Mutter, moan, complain

Dagnabbit, I really, really wish I was going to the German championship next weekend. If nothing else, it's always such good preparation for the world championship, but also I want to catch up with all the latest memory gossip, see what everybody's up to, talk about the rest of the competitions to come this year, and so on. There are some things you don't find out just by emailing and posting on internet forums. Besides, I'd rather be just hanging out with fun memory people than working. But hey, it's my own fault for spending so long jobless. And I always under-perform at the German championship and feel annoyed with myself anyway (except last year, when I was brilliant).

Potatoes

Potatoes, which also have a Latin name, are made in factories in the West Country, by a secret recipe which involves beetles. They have been a popular accompaniment to many meals since being reclassified as a vegetable (as opposed to a vehicle) in 1932. Unsubstantiated rumours have it that many celebrities eat potatoes, among them Dennis Waterman, John Travolta and Dutch international hockey player Wouter Jolie.

There are three different ways to cook potatoes - baked, grilled or eaten raw. True connoisseurs of potato-eating believe that washing them beforehand spoils the taste, and indeed often pour handfuls of dirt, mud and worms over the vegetables before cooking and eating them. Baked beans can be eaten with potatoes, but broad beans can not, due to a law passed by Margaret Thatcher's government in 1987 aimed at preventing "unwholesome eating practices".

When not being eaten, potatoes can be used as paperweights, doorstops, tennis balls, DVDs (when sliced to the correct width) and antelopes. Some cheeky bus drivers have been known to take a crafty day off work by dressing a large potato in hat and tie and having it drive their buses for them. A poll of Austrian socialist early-20th-century aeroplane enthusiasts in 2003 listed potatoes as their third favourite thing, after vacuum cleaners and Pakistan. Early-20th-century aeroplanes were ranked a disappointing 27th.

The legends associating Sir Walter Ralegh with potatoes are entirely false - he in fact invented the tomato and the geranium, and sometimes wore a hat that looked somewhat potato-like, but the potato was in fact invented by Rotisserie Vasquez, by accident, in 1657 while he was preparing for the World Memory Championship. Vasquez remained unaware all his life that he had invented the potato, noting in his diary that "my basement is full of strange brown things these days" shortly before his death in 1660.

A new kind of "space potato", launched in 1983, is expected to land on Jupiter in August 2010.

Luxury apartment or stonking great house?

Luckily, all the people who failed to advertise Beeston flats in the paper a couple of days ago have all decided to start putting properties up for rent now. There's a staggeringly expensive "luxury apartment", a slightly cheaper three-bedroomed terraced house, and a reasonably-priced nice-sounding one-bedroom flat in a very handy location. I'm going to see the latter tomorrow, although I'm a little tempted by the luxury apartment. I mean, I quite like the idea of living a life of luxury, and hey, I've got a new job and haven't been fired after my first week, I can pay more than twice my current rent for a really nice place, right?

Nah, I'd become fat and decadent. I'll just go for the non-expensive and doubtless very pleasant one. I hope it's not secretly luxurious too.

Ah, the fun of talking memory with people who are more or less interested in the subject

Today was quite fun. I forgot to ask whether the gathering at the Tamworth Travelodge was officially called a seminar or a convention or a get-together or what, but whatever it was that I was speaking at, it seemed to go down well. People were left with the impression that I know something about memory [or, if you want to look at it a less self-centred way, people were given some useful tips for how to teach schoolchildren to use their brains] and I had the fun of making up a way to remember the workings of the body's circulatory system, which included a digression about how Fat Andy went to the school where Philip Pullman was a teacher.

I had also prepared a snazzy way of remembering that speed equals distance divided by time, which involved Speedy Gonzales and Daffy Duck, but didn't have the time to show it off. Which is a shame, really, because it was cool. Ah well, I'll save it for the next time I'm talking to teachers. I'm sure it'll happen again.

Subtle advertising

In your latest British Othello Newsletter, when you're reading my article on how to win tournaments, cross out the words "during lunch" in the London section and add "before each round", please. That was what I'd intended to write, but I seem to have forgotten it when I sat down to type it up, ending up with outlining a strategy that works perfectly well at every tournament rather than a Bath House-specific one. This occurred to me late one night in bed, a couple of days after I'd sent the article to Adelaide, but I decided it probably wasn't worth emailing her and asking her to stop the presses and change it, especially considering I missed the deadline for submitting it in the first place.

What, you're not a member of the BOF? Well, go and join, right now! £6 a year and you get to read the entertaining newsletter articles of me and others, you get to come to tournaments on a regular basis and hang out with a lot of very nice and entertaining weirdos, and an ability to play othello isn't essential. It's easy to learn, and I'm sure you'll like it. Go on, join the club, even if you're reading this blog in the hope that I'll talk about memory stuff for a change.

Anyway, I've got the day off work tomorrow. Kind of bad form to take a holiday on your fourth day in a new job, but I'd arranged long ago, while I was unemployed and thought I'd probably need the money, to be a guest speaker at the annual convention (or something along those lines) of Maximize Your Potential, up in Tamworth. Not the kind of thing I normally agree to do, I know, but it might turn out to be fun.

The commuter's lament

I'm working in Beeston now, I don't think I mentioned that, which means travelling there by train. Which isn't so bad, but tonight the train was cancelled for no adequately explained reason, so I got the bus instead, which takes longer, and the whole thing cut into my sitting-around-at-home-doing-nothing-of-importance time. I bought a local paper while I was in town to see if there are any nice flats to rent in the town, but it seems there aren't any, nice or otherwise, within a ten-mile radius. I did walk past a four-bedroomed house for rent, but I thought that would probably be a bit excessive.

Hello, I'm the new Jeremy

It's fun being the new bug in an office. You know you've settled in when people stop introducing you as the replacement for your predecessor, but until then you remain a semi-anonymous New Jeremy. In my time I've been a new Kevin, a new Phil, a new Dave and a new Natasha - jokes about that one lasted the longest; it varies proportionately to the physical differences between you and the person who did your job before. One of these days, maybe I'll be the new Ben. That'll keep an office full of people rolling in the aisles for weeks!

Office workers are easily amused, as a rule.

In which I postulate a mediaeval memoriser

You know what there isn't enough of in blogs these days? Poorly-researched theories about 14th-century poetry, that's what.

I'd like to rectify that with a summary of my opinions about the two different prologues of Geoffrey Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women". The Legend is a collection of lengthy accounts of the lives of great women of ancient times, in rhyming couplets, and it's not Chaucer's greatest work. It probably went down better among his circle of poetic friends in the 1390s who wanted to see a new English-language summary of the story of Hypsipyle or Ariadne or Hypermnestra than it does with the casual reader today. The problem with the exercise is that all the great women of ancient legend did nothing of interest - they either nobly refrained from having it off with other men while their husband went out and had adventures, or killed themself because their lover cheated on them. It gets a bit repetitive when you put them all together.

The only bit really worth reading is the Prologue, in which the God of Love takes Chaucer to task for his past translations of antifeminist writings and orders him to make amends by writing about all these Good Women. It's got some funny bits, some beautiful poetry of the kind that only Chaucer could do with an ugly language like Middle English and, to the puzzlement of literary critics of the past six hundred years, it comes in two distinct versions.

The two versions of the Prologue are known as the F version and the G version - the F appears in all but one of the surviving manuscripts (Chaucer lived before the invention of the printing press, when books were all hand-written and thus a lot more scarce. All the surviving manuscripts of the Legend are clearly copies of copies, dating from the 15th century, and none of them is exactly the same), and the G version exists in only one manuscript, MS Gg 4.27.

As an aside, I really feel sorry for old Gg 4.27 (Gg to its friends). It's a really important manuscript - dating from no more than twenty years after Chaucer's death, it was the first known attempt to combine all his works into one volume. It's hugely significant to Chaucerian students, and yet unlike the Fairfax manuscript (after which the F prologue is named), or the Ellesmere, the Hengwrt or dozens of other snappily-named documents, Gg hasn't got a real name, and we just have to know it by the code it was given by the Cambridge University Library.

Anyway, the G prologue is found only in Gg, which is the earliest of the eight manuscripts that contain the prologue, and critical opinion until the 20th century held that G was the original draft, and F was Chaucer's revised version. Victorian editor the Rev Walter Skeat said in his edition that he wasn't aware that anyone had ever suggested otherwise (which probably means that someone had and Skeat wanted to deride their theory in a public forum - Skeat was a very cool guy who thought nothing of describing other editors' editions as "worthless" and much of the subsequent work on Chaucer seems to have mainly been aimed at getting back at Skeat for his opinions). But since then, there has been a lot of writing on the subject arguing that G was the revision, done some years later. A hundred years of heated debate of the kind only academics are capable of and the question is still up in the air.

It's a tricky question, and my theory on the subject is that everybody's wrong. I reckon that the G prologue is nothing to do with Chaucer at all - he wrote the F version, and G came about by virtue of a manuscript being produced by memorial transmission. It looks to me like the scribe of an ancestor of the Gg manuscript had access to the text of the legends, but his exemplar for the Prologue had been reconstructed from memory. I've been known to memorise poetry myself - not many people do this in these modern times when you can record a poem in millions of different technological ways, and modern editors tend not to believe that such a thing was ever possible - and I can see the signs of a not-quite-perfect recall.

The main differences between F and G are rearrangement of various passages, changes to a word here and there, and some pieces omitted in one or the other - most of these appear in F but not in G.

The rearrangements are an easy mistake to make when you're trying to memorise a long text. You remember individual sections, but forget exactly what order they came in. The story does seem to flow better with the sections in the F order - at least one of G's rearrangements seems to break a sentence in half and continue it a couple of dozen lines later.

Where words are changed, the F version is normally more poetic-sounding (lines 12-15 in F go "...Men shall not ween every thing a lie/ But if himself it seeth or else dooth;/ For, God woot, thing is never the less sooth/ Though every wight may it not see..."; in G, lines 13-14 become "For that he say it not of yore ago/ God woot a thing is never the less so..." . I suspect the G-memoriser was no poet himself, and just came up with something that fitted the meaning without thought for how it sounds when you read it out loud. Of course, a lot of differences in the G prologue are probably the fault of the Gg scribe, who was pretty rubbish, so it's hard to say.

The bits that G has and F doesn't are mainly an extra couplet here and there which doesn't add anything to the meaning, except for one lengthy digression on the subject of books. This is entirely Chaucerish in tone and relevant to the discussion at hand (although it slows down the action more than it needs to) - maybe it's from another, lost, poem of his and the memoriser mentally joined them together because they were about the same thing?

Anyway, I could go on at length about this poorly-thought-out theory, which I'm quite fond of, but I probably shouldn't stay up all night writing about it. I should probably go to sleep and wake up refreshed early tomorrow morning for my new job...

Advertisement

It occurred to me that, even though I'm being coy about the details of who my new employers are (regular readers may remember that time, now purged from my blog, when I blogged about a choice between two jobs, listing the pros and cons of each, only for one of the employers to read it, take exception to the cons I mentioned and decide they didn't want to employ me after all), it would be entirely acceptable for me to give a plug to the employment agency that found me the job in the first place.

So, if you want a new job in the world of finance or HR, get in touch with Macildowie Associates! Seriously, I can't praise their service highly enough - they called me after seeing my CV on Monster, I had a useful and entertaining meeting with a friendly guy talking through my job history and the kind of things I'm looking for, they had me do an Excel test to prove to them and their clients that I'm as good at it as I claim to be and then within a week of signing up they'd arranged me a couple of interviews for two really cool jobs that were exactly what I wanted, with big, world-famous companies to boot, and another couple of similar interviews waiting in the wings if those didn't work out. As it happened, they did, and I've got a cool job starting on Monday. So yay for Macildowie, they get the Zoomy seal of approval!

Early to bed, early to rise

I need to get back into the habit of getting up in the morning at an office-worker kind of time, not at some time between nine and twelve (or later if I'm feeling lazy). This is one of the many disadvantages of working for a living, such as having to leave the house, having to sit in an office and play on a computer, having to do what other people tell you to do, all that kind of thing. Still, I'm sure I'll get used to it again soon enough. It's probably good for you, although I've got up early in the morning for most of my life and I'm still unhealthy, flat broke and stupid.

But it's the weekend first, and yay, it's a meaningful weekend because I'm working on Monday! Woohoo!

It's like someone's erased my memory

I don't know what it is, but for the last few days I've felt sort of at a loose end, with lots of time on my hands. It's as if I'd previously been doing something that took up a lot of my time on a daily basis, but now I'm not and I need to find something to fill all the time I'd previously devoted to it. But what is it? I've been sitting around doing absolutely nothing for months now!

Job-hunting? That didn't take up too much of my time, and I seem to have spent a lot of time today anyway fending off calls from people who've seen my CV on Monster and want to offer me jobs. Seriously, they all seem to have come along at once lately!

Memory training? I haven't done too much of that just lately, but I've been pretty good about training at weekends and I don't normally feel vacant after not doing anything for a couple of days.

I think it must just be that I've officially got a job now, so I'm feeling like not working on a weekday is strange and gives me lots of spare time. Or perhaps I've been on secret government work of some kind and my memory has been blanked out. I like that second theory best.

Hmmm

Well, I've analysed my money situation carefully, and even a talented accountant like me can't juggle the numbers to come up with the answer I wanted to get. There is officially no way on Earth I can afford to go to the German Memory Championship in a fortnight.

It's unfortunate, but I can't go jetting off to Tuttlingen before I start getting paid for the new job, which won't be until August. Not without borrowing more money than is at all sensible, anyway. I'll just have to stay at home and memorise numbers and cards here. Maybe if I phone the competition and tell them my scores, they'll still give me a round of applause...

Get a job!

Yes, I'm talking to you, all you scummy unemployed people out there. I can now officially look down on you all again, because I've now got a job, starting Monday, subject to confirmation. Yay!

Feeling very accomplished and in the mood to achieve something else amazing this afternoon, I tried to fix a puncture on my bike. Now, I'm a man of many talents, but few of them involve fixing things. I'm entirely hopeless at fixing anything that's broken. And I can cheerfully report that after a great deal of effort getting the tyre off, finding the hole in the inner tube, patching it up with that glue stuff and little rubber patches, getting the tyre back on and injuring my hand in the process... my rear tyre is still flat as a pancake.

My natural instinct in situations like this is just to buy a new bike and avoid all the hassle, but under the financial circumstances, maybe that's not such a good idea. Let's wait till I get my first paycheque, at least.

Olympics here, olympics there, olympics everywhere!

I won't be going to the one in China, but luckily, everybody always wants to jump on the bandwagon in an olympic year, so there's a couple of other olympiads I'm thinking of checking out.

First off, there's the good old Mind Sports Olympiad, returning this year for the twelfth time. I've just got the schedule, and I'm considering whether or not to go along. I'm inclining towards probably not - I will be in London for the first weekend, for the UK Memory Championship, and that only takes place in the mornings (because it's sharing accommodations with a big chess competition in order to get a free room - hilarious arguments are sure to ensue when the memory competition overruns and hasn't finished by the time the chess players want to come in), so I could go along and join in the fun in the afternoons. But there isn't anything happening just on the Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday afternoon it's just othello, and will anyone else turn up for that? They haven't for the last few years.

Othello and some other competitions are cheaper than previously, just £8 rather than £12, but that's still more than British othello players are used to paying for a tournament (especially since the MSO competitions is shorter than the normal regionals that we pay £5 for). And the full-week, play-anything cost is still £99, and if you add the cost of accommodation to that, it all adds up to more than I can really justify spending on a holiday right now. So, all in all, I'll probably give the MSO a miss, maybe just turning up for the othello.

Olympiad number two is a Memoriad, which is even cooler! It's in Turkey, in November, and it's an olympiad composed of memory, mental calculation and speed reading competitions and promising to pay big prizes for the winners! I'm sort of sceptical about it, just because it's never happened before that a competition has popped up out of nowhere and given people money for memorising things, but I'm all in favour of the principle, naturally, and I'll certainly go along to this one if it doesn't end up being called off. It could actually turn out to be a lot of fun!

Exterminieren!

After just making a passing mention of the final episode of Doctor Who last night, I thought I should probably say more on the subject, since it was actually quite good. Certainly a big improvement on last year's season finale, although it still had its flaws - rather too many technobabbly pseudo-justifications of magic things happening for plot convenience. And the poor old Daleks not quite being the indestructible killing machines we all love (it really shouldn't be possible to make them all blow up by pressing a few buttons on a control panel).

But what it did have was Julian Bleach's wonderful portrayal of Davros! He was amazing, clever, loud and stark raving mad, exactly what a real villain should be! He needs to come back as soon as possible. And exterminate people. Also, the Daleks should win. Daleks are great.

Busy day

Well, there was a lot of tennis and Doctor Who on telly that needed watching, but I still fitted in three hours of memory training, so I feel good about myself. Or I would feel good if not for the fact that I've eaten a big bag of liquorice allsorts and feel sick. But overall, everything is good. Tomorrow I'll do more memory stuff and then win the German, UK, French and World championships. Probably. If I get a job and can afford to go to them.

And any other memory championships I end up going to. There's an Indian one, I understand. Maybe I can hitch-hike out there.

High-five!

Woo, two days, two interviews that both went really well! I'm sure I'll get a job offer out of one or more of them. And there's the added advantage that they're both really great jobs that I'm pretty sure I could do very well, too. So yay! If you're American, celebrate by setting off fireworks tonight in my honour. Got a complex display in the shape of the star-spangled banner? Rearrange it into a gigantic picture of my face!

Or not, if you don't want to. Anyway, it's the weekend and memory training is upon us. Let's see how much I can cram into my brain in a series of half-hour periods. Yay! I'm very excitable today for some reason. Yay!

Busy doing nothing

I seem to have got behind with things I've been meaning to do, despite being a jobless layabout. There are lots of people I need to email and generally keep in touch with, plus I need to write some entertaining articles for the othello newsletter before the deadline on Sunday. I'd say I'm going to make an effort to do it tomorrow, but I'm going to another job interview. And then this weekend I want to spend a lot of time practicing memory, just in case I get a job and can afford to go to the German championship.

Today's interview went well, anyway, so who knows, maybe there'll be a job there. Hope so, because it sounds like a good one. Tomorrow's interview incorporates an Excel test, which makes me all nervous for some reason. Last time I had an interview with an Excel test, long ago, I thought I did really badly at it, although the people testing me subsequently said I'd done very well. They didn't employ me, though, so perhaps they were just being polite. Or perhaps I just have unrealistically high expectations.

Hairy face: good or bad?

I'm thinking about shaving off my beard. I've had it for nearly six years now, and I was wondering whether it might be a good idea to see what I look without one now, just in case I like it. What do my loyal blog-readers think? Especially the ones who remember my pre-beard days and can make a comparison? I think I look good right now, and not having to shave in the morning is very nice, but who knows, maybe I'd look better and enjoy the shaving experience if I was beardless?

But on the other hand, I haven't shaved for six years. Can I still remember how to do it? Can I cope with advances in shaving technology? Last time I was shaving regularly, two blades was still considered an acceptable number for a razor to have. Nowadays they're up to six or seven, I've lost count. I'm not sure my face could cope with the ultimate close shave, 2008 definition.

Oh, and also, interviews tomorrow and Friday, wish me luck, you know the drill.

Overheard conversation in the street

"... and it looks like the doctor's sucking Jesus's tits. It's not Mary Magdalene, it's his doctor friend..."

I'm guessing they were discussing a photo from a fancy dress party, but I think it would be great if they were archaeologists who had unearthed an amazing lost first-century illustrated Gospel manuscript.

Supporters

Well, I take back most of the things I've been saying about Andy Murray. I've been going around predicting that he wouldn't stand a chance at Wimbledon because he still can't play a five-set match without collapsing, but he seems to have got that problem licked. Fantastic match tonight, although you had to feel sorry for Richard Gasquet, with all the British fans yelling their heads off.

I had a similar experience today, or at least I had one man on the street tell me that he and his wife really enjoyed watching me on The Mentalists, and wish me good luck in this year's memory competitions. It really is great that I still get this kind of thing quite regularly here in Derby and other places around the country, nearly six months after the programme was on telly. The Mentalists really seems to have struck a chord with a whole lot of people! There really would be a huge audience interested in watching TV coverage of this year's world championships, anyone out there who might want to broadcast it? Hello, Channel 4, I'm talking to you, it's exactly your kind of thing and it'd be a hit!

I should probably be cheering

I just can't find it in me to support Spain in a football match, though. I somehow find it impossible to have an opinion one way or the other about them. I need to meet some Spanish people, get some kind of emotional attachment to the place that would let me cheer them on when they're up against the likes of Germany in a big final.

But since I can't support Spain, I was hoping Germany would win this one, and memory-competition international rivalries be damned. So now I'm all disappointed. Still, maybe all my rivals will sink into deep depression and be unable to memorise quite as much stuff, allowing me to win despite incompetence and lack of practice (did a half-hour numbers today but it didn't go very well - I'm feeling a bit slow-witted lately, and I was below optimum pace of going through the digits. At top speed I can go through 1640 digits three times with a minute or two to spare, but I was 200 short of the end third time through when the 30 minutes ran out today).

What?

I got a water bill in the post this morning. Dated 14 June 2007, for the period 18 August 2006 - 12 November 2006, 'please ensure that your payment reaches us by 5 Jul 07.'

And it's not a bill for this place. It's for the flat in Boston that I used to live in until November 2003. I mean, what's going on here? It says 'this is a copy bill' on it, so I assume the people who live there now have asked for a copy and through some confusion of the computer system it's come to me by mistake. But the enquiries phone line isn't open again until Monday, so I'll just have to remain confused until then.

It surprises me that Anglian Water have got my new address in the first place. Unless I'm misremembering, I didn't pay the water bill at the Boston flat, the landlord did. I don't recall telling the water company where I was moving to. It's all extremely strange. Possibly it's all some kind of elaborate practical joke performed by a really uninspired new TV show.

Must... resist... temptation...

Sometimes it's so hard to refrain from poking gentle fun at companies that might possibly be going to employ me. Tell you what, if I don't get this particular job, I'll deride them at length next week. In a harmless kind of way, of course - there was even a thing on the BBC news website a while ago about stupid corporate jargon, so I'm sure it wouldn't really hurt to write about it on the blog. But better safe than sorry, eh?

I'll complain about the BBC instead. That'll teach them. Is it me, or is their coverage of Wimbledon more rubbish this year than it has been in the past? They seem to have cameras on fewer courts for people to watch via the red button. I like to watch the doubles games if I've got nothing better to do, but they've barely been televised at all this year so far.

Nothg. happened

Sorry, twenty to eleven, watching hilarious comedy "The Inbetweeners", have divided day between chasing up jobs and somehow not remembering to blog earlier, no time to write more. Or to frame complete sentences. Will make up for it tomorrow. Pronouns too.

He's called David Higginbottom?

"I've already killed three people with my skimmer, but that hardly counts - they were all Senior Citizens."

So says Dano Gazzard, slipped nonchalently into a paragraph describing himself and his surroundings, so casually that it goes unnoticed by a ten-year-old reader looking forward to some kind of science-fiction children's story. By the time this ten-year-old gets to the end of "Time Trap" with its ingeniously tightly-knotted time-travel circular insanity plotline and the pretty horrific ending where the good guys don't win, he's hooked on the works of Nicholas Fisk for life.

So it was nice to find out that the favourite author of my boyhood years has acquired a Wikipedia page since I last tried to look him up on the internet. And hey, check it out! Not only is his real name David Higginbottom, he shares my birthday! And he's, as far as whoever wrote the wiki page knows, at least, still alive, and nearly 85. I need to find a way to send him a long-overdue fan letter.

Words can't describe how cool the books of Nicholas Fisk are. Calling them children's sci-fi does them a real disservice - I'd never read anything so adult in tone (and still haven't read much that can compare with his best stuff, even now). It's criminal that he's not better-known. I'd love to see his stuff back in print again, because most of his books I got from the library. All I've got on my bookshelves now are tattered old copies of "Time Trap" and "Robot Revolt" and a more recent edition of "Trillions" I found a few years ago.

Now my interest has been piqued by that bibliography (including some that the libraries at Horncastle and Boston didn't have in their collections), I really want to track down copies of the likes of "A Rag, A Bone And A Hank Of Hair" ('And please do not tell me that Jack cannot be killed, because I say he can') and "Space Hostages" (the rather graphic description of the dying, deranged Flight Lieutenant sticks with me even now). And so many other long-lost favourites on that list, too - "Leadfoot" was always a particular favourite, no sci-fi in that one, just a boy and a car, Oddiputs the evil robot from "Sweets From A Stranger and other stories", "On The Flip Side", which gave me weird dreams for a month afterwards (those blobs were scary!)...

I need to start trawling eBay and charity shops. And re-reading the handful of books I've still got. Starting with Robot Revolt - great story, bad title. I think a lot of his titles were forced on him by the publishers, but this one especially - sure, it's snappy and it lures readers in, probably, but the point of the book is that while it is about a robot revolt, we don't realise that until late on in the story. We think it's about Hez and Abi and the Pastor, until things come to a head and we see that Max has been using the heroes for his own purposes. And then there's another twist to come after that...

Great stuff. Seriously.

Idleness

Curse this self-imposed ban on blogging about jobs I'm applying for. While it does reduce the chance of me inadvertently offending a potential employer, it does leave me short of something to write about when I haven't done anything else of interest all day. I get the feeling people are going to read this and think I'm living a life of vacuous sloth, when in fact that's only partially true.

I suppose I could pretend I've done something exciting. I could make up a thrilling tale about how I rescued a kitten stuck up a tree - poor thing, it was blown up there by the gales the other day, it didn't climb up there by itself. In fact, it can't climb, it was brought up by pigs after its mother died in an unusual helicopter accident when it was only a baby, and it believes itself to be a piglet. And I must confess that while I was rescuing it, I accidentally let slip that it looks more like a kitten to me, which has thrown the poor thing into a state of terrible confusion. It went straight back to its surrogate mother and demanded to know whether it was adopted.

Mind you, these modern kittens adapt pretty easily to this kind of thing. I'm sure it'll be okay if someone just reads it the story of the ugly duckling. The cat-language version, obviously, in which the ducks and swans are all eaten by kittens at the end. That'll put a smile on any kitten/piglet's face.

Okay, I'll make a point of doing something bloggable tomorrow. I'd hate for this thing to become dull and devoid of content.

Right, that does it, no more reindeer games for you.

I knocked over one of the piles of old paper in my living room (remember that exciting post last week about unpacking my box of old paperwork?) to be greeted by a loud, high-pitched, bleepy, acoustic version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer". Constantly repeating itself. It took me about five minutes of digging through all the old rubbish before I managed to find the Christmas card that was bleeping at me. I was beginning to think that I'd just have to get used to the constant jingle for the rest of eternity. It would certainly get me into a Christmassy mood, and I think that's something there should be more of in June. Let's celebrate Jesus's half-birthday!

Reunited

I got my keyboard back, if you were worried. By way of the neighbours leaving it out in the hallway. So that's all okay, unless they still think I'm a maniac rock star. Maybe one day I'll learn to play the thing, if it still works, instead of just using it as a window-prop.

Anyway, new week beckons. No football till Wednesday. How will I survive? It's surprisingly easy to get addicted to an international tournament, even when England aren't in it...

Rock star lifestyle

I might have mentioned before that I own an electric piano keyboard thing that I use for the sole purpose of propping my bedroom window open. Well, yesterday, the inevitable happened and I accidentally dropped it out of the window into my downstairs neighbours' yard. Big bang. I did go down and knock on their door to apologise and ask for my keyboard back please, but there was no answer. Looking out the window a little later, I noticed the keyboard had gone, though. I don't know the new people in flat two, they only just moved in recently, and I suspect they think they're living below a temperamental rock musician who occasionally throws his instruments through the window in a fit of booze-addled creative insanity. I'm now hoping to bump into them in the hallway and assume the keyboard incident will come up in the conversation in a way that we can all laugh about it.

Meanwhile, this morning, I was in WH Smith's, and an unfamiliar voice hailed me across the store with "Memory man!" Ah, a fan, I thought to myself. And an unusually loud one, too. No, wait, I know this guy. Who is he? He's coming over. "Hi, Ben, how are you?" Ah, that's who he is. "Hi there... Angus."

"No, try again." Dang. Why did I think he was Angus Walker, former World Intelligence Champion whom I haven't seen for eight years? I've barely thought about him in the intervening time, either, so why did he pop into my head if this person isn't him? "Three more guesses," said the mystery man, clearly enjoying experiencing my famous inability to remember people's names. I flailed around for a minute or two, apologising for having not the faintest idea who he was. "Think numbers," he hinted.

"Ah! Robert! Yes, I knew it all along," I said, unconvincingly. Of course it is. Robert Fountain, Mental Calculation World Cup winner, whom I haven't seen for a mere two years. He does look quite a bit like Angus Walker, you know. And I'm sure I would have recognised his voice, only he'd just been to the dentist. He's just moved in to the neighbourhood, so I'll have to make a point of remembering who he is in future.

Anyway, this afternoon I decided to roll up my metaphorical sleeves and get stuck in to a real memory training session. Half-hour numbers, half-hour cards and half-hour binary, crammed into a six-hour time period, exactly like in the German championship. I did the numbers and cards, but had to give up on the binary after ten minutes, conscious that absolutely nothing was sinking in to my brain. Despite my reputation for working harder than any sane person would at memory training, I just haven't been up to world championship winning standard in my preparation regime for a very, very long time. I really need to work on my stamina. Or maybe schedule my training sessions for a time when I don't know Doctor Who is on the telly.

No problem with the memory in the numbers or cards, though - marked them during the first half of the football, and I got 1340 digits and 17½ packs, which would be two new world records if I did it in Tuttlingen. Would've been nice to get a binary score of some kind to go with them, but we're still a month away. If I'm serious about training, that three-world-records plan of mine might just be possible.

Millennium

Well, if yesterday's blog was number 999, I suppose that means that this is the big one thousand! Woo!

So, I've been racking my brains, wondering what kind of post I should make for this historic occasion. Some kind of song and dance routine? An analysis of my life over the last thousand blogged days? A shocking personal revelation? A blank blog to really subvert expectations?

No, what I should really do is stop talking about myself for once, and say "But enough about me. How's things with you?" What's happening with you, my blog readers, today? I'd really like to see in the comments thread a paragraph or two of what you would be blogging about tonight if you were a blogger. And if you already are a blogger, well, write something else.

Call the police!

This note has been added as an afterthought, realising that a large proportion of my blog readers are American, German or Other. 999 is the phone number for the emergency services. Just substitute it in your mind for 911 or 112 or whatever outlandish number you prefer to use whenever you encounter "999" in the following blog. Thank you for reading.

This is, apparently, blog post number 999 in Zoomy's Thing. Wowee!

Actually, the only thing this inspires me to write about is a question I occasionally get asked about the "Ben System". Doesn't it make more sense, people say, to have, for example, 999 be a policeman, because that's the first thing that comes to mind when you see the number 999, and not Mr Burns's teddy Bobo, or whatever image you might create with the Ben System.

Actually, people who say that are invariably people who currently use the Dominic System, which recommends this kind of thing. People who started off by reading Tony Buzan's books, like me, have never encountered the idea. So that's probably why I always reply "No, that's not the way you should do it. Make a Ben-system or Major-system or Dominic-system image for each number/card/whatever, don't break the rules. Easier to learn them then, believe me."

However, this response of mine is, I think, a worthy one. When you're learning a lot of images, especially if you're trying your hand at a 1000-image system, it takes time to drill them into your head. And the way to think about the "Ben System" is not as a way of converting numbers into words and pictures, but as a way of learning to read a different alphabet. You want to get to a point where you're looking at the piece of paper and not seeing numbers at all, but automatically seeing the appropriate image. And you will get to that point more quickly if during the learning phase you're thinking "that's buh-oh-buh... Bobo!" instead of "that's 999... policeman!" Really, you will. So pick a system and use it for EVERYTHING. No exceptions. Your brain will thank you for it.

Probably. I mean, Dominic hasn't exactly been a failure at the whole memory thing...

Yah! Fatty!

You'd think, with being unemployed and penniless and everything, that I'd be losing weight, but in fact I'm pretty sure I'm doing the reverse just lately. Looking at some of the pictures from the party on Saturday, I have to admit I look decidedly blubbery. I'm giving that weighing machine in Woolworth's a wide berth. I need a job that involves a good long cycle ride or walk every day. Or in a liposuction clinic that gives free sucks to its accountants.

Superliminal advertising

The boxes of sweets/chocolates/jaffa cakes etc on the shelves lining the queue for the tills in Woolworth's have got big, visible yellow stickers on them saying "IMPULSE LINE - PRE-TILLS" or something along those lines. As a customer, I find it quite offensive that they're owning up to strategically placing goodies in the eyeline of people waiting to pay for the things they came into the shop for! What happened to the long-standing tradition of pretending it's all just a coincidence? The decent, honourable thing to do is to be sneaky and underhanded and insult your customers' intelligence.

Warning: Not for the faint-hearted

Well, you see, it was my brother's thirtieth birthday and he really wanted lots of cool costumes at his party, so I had to make an effort to do something unexpected. So this is what I looked like:

Attractive, eh?



On the right of that one you can see my regular blog-commenter Ian, who had a magnificent costume himself:



Whereas my brother himself was a destructo-robot with a slightly alarming tight-fitting leotard:





And all in all, the evening had a lot of this kind of thing going on:





So yes, don't say I didn't warn you, and I probably won't be wearing another miniskirt for quite some time, probably. I did look good, though. Maybe the costume will find its way into my regular rotation...

Cosplay

Well, that was a fantastic party! I'm still suffering a little from over-drinking and under-sleeping last night, so I'll be brief, but photos will follow soon, hopefully, of me in my costume. It looked a bit like this:

Manure

There's a Manchester United website called manureds.co.uk. To me, that looks like a website devoted to people or things which have been manured, such as Biff in Back To The Future.

Sorry, I couldn't think of anything more enlightening to talk about tonight. Also, I won't be posting anything tomorrow on account of the birthday party, so that snippet of information will have to last you till Sunday night. I hope nobody is in any way dissatisfied about that.

Well, that was embarrassing

I've been suffering with a cold for the last week, although I seem to have been very brave and noble and not whined about it on my blog. Anyway, still feeling sniffly and tired this afternoon I had a lie down and ended up falling asleep. I was woken up (from a dream about losing the world memory championship by deciding to stay in bed and not compete in large parts of it) by the phone ringing.

Possibly unwisely, I decided to answer it, and had a conversation with an accountancy recruitment agency in Nottingham whom I got in touch with a month or so ago. Lucky it wasn't someone offering me a job, really, since I wasn't really with it throughout the phone call, and probably gave the woman the impression that I was drunk, on drugs or just generally dimwitted. I thought it was probably best not to admit that I'd been asleep at half past four in the afternoon, but I think I'll come clean when I go in to see them tomorrow morning.

I've also hopefully kept my subconscious quiet for a while by doing three speed cards trial runs between football games today - 26.47, 24.97 and 22.28, all perfect - to keep my brain ticking over until I get a chance to do some more serious training next week. Another thing I didn't mention in my blog is that I didn't do the weekend half-hour-disciplines training that I was planning to do, and in fact spent the weekend sitting around, watching telly and occasionally sneezing. So I've been feeling a little bit guilty about it ever since, hence the mid-afternoon nightmare.

I'm also annoyed with Howard Webb the referee. I didn't mention it on the blog (what the heck have I been writing about for the last week?), but I had another bet on the last three days of football, and I had Poland down to win. They were 1-0 up with a minute to go and Webb goes and gives Austria a penalty! It's disgraceful! That reduces my winnings on that bet from a potential £16.46 to a £4.92 return from my £6.30 stake. Still, it's an improvement on the £1.91 I got from the first three days, and it's not going to break the bank at this rate. And yes, I did have Croatia to beat Germany, so I was cheering this afternoon.

Really, this betting on games has added hugely to my enjoyment of Euro 08. I've got a result to cheer for in every game now! I've already got my money on the next six games, and I'll probably have a final bet on the last six group matches too, unless I get all of the next lot wrong. Results to watch out for over the weekend:

Italy to beat Romania
Holland to beat France
Spain to beat Sweden
Greece to beat Russia (rather unwisely put my money on this one before seeing how terribly Greece played in their first game, but hey, Russia are rubbish too, you never know)
Portugal to beat Switzerland
Czech Republic to beat Turkey

Of course, it's Friday the thirteenth tomorrow, so luck probably won't be on my side. For some reason, even though my birthday's on the fourteenth of October and my brother's is the fourteenth of June, whenever they fall on a Saturday it never occurs to me that this means they're preceded by a Friday the thirteenth until the day itself comes along. You'd think after 61 birthdays between us, I would be used to the idea by now...

Discreet customer service

I was in Oxfam today, looking for cheap accessories to supplement the costume I'm wearing at my brother's fancy dress party on Saturday, when I noticed a wig for sale that I could use to make me look even more like the character I'm supposed to be (I was planning to be a bald version - the theme is characters from my brother's stories, and like all fiction writers, he has shamefully few handsome, bald-headed heroes). The wig didn't have a price on it, so I asked the woman on the till how much it cost, and she responded by yelling across the store "Gloria! There's a gentleman here wants to know how much the wig costs!"

So the entire Oxfam shop full of people, and I'm sure quite a few people passing by outside, turned to look at me. It'll be in all the papers tomorrow, I'm sure - memory champion buys wig!

Can't you talk about anything else?

Okay, final football-related post for at least a few days, I promise, but I would like to retract my prediction of Greece to win Euro 2008. They were atrocious tonight! I mean, I know they've got a reputation as a negative team, but they're not normally that negative. What kind of team goes out for their first group game against a team like Sweden and plays for a 0-0 draw? Dear me, they were bad.

Anyway, the interview went well today, so please keep your fingers crossed until some time early next week when I should hear whether they want me or not. It'd be a great job for me to get. And I'm sure the inconvenience of you trying to go about your everyday lives with your fingers crossed is a small price to pay for my eventual job satisfaction for the next nine months or so (it's a maternity leave cover job).

Dang

Well, the embarrassing defeat for France turned out to be a very dull embarrassing draw for France, and the dull 0-0 draw between Holland and Italy ended up being a thrilling 3-0. So I'm never going to make my living as a professional gambler, obviously.

Anyway, enough watching football, time to get a job. Another interview tomorrow, as I might have mentioned, out in Edwalton, a pleasant four-mile cycle from Nottingham station. Or, if it's as hot tomorrow as it was today, an extremely unpleasant cycle. Nonetheless, I'm going to cycle instead of taking a bus. Healthy exercise is good for you. Wish me luck! For the interview, not the cycling. Although you can wish me luck for that too, if you want. I might need more luck for that, actually. There's less chance of being hit by a lorry in an interview room.

Technical question

Why doesn't my internet explorer auto-redirect me on some web pages that really want me to be redirected? I bet it's some kind of security setting. This stupid laptop is riddled with security programs and settings and things. Okay, it stops people using my computer for evil purposes, probably, but it's mildly annoying when it does things like this and I don't know how to stop it.

Speaking of people using computers for evil purposes, I decided to count up all the emails I get in my spam folder from the Bank of Africa in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso offering a share of some vast fortune left in the bank by a wealthy foreigner. I've had five different ones in the last two days, the most entertaining being the "very huge sum of money belonging to a deceased person Mr.Emmanuel Etukudo who died on May 2nd, 2004 in a gassy car accident with his entire family on there way back from Bobo-Dioulasso the formal capital city of Burkina-Faso, and the fund has been dormant in his account with this Bank without any claim of the fund in our custody either from his family or relation before our discovery to this development."

I hope I'm never involved in a gassy car accident, it sounds nasty. You know, I should create phishing emails for a living. I sometimes get some that I think would really work if only the creators had put a little bit more effort into it. I could make a really convincing one and con lots of stupid people out of lots of money. You know, if I had someone else on my team who could do HTML and things, obviously...

Nearly

The first game could easily have been a draw if not for one lucky goal, and Portugal did indeed win easily. See, I'm great at predicting football results. I'm a little less good at making lunch, possibly, having filled the flat with thick, acrid smoke while cooking chicken kievs, but I think the place is mostly aired out now, and the damage to my lungs probably wasn't too severe.

Oh, and Doctor Who tonight was complete gibberish. Complete gibberish that looked on the surface like intelligent, thoughtful and different semi-thriller drama, but think about any element of the plot for more than five seconds and it all falls apart.

Gambolling in the fields

An extra early-afternoon pre-kickoff blog today. In a probably vain attempt to make the England-free European Championship in some way interesting to me, and since I haven't had a bet on a football game since leaving Adams six years ago, and since gambling is the last refuge of the unemployed layabout, I've decided to have a flutter on the first three days of games. My picks are as follows:

Switzerland - Czech Republic draw (all sane logic suggests that the Czechs should win this one without any trouble, but it's the first game, the home fans will be excitable and it'll probably be an anticlimactic 0-0)

Portugal to beat Turkey (they could win this one with their eyes closed, barring any kind of injury to Ronaldo)

Croatia to beat Austria (Austria are hopeless and should lose every game without too much difficulty)

Germany to beat Poland (Poland aren't that bad, actually, but Germany should overwhelm them in the end. I'm thinking a late goal just when the Germans are starting to panic)

Romania to beat France (France have an amazing ability to mess up games like this, and I'm confident they can do it again)

Holland - Italy draw (another game that'll have lots of hype and very little action)

So now you can all follow along and see how wildly inaccurate my predictions are, as a substitute for getting excited about England's failure to win the championship. Yay!

Also, my tip to win - Greece. Nobody thought they had a chance four years ago, and strangely enough, nobody thinks they've got a chance this time either, although they're playing really well, they've still got the same great manager and a lot of the same great team, and they're looking like they could go far.

Boxes

I unpacked my big box of important papers and stuff the other day, and now the contents are sitting in the middle of my living room in a big, densely packed pile at least three times the size of the box they came out of. It's magic. I did find lots of cool stuff while failing to find what I was looking for in the first place - the posh photos I had taken in 2003, so now I can send one to that guy who wanted an autographed picture of me; my copy of Othello Brief & Basic that I thought I must have lent to someone else and lost long ago (maybe I'll donate it back to the BOF, we're running out of copies and can't get any new ones); lots of wild-west-themed cardboard accessories left over from that party many years ago (fun party, we need to have another one); and even my CIMA certificate so that any prospective employer who demands proof that I'm qualified won't have to just take my word for it. All these discoveries are well worth the inconvenience of no longer being able to see my living room floor.

Anyway, a weekend of memory training is coming up. I'm trying to get into the kind of training schedule I would be following if I was working (as, with any luck, I will be before too long - another interview on Tuesday, out Nottingham way this time), and that means long-discipline practice sessions every weekend I haven't got anything better to do. And there aren't many such weekends between now and Tuttlingen - next weekend I have the delights of my brother's fancy-dress thirtieth-birthday party (transvestism encouraged) and then, if I do end up having the money, there are other appointments for at least two of the weekends between now and the end of July. So it's important to get a good bit of training in this weekend in the 30-minute events and also in abstract images, trying to get that system up and running effectively. Let's make 2008 the year of me winning memory competitions, instead of coming second!

My stars!

On the train this morning I read my horoscope in the free paper, and it said something along the lines of "everything's topsy-turvy today, people you expect to be nice to you are nasty, and vice versa". And funnily enough, after I got back home I got a call from the bank - not the department of complaining about people who exceed their overdraft limit (which is apparently outsourced to India) who called me the other day, but the department of calling for a friendly chat and offering long-term customers credit cards and increased overdrafts (based at the local branch) who call once a year or so. I'd sorted out the overdraft miscalculation with some transfer of funds from that credit card I never use, and the guy who called me seemed blissfully unaware that I'd gone over the limit in the first place, calling me a valued and reliable customer and things like that. I didn't take him up on the offer of another credit card or a bigger overdraft or anything-else-we-can-do-to-make-your-banking-experience-more-satisfactory, but he still wasn't unpleasant about it.

So I've had the niceness from people I expect to be nasty (also a cheque from my mother, but if I list her as 'people I expect to be nasty' it would make me seem like a horribly ungrateful son, so I won't - thanks, Mum!) but I'm still waiting for the nastiness from people I expect to be nice to me. The interview today went fine, without any nastiness, so who's going to be mean to me? It's going to be the person I least expect, according to the horoscope. I'm a nervous wreck with anticipation...

Plans for the future

Interview tomorrow morning in, funnily enough, Oadby, just down the road from the church where I've lost many an othello game. Really good job for a company that I couldn't say anything bad about even if I didn't have this self-imposed ban on talking about companies I potentially work for - smallish family company that has a super-professional-looking website with perfect spelling, grammar and punctuation! What more could a friendly and pedantic accountant want in life?

So let's talk memory instead. I did a practice 30-minute cards this evening, attempting 21 packs and getting 14 right. But I really wasn't far off with the other seven, and I'm contemplating trying 21 at the German championship in just under two months' time. Now, some might say that would be unnecessarily risky (and others might describe it as 'ludicrously stupid') when I can attempt 18 and be reasonably confident of only making one or two mistakes and beating everyone else by some margin... but I wanna break records and it's pretty unlikely I'm going to break my new record of 17 if I only attempt 18.

Maybe I'll do a bit more practice and see how it goes. I'd hate to get even more of a reputation as the kind of person who loses big championships by trying to show off...

Drifters!

I've been extremely unhappy ever since Drifter chocolate-toffee-wafer bars stopped being available, so I was absolutely delighted to find them on sale in a newsagent's in Derby today. I think they were new ones, too, rather than leftover stock from last year, so I'm hopeful of seeing a new influx of my favourite unhealthy snack in the shops soon!

Really, I couldn't be happier - unless of course I had a job and money to put in the bank and stop them complaining about me going over my overdraft limit. Anyone got a bit of spare change that you might want to lend me until I'm back on my feet?

Job advertisements I considered

Dog Congratulator
Salary: £50k + car + donkey
Location: Biggleswade
Start date: June 2009

An experienced Dog Congratulator is required for a busy company located directly above Biggleswade town centre. Applicants should have at least three years' experience, preferably of congratulating dogs although experienced metalworkers will also be considered. The successful applicant will be between five foot eight and five foot eleven in height, admire the works of Chopin and disapprove of radio. Holders of a degree in dog congratulation need not apply.

Man
Salary: 3
Location: Biggleswade
Start date: Last week

A man is required to perform certain duties at a hockey stick and artificial dolphin factory in western Biggleswade. No experience necessary, but applicants must have a minimum of three GCSEs grade G or above. Five days holiday per year, uniform provided on Tuesdays. We are an equal opportunities employer, but no applications from women will be accepted.

Horse
Salary: oats
Location: Biggleswade
Start date: December 2037

A horse, a horse, our kingdom for a horse. Needed by a small company of financial consultants/dressmakers in Biggleswade. Duties include eating grass, swatting flies with tail and neighing. Applicants must have legs, tail, eyes and be a horse.

Management Accountant
Salary: none
Location: Giggleswick
Start date: immediate

A qualified and experienced Management Accountant is required for a friendly family company, not located in Biggleswade. Part-qualified CIMA preferred, good Excel skills and knowledge of Sage Line 50 essential. Good package except for lack of monetary payment. The successful applicant will be remorselessly flogged by a cruel slavedriver while attempting to perform his/her duties. All applications must be made by carrier pigeon or via a trained gorilla-impersonator. This job requires the wearing of clothes.

Right, job-hunting time

I've had more than enough of being unemployed. I'm going to spend tomorrow applying for jobs left, right and centre. I don't care how vaguely related to management accounts they are, if it's a job, anywhere in the country, it's going to get my CV. I'll probably end up as a window cleaner by accident and discover that it's the perfect job I've always been looking for.

Darkness and light

Hmm, I might take back what I said about it being good that Steven Moffat is taking over as executive producer of Doctor Who - "Silence In The Library" makes it look like he's really running out of ideas. It was a sort of mishmash of elements of the previous stories he's written, it wasn't scary like it was trying to be, and it was all very base-under-siege.

Still, to look on the bright side, we had a fun day of othello today here in Derby. Eight players, which is just perfect for a seven-round tournament because it doesn't need me to faff about with pairings and Swissness and byes. Everything worked out the way it should - the venue was very nice as usual (although rather more expensive than the income from entry fees), I hadn't forgotten to bring the boards, pieces, clocks, transcript sheets, list of people whose membership had expired, pens, round-robin pairings table or anything important. I had forgotten to bring tea and coffee, but since I don't drink the stuff, I wasn't inconvenienced. And since there's a Happy Shopper just down the road, neither was anyone else.

I beat David, which I always seem to do these days, and lost to Roy, which I also invariably seem to do, and ended up with four wins out of seven in total. I seem to have settled back into a happy mediocrity at othello tournaments now, which I'm perfectly happy with. David and Iain ended up tied for first place, with 6 wins each, and Geoff third with 5. The BGP is really quite exciting this year, even though I'm not in contention, with Iain a mere 20 points ahead of David going into the last regional in Farnborough on June 21st. Which I may or may not go to, depending on whether I've got any money by that time.

Classified ad

I got this wonderful little A6-size piece of card through the letterbox this morning:

I'm really thrilled to know that the first man to combine the powers of spirituality lives as nearby as Leicester. Maybe I'll pop round there tomorrow morning and get him to cast a spell to give me luck in the othello. I need a new lucky charm of some kind - ever since tidying my flat up last week, I've been unable to find my lucky Zoom-Zoom T-shirt. For the last day of the memory competition, I had to wear the original Zoom-Zoom shirt, which I retired a couple of years ago because it's sadly more hole than shirt these days and doesn't so much cover my torso as hang in rags from my neck.

Ooh, maybe Mr. Wahab can cast a powerful spell to help me find my lucky shirt!

Dedication, that's what you need

I have a feeling I might have used that title before, but I'm too lazy to check. One thing I'm not too lazy to do, though, is memory practice! I'm very much in the mood for it now, and I'm quite keen to go to Germany in July and break some world records. Specifically, I think it would be rather groovy to break the world record in the three half-hour disciplines that traditionally make up the first day of the competition - binary, cards and numbers, not necessarily in that order (I'm also too lazy to look up the timetable). I think that's an achievable goal, just about, if I'm really on super-top form, and it'd certainly get people talking. Talking about how great I am, too, which is the best kind of talking.

In all seriousness, I do really want to get the record for half-hour numbers or speed numbers. It bugs me that I don't hold any of the numbers records any more - I see it as a failing of "the Ben system" that it doesn't give me any kind of advantage over my rivals when it comes to numbers (unlike binary and cards, where it's really really great). But I've never been able to think of a way to improve my system and give myself an edge over the likes of Gunther and Andi. Maybe it'll come to me in a flash of inspiration some day. Or maybe I'll just work at it the old-fashioned way and beat the Gunthers of this world by dint of traditional elbow-grease. I'm sure I can manage to be only selectively lazy if I really put my mind to it.

Tello

It's the first-ever-as-far-as-I-know Derby Regional othello tournament this Saturday. Yay! And with any luck, there'll be more competitors at that than turned up for the memory competition last weekend. In fact, if you're reading this, I command you to come along and play othello! No excuses!

All good Things...

I've been thinking. I've been told off more than once just lately for certain ill-advised blog entries of mine, and it's making me think that I should either a) stop occasionally saying cruel and hurtful things about people or institutions; or b) start blogging in a slightly less public way.

So I'm considering moving Zoomy's Thing to my LiveJournal account (which exists solely in order to access certain people's friends-only journals), setting it to friends-only and accepting friend requests from anyone who chooses to make one. That way everyone who wants to read my ramblings will still have a chance to, this site will still be here so new readers will still be able to stumble across it and then read the further adventures on LJ, and if I, for example, choose to mercilessly mock a school's website's punctuation and philosophy, I'll be able to do so without them relaying reprimands to me via Phil at memory competitions.

What do my loyal readers think about the pros and cons of this approach? I know some of you are the shy, retiring types who might not want to create a LJ account, friend me and thus identify yourself, but I assure you it won't be any trouble. Besides, this is post number 976 on Blogger, and I think it would be cool to finish here on a nice round 1000, and move over to a brand new adventure.

Making up for lost time

Okay, I've done very little blogging for the last several days, for various reasons, so tonight you get a whole lot. Before I start talking about something that some of my readers might possibly want to hear, could I please direct your attention here? It's the E Nesbit short story "The Cockatoucan", which I've just discovered is available online and read for the first time. I've been looking for it (in my usual passive way of looking for things, which means I've been sitting around and waiting for it to fall into my lap) for quite some time, since I heard that it is practically the only work of fiction in the English language to feature a character called Pridmore.

Now that I've read it, I can say that it's not Nesbit's best work, but I urge you to go and read it anyway, just for the unusual Pridmore-content. She's an unpleasant nursemaid who gets turned into an Automatic Nagging Machine.

And while we're talking about children's books, I noticed today that my copy of "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" has an obvious edit in it that I've somehow never spotted before - on page 53, "This is not good and I know why. A mouse has cut the wire. Good-bye!" The 'good-bye' is in a slightly different font and has the tell-tale faint rectangular outline around it that shows it's been literally cut-and-pasted on top of the original text.

A quick Google search for "a mouse has cut the wire" shows that roughly half of the results say "Good-by" after it. Have any of my readers got an original edition and can confirm that the recent edition amended the outdated spelling? I'll feel very clever if you can tell me I'm right to make that deduction.

Right, was there something else you wanted to know about? Oh, yes, the Derby Memory Championship. The excitement started on Friday night, when Nik (who was born in Russia, lived most of his life in Norway and is now over here studying) and Dai (who's Welsh) arrived at my place, after an extensive and very enjoyable day's filming with the ITV people. It's going to be a very fun programme. I had successfully cleared just enough floor space to accommodate them both, and even though I'd never met either of them in real life before, neither of them turned out to be the kind of person who'd murder me in my bed, which was nice.

We set off for the community centre bright and early, which was a good thing since we went in Dai's car and I gave some very bad directions. But when we eventually found the place, everything went smoothly from then on. We were joined by our very select crowd of competitors - Gaby and Dagfinn, who can take credit for the competition not being cancelled when it became clear that nobody else was going to turn up, since they'd already booked their flights and hotels and in Gaby's case her week-long sightseeing holiday in Britain - and Phil, bearing a big box of memorisation and recall papers provided by James Paterson. My gratitude to both of them is overwhelming.

The actual competition went pretty well for me. I'm completely out of practice at spending a whole weekend memorising, but I managed to keep the right mental state going anyway, once I'd warmed up a bit - I only managed mediocre results in the random words and binary, but after skipping names and faces to do a final set of interviews with the TV crew, I produced a quite respectable 995 in 30-minute numbers, which I haven't practiced at all. I'm sure I can do 1200 or so in Germany with just a little bit more effort in the meantime. Then I did the TV-special world record attempt with Ray Keene and various spectators in attendance, which I'm going to refrain from talking about since the TV people want it to be a surprise. Although the show won't be on TV till later this year, by which time there will hopefully have been other memory-related headlines.

That was the end of the first day's excitement, and we went to Burger King to celebrate. Nik was reluctant, since he tries to eat healthy food as much as possible (people with that attitude should probably stay away from me at memory competitions), but faced with not only my insistence that junk food is very much the way to go if you want to be a great memoriser, but also Dagfinn's enthusiastic agreement and reportedly his psychologist wife's wholehearted condoning of my 'eat food that makes you happy and you'll do better in life' philosophy, he gave in and had a bacon double cheeseburger. A victory for the forces of fast food! We'll soon have wiped all that omega-3 stuff out of existence!

Sunday, being free from the stress of TV cameras, was quieter and simpler, but no less interesting. I started off with a new record of 17 packs in 30-minute cards (attempting 18 and the only problems came right at the end of the 18th pack), I gave my new abstract images system its first trial run and got a personal best of 142 - with a bit more work, it's going to be really good, I'm sure - and followed it up with an acceptable 320 in speed numbers and a decent 90 in historic dates. I still want to get those two world records back, but it'll have to wait until later this year. I had to skip the spoken numbers event - there'd been a problem with the file James had sent to Phil, so I had to create some new numbers myself at short notice on Saturday night - and we had our only delay of the competition before it, waiting for the noisy cistern in the otherwise perfectly quiet venue to finish filling up before we could begin.

That only left speed cards, but despite having two chances to break my own record, I didn't manage to do it. I recorded a snazzy time of 22.88 in the first attempt but the recall was pretty awful, and the second time round I took it just a bit too slowly, stopped the clock at 26.58 and failed to remember it properly anyway. Still, I'm sure it'll all go right at some competition in the near future.

So, I won, Gaby came second and claimed the prize money. Oh knickers, just now as I type this I remember that I promised James J that I'd get him photos of the prize-winners. And I didn't. Hmm, Gaby did take some pictures, we might be able to come up with something to go on the Science House website... Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Dagfinn came third and took the second-place-apart-from-Ben prize and Nik scooped the best (and only) beginner money. So it's a good thing that only four people came to the competition, because everybody was able to leave with significantly more money than they arrived with!

Except me, obviously. My monetary state is really, really not good at the moment. If I don't get a job and/or a big pile of money some time soon, I'm going to have serious problems here. Still, never mind, something'll turn up, I'm sure...

A memorable weekend

...which I'm too worn out from memorising to write about tonight. Sorry, and also sorry for not blogging at all for the last two days due to Dai and Nik staying with me. But in brief, we had a great international turnout at the Derby Memory Championship (a German, a Russian Norwegian and a Norwegian Norwegian) and an awful British turnout, a great competition, at least one world record (17 packs of cards in 30 minutes) and one non-competition world record attempt for the benefit of the TV crew who were only there on Saturday (see the result when the programme is broadcast!), and I'll tell you about it all at more length tomorrow.

Sorry, sorry

It seems that with all the fun filming today and everything (which I would really love to write about - possibly I'll break my rule and tell all the backstage secrets after all), I underestimated how much time I'd have to get my flat into the kind of state that two guests can sleep in tomorrow night. So I'm taking a two-minute break from a frenzied process of shovelling rubbish into the corners to clear a bit of space, in order to post this quick blogging instead of the lengthy and fictional entry I promised for tonight. Sorry about that.

Little girls from Sweden dream of silver-screen flirtation

As I've mentioned before, I'm being filmed extensively for the next three days. Some of the stuff we're doing sounds like fun, but this time round I won't talk about it that much, I'll leave it as a surprise for when the "Super Genius" documentary airs. Of course, that leaves me a little short of something to actually write about, but I'm well overdue for another outpouring of unusual fiction, so brace yourselves for another burst.

Funny money

At some point on my travels today (been up to Matlock, pitching our teaching-memory-skills-in-the-schools scheme) I've acquired a 1949 shilling coin passed off as a 10p piece. Quite nice condition, too, apart from a little scratch on one side that makes it look like George VI had a duelling scar on his cheek. They're being sold for two or three pounds on eBay, although whether anyone's buying them at that price is another matter, but I think I'll keep it, just in case I ever end up travelling back in time and need some money to finance my inaugural world memory championship several decades early.

I would love to know how this coin ended up coming to me in change - shillings haven't been legal tender for about 15 years now, so surely it can't have been passed around by mistake all this time? Maybe it's magic.

And speaking of taking the King's shilling, it's a great shame that Russell T Davies is leaving Doctor Who, but if he really had to go, Steven Moffat (who of course wrote Press Gang many years ago, thus making sense of that really quite brilliant "King's shilling" segue back there) is probably the best choice for a replacement. Hopefully it'll still be good and will still feature David Tennant in 2010 and beyond!

What did you do in the war, Daddy?

I had a dream last night that my father (still alive) had published his memoirs, and that they consisted mainly of entertaining anecdotes about his time as a soldier fighting in the Vietnam War. I worry about my brain, sometimes.

Discipline

I'm feeling quite optimistic about abstract images now. With any luck, and any practice, I'm aiming to get a reasonably high, Gunther-worrying kind of score maybe not at the Derby competition this weekend, but at the German, UK and World championships.

I'm not sure, all in all, how I'll get on at the Derby championship (assuming I'm able to compete rather than having to arbitrate, which still isn't certain). I'm not going to get much more chance to practice this next week - lots of documentary filming, a trip to Matlock to talk about schools memory demos, probably an unnecessary trip to Cambridge to return some clocks I've ended up with, maybe if I find a spare moment even some job-hunting. But I think I'm in half-decent form, and it'll be good practice to spend a whole weekend memorising - it's the long-lasting concentration I really need to work on. Assuming I get to compete, that is.

Censorship

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

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

Reality TV

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

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

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

Interesting demographic

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

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

Ewwwwww. Seriously, ewwwwww.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing

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

Boooooo

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

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

Doctor Doctor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody wants to play with me

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

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

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

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

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

Mapped into abstraction

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

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

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

The cake is a lie

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

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

Non-interview-related post

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

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

Drat!

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

I'm going to buy another one on eBay.