My beard's got to the kind of bushiness-level where I always agonize over whether to let it grow a bit longer or just chop it short. I sometimes think it looks quite good very full, but the moustache is definitely too long (it gets in the way when I drink) and trimming the moustache but leaving the rest intact sends me plummetting headlong into the territory of 'looking like I care what I look like', which really isn't somewhere I want to go.
I'll probably just leave it another few days before taking the scissors to it.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Horrors!
In the course of wandering around the internet tonight, I found out that Mr Peacock, the headmaster of my old school, has retired! And been replaced by a Mrs Heather Payne! This won't do. Admittedly I'm just jumping to conclusions based on the name, and I might be wrong, but I don't see how Mrs Payne is going to fulfil what I see as important prerequisites for a head teacher, like striking fear into students with an imposing well-over-six-foot frame, full beard and deep booming voice. I tell you, education isn't what it was. Mr Peacock was 'the new head' when I started there in 1987, so this is really quite a significant era for QEGS. It inspired me to have a look at the website, which has had a bit of a revamp since I last checked it out.
The coolest part, for former pupils, is probably the 'Departments' menu, which now has a page for each subject, most of which list the teachers who teach it, and so allow us to see who's still there, after all these years. Even more alarming than the new head, a couple of these pages list the teachers' first names! These modern education methods have gone too far! Apart from Mr "Call Me Steve" Harvey, who came along when I was in the sixth form, such things were unheard of and viewed with great suspicion in my schooldays. I'm sorry, but Mr Edwards is not a Bob. He's "Mr Edwards" to his face, "Taffy" behind his back if you're feeling brave, "R.W. Edwards" on report cards, "My dad" if you're Rachel Edwards in my class, but I'm fairly sure I could never call him "Bob", even if I met him nowadays.
Mr Hull and Mrs Scarborough are still teaching art - she started there when I was in the second year, I think, while he's been there since the year dot. Mr Roger Howard is still deputy head and still teaching English (and, presumably, hockey, unless he's got too old for that, but he was surprisingly passionate about the game). Mrs Boddy, Martin's mum (for some reason, my class had multiple teachers' kids in it) is still teaching maths, but apparently not biology any more. Mr Carr is still head of biology, Mrs Boucher is one of the five names listed under "our four specialist biology teachers".
The ICT department now has six teachers, apparently, one of them my old form teacher Mr Forster (he's just listed as "Mr G Forster", but he was always "Ged" behind his back, which is what you get for having a vaguely silly first name - see also Mr Lester Thompson the geography teacher). When I started at the school, Mr Forster taught "commerce", and IT lessons were taught by Mr Chatfield the elderly geography teacher. They mainly consisted of sitting in the room full of BBC micros and reading books about what could be done with super-computers that were far beyond the school's (and most small countries') budgets.
The PE teachers aren't listed, but it's probably safe to assume the ones who taught me aren't teaching it any more. People like Mr Leach, who kept on teaching PE well into his sixties but must have finally retired by now, are rare. He was extremely cool, though, in his ever-present faded blue tracksuit, occasionally flinging himself to the floor of the gym or changing rooms and doing press-ups just to show that he still could, then bouncing back to his feet again and suggesting that we all go for a ten-mile run through the rain and snow. Mr Sanderson's still teaching history, Ms Boocock still in the geography department. There are now three German teachers (in my day, it was one-and-a-half) and three Spanish teachers (none at all when I was a lad), but the entire foreign language team has been replaced since I left the school. "Bob Edwards" and "Tony Sanderson" are still teaching RE, but there's nobody I recognise in D&T or music.
Still, that's quite an impressive number, even without "Captain Peacock" (as my dad always called him) still at the helm. I just wonder if the chess club's still going without Dr Chambers's guidance. Apart from the fact that he didn't play chess, he was a really great school chess club organiser. Maybe the chess club doesn't even meet in the chemistry lab any more! Change is bad.
The coolest part, for former pupils, is probably the 'Departments' menu, which now has a page for each subject, most of which list the teachers who teach it, and so allow us to see who's still there, after all these years. Even more alarming than the new head, a couple of these pages list the teachers' first names! These modern education methods have gone too far! Apart from Mr "Call Me Steve" Harvey, who came along when I was in the sixth form, such things were unheard of and viewed with great suspicion in my schooldays. I'm sorry, but Mr Edwards is not a Bob. He's "Mr Edwards" to his face, "Taffy" behind his back if you're feeling brave, "R.W. Edwards" on report cards, "My dad" if you're Rachel Edwards in my class, but I'm fairly sure I could never call him "Bob", even if I met him nowadays.
Mr Hull and Mrs Scarborough are still teaching art - she started there when I was in the second year, I think, while he's been there since the year dot. Mr Roger Howard is still deputy head and still teaching English (and, presumably, hockey, unless he's got too old for that, but he was surprisingly passionate about the game). Mrs Boddy, Martin's mum (for some reason, my class had multiple teachers' kids in it) is still teaching maths, but apparently not biology any more. Mr Carr is still head of biology, Mrs Boucher is one of the five names listed under "our four specialist biology teachers".
The ICT department now has six teachers, apparently, one of them my old form teacher Mr Forster (he's just listed as "Mr G Forster", but he was always "Ged" behind his back, which is what you get for having a vaguely silly first name - see also Mr Lester Thompson the geography teacher). When I started at the school, Mr Forster taught "commerce", and IT lessons were taught by Mr Chatfield the elderly geography teacher. They mainly consisted of sitting in the room full of BBC micros and reading books about what could be done with super-computers that were far beyond the school's (and most small countries') budgets.
The PE teachers aren't listed, but it's probably safe to assume the ones who taught me aren't teaching it any more. People like Mr Leach, who kept on teaching PE well into his sixties but must have finally retired by now, are rare. He was extremely cool, though, in his ever-present faded blue tracksuit, occasionally flinging himself to the floor of the gym or changing rooms and doing press-ups just to show that he still could, then bouncing back to his feet again and suggesting that we all go for a ten-mile run through the rain and snow. Mr Sanderson's still teaching history, Ms Boocock still in the geography department. There are now three German teachers (in my day, it was one-and-a-half) and three Spanish teachers (none at all when I was a lad), but the entire foreign language team has been replaced since I left the school. "Bob Edwards" and "Tony Sanderson" are still teaching RE, but there's nobody I recognise in D&T or music.
Still, that's quite an impressive number, even without "Captain Peacock" (as my dad always called him) still at the helm. I just wonder if the chess club's still going without Dr Chambers's guidance. Apart from the fact that he didn't play chess, he was a really great school chess club organiser. Maybe the chess club doesn't even meet in the chemistry lab any more! Change is bad.
Friday, January 29, 2010
The anonymous pirate
I re-read Treasure Island during the long flight to Tokyo, and there's something about it that's always intrigued me. I'm sure people have written on the subject before, so if I'm treading on someone's literary-critical toes, I assure you it was unintentional. Except if you're John Sutherland, the writer of those really cool 'Literary Detective' essays, in which case yes, I'm unashamedly copying your style. Imitation, flattery, etc.
Throughout the book, narrator Jim Hawkins keeps an almost pedantic tally of how many of the twenty-seven men who set sail on the Hispaniola are still alive and whose side they're on. So when Jim returns to the island after his thrilling confrontation with Israel Hands on the schooner and stumbles into the hands of the pirates, the reader who's been paying attention knows even before narrator-Jim has told him so that there are now only six of them remaining. Drink and the devil have done for the rest.
This is the first time Jim has been in close contact with the mutineers, and so the first time we the readers get to really know them. The emphasis not just on plot, but also on character, revolutionized the writing of adventure stories, according to the badly-written foreword in my copy of the book, and it's certainly true that everyone in Treasure Island is a three-dimensional, rounded, believable human being, and that's what makes the story so fascinating to read. Compiling the little character details throughout the book, but especially in this chapter, we know that the six buccaneers are: Long John Silver, the arch-villain; Tom Morgan, the old, grey-haired, mahogany-faced sailor who, with Silver, was part of the infamous pirate Flint's crew in days gone by and who we first met back in Silver's pub in Bristol when he played along (helped by some heavy-handed prompting) with Long John's deceptions; George Merry, thirty-five years old, long and ill-looking with yellow eyes from the fever that many of the pirates contracted camping out in the swamps, who becomes the ringleader as the mutineers finally lose patience with Silver; Dick Johnson, the youngest of the crew, the one who Jim earlier overheard being talked into joining the mutiny by Long John, and who had a good upbringing before he fell in with a bad lot, carries a Bible with him and is deeply worried about the way things are going; John, whose surname we never learn (which is a pity, really, because he's one of at least four Johns on the Hispaniola, the narrative convention of avoiding duplicated Christian names not being something Robert Louis Stevenson had any time for - there are also three Toms with speaking parts), who was shot in the head during the first attack on the stockade but got up immediately and ran away, and by this point in the book is well on the way to a full recovery, though he's deadly pale and doesn't talk much; ... and one other man, about whom we know absolutely nothing.
This sixth pirate is a complete mystery. We're never told his name or any physical details about him, he just hangs around his colleagues like a ghost. In the earlier part of the book, the mutineers included among their number a lot of nameless characters who only got their brief moment in the spotlight when they were killed, but now we have this one anonymous man remaining with the five vividly-described villains (well, John is a bit of a shadowy figure, but his bandaged head gives him character). Pirate X intrigues me. Is he young like Dick, old like Morgan and Silver, or somewhere in between like George and (probably) John? Tall or short, brave or cowardly, healthy or sickly? He presumably joins in with the actions attributed to all five of Long John Silver's scurvy crew as they glare at him, huddle together in mutinous conference, get drunk and waste their limited food rations, spread out through the woods on the search for the treasure, and so on, but he never says or does anything individual that we can definitely identify.
Jim the narrator quite often describes things that 'one of them' has done, without naming names, so it's possible that Mr X has a line of dialogue here and there. The most likely point comes when the treasure hunters stumble on a skeleton, laid out straight with arms stretched above its head, which turns out to be pointed exactly in the compass direction described on the map:
"I thought so," cried the cook; "this here is a p'inter. Right up there is our line for the Pole Star and the jolly dollars. But, by thunder! if it don't make me cold inside to think of Flint. This is one of his jokes, and no mistake. Him and these six was alone here; he killed 'em, every man; and this one he hauled here and laid down by compass, shiver my timbers! They're long bones, and the hair's been yellow. Ay, that would be Allardyce. You mind Allardyce, Tom Morgan?"
"Ay, ay," returned Morgan, "I mind him; he owed me money, he did, and took my knife ashore with him."
"Speaking of knives," said another, "why don't we find his'n lying round? Flint warn't the man to pick a seaman's pocket; and the birds, I guess, would leave it be."
"By the powers, and that's true!" cried Silver.
"There ain't a thing left here," said Merry, still feeling round, among the bones, "not a copper doit nor a baccy box. It don't look nat'ral to me."
"No, by gum, it don't," agreed Silver; "not nat'ral, nor not nice, says you. Great guns! messmates, but if Flint was living, this would be a hot spot for you and me. Six they were, and six are we; and bones is what they are now."
"I saw him dead with these here deadlights," said Morgan. "Billy took me in. There he laid, with penny-pieces on his eyes."
"Dead — ay, sure enough he's dead and gone below," said the fellow with the bandage; "but if ever sperrit walked, it would be Flint's. Dear heart, but he died bad, did Flint!"
"Ay, that he did," observed another; "now he raged, and now he hollered for the rum, and now he sang. 'Fifteen Men' were his only song, mates; and I tell you true, I never rightly liked to hear it since. It was main hot, and the windy was open, and I hear that old song comin' out as clear as clear — and the deathhaul on the man already."
"Come, come," said Silver, "stow this talk. He's dead, and he don't walk, that I know; leastways, he won't walk by day, and you may lay to that. Care killed a cat. Fetch ahead for the doubloons."
'The cook' is Silver, 'the fellow with the bandage' is John, Morgan and Merry are identified by name and Dick wasn't around to witness Flint's death. The 'another' who gives the gripping description of Flint's last moments must be our mystery man. He's presumably also the 'another' who wonders about Allardyce's knife, which shows both that he knows Flint's personality and that he's got quite a sharp mind - this might be the only time in the whole book that anyone thinks of something before Long John Silver gets it. Admittedly he plays second-fiddle to George Merry, who's a pretty unimpressive specimen, but perhaps Mr X is just sensibly keeping his head down. He might just be the brains of the operation.
He certainly has a talent for survival, anyway. Events come to a head a little later, when the disenchanted pirates finally rise up in rebellion against Silver and Jim, whose lives are only saved by a volley of musket fire from the trees - Dr Livesey, Abraham Gray and Ben Gunn have come to the rescue in the nick of time. The luckless John is shot again, this time fatally, and Silver with great satisfaction takes the opportunity to rid himself of the annoying Merry. The remaining three - Morgan, Dick and Mr X - run for it, and don't trouble the heroes again. We get one more little suggestion of Mr X's history when Jim notes that there are three men on the island ('Silver, and old Morgan, and Ben Gunn') who had aided Captain Flint in his many crimes, which would suggest that our mystery man wasn't one of the pirates in Flint's glory days, and only fell in with them more recently. But none of the three surviving mutineers gets any more character development from this point on. They are marooned on the island, rather heartlessly it seems to me, and I think it's safe to say that their chances of survival rest entirely on the shoulders of Pirate X - Morgan is old and not too bright, Dick is generally hopeless and seriously ill with malaria - so it would be nice to know whether or not he's the kind of man who could rise to the challenge.
So, why is this man such an enigma, in a book populated with so many great and memorable characters? I think a clue to the answer lies in his shipmate, George Merry. Merry goes unmentioned in the book until Jim finds himself in the enemy's camp. Unlike Morgan, Dick and bandaged John, who all had their moments earlier on, he has risen from anonymity and come to sudden prominence now that the plot needs a pirate to lead the opposition to Silver. A little history is inserted into the story when Silver berates Merry for having insisted on a more direct course of action than Silver would have preferred, right from the time they first landed on the island: "But who done it? Why, it was Anderson, and Hands, and you, George Merry! And you're the last above board of that same meddling crew; and you have the Davy Jones' insolence to up and stand for cap'n over me — you, that sank the lot of us!"
It's old news to the pirates, but it's new information to the reader that Job Anderson and Israel Hands, the two most senior pirates in the first three-quarters of the narrative, formed a triumvirate with George Merry all along. Anderson was boatswain on the Hispaniola and Hands the coxswain, but what was Merry? Just an ordinary seaman? We never find out, because we're not introduced to him until long after they've fled the ship. Clearly, he was a late addition to the plot - Stevenson, like most great Victorian writers, made things up as he went along without a clear idea how his story was going to develop. Perhaps he didn't anticipate the mutineers mutineering against Silver in the end, or perhaps he did, but envisaged Israel Hands being their ringleader before he came up with the wonderful scene with Hands and Jim tussling on the Hispaniola? Possibly he regretted killing Anderson off so comparatively early on and leaving himself without a figurehead for the rebellion. Luckily, one of the remaining two anonymous pirates was available to be elevated to a higher purpose.
Clearly, Mr X was held in reserve, just in case a new plot twist occurred to the writer that needed a new character previously unthought-of. He's the substitute player on the Buccaneers' team, who never got the chance to show what he was made of. You have to feel sorry for him, but I think there's enough ambiguity for us to choose to believe he was man enough to come into his own, retrieve the remaining treasure and get off the island to a happy ending.
Throughout the book, narrator Jim Hawkins keeps an almost pedantic tally of how many of the twenty-seven men who set sail on the Hispaniola are still alive and whose side they're on. So when Jim returns to the island after his thrilling confrontation with Israel Hands on the schooner and stumbles into the hands of the pirates, the reader who's been paying attention knows even before narrator-Jim has told him so that there are now only six of them remaining. Drink and the devil have done for the rest.
This is the first time Jim has been in close contact with the mutineers, and so the first time we the readers get to really know them. The emphasis not just on plot, but also on character, revolutionized the writing of adventure stories, according to the badly-written foreword in my copy of the book, and it's certainly true that everyone in Treasure Island is a three-dimensional, rounded, believable human being, and that's what makes the story so fascinating to read. Compiling the little character details throughout the book, but especially in this chapter, we know that the six buccaneers are: Long John Silver, the arch-villain; Tom Morgan, the old, grey-haired, mahogany-faced sailor who, with Silver, was part of the infamous pirate Flint's crew in days gone by and who we first met back in Silver's pub in Bristol when he played along (helped by some heavy-handed prompting) with Long John's deceptions; George Merry, thirty-five years old, long and ill-looking with yellow eyes from the fever that many of the pirates contracted camping out in the swamps, who becomes the ringleader as the mutineers finally lose patience with Silver; Dick Johnson, the youngest of the crew, the one who Jim earlier overheard being talked into joining the mutiny by Long John, and who had a good upbringing before he fell in with a bad lot, carries a Bible with him and is deeply worried about the way things are going; John, whose surname we never learn (which is a pity, really, because he's one of at least four Johns on the Hispaniola, the narrative convention of avoiding duplicated Christian names not being something Robert Louis Stevenson had any time for - there are also three Toms with speaking parts), who was shot in the head during the first attack on the stockade but got up immediately and ran away, and by this point in the book is well on the way to a full recovery, though he's deadly pale and doesn't talk much; ... and one other man, about whom we know absolutely nothing.
This sixth pirate is a complete mystery. We're never told his name or any physical details about him, he just hangs around his colleagues like a ghost. In the earlier part of the book, the mutineers included among their number a lot of nameless characters who only got their brief moment in the spotlight when they were killed, but now we have this one anonymous man remaining with the five vividly-described villains (well, John is a bit of a shadowy figure, but his bandaged head gives him character). Pirate X intrigues me. Is he young like Dick, old like Morgan and Silver, or somewhere in between like George and (probably) John? Tall or short, brave or cowardly, healthy or sickly? He presumably joins in with the actions attributed to all five of Long John Silver's scurvy crew as they glare at him, huddle together in mutinous conference, get drunk and waste their limited food rations, spread out through the woods on the search for the treasure, and so on, but he never says or does anything individual that we can definitely identify.
Jim the narrator quite often describes things that 'one of them' has done, without naming names, so it's possible that Mr X has a line of dialogue here and there. The most likely point comes when the treasure hunters stumble on a skeleton, laid out straight with arms stretched above its head, which turns out to be pointed exactly in the compass direction described on the map:
"I thought so," cried the cook; "this here is a p'inter. Right up there is our line for the Pole Star and the jolly dollars. But, by thunder! if it don't make me cold inside to think of Flint. This is one of his jokes, and no mistake. Him and these six was alone here; he killed 'em, every man; and this one he hauled here and laid down by compass, shiver my timbers! They're long bones, and the hair's been yellow. Ay, that would be Allardyce. You mind Allardyce, Tom Morgan?"
"Ay, ay," returned Morgan, "I mind him; he owed me money, he did, and took my knife ashore with him."
"Speaking of knives," said another, "why don't we find his'n lying round? Flint warn't the man to pick a seaman's pocket; and the birds, I guess, would leave it be."
"By the powers, and that's true!" cried Silver.
"There ain't a thing left here," said Merry, still feeling round, among the bones, "not a copper doit nor a baccy box. It don't look nat'ral to me."
"No, by gum, it don't," agreed Silver; "not nat'ral, nor not nice, says you. Great guns! messmates, but if Flint was living, this would be a hot spot for you and me. Six they were, and six are we; and bones is what they are now."
"I saw him dead with these here deadlights," said Morgan. "Billy took me in. There he laid, with penny-pieces on his eyes."
"Dead — ay, sure enough he's dead and gone below," said the fellow with the bandage; "but if ever sperrit walked, it would be Flint's. Dear heart, but he died bad, did Flint!"
"Ay, that he did," observed another; "now he raged, and now he hollered for the rum, and now he sang. 'Fifteen Men' were his only song, mates; and I tell you true, I never rightly liked to hear it since. It was main hot, and the windy was open, and I hear that old song comin' out as clear as clear — and the deathhaul on the man already."
"Come, come," said Silver, "stow this talk. He's dead, and he don't walk, that I know; leastways, he won't walk by day, and you may lay to that. Care killed a cat. Fetch ahead for the doubloons."
'The cook' is Silver, 'the fellow with the bandage' is John, Morgan and Merry are identified by name and Dick wasn't around to witness Flint's death. The 'another' who gives the gripping description of Flint's last moments must be our mystery man. He's presumably also the 'another' who wonders about Allardyce's knife, which shows both that he knows Flint's personality and that he's got quite a sharp mind - this might be the only time in the whole book that anyone thinks of something before Long John Silver gets it. Admittedly he plays second-fiddle to George Merry, who's a pretty unimpressive specimen, but perhaps Mr X is just sensibly keeping his head down. He might just be the brains of the operation.
He certainly has a talent for survival, anyway. Events come to a head a little later, when the disenchanted pirates finally rise up in rebellion against Silver and Jim, whose lives are only saved by a volley of musket fire from the trees - Dr Livesey, Abraham Gray and Ben Gunn have come to the rescue in the nick of time. The luckless John is shot again, this time fatally, and Silver with great satisfaction takes the opportunity to rid himself of the annoying Merry. The remaining three - Morgan, Dick and Mr X - run for it, and don't trouble the heroes again. We get one more little suggestion of Mr X's history when Jim notes that there are three men on the island ('Silver, and old Morgan, and Ben Gunn') who had aided Captain Flint in his many crimes, which would suggest that our mystery man wasn't one of the pirates in Flint's glory days, and only fell in with them more recently. But none of the three surviving mutineers gets any more character development from this point on. They are marooned on the island, rather heartlessly it seems to me, and I think it's safe to say that their chances of survival rest entirely on the shoulders of Pirate X - Morgan is old and not too bright, Dick is generally hopeless and seriously ill with malaria - so it would be nice to know whether or not he's the kind of man who could rise to the challenge.
So, why is this man such an enigma, in a book populated with so many great and memorable characters? I think a clue to the answer lies in his shipmate, George Merry. Merry goes unmentioned in the book until Jim finds himself in the enemy's camp. Unlike Morgan, Dick and bandaged John, who all had their moments earlier on, he has risen from anonymity and come to sudden prominence now that the plot needs a pirate to lead the opposition to Silver. A little history is inserted into the story when Silver berates Merry for having insisted on a more direct course of action than Silver would have preferred, right from the time they first landed on the island: "But who done it? Why, it was Anderson, and Hands, and you, George Merry! And you're the last above board of that same meddling crew; and you have the Davy Jones' insolence to up and stand for cap'n over me — you, that sank the lot of us!"
It's old news to the pirates, but it's new information to the reader that Job Anderson and Israel Hands, the two most senior pirates in the first three-quarters of the narrative, formed a triumvirate with George Merry all along. Anderson was boatswain on the Hispaniola and Hands the coxswain, but what was Merry? Just an ordinary seaman? We never find out, because we're not introduced to him until long after they've fled the ship. Clearly, he was a late addition to the plot - Stevenson, like most great Victorian writers, made things up as he went along without a clear idea how his story was going to develop. Perhaps he didn't anticipate the mutineers mutineering against Silver in the end, or perhaps he did, but envisaged Israel Hands being their ringleader before he came up with the wonderful scene with Hands and Jim tussling on the Hispaniola? Possibly he regretted killing Anderson off so comparatively early on and leaving himself without a figurehead for the rebellion. Luckily, one of the remaining two anonymous pirates was available to be elevated to a higher purpose.
Clearly, Mr X was held in reserve, just in case a new plot twist occurred to the writer that needed a new character previously unthought-of. He's the substitute player on the Buccaneers' team, who never got the chance to show what he was made of. You have to feel sorry for him, but I think there's enough ambiguity for us to choose to believe he was man enough to come into his own, retrieve the remaining treasure and get off the island to a happy ending.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Do you think I will relax my discipline just because I have won? No! I will still train hard...
The director took me out for dinner after my unimpressive TV filming, and we had nabe. On a related note, I do need to keep training my memory. I've had much too much time off since last year's world championship, and now it's time to get serious about it again. This weekend, lots of training. Promise.
Also, if you're ever in Tokyo, buy some "Meltykiss" chocolates. They're absolutely delicious, except for the green tea flavour.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
I Wonder (Departure)
Yes, I'm back home again. I did get back last night, but I was too tired to blog about it. I'm still more than half asleep now, but never mind, it was worth it for a fun trip to Tokyo.
I don't know that my performance on the TV show, which was called "Wonder", was really worth the cost to the TV company of flying me out there, but they seemed happy with it, anyway. It's hard to describe exactly what the show is about, it's sort of a Juke Box Jury, only with things like memory champions and record-breaking scuba-divers instead of pop songs, and the panellists guess at answers to trivia questions on the subject of the week rather than rating it. So really, now I come to think of it, it's not much like Juke Box Jury at all. I've never even seen Juke Box Jury, it was before my time, so I don't know why I made that comparison in the first place.
Anyway, we got to see snippets of the upcoming Japanese documentary, which looks really awesome, and have some entertaining banter in the studio, as well as a memory challenge in which I memorised the order of forty sushi dishes, and the panel memorised ten each. They got them all perfectly, and I had two mistakes, which wasn't the result the TV people were expecting, but never mind. One of the guests was the famous actor Hideki Takahashi, who's a really big deal in Japan, but I can't remember who the other people were. I was a bit lost with all the goings-on, since I was relying on a translator sitting perched behind me and whispering a running translation of what everyone else was saying (usually with up to five people talking at once), so my spoken contributions were minimal and usually not really an answer to the questions I was asked. Still, perhaps it looked better to Japanese viewers.
The translator, incidentally, did a really great job, and it wasn't at all her fault if I didn't know what was going on - she'd even had a crash course in the basics of memory techniques and competitions, and understood it all very well. She had a notebook full of Japanese writing with occasional English phrases like "Ben System" and "Queen Elizabeth's Glammar School, Horncastle", so the TV company had clearly done their homework extensively. The director, for one, knows more about the world of memory competitions than some of the people who compete in them, and was able to explain in details the principles of person-action-object, journeys, the difference between the Major and Ben Systems, personal details of all the competitors, anything you might care to ask. I'm confident that the finished documentary is going to be the best ever, so hopefully it will somehow end up being translated into English.
There's more to say about the trip, but it can wait until I wake up.
I don't know that my performance on the TV show, which was called "Wonder", was really worth the cost to the TV company of flying me out there, but they seemed happy with it, anyway. It's hard to describe exactly what the show is about, it's sort of a Juke Box Jury, only with things like memory champions and record-breaking scuba-divers instead of pop songs, and the panellists guess at answers to trivia questions on the subject of the week rather than rating it. So really, now I come to think of it, it's not much like Juke Box Jury at all. I've never even seen Juke Box Jury, it was before my time, so I don't know why I made that comparison in the first place.
Anyway, we got to see snippets of the upcoming Japanese documentary, which looks really awesome, and have some entertaining banter in the studio, as well as a memory challenge in which I memorised the order of forty sushi dishes, and the panel memorised ten each. They got them all perfectly, and I had two mistakes, which wasn't the result the TV people were expecting, but never mind. One of the guests was the famous actor Hideki Takahashi, who's a really big deal in Japan, but I can't remember who the other people were. I was a bit lost with all the goings-on, since I was relying on a translator sitting perched behind me and whispering a running translation of what everyone else was saying (usually with up to five people talking at once), so my spoken contributions were minimal and usually not really an answer to the questions I was asked. Still, perhaps it looked better to Japanese viewers.
The translator, incidentally, did a really great job, and it wasn't at all her fault if I didn't know what was going on - she'd even had a crash course in the basics of memory techniques and competitions, and understood it all very well. She had a notebook full of Japanese writing with occasional English phrases like "Ben System" and "Queen Elizabeth's Glammar School, Horncastle", so the TV company had clearly done their homework extensively. The director, for one, knows more about the world of memory competitions than some of the people who compete in them, and was able to explain in details the principles of person-action-object, journeys, the difference between the Major and Ben Systems, personal details of all the competitors, anything you might care to ask. I'm confident that the finished documentary is going to be the best ever, so hopefully it will somehow end up being translated into English.
There's more to say about the trip, but it can wait until I wake up.
Friday, January 22, 2010
These people know me too well
In a last-minute email from the Japanese director, she asked if I could bring my Brazilian Mystery Cloak to the filming. "Aww, do I have to?" I thought, "It's too big for my little rucksack, so that means I'd have to bring the big one!" And I would have replied something to that effect, if the next line of the email hadn't been 'I am afraid it is a little bit heavy, and you have to change your bag’s size…
However, we appreciate if you bring it.'
And so how can I refuse to bring it along, when the director of this project has done her homework to such an extent that she knows I prefer to only bring a small rucksack on foreign jaunts? Best film crew ever, I tell you. So the big rucksack it is, I'm afraid. Still, it turns out my plane isn't until 12:35 tomorrow, so I can get the morning train and comfortably get to Heathrow in time.
Also, there's a sticky label on the back of my new passport with a barcode and the words 'Please remove this label'. If I don't remove it, do you think they'll refuse to let me leave the country?
However, we appreciate if you bring it.'
And so how can I refuse to bring it along, when the director of this project has done her homework to such an extent that she knows I prefer to only bring a small rucksack on foreign jaunts? Best film crew ever, I tell you. So the big rucksack it is, I'm afraid. Still, it turns out my plane isn't until 12:35 tomorrow, so I can get the morning train and comfortably get to Heathrow in time.
Also, there's a sticky label on the back of my new passport with a barcode and the words 'Please remove this label'. If I don't remove it, do you think they'll refuse to let me leave the country?
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Last-minute, dot com
People always ask me 'have you packed yet?' whenever I'm imminently going somewhere. Probably because I've never packed, until at the very earliest half an hour before I leave the house. I haven't even really thought about packing for my trip to Japan yet - I'm going down to London tomorrow night, probably, so as to catch my plane on Saturday morning. Or if the plane is a bit later than I'm thinking it is (I haven't checked), I'll get the early train on Saturday morning and save the fuss of finding a hotel for tomorrow night. But so far I haven't even written my list of things to take with me (passport, plane tickets, hat, all the essentials like that). I'll write the list tomorrow morning, and pack my clothes tomorrow evening.
The Japanese TV people want me to bring my world championship medals. Not all of them, presumably, because they give out hundreds every year, but I'm still going to have to trawl through all the piles of junk in my spare room to try to find some. I have no idea where I put my latest batch of medals - when I get home after a WMC, I'm generally tired enough that I just empty my rucksack onto the floor, go to bed and never see any of my various travelling accessories ever again.
The Japanese TV people want me to bring my world championship medals. Not all of them, presumably, because they give out hundreds every year, but I'm still going to have to trawl through all the piles of junk in my spare room to try to find some. I have no idea where I put my latest batch of medals - when I get home after a WMC, I'm generally tired enough that I just empty my rucksack onto the floor, go to bed and never see any of my various travelling accessories ever again.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Morning has broken
I'm having great difficulty dragging myself out of bed just lately. I've been wanting to get to the office early this week, but I'm physiologically incapable of properly waking up until eight o'clock. Perhaps I could save time and still get my lie-in by going to work in my pyjamas, but it's still a bit cold to be cycling dressed like that. I'll wait till the summer.
Anyway, have I mentioned that I'm going to Tokyo on Saturday? I probably have, once or twice, but it's still extremely groovy. I'm going to be memorising sushi.
Anyway, have I mentioned that I'm going to Tokyo on Saturday? I probably have, once or twice, but it's still extremely groovy. I'm going to be memorising sushi.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Thinking out of the inbox
I hate it when I've got lots of emails that I need to reply to. There's at least half a dozen of them waiting for me, but I'm just not in an emailing kind of mood. So I thought I'd make a sort of general apology on my blog, and vaguely promise to reply to everyone who's expecting a reply at some point in the next couple of days. I promise!
Now, since I did also promise to write more lengthy bloggings, let's talk about football. I don't really do that enough, and it's really a quite exciting season this year. In the three-way fight for the league title, my head says Chelsea will win it comfortably, but I'm trying to ignore it and root for Arsenal. It'd be nice to have a (sort of) change at the top after however many years of Man Utd and Chelsea, and besides, Arsenal's games have been more fun to watch this season, so they deserve a bonus point for that.
As for the league cup, which I'm watching at the moment, it looks like Aston Villa v Man U in the final, and it would be great if Villa could win it - they've been really uncharacteristically good just lately, and also a win would get them one of those precious Europa League places, which feeds into the rather more mean-spirited side of following the football this year...
Yes, like all vaguely neutral football fans, I've enjoyed watching Liverpool's continuing saga of (by their standards) disastrous results, and I'm rather hoping that they'll manage to fail to qualify for Europe at all next year, never mind the Champions League. Just because it would be funny to see them do a low-budget version of 2005, and have to whine that surely the Europa League winner should be allowed to defend the title. So I think it would be good if they finish in seventh or eighth and everyone points and laughs at them.
Now, since I did also promise to write more lengthy bloggings, let's talk about football. I don't really do that enough, and it's really a quite exciting season this year. In the three-way fight for the league title, my head says Chelsea will win it comfortably, but I'm trying to ignore it and root for Arsenal. It'd be nice to have a (sort of) change at the top after however many years of Man Utd and Chelsea, and besides, Arsenal's games have been more fun to watch this season, so they deserve a bonus point for that.
As for the league cup, which I'm watching at the moment, it looks like Aston Villa v Man U in the final, and it would be great if Villa could win it - they've been really uncharacteristically good just lately, and also a win would get them one of those precious Europa League places, which feeds into the rather more mean-spirited side of following the football this year...
Yes, like all vaguely neutral football fans, I've enjoyed watching Liverpool's continuing saga of (by their standards) disastrous results, and I'm rather hoping that they'll manage to fail to qualify for Europe at all next year, never mind the Champions League. Just because it would be funny to see them do a low-budget version of 2005, and have to whine that surely the Europa League winner should be allowed to defend the title. So I think it would be good if they finish in seventh or eighth and everyone points and laughs at them.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Video killed the DVD star
On the one hand, I feel like I should buy all the cheap video tapes I see in charity shops, because the day is fast approaching when there won't be any more videos to find anywhere. But on the other hand, if I take them all out of the shops, that day will come immediately, and it will be the Future, and that will be bad for everyone. It's a difficult balancing-act. I did buy an REM video the other day, which is cool. Shiny happy people holding hands...
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Remember Cambridge?
I really have to start arranging things for the Cambridge Memory Championship. It is going to happen, fans of cantabrigian cognitive competitions, I just haven't told anyone yet. Sunday May 2nd, I think, although don't book your tickets yet, because I might be wrong about that. I will publish full details, via the medium of memory-sports.com, very soon. Look forward to it!
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Morality play
Scene: Barbara's living room. Rotherham Roland is lying under a settee, with just his protruding legs visible. Garstin enters.
Rotherham Roland: Garstin, is that you?
Garstin: Who else would it be?
Rotherham Roland: Five minutes ago, it was a man to read the gas meter, and five minutes before that, it was a burglar who stole the gas meter.
Garstin: How did they get in? You and I are the only ones with keys to Barbara's house.
Rotherham Roland: Burglars, or at least the more successful burglars, can generally enter houses without using keys. And the burglar left the door open, so the gas meter man didn't need one either. However, he considerately closed it behind him after I explained that the gas meter had been stolen.
Garstin: That still doesn't explain why you're under that settee.
Rotherham Roland: You didn't ask me why I'm under the settee.
Garstin: I didn't say that I had asked you why you're under the settee.
Rotherham Roland: Shut the bloody hell up and just get this settee off me, Garstin. It's crushing my head, ribs and nose.
Garstin: All right. Just let me put this Cadbury's Creme Egg on the kitchen counter. I'll be wanting to eat it later, and if I leave it in my pocket or my hand for too long, it'll start to melt, and the two component parts of the chocolate 'shell' will become separated when I bite into it. And frankly, that thought doesn't appeal to me at all.
Rotherham Roland: Any time you're ready.
Garstin: Don't rush me. This operation takes time. Where's my spirit level?
Rotherham Roland: It's probably at your house. Were you expecting it to be in Barbara's kitchen?
Garstin: Because I need to know whether the kitchen counter slopes downwards towards the floor before I put my Cadbury's Creme Egg on it.
Rotherham Roland: Are you even listening to me? You just replied as if I'd asked you why you need your spirit level, but I didn't.
Garstin: Hardly my fault if you don't understand the basic principles of conversation, Phil.
Rotherham Roland: Phil? I'm Rotherham Roland!
Garstin: Oh, sorry, I can only see your legs, I assumed you were Phil.
Rotherham Roland: Phil who? And if you thought I was this Phil person, why did you claim earlier that only you and I have the keys to Barbara's house?
Garstin: It's extremely rude to ask a second question before a fellow has had time to reply to the first. Now I'm confused.
Rotherham Roland: Just get this bloody hell settee off me.
Garstin: I don't know how to get settees off people.
Rotherham Roland: Fine. Then just eat your Cadbury's Creme Egg.
Garstin: I never had a Cadbury's Creme Egg. I don't even like them. I don't know why I claimed to have one earlier, I suppose I just wanted you to think I'm cool.
Rotherham Roland: I do think you're cool, Garstin. And the reason I think you're cool is because you yourself are cool. You don't need to pretend to be someone you're not.
Garstin: That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me, Phil. I'm touched.
Garstin absent-mindedly sits on the settee, crushing Rotherham Roland.
The end.
Rotherham Roland: Garstin, is that you?
Garstin: Who else would it be?
Rotherham Roland: Five minutes ago, it was a man to read the gas meter, and five minutes before that, it was a burglar who stole the gas meter.
Garstin: How did they get in? You and I are the only ones with keys to Barbara's house.
Rotherham Roland: Burglars, or at least the more successful burglars, can generally enter houses without using keys. And the burglar left the door open, so the gas meter man didn't need one either. However, he considerately closed it behind him after I explained that the gas meter had been stolen.
Garstin: That still doesn't explain why you're under that settee.
Rotherham Roland: You didn't ask me why I'm under the settee.
Garstin: I didn't say that I had asked you why you're under the settee.
Rotherham Roland: Shut the bloody hell up and just get this settee off me, Garstin. It's crushing my head, ribs and nose.
Garstin: All right. Just let me put this Cadbury's Creme Egg on the kitchen counter. I'll be wanting to eat it later, and if I leave it in my pocket or my hand for too long, it'll start to melt, and the two component parts of the chocolate 'shell' will become separated when I bite into it. And frankly, that thought doesn't appeal to me at all.
Rotherham Roland: Any time you're ready.
Garstin: Don't rush me. This operation takes time. Where's my spirit level?
Rotherham Roland: It's probably at your house. Were you expecting it to be in Barbara's kitchen?
Garstin: Because I need to know whether the kitchen counter slopes downwards towards the floor before I put my Cadbury's Creme Egg on it.
Rotherham Roland: Are you even listening to me? You just replied as if I'd asked you why you need your spirit level, but I didn't.
Garstin: Hardly my fault if you don't understand the basic principles of conversation, Phil.
Rotherham Roland: Phil? I'm Rotherham Roland!
Garstin: Oh, sorry, I can only see your legs, I assumed you were Phil.
Rotherham Roland: Phil who? And if you thought I was this Phil person, why did you claim earlier that only you and I have the keys to Barbara's house?
Garstin: It's extremely rude to ask a second question before a fellow has had time to reply to the first. Now I'm confused.
Rotherham Roland: Just get this bloody hell settee off me.
Garstin: I don't know how to get settees off people.
Rotherham Roland: Fine. Then just eat your Cadbury's Creme Egg.
Garstin: I never had a Cadbury's Creme Egg. I don't even like them. I don't know why I claimed to have one earlier, I suppose I just wanted you to think I'm cool.
Rotherham Roland: I do think you're cool, Garstin. And the reason I think you're cool is because you yourself are cool. You don't need to pretend to be someone you're not.
Garstin: That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me, Phil. I'm touched.
Garstin absent-mindedly sits on the settee, crushing Rotherham Roland.
The end.
Friday, January 15, 2010
How misty men like Cromwell ought to live
I'm reliably informed by my mother that "Wolf Hall", by Hilary Mantel, is a great book. It's about Thomas Cromwell, and contains a really groovy description of a memory system used by either him or someone else (I've only got a photocopy of one page that doesn't say who it's talking about). I urge everyone to buy the book, and read not just page 216, but the whole thing.
Anyway, this immediately reminded me of the line in the title, up there, written about Thomas's great-great-great-nephew Oliver [family relationship lazily looked up on wikipedia and so probably incorrect] in 1849, by the Rev. T. Brayshaw (according to this website, which is almost certainly more reliable than wikipedia because it belongs to Russian memory man, othello player and circus strongman Oleg Stepanov and is a transcription of a 19th-century book about memory - and all 19th-century books were entirely accurate and free from factual error). It's part of a mnemonic poem you can use to learn the sequence and dates of English monarchs, and it includes the couplet "Fair MODEL [1625] did first Charles, when martyred, give, / How MISTY [1649] men like Cromwell ought to live."
When I first read this poem, I thought "What a stupid line. In what way could Cromwell be described as 'misty'? It makes no sense at all, and so doesn't work as a mnemonic!" Of course, this meant that the only phrase from this poem that stuck in my head was "misty men like Cromwell", and ensured that any time I've seen a patch of mist since then, I've always thought of Oliver Cromwell [and presumably also his son, who doesn't get a line to himself in the poem]. Three cheers for the power of mnemonics and the golden rule that silly nonsensical images are the most memorable!
The one thing I didn't remember, of course, is what year the word "misty" was supposed to represent, because the Reverend Brayshaw used a system of his own devising that nobody else has ever used since. Still, his book of Metrical Mnemonics sounds downright awesome, and I must try to find a copy. Not least because either his book, the 1885 book that quoted it, or Oleg's transcription of the latter, misses out a line of the poem.
It's the line about King John - 1199, which in this system is [B or C], [T or V], [T or V] ("battle" sounds obvious but seems to be disallowed because all the other mnemonic words in the poem use only the three consonants, no extra ones on the end), and rhyming with the following line "His FACE, IN Parliament, weak third Henry shows." I'd suspect "covet" for the mnemonic, and "goes" for the rhyme, but I can't think of a good way to make a nice metric out of them...
Anyway, this immediately reminded me of the line in the title, up there, written about Thomas's great-great-great-nephew Oliver [family relationship lazily looked up on wikipedia and so probably incorrect] in 1849, by the Rev. T. Brayshaw (according to this website, which is almost certainly more reliable than wikipedia because it belongs to Russian memory man, othello player and circus strongman Oleg Stepanov and is a transcription of a 19th-century book about memory - and all 19th-century books were entirely accurate and free from factual error). It's part of a mnemonic poem you can use to learn the sequence and dates of English monarchs, and it includes the couplet "Fair MODEL [1625] did first Charles, when martyred, give, / How MISTY [1649] men like Cromwell ought to live."
When I first read this poem, I thought "What a stupid line. In what way could Cromwell be described as 'misty'? It makes no sense at all, and so doesn't work as a mnemonic!" Of course, this meant that the only phrase from this poem that stuck in my head was "misty men like Cromwell", and ensured that any time I've seen a patch of mist since then, I've always thought of Oliver Cromwell [and presumably also his son, who doesn't get a line to himself in the poem]. Three cheers for the power of mnemonics and the golden rule that silly nonsensical images are the most memorable!
The one thing I didn't remember, of course, is what year the word "misty" was supposed to represent, because the Reverend Brayshaw used a system of his own devising that nobody else has ever used since. Still, his book of Metrical Mnemonics sounds downright awesome, and I must try to find a copy. Not least because either his book, the 1885 book that quoted it, or Oleg's transcription of the latter, misses out a line of the poem.
It's the line about King John - 1199, which in this system is [B or C], [T or V], [T or V] ("battle" sounds obvious but seems to be disallowed because all the other mnemonic words in the poem use only the three consonants, no extra ones on the end), and rhyming with the following line "His FACE, IN Parliament, weak third Henry shows." I'd suspect "covet" for the mnemonic, and "goes" for the rhyme, but I can't think of a good way to make a nice metric out of them...
Thursday, January 14, 2010
In the long run
Starting tomorrow, I'm going to write big long blog posts every night for at least a week. All this brevity lately, I'm turning into Twitter. And I really don't want to become Stephen Fry.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Drat it
It's hard to find the time to learn Japanese and practice memory when there's constantly football on the telly. The TV people should be more considerate, and show nothing but Coronation Street all night, on every channel. Then I might actually accomplish something.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Up Close And Personal
If you're interested in a lengthy interview with me about memory competitions, with sensible and interesting questions unlike the kind you normally see in interviews with me, click here! If you're not, then click somewhere else. Or switch off your computer and go out and do something less boring instead!
Monday, January 11, 2010
Lateral Thinking
The Israeli journalist I was talking to on Sunday came out with the old chestnut "Do you ever walk into a room and find you can't remember what you were meaning to do there?" I cheerfully replied that yes, I do, all the time. "What do you do then?", she asked. "I do something else,' I replied. "If I can't remember, it can't have been anything important."
She found this quite funny, especially since she'd asked Tony Buzan the same question a couple of days earlier, and he'd spelled out extensive techniques and strategies for remembering what you were meaning to do.
She found this quite funny, especially since she'd asked Tony Buzan the same question a couple of days earlier, and he'd spelled out extensive techniques and strategies for remembering what you were meaning to do.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Accomplished
I feel like I've really got things done this weekend. It's more of a state of mind than anything you could objectively point to and say that I've actually done, but even so. A productive weekend, rather than a lazy one. This is the kind of thing that puts me in memory-training mood, which is great. Hopefully I'll do some serious practice over the coming weeks. It's not too long until the memory season starts up again, after all...
Can I also just throw in a recommendation to read Order of the Stick? I've just finished reading the latest compilation book, and there are so many awesome and clever and hilarious moments, it's worth reading even if like me you've only got a passing knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons.
Oh, and also, the weather's better. It's just cold, wet and miserable out there now, with just a few stray lumps of ice in the road. Perfect!
Can I also just throw in a recommendation to read Order of the Stick? I've just finished reading the latest compilation book, and there are so many awesome and clever and hilarious moments, it's worth reading even if like me you've only got a passing knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons.
Oh, and also, the weather's better. It's just cold, wet and miserable out there now, with just a few stray lumps of ice in the road. Perfect!
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Snowed in
Actually, there's no more than an inch of snow around here, because Nottingham never gets the really bad weather, but it's on top of all the ice and nastiness from last week, so I'm not going anywhere this weekend. I'm staying in the house and hoping everything will have melted by Monday. I even cleaned up my spare room and refreshed my knowledge of basic conversational Japanese!
Friday, January 08, 2010
I've been to Frimley Green
Why does Martin Adams keep winning at darts when he can't hit doubles? Or is it just that whenever I turn the telly on, he gets nervous and starts missing? Because he seems to do a lot better whenever I'm not watching him. Perhaps I'm just intimidating to darts players in general.
Also, whatever happened to those groovy displays they used to have of giant dartboards with lights that would be turned on in a position roughly corresponding to where the dart hit the board? They were extremely cool, but it's all TV screens nowadays. Did they all end up on a tip somewhere? I'll have to go and look.
Also, whatever happened to those groovy displays they used to have of giant dartboards with lights that would be turned on in a position roughly corresponding to where the dart hit the board? They were extremely cool, but it's all TV screens nowadays. Did they all end up on a tip somewhere? I'll have to go and look.
Thursday, January 07, 2010
Tokyo-2
Yep, it's definitely confirmed, I'm going back to Tokyo for a flying visit - flying out on Saturday 23rd, arriving Sunday morning, then back home on Tuesday morning, and back into work on the Wednesday, thus only using up my last two remaining holiday days of the financial year. I think it's fair to say that jetlag will be a problem, but I'm sure I'll be up to whatever memory stunts they're wanting me to perform in the studio.
The weather is apparently really quite nice in Tokyo at the moment, so hopefully it'll be a nice change from the ice and snow and nastiness over here. And even if it's not, yay! Japan! Again! For free! Being the World Memory Champion is great!
The weather is apparently really quite nice in Tokyo at the moment, so hopefully it'll be a nice change from the ice and snow and nastiness over here. And even if it's not, yay! Japan! Again! For free! Being the World Memory Champion is great!
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Synchronicity
I don't plan my life in advance, generally speaking, so when everything works out nicely like it did at lunchtime today, I feel quite pleased with myself. The meeting at work didn't overrun at all (since someone important had a conference call scheduled for twelve), I was able to honestly say "I'll have to look into it and ask someone else" when someone came up to me afterwards with a mysterious piece of paper and leave at exactly the time I was meaning to. And then I got back home at the exact moment when a postman arrived to deliver my new passport (which has to be signed for and would have gone back to some depot somewhere if I hadn't been around), made myself a sandwich and finished eating it at the exact moment when Radio Gloucestershire phoned for the interview, talked to them for a concise five-minute chat and had ten minutes left to browse through the latest othello newsletter before having to go back to the office. It was quite the most productive and well-organised lunch hour I've ever had, and perfectly timed throughout! I'm very nearly a yuppie!
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
It's like being Princess Diana
Tune in to Radio Gloucestershire tomorrow for a live, in-depth, five-minute interview with the World Memory Champion during his lunch hour. Work permitting - I've got a meeting at work scheduled to finish at twelve, but it's the kind of thing that's likely to overrun, and I do rather have to give priority to my real job, even in favour of Radio Gloucestershire.
And then on Sunday I'm being interviewed over the phone by the second-biggest newspaper in Israel! This one has come about because a journalist in Tel Aviv has just seen "The Mentalists", which I think is extremely groovy. I'm glad to hear that it's still being watched by people, because it really was an excellent documentary about memory competitions, and it's exactly the kind of thing there needs to be more of if we're going to get new people interested in taking part.
And I tell you, this constant pursuit by the media of the world really takes its toll on a celebrity like me. I'll probably go mad and turn to drugs and shoplifting and cutting all my hair off and things, and it'll all be the fault of the press.
And then on Sunday I'm being interviewed over the phone by the second-biggest newspaper in Israel! This one has come about because a journalist in Tel Aviv has just seen "The Mentalists", which I think is extremely groovy. I'm glad to hear that it's still being watched by people, because it really was an excellent documentary about memory competitions, and it's exactly the kind of thing there needs to be more of if we're going to get new people interested in taking part.
And I tell you, this constant pursuit by the media of the world really takes its toll on a celebrity like me. I'll probably go mad and turn to drugs and shoplifting and cutting all my hair off and things, and it'll all be the fault of the press.
Monday, January 04, 2010
New cooker smell
I've got a new oven. Don't you love it when you turn them on for the first time and they melt the protective covering stuff on the elements and fill the house with poisonous toxic gases? It really takes me back to my short-lived student days when we also got a new cooker and were similarly gassed.
Smells are really good at triggering distant memories, as people always tell me. Seriously, people tell me that quite often. It's the kind of person who comes up to me and says "You're the memory man, aren't you?" and then follows it up with "I've always had a good memory myself..." and then tells me everything they know about the process of memory. I think they're expecting me to say "Yes, that's right, my goodness, you certainly are clever!" But the smell thing is always one of the first things they say. It's true, anyway, and I'm currently trying to formulate a way of cheating in memory competitions by smuggling scratch-and-sniff books into the room, disguised as rough notepaper.
Actually, now I come to think of it, I do say something like "Yes, that's right, my goodness, you certainly are clever!" in that kind of situation. So I've only got myself to blame if people keep doing this to me. Maybe I should just sneer contemptuously at them instead, but then I'm afraid that they might punch me in the nose and destroy my sense of smell, and with it my memory.
Smells are really good at triggering distant memories, as people always tell me. Seriously, people tell me that quite often. It's the kind of person who comes up to me and says "You're the memory man, aren't you?" and then follows it up with "I've always had a good memory myself..." and then tells me everything they know about the process of memory. I think they're expecting me to say "Yes, that's right, my goodness, you certainly are clever!" But the smell thing is always one of the first things they say. It's true, anyway, and I'm currently trying to formulate a way of cheating in memory competitions by smuggling scratch-and-sniff books into the room, disguised as rough notepaper.
Actually, now I come to think of it, I do say something like "Yes, that's right, my goodness, you certainly are clever!" in that kind of situation. So I've only got myself to blame if people keep doing this to me. Maybe I should just sneer contemptuously at them instead, but then I'm afraid that they might punch me in the nose and destroy my sense of smell, and with it my memory.
Sunday, January 03, 2010
Back, back, back to school again
Well, after an enjoyably and completely squandered week off, it's back to the office again tomorrow. Possibly this will motivate me to do some more memory training and the like, although it probably won't. Anyway, I'll do some more heavy-duty blogging soon, I assure you. It might involve giant spiders or something equally exciting, although it probably won't.
Saturday, January 02, 2010
Just keep your bottle and use your heads
For want of anything better to do today, I went to see Nottingham Forest play Birmingham in the cup. Freezing temperature and no goals, but it was still a fun experience. Forest were mostly the best team, but they didn't really look like winning. The penalty miss was worth seeing, though - Robert Earnshaw basically minced up to the ball and daintily chipped it over the crossbar.
Maybe I'll become a Forest fan in 2010. It's about time I started supporting a local team, and perhaps it'd put an end to all those people thinking I still live in Derby. It's the internet's fault. Or possibly my fault for not having my own website that tells people where I live nowadays. I've only got myself to blame.
Maybe I'll become a Forest fan in 2010. It's about time I started supporting a local team, and perhaps it'd put an end to all those people thinking I still live in Derby. It's the internet's fault. Or possibly my fault for not having my own website that tells people where I live nowadays. I've only got myself to blame.
Friday, January 01, 2010
It's not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me...
Someone sent a text message to my landline yesterday, read out by that robot voice, which went along the lines of "Happy New Year, everyone! Just to let you know, I'm moving into my own place, at the following address in Liverpool. Bye!"
I don't think this is from anyone I know, it's probably a wrong number, but just in case, and you're the person who's moved into a new home in Liverpool, send me an email? Because I deleted the message and I don't remember where it was.
Isn't that an exciting way to start a new decade of Zoomybloggery?
I don't think this is from anyone I know, it's probably a wrong number, but just in case, and you're the person who's moved into a new home in Liverpool, send me an email? Because I deleted the message and I don't remember where it was.
Isn't that an exciting way to start a new decade of Zoomybloggery?
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Hootenanny!
Note: The following has been slightly edited, much as this goes against my stream-of-consciousness principles, in case I get sued by the person I originally named in Resolution 4. He has been replaced by Wilson, the Space Aubergine, a character I just invented who bears no resemblance to any human or aubergine living or dead.
Happy New Year, everyone! My resolutions:
1) To develop a new kind of trousers that are somewhere between the full-length kind and those weird three-quarter-length ones that cool people wear nowadays, and become a millionaire by selling them. The secret to this will be to buy lots of normal trousers in bulk and sell them to people who are one-eighth of a leg taller than the people the trousers were designed for.
2) To encourage people to wear skirts on top of their seven-eighths-length trousers, thus doubling the profits of my clothing company and making me a millionaire.
3) To start up a clothing company of some kind in order to facilitate resolutions one and two, and encourage gullible people to invest hugely in "Memory Clothes plc - the only clothing company endorsed by a World Memory Champion as far as is known", thus making me a millionaire before I even sell any trousers or skirts.
4) Consult someone like Wilson, the space aubergine for advice on how to encourage gullible people to invest in manifestly unprofitable schemes like the above, but present the request for help in such an exciting way that instead of me paying him for the consultation, he gives me lots of money as well as the advice, thus making me a millionaire before I even act on the advice received.
5) Set some lateral-thinking expert like Edward de Bono the challenge of re-ordering my resolution list in such a way that I don't have to do the resolutions in sort-of-reverse-order-except-for-the-first-two, because that would just be confusing. Also require him to pay me an entry fee sufficient to make me a millionaire, for the privilege. And also, while he's at it, to rewrite resolution number four so that it doesn't look like some kind of scathing Private-Eye-style satire of Wilson, the space aubergine's business dealings (about which I know nothing), because that wasn't my intention at all, but now when I come to look at it... well, I'm too lazy to change it, anyway.
6) Having become a millionaire, five times over, give the money away to someone else, picked at random from the world's population, because being a millionaire would be no fun at all. And besides, what would I resolve next year?
Happy New Year, everyone! My resolutions:
1) To develop a new kind of trousers that are somewhere between the full-length kind and those weird three-quarter-length ones that cool people wear nowadays, and become a millionaire by selling them. The secret to this will be to buy lots of normal trousers in bulk and sell them to people who are one-eighth of a leg taller than the people the trousers were designed for.
2) To encourage people to wear skirts on top of their seven-eighths-length trousers, thus doubling the profits of my clothing company and making me a millionaire.
3) To start up a clothing company of some kind in order to facilitate resolutions one and two, and encourage gullible people to invest hugely in "Memory Clothes plc - the only clothing company endorsed by a World Memory Champion as far as is known", thus making me a millionaire before I even sell any trousers or skirts.
4) Consult someone like Wilson, the space aubergine for advice on how to encourage gullible people to invest in manifestly unprofitable schemes like the above, but present the request for help in such an exciting way that instead of me paying him for the consultation, he gives me lots of money as well as the advice, thus making me a millionaire before I even act on the advice received.
5) Set some lateral-thinking expert like Edward de Bono the challenge of re-ordering my resolution list in such a way that I don't have to do the resolutions in sort-of-reverse-order-except-for-the-first-two, because that would just be confusing. Also require him to pay me an entry fee sufficient to make me a millionaire, for the privilege. And also, while he's at it, to rewrite resolution number four so that it doesn't look like some kind of scathing Private-Eye-style satire of Wilson, the space aubergine's business dealings (about which I know nothing), because that wasn't my intention at all, but now when I come to look at it... well, I'm too lazy to change it, anyway.
6) Having become a millionaire, five times over, give the money away to someone else, picked at random from the world's population, because being a millionaire would be no fun at all. And besides, what would I resolve next year?
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
The 2000s
You know, this decade has been generally memory-themed for me, starting with my first competition (and simultaneously my first introduction to the basic principles of memory techniques) in 2000. I sort of feel like the 2010s should also involve some entirely new challenge for me. I should make an effort to enter as many new and unusual competitions next year as I possibly can, in the hope that one or more of them will click for me in the same way as memory has. That way, in December 2019, I can sit back and say 'Yep, now I'm the undisputed world champion snail-shell-rotator [or whatever my new hobby turns out to be], I can move on to the challenges of the 2020s without feeling at all like I've already achieved everything I'm going to be remembered for in this life...'
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Rain is rubbish
I'm fed up of living in the part of the country that never gets the snow. I realise that I hate snow when I have to go out in it, but I don't really need to go out for the next few days, so I'd like to be able to look at it from the window. So yes, I'm going to have to move somewhere arctic. Or just anywhere else in Britain.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Barton in Fabis?
Hey, I've just noticed there's a village called 'Barton in Fabis' really quite close to here, over on the unfashionable side of the River Trent. That's probably what the street I live on is named after. And I always assumed it was just somebody called Barton. Maybe I'll go there and see what it's like, but I probably won't.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Happy That-Bit-Between-Christmas-And-The-New-Year!
I don't know why I never blog on Christmas Day, even if I'm at home in the evening, nor why I didn't blog last night either. Perhaps my latest new year resolution will be to actually blog something every night, like I always intend to. Anyway, yesterday I was helping out in the big Boots store in Nottingham, and today I've been devoting my time to doing absolutely nothing at all. And now I've got seven more entirely work-free days before I have to go back to the office in the far-distant future world of 2010.
I've got plans for this next week. I'm going to learn to speak both Japanese and Chinese, get back into the routine of memory training again and also clean up my flat and do all kinds of productive things. At least, those are the plans. We'll see what happens in reality.
I've got plans for this next week. I'm going to learn to speak both Japanese and Chinese, get back into the routine of memory training again and also clean up my flat and do all kinds of productive things. At least, those are the plans. We'll see what happens in reality.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Christmas Number One
I'm reliably informed that Current TV called me the number one geek-we-all-love last night, and played my 'pod' (which is what they call programmes on Current TV, because Current TV is 'cool' and 'down with the kids') from several years ago. You can watch it here if you haven't seen it before. Disturbingly, I had a lot less white in my beard back then, and it was only, what, three years ago?
The really entertaining bit about that page is the comment-threads. Because Current TV is all about viewer-created content (or, as they call it, 'VC-squared', which to my obviously uncool ears sounds just about the squarest phrase it's possible to make up), everybody who commented did so with some bland 'hey, this is a good pod' thing (although at least they all made some specific reference to the content, to prove they're not just spambots) and followed it up with 'please check out my pod at the following link...'.
This is still quite flattering, because obviously they think that this 'pod', and its creator (who's almost a real TV person, not a member of the public) are among the coolest things on Current TV, and they can achieve fame by attracting its many viewers to come and see their own efforts.
In all seriousness, though, it's completely and totally groovy to be adulated as the coolest geek of them all. As I said in an uncharacteristically snappy soundbite in a newspaper interview at the WMC, "I'm absolutely a nerd, and I'm very proud of it. I'm the nerd who all the other nerds look up to and want to be like, and that's a wonderful thing to be." If that's how I'm remembered by history, I'll be delighted!
Also, Happy Christmas, everyone!
The really entertaining bit about that page is the comment-threads. Because Current TV is all about viewer-created content (or, as they call it, 'VC-squared', which to my obviously uncool ears sounds just about the squarest phrase it's possible to make up), everybody who commented did so with some bland 'hey, this is a good pod' thing (although at least they all made some specific reference to the content, to prove they're not just spambots) and followed it up with 'please check out my pod at the following link...'.
This is still quite flattering, because obviously they think that this 'pod', and its creator (who's almost a real TV person, not a member of the public) are among the coolest things on Current TV, and they can achieve fame by attracting its many viewers to come and see their own efforts.
In all seriousness, though, it's completely and totally groovy to be adulated as the coolest geek of them all. As I said in an uncharacteristically snappy soundbite in a newspaper interview at the WMC, "I'm absolutely a nerd, and I'm very proud of it. I'm the nerd who all the other nerds look up to and want to be like, and that's a wonderful thing to be." If that's how I'm remembered by history, I'll be delighted!
Also, Happy Christmas, everyone!
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
RIP Top Cat
There was an article on the BBC News today announcing the sad news that Arnold Stang, the voice of Top Cat, has died, aged 91. It's a good innings - I'd sort of assumed he'd died years ago, to be honest. Anyway, fanatical cartoon fan though I am, he's not an actor who figures very prominently in my consciousness - Top Cat used 'real' actors, not cartoon voice specialists, and none of them really saw the job as anything other than a one-off, fun little thing they did in between films and TV shows. With one exception...
John Stephenson, playing Fancy (the orangey-brown one with the white scarf, who has one line per episode if he's lucky), was a 'real' actor too, until he was given that minor voice part in 1961, on the grounds that he could do a good Clark Gable impression. But from then on, he became a regular name that would pop up in the credits of EVERY cartoon series you might happen to watch. Always in minor roles who didn't say much - Mr Slate in The Flintstones, Luke in Wacky Races, Thundercracker in Transformers, Beef in Galaxy High... wherever Frank Welker was voicing six or seven lead characters, there'd be John Stephenson in the background, chipping in a "Yes, Boss!" every now and then. He's a hero to fans of minor cartoon characters everywhere, and he's still voicing them even today, every now and then, though he's in his late eighties now.
I'm hoping that he gets a big write-up in the media as and when he eventually passes away. Anyone who gives fifty years' service to an industry that makes millions of people happy deserves recognition!
John Stephenson, playing Fancy (the orangey-brown one with the white scarf, who has one line per episode if he's lucky), was a 'real' actor too, until he was given that minor voice part in 1961, on the grounds that he could do a good Clark Gable impression. But from then on, he became a regular name that would pop up in the credits of EVERY cartoon series you might happen to watch. Always in minor roles who didn't say much - Mr Slate in The Flintstones, Luke in Wacky Races, Thundercracker in Transformers, Beef in Galaxy High... wherever Frank Welker was voicing six or seven lead characters, there'd be John Stephenson in the background, chipping in a "Yes, Boss!" every now and then. He's a hero to fans of minor cartoon characters everywhere, and he's still voicing them even today, every now and then, though he's in his late eighties now.
I'm hoping that he gets a big write-up in the media as and when he eventually passes away. Anyone who gives fifty years' service to an industry that makes millions of people happy deserves recognition!
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Ice Ice Baby
I HATE icy pavements! It takes me ten times longer to get from A to B, even if I don't slip over and cripple myself. I'm going to start carrying a flamethrower around with me so I can melt the ice. I'm not sure where you go to buy a flamethrower, but I'm sure they're available on the internet.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Monopolopoly
I'm getting quite sloppy about blogging every night, just lately. I was very tired yesterday, that's my excuse. And I'm working in the Boots store in Newark for the next couple of days, so I'm probably just going to get tireder. Still, on the plus side, I've now got a monopoly set of my very own! (see my post on the subject a few weeks ago if you wonder why that would be a good thing) It really is a fun game. And it also seems like the kind of thing it would be good to spend a drunken evening playing with a whole mob of friends. Anyone fancy a drunken monopoly evening?
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Christmas is coming, the Zoomy's getting fat
The whole diet thing seems to have gone out the window this last month or so. I'm eating sweets and junk food more or less constantly at the moment, and I really ought to stop. Maybe I'll make a resolution. Or, and I think this option might be more fun, I'll try to find a way to make everybody else in the world over-eat to a much greater extent than I do, so I can still eat whatever I want, but I'll look comparatively thin!
Friday, December 18, 2009
Pretty smart
I tried to find a link to watch tonight's Central Tonight online, but it doesn't seem to be working at the moment. Still, if you do manage to watch it somehow (my bit is around the middle, fifteen minutes or so into it), you'll have the pleasure of seeing me in my suit and tie (plus hat), since I filmed it very early this morning before going in to work. And the sight of me memorising things in my work clothes really doesn't happen very often, so Zoomy-collectors will really treasure this one.
Tonight on Central Tonight
If you're in the Central TV region, watch the local news at 6pm for more fun with me and Sainsbury's. Also, while you're at it, go and watch that old clip of me on Central Tonight a couple of years ago, on YouTube. That's my favourite one on there.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Central aisle
I'm getting up at some time before the crack of dawn tomorrow, to film some more supermarket-themed memory fun with Central News. And possibly an interview on Radio Nottingham, but I'm not sure about that - I spent most of this afternoon emailing the Sainsbury's person and the Radio Nottingham person on the subject (I didn't want to do it, because I've got a real job that I've been neglecting lately, but Sainsbury's begged and offered me food hampers) until I finally asked them to please sort it out among themselves. I should really have added "... and tell me whether or not I'm going to do a radio interview tomorrow morning", but I didn't, and they didn't, so I don't know. Never mind.
And after that, I'm going to stop blogging about memory and Sainsbury's every single night. It's time to move on to other subjects, I'm sure you must all be as bored with this theme as I am.
And after that, I'm going to stop blogging about memory and Sainsbury's every single night. It's time to move on to other subjects, I'm sure you must all be as bored with this theme as I am.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
It's the sound of Lincolnshire, that special place to live
... It's the sound of Lincolnshire, with so much more to give. Radio Lincolnshire!
I grew up listening to that catchy jingle, although I don't think they still use it nowadays, and they almost certainly don't play it on Radio Solent, which serves Hampshire, Dorset and the Isle of Wight. But despite this, my appearance on Jon Cuthill's morning show was good fun. Click on that link to hear it, about two hours and ten minutes in (you're allowed to fast-forward if you want). He even had me memorise a pack of cards, live on air (which doesn't sound terribly impressive when you're doing a phone interview on a radio show, but I really didn't cheat. I did only memorise the first dozen or so cards, because I knew he wouldn't ask me them all, but I didn't cheat!). And he gave me thirty seconds to memorise it, thirty seconds of dead air, which I didn't think radio presenters were really supposed to do. Most radio people don't want me to do cards at all...
I do enjoy this kind of thing, though - perhaps I should try to spread the word to local radio stations that I'm available for interviews, free of charge, if they want. They don't have to wait until Sainsbury's tell them to interview me. Radio Derby always tell me to tell them when I win a memory competition, and I never do because I disapprove of self-publicity, but perhaps I'll change that policy.
Also, the producer said we were only allowed to mention Sainsbury's a maximum of two times, otherwise he'd have to fill in a BBC form of some kind, but in the end we only mentioned it once. I feel like I'm not completely living up to my contract with Sainsbury's (especially since they were hoping to get me on national TV and in all the newspapers, name-dropping them left, right and centre, but seriously overestimated how big a draw I am to the media), so here's a bit more advertising, courtesy of Zoomy's Thing: Sainsbury's, Sainsbury's, Sainsbury's. It's the place to buy things. Sainsbury's, Sainsbury's, Sainsbury's. Something something something wings.
Okay, writing advertising slogans isn't my forté.
I grew up listening to that catchy jingle, although I don't think they still use it nowadays, and they almost certainly don't play it on Radio Solent, which serves Hampshire, Dorset and the Isle of Wight. But despite this, my appearance on Jon Cuthill's morning show was good fun. Click on that link to hear it, about two hours and ten minutes in (you're allowed to fast-forward if you want). He even had me memorise a pack of cards, live on air (which doesn't sound terribly impressive when you're doing a phone interview on a radio show, but I really didn't cheat. I did only memorise the first dozen or so cards, because I knew he wouldn't ask me them all, but I didn't cheat!). And he gave me thirty seconds to memorise it, thirty seconds of dead air, which I didn't think radio presenters were really supposed to do. Most radio people don't want me to do cards at all...
I do enjoy this kind of thing, though - perhaps I should try to spread the word to local radio stations that I'm available for interviews, free of charge, if they want. They don't have to wait until Sainsbury's tell them to interview me. Radio Derby always tell me to tell them when I win a memory competition, and I never do because I disapprove of self-publicity, but perhaps I'll change that policy.
Also, the producer said we were only allowed to mention Sainsbury's a maximum of two times, otherwise he'd have to fill in a BBC form of some kind, but in the end we only mentioned it once. I feel like I'm not completely living up to my contract with Sainsbury's (especially since they were hoping to get me on national TV and in all the newspapers, name-dropping them left, right and centre, but seriously overestimated how big a draw I am to the media), so here's a bit more advertising, courtesy of Zoomy's Thing: Sainsbury's, Sainsbury's, Sainsbury's. It's the place to buy things. Sainsbury's, Sainsbury's, Sainsbury's. Something something something wings.
Okay, writing advertising slogans isn't my forté.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
You're listening to BBC Radio Solent
Well, in all likelihood you're not right now, but if you do tomorrow at 11:40, you might hear a brief interview with me, as a follow-up to the Sainsbury's thing.
I can't actually remember right now exactly where the Solent is. Should I look it up before tomorrow, or just hope nobody tests me?
I can't actually remember right now exactly where the Solent is. Should I look it up before tomorrow, or just hope nobody tests me?
Monday, December 14, 2009
Inside the head of Zoomy
This is a picture of the screen of the brain-scanning machine in Tokyo:
Actually, that's the outside of the head of Zoomy, but you could slice cross-sections of it by careful clicks of the mouse, to examine the brain inside. The marks around my eyes are the space-age goggles I was wearing instead of my glasses, by the way.
The Japanese TV people want me to go back there in January, to do some more memory things in the studio! Hopefully it'll be possible to arrange it - I've only got two more days of holiday left after my Christmas break, but that's probably enough to make a flying visit to Tokyo. I have also supposedly won a trip to Bahrain as a prize in the WMC last month, but nobody's replied to my email about the details of that, so I assume there's no time limit on the invitation to go out there and be shown historic buildings. I was thinking of sending someone else, disguised as me, anyway - it can be my Christmas present to anyone out there who looks a bit like me and likes the idea of historic buildings in Bahrain.
As everyone knows, I'm also bad at replying to emails myself, so I've spent this evening catching up with all the various queries about memory techniques I've had in the last couple of weeks. There have been a lot of them, which serves me right for winning the world championship, I suppose, and most of them have been about how to use memory techniques to pass exams at university and things like that which I know nothing about, so replying to them is a bit difficult. I also had someone today asking for memory tips for her toddler.
Tomorrow, I will devote my time to typing up my transcripts for the Cambridge Christmas tournament, three weeks late, before Geoff summons his Viking hordes from Denmark and pillages me. And then email my brother, which is a full evening's work because we write long emails to each other, but at least that's fun rather than a chore...
Actually, that's the outside of the head of Zoomy, but you could slice cross-sections of it by careful clicks of the mouse, to examine the brain inside. The marks around my eyes are the space-age goggles I was wearing instead of my glasses, by the way.
The Japanese TV people want me to go back there in January, to do some more memory things in the studio! Hopefully it'll be possible to arrange it - I've only got two more days of holiday left after my Christmas break, but that's probably enough to make a flying visit to Tokyo. I have also supposedly won a trip to Bahrain as a prize in the WMC last month, but nobody's replied to my email about the details of that, so I assume there's no time limit on the invitation to go out there and be shown historic buildings. I was thinking of sending someone else, disguised as me, anyway - it can be my Christmas present to anyone out there who looks a bit like me and likes the idea of historic buildings in Bahrain.
As everyone knows, I'm also bad at replying to emails myself, so I've spent this evening catching up with all the various queries about memory techniques I've had in the last couple of weeks. There have been a lot of them, which serves me right for winning the world championship, I suppose, and most of them have been about how to use memory techniques to pass exams at university and things like that which I know nothing about, so replying to them is a bit difficult. I also had someone today asking for memory tips for her toddler.
Tomorrow, I will devote my time to typing up my transcripts for the Cambridge Christmas tournament, three weeks late, before Geoff summons his Viking hordes from Denmark and pillages me. And then email my brother, which is a full evening's work because we write long emails to each other, but at least that's fun rather than a chore...
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Comparisons
Boris, in response to last night's blog, commented that it would be interesting to compare developments in athletics with those in memory sports. The fact that the winner of the 100m sprint in the first Olympic Games in 1896 did a sensational 12 seconds, for instance. Actually, there are other similarities apart from the gradual change in what is considered an exceptional performance - at the first modern Olympics, the athletes paid their own way over to Greece, the competitors were drawn from only those people who could afford the trip and who knew the event existed (C. B. Fry, probably the foremost British athlete at the time, didn't find out about the Olympics until after it had happened), and a lot of the rules and regulations were made up on the spur of the moment as and when they were needed. Memory sport is still very much in this kind of state at the moment, but if the Olympics can go from such humble beginnings to a really big thing, who knows?
Also, the 100m in those days was run from a standing start, on a dirt track, wearing rubber-soled boots and baggy shorts. The way they've improved on the basic principles of running in a straight line as quickly as possible is very much like the way we've improved on the way to memorise a pack of cards.
Actually, the comparison with swimming is even more similar. In 1878, when the first "world records" were published by the Amateur Swimming Association, the world record for the 100 yards freestyle was 76.75 seconds. The modern 100m record has knocked 30 seconds off that - helped by the development of "techniques" like the crawl (which was a brand new thing, distrusted by most Victorian swimmers, in 1878), swimming trunks instead of full-body bathing suits, holding swimming races in pools rather than the sea, modifications to the rules about diving starts, all the way up to the modern day and Michael Phelps's bionic body-suit (without which I suspect he'd drown if you pushed him in a swimming pool).
If there's one way in which memory sport is different (apart from the fact that it's a pointless mental exercise for people with too much time on their hands rather than a display of the awesome physical prowess of the human body at its peak), it's that the developments have been much more rapid, and the records have tumbled down much more dramatically. Who knows what will have happened in a hundred years? I hope I'm still around to see it, anyway...
Also, the 100m in those days was run from a standing start, on a dirt track, wearing rubber-soled boots and baggy shorts. The way they've improved on the basic principles of running in a straight line as quickly as possible is very much like the way we've improved on the way to memorise a pack of cards.
Actually, the comparison with swimming is even more similar. In 1878, when the first "world records" were published by the Amateur Swimming Association, the world record for the 100 yards freestyle was 76.75 seconds. The modern 100m record has knocked 30 seconds off that - helped by the development of "techniques" like the crawl (which was a brand new thing, distrusted by most Victorian swimmers, in 1878), swimming trunks instead of full-body bathing suits, holding swimming races in pools rather than the sea, modifications to the rules about diving starts, all the way up to the modern day and Michael Phelps's bionic body-suit (without which I suspect he'd drown if you pushed him in a swimming pool).
If there's one way in which memory sport is different (apart from the fact that it's a pointless mental exercise for people with too much time on their hands rather than a display of the awesome physical prowess of the human body at its peak), it's that the developments have been much more rapid, and the records have tumbled down much more dramatically. Who knows what will have happened in a hundred years? I hope I'm still around to see it, anyway...
Saturday, December 12, 2009
In 1994, scientists predicted...
I'm genuinely thinking about writing a huge long account of everything that's happened in the world of memory sports between 2000 and 2009. And calling it "Noughty Memories", but you can ignore the title if you think it's silly. The second decade of competitive memory has been crammed full of a whole book's worth of events, after all. And 2000 was sort of a starting point for lots of things, not least Gunther memorising 400 digits spoken at a rate of one every two seconds, confounding those scientists' predictions that nobody would ever memorise more than 30, and giving Tony something to talk about in every speech at every memory competition ever since. Usually twice.
Being in the mood for this, I found an entertaining discussion about the revised championship points standards issued in 2005 (back in the days when there wasn't even any kind of rule about when or how the standards would be updated, it just happened whenever the powers that be thought it was necessary and the standards were altered to whatever seemed sensible to Phil - nowadays, in these more enlightened times, there's a rule about when and how, although everyone ignores it), which included Boris's reaction to setting the historic dates standard to 100 dates: "The standard of dates is much too high. No-one will ever come close to it."
The world record, four and a half years later, now stands at 118.5, and frankly I think the championship points standard needs increasing beyond the 100 mark! It just goes to show how far we've come since those dark and distant days. Maybe we should all mention that in all our speeches at memory competitions from now on.
We also don't seem to argue about the rules as much as we used to. Maybe the 2010s will be the decade when the World Memory Championships has a consistent set of rules from one year to the next, and nobody complains!
Being in the mood for this, I found an entertaining discussion about the revised championship points standards issued in 2005 (back in the days when there wasn't even any kind of rule about when or how the standards would be updated, it just happened whenever the powers that be thought it was necessary and the standards were altered to whatever seemed sensible to Phil - nowadays, in these more enlightened times, there's a rule about when and how, although everyone ignores it), which included Boris's reaction to setting the historic dates standard to 100 dates: "The standard of dates is much too high. No-one will ever come close to it."
The world record, four and a half years later, now stands at 118.5, and frankly I think the championship points standard needs increasing beyond the 100 mark! It just goes to show how far we've come since those dark and distant days. Maybe we should all mention that in all our speeches at memory competitions from now on.
We also don't seem to argue about the rules as much as we used to. Maybe the 2010s will be the decade when the World Memory Championships has a consistent set of rules from one year to the next, and nobody complains!
Well, that's interesting...
The other day, while drifting aimlessly around the internet, I was reminded of Krypton Force videos (as described in my blog a few years ago here and here). I looked for them on eBay and as luck would have it, there was someone selling off a big video collection, including one Protectors tape and THREE Sci-Bots that I haven't got. 'Splendid!' I thought to myself. 'I'll pick up a few more of those poor-quality British bootlegs of American dubs of ancient Japanese giant robot cartoons!' So I bid 99p each on them and left eBay to work its wonders.
With an hour to go before the end of the auction, just now, I got a trio of emails telling me I'd been outbid on the Sci-Bots tapes. 'Hey, check it out, one of the other three or four people in the universe who like these things has discovered these auctions!' I thought. 'Well, we'll see about that, let's have us a bidding war!'
So I put a maximum bid of £5 in, and when it turned out that wasn't enough, went up to £10, which is way more than these things are worth, but hey, I'm rich. Turns out that was my rival bidder's maximum too, so I went with £10.50 and wondered if he/she wanted these videos (which have probably been taped over with something else long since anyway - Krypton Force often forgot to remove the copy-protection tab from the second-hand video tapes they used) badly enough to outbid me again.
Turns out that he/she did, and is willing to go up to £25 and beyond, on all three auctions! Now, that's just silly. It's not like these videos are valuable. 'Downright awful' is the kind of words most people would use for them, indeed. Only a handful of weirdos, like me, could possibly derive any enjoyment from the things. Well, I've got the bit between my teeth now. I'm wealthy, foolish and curious, which is a very bad combination for circumstances like this. I'm going to see just how high we can make these bids. 38 minutes to go.
If I don't blog again, it'll be because I've had to sell all my posessions, including my video recorder, to pay for a cheap and tacky video of a cartoon series that I don't really like all that much anyway.
With an hour to go before the end of the auction, just now, I got a trio of emails telling me I'd been outbid on the Sci-Bots tapes. 'Hey, check it out, one of the other three or four people in the universe who like these things has discovered these auctions!' I thought. 'Well, we'll see about that, let's have us a bidding war!'
So I put a maximum bid of £5 in, and when it turned out that wasn't enough, went up to £10, which is way more than these things are worth, but hey, I'm rich. Turns out that was my rival bidder's maximum too, so I went with £10.50 and wondered if he/she wanted these videos (which have probably been taped over with something else long since anyway - Krypton Force often forgot to remove the copy-protection tab from the second-hand video tapes they used) badly enough to outbid me again.
Turns out that he/she did, and is willing to go up to £25 and beyond, on all three auctions! Now, that's just silly. It's not like these videos are valuable. 'Downright awful' is the kind of words most people would use for them, indeed. Only a handful of weirdos, like me, could possibly derive any enjoyment from the things. Well, I've got the bit between my teeth now. I'm wealthy, foolish and curious, which is a very bad combination for circumstances like this. I'm going to see just how high we can make these bids. 38 minutes to go.
If I don't blog again, it'll be because I've had to sell all my posessions, including my video recorder, to pay for a cheap and tacky video of a cartoon series that I don't really like all that much anyway.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Friday feeling
It's nice to have a weekend of doing nothing. Or of catching up with all the things I've been meaning to do for weeks, anyway. I've also decided to use up what remains of my holiday from work to take the whole week between Christmas and the New Year off, and just stay at home, lounging around and doing nothing. I haven't done that for much too long!
I'm sorry that doing nothing and planning future occasions when I'm going to do nothing doesn't make a terribly exciting blog, but maybe tomorrow I will have done something after all and will be able to write about it.
I'm sorry that doing nothing and planning future occasions when I'm going to do nothing doesn't make a terribly exciting blog, but maybe tomorrow I will have done something after all and will be able to write about it.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Oh, sorry
Sorry I didn't post anything yesterday, but I was busy doing something staggeringly important - or at least that's my logical deduction from the fact that I can't remember why I didn't get round to blogging.
Anyway, I've been meaning for a few days to mention that I was pleased to see the Popeye-themed Google logo recently. It did confuse me at first, making me think "Wait, is it a Popeye anniversary of some kind? It was January he first appeared, not December. And the cartoons were 1933, surely, so it's not 75 years of those..." It turned out that it was to commemorate Popeye's creator E.C. Segar's 115th birthday.
Now, it's not that I'm complaining, since any Google logo featuring Popeye has to be better than a logo that doesn't, but that seems like a bit of a stretch to me. It's like something that might happen in one of Segar's own comic strips - they decide to do a Popeye-themed logo and have to come up with an excuse for it, so come up with a ridiculously tangential justification. This would be followed by someone exclaiming "Good night!" and fainting.
Anyway, since now we don't need a good reason for this kind of thing, as a continuing tribute to the sad fact that Segar is still dead, from now on whenever I win a memory competition I'm going to let his slightly less well-known creation Professor Wotasnozzle announce the fact for me:
I like Wotasnozzle. I'm going to look like that when I'm a little bit older.
Anyway, I've been meaning for a few days to mention that I was pleased to see the Popeye-themed Google logo recently. It did confuse me at first, making me think "Wait, is it a Popeye anniversary of some kind? It was January he first appeared, not December. And the cartoons were 1933, surely, so it's not 75 years of those..." It turned out that it was to commemorate Popeye's creator E.C. Segar's 115th birthday.
Now, it's not that I'm complaining, since any Google logo featuring Popeye has to be better than a logo that doesn't, but that seems like a bit of a stretch to me. It's like something that might happen in one of Segar's own comic strips - they decide to do a Popeye-themed logo and have to come up with an excuse for it, so come up with a ridiculously tangential justification. This would be followed by someone exclaiming "Good night!" and fainting.
Anyway, since now we don't need a good reason for this kind of thing, as a continuing tribute to the sad fact that Segar is still dead, from now on whenever I win a memory competition I'm going to let his slightly less well-known creation Professor Wotasnozzle announce the fact for me:
I like Wotasnozzle. I'm going to look like that when I'm a little bit older.
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Taffy
While doing my reading-volunteer thing today, I flicked through a book of nursery rhymes at the school and was surprised to find that it contained "Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief". I would have thought that that poem would be out of fashion with modern educational theories, but maybe not. Possibly we're trying to encourage the young folk nowadays to distrust the Welsh and to deal with persistent thieves by flinging a poker at their heads.
Monday, December 07, 2009
Memorising London
The Sainsbury's support office is really very like the Boots one, so it was an interesting experience to be there in my memory-man clothes rather than the suit and tie, being a visiting memory-trainer rather than whatever it is I normally do for a living. My presentation was rubbish, but hopefully they got some good pictures for publicity. Tune in to the Sunday Telegraph... no, wait, I mean the Independent (some memory man I am, I can't even remember what paper I've been talking to) on Sunday to read all about it. Probably. It might still not be in there after all, I can't promise anything.
I'm going to bed. I couldn't get to sleep last night, and I had to get up early this morning to catch my train, so I've been feeling tired all day. That might have been a contributing factor to my presentation being rubbish, but it's probably just because I'm generally rubbish at memory presentations.
I'm going to bed. I couldn't get to sleep last night, and I had to get up early this morning to catch my train, so I've been feeling tired all day. That might have been a contributing factor to my presentation being rubbish, but it's probably just because I'm generally rubbish at memory presentations.
Sunday, December 06, 2009
Day trip
London tomorrow, teaching people to memorise the locations of Christmas products in Sainsbury's. Rather than preparing my presentation, I've spent the weekend watching the Alan Bennett season on BBC2. This is justifiable, you see, because Sainsbury's is mentioned in passing in "A Chip In The Sugar", which was on today. However, the practical upshot of this is that I'm only just now finishing the tedious preparation work. This is a really good example of why people who say I should do memory stuff for a living don't know what they're talking about.
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Scary picture
I finally got round to getting some new passport photos taken today, and...
Okay, I'm not used to seeing myself without glasses (you're not allowed to wear them in passport photos nowadays, and you're also not allowed to smile, which makes me look like some kind of psychopath), but this really isn't a good photo. Is it me, or is one of my eyes higher than the other? Or is my head just tilted? I look quite freakish. Never allow me to see myself without glasses again! See, now I've got another reason not to wear contacts!
Okay, I'm not used to seeing myself without glasses (you're not allowed to wear them in passport photos nowadays, and you're also not allowed to smile, which makes me look like some kind of psychopath), but this really isn't a good photo. Is it me, or is one of my eyes higher than the other? Or is my head just tilted? I look quite freakish. Never allow me to see myself without glasses again! See, now I've got another reason not to wear contacts!
Friday, December 04, 2009
The history of othello
Othello was invented by James Othello, a Lancashire coal miner and barrister, in 1937. The invention of the game was a happy accident. Othello, who in his spare time was a board game designer, had been working on a game involving an 8x8 board and 64 discs, but it wasn't working out very well as all the discs were white, so it was hard to tell which belonged to which player, and it wasn't possible to move them, because there weren't any free spaces on the board to move them to. Othello, who was also a talented amateur artist who sold watercolours to local and national galleries whenever he had a spare moment, decided to relieve his frustrations by painting a picture of himself throwing a pot of black paint over his unsuccessful board game. However, he accidentally upset his pot of black paint over the game while reaching for the green, and found that it had half covered all of the discs, so that they were black on one side and white on the other. Furthermore, while picking the newly-painted discs up to examine them, he hit upon the idea of a game in which the aim was to put discs down on the board in strategic positions.
Quickly, he ran to his study, put aside the novel he'd been working on in his spare time, and typed out a set of rules to his newly-invented board game, which he decided to call "Othello's Game" (named not after himself but after the Shakespeare character whom James Othello mistakenly believed to be the hero of a play about board games). The book of rules was published the following week and became a best-seller. With the proceeds, James Othello was able to buy a new house in Aldershot for one of his wives and their three children, thus making his bigamous life a great deal easier, as up until this point he had been maintaining two different families in neighbouring houses and lived in fear of his two wives becoming friends and comparing notes about their husbands.
The only problem encountered by the billions of people who bought the book of rules was the unavailability of othello sets to play on - the rules specified that the only "official" set was the one owned by James Othello, and he refused to allow anyone to play on that in case they got dirty fingerprints on it (somewhat germ-phobic, James Othello spent up to six hours a day cleaning his house from top to bottom and back up to top again). It fell to Goro Othello (no relation) to re-invent the game in 1972, removing the rule about the official set and renaming the game "Othello", after his mother, Mrs Othello Othello.
James Othello was somewhat embittered by this, but was never able to prove to the satisfaction of the courts that he had ever invented othello in the first place, as all copies of his book had been lost. He spent the rest of his life, when he wasn't coal-mining, trying to invent a better game, but it kept turning into the exact same game as chess, only with no knights, and everyone hated it.
In tribute to James Othello, everyone nowadays refrains from typing up their transcripts and sending them to Geoff until at least a week after the Cambridge Christmas tournament, in accordance with a strangely specific provision in his last will and testament.
Quickly, he ran to his study, put aside the novel he'd been working on in his spare time, and typed out a set of rules to his newly-invented board game, which he decided to call "Othello's Game" (named not after himself but after the Shakespeare character whom James Othello mistakenly believed to be the hero of a play about board games). The book of rules was published the following week and became a best-seller. With the proceeds, James Othello was able to buy a new house in Aldershot for one of his wives and their three children, thus making his bigamous life a great deal easier, as up until this point he had been maintaining two different families in neighbouring houses and lived in fear of his two wives becoming friends and comparing notes about their husbands.
The only problem encountered by the billions of people who bought the book of rules was the unavailability of othello sets to play on - the rules specified that the only "official" set was the one owned by James Othello, and he refused to allow anyone to play on that in case they got dirty fingerprints on it (somewhat germ-phobic, James Othello spent up to six hours a day cleaning his house from top to bottom and back up to top again). It fell to Goro Othello (no relation) to re-invent the game in 1972, removing the rule about the official set and renaming the game "Othello", after his mother, Mrs Othello Othello.
James Othello was somewhat embittered by this, but was never able to prove to the satisfaction of the courts that he had ever invented othello in the first place, as all copies of his book had been lost. He spent the rest of his life, when he wasn't coal-mining, trying to invent a better game, but it kept turning into the exact same game as chess, only with no knights, and everyone hated it.
In tribute to James Othello, everyone nowadays refrains from typing up their transcripts and sending them to Geoff until at least a week after the Cambridge Christmas tournament, in accordance with a strangely specific provision in his last will and testament.
Thursday, December 03, 2009
Following in footsteps overgrown with moss
It was our department's Christmas do, at a restaurant with decent food and all the usual trimmings, but with crackers containing not jokes but extremely strange trivia, mostly about dogs, but also such fascinating information as (and I'm not making this up) "Question: How many dwarfs are there? Answer: Seven (7)"
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Sometimes I can't resist the obvious
I'm sorry, I just have to observe that the headline on the front page of the Sun this morning was "I Had Two-Year Fling With Tiger", while the front page of the Mirror went with "My Three-Year Affair With Tiger". Both about the same woman, as far as I can see. Honestly, it's almost enough to shake my faith in the ability of tabloid newspapers to accurately report celebrity gossip.
I would love to know which paper gained the most sales from its headlines. Perhaps the Sun appealed to people who like Tiger Woods more, and who wanted to read the story that suggested he'd cheated on his wife for the shorter period of time, whereas the Mirror sold to the people who prefer Nick Faldo, and want the maximum possible infidelity from his rivals. The BBC News website, I notice, describes it as a 31-month affair. That's the kind of accuracy you get from a classy source like the BBC. It would be even more classy of them to concentrate on reporting the real news, rather than the celebrity adultery, but I suppose we can't have everything.
Ooh, but here's something I've only just learned about the BBC News website - did you know that all of its headlines are between 31 and 33 characters in length? I'm hugely impressed. That's so horribly restrictive, and yet they do it so naturally that I never noticed! It's because, apparently, 33 characters is the maximum that can fit on a line on Ceefax (and, apparently, the BBC website thinks that people still read Ceefax), and because someone somewhere calculated that the minimum possible to convey a good headline without looking abridged is 31 characters.
I mean, this is really brilliant. Look at the headlines right now: "Taliban defiant over Obama surge": 32 characters. "Yacht skipper speaks of 'mistake'": 33 characters. "Woods admits letting family down": 32 characters. There are some really talented writers at the BBC! Tragically, though, the powers that beeb have just heard of the concept of search engine optimisation, so now when you click on the 31-33-character headlines, you go through to the story page and find it's got a longer headline featuring as many keywords as possible. Perhaps soon they'll allow Ceefax to fade into the history books and those headline-compressors will be out of a job. I wonder what they'd do if Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink cheated on his wife? He's got 22 characters just in his surname. 23, because you'd have to leave a space after it.
I would love to know which paper gained the most sales from its headlines. Perhaps the Sun appealed to people who like Tiger Woods more, and who wanted to read the story that suggested he'd cheated on his wife for the shorter period of time, whereas the Mirror sold to the people who prefer Nick Faldo, and want the maximum possible infidelity from his rivals. The BBC News website, I notice, describes it as a 31-month affair. That's the kind of accuracy you get from a classy source like the BBC. It would be even more classy of them to concentrate on reporting the real news, rather than the celebrity adultery, but I suppose we can't have everything.
Ooh, but here's something I've only just learned about the BBC News website - did you know that all of its headlines are between 31 and 33 characters in length? I'm hugely impressed. That's so horribly restrictive, and yet they do it so naturally that I never noticed! It's because, apparently, 33 characters is the maximum that can fit on a line on Ceefax (and, apparently, the BBC website thinks that people still read Ceefax), and because someone somewhere calculated that the minimum possible to convey a good headline without looking abridged is 31 characters.
I mean, this is really brilliant. Look at the headlines right now: "Taliban defiant over Obama surge": 32 characters. "Yacht skipper speaks of 'mistake'": 33 characters. "Woods admits letting family down": 32 characters. There are some really talented writers at the BBC! Tragically, though, the powers that beeb have just heard of the concept of search engine optimisation, so now when you click on the 31-33-character headlines, you go through to the story page and find it's got a longer headline featuring as many keywords as possible. Perhaps soon they'll allow Ceefax to fade into the history books and those headline-compressors will be out of a job. I wonder what they'd do if Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink cheated on his wife? He's got 22 characters just in his surname. 23, because you'd have to leave a space after it.
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
The Balaclava Story and other stories
You know, it's a shame that balaclavas are out of fashion these days. On a cold winter's morning, that's exactly the kind of thing I need to wear when I'm cycling to work. Maybe I'll buy one and to heck with fashion. Or get someone to knit me one - it will need to be in bright colours and patterns, so people don't think I'm a terrorist.
I do also need to buy a cycle helmet. People keep telling me to, and my only real excuse for not getting one is that I'm too lazy. Maybe I'll kill two birds with one stone and get a sort of super-strong balaclava that protects my head from all possible injury. I do need to keep my superhuman genius brain safe, after all...
I do also need to buy a cycle helmet. People keep telling me to, and my only real excuse for not getting one is that I'm too lazy. Maybe I'll kill two birds with one stone and get a sort of super-strong balaclava that protects my head from all possible injury. I do need to keep my superhuman genius brain safe, after all...
Monday, November 30, 2009
Floppy ears and curly whiskers
"The Book People" periodically come to Boots and set up shop, flogging reasonably-priced but not-very-good books. Today, however, they had a complete set of Beatrix Potters for a very reasonable kind of price, so I snapped it up. Well, if people ask me often enough to buy things, I always give in in the end. So now please excuse the brief blog, I'm off to read about Timmy Tiptoes.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Chicken Licken
Grandma is knitting woolly jumpers for hens. She mentioned this to me in the course of a conversation about how everyone else in the world thinks she's going barmy, but it turns out that there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for it. So please do go to that website and support this quite genuine need for woolly hen-jumpers.
On an unrelated note, there's a new rule of Zoomy's Thing - any comments that have absolutely nothing to do with the subject of today's blog will be remorselessly deleted, like I've done with most of the comments on the last couple of weeks' bloggings. No, that's too strict. I mean, any comments that have nothing to do with the subject of today's blog will be remorselessly deleted unless they entertain me in some way. Actually, even that goes rather further than I intended. How do you tell one specific person that you're going to delete all his comments without making it look like you're victimising one specific person?
Seriously, please note that I get the comments anyone makes on any blog post, any time, emailed to me. So you don't have to comment on today's post if you want to make sure I see it. I like to look back through my blog occasionally and see what people replied to particular posts, and it irks me if I find a comment about something else entirely that ignores whatever strange subject I was blogging about.
There, that's the serious business out of the way (hens and victimisation). Everybody have a nice day, and normal niceness will be resumed tomorrow. And hey, it's December on Tuesday!
On an unrelated note, there's a new rule of Zoomy's Thing - any comments that have absolutely nothing to do with the subject of today's blog will be remorselessly deleted, like I've done with most of the comments on the last couple of weeks' bloggings. No, that's too strict. I mean, any comments that have nothing to do with the subject of today's blog will be remorselessly deleted unless they entertain me in some way. Actually, even that goes rather further than I intended. How do you tell one specific person that you're going to delete all his comments without making it look like you're victimising one specific person?
Seriously, please note that I get the comments anyone makes on any blog post, any time, emailed to me. So you don't have to comment on today's post if you want to make sure I see it. I like to look back through my blog occasionally and see what people replied to particular posts, and it irks me if I find a comment about something else entirely that ignores whatever strange subject I was blogging about.
There, that's the serious business out of the way (hens and victimisation). Everybody have a nice day, and normal niceness will be resumed tomorrow. And hey, it's December on Tuesday!
Saturday, November 28, 2009
It's Christmas Day
Or at least, it is in othello terminology. Today was the traditional "Christmas tournament", traditionally held some time around the end of November. I was meaning to get the very early train down to Cambridge this morning, and so set my alarm clock last night for some time before the crack of dawn, but then forgot to turn the alarm on. I did wake up in time - I generally wake up just before my alarm goes off, whatever time it's set for - but decided that since the alarm hadn't gone off yet, it must not be time to get up, and just lay around dozing until I finally decided to look at the clock and noticed that the train I was meaning to get had left five minutes earlier.
Still, I got the quarter-past-seven train with no problems, trusting that the half-nine starting time would really mean ten o'clock or a bit later, as it usually does, and I got to the Junior Parlour at Trinity College (the traditional location) just after ten. I was greeted with "Well, that buggers everything up, doesn't it!" from Aubrey, who'd just finished inputting everybody's name into the computer and pressed the button to generate the pairings for round one. Still, it turned out to be easy to fix.
The tournament itself went reasonably well - I lost to David Beck and Helen Starkey, then went on a sort of winning rampage, beating Roy, David Hand, Adelaide and Aidan before finally losing to Imre. Four out of seven is sort of what I aim for at this kind of thing, so I'm quite satisfied. I also surprised everyone by consistently playing the diagonal opening, which I never do - I'm very boring in my choice of openings normally, so I'd decided to make an effort to do weird and unusual things in this competition. Whether it helped or hindered me, I'm not sure. I was white in four games, in one of which I forgot I was playing the diagonal today and went perpendicular without thinking, and the other three games were my losses to David B and Imre, who generally beat me whatever I'm playing, and my win against Roy, who I generally beat. So it's hard to really analyse, and the only conclusion we can draw is that I'm a mediocre othello player.
Still, getting home tonight was unusually easy, given how hard it is to travel to and from Cambridge by train - I got to the station at exactly the right moment to catch the 18:12, and only had to sit around at Ely for twenty minutes or so to get on the Nottingham train. So, that's all the othelloing until next February, and now we're into the long winter mind-sports-free closed season. It's terribly boring.
Still, I got the quarter-past-seven train with no problems, trusting that the half-nine starting time would really mean ten o'clock or a bit later, as it usually does, and I got to the Junior Parlour at Trinity College (the traditional location) just after ten. I was greeted with "Well, that buggers everything up, doesn't it!" from Aubrey, who'd just finished inputting everybody's name into the computer and pressed the button to generate the pairings for round one. Still, it turned out to be easy to fix.
The tournament itself went reasonably well - I lost to David Beck and Helen Starkey, then went on a sort of winning rampage, beating Roy, David Hand, Adelaide and Aidan before finally losing to Imre. Four out of seven is sort of what I aim for at this kind of thing, so I'm quite satisfied. I also surprised everyone by consistently playing the diagonal opening, which I never do - I'm very boring in my choice of openings normally, so I'd decided to make an effort to do weird and unusual things in this competition. Whether it helped or hindered me, I'm not sure. I was white in four games, in one of which I forgot I was playing the diagonal today and went perpendicular without thinking, and the other three games were my losses to David B and Imre, who generally beat me whatever I'm playing, and my win against Roy, who I generally beat. So it's hard to really analyse, and the only conclusion we can draw is that I'm a mediocre othello player.
Still, getting home tonight was unusually easy, given how hard it is to travel to and from Cambridge by train - I got to the station at exactly the right moment to catch the 18:12, and only had to sit around at Ely for twenty minutes or so to get on the Nottingham train. So, that's all the othelloing until next February, and now we're into the long winter mind-sports-free closed season. It's terribly boring.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Postscript
I've just noticed that I'm prejudiced against American sudoku-solvers. I noticed that while I was writing about the national sudoku championship, I was automatically assuming that American sudoku competitions would be really easy to win for someone from this country, because we do much more complicated and difficult sudokus than them as a matter of course.
This prejudice is based on crosswords, I think - I have absolutely no idea how difficult the average sudoku puzzle is in the USA and no reason at all to assume that it's easier than the ones in newspapers over here. So I apologise to any American sudoku-solving mind-readers who were offended by what I was subconsciously thinking. I'm really sorry about that.
This prejudice is based on crosswords, I think - I have absolutely no idea how difficult the average sudoku puzzle is in the USA and no reason at all to assume that it's easier than the ones in newspapers over here. So I apologise to any American sudoku-solving mind-readers who were offended by what I was subconsciously thinking. I'm really sorry about that.
Cheat!
I'm not sure whether this violates my rule about not passing comment on news articles on the internet (because everybody does that in their blogs, and I like to be different), but I notice that Evil Eugene Varshavsky (as he's probably known in Philadelphia mind sports circles) has been stripped of his third place and $3000 prize in the US National Sudoku Championship, according to this article. The cool thing is that Eugene was also caught trying to cheat his way to victory in a major chess tournament, also in Philadelphia, a couple of years ago. Which makes me wonder how long it'll take him to expand his sphere of evil operations into memory competitions.
Okay, probably not until the WMC a) moves to Philadelphia and b) has prize money, but still, the US Championship in New York should probably watch out. It's been quite a while since we had a really interesting accusation of cheating in memory competitions and wow, it's ten years now since Yu Zhang's famous performance at the WMC (I wonder what he's doing now?). Of course, maybe everybody's been cheating all the time and they just haven't been caught yet. I suspect some competitors have been using secret techniques to help them memorise cards more easily - converting cards into mental images, visualising them along a journey, that kind of thing. It's disgraceful, and something should be done about it.
Okay, probably not until the WMC a) moves to Philadelphia and b) has prize money, but still, the US Championship in New York should probably watch out. It's been quite a while since we had a really interesting accusation of cheating in memory competitions and wow, it's ten years now since Yu Zhang's famous performance at the WMC (I wonder what he's doing now?). Of course, maybe everybody's been cheating all the time and they just haven't been caught yet. I suspect some competitors have been using secret techniques to help them memorise cards more easily - converting cards into mental images, visualising them along a journey, that kind of thing. It's disgraceful, and something should be done about it.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
普里德莫尔
Okay, I admit, I haven't touched my Teach Yourself Chinese course since trying the first lesson a week or so ago and deciding it was too hard. But hey, I've still got a year before next year's World Championship. Well, nine months, because it's planned to move back to August after a few years in the autumn/winter, which will mean my current reign as World Memory Champion will be the shortest one in history, probably. I haven't checked, but that sounds right. I've been too busy finding out that the title you see above is apparently how you write my name in Chinese news articles about the World Memory Championship. Now that's something worth remembering!
Anyway, speaking of the history of the WMC, I was thinking that I should write a huge long epic article of some kind about "Memory Sports in the Noughties" - the history of competitive memory's second decade. It's been a pretty eventful ten years, from 2000 to 2009, all in all, and as the person who competed in the second-most world championships and other competitions in that decade, I'm uniquely qualified to write about it if Gunther doesn't. I think it's a work that needs to be written, although I'd probably only offend someone in the process - unless I leave out all the fun but controversial bits, and that would just make it boring...
Anyway, speaking of the history of the WMC, I was thinking that I should write a huge long epic article of some kind about "Memory Sports in the Noughties" - the history of competitive memory's second decade. It's been a pretty eventful ten years, from 2000 to 2009, all in all, and as the person who competed in the second-most world championships and other competitions in that decade, I'm uniquely qualified to write about it if Gunther doesn't. I think it's a work that needs to be written, although I'd probably only offend someone in the process - unless I leave out all the fun but controversial bits, and that would just make it boring...
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
How to win the World Memory Championship
I need some kind of new strategy if I'm going to win it again. I haven't really improved at all over the last couple of years, or not by enough, anyway. I didn't even beat a single personal best at this year's WMC. I've still got the edge over everyone else in the cards and binary, but that's just because my system is so much better than everyone else's (I'm trying not to be modest, because it's non-English), and when other memorisers have successfully adopted a Ben-style-system and practiced it a bit, they'll catch up with me.
I could get better scores if I practiced some more, but I lack the motivation. I really need to develop new and better techniques - a four-digit-per-image system would really boost my scores on the numbers, but I can't get my head around a good way to do it. And what clever things could I do with cards to make my system even better? There must be something, I don't claim to have come up with the greatest system it's possible to have... (just the greatest system that anybody's got right now! To heck with modesty, let's call it the Ben System with capital letters and boast about how great it is, while I still can! I'm the best!)
I could get better scores if I practiced some more, but I lack the motivation. I really need to develop new and better techniques - a four-digit-per-image system would really boost my scores on the numbers, but I can't get my head around a good way to do it. And what clever things could I do with cards to make my system even better? There must be something, I don't claim to have come up with the greatest system it's possible to have... (just the greatest system that anybody's got right now! To heck with modesty, let's call it the Ben System with capital letters and boast about how great it is, while I still can! I'm the best!)
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Monday, November 23, 2009
Englishness
An anonymouse asked me in a comment today "Ben, from where are you originally from? You dont look like british..."
I asked why not, and got the following reply:
"I think you are not British for the following reasons:
1.Your First name and Surname are not typical for someone from Britain.
2.You are much smarter than the average Englishman. Here I don’t mean memory and stuff.
3.Then, you are too modest. That is not typical for an Englishman as well.
4.You don’t get drunk and go outside to make some damage (at least I think so), which is common for some English guys.
5.When you wear the hat it reminds me of someone who has cultural backgrounds from southern countries.
That is what I think, and I did not mean to offend anyone."
I'm fascinated to learn that I don't fit the traditional English stereotypes as held by foreigners, but I think we should examine these points in more detail. At least it's my behaviour and not my appearance that strikes the anonymouse as being non-English - I was worried that I'd need to pose for my new passport photo wearing a top hat and gnawing on a joint of roast beef, like all English people do.
1. Pridmore is, according to a website that's almost certainly wrong, the 5171st-most-popular surname in Britain. Okay, it's not exactly top of the charts, and it's not a name that most people have heard of, but it's a genuine English name, like most or all names ending with 'more'. Well, some people suggest that it's Welsh, and others that it might be French (derived from 'Prudhomme', since 'Pridham' also exists, but I don't think that's a very plausible theory), and the origin of the name is unknown. It's a name that has only ever been used by working-class nonentities, and so has never featured in literature, court reports etc, but it's got a long (albeit mostly unrecorded) history, and I'm quite proud of it.
Incidentally, type Pridmore into Google, and you get Pridmore Bookmakers, then johnpridmore.co.uk (John Pridmore, "an ex-London Gangster, turned Christian" whose website describes how God has changed his life. He's no relation. And I assume the "ex" relates to his gangster career, not just to London, but you never know.), then pridmore.co.uk, which belongs to a Shaun Pridmore who as far as I can see has never done anything of note but who presumably was the first Pridmore to discover computers and bags the domain name for his family photos, then the Google Maps location of Alan Pridmore Entertainment, then the Surname Database entry for 'Pridmore', which boldly asserts that the name is a lost place-name (an assertion apparently based on complete guesswork), and then, finally my blog. See, anonymouse - I'm world-famous, and I'm only number six on Google's Pridmore listing!
As for Benjamin, I owe that to my mother's fondness for Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat back in 1976, but it's not an uncommon name in Britain. Lots of famous Bens in this country - Benjamin Britten springs to mind for obvious reasons, but there's lots of others too.
2. I always thought English people had a worldwide reputation for cleverness! What, we're a land of dunces to the world outside? Well, that's disappointing. Anyway, I'm not 'smart'. Not in any sense of the word. Thick as two short planks, me. So obviously I fit right in to the mass of oafish English!
3. And I'm sure that modesty is a quintessentially English trait! Come on, don't we all like to hide our light under a bushel, at least compared to those boastful, swaggering foreigners? The tradition of British understatement? I can see that we need some better ambassadors for the country. And anyway, I'm not modest. I ceaselessly brag about my accomplishments, I just do it in a subtle way, by saying that I'm modest and following it up with "Here's an impression of what I would say if I wasn't modest: I'm really great, for the following detailed and lengthy reasons..."
4. Yep, the English reputation is rather worse than I thought. Can't really argue with this one completely, but we're not all football hooligans over here. Quite a few English people practically never get drunk and damage things. My grandma, for instance, is practically never drunk and disorderly and hasn't assaulted a policeman or carved her name into a public monument for weeks. And while I have been known to damage things when drunk, it's only shot glasses that I tried to juggle to impress my friends, or the ligaments of my knees. Ahh, that was a great weekend...
5. Hey now, there's one thing I'm most emphatically not, and that's southern! My hat's not a southern hat! It's northern, like me! It's probably a Yorkshirehat!
For the record, I am as far as is known an entirely English person. As I've mentioned once or twice before, my family tree is the most boring in the universe, it's full of Yorkshire/Midlands labourers and absolutely nothing else. On the other hand, my strikingly semitic appearance and instinctive fondness for beards and black fedoras leads many people to guess, possibly correctly, that there's a touch of the Jewish in my family history, and I hope there is. It'd make my background ever so slightly more interesting...
I asked why not, and got the following reply:
"I think you are not British for the following reasons:
1.Your First name and Surname are not typical for someone from Britain.
2.You are much smarter than the average Englishman. Here I don’t mean memory and stuff.
3.Then, you are too modest. That is not typical for an Englishman as well.
4.You don’t get drunk and go outside to make some damage (at least I think so), which is common for some English guys.
5.When you wear the hat it reminds me of someone who has cultural backgrounds from southern countries.
That is what I think, and I did not mean to offend anyone."
I'm fascinated to learn that I don't fit the traditional English stereotypes as held by foreigners, but I think we should examine these points in more detail. At least it's my behaviour and not my appearance that strikes the anonymouse as being non-English - I was worried that I'd need to pose for my new passport photo wearing a top hat and gnawing on a joint of roast beef, like all English people do.
1. Pridmore is, according to a website that's almost certainly wrong, the 5171st-most-popular surname in Britain. Okay, it's not exactly top of the charts, and it's not a name that most people have heard of, but it's a genuine English name, like most or all names ending with 'more'. Well, some people suggest that it's Welsh, and others that it might be French (derived from 'Prudhomme', since 'Pridham' also exists, but I don't think that's a very plausible theory), and the origin of the name is unknown. It's a name that has only ever been used by working-class nonentities, and so has never featured in literature, court reports etc, but it's got a long (albeit mostly unrecorded) history, and I'm quite proud of it.
Incidentally, type Pridmore into Google, and you get Pridmore Bookmakers, then johnpridmore.co.uk (John Pridmore, "an ex-London Gangster, turned Christian" whose website describes how God has changed his life. He's no relation. And I assume the "ex" relates to his gangster career, not just to London, but you never know.), then pridmore.co.uk, which belongs to a Shaun Pridmore who as far as I can see has never done anything of note but who presumably was the first Pridmore to discover computers and bags the domain name for his family photos, then the Google Maps location of Alan Pridmore Entertainment, then the Surname Database entry for 'Pridmore', which boldly asserts that the name is a lost place-name (an assertion apparently based on complete guesswork), and then, finally my blog. See, anonymouse - I'm world-famous, and I'm only number six on Google's Pridmore listing!
As for Benjamin, I owe that to my mother's fondness for Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat back in 1976, but it's not an uncommon name in Britain. Lots of famous Bens in this country - Benjamin Britten springs to mind for obvious reasons, but there's lots of others too.
2. I always thought English people had a worldwide reputation for cleverness! What, we're a land of dunces to the world outside? Well, that's disappointing. Anyway, I'm not 'smart'. Not in any sense of the word. Thick as two short planks, me. So obviously I fit right in to the mass of oafish English!
3. And I'm sure that modesty is a quintessentially English trait! Come on, don't we all like to hide our light under a bushel, at least compared to those boastful, swaggering foreigners? The tradition of British understatement? I can see that we need some better ambassadors for the country. And anyway, I'm not modest. I ceaselessly brag about my accomplishments, I just do it in a subtle way, by saying that I'm modest and following it up with "Here's an impression of what I would say if I wasn't modest: I'm really great, for the following detailed and lengthy reasons..."
4. Yep, the English reputation is rather worse than I thought. Can't really argue with this one completely, but we're not all football hooligans over here. Quite a few English people practically never get drunk and damage things. My grandma, for instance, is practically never drunk and disorderly and hasn't assaulted a policeman or carved her name into a public monument for weeks. And while I have been known to damage things when drunk, it's only shot glasses that I tried to juggle to impress my friends, or the ligaments of my knees. Ahh, that was a great weekend...
5. Hey now, there's one thing I'm most emphatically not, and that's southern! My hat's not a southern hat! It's northern, like me! It's probably a Yorkshirehat!
For the record, I am as far as is known an entirely English person. As I've mentioned once or twice before, my family tree is the most boring in the universe, it's full of Yorkshire/Midlands labourers and absolutely nothing else. On the other hand, my strikingly semitic appearance and instinctive fondness for beards and black fedoras leads many people to guess, possibly correctly, that there's a touch of the Jewish in my family history, and I hope there is. It'd make my background ever so slightly more interesting...
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Extra post
Because some things can't wait until tomorrow's blogging. I take back everything I've ever said about Wikipedia. You've got to admire the kind of article-writing skill that, in the page about Japanese young children's cartoon Anpanman, describes Anpanman and his enemy Baikinman as "physical representations of moral dualism".
The computer screen that displayed the numbers and things for us to memorise in the MRI machine in Tokyo had a starting display of Anpanman saying "Please wait". I surprised the scientists by knowing who he was.
The computer screen that displayed the numbers and things for us to memorise in the MRI machine in Tokyo had a starting display of Anpanman saying "Please wait". I surprised the scientists by knowing who he was.
Of travel I've had my share, man
It's, sadly, passport renewal time. If I want to go abroad next year, my trusty passport will be past its expiry date in June. Just look at all those stamps in it, too - I wasn't sure if I was ever going to use the thing when I first got it. Now, if they gave you a stamp when you went to Europe, the passport would be full to bursting with exotic ink colours. Even so, it's still pretty cool.
The first page has Malaysia, 01 Oct 2003 arriving, 06 Oct 2003 departing. World Memory Championship, I came third and took a lot of people by surprise with how much I'd improved since the previous year (that was the year I debuted the "Ben system"... ahhh, happy memories). Next page has the USA, 26 Feb 2007 - Las Vegas, during my unemployed-waster phase, justifying it to myself by saying that it'd help me write my book if I had a change of scene. The page after that has the USA again, 01 Jul 2009, my recent jaunt to Pittsburgh, and Bahrain in 22 Oct 2008 where I triumphed in the World Championship last year. Blank page, then Japan, 24 Oct 2009 - I never realised it was exactly a year after the WMC - to have my brain scanned and sing karaoke. Six more blanks, then we come to the middle pages, which a lot of passport-stampers seem to favour. USA, July 02 2002, was a trip to Chicago to hang out with Jimi and the gang, wow, seven and a half years ago, and Brazil 09 07 06, for that brilliant TV-star holiday in Rio. The other half of the middle-page spread has two more American stamps - Jan 17 2002 was Las Vegas for the first time, Nov 16 2002 was back to Vegas for the second time because I'd liked the first time so much. Six more blanks, then again with the USA, Mar 05 2009 - New York this spring. Next page is a mostly faded black stamp of some kind, I don't know what, and USA for Feb 21 2005, which was another Vegas trip. I do love Las Vegas, although on that trip I caught the flu and spent the whole time ill in bed, so it wasn't the best holiday I've ever had. Four more blank pages, then we get Bahrain, 29 Aug 2007 to 03 Sep 2007, where I spectacularly failed to win the World Championship but still had a great time. And then on the last page, US Immigration on Oct 21 2000, my first ever trip abroad, visiting Washington DC just for the hell of it. There had been talk of having a housewarming party for CV when he moved over there, that didn't happen, but I eventually resolved to go to Washington anyway, because who says you need a good reason and I'd never been anywhere before. And I'm glad I did!
You don't need to get the renewal form and photos countersigned if you're still recognisable from your previous photo - I think I just about qualify, more or less:
Just look at that young stripling with the naive smile, the smooth chin and the last vestiges of a trendy hairstyle on top of his head. 23 years old, never left the country, never competitively memorised anything, never spontaneously quit his job for a life as a waster... and wearing a cool Zenith badge ("Never trust a hippy") that I wish I still had. I'd try to picture myself looking back on now, ten years in the future, but I really can't imagine getting any older than I am right now. 43? I'm never going to be 43.
The first page has Malaysia, 01 Oct 2003 arriving, 06 Oct 2003 departing. World Memory Championship, I came third and took a lot of people by surprise with how much I'd improved since the previous year (that was the year I debuted the "Ben system"... ahhh, happy memories). Next page has the USA, 26 Feb 2007 - Las Vegas, during my unemployed-waster phase, justifying it to myself by saying that it'd help me write my book if I had a change of scene. The page after that has the USA again, 01 Jul 2009, my recent jaunt to Pittsburgh, and Bahrain in 22 Oct 2008 where I triumphed in the World Championship last year. Blank page, then Japan, 24 Oct 2009 - I never realised it was exactly a year after the WMC - to have my brain scanned and sing karaoke. Six more blanks, then we come to the middle pages, which a lot of passport-stampers seem to favour. USA, July 02 2002, was a trip to Chicago to hang out with Jimi and the gang, wow, seven and a half years ago, and Brazil 09 07 06, for that brilliant TV-star holiday in Rio. The other half of the middle-page spread has two more American stamps - Jan 17 2002 was Las Vegas for the first time, Nov 16 2002 was back to Vegas for the second time because I'd liked the first time so much. Six more blanks, then again with the USA, Mar 05 2009 - New York this spring. Next page is a mostly faded black stamp of some kind, I don't know what, and USA for Feb 21 2005, which was another Vegas trip. I do love Las Vegas, although on that trip I caught the flu and spent the whole time ill in bed, so it wasn't the best holiday I've ever had. Four more blank pages, then we get Bahrain, 29 Aug 2007 to 03 Sep 2007, where I spectacularly failed to win the World Championship but still had a great time. And then on the last page, US Immigration on Oct 21 2000, my first ever trip abroad, visiting Washington DC just for the hell of it. There had been talk of having a housewarming party for CV when he moved over there, that didn't happen, but I eventually resolved to go to Washington anyway, because who says you need a good reason and I'd never been anywhere before. And I'm glad I did!
You don't need to get the renewal form and photos countersigned if you're still recognisable from your previous photo - I think I just about qualify, more or less:
Just look at that young stripling with the naive smile, the smooth chin and the last vestiges of a trendy hairstyle on top of his head. 23 years old, never left the country, never competitively memorised anything, never spontaneously quit his job for a life as a waster... and wearing a cool Zenith badge ("Never trust a hippy") that I wish I still had. I'd try to picture myself looking back on now, ten years in the future, but I really can't imagine getting any older than I am right now. 43? I'm never going to be 43.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
We're with the bear
I tell you, there's nothing like staying up till three in the morning when you've got a cold to make you feel all the worse the next day. Actually, I was feeling so yucky last night that I almost decided to skip the phone-answering, but I'm glad I didn't - not only was it fun, it's so mild outside at the moment now that I think a couple of late-night bike rides to work and back made me feel a lot better than wallowing in my germs at home would have done.
Anyway, enough whining. What with going out last night, I didn't have a chance to write a blog and tell you about my day on Friday. The highlight, among all the various fund-raising activities going on at the office, was entering a guess the name of the bear competition and winning it! Well, it was obvious, really - the options were Bartholomew and a lot of stupid modern names that people call their children nowadays. So Bartholomew, an extremely cool giant teddy (he'd come up about to my waist if he stood up, which he can't do since his legs are stuck in a sitting position) is now making friends with all my much smaller cuddly toys in my bedroom. I hope he's not bullying them.
There was also a second, less cool, part of the prize - a pair of "designer sunglasses". Funnily enough, they look exactly like my cheap Specsavers prescription sunglasses that I rarely wear, except they've got "Police" written on them in small letters. I don't really need these designer shades, and there doesn't seem much point in going to the effort of getting prescription lenses put in them so I don't have to wear them on top of my normal glasses, so somebody can expect them as a Christmas present from me.
Not somebody I like all that much, obviously, seeing as I've just spent the last paragraph deriding them. I'll give them to one of my enemies, assuming I manage to make any enemies between now and Christmas.
Anyway, enough whining. What with going out last night, I didn't have a chance to write a blog and tell you about my day on Friday. The highlight, among all the various fund-raising activities going on at the office, was entering a guess the name of the bear competition and winning it! Well, it was obvious, really - the options were Bartholomew and a lot of stupid modern names that people call their children nowadays. So Bartholomew, an extremely cool giant teddy (he'd come up about to my waist if he stood up, which he can't do since his legs are stuck in a sitting position) is now making friends with all my much smaller cuddly toys in my bedroom. I hope he's not bullying them.
There was also a second, less cool, part of the prize - a pair of "designer sunglasses". Funnily enough, they look exactly like my cheap Specsavers prescription sunglasses that I rarely wear, except they've got "Police" written on them in small letters. I don't really need these designer shades, and there doesn't seem much point in going to the effort of getting prescription lenses put in them so I don't have to wear them on top of my normal glasses, so somebody can expect them as a Christmas present from me.
Not somebody I like all that much, obviously, seeing as I've just spent the last paragraph deriding them. I'll give them to one of my enemies, assuming I manage to make any enemies between now and Christmas.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Does a lot of work for charity, doesn't like to talk about it
Remember that thing with helping children learn to read in schools? I am still doing it, it's just taken a little while to get everything arranged. But as of next Tuesday lunchtime, I'm having infants read Magic Key books to me on a one-to-one kind of basis. The school is really keen to get men doing this, because they've got a shortage of male role-models for the kids, apparently. I don't think I'd make a very good role-model, but I suppose beggars can't be choosers.
Also, I'm manning the phones for Children in Need again tomorrow, 9pm until 2am. So call in, and maybe I'll take your money!
And in non-charitable news, here's a memory statistic: If I'd got my 25.97-second pack and Simon had got his 20.93, I would have won the World Championship by 35 championship points. 8058 to 8023. Now that would have been a great finish! We would have had to have demanded a recount...
Also, I'm manning the phones for Children in Need again tomorrow, 9pm until 2am. So call in, and maybe I'll take your money!
And in non-charitable news, here's a memory statistic: If I'd got my 25.97-second pack and Simon had got his 20.93, I would have won the World Championship by 35 championship points. 8058 to 8023. Now that would have been a great finish! We would have had to have demanded a recount...
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Stooges and sneezes
I've got a cold and need sympathy, but on the other hand a comments-thread on my blog inspired me to look into the Three Stooges in more detail and watch some of their shorts on YouTube, so now I'm completely hooked on their antics. Heehee, I do love slapstick, I don't know why I've never watched them before. I'm impressed by the remakes and reused footage in their later films, too - I've never seen that kind of thing done outside cartoons...
It's a great comfort to my sore red nose. More of a comfort than these Kleenex Balsam tissues "with protective balm", certainly. I think the whole protective balm thing is just a lie.
Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I met a guy called Rudolf Reinders? Well, if I didn't, that's basically the whole story right there, but I really did. He's German and old and was born before the Red-Nosed Reindeer became a celebrity, so it's just a coincidence. He plays Chinese chess really well.
It's a great comfort to my sore red nose. More of a comfort than these Kleenex Balsam tissues "with protective balm", certainly. I think the whole protective balm thing is just a lie.
Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I met a guy called Rudolf Reinders? Well, if I didn't, that's basically the whole story right there, but I really did. He's German and old and was born before the Red-Nosed Reindeer became a celebrity, so it's just a coincidence. He plays Chinese chess really well.
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