I was going to write something specific tonight, and I'm pretty sure it was going to be about memory. But I've forgotten what it was.
So instead, I'd like to make a job offer - I would gladly pay someone to say no to other people on my behalf. I didn't manage to turn down the Daily Mail - I explained that I'm very busy lately what with work and the world championships coming up, but it ended up with me cheerfully agreeing that the writer can come round on Saturday morning to talk to me. And I really need to be training all weekend too, since next weekend I've agreed to parade in front of the TV cameras again even though that's the last weekend before the WMC and I really, really, really need to be training all that weekend.
Also, I have neither cancelled the interview on Friday nor asked my current employers for the morning off. I like to adopt the attitude that if I don't do anything, the whole situation will sort itself out to my satisfaction somehow anyway. Strangely enough, it usually does, too.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
What to do?
I've been offered an interview for a rather cool job in Burton-on-Trent on Friday morning. It's something that's been in the pipeline since before I started the job I'm at now in Nottingham - they wanted to interview me while I was in Germany, then the boss went on holiday and now they still want to see me. So they're at least a little bit impressed by my CV. Which is weird, really, since they job spec asks for a graduate, with experience of the strange accounting software they use (which I've never even heard of before now). But like I say, it sounds like a good job, and it pays rather significantly more than the one I'm doing right now.
On the other hand, the one I'm doing right now is a nice enough job, pays enough to keep me going and they've been very generous in letting me take time off to go to Bahrain right in the middle of when I should be producing the year end accounts (as an aside, I have to stop getting jobs with companies with a financial year end in July and August - it's always going to clash with the WMC), and I'd feel bad about taking Friday morning off to go to an interview for another job.
I've already said yes to the interview, because as you might remember I find it impossible to say no to people, so I'm going to let somebody down one way or the other. Maybe I'll hire an actor to impersonate me at either the interview or the job. Or two actors, to do both! Then I can stay at home and watch cartoons all day! Or ooh, even better, I'll hire a third actor to stay at home and watch cartoons all day, while I go out and rob banks, safe in the knowledge that I have three cast-iron alibis!
On the other hand, the one I'm doing right now is a nice enough job, pays enough to keep me going and they've been very generous in letting me take time off to go to Bahrain right in the middle of when I should be producing the year end accounts (as an aside, I have to stop getting jobs with companies with a financial year end in July and August - it's always going to clash with the WMC), and I'd feel bad about taking Friday morning off to go to an interview for another job.
I've already said yes to the interview, because as you might remember I find it impossible to say no to people, so I'm going to let somebody down one way or the other. Maybe I'll hire an actor to impersonate me at either the interview or the job. Or two actors, to do both! Then I can stay at home and watch cartoons all day! Or ooh, even better, I'll hire a third actor to stay at home and watch cartoons all day, while I go out and rob banks, safe in the knowledge that I have three cast-iron alibis!
Monday, August 13, 2007
Some forever, not for better
I've said it before, but it bears saying again - the old house looks so SMALL! I still can't get over the whole perspective issue. The whole of Tumby Woodside seems to have shrunk, in fact (and it was never exactly big in the first place). But number 2, Chapel Road, especially.
The place has changed completely since I last saw it - the front hedge is three times as tall, so you can't see the house from the road. There's a new fence that stops you seeing through to the back garden, there's a new brick porch around the front door, and what used to be the lawn is now all gravel. And TINY! It's a few steps from one end to the other of what used to be the lawn - it used to be big enough for a full-scale football game (if I could bully my brother into playing football with me). While Nick was talking to the current owner's father and preparing to film me going into the house for the first time, I was picking out the few bits and pieces that are still the same - the bit of concrete marking one side of the driveway, the cherry blossom tree (now surrounded by other plants rather than standing on its own), the little hole at the corner of the hedge that you can hide in if you're small enough, the old roof tiles that don't match the newer ones on the other houses in the row (my dad didn't want to waste the money on getting them replaced - a decision vindicated by the fact that apparently they've just started leaking in the last couple of months). There wasn't much, and it was all too small, but it was good to see the few little familiar bits.
The house has just been bought by a London policewoman called Alex. She's still in London until she gets promoted to sergeant, when she'll be able to relocate to Lincolnshire. And judging by the dumbbells in the bedroom, you won't want to tangle with her when she does - I couldn't life them with both hands! So the house is pretty much empty right now, just a few bits of furniture, all the wallpaper's stripped off and it's waiting to be redecorated all over. It was Alex's father, Ron, who let us in and obligingly waited in his car while the TV crew did all the filming. She also has a brother who was in The Boot Street Band. The pictures and knick-knacks that are in the house already are all police-themed.
But the previous owners have done a heck of a lot of things to the inside of the house - for some reason they've blocked off the door between the lounge and dining room and knocked another one through at the other end of the wall. The fireplace that my dad built himself is all gone, and there's just a few scraps of the old wallpaper on the lounge walls. What used to be the dining room is now a kitchen, and what used to be the tiny kitchen is now a sort of study. They've moved the back door along the wall too, and replaced it with French windows. The bathroom's still the bathroom, but the fixtures have all been replaced. I was just marvelling at how small the rooms were - how did we fit the piano, record player, sofas, armchair, TV, shelves and things into the lounge and still have so much space? How did we enact so many epic Action Force adventures in the minimal floor space of the dining room? And yes, the kitchen was always cramped, but it doesn't look like it could ever have fitted the sink, wasing machine, cooker, fridge, freezer and a bit of space to walk between them.
And upstairs, my bedroom looked like a cupboard! No furniture in it at all, but it's so tiny now, I couldn't believe it. Likewise my brother's room, although the view out to the kitchen roof is familiar - nobody's replaced the tiles there, either, even the couple that are broken or the wrong shape. Funnily enough, the only room I didn't get the shrinking feeling is my dad's room - obviously, because that's the one room in the house I didn't spend much time in when I was little. It's weird, but that room is still the size I remember.
And as for the garden - there's a wooden summer-house out on the front, the old brick shed is still there but the garage and bike shed are gone. The grass is neatly cut and flat, there's no blackberry bushes. The hedges there are also ten feet high - the previous owners really liked their privacy - and there's a new row of tall trees hiding the back garden from anyone in the fields behind. But duck behind the trees and there's a couple of feet of the garden I remember, overgrown and wild, before the wooden fence which, wonderfully, still has the rusty metal pole tied to it. I never knew what that pole was for, but you could hold onto it and stand on top of the fence in the corner of the garden where we had our base (Bjorn House, with "Bjorn" pronounced in a strictly English way). I looked for the old wooden flooring, but it's either gone or overgrown.
It was a strange experience - tiny bits of the house are still the same, the rest is so different it's scary. I still sort of think of it as the place where my dad's living, and I can pop down to see him any time. It's weird to see that it hasn't just stayed the same all these years...
The place has changed completely since I last saw it - the front hedge is three times as tall, so you can't see the house from the road. There's a new fence that stops you seeing through to the back garden, there's a new brick porch around the front door, and what used to be the lawn is now all gravel. And TINY! It's a few steps from one end to the other of what used to be the lawn - it used to be big enough for a full-scale football game (if I could bully my brother into playing football with me). While Nick was talking to the current owner's father and preparing to film me going into the house for the first time, I was picking out the few bits and pieces that are still the same - the bit of concrete marking one side of the driveway, the cherry blossom tree (now surrounded by other plants rather than standing on its own), the little hole at the corner of the hedge that you can hide in if you're small enough, the old roof tiles that don't match the newer ones on the other houses in the row (my dad didn't want to waste the money on getting them replaced - a decision vindicated by the fact that apparently they've just started leaking in the last couple of months). There wasn't much, and it was all too small, but it was good to see the few little familiar bits.
The house has just been bought by a London policewoman called Alex. She's still in London until she gets promoted to sergeant, when she'll be able to relocate to Lincolnshire. And judging by the dumbbells in the bedroom, you won't want to tangle with her when she does - I couldn't life them with both hands! So the house is pretty much empty right now, just a few bits of furniture, all the wallpaper's stripped off and it's waiting to be redecorated all over. It was Alex's father, Ron, who let us in and obligingly waited in his car while the TV crew did all the filming. She also has a brother who was in The Boot Street Band. The pictures and knick-knacks that are in the house already are all police-themed.
But the previous owners have done a heck of a lot of things to the inside of the house - for some reason they've blocked off the door between the lounge and dining room and knocked another one through at the other end of the wall. The fireplace that my dad built himself is all gone, and there's just a few scraps of the old wallpaper on the lounge walls. What used to be the dining room is now a kitchen, and what used to be the tiny kitchen is now a sort of study. They've moved the back door along the wall too, and replaced it with French windows. The bathroom's still the bathroom, but the fixtures have all been replaced. I was just marvelling at how small the rooms were - how did we fit the piano, record player, sofas, armchair, TV, shelves and things into the lounge and still have so much space? How did we enact so many epic Action Force adventures in the minimal floor space of the dining room? And yes, the kitchen was always cramped, but it doesn't look like it could ever have fitted the sink, wasing machine, cooker, fridge, freezer and a bit of space to walk between them.
And upstairs, my bedroom looked like a cupboard! No furniture in it at all, but it's so tiny now, I couldn't believe it. Likewise my brother's room, although the view out to the kitchen roof is familiar - nobody's replaced the tiles there, either, even the couple that are broken or the wrong shape. Funnily enough, the only room I didn't get the shrinking feeling is my dad's room - obviously, because that's the one room in the house I didn't spend much time in when I was little. It's weird, but that room is still the size I remember.
And as for the garden - there's a wooden summer-house out on the front, the old brick shed is still there but the garage and bike shed are gone. The grass is neatly cut and flat, there's no blackberry bushes. The hedges there are also ten feet high - the previous owners really liked their privacy - and there's a new row of tall trees hiding the back garden from anyone in the fields behind. But duck behind the trees and there's a couple of feet of the garden I remember, overgrown and wild, before the wooden fence which, wonderfully, still has the rusty metal pole tied to it. I never knew what that pole was for, but you could hold onto it and stand on top of the fence in the corner of the garden where we had our base (Bjorn House, with "Bjorn" pronounced in a strictly English way). I looked for the old wooden flooring, but it's either gone or overgrown.
It was a strange experience - tiny bits of the house are still the same, the rest is so different it's scary. I still sort of think of it as the place where my dad's living, and I can pop down to see him any time. It's weird to see that it hasn't just stayed the same all these years...
Sunday, August 12, 2007
This old house once rang with laughter, this old house heard many shouts
Actually, I'm too tired and headachy to write at length about my trip to my old house tonight - I've only just got home and I've got to be up early tomorrow for work. So I'll leave it till tomorrow except to say that it genuinely looks so much smaller now, I was amazed! Especially since I lived there till I was twenty, brief dalliances with university aside, and visited it frequently until I was 23. I haven't grown significantly since then, as far as I know, so why do I remember the place being so much bigger?
Instead, I'll post tonight that the prize fund for the World Memory Championship has just been announced (woo!) and there are very nice prizes for the top ten competitors (double woo!). I quote:
The total prize fund will be US$ 30,000.
This will be divided in the following way.
The World Memory Champion 2007 will receive US$10,000
The Silver Medallist will receive US$ 5,000
The Bronze Medallist will receive US$ 3,000
Competitors achieving 4th to 10th place in the competition with each
receive US$1,000
I am sure you will agree that this exciting news will dramatically raise the profile
of the Mind Sport of Memory and contribute to making the 2007 World Championships
in Bahrain the best yet.
Our grateful thanks go to Shaikh Hamad and Intelnacom for their tremendous support
Presumably the remaining $5,000 will be embezzled by someone in a position of power. But even if the prize fund is actually only $25,000, that still makes it the biggest ever by a long way! And since so few of the world's best memorisers will be turning up, anyone who can scrape together the cash for a flight to Bahrain stands a very good chance of making back a good part of the cost. Hopefully this'll inspire a few last-minute entries (and hopefully the WMSC don't really mean it when they say registrations close a month before the competition, because that's just silly).
Instead, I'll post tonight that the prize fund for the World Memory Championship has just been announced (woo!) and there are very nice prizes for the top ten competitors (double woo!). I quote:
The total prize fund will be US$ 30,000.
This will be divided in the following way.
The World Memory Champion 2007 will receive US$10,000
The Silver Medallist will receive US$ 5,000
The Bronze Medallist will receive US$ 3,000
Competitors achieving 4th to 10th place in the competition with each
receive US$1,000
I am sure you will agree that this exciting news will dramatically raise the profile
of the Mind Sport of Memory and contribute to making the 2007 World Championships
in Bahrain the best yet.
Our grateful thanks go to Shaikh Hamad and Intelnacom for their tremendous support
Presumably the remaining $5,000 will be embezzled by someone in a position of power. But even if the prize fund is actually only $25,000, that still makes it the biggest ever by a long way! And since so few of the world's best memorisers will be turning up, anyone who can scrape together the cash for a flight to Bahrain stands a very good chance of making back a good part of the cost. Hopefully this'll inspire a few last-minute entries (and hopefully the WMSC don't really mean it when they say registrations close a month before the competition, because that's just silly).
Saturday, August 11, 2007
It'd take a dozen skivvies, his clothes to wash and scrub
Woo, the football season is back! And with it comes Match of the Day on the BBC on Saturday nights, coinciding nicely with the othello tournament on kurnik! I can get back to my usual Saturday routine of avoiding seeing the football results so I can be surprised when I watch the highlights. Which is going to be a bit harder this year, with Derby being back in the Premiership. I haven't heard any celebrating fans running through the streets this evening, so they probably lost.
Normally speaking, staying up till nearly midnight isn't a problem, it being Saturday, but tomorrow I need to be up at the crack of dawn to get a series of rail replacement buses down to Boston, so I can be filmed hanging out in Tumby Woodside. Times like this I need reminding why I agreed to this whole documentary idea. I'm still getting used to working five days a week again, I can do without giving up half of my weekend too. Moan, mutter, grumble...
Normally speaking, staying up till nearly midnight isn't a problem, it being Saturday, but tomorrow I need to be up at the crack of dawn to get a series of rail replacement buses down to Boston, so I can be filmed hanging out in Tumby Woodside. Times like this I need reminding why I agreed to this whole documentary idea. I'm still getting used to working five days a week again, I can do without giving up half of my weekend too. Moan, mutter, grumble...
Friday, August 10, 2007
I have GOT to learn to say no on the phone!
The Daily Mail phoned me tonight and I ended up agreeing to let them send someone round to interview me next Wednesday night. I should have said something along the lines of "Sorry, I don't really want to be interviewed", but as regular readers of my blog will know, I'm not good at that. So I said that I'm quite busy at the moment, and let myself be talked round.
Seriously, the Telegraph was bad enough, but the Daily Mail? I do have a strict rule in this blog of not talking politics, and I only break it very occasionally, but I do have quite extreme left-wing views, and it's not that much of a secret. So why is it only the right-wing papers that want to talk to me? I'm the kind of typical weirdo bearded lefty Guardian reader (except that I don't read the Guardian), aren't they curious about the world memory championships? Is the Mirror completely uninterested in the mechanics of memorising a pack of cards? Doesn't the Socialist Worker want to make me a pin-up of the week?
I'm going to get out of this, I can't actually appear in the Daily Mail.
Seriously, the Telegraph was bad enough, but the Daily Mail? I do have a strict rule in this blog of not talking politics, and I only break it very occasionally, but I do have quite extreme left-wing views, and it's not that much of a secret. So why is it only the right-wing papers that want to talk to me? I'm the kind of typical weirdo bearded lefty Guardian reader (except that I don't read the Guardian), aren't they curious about the world memory championships? Is the Mirror completely uninterested in the mechanics of memorising a pack of cards? Doesn't the Socialist Worker want to make me a pin-up of the week?
I'm going to get out of this, I can't actually appear in the Daily Mail.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
The problem with working
Is that I go to work, juggle numbers, come home and do nothing exciting or blogworthy a lot of the time. And I'm in a bit of a lull between memory championships. I should be training in the evenings, but I haven't been in the mood this week. I'll try to do an hour numbers again on Saturday, and maybe hour cards too. But I need to get into the habit of doing some speed and spoken numbers in the evenings, because that's what I need to work on.
Who knows, maybe something interesting will happen to me tomorrow?
Who knows, maybe something interesting will happen to me tomorrow?
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
It was quite a day
Donald woke up on the morning of his thirty-seventh birthday to find himself not in his bed, but lying in the middle of a mini-roundabout, tied by the wrists and ankles to a tree trunk and blindfolded with what a quick probe with his unusually long tongue suggested was a medium-sized woman's handkerchief. "What's going on?" he asked.
A medium-sized woman took off the blindfold and started to untie him. "Surprise!" she said.
"Prudence?" said Donald, a little confused. "Why am I tied to a tree trunk in the middle of a mini-roundabout?"
"I wanted to bring you here as a birthday surprise, so I drugged you last night and dragged you here. I don't own a car, so I have to travel everywhere by dragging a tree trunk around."
"But why a mini-roundabout? Many lazy drivers drive over the painted white circle over the edges of which your tree trunk is dangerously jutting. We're not entirely safe here."
"I had to stop here because I ran out of petrol. I was heading for the car park half a mile down the road."
"Wait a minute," said Donald, with a look of dread on his face. "A car park half a mile down the road from a mini-roundabout? There's only one place in the world where that occurs! We're in WELWYN GARDEN CITY!"
"Yep!" said Prudence, finally freeing Donald from the trunk. "Happy birthday! I knew you'd like it!"
"Like it?!" Donald screamed. "Like it? I hate Welwyn Garden City! You know I can't ever bring myself to go within fifty miles of the place! I've told you about it several times - when I was ten years old I was chased by a rabid pig through the streets of Welwyn Garden City for seventeen hours until it was finally killed by a white hunter! It left me permanently psychologically scarred!"
"Oh," said Prudence, frowning. "A pig? I thought it was a rabid horse."
"But you did know it was Welwyn Garden City? And still brought me here?"
"Well, yes, but I checked with the Lady Mayoress before we came that they weren't intending to have any rabid horses roaming the streets today. I didn't check for pigs, though."
"There might be rabid pigs? Seriously, what's wrong with you?"
Prudence sniffled and her lip wobbled. "I only wanted to give you a birthday surprise! I thought you'd like it!"
"I wanted to spend my birthday with my wife and children! It's not that I don't appreciate your gesture, but we just work together, we're not even particularly close friends. You could have just sent me a card. Oh heck, here comes a rabid horse!"
"It can't be! The Lady Mayoress promised me!" Prudence screamed as the horse bore down on them. Abandoning the tree trunk, which was subsequently towed away and crushed into a cube, the two of them ran headlong through the streets for eighteen hours until the horse was felled by a collapsing statue of Disraeli.
"Sorry the birthday surprise didn't work out quite the way I'd expected," Prudence gasped, lying down in the gutter to catch her breath.
"Don't worry about it," Donald smiled. "It was a surprisingly pleasant experience, all in all. Apart from the bit with the horse."
This has been a presentation of the Welwyn Garden City Tourist Board. Come to Welwyn Garden City. A great day out for all the family.
A medium-sized woman took off the blindfold and started to untie him. "Surprise!" she said.
"Prudence?" said Donald, a little confused. "Why am I tied to a tree trunk in the middle of a mini-roundabout?"
"I wanted to bring you here as a birthday surprise, so I drugged you last night and dragged you here. I don't own a car, so I have to travel everywhere by dragging a tree trunk around."
"But why a mini-roundabout? Many lazy drivers drive over the painted white circle over the edges of which your tree trunk is dangerously jutting. We're not entirely safe here."
"I had to stop here because I ran out of petrol. I was heading for the car park half a mile down the road."
"Wait a minute," said Donald, with a look of dread on his face. "A car park half a mile down the road from a mini-roundabout? There's only one place in the world where that occurs! We're in WELWYN GARDEN CITY!"
"Yep!" said Prudence, finally freeing Donald from the trunk. "Happy birthday! I knew you'd like it!"
"Like it?!" Donald screamed. "Like it? I hate Welwyn Garden City! You know I can't ever bring myself to go within fifty miles of the place! I've told you about it several times - when I was ten years old I was chased by a rabid pig through the streets of Welwyn Garden City for seventeen hours until it was finally killed by a white hunter! It left me permanently psychologically scarred!"
"Oh," said Prudence, frowning. "A pig? I thought it was a rabid horse."
"But you did know it was Welwyn Garden City? And still brought me here?"
"Well, yes, but I checked with the Lady Mayoress before we came that they weren't intending to have any rabid horses roaming the streets today. I didn't check for pigs, though."
"There might be rabid pigs? Seriously, what's wrong with you?"
Prudence sniffled and her lip wobbled. "I only wanted to give you a birthday surprise! I thought you'd like it!"
"I wanted to spend my birthday with my wife and children! It's not that I don't appreciate your gesture, but we just work together, we're not even particularly close friends. You could have just sent me a card. Oh heck, here comes a rabid horse!"
"It can't be! The Lady Mayoress promised me!" Prudence screamed as the horse bore down on them. Abandoning the tree trunk, which was subsequently towed away and crushed into a cube, the two of them ran headlong through the streets for eighteen hours until the horse was felled by a collapsing statue of Disraeli.
"Sorry the birthday surprise didn't work out quite the way I'd expected," Prudence gasped, lying down in the gutter to catch her breath.
"Don't worry about it," Donald smiled. "It was a surprisingly pleasant experience, all in all. Apart from the bit with the horse."
This has been a presentation of the Welwyn Garden City Tourist Board. Come to Welwyn Garden City. A great day out for all the family.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Vaše pravo na glasanje (Your Right To Vote)
Had my voter registration form in the post today along with a booklet explaining it in English, Albanian, Arabic, Bosnian, Chinese, Farsi, French, Hindi, Kurdish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Punjabi, Somali, Turkish, Ukrainian and Urdu. I'm going to campaign to get German added to the list. Derby needs to become a worldwide capital of 'memory sports', and that'll mean there'll be a swarm of German immigrants coming and setting up home here.
Yes, I couldn't think of anything to write about tonight. Is that a crime?
Yes, I couldn't think of anything to write about tonight. Is that a crime?
Monday, August 06, 2007
Homeward bound
The TV people are taking me to my old house in Tumby Woodside on Sunday, presumably to wander around and point at things as if they hold some special significance to me. Which will be cool. I haven't been there since, ooh, probably more than five years ago, whenever it was that my dad moved out. When was that, anyway? See, this is why I'm famous for my bad memory. Now, hang on, association techniques ahoy, I remember talking on VPS about having to take all our old toys to my flat in Boston, and subsequently talking about it in real life at what was almost certainly the famous VPS Meet 7th April 2000. So it's probably more than seven years, if that's right. My passport has his original address in Huntingdon as my emergency contact details (I should probably change those some day - my emergency contacts are my late father and my brother at an address he left about two years ago), and I got the passport in June 2000. Although I might not have filled in the contacts bit for a year or two.
I can't imagine Tumby Woodside has changed very much since I was last there (come to think of it, I went down there on my motorbike once or twice to see what the new owners had done with the house, so it was well before I got rid of the bike in late 2002). There isn't much to change - it isn't so much a village as a road, about a mile long, with farmhouses here and there and a clump of four council houses incongruously dropped in the middle of nowhere, possibly due to a clerical error, in one of which I spent my halcyon days. The whole idea of going there has put me in a nostalgic kind of mood, though. Some time when I'm not being filmed, I'll take my bike down to Boston on the train and cycle out to Tumby Woodside, Coningsby and Tattershall and all the surrounding places. Maybe up to Horncastle too, although that would take a lot of cycling (ten miles from Boston to Tumby, and another ten from there to Horncastle, which involves cycling up the only hill in that part of Lincolnshire along the way). Yep, I really like this plan now. I'll have to see when I can fit it into my busy schedule...
I can't imagine Tumby Woodside has changed very much since I was last there (come to think of it, I went down there on my motorbike once or twice to see what the new owners had done with the house, so it was well before I got rid of the bike in late 2002). There isn't much to change - it isn't so much a village as a road, about a mile long, with farmhouses here and there and a clump of four council houses incongruously dropped in the middle of nowhere, possibly due to a clerical error, in one of which I spent my halcyon days. The whole idea of going there has put me in a nostalgic kind of mood, though. Some time when I'm not being filmed, I'll take my bike down to Boston on the train and cycle out to Tumby Woodside, Coningsby and Tattershall and all the surrounding places. Maybe up to Horncastle too, although that would take a lot of cycling (ten miles from Boston to Tumby, and another ten from there to Horncastle, which involves cycling up the only hill in that part of Lincolnshire along the way). Yep, I really like this plan now. I'll have to see when I can fit it into my busy schedule...
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Five Not Live
I know I said I wasn't going to write about memory-related stuff for a while, but I had to record that I've just done an interview over the phone for Radio Five Live, that's going to be broadcast some time around midnight tonight, under the pretence that it's a live chat with a 'fascinating person'. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the media are all a bunch of fakers. They did actually want me to do it live, at midnight, but I told them I've got to work tomorrow. And really, if I'm not important enough to be on the air at half past eight on a Sunday night, I'm not going to stay up late until we get to a timeslot with few enough listeners. I'm almost a celebrity, dagnabbit! I should be demanding all sorts of concessions for this kind of work! My own dressing room, and a box of really nice chocolates with no nuts in, brought to me by trained squirrels. And a Big Yellow Teapot.
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Back in black and white
I've completely neglected the game of othello lately. I'm playing right now in a tournament on kurnik for the first time in I can't even remember how long. So many memory competitions and media nuisances and jobs and things getting in the way. But I'm not doing all that badly, considering.
I should really write more on the subject, to make this into a proper blog entry and not short-change my readers, but it's late and I'm going to bed as soon as the tournament finishes. So I'll just advise everyone to buy the Sunday Telegraph tomorrow, where somewhere among whatever rubbish the Sunday Telegraph usually contains (I've never read it, but I'm pretty sure it complies to the usual quantity-not-quality rule of Sunday newspapers) there should be a big article about the World Memory Championships.
I should really write more on the subject, to make this into a proper blog entry and not short-change my readers, but it's late and I'm going to bed as soon as the tournament finishes. So I'll just advise everyone to buy the Sunday Telegraph tomorrow, where somewhere among whatever rubbish the Sunday Telegraph usually contains (I've never read it, but I'm pretty sure it complies to the usual quantity-not-quality rule of Sunday newspapers) there should be a big article about the World Memory Championships.
Friday, August 03, 2007
Wheeee!
It's the weekend! This is the first full week's work I've done for a while, so it makes a couple of days off feel extra-special. I'm going to hopefully do some hour numbers and hour cards practice, possibly draw some pictures (remember that learning-to-draw intention I had? Still got it, just haven't had the time to doodle), maybe clean up my flat just in case I decide to move out (living in Nottingham would be a heck of a lot more convenient if I'm going to be working there). All in all, just relax. Yay!
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Behind the door of the Big Yellow Teapot, there's a whole world of fun
Having a conversation at work today about children's toys, and the subject of the Big Yellow Teapot came up. I always wanted a Big Yellow Teapot, and I never got one! Admittedly by the time it came out I was a bit too old and a lot too male to be in their main target market, so I never really told anyone I wanted one, but someone should have realised and bought me one anyway. I had a Family Treehouse, also mentioned in the article linked above, but that was comparatively rubbish, and no substitute for a Big Yellow Teapot. It's not fair.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
The railway and the telegraph
Two inventions of the Victorian age without which the world would be a much better place. Got up earlyish this morning and intended to catch the 7:22 to work, which gets me into the office a bit after eight, which lets me leave in time for the 5:00 train home. However, I missed it by about thirty seconds, and had to get the 8:03 instead. Which was cancelled. And then the 8:22 did turn up, but the electrics failed and it never left the station. So I had to get the 8:39, which was running late as well as being full of three trainloads of passengers, and didn't get to the office till gone half nine.
So I couldn't really justify leaving before five, so I got the 5:34 home, in time for the visit of a writer and photographer from the Sunday Telegraph, who conducted a surprisingly lengthy interview - more than three hours they were here! I taught him a basic card memory technique (which he seemed to pick up quite well), while the large photographer wandered around the room knocking every single one of my posessions over on his way. He also took photos of me in the hat and the Brazilian Mystery Cape, which should look good. Although they probably won't get into the paper - they've got enough writing and pictures there to fill a largish book, and they're only writing a little article for which they're also interviewing Tony tomorrow.
So I'm tired.
So I couldn't really justify leaving before five, so I got the 5:34 home, in time for the visit of a writer and photographer from the Sunday Telegraph, who conducted a surprisingly lengthy interview - more than three hours they were here! I taught him a basic card memory technique (which he seemed to pick up quite well), while the large photographer wandered around the room knocking every single one of my posessions over on his way. He also took photos of me in the hat and the Brazilian Mystery Cape, which should look good. Although they probably won't get into the paper - they've got enough writing and pictures there to fill a largish book, and they're only writing a little article for which they're also interviewing Tony tomorrow.
So I'm tired.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Zoom zoom zoom
Just as I was about to take my saucepan of spaghetti and my other saucepan of bolognese off the hob, my phone rang with one of those talking text message things. I've never had one of those before. It just said "zoom zoom zoom", from a phone number I didn't recognise.
The scary thing is that I have no end of friends who might have decided to send that message, so I have no idea who it could be from. I was going to call back, but I decided to have my tea first before it got cold. I'd just about got it onto the plate when the phone rang again, with another unrelated phone call. And then just after I'd finished, someone else rang up to talk to me. And bear in mind that I can go weeks on end without ever using the phone sometimes. So I forgot about the text message until right now, and now it'd just be silly to ring up. It made me giggle, and I imagine that was the only reason for the message. And I dare say whoever sent it will own up, right?
The scary thing is that I have no end of friends who might have decided to send that message, so I have no idea who it could be from. I was going to call back, but I decided to have my tea first before it got cold. I'd just about got it onto the plate when the phone rang again, with another unrelated phone call. And then just after I'd finished, someone else rang up to talk to me. And bear in mind that I can go weeks on end without ever using the phone sometimes. So I forgot about the text message until right now, and now it'd just be silly to ring up. It made me giggle, and I imagine that was the only reason for the message. And I dare say whoever sent it will own up, right?
Monday, July 30, 2007
One last observation
I now hold the world records in all the memory championship disciplines involving cards and binary digits, and none of them in the ones involving decimal numbers. It's because I've got good systems for the cards and binaries, better than anyone else (I think so, anyway), but an unexceptional one for the numbers. I need some ideas for how to improve it, something that doesn't involve switching to a 10,000-image thing, because I just don't think that would work.
Okay, that's it. Memory competitions over for another month, British media blissfully unaware that there even was a competition last weekend, I don't need to talk about memory any more. In fact, I resolve to give the whole talking-about-memory thing a rest for, ooh, at least a fortnight. I think my loyal readers have had more than enough.
What did I talk about before this last month or so, anyway? How about work? I'm not technically really looking for a job, but I did agree that Hays could put my CV forward for three permanent jobs today - they sound a bit upset that I've taken a temp job (albeit a temp-leading-to-permanent-possibly job) with another agency, after telling them I didn't want one. I hate to upset anyone. One of these jobs is in Denby again - maybe I'll cycle if I get an interview.
No, work's too dull a subject. Cartoons! I haven't watched nearly enough cartoons lately. Apart from a couple of episodes of Thundercats. I really must do that proper Thundercats review blog thing I was talking about. I'm sure you'll all love to read it. I just want to get some kind of magic device that lets you put pictures from old videos on the internet. I'm sure such a thing exists, but I'm a bit ignorant when it comes to hardware.
Okay, that's it. Memory competitions over for another month, British media blissfully unaware that there even was a competition last weekend, I don't need to talk about memory any more. In fact, I resolve to give the whole talking-about-memory thing a rest for, ooh, at least a fortnight. I think my loyal readers have had more than enough.
What did I talk about before this last month or so, anyway? How about work? I'm not technically really looking for a job, but I did agree that Hays could put my CV forward for three permanent jobs today - they sound a bit upset that I've taken a temp job (albeit a temp-leading-to-permanent-possibly job) with another agency, after telling them I didn't want one. I hate to upset anyone. One of these jobs is in Denby again - maybe I'll cycle if I get an interview.
No, work's too dull a subject. Cartoons! I haven't watched nearly enough cartoons lately. Apart from a couple of episodes of Thundercats. I really must do that proper Thundercats review blog thing I was talking about. I'm sure you'll all love to read it. I just want to get some kind of magic device that lets you put pictures from old videos on the internet. I'm sure such a thing exists, but I'm a bit ignorant when it comes to hardware.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Other things I should mention
Tuttlingen is noted for producing surgical implements - the top winners all got a special souvenir case of scalpels and things. Which is very nice, but I only had hand luggage, so I couldn't possibly take them home with me! I gave my set to Boris. I did manage to fit the trophy in my rucksack, although I can't think how since it was stuffed full to bursting on the way out too, and I didn't leave anything behind. Commendably, this year's best-foreigner trophy was only half the size of the one I got in 2005.
On the train on the way to Zurich this morning, the passport inspectors inspected my passport to a quite scary extent, examining it through a magnifying glass, shining lights through the pages, practically taking it to pieces to examine the component molecules. I have no idea what they were looking for, but since I didn't get arrested, they presumably didn't find it.
There were no trains running from Birmingam airport train station today, as usual. I might have mentioned before that it's the only train station in the country that seems to be permanently served by nothing but rail replacement buses. A man at the station with such a strong Birmingham accent that I think he must have been faking it to sound cool said the current lot of maintenance work is going on until September the nointh, although that probably won't concern me, since I'm flying to Bahrain from London, and tragically I don't think I'm going to get the chance of any more foreign trips in the next couple of months. It's really not fair.
On the train on the way to Zurich this morning, the passport inspectors inspected my passport to a quite scary extent, examining it through a magnifying glass, shining lights through the pages, practically taking it to pieces to examine the component molecules. I have no idea what they were looking for, but since I didn't get arrested, they presumably didn't find it.
There were no trains running from Birmingam airport train station today, as usual. I might have mentioned before that it's the only train station in the country that seems to be permanently served by nothing but rail replacement buses. A man at the station with such a strong Birmingham accent that I think he must have been faking it to sound cool said the current lot of maintenance work is going on until September the nointh, although that probably won't concern me, since I'm flying to Bahrain from London, and tragically I don't think I'm going to get the chance of any more foreign trips in the next couple of months. It's really not fair.
The brain's fine, the fingers need some help
First of all, it turned out not to be possible to find a big black hat for sale anywhere in Stuttgart. I'm horrified. But I suppose if they were easy to come by, everyone would wear them and they wouldn't look so cool any more. So I bought a straw hat instead, which looks quite cool and works as something to prop my stopwatch up on.
Anyway, the competition was great, the venue was excellent, lots of fuss being made over the whole thing by everyone at the Aesculap Akademie. All the competitors got an Aesculap Memo Masters '07 T-shirt, which everyone except Andi dutifully wore. Who needs a team uniform when the venue dress us? Sixteen competitors in the adult championship - twelve regulars and four eighteen-year-olds from the local grammar school who'd never heard of memory a couple of weeks ago and were having a competition among themselves to see who'd do best. Sabine Michelfelder won, for the record, just in case she goes on to be world champion in a few years' time.
Meanwhile, Gunther was on cracking form all weekend. Even better, so was I! After the first two events I mentioned yesterday, I ended up with 3915 in the binary digits, another world record, and 3000 points from the first three disciplines. Which is very cool. Cornelia was third-best in binary, like in the cards, Simon was fourth in all three events on the first day, and Boris, Johannes and Alisa were the chasing pack. Seriously tough competition.
For the second day, I did much better than I expected in the events where the German language got in the way a bit - an entirely respectable 62 in historic dates (Hannes got 79, and he's aiming to beat my record some time soon), 90 in spoken numbers, 81 in names (all German names, half of which I'd never heard of before), and 109 in words, which I'm extremely pleased with - attempting 110, so just one spelling mistake, and about 25% of the words were ones I didn't recognise. Boris set a new world record 227 in words, and Gunther beat his own world record in abstract images with 244.
In speed numbers, I did 360 in the second attempt (having made a bit of a mess of the first one), which would have been a new world record too if Andi, who skipped the morning's events, hadn't done 396 in the first go. So that's his revenge for me taking his speed cards record in Highley. I'll get it back in Bahrain.
At this point, I noticed that Gunther's consistently great scores in everything were not only giving him a safe lead over me (which didn't worry me, because what with the language barrier I didn't go there aiming to win), but also giving him a high enough score that a half-decent score in the final discipline, speed cards, would put him on top of the world ranking list, dislodging me! Unless I could do a very good time in the cards and beat him after all.
But I did a safe 55 seconds first time round, because this was practice for the world championship and I never practice slow-and-steady speed cards. Gunther did a safe time of one minute or so. Second time round, I did 27.44 seconds, but as I put the cards down, they slipped out of my hand and spread all over the table. I carefully put the pack back together, but there was one sticking out that I wasn't sure was the bottom one or another that had come out. And without looking at the face and thus invalidating my time, I couldn't be sure. So I tucked it into the bottom of the pack and hoped for the best. I got the recall right, but it turned out that the last two cards had got switched, so the time didn't count. Which is extremely annoying, but never mind.
Gunther did 47 seconds, and I've been trying to work out in my head whether my time on the second pack, if I'd got it right, would have put me narrowly ahead of him in the final table, or narrowly behind. Perhaps someone with the spreadsheet could save me the effort and work it out properly? Not that it matters - for one thing, I have the moral victory of knowing that but for that mishap I would have had a personal-best total score, despite the four disciplines in German; for another, honour was the only thing at stake anyway - only Germans can win the German championship, foreigners compete alongside them but fight for a different set of trophies. So Gunther was always going to win the big cup, the smaller cup he gets to keep and not return for the next champion and the complete ten-bulky-volumes encyclopaedia (of which he already has more than enough - that's always the prize at the German championships, and this was his eighth win), and I was always going to win the smaller best-foreigner trophy.
But that does put Gunther in the number one spot on the ranking list, that has been my personal property since August 2004! I always figured it'd be Clemens who knocked me off, but it just goes to show how Gunther's still improving steadily after all these years. He definitely deserves to finally be number one, and I'll just have to do something special in Bahrain to get it back.
Cornelia is also still improving at a rate of knots - she finished a bit behind me in the total rankings, to get the second place German trophy. She's now up to 5th in the world ranking, and Simon, who was third, moves up to number 8. It's quite staggering how the standard keeps rising at these things, and the scores get higher by so much every time.
There was a barbecue after the championship, and then the lavish prize-presentation ceremony, which goes on for hours but is always very entertaining - everyone gets medals, trophies, certificates and so on, there's a big screen display with the statistics, lots of applause and local dignitaries handing out the prizes, I love it. The world championships prizegiving ceremonies are always rather subdued in comparison to the German spectacle.
So, all in all, I'm delighted with the way I performed. I was good in EVERYTHING, no weak events, and that's exactly what I've been aiming for over the last year of practice. Bahrain's going to be fun - Gunther kindly, and inaccurately, said he wouldn't have a chance of beating me, but it's going to be a real challenge. As for who's going, that's the problem - Gunther will be there, the rest of the Germans aren't so sure - Cornelia and Hannes definitely can't, which is a real loss (we'll also be missing Joachim, who's currently in Costa Rica on his gap year and can't make it), Boris and Simon are thinking about it. Clemens, no idea, but I really hope he'll be there.
Boris explained to Tony Buzan that as a student, he might not be able to make the trip to Bahrain. Tony, who never really understands the concept of not having enough money for something, helpfully replied "You must!", but he did say that they'll be announcing the prize fund within the next week. In WMSC language, that generally means in the next two or three months, so we'll have to see, but if they did offer big prize money, and split it between, say, the top three in each discipline rather than giving it all to the overall winner, they would get more competitors.
Even so, I'm looking forward to it. If I can do this well there too, I'll win. Need to practice the hour numbers and cards over the next month, but otherwise just keep on form. I want it to be tomorrow, to be honest. I hate waiting for in a competition when I'm in the mood, and I've seldom been quite so in the mood as I am right now.
Anyway, the competition was great, the venue was excellent, lots of fuss being made over the whole thing by everyone at the Aesculap Akademie. All the competitors got an Aesculap Memo Masters '07 T-shirt, which everyone except Andi dutifully wore. Who needs a team uniform when the venue dress us? Sixteen competitors in the adult championship - twelve regulars and four eighteen-year-olds from the local grammar school who'd never heard of memory a couple of weeks ago and were having a competition among themselves to see who'd do best. Sabine Michelfelder won, for the record, just in case she goes on to be world champion in a few years' time.
Meanwhile, Gunther was on cracking form all weekend. Even better, so was I! After the first two events I mentioned yesterday, I ended up with 3915 in the binary digits, another world record, and 3000 points from the first three disciplines. Which is very cool. Cornelia was third-best in binary, like in the cards, Simon was fourth in all three events on the first day, and Boris, Johannes and Alisa were the chasing pack. Seriously tough competition.
For the second day, I did much better than I expected in the events where the German language got in the way a bit - an entirely respectable 62 in historic dates (Hannes got 79, and he's aiming to beat my record some time soon), 90 in spoken numbers, 81 in names (all German names, half of which I'd never heard of before), and 109 in words, which I'm extremely pleased with - attempting 110, so just one spelling mistake, and about 25% of the words were ones I didn't recognise. Boris set a new world record 227 in words, and Gunther beat his own world record in abstract images with 244.
In speed numbers, I did 360 in the second attempt (having made a bit of a mess of the first one), which would have been a new world record too if Andi, who skipped the morning's events, hadn't done 396 in the first go. So that's his revenge for me taking his speed cards record in Highley. I'll get it back in Bahrain.
At this point, I noticed that Gunther's consistently great scores in everything were not only giving him a safe lead over me (which didn't worry me, because what with the language barrier I didn't go there aiming to win), but also giving him a high enough score that a half-decent score in the final discipline, speed cards, would put him on top of the world ranking list, dislodging me! Unless I could do a very good time in the cards and beat him after all.
But I did a safe 55 seconds first time round, because this was practice for the world championship and I never practice slow-and-steady speed cards. Gunther did a safe time of one minute or so. Second time round, I did 27.44 seconds, but as I put the cards down, they slipped out of my hand and spread all over the table. I carefully put the pack back together, but there was one sticking out that I wasn't sure was the bottom one or another that had come out. And without looking at the face and thus invalidating my time, I couldn't be sure. So I tucked it into the bottom of the pack and hoped for the best. I got the recall right, but it turned out that the last two cards had got switched, so the time didn't count. Which is extremely annoying, but never mind.
Gunther did 47 seconds, and I've been trying to work out in my head whether my time on the second pack, if I'd got it right, would have put me narrowly ahead of him in the final table, or narrowly behind. Perhaps someone with the spreadsheet could save me the effort and work it out properly? Not that it matters - for one thing, I have the moral victory of knowing that but for that mishap I would have had a personal-best total score, despite the four disciplines in German; for another, honour was the only thing at stake anyway - only Germans can win the German championship, foreigners compete alongside them but fight for a different set of trophies. So Gunther was always going to win the big cup, the smaller cup he gets to keep and not return for the next champion and the complete ten-bulky-volumes encyclopaedia (of which he already has more than enough - that's always the prize at the German championships, and this was his eighth win), and I was always going to win the smaller best-foreigner trophy.
But that does put Gunther in the number one spot on the ranking list, that has been my personal property since August 2004! I always figured it'd be Clemens who knocked me off, but it just goes to show how Gunther's still improving steadily after all these years. He definitely deserves to finally be number one, and I'll just have to do something special in Bahrain to get it back.
Cornelia is also still improving at a rate of knots - she finished a bit behind me in the total rankings, to get the second place German trophy. She's now up to 5th in the world ranking, and Simon, who was third, moves up to number 8. It's quite staggering how the standard keeps rising at these things, and the scores get higher by so much every time.
There was a barbecue after the championship, and then the lavish prize-presentation ceremony, which goes on for hours but is always very entertaining - everyone gets medals, trophies, certificates and so on, there's a big screen display with the statistics, lots of applause and local dignitaries handing out the prizes, I love it. The world championships prizegiving ceremonies are always rather subdued in comparison to the German spectacle.
So, all in all, I'm delighted with the way I performed. I was good in EVERYTHING, no weak events, and that's exactly what I've been aiming for over the last year of practice. Bahrain's going to be fun - Gunther kindly, and inaccurately, said he wouldn't have a chance of beating me, but it's going to be a real challenge. As for who's going, that's the problem - Gunther will be there, the rest of the Germans aren't so sure - Cornelia and Hannes definitely can't, which is a real loss (we'll also be missing Joachim, who's currently in Costa Rica on his gap year and can't make it), Boris and Simon are thinking about it. Clemens, no idea, but I really hope he'll be there.
Boris explained to Tony Buzan that as a student, he might not be able to make the trip to Bahrain. Tony, who never really understands the concept of not having enough money for something, helpfully replied "You must!", but he did say that they'll be announcing the prize fund within the next week. In WMSC language, that generally means in the next two or three months, so we'll have to see, but if they did offer big prize money, and split it between, say, the top three in each discipline rather than giving it all to the overall winner, they would get more competitors.
Even so, I'm looking forward to it. If I can do this well there too, I'll win. Need to practice the hour numbers and cards over the next month, but otherwise just keep on form. I want it to be tomorrow, to be honest. I hate waiting for in a competition when I'm in the mood, and I've seldom been quite so in the mood as I am right now.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Scores on the videoprinter
Very quick post tonight, because I really should get some sleep (not to mention finish reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), and we start tomorrow morning at 8:30am (we finished today at around 8:30pm).
Clemens isn't there - he showed up briefly just to say he wasn't taking part, I don't know what the story is there - but we've got the full complement of the rest of the world's best Germans (unless Steffen Bütow or Jan Formann are still active enough and German enough to fall into that category). Andi is also half there, in his usual way - he doesn't want to get up early tomorrow, so he's going to skip half the disciplines. He says he's definitely not going to the world championships, but I'll believe that when I see it.
30-minute numbers didn't go quite as well as I'd hoped, but I ended up with a respectable 1000 exactly - Gunther got a new world record 1160, Cornelia 1016, Simon 985, Johannes 890, Andi 740, someone whose name I've written down on my piece of paper as "AK" got 700 (Alisa Kellner, of course - I knew it would come back to me eventually), and Boris 660. Going to be a tough competition, obviously.
But I did seriously well in 30-minute cards, with 16 packs - Gunther got 11 and an extra few cards, Cornelia nine and a half and Simon nine. Scores on the doors after two disciplines:
Me 2064.1
Gunther 1820.2
Cornelia 1570.0
Simon 1513.1
Andi 1078.2
Boris 1013.0
Johannes 1010.9
Binary went well too - with a bit of luck I've beaten my record there. Gunther no doubt did well too, so I should still be narrowly in the lead after day one. Tomorrow, of course, we have the untranslated German-language events, so expect me to drop down the rankings. I'd write more, but it's bedtime and Harry's in a tight spot.
Clemens isn't there - he showed up briefly just to say he wasn't taking part, I don't know what the story is there - but we've got the full complement of the rest of the world's best Germans (unless Steffen Bütow or Jan Formann are still active enough and German enough to fall into that category). Andi is also half there, in his usual way - he doesn't want to get up early tomorrow, so he's going to skip half the disciplines. He says he's definitely not going to the world championships, but I'll believe that when I see it.
30-minute numbers didn't go quite as well as I'd hoped, but I ended up with a respectable 1000 exactly - Gunther got a new world record 1160, Cornelia 1016, Simon 985, Johannes 890, Andi 740, someone whose name I've written down on my piece of paper as "AK" got 700 (Alisa Kellner, of course - I knew it would come back to me eventually), and Boris 660. Going to be a tough competition, obviously.
But I did seriously well in 30-minute cards, with 16 packs - Gunther got 11 and an extra few cards, Cornelia nine and a half and Simon nine. Scores on the doors after two disciplines:
Me 2064.1
Gunther 1820.2
Cornelia 1570.0
Simon 1513.1
Andi 1078.2
Boris 1013.0
Johannes 1010.9
Binary went well too - with a bit of luck I've beaten my record there. Gunther no doubt did well too, so I should still be narrowly in the lead after day one. Tomorrow, of course, we have the untranslated German-language events, so expect me to drop down the rankings. I'd write more, but it's bedtime and Harry's in a tight spot.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
And now for today's post
Hi! I'm in Stuttgart! No time to write anything else, but I thought you might like to know.
Blogging in an unusual location
I couldn't get on to Blogger last night, so I posted this on the LJ account I never use:
Having found an internet cafe in Tuttlingen, I'm darned if I'm going to let the fact that Blogger isn't working stop me from blogging. I'll do one here instead, and copy it over later. It'll be a short one, because German keyboards have the Y and Z in the wrong places and I can't type very quickly. But I had to record the fact that I left my hat on a train, again, on the way here from Zurich airport. It's getting a bit silly now.
I wouldn't have done it if I'd been travelling on my own, but I had the TV people with me, distracting me. It's quite definitely their fault, rather than mine. But never mind, I'll see if I can get a new hat when I go to Stuttgart tomorrow - I've got the whole day to myself for once, and plenty of time to get properly outfitted for the competition on Friday. Well, almost the whole day, they want to film me again tomorrow night - I might ditch them, depending on the mood I'm in, because I feel like I've hardly had a second to myself for the last couple of weeks.
The woman at the hotel complimented me on my German! She might have been jumping to conclusions a bit, because all I'd done at that point was nod while she rattled off explanations of where breakfast and the lift were. Although I did understand the breakfast thing, and it's in another building down the road, so I'm quite proud of myself there. Tuttlingen is a really nice town, by the way, a lot bigger than I'd expected. The venue for the championship looks nice too, from the outside. Looking forward to it!
Having found an internet cafe in Tuttlingen, I'm darned if I'm going to let the fact that Blogger isn't working stop me from blogging. I'll do one here instead, and copy it over later. It'll be a short one, because German keyboards have the Y and Z in the wrong places and I can't type very quickly. But I had to record the fact that I left my hat on a train, again, on the way here from Zurich airport. It's getting a bit silly now.
I wouldn't have done it if I'd been travelling on my own, but I had the TV people with me, distracting me. It's quite definitely their fault, rather than mine. But never mind, I'll see if I can get a new hat when I go to Stuttgart tomorrow - I've got the whole day to myself for once, and plenty of time to get properly outfitted for the competition on Friday. Well, almost the whole day, they want to film me again tomorrow night - I might ditch them, depending on the mood I'm in, because I feel like I've hardly had a second to myself for the last couple of weeks.
The woman at the hotel complimented me on my German! She might have been jumping to conclusions a bit, because all I'd done at that point was nod while she rattled off explanations of where breakfast and the lift were. Although I did understand the breakfast thing, and it's in another building down the road, so I'm quite proud of myself there. Tuttlingen is a really nice town, by the way, a lot bigger than I'd expected. The venue for the championship looks nice too, from the outside. Looking forward to it!
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Look North
"Look North" was the local counterpart of East Midlands Today that I got when I was living in Boston. I never really understood why it was called Look North. It covered Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, which is kind of up in the north, so why would the people watching it want to look north? The only thing up there is Newcastle and Scotland and the Arctic. There's more things to see if you look south, or east, or west.
Anyway, East Midlands Today was kind of like a dumbed-down version of the Central Tonight interview - they gave me the whole of the sports news to memorise a pack of cards, and then only had me recite precisely six of them before making impressed noises. Other than that it was just the usual questions, although at least this time the studio was just around the corner from work, rather than in Birmingham.
Speaking of Birmingham, tomorrow I'm flying from there to Zurich, and thence by train to Tuttlingen. Then a day's sightseeing in Stuttgart, assuming I can escape Nick and his camera, then two days of memorising against the world's best. Woohoo! See you (and by that I mean write a blog that you will subsequently read) on Sunday, unless I find a net cafe and the time to blog while I'm there.
Anyway, East Midlands Today was kind of like a dumbed-down version of the Central Tonight interview - they gave me the whole of the sports news to memorise a pack of cards, and then only had me recite precisely six of them before making impressed noises. Other than that it was just the usual questions, although at least this time the studio was just around the corner from work, rather than in Birmingham.
Speaking of Birmingham, tomorrow I'm flying from there to Zurich, and thence by train to Tuttlingen. Then a day's sightseeing in Stuttgart, assuming I can escape Nick and his camera, then two days of memorising against the world's best. Woohoo! See you (and by that I mean write a blog that you will subsequently read) on Sunday, unless I find a net cafe and the time to blog while I'm there.
Monday, July 23, 2007
Dance your cares away (clap-clap)!
Boomerang are showing Fraggle Rock! They started tonight with the first episode, and I found out about it fifteen minutes beforehand, so I was thrilled. I don't think I've ever seen the first one before, or at least it didn't ring any bells in my ever-unreliable memory. Strangely enough, they're showing the US version, even though the British version with Fulton Mackay is available on DVD (I've been sort of meaning to buy it for ages. Maybe I still will).
Oh, and I also started the new job today. It seems okay, although it's one of those companies with a lot of bureaucracy and lots of people to get to know from all the little departments I'll be doing the accounts for. Plus the commute to Nottingham is inconvenient. But it's still preferable, morally speaking, to staying at home doing nothing all day. And I only have one more day till I flounce off on my holidays. Yay!
Oh, and I also started the new job today. It seems okay, although it's one of those companies with a lot of bureaucracy and lots of people to get to know from all the little departments I'll be doing the accounts for. Plus the commute to Nottingham is inconvenient. But it's still preferable, morally speaking, to staying at home doing nothing all day. And I only have one more day till I flounce off on my holidays. Yay!
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Not more memory talk!
Sorry, I know I've been on about nothing else for the last week or so, but that's just because I've been doing nothing but talk memory 24 hours a day. Starting tomorrow, I'll shut up about it for a day or so.
But today I felt that I'd have to do some practice for Germany. All this media attention had completely knocked me out of the memory-competition frame of mind, I hadn't found the time for even a pack of cards except the one I did on the telly, and I'd completely forgotten exactly what I'd planned to do in Tuttlingen. I figured I needed to spend the day doing a lot of work, just to get me back in 'the zone'. I promise never to use that expression again.
Anyway, I did a 30-minute numbers, 30-minute cards and 30-minute binary, and got 1164, 18 packs and 3255 respectively. Which is extremely encouraging - if I could do that in the competition, it'd be two world records and a score that should beat everyone except Gunther in the other. Although doing it in the competition is a different kettle of fish altogether, obviously. And I would expect Clemens and Gunther to be somewhere around 1200 in the numbers too, because that record's ripe for the beating.
18 packs of cards is doubleplusgroovy, though - I attempted 18 and got them all flawlessly correct. And the binary isn't too disappointing, because I'm never going to be on top form after two other half-hour disciplines in a short period of time. So now I'm going to give my brain a rest until Friday (you know, except for the new job, I might use my brain a bit for that), and look forward to Tuttlingen! Historically, I always do terribly at the German championship, and I'd really like to break that pattern this time round.
But today I felt that I'd have to do some practice for Germany. All this media attention had completely knocked me out of the memory-competition frame of mind, I hadn't found the time for even a pack of cards except the one I did on the telly, and I'd completely forgotten exactly what I'd planned to do in Tuttlingen. I figured I needed to spend the day doing a lot of work, just to get me back in 'the zone'. I promise never to use that expression again.
Anyway, I did a 30-minute numbers, 30-minute cards and 30-minute binary, and got 1164, 18 packs and 3255 respectively. Which is extremely encouraging - if I could do that in the competition, it'd be two world records and a score that should beat everyone except Gunther in the other. Although doing it in the competition is a different kettle of fish altogether, obviously. And I would expect Clemens and Gunther to be somewhere around 1200 in the numbers too, because that record's ripe for the beating.
18 packs of cards is doubleplusgroovy, though - I attempted 18 and got them all flawlessly correct. And the binary isn't too disappointing, because I'm never going to be on top form after two other half-hour disciplines in a short period of time. So now I'm going to give my brain a rest until Friday (you know, except for the new job, I might use my brain a bit for that), and look forward to Tuttlingen! Historically, I always do terribly at the German championship, and I'd really like to break that pattern this time round.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Just another frantic Friday
Sooo, let’s see. I had to get out of bed at seven o’clock in the morning to get showered and dressed before Nick arrived to film my every movement. He got here about ten minutes earlier than promised, at 7:35, while I was still eating my bacon butty, and we discussed the fun-filled day ahead.
Caught the train to Nottingham at 8:39, where Nick got told off for filming on the station and the train without permission, arrived to find that the Bentinck hotel and pub next to the station was all cordoned off by police barrier tape. No time to really gawp at it, because I wanted to find the place I was going for an interview before having to talk about it for the cameras – it turns out that the New College offices are in a great location, right near the city centre and all the good shops. Nick wanted to film the interview, but I refused to let him anywhere within sight of the place, so as not to jeapordise my chances, and packed him off to a coffee shop.
The interview was fun – they had a half-hour written test first, giving me some paperwork and asking me to put together a month’s accounts, like an exam question. I haven’t done an exam for years, but I think I picked up on the bits you were supposed to pick up on, and provided a halfway decent set of answers. More companies should do this kind of thing, I’ve always felt interviews are a pretty rubbish way of picking an accountant. But we did have a conventional kind of interview afterwards, which also went well. I judged that professional-hardworking-type would go over better than eccentric-genius, so I didn’t mention the memory stuff except once in passing, and didn’t tell them I was on the local news that evening.
Interview done, and it took rather longer than planned, we then got the bus out to Chilwell to visit Grandma. She, of course, turned out to be a natural in front of the camera, and we got a heck of a lot of entertaining footage in the can (I think that’s the technical term). We went into Beeston for lunch, and came back to find my Central TV taxi waiting for me already. By this time, the constant filming of everything was starting to get on my wick, and it was pouring with rain again. Nick kept us standing outside while he filmed establishing shots of Grandma’s place, but eventually we got in the taxi and set off for Birmingham.
“It’ll be about 40 minutes,” said the taxi driver, inaccurately as it turned out. “How long do you want me to wait for you there?”
“Wait for us?” I said, surprised. It was about quarter to four, and the show didn’t start till six. The driver wasn’t at all happy to find that he’d been hired to wait around in Birmingham for anything up to three hours. He moaned that he wouldn’t have taken the job if he’d known that, because he had an important birthday party to go to and he’d have to miss it. He phoned his boss and complained to him too. Meanwhile, it was raining very heavily and there were roadworks and traffic jams all over the place. A tree had come down over the main entrance to the Central TV studios, so we had to drive around the back to try to find a way in.
When we arrived, I decided to perform my random act of kindness for the day, and told the driver to go. We were just down the road from the train station, so taking a taxi back to Derby offended my sensibilities on several levels – as a working class hero, I don’t like taxis anyway, and as an accountant I was appalled that Central were paying a taxi to sit outside the studio for hours, whereas as someone who appreciates the importance of this birthday party, I would have hated to be responsible for keeping him sitting around.
So, having saved the big TV company a bit of money and put a dent in the profits of a small taxi firm, possibly getting the driver in trouble for it, we went into the studio, which was a very cool place. Just about as soon as we got inside, someone mentioned in passing that the train station had closed down because of the weather, but I decided to cross that bridge when we came to it.
Probably worth mentioning at this point that it was in fact Central Tonight yesterday, and East Midlands Today on Tuesday. I had got them mixed up and told everyone it was the other way around, so I do apologise to anyone who wanted to watch it and missed it. If you did, you can see my performance here, if you select Central East, and evening bulletins, and Friday July 20th. My bit starts around the 22nd minute, if you don’t really want to watch the rest of the latest news in the east midlands.
It’s a lot of fun to see what goes into the making of a live local news show. The studio set is a lot smaller than you’d think, and it’s weird to see it all brightly lit, with cameras and autocues lurking in the darkness around it. And my bit went very smoothly – they gave me a pack of cards and thirty seconds or so to memorise it during a montage of people on the streets of Nottingham trying to remember cards too, then I recalled it afterwards. I knew we wouldn’t have the time to recite the whole pack, so I just concentrated on getting the first few flawless – I would probably have struggled if we’d got past halfway through the deck. Still, it looked great on the telly.
And I got to see all the behind-the-scenes stuff, like the story they had to drop when a breaking-news thing came up (it was just about the fact that it had been raining rather a lot, so not really news as such), and the story behind the Bentinck Hotel (someone threw a firebomb into it, apparently).
Then it was just a case of getting home, which promised to be an adventure. Strangely enough, though, I was feeling extremely cheerful by that point, after having been in an irritable kind of mood most of the afternoon, what with the constant filming and being rushed from place to place. I was quite looking forward to a lengthy rail-replacement bus ride in the still pouring rain. But it turned out that half the trains were still running from New Street station, which will teach me to believe any gossip I hear in a newsroom.
There was a lot of confusion at the station, of course, with half the trains being cancelled, and we eventually got on one that we were assured went to Derby, even though the electronic displays all said Weston-super-Mare. Fortunately enough, it did go to Derby, and we got away without buying tickets too.
So today I was planning to spend the whole day in bed, apart from Nick coming round for yet more filming for a couple of hours. But I also found that I’d got the job – starting Monday, for three months with the possibility of applying for the permanent job there afterwards, assuming I like it. I think I probably will, although I’m a bit concerned by the fact that they apparently requested that I should wear a more boring tie to the office than my playing-cards one…
As for tomorrow, a bit of final practice for Germany! I need to keep reminding myself that it’s Sunday tomorrow, because I was thinking all day yesterday that it was Saturday.
Caught the train to Nottingham at 8:39, where Nick got told off for filming on the station and the train without permission, arrived to find that the Bentinck hotel and pub next to the station was all cordoned off by police barrier tape. No time to really gawp at it, because I wanted to find the place I was going for an interview before having to talk about it for the cameras – it turns out that the New College offices are in a great location, right near the city centre and all the good shops. Nick wanted to film the interview, but I refused to let him anywhere within sight of the place, so as not to jeapordise my chances, and packed him off to a coffee shop.
The interview was fun – they had a half-hour written test first, giving me some paperwork and asking me to put together a month’s accounts, like an exam question. I haven’t done an exam for years, but I think I picked up on the bits you were supposed to pick up on, and provided a halfway decent set of answers. More companies should do this kind of thing, I’ve always felt interviews are a pretty rubbish way of picking an accountant. But we did have a conventional kind of interview afterwards, which also went well. I judged that professional-hardworking-type would go over better than eccentric-genius, so I didn’t mention the memory stuff except once in passing, and didn’t tell them I was on the local news that evening.
Interview done, and it took rather longer than planned, we then got the bus out to Chilwell to visit Grandma. She, of course, turned out to be a natural in front of the camera, and we got a heck of a lot of entertaining footage in the can (I think that’s the technical term). We went into Beeston for lunch, and came back to find my Central TV taxi waiting for me already. By this time, the constant filming of everything was starting to get on my wick, and it was pouring with rain again. Nick kept us standing outside while he filmed establishing shots of Grandma’s place, but eventually we got in the taxi and set off for Birmingham.
“It’ll be about 40 minutes,” said the taxi driver, inaccurately as it turned out. “How long do you want me to wait for you there?”
“Wait for us?” I said, surprised. It was about quarter to four, and the show didn’t start till six. The driver wasn’t at all happy to find that he’d been hired to wait around in Birmingham for anything up to three hours. He moaned that he wouldn’t have taken the job if he’d known that, because he had an important birthday party to go to and he’d have to miss it. He phoned his boss and complained to him too. Meanwhile, it was raining very heavily and there were roadworks and traffic jams all over the place. A tree had come down over the main entrance to the Central TV studios, so we had to drive around the back to try to find a way in.
When we arrived, I decided to perform my random act of kindness for the day, and told the driver to go. We were just down the road from the train station, so taking a taxi back to Derby offended my sensibilities on several levels – as a working class hero, I don’t like taxis anyway, and as an accountant I was appalled that Central were paying a taxi to sit outside the studio for hours, whereas as someone who appreciates the importance of this birthday party, I would have hated to be responsible for keeping him sitting around.
So, having saved the big TV company a bit of money and put a dent in the profits of a small taxi firm, possibly getting the driver in trouble for it, we went into the studio, which was a very cool place. Just about as soon as we got inside, someone mentioned in passing that the train station had closed down because of the weather, but I decided to cross that bridge when we came to it.
Probably worth mentioning at this point that it was in fact Central Tonight yesterday, and East Midlands Today on Tuesday. I had got them mixed up and told everyone it was the other way around, so I do apologise to anyone who wanted to watch it and missed it. If you did, you can see my performance here, if you select Central East, and evening bulletins, and Friday July 20th. My bit starts around the 22nd minute, if you don’t really want to watch the rest of the latest news in the east midlands.
It’s a lot of fun to see what goes into the making of a live local news show. The studio set is a lot smaller than you’d think, and it’s weird to see it all brightly lit, with cameras and autocues lurking in the darkness around it. And my bit went very smoothly – they gave me a pack of cards and thirty seconds or so to memorise it during a montage of people on the streets of Nottingham trying to remember cards too, then I recalled it afterwards. I knew we wouldn’t have the time to recite the whole pack, so I just concentrated on getting the first few flawless – I would probably have struggled if we’d got past halfway through the deck. Still, it looked great on the telly.
And I got to see all the behind-the-scenes stuff, like the story they had to drop when a breaking-news thing came up (it was just about the fact that it had been raining rather a lot, so not really news as such), and the story behind the Bentinck Hotel (someone threw a firebomb into it, apparently).
Then it was just a case of getting home, which promised to be an adventure. Strangely enough, though, I was feeling extremely cheerful by that point, after having been in an irritable kind of mood most of the afternoon, what with the constant filming and being rushed from place to place. I was quite looking forward to a lengthy rail-replacement bus ride in the still pouring rain. But it turned out that half the trains were still running from New Street station, which will teach me to believe any gossip I hear in a newsroom.
There was a lot of confusion at the station, of course, with half the trains being cancelled, and we eventually got on one that we were assured went to Derby, even though the electronic displays all said Weston-super-Mare. Fortunately enough, it did go to Derby, and we got away without buying tickets too.
So today I was planning to spend the whole day in bed, apart from Nick coming round for yet more filming for a couple of hours. But I also found that I’d got the job – starting Monday, for three months with the possibility of applying for the permanent job there afterwards, assuming I like it. I think I probably will, although I’m a bit concerned by the fact that they apparently requested that I should wear a more boring tie to the office than my playing-cards one…
As for tomorrow, a bit of final practice for Germany! I need to keep reminding myself that it’s Sunday tomorrow, because I was thinking all day yesterday that it was Saturday.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Hoo-boy!
I'm not even going to TRY to write about everything that I've been doing today. I've been on the go for the past fourteen hours and I need to sleep. Tomorrow I'll do some kind of epic-length blog and chronicle everything.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
B-b-b-but I'm weary...
I think that's a Porky Pig quote from "The Ducksters", where he's a contestant on a radio quiz show hosted by Daffy Duck. But I have a nagging feeling that it's actually from a different cartoon, and therefore not at all relevant to what I'm about to write, even to the small minority of people who might be expected to recognise the quote in the first place.
Anyway, I had an interview today on the breakfast show for Radio Derby. My alarm went off at seven o'clock, and I thought "Hmm" and went back to sleep. Woke up a bit later, thinking "Wait, did my alarm go off back then? What time is it?" 7:50. Need to get to the radio station on the other side of the city centre for eight o'clock.
Skipping such unnecessaries as breakfast and showers and tooth-brushing, I made it in time for the 8:20 interview, where I talked nonsense about memorising and totally failed to memorise a pack of cards for them (I don't have a great track record for memory skills when I've just got out of bed, as anyone who was in Malaysia in 2003 will tell you). But the interview seems to have been popular - as soon as I got home the phone was ringing, with the Derbyshire Evening Telegraph and the two local TV stations demanding to talk to me.
The upshot of it is that I'm on East Midlands Today tomorrow, and Central News on Tues. Possibly the other way round, but whoever it is tomorrow is sending a car for me, so I don't need to worry. I also have a pre-arranged trip to see Grandma and a new job interview in Nottingham for the morning (temp job, acceptable pay, leading to possibility of permanent job, doesn't sound great but I'll probably end up taking it anyway), all of which Nick the Channel 5 director wants to film.
I refused to let him film the interview, but otherwise he'll be following me around all day, whoopee. Seriously, the phone's been ringing non-stop this week with one thing or another, it's tiresome and I want to become a hermit. Or better yet, an accountant. The kind who goes to the office and comes home at night and doesn't have to describe to anyone the process of memorising a pack of cards.
Anyway, I had an interview today on the breakfast show for Radio Derby. My alarm went off at seven o'clock, and I thought "Hmm" and went back to sleep. Woke up a bit later, thinking "Wait, did my alarm go off back then? What time is it?" 7:50. Need to get to the radio station on the other side of the city centre for eight o'clock.
Skipping such unnecessaries as breakfast and showers and tooth-brushing, I made it in time for the 8:20 interview, where I talked nonsense about memorising and totally failed to memorise a pack of cards for them (I don't have a great track record for memory skills when I've just got out of bed, as anyone who was in Malaysia in 2003 will tell you). But the interview seems to have been popular - as soon as I got home the phone was ringing, with the Derbyshire Evening Telegraph and the two local TV stations demanding to talk to me.
The upshot of it is that I'm on East Midlands Today tomorrow, and Central News on Tues. Possibly the other way round, but whoever it is tomorrow is sending a car for me, so I don't need to worry. I also have a pre-arranged trip to see Grandma and a new job interview in Nottingham for the morning (temp job, acceptable pay, leading to possibility of permanent job, doesn't sound great but I'll probably end up taking it anyway), all of which Nick the Channel 5 director wants to film.
I refused to let him film the interview, but otherwise he'll be following me around all day, whoopee. Seriously, the phone's been ringing non-stop this week with one thing or another, it's tiresome and I want to become a hermit. Or better yet, an accountant. The kind who goes to the office and comes home at night and doesn't have to describe to anyone the process of memorising a pack of cards.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
I think I'm safe
The publicity is dying down to acceptable levels now. My favourite request came from the "World Records Academy" who thought I might want to buy an 'official' certificate for $95 ("It's a great marketing tool!") documenting my world record. I decided to pass on that one.
Radio Derby tomorrow, Central News possibly next week. You can get tired of answering the same questions over and over again. Hopefully the German championship won't be covered by Tony's PR company, so I'll be back to my usual blissful state of the rest of the world being ignorant of what I've memorised or whether that's a good thing. And then maybe, if you're lucky, I'll be able to go back to writing about other stuff in this blog.
Radio Derby tomorrow, Central News possibly next week. You can get tired of answering the same questions over and over again. Hopefully the German championship won't be covered by Tony's PR company, so I'll be back to my usual blissful state of the rest of the world being ignorant of what I've memorised or whether that's a good thing. And then maybe, if you're lucky, I'll be able to go back to writing about other stuff in this blog.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
If you like pina coladas
My internet connection stopped working yesterday, and when I phoned them up they arranged for an engineer to come round this morning. Then a few hours later it started working again, and I told them about it, but nobody specifically said they'd cancelled the engineer, so I realised this morning there was a chance he'd still be coming round at some time between eight and twelve. So I had to get up early. Then I remembered that as well as the probability of the engineer, there was the certainty of the landlord coming round today to do the annual gas safety check. And the likelihood of people phoning me about the press release that went out yesterday describing the speed cards record. And the sporting chance of calls from three different accountancy recruitment agencies about job prospects. And the woman from Radio 4 who hasn't yet managed to talk to me despite our best efforts to arrange a mutually convenient time. And the TV documentary people who are determined to chronicle every slighest movement I make. All in all, it looked like being the kind of day when I'd constantly have people at the door, on the phone or emailing, and wouldn't be able to get anything done.
I'm not sure exactly what I was planning on 'getting done' today. But I would have been annoyed about not being able to do it, I'll assure you. So I decided to take the mature route to happiness, and run away. I went to Nottingham for the morning, and Peterborough for the afternoon, just to see if they'd changed since I last saw them. They hadn't, but I still had lots of fun browsing the shops and enjoying the feeling that people might be trying to contact me and wouldn't be able to find me. I bought a collection of James Kochalka's sketchbook diaries and two of his CDs, and admired his lifestyle, not for the first time - I'm only a memory champion because I can't draw, write children's books and cartoons and record songs with my band, you know.
Of course, when I got home, everyone was lying in wait for me. The engineer had indeed not been cancelled and had left a card, the landlord had let himself in and presumably found the flat not filled with carbon monoxide, I had oodles of emails to read through and the phone was ringing constantly - two job prospects, one of them sounding good and the other not, an interview on Radio Derby for Thursday morning (did I mention I did Radio Shropshire yesterday? I don't remember) and even a call from Tony Buzan to say congratulations.
The TV people want to film me at a job interview. This doesn't seem like a very good way to go about getting a job - if I was the financial controller of a company and wanted a new accountant, I'd go for one who didn't bring his own film crew to the interview. It kind of gives the impression that I care more about being on TV than I do about being an accountant (which, scarily, I really don't) and would be constantly dashing off to give interviews and autographs instead of preparing the monthly balance sheet reconciliations.
On the other hand, they also want to film me going to see Grandma on Friday, which might be fun. Hopefully they won't cancel it, because she's promised to beat me to death with her stick if it turns out that I'm just winding her up about the film crew. I think she's looking forward to being a TV star. She'd make a great one - there's nobody in the world who's a more natural talker, and she's got a heck of a lot of interesting stories to tell.
All in all, I find myself quite liking the idea of escaping from all the people who want to talk to me right now. Maybe I'll go into hiding somewhere until all the excitement has blown over.
I'm not sure exactly what I was planning on 'getting done' today. But I would have been annoyed about not being able to do it, I'll assure you. So I decided to take the mature route to happiness, and run away. I went to Nottingham for the morning, and Peterborough for the afternoon, just to see if they'd changed since I last saw them. They hadn't, but I still had lots of fun browsing the shops and enjoying the feeling that people might be trying to contact me and wouldn't be able to find me. I bought a collection of James Kochalka's sketchbook diaries and two of his CDs, and admired his lifestyle, not for the first time - I'm only a memory champion because I can't draw, write children's books and cartoons and record songs with my band, you know.
Of course, when I got home, everyone was lying in wait for me. The engineer had indeed not been cancelled and had left a card, the landlord had let himself in and presumably found the flat not filled with carbon monoxide, I had oodles of emails to read through and the phone was ringing constantly - two job prospects, one of them sounding good and the other not, an interview on Radio Derby for Thursday morning (did I mention I did Radio Shropshire yesterday? I don't remember) and even a call from Tony Buzan to say congratulations.
The TV people want to film me at a job interview. This doesn't seem like a very good way to go about getting a job - if I was the financial controller of a company and wanted a new accountant, I'd go for one who didn't bring his own film crew to the interview. It kind of gives the impression that I care more about being on TV than I do about being an accountant (which, scarily, I really don't) and would be constantly dashing off to give interviews and autographs instead of preparing the monthly balance sheet reconciliations.
On the other hand, they also want to film me going to see Grandma on Friday, which might be fun. Hopefully they won't cancel it, because she's promised to beat me to death with her stick if it turns out that I'm just winding her up about the film crew. I think she's looking forward to being a TV star. She'd make a great one - there's nobody in the world who's a more natural talker, and she's got a heck of a lot of interesting stories to tell.
All in all, I find myself quite liking the idea of escaping from all the people who want to talk to me right now. Maybe I'll go into hiding somewhere until all the excitement has blown over.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Other things I forgot about Saturday
It was a lovely day! Boris commented "I thought this was England - where's the rain?". It had been pouring down constantly for the couple of months before the competition, and it started again on Sunday, but on Saturday we had baking hot summer sunshine. It was great! There was also sponsorship coming out of the wazoo - I won flights to and accommodation in Bahrain for the world championship, plus a bottle of champagne and a very nice trophy - a glass thing with blue coloured stuff inside, like a giant paperweight. Much better than a fake-metal trophy!
I also did an interview with Radio Shropshire today, and there's been a press release sent out by Tony Buzan's PR people urging all newshounds to call me. Maybe someone will, you never know. But I should probably get back to finding a job. I don't want to be sitting unemployed for too long. Well, maybe for the next two weeks so I don't have to use up holidays straight away to go to Tuttlingen.
I also did an interview with Radio Shropshire today, and there's been a press release sent out by Tony Buzan's PR people urging all newshounds to call me. Maybe someone will, you never know. But I should probably get back to finding a job. I don't want to be sitting unemployed for too long. Well, maybe for the next two weeks so I don't have to use up holidays straight away to go to Tuttlingen.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
BOOyeah!
"Booyeah" isn't a word I normally use, but I did find a good excuse to use it yesterday. The UK Open Memory Championship was great fun - what it lacked in competitors it more than made up for in entertainment value.
There turned out to be five of us taking part - me, James Ponder and James Kemp from Britain, Boris Konrad from Germany and Tomasz Krasinski from Poland. Idriz Zogaj was planning to come from Sweden, but didn't turn up, and there was a mystery new competitor who registered the day before but then changed her mind again at the last minute. So our five desks seemed a bit lonely in the middle of the very nice main hall in the very nice Severn Centre in Highley.
The Severn Centre is a bit of a mystery - it's a HUGE sports/leisure/everything else centre (it also contains a library and a police station and probably a small zoo somewhere among the masses of tennis courts, playgrounds, fields, badminton courts, large cafeteria and bar etc etc) in a village that, although apparently the largest village in Shropshire, is still a village. It's not a huge place, and you could probably fit the whole population of Highley into the Severn Centre without an overcrowding problem. But the facilities there were more than top-notch. We need to make memory competitions there a regular feature, however impossible to reach by public transport the place is. Hold the world championships there some time, and we'll car-pool.
Things went more or less well for me. I got quite respectable scores in nine disciplines out of ten, and the speed numbers wasn't my fault (this means it was my fault, but I'm making excuses) - the camera crew made a loud clanking noise early on in the memorisation time, just as I was fiercely concentrating and that put me in a bad mood throughout the five minutes, so that every muffled noise or movement seen out of the corner of my eye infuriated and distracted me. I had no end of gaps in the recall and ended up with one complete row and one row a bit further down (I think it was the fourth) with the only gap being the last four digits. So I crossed out everything below that and settled for a woeful score of 76.
In everything else, though, I was satisfied. I was generally a way below the scores I'd been getting in practice, with a slightly slower memorising speed than I'd expected, and a less efficient recall, but I was still getting scores that were more than acceptable. From memory, a decent 70 in five-minute words, a slightly-better-than-my-old-world-record 795 in five-minute binary, a thoroughly excellent 52.5 in five-min names and faces (I'm definitely getting better at that), 615 or so in fifteen-minute numbers, five packs in ten-minute cards, 99 in abstract images (getting there with that one, too, slowly), 84 in historic dates and 95 in spoken numbers. All of those, names and images aside, are scores that I know I can improve on, but which are more than enough to satisfy me, especially in my first competition for seven or eight months.
As for speed cards, well, that's the fun one. I was about 2000 points clear of Boris by that point, so no need to go for a safe first time. I decided to go all-out for that fabled 30-second barrier. The first time through, it didn't go so well, there were three or four images that didn't come instantly to mind and I had to drag them out of my brain kicking and screaming. The time was 29.16, but the recall was unexpectedly dreadful, and I didn't come anywhere close to getting it right.
So, second attempt, TV cameras on me, local newspaper reporter hanging around, Phil Chambers sitting to my right, Dominic O'Brien keeping an eye on me from across the room, last chance to break the record, and my brain obviously not fully up to speed, I didn't expect wonders. I sort of blanked my mind out, thought to myself "Come on, let's show them what I can do!" in a silly, macho style, giggled at myself silently, and started to memorise. "That's more like it!" I thought, realising I was seeing the images much more clearly. I focused on what I was doing, getting a good feeling all the way, and stopped the timer. 26.28 seconds. Damn, that would be something, I thought. That gave me four and a half minutes to sit and think before I could recall anything - running through the journey in my brain, I had the first three locations all there, just the first image of the fourth, all present and correct for the fifth and sixth, then a big gap and then the ninth location all present and correct. Drat, I thought, must have lost concentration towards the end there. Maybe I can work them out when I get to look at the unshuffled deck. That makes 16 cards I can't place, I've rescued packs with worse.
Then my mind wandered to other things, and suddenly locations seven and eight popped merrily back into my brain - tiny bit of doubt about the exact identity and order of the images at location eight, but not enough to worry me. By recall time, I was quietly confident. I worked out what the final two missing images were, sat indecisively for a moment trying to remember the order, and finally made an educated guess that I was about 90% sure of. Then I had to wait another two and a half minutes for the recall time to end before I could check them with Phil (and an interested crowd who had gathered to watch). Sure enough, they all came out correct, and I saw fit to shout "BOOyeah!", just to alert anyone who hadn't noticed that something interesting had happened.
That capped off a definitely enjoyable day. 26.28 - I'd like to see Andi beat THAT! Everyone involved has my deepest gratitude - Phil organised the tournament impeccably, as usual, assisted ably by Gaby Kappus and others. Everything worked the way it was supposed to, even the spoken numbers (more or less), we weren't more than half an hour behind schedule. Tony Buzan paid a flying visit before dashing off to see a sheikh from Bahrain, told us the story about how scientists once said that nobody would ever memorise a 30-digit spoken number (as I'd told the camera crew he would - I'm a psychic, aided by the fact that he says the same thing at every memory competition) and the one about his university teacher who memorised all the class's details (I hadn't heard that one before, but it's in at least two of his books). He also orchestrated a phone call to Jennifer over at the Australian championships in Melbourne (Simon Orton won, brilliantly) and generally inspired everyone with his unfailing enthusiasm for the world of memory. Dominic came by in the afternoon and did the same (in a slightly more low-key way), including very kindly describing me as the reason he isn't competing. He also said that he's working on training again, he's got a new system that he's breaking in, and while he won't be competing in Bahrain, he's 70% sure he'll take part in 2008. Which will be great.
But 26.28, baby. Booyeah.
I also wrote a pen-and-paper blog on Friday night, and when I find it, I'll probably transcribe it for the world to read. It's mostly about an anecdote told to me by a taxi driver, but you'll still want to see it, I'm sure.
There turned out to be five of us taking part - me, James Ponder and James Kemp from Britain, Boris Konrad from Germany and Tomasz Krasinski from Poland. Idriz Zogaj was planning to come from Sweden, but didn't turn up, and there was a mystery new competitor who registered the day before but then changed her mind again at the last minute. So our five desks seemed a bit lonely in the middle of the very nice main hall in the very nice Severn Centre in Highley.
The Severn Centre is a bit of a mystery - it's a HUGE sports/leisure/everything else centre (it also contains a library and a police station and probably a small zoo somewhere among the masses of tennis courts, playgrounds, fields, badminton courts, large cafeteria and bar etc etc) in a village that, although apparently the largest village in Shropshire, is still a village. It's not a huge place, and you could probably fit the whole population of Highley into the Severn Centre without an overcrowding problem. But the facilities there were more than top-notch. We need to make memory competitions there a regular feature, however impossible to reach by public transport the place is. Hold the world championships there some time, and we'll car-pool.
Things went more or less well for me. I got quite respectable scores in nine disciplines out of ten, and the speed numbers wasn't my fault (this means it was my fault, but I'm making excuses) - the camera crew made a loud clanking noise early on in the memorisation time, just as I was fiercely concentrating and that put me in a bad mood throughout the five minutes, so that every muffled noise or movement seen out of the corner of my eye infuriated and distracted me. I had no end of gaps in the recall and ended up with one complete row and one row a bit further down (I think it was the fourth) with the only gap being the last four digits. So I crossed out everything below that and settled for a woeful score of 76.
In everything else, though, I was satisfied. I was generally a way below the scores I'd been getting in practice, with a slightly slower memorising speed than I'd expected, and a less efficient recall, but I was still getting scores that were more than acceptable. From memory, a decent 70 in five-minute words, a slightly-better-than-my-old-world-record 795 in five-minute binary, a thoroughly excellent 52.5 in five-min names and faces (I'm definitely getting better at that), 615 or so in fifteen-minute numbers, five packs in ten-minute cards, 99 in abstract images (getting there with that one, too, slowly), 84 in historic dates and 95 in spoken numbers. All of those, names and images aside, are scores that I know I can improve on, but which are more than enough to satisfy me, especially in my first competition for seven or eight months.
As for speed cards, well, that's the fun one. I was about 2000 points clear of Boris by that point, so no need to go for a safe first time. I decided to go all-out for that fabled 30-second barrier. The first time through, it didn't go so well, there were three or four images that didn't come instantly to mind and I had to drag them out of my brain kicking and screaming. The time was 29.16, but the recall was unexpectedly dreadful, and I didn't come anywhere close to getting it right.
So, second attempt, TV cameras on me, local newspaper reporter hanging around, Phil Chambers sitting to my right, Dominic O'Brien keeping an eye on me from across the room, last chance to break the record, and my brain obviously not fully up to speed, I didn't expect wonders. I sort of blanked my mind out, thought to myself "Come on, let's show them what I can do!" in a silly, macho style, giggled at myself silently, and started to memorise. "That's more like it!" I thought, realising I was seeing the images much more clearly. I focused on what I was doing, getting a good feeling all the way, and stopped the timer. 26.28 seconds. Damn, that would be something, I thought. That gave me four and a half minutes to sit and think before I could recall anything - running through the journey in my brain, I had the first three locations all there, just the first image of the fourth, all present and correct for the fifth and sixth, then a big gap and then the ninth location all present and correct. Drat, I thought, must have lost concentration towards the end there. Maybe I can work them out when I get to look at the unshuffled deck. That makes 16 cards I can't place, I've rescued packs with worse.
Then my mind wandered to other things, and suddenly locations seven and eight popped merrily back into my brain - tiny bit of doubt about the exact identity and order of the images at location eight, but not enough to worry me. By recall time, I was quietly confident. I worked out what the final two missing images were, sat indecisively for a moment trying to remember the order, and finally made an educated guess that I was about 90% sure of. Then I had to wait another two and a half minutes for the recall time to end before I could check them with Phil (and an interested crowd who had gathered to watch). Sure enough, they all came out correct, and I saw fit to shout "BOOyeah!", just to alert anyone who hadn't noticed that something interesting had happened.
That capped off a definitely enjoyable day. 26.28 - I'd like to see Andi beat THAT! Everyone involved has my deepest gratitude - Phil organised the tournament impeccably, as usual, assisted ably by Gaby Kappus and others. Everything worked the way it was supposed to, even the spoken numbers (more or less), we weren't more than half an hour behind schedule. Tony Buzan paid a flying visit before dashing off to see a sheikh from Bahrain, told us the story about how scientists once said that nobody would ever memorise a 30-digit spoken number (as I'd told the camera crew he would - I'm a psychic, aided by the fact that he says the same thing at every memory competition) and the one about his university teacher who memorised all the class's details (I hadn't heard that one before, but it's in at least two of his books). He also orchestrated a phone call to Jennifer over at the Australian championships in Melbourne (Simon Orton won, brilliantly) and generally inspired everyone with his unfailing enthusiasm for the world of memory. Dominic came by in the afternoon and did the same (in a slightly more low-key way), including very kindly describing me as the reason he isn't competing. He also said that he's working on training again, he's got a new system that he's breaking in, and while he won't be competing in Bahrain, he's 70% sure he'll take part in 2008. Which will be great.
But 26.28, baby. Booyeah.
I also wrote a pen-and-paper blog on Friday night, and when I find it, I'll probably transcribe it for the world to read. It's mostly about an anecdote told to me by a taxi driver, but you'll still want to see it, I'm sure.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Too much TV is bad for you
I've spent most of the day being filmed, and then tomorrow there's more to come. It's tiring! TV stars possibly don't entirely live a life of luxury after all. Anyway, this may be my last entry before the competition on Saturday (travelling down there tomorrow, and I probably won't have internet access there), so I'll have to take a few days off from bloggery. Wish me luck!
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Not again!
It occurred to me this morning that I'm not going to have a chance to go somewhere and aimlessly wander around the shops for at least four days after today, so I decided to go to Sheffield on the train. I know that's not a great excuse, since I quite often go more than four days without wandering around shops, but never mind. However, the train was stuck in the middle of nowhere just outside Chesterfield for forty minutes, because the train in front had hit someone. I think I've mentioned on my blog before that I have a habit of being on trains delayed by fatalities on the line. It's starting to get worrying.
Everyone else on the train needed to call at least three people on their mobiles to explain why they were going to be late. The man behind me joked repeatedly that they'd have to wait for a health and safety man to drive up from Grimsby. After he'd finished the job he was on at the moment. If I was the social-commentator/stand-up-comedian type like he obviously feels he is, I would have varied the place the health and safety man was coming from, but perhaps he thought Grimsby is so naturally hilarious the joke bore repeating word-for-word to everyone he told it to.
Meanwhile, look at this:
...and tell me the answer. And not just the answer, a good reason WHY it's the answer. My feeling is number 5, and I've got a half-decent explanation for it, but it's not terribly convincing. It comes from a Swedish magazine IQ test that Göran Andersson and his poker buddies have been racking their brains over.
Everyone else on the train needed to call at least three people on their mobiles to explain why they were going to be late. The man behind me joked repeatedly that they'd have to wait for a health and safety man to drive up from Grimsby. After he'd finished the job he was on at the moment. If I was the social-commentator/stand-up-comedian type like he obviously feels he is, I would have varied the place the health and safety man was coming from, but perhaps he thought Grimsby is so naturally hilarious the joke bore repeating word-for-word to everyone he told it to.
Meanwhile, look at this:
...and tell me the answer. And not just the answer, a good reason WHY it's the answer. My feeling is number 5, and I've got a half-decent explanation for it, but it's not terribly convincing. It comes from a Swedish magazine IQ test that Göran Andersson and his poker buddies have been racking their brains over.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Tired of being worried about Ray
A major turning point in my brain - until today, I couldn't hum "Worried About Ray" by the Hoosiers without it turning into "Happy Together" by the Turtles (from which they stole the tune). Then I heard "Worried About Ray" this morning and a bit later on found that I couldn't hum "Happy Together" any more without it turning into "Worried About Ray". Quite disturbing, really.
Anyway, I've done my last bit of practice today before Saturday's competition, probably. I think I'm now at a point where I should avoid thinking about memory for a few days, just to help clear my mind. I might do a few quick cards practices on Friday night or Saturday morning, just to get me back in the right mood, although I'm never sure if that's a help or a hindrance. Two days now of proper job hunting - scouring the internet all over the country for people looking for part-qualified management accountants, memory champions and complete weirdos preferred. I quite fancy finding a nice job in a whole new city and relocating, actually, it'd be a bit of an adventure.
Oh, and also I'll be being filmed for this documentary, and talking to Radio 4 about appearing (does it count as 'appearing' if it's on the radio?) on Saturday Live. I also had a phone call yesterday from the executive producer of Child Of Our Time - apparently a transcription of my burblings on there, plus a photo of me, is going in a new book of the series. Fame! Fortune! Celebrity!
Anyway, I've done my last bit of practice today before Saturday's competition, probably. I think I'm now at a point where I should avoid thinking about memory for a few days, just to help clear my mind. I might do a few quick cards practices on Friday night or Saturday morning, just to get me back in the right mood, although I'm never sure if that's a help or a hindrance. Two days now of proper job hunting - scouring the internet all over the country for people looking for part-qualified management accountants, memory champions and complete weirdos preferred. I quite fancy finding a nice job in a whole new city and relocating, actually, it'd be a bit of an adventure.
Oh, and also I'll be being filmed for this documentary, and talking to Radio 4 about appearing (does it count as 'appearing' if it's on the radio?) on Saturday Live. I also had a phone call yesterday from the executive producer of Child Of Our Time - apparently a transcription of my burblings on there, plus a photo of me, is going in a new book of the series. Fame! Fortune! Celebrity!
Monday, July 09, 2007
Forgive the lack of content, couldn't think what to write about tonight.
'Ropes' entered the room through the front door, and found Gordon and Borstal arguing loudly.
"It's a plum!" screamed Gordon.
"It's a bloody nectarine!" Borstal yelled back.
"It's a large plum! Any fool can see that!"
"It's a nectarine! I've never heard of anyone who can't tell the difference between plums and nectarines!"
"Nor had I until this moment! Now unless you concede that it's a plum, I'm going to give you a thick ear!"
'Ropes' decided this was a good moment to intercede. "Fellows," he said, although Gordon and Borstal were both female, "I can see what's happening here. You're both hallucinating and each imagine that you're seeing a slightly different kind of fruit. In fact, there's nothing there at all."
"Oh," said Gordon, calming down. "That does explain a lot. So who are you, anyway?"
"I'm 'Ropes', and this is my house," said 'Ropes'.
"No, this is my house," said Borstal. "Perhaps you're hallucinating and seeing your house instead of mine?"
"I suppose that would explain why my house is in a different town to the one it was in this morning," conceded 'Ropes', sitting down in an armchair. "What's on telly?"
"A programme about Greek table tennis stars," said Gordon, sitting down in the same armchair, with some difficulty. "There's no way to change the channel on this kind of television, so that's the only thing we can watch."
Borstal picked up a hammer and started smashing the coffee table to pieces.
"Perhaps we could listen to the radio instead?" 'Ropes' suggested.
"Nothing on it but the same programme about Greek table tennis stars, only without pictures," said Gordon, quite loudly so as to be heard over the sounds of hammering and splintering wood.
"Still sounds better than the telly," said 'Ropes', going over to the washing machine and turning it on.
"That's the toaster," said Gordon. "You're hallucinating and believe it to be the radio."
"Why do they call you 'Ropes'?" asked Borstal, suddenly. "Is it because you're not a human being, but a collection of ropes knotted together and able to move around and talk by some means beyond my understanding?"
"No, that's just a funny coincidence," said 'Ropes'. "They started calling me 'Ropes' before they'd seen what I'm composed of, and still assumed me to be a human being. I acquired the nickname because of sausages."
"Oh, the coffee table's broken!" Borstal lamented. "I was going to put coffee on it!"
"There's no such thing as coffee," said Gordon. "You must have hallucinated it."
"It's a plum!" screamed Gordon.
"It's a bloody nectarine!" Borstal yelled back.
"It's a large plum! Any fool can see that!"
"It's a nectarine! I've never heard of anyone who can't tell the difference between plums and nectarines!"
"Nor had I until this moment! Now unless you concede that it's a plum, I'm going to give you a thick ear!"
'Ropes' decided this was a good moment to intercede. "Fellows," he said, although Gordon and Borstal were both female, "I can see what's happening here. You're both hallucinating and each imagine that you're seeing a slightly different kind of fruit. In fact, there's nothing there at all."
"Oh," said Gordon, calming down. "That does explain a lot. So who are you, anyway?"
"I'm 'Ropes', and this is my house," said 'Ropes'.
"No, this is my house," said Borstal. "Perhaps you're hallucinating and seeing your house instead of mine?"
"I suppose that would explain why my house is in a different town to the one it was in this morning," conceded 'Ropes', sitting down in an armchair. "What's on telly?"
"A programme about Greek table tennis stars," said Gordon, sitting down in the same armchair, with some difficulty. "There's no way to change the channel on this kind of television, so that's the only thing we can watch."
Borstal picked up a hammer and started smashing the coffee table to pieces.
"Perhaps we could listen to the radio instead?" 'Ropes' suggested.
"Nothing on it but the same programme about Greek table tennis stars, only without pictures," said Gordon, quite loudly so as to be heard over the sounds of hammering and splintering wood.
"Still sounds better than the telly," said 'Ropes', going over to the washing machine and turning it on.
"That's the toaster," said Gordon. "You're hallucinating and believe it to be the radio."
"Why do they call you 'Ropes'?" asked Borstal, suddenly. "Is it because you're not a human being, but a collection of ropes knotted together and able to move around and talk by some means beyond my understanding?"
"No, that's just a funny coincidence," said 'Ropes'. "They started calling me 'Ropes' before they'd seen what I'm composed of, and still assumed me to be a human being. I acquired the nickname because of sausages."
"Oh, the coffee table's broken!" Borstal lamented. "I was going to put coffee on it!"
"There's no such thing as coffee," said Gordon. "You must have hallucinated it."
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Bad omens
Roger Federer reminds me of Clemens Mayer - they look quite similar, if you half-close your eyes (well, three-quarters close them, maybe), and they always win. Rafael Nadal, on the other hand, has long hair and therefore looks like I would if nature had been a bit more fair in its follicle distribution. So I was rather hoping for an upset, but no such luck. Another reason I might not win the world memory championship this year is that I haven't done any practice this weekend. My motivation seems to come and go, and it's well and truly gone just lately. Hopefully I'll get back into it over the next couple of days. It's not like the UK championship is real preparation for the WMC, but if I don't win it I'll be all annoyed with myself (unless I lose it and still beat all my records - actually, that would be even better, because it would force me to get even better over the next couple of months!)
But hey, for the benefit of those who don't care about memory stuff, look at this!
This, you see, is what my comic character would look like if I was a real artist! Drawn by the incomparable Munkart, who's not only the world's greatest creator of Chip n Dale Rescue Rangers fanart (a much more hotly contested title than you might think), but also a really nice guy. There are very few people in the world I admire enough that I would ask them to draw me as a squirrel, and even fewer people who on being asked such a thing would actually do it, rather than shipping me off to the nearest loony bin. Isn't it great?
But hey, for the benefit of those who don't care about memory stuff, look at this!
This, you see, is what my comic character would look like if I was a real artist! Drawn by the incomparable Munkart, who's not only the world's greatest creator of Chip n Dale Rescue Rangers fanart (a much more hotly contested title than you might think), but also a really nice guy. There are very few people in the world I admire enough that I would ask them to draw me as a squirrel, and even fewer people who on being asked such a thing would actually do it, rather than shipping me off to the nearest loony bin. Isn't it great?
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Fix! Fix!
I bought a lottery ticket today, which I don't normally do (I was feeling a bit depressed, and thought that since money is the secret to true happiness, a lottery win would solve all my problems), so I watched the lottery numbers being drawn on BBC2 tonight after the tennis. And I noticed that while there were references to the tennis, the fact that they were running late, and a couple of time checks, these were all spoken by the voice-over guy. Tim Vincent and the people on screen didn't say or do anything that they couldn't have said or done if the show had been taped a week ago! I sense a conspiracy theory. I bet they tape fourteen million different shows for every week, one with each combination of numbers, and then broadcast the one that guarantees the most profit for Camelot. It's disgraceful.
Actually, it would be a lot more than fourteen million, because there's the bonus ball, too. 686 million, by my mental calculation. Still, Tim Vincent hasn't been on TV for years, he's had plenty of time for all that filming. And the guy with the white gloves is a robot, so he wouldn't have a problem.
Still, the tennis was fun, and almost certainly not rigged by sinister gambling syndicates. I've been cheering for Venus Williams all the way through the last fortnight, so if only I'd thought to mention it on this blog, I could be boasting about how right I was all along right now. Note to self, always write everything down. It's the only way to beat the government/alien/freemason conspiracy. I'm not paranoid, everyone really is out to get me.
Actually, it would be a lot more than fourteen million, because there's the bonus ball, too. 686 million, by my mental calculation. Still, Tim Vincent hasn't been on TV for years, he's had plenty of time for all that filming. And the guy with the white gloves is a robot, so he wouldn't have a problem.
Still, the tennis was fun, and almost certainly not rigged by sinister gambling syndicates. I've been cheering for Venus Williams all the way through the last fortnight, so if only I'd thought to mention it on this blog, I could be boasting about how right I was all along right now. Note to self, always write everything down. It's the only way to beat the government/alien/freemason conspiracy. I'm not paranoid, everyone really is out to get me.
Friday, July 06, 2007
Tut tut
It's just occurred to me that I really should book flights and accommodation for the German Memory Championship in three weeks' time, in Tuttlingen. A quick internet check suggests that there is exactly one hotel in the town, and no way to book a room online. Wonderful. You know, I miss the days when people would organise memory championships in some place other than the heart of a vast uncharted desert, five thousand miles from the nearest reliable public transport and ten squillion miles from the nearest internet-accessible hotel. Once upon a time, they even held these competitions IN hotels! See, that's convenient.
Of course, I shouldn't complain too much. Phil has, after all, booked me a hotel within hitch-hiking distance of Highley, and I'm sure I could just ask any one of half a dozen obliging Germans to find me a room somewhere close to Tuttlingen if I can't manage it myself. But still, it's fun to complain from time to time. Incidentally, my Cambridge championship was equally inaccessible, being a long way out of town, and starting on a Sunday morning before the buses start running. Maybe I set a precedent and everyone decided to copy me?
Of course, I shouldn't complain too much. Phil has, after all, booked me a hotel within hitch-hiking distance of Highley, and I'm sure I could just ask any one of half a dozen obliging Germans to find me a room somewhere close to Tuttlingen if I can't manage it myself. But still, it's fun to complain from time to time. Incidentally, my Cambridge championship was equally inaccessible, being a long way out of town, and starting on a Sunday morning before the buses start running. Maybe I set a precedent and everyone decided to copy me?
Thursday, July 05, 2007
It's all about the money, it's all about the dum dum dada dum dum
I turned down a job offer today on purely financial grounds. I feel like such a money-obsessed miser. Well, mostly financial grounds, anyway - it was a temp job with the prospect of applying for the role permanently after six weeks, in Nottingham, and the job description made it sound good, but the pay was dreadful. Two-thirds of what I was getting in my previous job. And in all fairness, I can't believe it was as good a job as it sounded if they were only paying that amount - nobody with my qualifications would touch that with a bargepole. But I still feel bad about it.
But hey, there'll be other job offers (though probably not through SF Group, because agencies don't like it when you turn them down like that), and I really do want to make sure I pick something that I can stay at for a long time, until I become an institution in the office. A well-paid part of the furniture.
But hey, there'll be other job offers (though probably not through SF Group, because agencies don't like it when you turn them down like that), and I really do want to make sure I pick something that I can stay at for a long time, until I become an institution in the office. A well-paid part of the furniture.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
We could be Heroes
The TV series, Heroes, is really much better than it has any right to be. I love it to bits! They really have taken comic book superheroes and turned it into a proper adult drama series. I wouldn't have believed it possible, but I'm still watching it and I haven't forgotten it was on once (although that's made easier by the way the SciFi Channel shows each episode three or four times a week - I usually forget it on Mondays, but catch the Wednesday showing). Save the cheerleader, save the world! If you haven't seen it, and if it's possible to buy it on DVD, then you should. Even if you don't like superheroes.
Sorry I haven't got anything more, well, interesting to say tonight, but I'm fresh out of ideas. Ooh, did I mention I did 25.88 seconds on the cards the other night? Gradually, glacially, getting there. The only trouble is doing it in competition - I seem to be making a lot of mistakes in recall, going at that speed. And getting one in three packs correct isn't a lot of use at the world championships. Still, we'll see what happens...
Sorry I haven't got anything more, well, interesting to say tonight, but I'm fresh out of ideas. Ooh, did I mention I did 25.88 seconds on the cards the other night? Gradually, glacially, getting there. The only trouble is doing it in competition - I seem to be making a lot of mistakes in recall, going at that speed. And getting one in three packs correct isn't a lot of use at the world championships. Still, we'll see what happens...
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Blasted Virgin Media
I bought a book about Jack the Ripper at the weekend, which makes entertaining reading. It's not really my kind of thing, normally, but I'd been re-reading Alan Moore's "From Hell" and wanted to know some more of the facts behind it. And this book, which is called "Jack the Ripper: The Facts", seemed like it would probably fit the bill. So now that I'm in a ripperological mood, I noticed tonight in the Radio Times that there's a programme on called "Vic Reeves investigates Jack the Ripper". Well, great, I thought. Vic Reeves is funny and Jack the Ripper is on my mind, I'll watch that. But then I noticed it's on Sky, and Virgin Media stopped carrying Sky several months ago. This is the first time it's really annoyed me. Although the Radio Times review calls it 'workmanlike', and Vic is never much good when he's not doing his own surreal material, so it probably wouldn't have been worth watching anyway.
I suppose I could watch "The Thick Of It" on BBC4 instead. The Radio Times says it's the funniest thing since Fawlty Towers, which is the kind of praise that's only going to leave you disappointed however good it is. And it's Alison Graham who's saying that, and I never like what she likes. But then again, if I'm going to judge everything on TV like this without seeing it, I'll never turn it on again. Actually, that would probably be a good thing. Opium of the masses, and all that. I could become one of those people who listen to the radio and have an ancient black and white portable TV for watching occasional nature documentaries.
I suppose I could watch "The Thick Of It" on BBC4 instead. The Radio Times says it's the funniest thing since Fawlty Towers, which is the kind of praise that's only going to leave you disappointed however good it is. And it's Alison Graham who's saying that, and I never like what she likes. But then again, if I'm going to judge everything on TV like this without seeing it, I'll never turn it on again. Actually, that would probably be a good thing. Opium of the masses, and all that. I could become one of those people who listen to the radio and have an ancient black and white portable TV for watching occasional nature documentaries.
Monday, July 02, 2007
Potters Bar
Ah, the Mind Sports Olympiad returns! I got the schedule and entry form in the post today. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to bother with it this year, though. All the really fun events either aren't there any more or have been shrunk down to nearly nothing. Othello is only one little 15-minute tournament, taking up 3½ hours, for which anyone who wants to just play in that will have to pay £12. What would be good there, actually, would be a memory competition. It'd be great if there was a full world-championship-standard event, for people who can't get to Bahrain a couple of weeks later. I wonder if I could organise one, if I could get a gang of people to help?
Sunday, July 01, 2007
I'm great! Sort of.
I did 1224 in 30-minute numbers today, and possibly 18 packs in 30-minute cards (I couldn't be bothered to check them, but I'm pretty confident what I wrote down was all correct. Allowing for a few stupid mistakes here and there, it should still beat the world record). This is great, obviously, but on the other hand I first tried to do a 30-minute numbers this morning and gave up on it after a minute or so twice in succession, because I wasn't really in the right kind of mood. I didn't feel like the big practice session I was meaning to do today until five o'clock. That's not the kind of attitude that would get you very far in a real competition. But then again, I've never not been in the memorising mood at a competition - it happens here at home quite a lot, but when I'm there, I think the atmosphere and the adrenaline gets me all hyped up. So I probably haven't got anything to worry about. I didn't have time to do the 30-minute binary practice I was intending to do, but that one wasn't so important - I already know how many digits I can go for on that in Tuttlingen. Could probably do with one more practice session before the championship, though, to keep me at match fitness, so to speak.
But now I can concentrate on the short little disciplines of the Highley championship (less than two weeks away!). Still need to firmly decide how much to go for in 15-minute numbers - four journeys feels right, but I need a practice run or two to make sure.
I'm also officially good at othello again - I was up to my usual mediocre standard in the kurnik tournament last night. It's strange how my abilities seem to fluctuate like that. Ooh, and I also haven't mentioned here yet that I did decide to leave my temp job - I'm finishing at the end of the week. Then I'm going to throw myself into finding a real, permanent position, and choose carefully so I end up with one that I can work at for the next couple of decades quite happily. I'm fed up with chopping and changing jobs, I need stability and boringness.
But now I can concentrate on the short little disciplines of the Highley championship (less than two weeks away!). Still need to firmly decide how much to go for in 15-minute numbers - four journeys feels right, but I need a practice run or two to make sure.
I'm also officially good at othello again - I was up to my usual mediocre standard in the kurnik tournament last night. It's strange how my abilities seem to fluctuate like that. Ooh, and I also haven't mentioned here yet that I did decide to leave my temp job - I'm finishing at the end of the week. Then I'm going to throw myself into finding a real, permanent position, and choose carefully so I end up with one that I can work at for the next couple of decades quite happily. I'm fed up with chopping and changing jobs, I need stability and boringness.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Doctor, doctor, I'm feeling a little hoarse
I've got a sore throat from talking too much. This is what happens when I get chatting about memory to someone who knows nothing about it but is keen to learn. Actually, the most fun idea to come from talking to director Nick was the suggestion that we could come up with Team Britain shirts for the UK and world championships. Wouldn't that be cool? We could compete with all those Germans in their MemoryXL T-shirts!
Friday, June 29, 2007
Aren't you him off the telly?
Nobody has ever said that to me on the street. I wish they would. Well, I did use to get "Hey, it's Adrian Mole!" shouted at me when I was younger and had hair and no beard, but that's not the kind of thing I'm looking for. But, as I mentioned, the channel 5 documentary is definitely all systems go, and the director is coming round here tomorrow afternoon, so maybe in a few months' time I'll be able to deny being that weird memory guy when total strangers ask me if I'm him. Since my phone's still broken (repair man coming on Monday), I've been arranging things by email, which is probably a recipe for disaster, because he'll get lost on his way here and won't be able to call me. But never mind, what annoys me more is that I'll have to spend the morning tidying up my flat to improve its status from 'filthy' to 'eccentrically untidy'. I hate cleaning.
I also need to establish who Dave is. Ravinder, the, um, person in charge of the project (I'm not sure if he's a producer or something else) told me he'd found a director for the film, and then I got an email from this Dave person talking about working with me on it and sounding very directorial. But then he told me he'd passed my details onto the director, Nick, who's coming to see me. So I have no idea what purpose Dave serves in the whole food chain. It all seems very complicated.
I also want to spend a lot of weekend time practicing for the upcoming competitions, so I'd rather not spend too much time in front of the cameras. Some time this weekend or next, I need to do a half-hour binary, half-hour cards and half-hour numbers, all in the space of six hours, like you have to do on the first day of the German championship, so I can fix in my mind exactly what I'm going to attempt there. I don't want to do that the weekend before Germany (which is the weekend after Highley), because memorising so much in a short space of time sort of makes your brain blow up, and I wouldn't be fully recovered by the day of the championship. And I also want to do a last full practice run of the UK championship next weekend, spread over two days so as not to destroy too many brain cells. You know, in many ways, planning memory training is even more fun than actually doing it. I'm weird.
I also need to establish who Dave is. Ravinder, the, um, person in charge of the project (I'm not sure if he's a producer or something else) told me he'd found a director for the film, and then I got an email from this Dave person talking about working with me on it and sounding very directorial. But then he told me he'd passed my details onto the director, Nick, who's coming to see me. So I have no idea what purpose Dave serves in the whole food chain. It all seems very complicated.
I also want to spend a lot of weekend time practicing for the upcoming competitions, so I'd rather not spend too much time in front of the cameras. Some time this weekend or next, I need to do a half-hour binary, half-hour cards and half-hour numbers, all in the space of six hours, like you have to do on the first day of the German championship, so I can fix in my mind exactly what I'm going to attempt there. I don't want to do that the weekend before Germany (which is the weekend after Highley), because memorising so much in a short space of time sort of makes your brain blow up, and I wouldn't be fully recovered by the day of the championship. And I also want to do a last full practice run of the UK championship next weekend, spread over two days so as not to destroy too many brain cells. You know, in many ways, planning memory training is even more fun than actually doing it. I'm weird.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Stop the presses
Until ten minutes ago, I had a definite plan for this blog entry. In fact, I had the whole thing just about written in my head, and I was just waiting till I'd finished the othello tournament on kurnik to type it out. It was going to be about how for the last month or so, I've been really, really terrible at playing othello. I keep losing games stupidly, and basically seem to have forgotten how to play. But then after a tournament with lots of examples of that, I won my last two games in ways that I thought were rather clever, so that rather scuppers my plans to lament about my inabilities.
I suppose I could talk about how great I am, but that would be pushing it a bit. And anyway, I do that practically every day. No, tell you what, here's a subject - I saw an advert on telly the other day for a thing you put into your washing machine to stop colours running. Or rather, and I have no idea how this is supposed to work, to soak up all the running colours so that they don't dye your other clothes accidentally. Since all my clothes are a dingy shade of grey thanks to some black socks and my inability to sort them out from my whites, this is an invention that appeals to me. But their slogan at the end of the advert, displaying this little white sheet of whatever-it-is now a pink colour, is "the proof's on the sheet!" (or words to that effect). How in the name of sanity is that supposed to be impressive? I could get any old bit of white fabric, stick it in the wash with my socks and demonstrate that it's changed colour. That's what running colours do! I ask you. Pfah. Go along with you. The world is full of fools.
I suppose I could talk about how great I am, but that would be pushing it a bit. And anyway, I do that practically every day. No, tell you what, here's a subject - I saw an advert on telly the other day for a thing you put into your washing machine to stop colours running. Or rather, and I have no idea how this is supposed to work, to soak up all the running colours so that they don't dye your other clothes accidentally. Since all my clothes are a dingy shade of grey thanks to some black socks and my inability to sort them out from my whites, this is an invention that appeals to me. But their slogan at the end of the advert, displaying this little white sheet of whatever-it-is now a pink colour, is "the proof's on the sheet!" (or words to that effect). How in the name of sanity is that supposed to be impressive? I could get any old bit of white fabric, stick it in the wash with my socks and demonstrate that it's changed colour. That's what running colours do! I ask you. Pfah. Go along with you. The world is full of fools.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Everything I had to know, I heard it on my radio
Ah, now I'm really in the memory-championship-season mood! Radio 4 want to interview me! I assume it's because they know the UK championship is only a fortnight away, although it might be that they stumbled across my name somewhere and haven't the faintest idea. They asked the Alzheimer's Society for my details, which seems to be a popular way of getting in touch with me for BBC radio these days. You'd think they'd know my contact details already, anyway - I turned them down for an interview a few years ago (I had to work that day) and then more recently they turned me down for one, having originally planned to talk to me but then decided James would be more interesting (can't really argue with that).
Hopefully this one will actually happen - it's a good time for a bit of publicity, it might just help with Team Britain's efforts to get someone to pay for our plane tickets to Bahrain. Not to mention the possibility of getting a few more British people interested in competitive memory - I'm still determined to outnumber the Germans one of these days. Oh, and I nearly forgot, Ravinder's documentary is definitely going ahead, there's a director eager to, um, direct me who I need to get in touch with (they tried to call me, but my phone's still dead - repair man coming on Monday evening). Ah, fame and fortune. If only I could do this all year round. And if only some of these people would pay me. And if only I had a stunt double who could go and pretend to be me and do the interviews when I don't feel like it.
Hopefully this one will actually happen - it's a good time for a bit of publicity, it might just help with Team Britain's efforts to get someone to pay for our plane tickets to Bahrain. Not to mention the possibility of getting a few more British people interested in competitive memory - I'm still determined to outnumber the Germans one of these days. Oh, and I nearly forgot, Ravinder's documentary is definitely going ahead, there's a director eager to, um, direct me who I need to get in touch with (they tried to call me, but my phone's still dead - repair man coming on Monday evening). Ah, fame and fortune. If only I could do this all year round. And if only some of these people would pay me. And if only I had a stunt double who could go and pretend to be me and do the interviews when I don't feel like it.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
That's very personal!
I really can't think of anything to write about. Or rather, I can, but the one observation I want to make is an extremely rude and offensive and unnecessary comment about the appearance of a famous tennis player, and I like to think I'm above that kind of thing.
Anyway, I always preferred playing badminton, back in the days when I was almost capable of playing any kind of active game. I don't see why nobody watches badminton and everyone turns out in the rain for two weeks every year in the hope of seeing a couple of minutes of tennis between downpours at Wimbledon. They're essentially the same game, after all. I think the badminton authorities just need to get some PR guru to help them out and make the game more popular with the masses.
I was actually quite good at badminton. At least, that's my recollection. I wasn't terrible, anyway.
Anyway, I always preferred playing badminton, back in the days when I was almost capable of playing any kind of active game. I don't see why nobody watches badminton and everyone turns out in the rain for two weeks every year in the hope of seeing a couple of minutes of tennis between downpours at Wimbledon. They're essentially the same game, after all. I think the badminton authorities just need to get some PR guru to help them out and make the game more popular with the masses.
I was actually quite good at badminton. At least, that's my recollection. I wasn't terrible, anyway.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Do you want the good news or the bad news?
By which I mean that I've got several things I want to grumble about, and also something to enthuse about that I think is just great. I'll start with the grumbles, because nobody wants to end with a downer.
My phone's not working. I'm trying to cast my mind back to remember when I last used it - I know I unplugged it at the weekend while I was memorising, but I didn't pick it up and hear a dialtone before or after doing so. And yes, I did plug it back in again. I probably had a call some time last week from Hays the accountancy agency, but then again perhaps I didn't, since they mostly email me like I always ask people to do. It might have been not working for a week or so, at a pinch. So if anyone has tried to call me, sorry. But if you did, why didn't you email me? You know I prefer emails. You've only got yourself to blame.
I noticed the phone wasn't working when I tried to call in sick for work today. I've either got the mythical kind of stomach bug that people claim to have when they want a day off work, or food poisoning. I'm feeling better now, but I was decidedly indisposed this morning, ever since waking up at half past five.
Still, at least that meant not having to cycle to work in the atrocious weather. It's blowing a gale out there and it's been pouring down most of the day. All in all, today has been out to get me. It's just plain picking on me, is what it is, and I need a cuddle.
But on the other hand, Simon Reinhard won the South German Memory Championship, beating Clemens into second place! This is great, because it's the first time Clemens has been beaten since about 1736, and I think all of us (possibly excepting Clemens himself) were getting a bit bored with it. Even though it was a competition with only three quick "technique" memory disciplines (four if you count historic dates, which I normally don't), Simon has clearly been practicing - he got a 320 in speed numbers, which is fantastic, and without looking it up possibly better than anyone other than me has ever done before. (Just had to get a plug in for my own abilities there, I feel better now, thanks).
So it's going to be fun to see what happens in terms of the big German championship in a month's time. With any luck there'll be a battle royal between Simon, Clemens, Gunther, Boris, Cornelia and many more - hopefully Clemens will be all fired up and determined to get back on top, because I've been worried that he'd suffer the same been-there-done-that lack of motivation that I did, and I'd end up finally beating him when he was somewhere short of his best. Which would be much less fun than beating him when he's better than ever. Ooh, even though I didn't go to Munich, it's put me in memory-championship mood! Roll on Bastille Day!
My phone's not working. I'm trying to cast my mind back to remember when I last used it - I know I unplugged it at the weekend while I was memorising, but I didn't pick it up and hear a dialtone before or after doing so. And yes, I did plug it back in again. I probably had a call some time last week from Hays the accountancy agency, but then again perhaps I didn't, since they mostly email me like I always ask people to do. It might have been not working for a week or so, at a pinch. So if anyone has tried to call me, sorry. But if you did, why didn't you email me? You know I prefer emails. You've only got yourself to blame.
I noticed the phone wasn't working when I tried to call in sick for work today. I've either got the mythical kind of stomach bug that people claim to have when they want a day off work, or food poisoning. I'm feeling better now, but I was decidedly indisposed this morning, ever since waking up at half past five.
Still, at least that meant not having to cycle to work in the atrocious weather. It's blowing a gale out there and it's been pouring down most of the day. All in all, today has been out to get me. It's just plain picking on me, is what it is, and I need a cuddle.
But on the other hand, Simon Reinhard won the South German Memory Championship, beating Clemens into second place! This is great, because it's the first time Clemens has been beaten since about 1736, and I think all of us (possibly excepting Clemens himself) were getting a bit bored with it. Even though it was a competition with only three quick "technique" memory disciplines (four if you count historic dates, which I normally don't), Simon has clearly been practicing - he got a 320 in speed numbers, which is fantastic, and without looking it up possibly better than anyone other than me has ever done before. (Just had to get a plug in for my own abilities there, I feel better now, thanks).
So it's going to be fun to see what happens in terms of the big German championship in a month's time. With any luck there'll be a battle royal between Simon, Clemens, Gunther, Boris, Cornelia and many more - hopefully Clemens will be all fired up and determined to get back on top, because I've been worried that he'd suffer the same been-there-done-that lack of motivation that I did, and I'd end up finally beating him when he was somewhere short of his best. Which would be much less fun than beating him when he's better than ever. Ooh, even though I didn't go to Munich, it's put me in memory-championship mood! Roll on Bastille Day!
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Is it me, or
... has it started raining all the time just when I've started having to cycle to and from work on a daily basis? Actually, that's one of at least two reasons why I'm regretting taking the temp job. For another, it gets in the way of looking for something permanent - I've never had a temporary position before without the prospect of it becoming a long-term thing, and it's inconvenient when it comes to interviews and things. I know I wanted to get back to working fast, but it was a bit silly to go and take this one, I think. Still, I'm not sure whether to quit (which would probably look bad) or carry on and assume I'll still be able to find a real job (it doesn't really take that much effort).
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Highley memorable
I haven't really hyped the UK Memory Championship here before, as far as I can remember, and today seems like a good time, since Phil's just announced the prizes they 'hope' to provide. It's in Highley, Shropshire, and I'm still not entirely sure where that is. But I was hoping to go there on the Severn Valley Railway (I did miss going to the Butterley steam railway place on father's day this year), only to find it's been washed away in the floods the other day. I'm not sure if that's a bad omen or not. Anyway, the first prize is flights, accommodation and entry to the WMC in Bahrain, which is nice. I did say a while ago that if I ended up with a free trip I'd give it to someone else, if I had the money to pay my own way, so if I do end up winning, I'll check my bank balance and see what I can do. There's a bottle of champagne for the winner too! I don't like champagne, but I've always wanted to spray it around in celebration. Hopefully I'll get the chance. July 14th, mark it in your calendars!
Friday, June 22, 2007
Bill Mantlo
If you happen to be passing a comic shop this weekend, go in and pick up a copy of Mantlo: A Life In Comics. It's a magazine/book/something all about Bill Mantlo, one of my all-time favourite writers of superhero comics. Even if you're not a fan, buying the book is a good thing - Mantlo was knocked down and nearly killed by a hit-and-run driver fifteen years ago, suffered permanent brain damage and all the proceeds from the book are going to the costs of his care.
Bill Mantlo, if you look at his work objectively, was never the greatest writer in the world. His dialogue is much too long-winded and stilted, and his stories are often more miserable and depressing than most people are happy with. Characters, when they're not being summarily killed off, will often spend pages lamenting about their own shortcomings and anxieties. None of the comics he wrote is hailed today as a landmark in the history of superheroics. But what he did do is write a heck of a lot - nowadays when a writer misses his deadline, the comic just comes out late. The publishers don't seem to care any more. In the seventies and eighties, if a Marvel writer didn't turn in a script on time, the editor called Bill Mantlo. He seemed to have an endless capacity for producing superhero stories that were always readable, and often exciting, funny and clever too. And his run on Alpha Flight was something that really struck a chord with me and played a big part in making me a comic fan today.
Picture the scene - it's the late eighties, or early nineties, I can't remember exactly which, I'm a young teenager and my comic experience has been limited to Transformers and whatever series had been the backup strip in Transformers. And a Spider-Man annual or summer special here and there. One day in WH Smith I found one of the paperback collections of the Marvel Universe handbooks, profiles of Marvel's characters from the Abomination to the Circus of Crime (it was only volume 1). Alpha Flight were in it, and they sounded like fun. A bit later, I can't remember exactly how or why, I ended up with a catalogue from the Nostalgia and Comics shop in Birmingham (or somewhere like that) and decided to order the latest issue of Alpha Flight, to see what it was like.
Actually, I didn't like it all that much. It was the penultimate issue of Fabian Nicieza's run, and that was the kind of comic you really had to sit down and study to make any sense of. Or I did, anyway. But I could see it had potential, stuck with it, and kept with it through the start of Scott Lobdell's run, which was a completely different style, still not a classic, but again compelling to a superhero-comic-newcomer. But after a year or so of this, I discovered the existence of back issues, and the wonders of the Bill Mantlo issues of Alpha Flight. And THAT was the kind of thing I'd been looking for!
For a couple of years, my aim in life was to collect the entirety of Mantlo's run on Alpha Flight - thirty-something issues of death, misery, characters recapping the events of the last twenty issues every time they opened their mouths and un-put-downably compelling stories. Yes, I also liked John Byrne's acclaimed original run on the series, but Mantlo's stories struck a chord with teenage me like nothing ever before. I got my brother reading and collecting them too, forced them on my best friend in return for having Judge Dredd forced on me, read them out of sequence, one or two at a time with months in between. I liked them a lot.
So this book describes a pretty significant person in my life. He wrote a lot of other great stuff, as I've discovered since - Spider-Man, Micronauts, Cloak and Dagger, many many more. A lot of them are long out of print and never collected, but I'm hopeful that one day we'll see a lot more graphic novels of his classic works. When it comes to people I admire in comics, the five people I wouldn't be the same without are Simon Furman for those wonderful Transformers comics that hooked me since the age of eight, Tony Isabella for an obscure Marvel Team-Up comic that found its way into a Spidey summer special and showed me that superhero comics could be something very much more than hero-fights-villain (it chronicled the supervillain Blacklash suffering a nervous breakdown), Kurt Busiek for dragging me back into comics in the late nineties when Alpha Flight had been cancelled and I'd given up on finding a new series that wasn't terrible, Alan Moore for just writing such amazingly, staggeringly good comics, and Bill Mantlo for those thirty-odd issues of Alpha Flight. Go out there and check it out!
Bill Mantlo, if you look at his work objectively, was never the greatest writer in the world. His dialogue is much too long-winded and stilted, and his stories are often more miserable and depressing than most people are happy with. Characters, when they're not being summarily killed off, will often spend pages lamenting about their own shortcomings and anxieties. None of the comics he wrote is hailed today as a landmark in the history of superheroics. But what he did do is write a heck of a lot - nowadays when a writer misses his deadline, the comic just comes out late. The publishers don't seem to care any more. In the seventies and eighties, if a Marvel writer didn't turn in a script on time, the editor called Bill Mantlo. He seemed to have an endless capacity for producing superhero stories that were always readable, and often exciting, funny and clever too. And his run on Alpha Flight was something that really struck a chord with me and played a big part in making me a comic fan today.
Picture the scene - it's the late eighties, or early nineties, I can't remember exactly which, I'm a young teenager and my comic experience has been limited to Transformers and whatever series had been the backup strip in Transformers. And a Spider-Man annual or summer special here and there. One day in WH Smith I found one of the paperback collections of the Marvel Universe handbooks, profiles of Marvel's characters from the Abomination to the Circus of Crime (it was only volume 1). Alpha Flight were in it, and they sounded like fun. A bit later, I can't remember exactly how or why, I ended up with a catalogue from the Nostalgia and Comics shop in Birmingham (or somewhere like that) and decided to order the latest issue of Alpha Flight, to see what it was like.
Actually, I didn't like it all that much. It was the penultimate issue of Fabian Nicieza's run, and that was the kind of comic you really had to sit down and study to make any sense of. Or I did, anyway. But I could see it had potential, stuck with it, and kept with it through the start of Scott Lobdell's run, which was a completely different style, still not a classic, but again compelling to a superhero-comic-newcomer. But after a year or so of this, I discovered the existence of back issues, and the wonders of the Bill Mantlo issues of Alpha Flight. And THAT was the kind of thing I'd been looking for!
For a couple of years, my aim in life was to collect the entirety of Mantlo's run on Alpha Flight - thirty-something issues of death, misery, characters recapping the events of the last twenty issues every time they opened their mouths and un-put-downably compelling stories. Yes, I also liked John Byrne's acclaimed original run on the series, but Mantlo's stories struck a chord with teenage me like nothing ever before. I got my brother reading and collecting them too, forced them on my best friend in return for having Judge Dredd forced on me, read them out of sequence, one or two at a time with months in between. I liked them a lot.
So this book describes a pretty significant person in my life. He wrote a lot of other great stuff, as I've discovered since - Spider-Man, Micronauts, Cloak and Dagger, many many more. A lot of them are long out of print and never collected, but I'm hopeful that one day we'll see a lot more graphic novels of his classic works. When it comes to people I admire in comics, the five people I wouldn't be the same without are Simon Furman for those wonderful Transformers comics that hooked me since the age of eight, Tony Isabella for an obscure Marvel Team-Up comic that found its way into a Spidey summer special and showed me that superhero comics could be something very much more than hero-fights-villain (it chronicled the supervillain Blacklash suffering a nervous breakdown), Kurt Busiek for dragging me back into comics in the late nineties when Alpha Flight had been cancelled and I'd given up on finding a new series that wasn't terrible, Alan Moore for just writing such amazingly, staggeringly good comics, and Bill Mantlo for those thirty-odd issues of Alpha Flight. Go out there and check it out!
Thursday, June 21, 2007
No, I don't think I will
I think I'd be better off not splashing out on two German trips in two months, all in all. I'll stay at home this weekend and practice for the UK championship (three weeks and a bit to go! Woo! Even though I still don't really like the one-day events!).
Late
Sorry I didn’t post anything last night, I had a headache and went for a lie down at around eight o’clock, and didn’t wake up till two in the morning. And at that point there wasn’t much motivation to get up just to write a blog entry. I tell you, working for a living is much more tiring than sitting at home on one’s fat backside all day. Who would have thought it? So as a bonus, I’m writing from the office on my lunch break.
Anyway, I still haven’t decided whether to go to Germany for Sunday’s competition. On the one hand, I can’t really claim it would be good practice for the bigger championships coming up next month – it’s just speed numbers, speed binary and speed cards plus four disciplines in German – but it’s still a fun social thing, getting to hang out with the German memory contingent and see what everybody’s up to nowadays. Although I’ll get to do that on a bigger scale anyway in a month at the German national championship.
I don’t have a problem justifying to myself the expense of travelling to Munich for a weekend just to hang out with German memorisers for a day – I probably should, but I’ve got seriously reckless when it comes to spending my non-hard-earned cash these last few months. The main reason not to go is work, because I’ve only been here a week, I’ve already taken an afternoon off to go to an interview for a better job (and I feel terribly guilty about that), and I feel like I should at least try to give the impression that I’m taking the job seriously.
Hmm, sitting here typing this right now, that doesn’t seem like a compelling reason not to go. Well, I’ll think about it and make up my mind tonight. Assuming I manage to do my regularly scheduled blog post, maybe I’ll even tell you about it.
Anyway, I still haven’t decided whether to go to Germany for Sunday’s competition. On the one hand, I can’t really claim it would be good practice for the bigger championships coming up next month – it’s just speed numbers, speed binary and speed cards plus four disciplines in German – but it’s still a fun social thing, getting to hang out with the German memory contingent and see what everybody’s up to nowadays. Although I’ll get to do that on a bigger scale anyway in a month at the German national championship.
I don’t have a problem justifying to myself the expense of travelling to Munich for a weekend just to hang out with German memorisers for a day – I probably should, but I’ve got seriously reckless when it comes to spending my non-hard-earned cash these last few months. The main reason not to go is work, because I’ve only been here a week, I’ve already taken an afternoon off to go to an interview for a better job (and I feel terribly guilty about that), and I feel like I should at least try to give the impression that I’m taking the job seriously.
Hmm, sitting here typing this right now, that doesn’t seem like a compelling reason not to go. Well, I’ll think about it and make up my mind tonight. Assuming I manage to do my regularly scheduled blog post, maybe I’ll even tell you about it.
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