany as a trip to a different continent. We're not in a continent, we're on an island floating next to one. I'm pretty sure I haven't done this before - the previous time I went to Malaysia, in 2003, I didn't go anywhere else that year, mainly because I was unemployed for most of the year and financed it with horrifically huge loans that I'm only two-fifths of the way through paying off now. Ah, the follies of youth.

Still, it makes me wonder if I can get an Australian holiday into my schedule somehow. They do have a memory championship over there, and I could always drop by and watch. Nah, that would just be silly.

He's in the best selling show

I'm really enjoying Life On Mars. It's a TV series with a really weird and complicated premise, which it mostly ignores as much as possible. John Simm plays Sam Tyler, a police officer who finds himself back in 1973 after a near-fatal accident in 2006. He's a police officer in 1973 too, and nobody believes he's from the future. Occasionally, TVs and radios talk to him, he hears voices talking about him as if he's in hospital in a coma and he has nightmares where the girl from the TV test card chants ominous cryptic rhymes at him while he screams and hides in the corner.

But for the most part, it's a 1970s cop show, with Sam as the by-the-book copper, horrified by his boss's willingness to break the rules if it gets the job done. The combination of genres and themes shouldn't work, but it really does. John Simm never quite looks like a policeman to me, but that really just adds to the weirdness and makes it work better. He was also great in that fantastic drama series from a few years ago, The Lakes, so it's good to see him with another starring role in a well-written show.

Avengers Assemble!

I've just realised that I passed the 150-posts mark a few days ago - the 150th was the brief ramble about the memory test on the BBC website. So hardly a highlight of this thing, but never mind. I wonder how much of my life I've wasted typing unimportant gibberish like this so far? But rather than worry about that, I'll do something I haven't done for a while - talk about the superhero comics I've bought lately.

Just one book, actually - Essential Avengers, volume 5. The 'Essential' giant paperbacks are wonderful for fans of old comics. They compile around 25 old comics from the sixties and seventies, printed in black and white on cheap paper, and sell for somewhere in the region of £10.99 - not bad for 500+ pages of reading, really. Okay, you could get a novel with probably more words in it for less money, but that's not the point. In a world where the American publishers can justify charging the equivalent of £2 or more for a 20 page comic, it's nice to get a bigger volume of story on the cheap.

If you don't know who the Avengers are (or if you're thinking Steed and Peel), a quick history lesson is in order. In 1961, after years of publishing nothing of interest, Marvel Comics released a new superhero comic called The Fantastic Four, written by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby. It caught on. It had something that those mainstays of superheroics, Superman and Batman, didn't have - fairly realistic characters who argued among themselves and were a lot more human and flawed than godlike and wonderful. Stan Lee put his thinking cap on, and over the next couple of years dreamed up a lot more superheroes, all with their own unique twists on the established formula, and Marvel Comics was suddenly a major rival for DC (whose Superman-Batman-Wonder Woman-Flash-Green Lantern based dominance looked like taking over the universe of comics until then). Stan Lee followed up FF with the likes of Thor, Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man, Ant-Man, Daredevil, the X-Men and so on, and they were all very big. Except Ant-Man, who was very small, and also very unpopular.

So in 1963, Stan Lee was told by his bosses that since DC's Justice League of America (in which Superman and co formed a super-team to battle bad guys) was so popular, he should do something similar and make a team out of Marvel's popular characters. And thus were born the Avengers - Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, Ant-Man and his sidekick the Wasp. They hadn't realised just yet that nobody liked Ant-Man and the Wasp. The Hulk was just there to show how different this was from the Justice League - he didn't like his teammates, walked out on them after the second issue and fought them on and off after that whenever he was in a bad mood.

It wasn't the best of Marvel's 1960s comics, but it was still a lot of fun. The adventures were a bit more traditional than most superhero comics, until Stan Lee, who I get the impression had never liked putting the stars all together in one team like that when they had their own comics too, wrote out the other founding members and replaced them with heroes without their own titles (Ant-Man's own title had been cancelled by then, but few people cared when he was written out of Avengers too).

Anyway, back to Essential Volume 5, we're now in the early seventies. The collection starts with the 98th issue of Avengers. The spell of creativity that launched the company ten years previously has pretty much come to an end, and Avengers is more concerned with keeping the stories ticking along and celebrating the upcoming 100th issue. The previous issue was the end of the acclaimed Kree/Skrull War story, about the Avengers caught up in an intergalactic war, and it was a hard act to follow. Roy Thomas, who had replaced Stan Lee as writer a few years previously, fills time in this issue with an unexceptional story about Ares, the Greek god of war, stirring up violence in ordinary people and causing chaos in the city. This is just to give the Avengers something to fight until the final two pages, when their missing member Hawkeye reappears in an awful new costume (which seems to include a miniskirt), accompanied by former member Hercules, who's lost his memory and is uttering rhyming prophecies of doom. With Thor and Iron Man having rejoined the team to help out with the Kree/Skrull war, we're gathering everyone who's ever been an Avenger together, slowly but surely. The artwork, from Barry Smith (now known as Barry Windsor-Smith - presumably he didn't want to sound too posh back then) is excellent, like the art throughout this collection. Nowadays, an ability to draw a coherent story doesn't seem to be a requirement for Marvel's artists, but back then there were lots of talented artists out there who could produce a good story in the house style to a monthly deadline. And most of them, like Smith, could do it very well.

Issue 99, then, is unashamed setup for something big to happen in issue 100. Hawkeye explains where he's been and how he hooked up with Hercules, the Vision calls up a couple of other former members, the Black Panther and good old Ant-Man, to ask them if they can help (they're both all-purpose scientists, so it's not too much of a stretch to think they might be able to help someone with amnesia), and then we get the requisite couple of pages of soap opera (Hawkeye tries to chat up the Scarlet Witch, who's in love with the Vision, Quicksilver (SW's brother) interrogates her about it (the Vision's a robot, and Quicksilver wouldn't want his sister to marry one) and the Vision agonises to Jarvis the butler about his feelings). Then two bad guys attack, to provide the requisite fight scene, grab Hercules and escape. It's all by-the-numbers stuff, but very nicely done.

So then we're into the Big Hundredth Issue! Everyone who's ever been an Avenger converges at the Black Knight's castle in England (because everyone in England owns a castle, everyone knows that), including, for no adequately explored reason, the Hulk, who doesn't like them but decides to help them out anyway, and the Swordsman, the bad guy who joined the team under false pretences back in issue #20 only to betray them and try to kill them all. But now he's decided to give them a hand, just for the heck of it. This is typical Roy Thomas thoroughness - he's going to put every Avenger ever in the story, by hook or by crook, whether it makes sense or not. Barry Smith provides some unbelievably beautiful artwork showing all the heroes arriving - it really is a delight to behold, and somehow even better in the black-and-white Essential format than in the original colours. The rest of the story is unexceptional, though - the Black Knight has seen in his magic cauldron that Hercules has been kidnapped by Ares in Olympus, the heroes go there and sort things out. The end. Oh, after a bit of merry banter with a policeman back in England - Thor: "A moment, now... for silence." Policeman: "And I'd like to respect that moment, yank, but I'm afraid I got me a sergeant down at the station who'll be wantin' a report on what happened here. So if you'll just be tellin' me where that hole-in-the-air led to... or what all the to-do was about..." Thor: "My badge-wielding friend... in the words of an armor-clad philosopher... don't ask!" That's the punchline.

Issue 101 is a bit of filler while Roy Thomas works out what to do with his heroes next. It's adapted from a Harlan Ellison story, and it's not very good at all. All the ongoing plotlines are dropped to fit in the somewhat complex but repetitive plot, and the pacing is all wrong - it drags at the start and is very rushed at the end. Rich Buckler takes over as artist, and he's perfectly acceptable, but a step down from Barry Smith. The story, for what it's worth, is about an ordinary man who develops amazing powers and is told by a horribly out-of-character Watcher that he has to kill five people to prevent a future disaster. This ordinary man concocts a ludicrously convoluted plan to kill the first one - a Russian chess player who the entire Avengers team happen to be working for as bodyguards (not the kind of thing they normally do) by putting poison on a pawn and rigging the chess computer he's playing against so that he will touch the pawn at precisely the moment when this strange poison becomes deadly. How he does this we can only guess, since the rest of the story portrays him as a man of normal intelligence without access to rare poisons or anything like that. But then he races around the world and just zaps the other four with laser beams from his hands, with the Avengers getting there just too late to stop him each time. Then the Watcher shows up, with an explanation that doesn't really make sense, and takes the bad guy away for good.

Back to normality, the next few issues give full rein to the soap opera that made the comic so cool - the Vision and the Scarlet Witch continue to agonise about their feelings for each other, Hawkeye begins to get the idea that SW doesn't fancy him after all, and the Vision meets up with his supervillain "brother" the Grim Reaper. The Reaper is the brother of Wonder Man, the dead superhero whose brain patterns are the basis for the Vision's artificial intelligence. It turns out that the Reaper is keeping his brother's corpse (he's been dead since #9) in a frozen food locker, and he offers to put the Vision's mind in that human body, if the Vision refrains from stopping the Reaper killing the other Avengers. The Vision promises to think about it, and leaves the looney to whatever he does with his brother's dead body in a freezer. Then the giant robots called the Sentinels come flying out of the sun and cause troubles for the Avengers. They kidnap the Scarlet Witch and take her to their base in Australia, where they're using her 'mutant energy' to power a weapon that makes solar flares.

This is all a sequel to an X-Men story that Roy Thomas wrote a couple of years previously, and it would have fitted better in X-Men if the title hadn't been cancelled. Mutants in the Marvel Universe are people who are born with superpowers, and the Sentinels are robots whose mission in life is to rid the world of mutants. But most of the Avengers, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch excepted, aren't mutants - they got their powers by other means - and so there isn't really the personal touch that there should be in this story. But it's a good one, and the Sentinels' plot is wonderful - they're not allowed to harm non-mutant humans, so they've developed a plan to render everyone in the world sterile and then, when the human race has died out from natural causes, genetically create new humans, only without the mutants. Brilliant. Needless to say the Avengers beat them, but it's worth mentioning the strategy Quicksilver uses to beat one of the giant robots. Knowing that it can match his super-speed exactly, he runs headlong towards a wall. The Sentinel taunts him, noting that if Quicksilver can stop in time, so can it, but it turns out that Quicksilver can't, and deliberately crashes into the wall, breaking several bones and nearly killing himself, so that the Sentinel will do the same. I worry for the guy's sanity. He then disappears under mysterious circumstances, to provide a sub-plot for future issues and to write him out of the series (he goes on to show up in Fantastic Four).

That brings us up to the end of Roy Thomas's run as writer. It was never worse than bland, and usually excellent. Steve Englehart takes over after this, and soon launches into that epic storyline, the Avengers/Defenders War, which I might write about some other time. But Roy Thomas's work is a major reason why Marvel comics continue to be so popular today - Stan Lee started it off, but it's from Thomas that we get the traditions of referencing old stories, recurring characters from the past and tight continuity between the many different titles. Stan Lee could have passed his characters onto any old hack when he got bored with writing them, but instead he gave them to a fan who loved the superheroes he was writing about, and cared about making the comics great. It's a shame the current writer of Avengers is so terrible, but these things go in cycles, and I'm sure some day we'll get another Lee, Thomas, Englehart, Busiek etc chronicling their adventures. 42 years and they're still going strong!