Weekend!

Snow! Possibly. Maybe I'll make a snowman out front and then throw snowballs at it. Or maybe I'll stay indoors where it's warm and watch the telly. Or play the ukulele. We'll see how the mood takes me.

Wiki wiki woo

I disapprove of Wikipedia. It's almost certainly a bad thing that a website so full of wild inaccuracies and outright lies should be the first port of call for anybody conducting research into anything. On a related note, I believe that editing one's own Wikipedia page is just about the worst thing anybody can do, ethically speaking. You have to be a terrible swollen-headed oaf to care what is written about you on a website like that.

Which brings me to the point of this blog. See, if somebody doesn't edit my Wikipedia page very soon indeed, I'm going to have to do it myself, and then I'll be consumed with shame and self-loathing. I also disapprove of asking people to edit my page, of course, so I'm not doing that tonight. I just want to say that it would be cool if someone made sure the world records list was up to date, complete and didn't include things that aren't world records held by me. It'd be great if somebody wrote a bit more in the body of the article about the TV shows I've been on, like the time I made a complete fool of myself on Blue Peter or the thing with the chimp. It would be extremely groovy if somebody realised that I didn't 'recently' quit my job (two and a half years out of date with that bit now), and that I was never working on a novel unless you count the NaNoWriMo. Similarly, if only somebody would remove the description of me as 'a writer' unless and until I actually write something, ever.

And wouldn't it be fantastic if somebody slipped in a 'fact' that's completely untrue, like for example that I won the hammer throw at the North Berwick Highland Games in 2003, and threw in a link to a website that looks at first glance that it might be corroborating evidence for that claim, just to see if it slips past the Wiki editors? I tell you, I'm just itching to do that myself, but I worry about the morality of the whole thing...

One point twenty-one gigawatts!

Well, you can't see that Back To The Future is on Sky and not watch it, can you? Even though it's getting alarmingly close to the point where I could travel thirty years back in time and hang out with my teenage self, which makes me worry that I'm never going to be the star of a teen movie. Heck, I'm even older than Michael J Fox was when he last played 17-year-old Marty!

Also, I really suck at doing things, just lately. Will someone please come round here and bully me into organising all the various events/get-togethers I'm supposed to be organising?

Another one to set the video for

Tuesday, 10th February, 10:35pm, BBC1 - "Make Me... Smart". Featuring that loveable World Memory Champion, whatsisname.

I can't promise it's any good, I haven't seen it yet, but hey, it's got me in it.

Also, apparently, this is the UK version, trimmed down to fit BBC1's timeslot (not a great timeslot, incidentally - don't they know I'm a major superstar who should be broadcast in primetime? Between EastEnders and Holby City, say?). There's also a longer, 'international' version that will be making its way around the world via BBC Worldwide, so truly devoted Pridmore-philes will have to track down both of them to add to the constantly-looped video playing on all four wall-sized screens in their Ben-Shrine.

Cycling in a winter wonderland

It's really great when it snows all day long like this! Even though this part of the country always gets much less snow than all the rest, it works out quite well today, because we got a reasonable amount, whereas the rest got too much. Even cycling to work through a snowstorm is quite fun, every once in a while. It's invigorating!

How do you do, do you do, the thing that you do?

Ace wondered, via a blog-comment, what exactly an accountant does. I must say, I'm a bit in the dark too. Of course, I do have that self-imposed ban on talking about my work on this blog (and I only violate it once a week or so at the most), but I'm not actually working as an accountant right now, I'm an analyst, which is an entirely different kettle of fish, so I'm quite at liberty to talk about it.

I do, however, firmly believe that accountants are unnecessary in this world. Their very existence rather clashes with my socialist principles. You might wonder why I choose to do it for a living, but basically, it's because I'm good at it and people give me money to do it, and my socialist principles aren't really what you'd call a deeply held belief system. I'm still a working class hero, though - look, I've got a blister on my thumb and everything.

I would like to come up with a snappy definition of accountants, such as Ambrose Bierce or Samuel Johnson might have come up with, along the lines of 'someone who tells a company how much money they have and then takes every penny in fees', or 'one whose entire working life is devoted to bending the facts in order to justify his employment' but I can't think of a good one.

I once had a whim and I had to obey it

Just every once in a while, if I've got money in my bank account and the whim takes me, I get into a mood where I buy things on impulse. I did that today, out in Nottingham - I was passing HMV and thought to myself 'I like browsing through the DVDs in HMV, but I never buy anything there. If I really want a particular DVD/video/whatever, I buy it on the internet or tape it off the telly, whichever is more convenient. And yet, if everybody did this, HMV would close down and I wouldn't be able to browse their DVDs any more. I'd better buy something. It'll be good for the economy.'

So I bought some of their cut-price DVDs - The Mitchell and Webb Look series one, Catterick, The Day Today, The Inbetweeners and the Doctor Who Lost In Time collection. The last of these wasn't reduced price, it was £15, but I've been meaning to get it for ages. And then in the Works bookshop I saw a book on playing the ukulele for absolute beginners. And then shortly afterwards I was passing the music shop and noticed that they had a cheap ukulele for sale. A little red one. So basically, I now own a ukulele. And I've spent the afternoon playing it. It's great - I can now play the ukulele part of 'Five Years Time' by Noah And The Whale (which is really, really, really easy to play, and I suspect their ukulele player also only had an afternoon of practice before they recorded it) and I'm starting to work on fingerpicking.

It's murder on the fingers, though - alternative titles I considered for this blog entry included "Played it till my fingers bled", "I've got blisters on my fingers!" and "Maybe get a blister on your thumb". The thumb-blister is the only one of those that has actually happened so far, but the fingers on my left hand are also rather sore.

The important question, though, is 'will calluses on my fingers impede my card-memorising technique?' Andi Bell learnt to play the guitar a few years ago and he's never won the world championship since. Perhaps it really isn't possible to be a Rock n Roll World Memory Champion!

Correspondence

I think I might have to spend the whole weekend writing to people. I've got to reply to a list of questions from the fact-checker who's proof-reading Josh's book (asking me about some things I've completely forgotten, naturally), reply to a few more interview questions from the BBC website guy who was here the other day (need to expound my 'filing cabinets' theory of memory in full detail), and reply to lots of emails from friends, fans and enemies (well, I haven't had any emails from enemies lately - perhaps they're not talking to me because they don't like me. Also, all my fans are my friends too, although possibly not all my friends are fans...)

Also, if anyone sees any business cards, bits of paper and such like fluttering around Beeston, could you give them back to me, please? They all fell out of my back pocket while I was cycling home from the supermarket tonight. I did manage to find all the credit/debit cards, luckily enough, but there's still some miscellaneous junk that's missing.

And also furthermore, I'm making a concerted effort to get every episode of Pocket Dragon Adventures on video, before Tiny Pop stops showing them and they disappear into obscurity again (actually, I think they're maybe going to release them all on DVD, but just in case they don't...) I've taken stock of all my old tapes and now I've got 70 of the 104 episodes. Maybe when I've got them all I'll somehow convert them to computerish files and 'torrent' them like some kind of genius hacker for the world to see. Long like Pocket Dragon Adventures!

The black sheep of the family

I made an alarming discovery today - it seems that Michael Heseltine's mother's maiden name was Eileen Pridmore! This could have all kinds of alarming consequences. What if he decides he's a long-lost cousin and invites himself round for tea? I have no idea what the likes of Michael Heseltine like to eat, and anyway my kettle's broken. And what if some journalist uses an unusual filing system in which he organises minor celebrities by their mothers' names, and then confuses the names Aileen and Eileen (which happens a lot), and asks Michael Heseltine for advice on how to remember where you put your car keys? My reputation would be ruined! Or what if the same journalist asks me for my comments on whatever Michael Heseltine achieved during his years in the halls of power (if anything)? I'd probably say something wrong and the government would collapse!

It's not like he's even got a hereditary peerage and thus gives me the fun of calculating how many people I'd have to assassinate to get myself a seat in the Lords.

It's hard work being memorable

High up on my to-do list is organising the Cambridge Memory Championship. It gets harder every year to come up with 'historical events', especially since we need 120 of them now. It's just typical of those memory competitors, insisting on raising the standards without a thought for us poor slobs who have to create the memorisation papers. It's very difficult to think of a whole lot of vague event descriptions, ideally two to five words, along the lines of 'peace treaty signed'. There are only so many things that can possibly happen, and I'd hate to repeat myself and use a description that I've used in previous years.

And then there's names and faces. It's a real chore finding pictures of people and then putting names to them. If anything, that's even more difficult than remembering their names in a competition (which, as everyone knows, I'm rubbish at).

And I've got to email people and pester them to come along and compete. Because all this work of creating things for people to memorise is much less worthwhile if nobody turns up to the competition. I'm way behind on keeping in touch with competitors, and it really is easy to forget about a memory competition if you don't get reminded...

It'll be memorable

Well, three hours of filming for the BBC News website, and hopefully it'll come out as something fun to watch. I'll let you know when it's online!

I should probably confess...

... that despite having bought a new hoover on Saturday, I haven't actually technically taken it out of the box yet, let alone used it to suck up some of the filth around this place. And the BBC are coming tomorrow. I might just leave the place dirty, so as to give the little snippet of BBC-News-website-magazine-feature a gritty edge.

In other news, those Natural Confectionery Company sweets you see advertised on telly? They're not very nice. Stick to unnatural confectionery if you want good sweeties.

It's the works Burns supper and I've tae address the haggis!

Hey, all you people out there in the blog-reading world, would you do me a favour? If I die (I'm not planning to die, but they tell me there's a chance of it happening at some point over the next hundred years), start having annual suppers on the anniversary of my birth, death, first World Boku Championship, whatever's most convenient. And turn it into some kind of national event somehow (create a wikipedia page that says Pridmore Night is the most important festival in Britain, that should do the trick). I think I'd make a good national icon.

Why does everything I own inevitably explode?

Had to buy a new vacuum cleaner today in order to keep my clean-this-pigsty-up-a-bit resolution. The old one started pouring smoke out of itself when I turned it on, and although I'm not one of those technological whizzes, I'm pretty sure that's a bad sign. I considered leaving it on to see whether it would either stop or go bang and destroy half the street, but decided to just go and splash out on a new one from Argos. It's good for the economy to buy new vacuum cleaners, I understand.

Real plans this time!

I was out of bed this morning in time for a few speed cards before going to work (it's official, my brain is four seconds slower in the early morning than in the afternoons) and now I'm all fired up to actually do some memory training this weekend. And also some house-cleaning, because the BBC News website are coming to film me on Tuesday. And I've also had an email today from Korean TV wanting to film me for a memory documentary. The whole fame and fortune bandwagon keeps on rolling! (On a very obscure kind of back road that few people are watching...)

Have you ever noticed?

That if you're typing an email to somebody called Jim, and your right hand accidentally slips one key to the left, you end up writing a sentence like "Hun, if I send you an amended file, can you include it in a new report?" Which completely changes the tone of the whole email.

Yes, I'm still superhuman

I'm actually getting tired of seeing "Superhuman: Genius" in the TV listings. It seems to have been playing constantly on ITV4 for the last few months, and now tonight it's on ITV1 again. I mean, it's nice, but can't ITV make some new documentaries? And couldn't they buy "The Mentalists" and subject that to the same round-the-clock showing? "The Mentalists" is all about the world of memory competitions, and it's the kind of thing that motivates people to take part themselves. "Superhuman: Genius" just motivates people to tell me I'm extremely clever if they see me in the street.

Ah well, at least it clashes with Celebrity Big Brother Eviction, so nobody's going to watch it...

Meerkat market

Since I've posted more than one blog entry criticising TV adverts that have no idea how to sell their product, I thought I really should praise comparethemarket.com, for their brilliant 'comparethemeerkat.com' ads. Now THAT's how to present a concept in a memorable way!

For the benefit of foreigners or non-TV-watchers, comparethemarket.com is a car insurance website, and their adverts consist of a meerkat explaining that his website, comparethemeerkat.com, has been getting a lot of hits by mistake. If you want to compare meerkats (size, hobbies and so on) go to his website, if you're looking to compare the market for car insurance quotes, check out theirs.

The best part of it is that they've really created a http://www.comparethemeerkat.com/ site! Someone's had a lot of fun making it, I can tell. If I wanted car insurance, I'd almost be tempted to use the comparethemarket.com website. Almost. I'd probably still just call Direct Line, to be honest. Their adverts are more convincing.

Suspicious

Yesterday I bought "The Suspicions of Mr Whicher", largely because I'd seen someone at work reading it, liked the title and then noticed it in the bookshop and decided to flick through it, rather than because I had any idea what it was about. Who needs fancy advertising techniques, anyway?

Luckily, it turned out to be brilliant - it's a detailed true account of an 1860 murder investigation, and what's best about it is the picture it gives of the very earliest days of police detectives. The developing vocabulary of detective fact and fiction is really fascinating, and the writer (Kate Summerscale) has a real knack for picking up on the little nuances of meaning in 150-year-old language. I'd recommend the book to anyone!

More family history

In the spirit of the genealogical research of last Tuesday, it seems only fair to write something on the subject of my grandmother too. My other grandmother, that is - not the one who starred in The Mentalists, wasn't born until 1920 and is still alive and well today, but the one who died when my dad was young and consequently doesn't get mentioned very much when I talk about my family. Her only fifteen minutes of fame, to the best of my knowledge, come in this 1948 article from a Sheffield newspaper:

"The parents were delighted, and none more than Mrs. S. Pridmore, of 72, Robey Street. She has ten children, nine boys and a girl. They are all members of St. Thomas's, and two of them are in the choir, but it was left to 17-month-old Georgie to represent them and give the daffodils to their mother."

And here's little Georgie himself, proving that aside from the moustache, my dad really did look exactly the same for his entire life!



And finally, here's Mrs. S. Pridmore on the 1911 census, back when she was still Katherine Millership and a middle child of one of those wonderful enormous Sheffield familes, rather than spending her entire life from the age of 19 to 45 churning out offspring of her own:



Let's preserve the memory of my long-dead Other Grandma! I'm sure she'd be just as big a hit with documentary-watchers if she was alive today!

Just maybe...

... I might be getting back into the memory mood. Really feeling like getting in some hard-core training in preparation for the Welsh Championship at the end of March. I might just spend tomorrow memorising a whole lot of numbers, cards and anything else that comes to hand!

Stupid Expedia

Not stupid working when I'm trying to book a stupid trip to stupid New York. Stupid letting me pick out all the stupid flight/hotel/other options and then not stupid letting me stupid book them.

Still, assuming it becomes possible to buy flights and things at some point before March 5th or thereabouts, I've decided I'm definitely going to non-stupid New York for the US Championship. Woohoo! It'll be fun to see the sights and the people and the giant monsters! Who wants to hang out with me while I'm there?

Ties

There are many aspects of this world that history books of the future will poke fun at and which make me deeply ashamed to be living in this time period. One of the more trivial but nonetheless annoying is the fact that I wear a tie to work. And an ironed shirt. I mean, really, it's the 21st century. Why is it still necessary to knot a decorative strip of cloth around your neck in order to look smart? Perhaps I should make a stand and go to work in my pyjamas. Or naked. I'm extremely cool and popular, after all - maybe it would start a new trend and I'd appear in those history books as an inspiration for change?

The illustrations would be hand-drawn and would make me look a lot better in the nude than I do in real life. History is written by the cool people.

Time flies when you're... working

I just realised today that I've now been working for Boots for six months! It really doesn't feel like it - sad to say, I really am having fun. This thought disturbs me so much that I can't think of anything appropriate to write about the semi-anniversary.

The good old days

I heard today that the 1911 census is available on the internet, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act and some bright spark noticing that it didn't become technically a law that you have to wait 100 years before releasing a census until 1920. And so, even though they make you pay money to look at it, I couldn't resist. Here's my granddad:

That's him at the bottom, Sidney Pridmore, age 10. Yes, my great-grandfather was born in the 1850s - we believe in big, big generation gaps in our family. Sid-Prid is rather an ugly rhyme, but then his parents had had twelve previous children (almost certainly most of them boys - females in our family tree are few and far between), so they were probably running short of names by then.

Funnily enough, if I'm remembering my family history properly, Granddad went on to have 13 children himself, three of whom died in infancy. I had no idea he was taking after his father. That's a weird family trend. And also, if Sid was the youngest of his Pridmore brood, does that make my dad the thirteenth child of a thirteenth child? And just how many magic powers does that grant me?

I really need to find out more about my family. Must get in touch with my cousin Sue, who actually knows about these things...

Office rituals

I'm vaguely irritated by the tradition of getting a 'secret' card for anyone in the office who has a birthday, gets married, has a baby, leaves the company, things like that. And particularly by the tradition of furtively passing the card around the office disguised by an old brown envelope and pretending it's some kind of tedious bureaucratic business. Every place I've ever worked does this, and I think it's just silly. It's not like the card-recipient ever doesn't know that a card is coming to them. Bah humbug, I say.

This doesn't mean I don't want a card next time I have a birthday, get married, have a baby or whatever. That'd be terrible! I hope nobody from work reads this...

The Cambridge Memory Championship!

Just a heads-up to let you all know that the Cambridge Memory Championship website, thanks to the usual great work by Grand Master of Memory James Ponder (sounds rather cool, doesn't it? I need to start using my GM title more in everyday conversation), is updated with everything you need to know about this year's competition.

Please do come to the championship! It's a lot of fun, it's designed to be beginner-friendly, and everyone is welcome! Also, it's free if it's your first competition!

I had plans for today

I had actually worked out a very specific programme of things to do today - I was going to clean the place up, do some memory training, all kinds of productive things. Maybe even pay my electic bill, since I've never got round to setting up a direct debit and haven't paid them any money since I moved in. My impression is that EDF haven't even noticed yet, but I think there's a fair chance that even a company as useless as them might start sending me letters soon.

Anyway, in the event, I woke up feeling lazy, took a long time finding a good reason not to stay in bed all day, and then noticed that "The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr T" was on Channel 5, so I just had to watch that, and then that was the whole morning gone, so I decided to spend the day relaxing and doing nothing instead, in preparation for a productive and successful day tomorrow.

But hey, isn't Dr T a wonderful film! The writing is hilarious and clever, the sets are amazing (some uncredited geniuses achieved the impossible and made three-dimensional versions of Dr Seuss designs!), the costumes are fantastic (I might try to make a Dr Terwilliker costume for the next fancy dress party I go to, and I really feel sorry for poor Peter Lind Hayes, who has to spend the entire film in ordinary-working-guy clothes when everybody else gets to dress up in the most awesome creations) and the acting (and singing, and dancing) from the four central actors is sensational! It's another one on my everybody-who-hasn't-seen-it-yet-needs-to-go-and-find-a-DVD-right-this-second list.

Yes, right this second. I don't care if it's 10pm and your local Zavvi store has been shut down by the administrators. Get out there!

Come let us stray our gladsome way and view the charms of nature

Look! Squirrels! A blog dedicated to pictures of red squirrels in Bavaria! It's great. I miss the squirrels who used to hang around my old flat in Derby - they had a regular route across the back yard which involved a section skittering quickly along a vertical wall to get to the roof of the shed in the next door garden. There don't seem to be any squirrels watchable from the windows of this house, although there are plenty of trees, big gardens and hiding-places. Maybe I'll leave some nuts lying around out the back and see what happens.

I'm in a bit of a nature-boy mood tonight, for some reason. I don't normally watch nature documentaries, but I saw an article earlier about a thing about cuckoos tonight, so I decided to watch it. And it was good stuff, too - it's always fun in a weird way to watch a tiny reed warbler feeding a massive screaming cuckoo chick three or four times its size.

2009 is your unlucky year!

This post has been edited because I just realised the Excel spreadsheet I used to work out the luckiness factors had a mistake in it!

It's true, we are now in what I like to call an Unlucky Year. Let me explain. The weirdness of the calendar means that every year has either one, two or three instances of a Friday The Thirteenth, and this year is one of the ones with three. 2006 and 2007 were Average Years (two Friday 13ths), but if we manage to get through the misfortunes of 2009, the following two years will be Lucky Years (just one Friday 13th)!

Unlucky Years don't happen very often. As any calendar-calculator knows, the days of the week run in 28-year sequences - if you were born on a Thursday, your 28th birthday will also be on a Thursday. If your third birthday is on a Saturday, your 31st birthday will be on a Saturday too. And, as a side note, during any 28-year cycle, each date will land on each day of the week exactly four times. So if you're one of those people who complain that your birthday is never on a weekend, you're lying.

In every 28-year cycle, there are 12 Lucky Years, 12 Average Years and just four Unlucky Years. The last Unlucky Year was 1998, the next will be 2012 (then 2015, then not until 2026). At one extremely boring point in the 28-year cycle, there are four consecutive Average Years - the next one is the dull period from 2017 to 2020 inclusive. The best run of luck you ever get is two Lucky Years in a row.

The three thirteenths to watch out for this year will be in February, March and November, as is the case in three of the four Unlucky Years of the cycle. The other is an Unlucky Leap Year, and has Friday 13ths in January, April and July.

Speaking of leap years, the year 2100 will not be a leap year, which will throw the 28-year sequence out. The upshot of this is that there will be some 28-year periods overlapping the turn of the century which have five or even six Unlucky Years in them! I'm going to spend the entire period from 2078 to 2099 hiding under my bed!

I hope you've enjoyed this fascinating blog entry. If you didn't, make sure to avoid this blog on July 6th, when I and all Excel users around the world will be celebrating Day 40000!

With a krypton factor of 999!

I missed the relaunch of The Krypton Factor at the weekend, but I caught the repeat tonight (didn't go to the football, sounds like it was a good game, though. Yay Derby!) and it was fantastic!

I always loved KF in the old days, and it was pleasing to see that the new series is exactly the same (except, sadly, without the aeroplane-simulator round). I would love to be a competitor! The obstacle course would literally kill me, of course, but the rest of it would be fun.

Adverts of which I disapprove

I can't believe they're STILL showing that "Colour Catcher" advert with "the proof's on the sheet!" stupidity. I complained about it on my blog MONTHS ago! And they still haven't taken it off the air!

And now there's an advert for some company or other that's changing its name, in which a number of actors and musicians observe that their stage names are better than their real names. Ringo Starr interacts with footage of screaming Beatle fans and asks "Would any of this have happened to me if I was still Richard Starkey?"

Well, yes, Ringo, it would. If you remember, you adopted the stage-name in order to become the drummer for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, who all had silly names, and then your mates in another band asked you to start playing with them instead, and it all got quite big from there. I'm almost certain that the exact same amount of fame and adulation would have come your way if you were still Richard Starkey.

Incidentally, I can't remember what company this advert's for. Like many adverts, it has no idea about how to make something memorable. The new and old names of the company are just flashed up on screen right at the end, entirely disconnected from the preceding celebrity-fest. They must have spent a fortune on the advert, and it doesn't do its job at all. I ask you.

Also, what's with those Renault adverts that operate from the starting point that nobody wants to buy a Renault, and then tries to convince you that the new one is actually quite cool, so maybe you should reconsider your prejudices. I thought Renaults were cool all along! Weren't they? What was wrong with Nicole and Papa? Now that was a good advertising campaign.

Also, and this isn't an advert I'm complaining about, I have a strange urge to go and see Derby play Man Utd in the league cup semi-final first leg tomorrow night. I don't know why, I never once went to see Derby play, even when I was living there and they were in the premier league and playing Man Utd all the time (well, twice in a year, anyway). Still, I feel like going to see this one now. Anyone want to come with me?

Doctor what?

I suppose, seeing as I go on about Doctor Who all the time on this blog, I should jump to conclusions about the new star actor without knowing anything about him or the future plans for the series. I've seen Matt Smith in The Ruby In The Smoke and The Shadow In The North - or at least, I must have seen him in those, since I watched them, and thought they were quite good. And Jim is a great character in the books, so it's a bit disturbing that I don't remember a single thing about Matt Smith's performance. Still, maybe he'll be a better match for the Doctor. There's nothing wrong with having a very young actor playing the part (although he'll be the first younger-than-me Doctor, which is alarming), but they'll need a hairstyle and costume that are timeless rather than trendy for it to work.

That's enough anticipation, though, we're not going to see him until 2010, and by that point we'll all be living on the moon and driving space cars.

Dragon's Claws!

I was thrilled to discover yesterday that the classic comic series Dragon's Claws is now available in graphic novel format. Buy it on Amazon here!

Or, if you need further persuasion, hear the story of a misspent youth first. Picture the scene, it's summer 1988, I'm eleven-going-on-twelve and my favourite weekly reading matter is the Transformers comic, with its thrilling and convoluted tales of time-travelling giant robots (interspersed with American-written, less thrilling and convoluted non-time-travelling stories), which around this point starts to run trailers on its editorial page for a brand new upcoming comic - Dragon's Teeth, written by Simon Furman and drawn by Geoff Senior and involving some kind of fighting in the distant future.

I don't think these editorials managed to give me any kind of impression of what this comic was going to be about, and the names of the creators didn't really intrigue me - at that point, I never paid attention to the identities of the writers and artists, and I really hadn't noticed that all the Transformers stories I really loved were written by Simon Furman, nor that all the ones drawn by a competent artist were drawn by Geoff Senior. But the plugging continued, and just before the all-new comic was due to hit the shelves, that week's Transformers comic gave it one final push, complete with full-page advert and a quick mention that it was now going to be called "Dragon's Claws" instead:

Forgive the crumpled and stained page, it comes from my own non-mint-condition comic collection. And notice that the change of name was so last-minute that the caption of panel two still refers to "the Teeth" instead of "the Claws". Apparently they'd found out at the last second that "Dragon's Teeth" was already the registered-trademark name of an obscure American comic.

All of which, as I said, didn't excite me in any big way, but when I saw Dragon's Claws #1 in W H Smith's, I decided to check it out, and I loved it from the start. Violence and destruction in the year 8162! Colourful costumes and fascinating characters! And, which I didn't expect, once you got past the action and adventure, there was a lot of intelligent and thought-provoking stuff. Debates about ethics, evil consipracies, dark secrets... I was hooked all the way through. I pestered my parents to buy me a subscription to it, and would eagerly read the new issue when it arrived, occasionally annoying my brother, who of course hadn't had a chance to see it yet, with outbursts like "Stenson's dead!"

Actually, that's sort of a spoiler for anyone who hasn't read it yet, so if you're going to buy it, forget you read that last sentence. Anyway, sadly, the series didn't last long, just ten monthly issues before it was cancelled. It just wasn't popular enough, which was the fault of the format more than anything to do with the stories it told; it was an attempt by Marvel UK to launch a range of American style comics - small size, twenty pages monthly, just one story in a comic - to an audience of British youth used to big weekly comics with four or five six-page stories in them. But it was something special, as everybody who read it at the time remembers, and I hope new people discover it now it's in the book shops.

I read through my old collection today, and it's still as good as I remember. But to get the full effect, you shouldn't read it all at once. Buy the book and read one chapter every month, spending the intervening time re-reading, picking up on the little details, and wondering what's going to happen next.

The book also has a great foreword by Simon Furman, and an afterword by Rich Johnston in which he rightly says that it's a great shame Dragon's Claws came out before the days of the internet, because otherwise the web would be full of fan fictions now. He also urges everyone to write their own Claws #11, and I second that! Go and buy the book now, and relive my childhood!

Cambridge Memory Championship 2009

The fourth Cambridge Memory Championship (gosh, has it really been so long since I started doing this?) will happen on Sunday May 3rd, in the delightful surroundings of Trinity College, Cambridge. Please come along! Memorise things and have fun! If you want any further details, please ask! I mean, I don't really know any further details yet, but I'll make something up.

Also, I've just watched both pilots of the US version of Red Dwarf on YouTube (I love YouTube), and they're really not anywhere near as bad as everyone says they are. It might have been a fun series. Craig Bierko especially is very likeable as Lister, it's a shame he didn't get the chance to play the character some more. What's he doing these days? Hmm, Broadway plays, it seems. And according to Wikipedia, he was offered the part of Chandler on Friends but turned it down. That's probably not true, but it does make him sound like a guy who has no luck with TV shows. If I make one, I'll offer him a part in it.

Tomorrow, I will be talking about Dragon's Teeth.

I'm a master criminal!

I've just realised something tonight. I took nine speed cards timers out to Bahrain with me for the world championship (I own a lot of them myself and lend them out to supplement the WMSC's supply at big events) and brought ten back with me. Nobody's complained, so perhaps they just called the police and left it at that.

Rissolutions

I understand it's the done thing to resolve to do things at this time of year. So here's what I resolve. If I haven't done these things within the next twelve months, throw things at me. Heavy things. But no sharp edges.

1) Win the World Memory Championship again. I'm rather lacking in dedication right now, although I have done a little bit of practice today, despite my strategy of not being pleased with my winning performance last year. I really need to make an effort to win two years in a row, because that really would be a cool achievement. Clemens did it, and Andi, and I'm pretty sure I'm better than them.

2) Encourage the likes of Clemens and Andi to compete and try to win the World Memory Championship by taunting them like in the paragraph above, so as to make the whole thing more fun and challenging.

3) Break some world records at the World Championship. That was embarrassing and annoying this year.

4) Organise at least one big, successful memory competition (see tomorrow's blog for details of the Cambridge Memory Championship 2009) and get lots of new people competing in memory competitions.

5) Outside the world of memory competitions, win an othello tournament. I'm getting fed up with never having done that. I'm a wildly inconsistent player, so I'm sure at some point I'll have one of those days where I beat everyone.

I would resolve to do things not related to mind sports competitions, but frankly, five resolutions is more than enough. Sheesh, what do you want, perfection?

Numismatology!

What better subject to talk about on New Year's Eve than my coin collection? I think I mentioned it on here a little while ago - I own a "collection" of 14 interesting coins that I've had since I was little and recently rediscovered among all my old junk while in the process of moving house. Most of the coins were sent to me by some relative, probably Auntie Cath, perhaps with the intention of starting me off on a fascinating hobby or perhaps because she had a house full of old coins and had run out of other presents to send to her numerous nephews.

Anyway, last night there was a Simpsons episode on Sky involving a coin collection (they really have run out of interesting plots for the Simpsons, haven't they?) and it inspired me to wonder 'did they make any coins with Edward VIII on them?' And since when I get a thought like that I can't sleep or do anything else until it's resolved to my satisfaction, I turned to the internet to find out. Luckily, I quickly came across this excellent website that gave me a quick and interesting answer - they did, but they were waiting for the coronation to issue them, so they never came into circulation - and motivated me to do what I'd been meaning to do for at least twenty-something years, and find out for certain whether that 1806 penny, the oldest coin in the collection, was actually a penny or in fact a halfpenny. Weirdly, coins in those days all look the same and don't say on them how much they're worth. I would think this would have been confusing. Still, it turns out that mine is a penny, like I've been saying it was all along, which is nice.

Here are the coins, scanned for your fascination:

Left to right, top to bottom:

1966 sixpence - haha, all the sixes. I think this one wasn't part of the "collection" I was originally sent, but was one of the old coins my dad had around the house. They were mostly old pennies, but there was the occasional interesting one, like this. Young-looking Queen Elizabeth II on either the obverse or reverse, I can never remember which is which.

1920 silver threepenny - this is a rather cool one. George V on the back, and I always think a beard looks good on a king. William should grow one, it'd make him look much cooler. Charles is a lost cause, even if he does end up becoming king in the end. Anyway, I remember my dad also having one of the big twelve-sided threepences, but I never saw fit to add that to the collection. There's an old Oor Wullie comic strip where he thinks he's found a half-crown but it turns out to be a silver threepenny (worth a tenth of a half-crown) under a magnifying-glass - that's the kind of plotline that you just can't do with modern coins.

1806 penny - as mentioned above. George III, looking fat.

1882 half penny - added to the collection from my dad's old pile of coins because it had gone a really weird green colour. I'd love to know what this coin has been soaked in at some point in the past. You can just about make out Queen Victoria.

1950 farthing - George VI on one side, a cute little wren on the other. Farthings were cool. By 1950, what with post-war inflation, they weren't being used much any more, but they kept minting the things until 1956, apparently. Useful fact learned from that website - until 1949, coins had 'IND IMP' after the 'FID DEF' bit, but then there was that whole Indian independence thing so they had to change it.

1868 third-farthing - Worth a twelfth of an old penny, and a really titchy little thing. That website isn't clear on whether they were ever in common use in Britain itself, but they were introduced for Malta, which used British currency but had previously had coins worth such a tiny amount.

1852 quarter-farthing - Probably the tiniest coin in the universe, and apparently only used in Ceylon, where the cost of living was REALLY cheap. I think this is an extremely groovy coin to have.

1977 crown - This one was a special issue for Elizabeth II's silver jubilee, and it's something that's belonged to me since I was a tiny little baby. Awwww.

1975 decimal half penny - I remember when these were still legal tender. And when things were cheap enough that you could actually need a half penny. I'm old.

1972 crown - Elizabeth and Philip's 25th wedding anniversary. Don't remember where this one came from.

1985 five pfennigs (Germany) - I've got a few obsolete European coins too. It's good to remember those days before the euro. No king or queen on this one. Bring back the Kaiser, that's what I say.

1980 fifty pesetas (Spain) - A commemorative World Cup 1982 coin, minted two years before the World Cup. They'd have felt really stupid if the World Cup had been cancelled for some reason.

1967 five cent (Holland) - I know nothing at all about Queen Juliana. I should find out what she was all about.

1885 ten centimes (France) - I should try to find some more modern francs and centimes, to remind me of those school trips to France back in the late eighties. Nineteen-eighties, that is. I'm not THAT old.

So yay, groovy coins! I'm almost fascinated enough by the aforementioned website to start collecting the things seriously, but collecting anything nowadays is just a matter of typing into the internet what you want and buying it. Which is no fun at all. I suppose I could get a metal detector and only collect coins I dig up for myself, but I think I'd probably be better off just giving away my collection to some bright-eyed, less jaded young budding numismatologist. Do any young people read this blog? If you do, drop me a line and I'll give you some coins!

Concerned about my kettle

My kettle seems to be malfunctioning in an alarming kind of way. Two times now I've turned it on and left the kitchen, then come back at the sound of a loud splash to find that it's somehow flung boiling water in vast quantities all over the kitchen surface.

I'm mystified as to how it's doing this. It's a normal upright jug kettle, with no holes in it except at the top, it wasn't more than half full to start with, and I don't see how it could have ejected half of the water that was in it while remaining upright. It seems to defy all the laws of nature and makes me worried that it's come alive and is angry with me for some reason. Possibly because I don't drink tea or coffee and seldom have reason to boil a kettle. I was thinking of turning it on and watching it to see exactly what's happening, but it might be an even worse explosion next time and would leave me looking like Father Bigley. Plus there's the fact that watched kettles never boil, so I'd be standing in the kitchen for the rest of eternity waiting for something to happen. And I've got to work tomorrow.

Work, sort of

Half of my department are on holiday, and the office is dead quiet for the bit-between-Christmas-and-New-Year. Which is annoying, because I've got quite a lot to do, and I can never work when I'm on my own in a quiet office. For some reason, my productivity is much higher when there's somebody else there nattering away for me to ignore. If I'm sitting in silence, my mind wanders and I find myself drawing pretty colourful pictures in Excel. Someone come into the office with me tomorrow and sit nearby, talking about the weather, so I can get some work done!

Horror of the Cheque Guarantee Card

"Flaming Nora!" Philip suddenly yelled, flinging his dinner plate across the bathroom and watching as it shattered in the washbasin.

"Is there a problem?" Samantha asked, perceptively. "Dinner too hot? Unusual choice of dining location causing distress? Sudden memory of past events causing alarming realisation? Existential angst of a non-specific nature?"

"The third one," Philip said, grimly. "And also the other three. Spaghetti was so hot it had melted into a bubbling pool of goo, sitting on the toilet to eat is uncomfortable and disturbing and the universe is cruel and overwhelming. But the main thing is what happened earlier this morning. Remember when I asked Cecil to return my library books while he was out in town?"

"No," said Samantha. "Did that happen?"

"I videoed it," Philip said, standing up and dragging Samantha by the hair into the living room. "I video everything now, because you never remember anything I've done. Watch this."

Philip put a tape into the VCR and pressed play. The screen showed Cecil sitting on the living room floor, cutting his toenails, and Samantha lying in bed reading a book. Philip then emerged from behind the camera. "Right, that's recording," he muttered. "Now if I have any reason to reference this conversation to you in future, Samantha, I'll have proof that it happened."

Samantha looked up from her book and said "I'll remember. I'm reading a book about how to have a good memory. It's by Ben Pridemore. Or Bridmore. Or something."

"Hmm," Philip said. "Anyway, Cecil, you're going into town today, aren't you? Good. Return my library books, would you? Here's my library card and here's fifty pounds to say thank you."

"Cheers," said Cecil, taking the card, the banknote and his leave, without even waiting to put his shoes on.

"You see!" Philip enthused. Not the Philip on the screen, who was pulling funny faces into the camera for his own amusement, we're talking about the Philip who just came out of the bathroom and played this tape for Samantha. He continued "Did you notice?"

"That Cecil didn't take your library books when he left the house?" Samantha said. "Yes, that was strange."

"No, I leave my library books on the front lawn," said Philip. "It was the card! That card I gave Cecil wasn't my library card! I took the wrong card out of my pocket! Cecil's got my cheque guarantee card!"

"He's got your what?" asked Samantha, scratching her head.

"You know, my cheque guarantee card," Philip repeated, unhelpfully. Samantha punched his face until he explained further. "It's the early nineteen-eighties, and the normal means of paying for goods and services is by means of a cheque, presented to the cashier accompanied by a plastic guarantee card. The cashier then copies the number of the card onto the back of the cheque and thus makes it legally binding or non-refundable or something."

"Oh," said Samantha. "I thought it was the year 2008."

"Ho ho," Philip laughed. "I think you've been reading too much science fiction set in the year 2008, Samantha. No, it's about 1983, I think. Give or take. Margaret Thatcher, Dexy's Midnight Runners, radios made of wood, all that kind of thing. Now we'd better chase after Cecil before he takes over the world!"

He made a packed lunch, a gesture for Samantha to follow him, his exit and his way to his car, while Samantha followed behind, querying "What? Takes over the world? I thought the card only enabled him to guarantee cheques in your name, with your signature, to a maximum value of fifty pounds. And also, did libraries use plastic cards in 1983?"

"Some did, I think," Philip mused, starting the car and driving off at top speed. "I mean, some do. We live in a major metropolis, let's say Nottingham, with a big library that is experimenting with a new computer database system and barcode reader. It's primitive, granted, but it's a major step up from the old paper-based records. Admittedly they probably don't need to scan the borrower's card if he's only returning books, but I forgot that in the heat of the moment."

"Right," said Samantha, fiddling with the car radio. "But what about the taking over the world thing? And if it's 1983, shouldn't this car have ashtrays in the doors?"

"What are you, a historian? Just shut up and wind down the passenger-side window using the time-period-accurate non-electric handle, will you? I think I see Cecil," commanded Philip.

"Noticed your mistake?" Cecil laughed, running alongside the car as it sped down the motorway at sixty miles an hour. "Too late! I've already taken over the world, Philip, and granted myself the ability to run at up to sixty-three miles an hour! And all thanks to your cheque guarantee card!"

"Only sixty-three?" Samantha gasped. "Then there's still a chance! Accelerate, Philip! If you can drive faster than Cecil can run, everything will be okay again!"

"There's no need to state the obvious, Samantha," chided Philip. "But we've got a problem. We're driving an Opel Kadett with numerous mechanical defects, similar to the one that George Pridmore drives around in right now in 1983, and I'm not sure it can get much faster than sixty-one mph!"

"Try pressing the accelerator!" Samantha urged. "And not the brake! Put it into the highest gear available, fourth I suppose! Sound the horn! Turn off the radio so that the slight vibrations caused by the jarring music of Culture Club don't slow the car down!"

"Good ideas," Philip said, doing all those things. The car sped up slightly, reaching a speed that, as best Philip could tell from the old-fashioned and inaccurate speedometer, was in the region of 62.9375mph. "No good!" he bellowed rather more loudly than was necessary, considering that Samantha was sitting right next to him and the radio was off. "We can't quite outrun Cecil and the car will explode if we keep pushing it so hard!"

"Then all is lost! Woe!" exclaimed Samantha, melodramatically. And indeed, all seemed to be lost, but just as the car was about to explode and shower the M1 Northbound with shreds of tacky orange metal debris, Cecil stumbled over a snail and fell flat on his face.

"Hooray!" Philip and Samantha chorused, bringing the car to a stop in front of him and getting out to see if Cecil was alright. Cars and lorries honked their horns and swerved to avoid them as they wandered cheerfully across the carriageway and helped Cecil to his feet.

"Ah well," Cecil mused philosophically. "Ruling the world was fun while it lasted. Here's your cheque guarantee card back. I returned your library books, but then the library closed down due to computer failure. That's 1983 for you!"

"Ha ha!" they all said.

Notoriety

It's a terrible thing to confess, but I would quite like to be on Celebrity Big Brother. I've never watched it, nor Normal Big Brother, and I only have the vaguest idea what goes on there, but I quite like the idea of being on a show for people desperate to stimulate a flagging or non-existent showbiz career. I bet they'd be interesting to talk to. I really do need to get an agent. Maybe that can be a new year's resolution too?

The longest possible time until more Christmas

Still, at least it's still Boxing Day. That's nearly as good. And also, last night's Doctor Who was freaking brilliant! God, next Christmas is going to comparatively suck without David Tennant to enliven the evening! Unless the new Doctor is even better, but I don't think that's going to be possible. Hey, maybe he's not leaving after all, and it's just yet another tease on the part of the creators! That'd be cool.

I think I've been watching too many American TV shows over the Christmas holiday, I seem to be using no end of yankee slang tonight. I'll stop it now. Anyway, maybe it's time I made some new year resolutions and posted them in my blog? Any suggestions would be welcome!

Memorising the future

Well, it's nearly the end of 2008, so let's look ahead to the memory competitions we'll all be enjoying in 2009. The memorysports.info website seems not to be working right now, so I'll be doing this from memory and occasional guesswork, but I think the calendar looks something like this:

March 7 - US Memory Championship, New York, 1-day TV-friendly format, only open to US residents but still fun to go along and spectate. I'm still thinking that I might go, but then I'm also thinking about jetting off to Las Vegas for Christmas because I got an email today recommending the Christmas Day menu in the buffet. I always get this kind of impulse at this time of year, it'll pass.

March 28 - Welsh Memory Championship, Cardiff?, 1-day National Standard format. Should be fun, run by Dai, whose enthusiasm is at times scary and who is sure to put in a huge effort into making it a great event. I'm hoping to see a big turnout to start the 'real' memory championship season! A great way to find out whether you're still in form after the winter break!

April... 9? I really need that website. - French Memory Championship, Maisons-Laffitte, 1-day National Standard format. After putting in such a terrible format at the first championship (which, for publicity-related technical reasons, doesn't count as a real French Memory Championship, to the organisers at least. This one in April is officially the First French Memory Championship, last I heard), I really have to go along to this and try to do something special. It'd be good to see it give memory competitions a real kick-start in France, too. Hoping for lots of new French and international competitors!

May? Maybe. - Cambridge Memory Championship? Cambridge? 1-day National Standard format? Okay, latest buzz is that the Cambridge MSO, on which I've piggybacked a memory competition for the last three years, probably won't happen in 2009. That leaves me without a cheap and available venue to host a competition. I might try to get a Beeston Memory Championship going, maybe seeing what my kind and generous employers can offer me by way of borrowing a room or chipping in with a bit of prize money. We'll just have to see.

May or June or never - North German and South German Memory Championships, somewhere in the north/south of Germany, half-day Regional Standard format. One or both of these events might well happen next year, and I must go along to one of them, one of these days. It's the only opportunity to try the 'poem' discipline these days!

July, probably - German Memory Championship, somewhere in Germany, hopefully Tuttlingen again because I know how to get there and it's a nice venue, 2-day International Standard format. I'm still annoyed that I had to miss this year's, and I'm definitely going to the one in 2009. It's the biggest non-world-championship event of the year, and will quite possibly get a bigger turnout of the best competitors than the WMC itself. It's very good preparation for the WMC, even if there's a four-month gap this time.

August 15-16 - UK Memory Championship, Simpson's-in-the-Strand, London, 1-day National Standard format (split over two mornings because they're sharing a venue with that big chess championship again). This year's was a big success, hopefully next year's will be even better! Yes, they're still having the prizegiving dinner at an expensive restaurant more than 24 hours after the competition finishes, which I would have thought would deter a big international turnout, but judging by this year's event I don't know anything, so I'll stop whining. I've just realised that I've now won the UK Championship two years in a row, and it would be cool to win it more consecutive times than Gunther won the German Championship, just for the sake of the history books, so that's my aim now.

November 11-14, World Memory Championship, somewhere in Bahrain, 3-day World Standard format. The big one, and still a long, long way away from where any of the competitors live (although I've been emailing a new guy in Oman who's all in favour of the location), but I think the memory world is getting used to it by now. And to be fair, it's a long journey for the European and Chinese contingents alike, so that's probably a good thing. And this year's did go very well, so I think we can hope for another great event with hopefully a big turnout again. I'll be there, about 80% probably. 95% if I win another free trip. :)

I've started using emoticons lately. I don't like it, but I find it's necessary to stop people taking me too seriously. ^.^

That's my favourite: ^.^

According to the official World Championship website, by the way, "Registrations are now being accepted. However this year to assist the the smooth organisation of the evenr, and to ensure the number of competitors expected is accurate, no registration will be deemed to have been confirmed until the registration fee of UK£50 has been received by the WMSC"

I did get the impression that people weren't happy with my entirely accurate prediction that the actual number of competitors would be roughly half the list of registered competitors, and that the boasts that this year's championship would have the most competitors ever would turn out to be wrong. I'll refrain from saying anything like that this time round. My new year's resolution is going to be to stop jeering at these people who annually give me money and plaudits for no good reason.

So that's 2009! There will be championships in places like Australia, Poland, Norway, China, Japan and such like too, but I don't know where or when and I very probably won't be able to go to them. Having a job is great because it gives me the money to travel the world, but bad because it doesn't give me enough time off to spend the whole year travelling. It's a catch-22 kind of thing.

Another new year's resolution is to read Catch 22 and start applying that expression in more informed ways.

And another one is to start memory training again. I haven't really done any to speak of since the world championship, and that's probably bad.

New York, New York?

Hmm, should I go to the US Memory Championship in March? Quite a few people I know are going to be there, and it was fun watching the proceedings a couple of years ago, and it would be extremely cool to visit New York again. Granted, it's not quite as cool as the New York in Lincolnshire, but it is easier to get to by public transport.

Any Americans out there want me to visit them?

I need to go to Derby more often

It's the place where all my fans live! In the space of about twenty minutes I had three people ask me if I was the one from that programme - two of them in fact had seen me on multiple different shows! And five minutes after this fan mobbing, I passed another man who whispered much too loudly to the woman he was with "That's him who was on the telly that time."

For the benefit of anyone who's reading this, I do much prefer it when people come up and say hello to me, rather than pointing and whispering. I get paranoid, you see. Especially when I'm shopping - whenever I hear a tannoy announcement saying something like "Staff announcement, could Sarah come to till seven please", I automatically assume that it's the employees' secret code for "Hey, look at that fat, bald, big-nosed man over there! Doesn't he look stupid! And he's reading the comics even though he clearly doesn't have any children of his own!" I assume that the staff at every shop have a wide range of millions of such codes ready for use, and that every single one of them relates to laughing at me.

So really, don't point and whisper if you see me. It's not good for my mental state.

As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted

What happened was, my laptop stopped working. It'd been playing up for some time, but then it took things to a new level, and the keyboard stopped working properly. I tried all the things I could think of - deleting and reinstalling the drivers, shouting at it, hitting it, you know the kind of thing, but that only seemed to make it worse, and it wouldn't even turn on. At this point I decided that since it's Christmas, and Christmas is about buying oneself expensive presents, I would get myself a new laptop. So I did, in the fun of late-night shopping in Derby. However, the new laptop turned out not to work properly either, so then I had to take it back the next night for a replacement. However, NOW, I'm finally back on the internet and ready to think about perhaps buying things for other people.

Incidentally, I've still got my reliable old desktop, getting on for its tenth birthday, but it hasn't got the right kind of socket for my internet cable. Somewhere I've got a dongly thing for converting the modern-style cable into a USB connection, but I'm damned if I know where it is since I moved. I'm sure it'll turn up some day, possibly in a museum.

Anyway, now I'm at liberty to gripe about modern times to an uninterested audience, while I was shopping I heard (in what is admittedly a refreshing change from the usual Christmas songs, much as I love them) the cover of "Run" by someone who was on Pop Idol or something, which I'd heard about before but never heard sung. I hadn't actually realised it was that song - I quite like it, and when I heard someone say "Run", I thought to myself 'oh yeah, I think I like that one, what does it go like?', but it's only now that I've put the thoughts together and formed bigoted opinions.

Really, that is so very not a song for the likes of this Pop Idol woman, whoever she is (I forget the name. Possibly Leona Lewis). That's a real song, it's the kind of song you don't sing unless you've written it yourself and belong to a moody, scruffy band who play guitar quite badly but write good enough songs that it doesn't matter and who have a cult following. Pop Idol women (come to think of it, Leona Lewis, who may or may not be the singer I'm complaining about, might have been off The X-Factor. I only know her name because I remember one of those music channels being rude about her attempts to pass herself off as a real singer) should do covers of chirpy seventies songs that everybody's forgotten, not of recent cool songs that real people like. It's an outrage, I tells ya. Actually, the cover isn't all that bad - the woman's not a very good singer, but it's a good enough song that any version of it is listenable-to. But it's the principle of the thing.

Forgive the brief posts just lately

Lots of things getting in the way of regular blogging. Most recently, my laptop died. I'll tell the full story some time when it's not bedtime. Please, keep reading! I'll start blogging properly again tomorrow!

Two days of stacking shelves...

... really makes your feet hurt. Not that I was using my feet to stack shelves, of course. That would be silly. Although it would have been fun to watch. No, I meant that spending my working day standing up comes as a bit of a shock to the system when you're used to sitting in a comfy office chair all day. Still, I'm back home now, and it's been a fun trip. Although my flat is c-c-c-cold, because I turned the heating off before I went away. Should've left it on the timer, but never mind, it'll warm up soon. Meanwhile, I'm going to go and snuggle up with a hot water bottle.

They knocked down the Regal!

The old Regal cinema in Boston actually stopped being a cinema years ago, and became a nightclub which then closed down. But that was no reason to demolish it! It was great when it was a cinema. I disapprove of change.

I'm rubbish at being a celebrity

I had a call just before leaving the house tonight to catch the train down to Boston. It was that BBC News website guy, who I'd forgotten had arranged to come and film me on Wednesday. So now I've had to postpone that until next year. I really do need to make more of an effort at publicising memory sports, like I promised I would. Maybe I should start sending out hundreds of press releases, explaining at great length that I'm the world's greatest genius, like a couple of other people I could mention...

Okay, I remembered, and it was pants

That thing I was meaning to blog about: I moved my bed the other day and found two pairs of pants and four socks that had fallen down the back of the radiator in the days of the previous occupant. This is great! It delays the time when I'll have to buy new underwear by at least another couple of years! I suppose, if I was strictly honest, I should track down the guy who used to live here and send them on to him, but then it's possible that they're not his, and they've been down the back of the radiator for decades. They do have a sort of seventies feel to them.

Also, I'm going to Boston tomorrow night for a couple of days. More of that 'get the head office workers out into real stores every now and then' thing that I did a few months ago, and I thought it might be a good excuse to check out the old town and see what's happening there these days. Probably nothing, but you never know. There's probably Christmas decorations. So I'll be staying in the only nice hotel in Boston, the White Hart, and they told me they've got internet access, so your daily blogging service should be uninterrupted. But you never know.

What was I going to blog about?

There's been something in my head that I've been meaning to mention for ages, and at odd moments I think to myself "I must blog about that tonight," but then by the time I sit down in the evening to do it, it's gone. It won't be anything important, it'll be an observation that coke is better than pepsi, or vice versa, so don't expect wonders, but hopefully it'll come back to me soon.

Meanwhile, I notice that the UK Snooker Championship is taking place at the Telford International Centre. Now, don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against Telford, I thought it was great when their football team got to the quarter-finals of the FA Cup back in nineteen-eighty-whateveritwas, but I don't think a town should claim to have an International Centre unless it's a place that someone outside Britain (or even someone outside Shropshire) has ever heard of. But that's just me being nasty for no reason.

Local Hero

I've been meaning to mention for a while that that interview with me has now appeared in the Beeston Express and been posted on the internet for the world to see. It's probably worth making it clear that I didn't actually claim that the reason I didn't win the world championship for the last three years is that I didn't take part, nor did I neglect to mention (as I always do when I end up telling that pi story) that I never recited it and would probably have only made a mess of it if I'd tried, and have forgotten the whole thing now anyway. Still, Grandma got a namecheck, which is the important thing!

Rain, sleet and snow

Few of these things seem to fall on me while I'm cycling to and from work. I've been with Boots for five months now (doesn't time fly?) and I've only had a couple of light showers on the way in, in all that time. Which is good, since I don't own any waterproofs, so if I get wet on the way to work I basically end up staying wet. Perhaps somebody will buy me some for Christmas. And some new work trousers. I'm reduced to wearing the ones with small and inconspicuous holes in the legs but which at least zip up properly.

Alternatively, I could stop being a dishevelled old tramp, start acting like a comfortably-well-off financial analyst and buy myself some decent clothes. I'll check out the charity shops at the weekend.

How to hold a successful conference

The whole memory performance went very well, except for one little thing. The little thing in question was the zip on my trousers, which seems to have lost the ability to stay closed. I didn't notice this problem until after I'd stood up in front of sixty people and memorised a pack of cards, so I have no idea exactly what kind of display I put on for them. Nobody mentioned seeing anything out of the ordinary, but perhaps they were all being polite. I did have to spend the rest of the day discreetly adjusting myself at regular intervals. This will teach me not to buy cheap work trousers. Or, possibly, not to buy 34-inch waists when I know perfectly well I can't fit into them any more.

Anyway, this reminds me of my theory of how to organise a good conference/course/official gathering of any kind. I've noticed over the years that there is always a set pattern when the event takes a break for tea and biscuits. Everybody, without exception, goes for a jammy dodger. Only when all the jammy dodgers are gone does anybody take a different kind of biscuit, usually with a cheerful grumble about how the jammy dodgers are always the first to go. The small proportion of attendees who managed to get a jammy dodger spend the rest of the conference in a happy frame of mind, whereas all the others leave in the evening feeling vaguely dissatisfied but not quite able to put their finger on why.

You might think that the solution would be to provide more jammy dodgers, but in fact that isn't the case. A large part of the satisfaction factor is knowing that you got one of the good biscuits, while your peers who weren't quite as fast as you had to make do with a garibaldi or, if they were really really slow, a shortbread. The actual key to a successful conference which everybody leaves feeling fulfilled is to hold numerous tea-breaks and strategically position the seats and the biscuits so that everybody attending gets exactly one jammy dodger during the course of the day. The feeling of 'yay, I got one' outweighs the feeling of 'aw, I didn't get one' by at least five to one, so a maximum of four tea-breaks should be provided.

This didn't apply to today's conference, as all the biscuits on offer were equally nasty, and yet everybody still seemed to have a good time. Must have been the excellent lunch.

Homework

There's a departmental conference at a hotel tomorrow and I've been roped in to be the Offical Boots Memory Man again and entertain the crowd with some memory tricks. This is actually quite cool, because I'm still pretty bad at performing memory stunts in front of an audience, and it's embarrassing if I'm called upon to do something impressive and make a mess of it. Showing off in front of Profit Protection Managers is good preparation for next time something like Blue Peter comes up (I mean, they'll never invite me back after that shambles, but someone else might...)

Of course, it does mean spending the evening memorising numbers, interrupted only by the football (I was hoping Chelsea would lose, but never mind). Still, I really do need the memory practice, too, so I shouldn't complain.

Yarrrgh, work is bad

Busy days at the office leave me comparatively inarticulate, sorry. Roll on Christmas, when I can stay in bed for four solid days and do nothing!

Phone's ringing

Yesterday I had a phone call that I just missed by half a second. I did 1471 and found that it was a number I didn't know with a Nottingham area code, called back and there was no answer. Being a superhuman genius, I quickly deduced that it was a phone box, and that the caller must have been my brother, who hasn't got a phone. Nobody else in the country uses phone boxes these days, after all. I typed the number into Google, just in case there's a directory of all public phone numbers in the country on the internet (turns out there isn't, but there is a list of all the phone box numbers, without any attached address. Just in case you want to call one at random, I suppose).

I rang back again, but still nobody answered it. I was hoping that someone would pick it up and tell me where this phone box was located - if it was just down the road from his flat, I could cycle down there and see what he wanted, and also tell him off for being too lazy to come here himself and tell me what he wanted (he's only about a minute away), whereas if it was in the city and next to his favourite pub, I could call that and accept his invitation to lunch/booze/debauchery.

Don't people answer the phone any more if they hear a phone box ringing? I know there was that film about a man who answered a phone and bad things happened, but it hasn't stopped me from theoretically answering phones. It's actually much more exciting than answering your own phone, because it could be anyone in the world, and they almost certainly didn't want to talk to you at all! And you might help a stranger who wants to pinpoint his brother's whereabouts!

There was a happy ending - he called back a bit later on, and only wanted to check whether I was in so he could come round later on his way back from Attenborough. But even so. Answer the phone, next time a phone box rings at you!

19 days?

Wow, Christmas sort of sneaks up on you, doesn't it? I was wondering whether I should put some decorations up in my flat - I don't normally bother, seeing as I live on my own and don't generally drag people in off the streets and force them to look at my walls, but seeing as it's a new flat and it's big enough to accommodate quite a lot of sparkly tinselly things, maybe I should.

On the other hand, I am extremely lazy. Maybe I won't bother.

Zoomy Clarifies Your Confusions Regarding British Weirdnesses

This week's blog entries, and the comments readers have appended to them, made it clear that I need to explain a few things here.

1) Mince pies are made with mincemeat. Mincemeat, despite the name, doesn't contain any meat, and I'll have to get back to you about how much mincing is involved. Probably none. It's made with raisins, apples, sugar and things.

2) Black pudding is not, as Americans might think, an unusually-coloured variety of a sort of gooey dessert. It's made with (and I worked in a factory that made them for six and a half years, so I know what I'm talking about) dried blood powder, leftover fat from butchering legs of pork, bread rusk, seasoning and whatever other ingredients are left lying around the factory.

3) BBC TV, rather than being funded by commercials advertising products viewers might like to buy, is funded by money from everybody in the country, who are required to buy a TV licence. The TV Licence people are famous for pretending that they are able to detect whether somebody has a television in their house by means of fantastic radar devices, and sending out threatening letters to every address without a licence claiming that they have an army of inspectors who might come round to your house at any moment and catch you watching TV, whereas in fact they don't do any of these things, ever.

The good thing about the licence is that you can watch BBC channels without having your favourite shows interrupted by commercial breaks. The bad thing is that you have to give the BBC money for the privilege, and many viewers feel that it's not worth it considering that the BBC no longer show anything worth watching.

A few years ago, the BBC had a big advertising campaign stressing that the licence fee is great, because it enables the corporation to experiment with unusual and innovative TV programming rather than being desperate to deliver viewers to its advertisers. They've stopped doing that now, acknowledging that everything they show these days is a desperate attempt to attract as many viewers as possible.

Any more questions?

It's happy hour again...

Sorry for the late (and very brief) blog tonight - I've been out for an early Christmas meal with the people from work. Night-night!

Lost things

Isn't it great when you're looking for something and find something else you'd forgotten about? I was looking for my TV licence tonight (they keep sending letters to The Occupier of this flat, implying that they're going to do something about it if I turn out not to have a licence) and came across a consent letter from the BBC that I never got round to signing and sending to them. You'd think they would have chased me up for it, it's been quite a while now. Maybe they just forged my signature.

Didn't find my TV licence, but then remembered that I don't need it, because I pay by direct debit and I could look up the number via internet banking. It's great being hi-tech. Just to celebrate that, I logged onto the TV licence website and offically changed my name from "Mr G Bridmore" too.

Also re-found my transcript sheet from Saturday's othello. I'm also surprised that Geoff hasn't chased me up for that, come to think of it. I get the feeling everybody's given up hope of getting stuff from me. This is going to make my Christmas shopping a lot easier.

Mincemeat!

It's at this time of year, what with the mince pies and everything, that I remember how much I really do like mincemeat. My preferred method of eating mince pies (when nobody's watching) is to nibble away at all the pastry and then eat the mincemeat bit last. Yummy. Eventually, I'm sure I'll move on to the next step and just buy a jar of mincemeat and a big spoon.

I wonder if the Co-op's still open?

You ask, I answer

Thank you all for your responses to my 'what should I blog about' post the other day. Let's see what I can come up with...

Mike said...
Mikinho:

What is the best curry house in Derby, based on your experience?
I went to one once near a big round-about and I found it adequate.


Actually, I don't think I've ever eaten at a curry house in Derby. I don't go out for curry very much. There's a place called the Siam Corner where I would guess you can get a Thai curry, I recommend there. Never been there, but I walked or cycled past it plenty of times on the way into town.

Boris said...
Memory!!! :)


Oh, but I always talk about memory! And nothing much is happening in the memory world lately. I did another three speed cards practice runs tonight, all under 30 seconds, and got them all recalled perfectly. Need to expand my training routine, though. I must get round to taking part in more Online Memory Challenges. Also, I need to buy 36 new packs of cards - my old ones are getting tatty and sticky.

Anonymous said...
Tell us about your mother, and your relationship with her.


Good grief, what kind of blog do you think this is? Go and watch EastEnders if you want to see people's relationships with their mothers. There's probably a lot of that kind of thing in there nowadays. I hear Bianca's back and has lots of children.

Chris said...
All of the above, one at a time. (Not at once; that would be silly.) Start at the end of the list and work backwards...


Hmm, that's more than I can fit into one blog post. Maybe I'll make a series out of it...

Anonymous said...
Memory :-)

Dai


I refer the right honourable gentleman to the answer I gave some moments ago.

Anonymous said...
snooker. always worth it....


Yep, but I don't know very much about that, either. The first Bahrain Snooker Championship happened a couple of weeks ago - Neil Robertson won it, and the headline "Robertson Stays Cool In Bahrain Heat" suggests that if the World Memory Championship does end up taking place there in November next year, it'll still be baking hot, which is nice.

There doesn't seem to be an easily-googled Bahraini royal family tree available on the internet, so I can't check what relation Shaikh Abdulla bin Abdulrahman al Khalifa, president of the Bahrain Snooker Association is to Shaikh Fawaz bin Mohamed al Khalifa, patron of the World Memory Championship. Get on the internet, al Khalifas! It's the 21st century, for crying out loud!

Casdok said...
The history of bubblegum sounds interesting!


It does, doesn't it! If only I knew the first thing about it. I'm guessing it was invented by an American, probably called Hiram Bubblegum or something like that, in the early thirties and was intended as a building material to replace wood in the event that trees were all destroyed by socialism.

Anonymous said...
It would not be that silly to talk about them all at once Chris.

One may easily imagine a man made of chewing gum playing othello with Ben who in turn, is moving his pieces with a snooker cue which is also made of chewing gum and becoming stuck to said pieces. Then sudddenly a cartoon Tony Buzan comes along and cuts the othello board in half with a cartoon samuri sword and also decapitates Ben's head. As Ben's yellow hat falls on to the othello board it sticks to the chewing gum pieces making it impossible for Ben to ever forget it again.

Dai.
Events here are based on a true story and peoples identities have been changed to protect the innocent from Cartoon Tony Buzan.


See, this is how memory people's minds work. All the time. Be afraid.

Funny names

Watching Histon beat Leeds today, all I could think was "He can't really be called Daniel Knight-Percival, can he? There surely can't have been a person called Knight and another person called Percival who thought it might be cool to join their names together like that? Hey, darling, let's saddle our offspring with the name 'Knight-Percival' and then make Holy Grail jokes as soon as they're old enough to understand them!"

I know I probably shouldn't devote an entire blog to poking fun at the surname of someone whom I'm just envious of because he's a semi-professional footballer and I'm not, but hey, little things please little minds. Remind me to regale you some time with the tale of how I met a guy called Rudolf Reinders once. I can get half an hour's stand-up comedy out of that one.

Nursery rhyme time

Thanks for all the suggestions for things to talk about, my loyal bloglings! However, I had about four and a half hours' sleep last night, and when I'm sleep-deprived and on a train, my brain does strange things. Today it thought up the following traditional nursery rhyme, which I mentally added to and enhanced during the othello tournament (unlike memory, I find that I only use about 75% of my brain even when I'm fiercely concentrating on an othello game - the other 25% is free to do what it wants. I remember a previous London regional when I'd had an early start and not enough sleep when I composed a song about going to the shops and encountering Gareth Enniskillen and his son Theodore. I should try to remember that and type it up for you all to read too...)


Oh, Father's donkey was no bleeding good!
He took it down the garden for to gather in some wood,
It got hold of his axe and swung it at his head,
Kicked in the window of the old garden shed,
Sent shards of flying glass through the bust of Robin Hood,
Oh, Father's donkey was no bleeding good!

Oh, Father's donkey was no bleeding use!
He took it to the forest for to hunt for deer or moose,
It got hold of his gun and shot him in the pants,
Smashed his lunchbox open and attracted all the ants,
Coating the soil for yards around with sweetened apple juice,
Oh, Father's donkey was no bleeding use!

Oh, Father's donkey was no bleeding good!
He took it to the kitchen for to cook it in a pud,
It got hold of his knife and stabbed him through the chest,
Ruining his overcoat, his waistcoat, shirt and vest,
Soaking his best trousers and his socks and shoes with blood,
Oh, Father's donkey was no bleeding good!

Oh, Father's donkey was no bleeding use!
He took it to the market for to swap it for a goose,
It got hold of his leash and swung it round his neck,
Dragged him down the road and dunked him in the beck,
Kicked him in the pants so hard he landed in a spruce,
Oh, Father's donkey was no bleeding use!


Oh, by the way, Graham won the othello, beating everybody with staggering ease, and I ended up with three wins out of seven. But hey, could be worse.

T'was ever thus

Whenever I have to get up super-early in the morning to catch the train down to Cambridge, I always end up sitting up late doing nothing and not even leaving myself enough time to write my blog.

So, I promise that next week I'll write lots and lots of interesting bloggery, all about subjects of interest to my many readers. And on that note, what would you, my loyal readers, if I still have any readers, like to see me talk about? Memory? Othello? Chocolate? Last week's Beano like I promised to write about but never did? Trousers? Geraniums? Dentistry? The history of bubblegum? Tell me!

I'm a memory man again

Did three speed cards practice sessions tonight, and made mistakes in all three packs, but the important thing is that I'm back in training! Now if I can just get into a regular routine and keep in shape throughout the winter, I might just win the world championship again next year. I'd still quite like to be a three-time winner. Or more. Nine would be nice, but I'll be really really old and ancient by that time...

In other news, othello in Cambridge on Saturday, woo! The radio interview was quite good, although the host took the approach that all people who play board games are terrible nerds, and I spent most of it trying to convey the impression that, despite the fact that I am a terrible nerd myself, othello is very much a game for everyone to come along and play. Please do come along and play on Saturday! Trinity College, 9:30, come and see the World Memory Champion! Or, you know, play othello. Whichever you find more exciting.

More Great World Memory Champions Of History

As we all know, history has been full of interesting World Memory Champions. And here are a few more of them:

Terence "The Punching Man" Punchman (World Memory Champion 1763), a noted London prizefighter, was the other World Memory Champion to hold the title despite never memorising anything. During the celebration dinner at Simpson's-On-The-Strand (then a social club for philosophers, fortune tellers, coal miners and similar professions) after the world championship in 1763, newly-crowned world champion Edith Estragon promised to hand over the trophy, title and all attendant ranks and privileges to anybody who could beat her in a fight. Punchman, who was dining at the next table, immediately got up and knocked the champion unconscious with a single punch to the head. Her one hour, thirty-seven minutes and fifteen seconds as champion (timed by the ever-pedantic Baron Crysanthemum on his pocket-watch) is of course the second-shortest title reign in World Memory Championship history.

It was suggested that the frail 93-year-old Estragon had probably been making a joke, and that her offer therefore shouldn't have been legally binding, but as she never regained her memory of the incident (or of anything else), there was no way to prove it and the title devolved on the boxer. During his year-long reign as World Memory Champion he had a regular newspaper column in which he answered readers' questions on the subject of memory to the best of his ability and was invited to dinner with the Prime Minister, during which he punched several people unconscious and thereby also became Under-Secretary of State and Minister for Taxation and Tennis. He declined to compete in the 1764 world championship, but failed in his attempt to win the title when he was spotted lurking outside the championship venue and clobbered by the bodyguards that eventual winner Szeznlwicz Norberto had had the foresight to employ.

Baboushka Boguinskaya (world memory champion 1853) competed in every world memory championship from 1800, when she was three years old, until 1847, and finished last on each occasion. She despised memory sports and everybody involved with it, and only took part in the competitions because her mother forced her to. Domineering Mrs B eventually gave up on her dream of vicariously living the life of a memory master through her untalented daughter (who was unable to remember what playing cards were, let alone which one she had recently seen) and instead took her to America to force her to become a rodeo champion.

This turned out for the best in 1853, when the World Memory Championship was held in Idaho. The venue had been announced three months in advance, but this was insufficient time for the message to reach Africa, where all the world's memorisers lived, and for them to make the lengthy and arduous journey to the championship venue in the middle of the empty plains. The Boguinskaya family, however, happened to be in the neighbourhood, looking for buffalos to ride, and Baboushka was forced to take part. Although she scored zero in every discipline, she was given a bonus point for owning an unusual hat, and thus won the championship by virtue of being the only competitor. Her mother, however, had lost interest in memory sports five minutes earlier and departed for Nepal, resolving to give up on her talentless daughter and become a mountaineer herself.

Porcelain Palladium (World Memory Champion 1947, 1956, 1983) was supposed to be called Percival. However, his parents both suffered from speech impediments that prevented the registrar of births and deaths from understanding what they said. He also refused to allow them to change the name, even when they wrote it down for him. Young Porcelain therefore grew up embittered towards authority figures and often found fault with the arbiters when he competed in memory championships. He generally hurled bricks and kettles at them from his seat while they were trying to tell contestants where the toilets were, and if at any point anyone tried to tell him the rules of the championship, he would attack with bone-crunching fury until nobody in the room was left standing. He won three world championships on the three occasions when unfortunate ski-jumping accidents (he wasn't a ski-jumper and never went within a hundred miles of a ski-jump, but freak gales caused ski-jumpers to land on him on three separate occasions) left him paralysed and unable to speak or otherwise do anything that might get him disqualified.

Football is rubbish!

When did the big and cool football teams lose the ability to score goals or play interesting games? I've given up on tonight's games and turned over to watch Mitchell and Webb, even though I've seen it before and it's the most recent series which wasn't all that good, mostly. That's how bored I am.

Attention, people of Cambridge!

I'm going to be talking on Radio Cambridge (possibly Radio Cambridgeshire) tomorrow morning at 8:15 about the othello tournament this weekend. So make sure to listen in if you don't know that there's an othello tournament, open to everybody, on Saturday, starting at 9:30, at Trinity College's Junior Parlour (use the entrance opposite the great big one, near to the post office), entry is free if it's your first tournament, a great day out for all the family, drop us an email if you're coming so that we're sure we've got enough boards, details can be found on http://www.britishothello.org.uk, othello is that game that you might know as reversi if you play on the internet, everyone's welcome regardless of age, ability or hair colour, wearing a hat is optional but recommended.

So if you're still in the dark about what's happening this weekend, tune in tomorrow morning when I will be saying some or all of the above, and nothing else, for your entertainment. And please do come along to the tournament, it really is fun!

One last memory talk

I know I've rambled on about nothing but memory lately, but I'll give it a rest after today. However, I felt it necessary to record that I haven't done any memory training today after all - didn't get out of bed in time for the Online Memory Challenge (yes, it started at ten. It's Sunday.) and then I discovered that Virgin have settled their dispute with Sky, so I get to watch the Simpsons and Futurama all day again, so that was that.

It's a bit worrying, really - on the one hand I'd hate to be all like 2005 again, when I didn't do any memory training for months and months, and my big teetering pile of packs of cards sat untouched on my desk until they all fell down behind the radiator. It's very sad if like me you associate cards with people. Because, generally speaking, people falling down behind the radiator is sad.

But on the other hand, I just don't feel like memorising at the moment. I'm hopeful that this is only a short-term thing (let's face it, my motivation always comes and goes depending on what latest fad has caught my attention this week), because I really do still want to be a memory champion and all famous and stuff. Maybe I should try memorising pi again, only I've heard that James Ponder is aiming to break the European record, so it would probably be rude of me to try to do the same. And very embarrassing if I did try to do it and ended up making a mess of it, as I probably would. No, I think I'll just try to get into a routine of practicing speed cards every night after work. That should keep me in shape.

Speaking of shape, I weighed myself on that machine in Woolworth's yesterday, and I'm 13 stone 4. It's roughly a year since I posted my weight according to that machine for the first time, and I'm deliberately refraining from looking back to see what it was. It wasn't 13 stone 4, though.