A memorable match

The Online Memory League Championship is a great thing. Here's an example of a fun match I had today, just in case anyone reading this was still on the fence about joining the fun next season.

I'm up against Islomxo'ja from Uzbekistan, a new territory for memory games! We've played once before, in a relegation playoff at the end of last season - I won that one 4-1 (he was rather unlucky), but a shortage of players signed up for this season has led to us both in division 2 this time around.

The way Memory League Championship matches work nowadays is the opponents take turns to choose one of the five disciplines, and the first to 4 (with a lead of two or more) is the winner. Maximum of eight games, so a match can end 4-4 or 4½-3½ or 5-3.

I had the first choice today, so went for cards as usual - I can normally safely do a full 52 cards in under 30 seconds, and not many other people in division 2 can do that. This time, though, I started very sluggishly and forgot what one of my images was - which you'd think I wouldn't do after nearly twenty years of using these images, but that's a lack of practice for you. So it took me thirty-seven and a half seconds - but luckily, Islom was playing it safe and went more slowly, so I still got the first point.

Second game, Islomxo'ja's choice was of course names. I can't do names, it's universally known. So that made it 1-1. This is how my first two games in any memory match almost invariably start.

So my usual next choice, numbers, is a little bit more risky - it's easier to forget one images in numbers, because unlike in cards, you can't go back and make sure you've used each of the 52 cards once. But I memorised these ones smoothly in 24 seconds... but made a mistake at the end. I 'grab' the last six images (18 digits - or rather 17 with an imaginary zero on the end, since 80 digits doesn't divide neatly by three), just reading them quickly to myself and saying the name of the images to myself. And the problem is, 286 and 386 have basically the same names, and I wasn't certain whether I'd seen the one that starts with M or the one that starts with N. It's rather sloppy on my part there. Islom was playing it safe again, and took a 2-1 lead.

And he then chose images, which he's generally faster at than I am, and won with a very nice 18 seconds. 3-1, match point, and we're down to my third choice of discipline...

I chose words - and I'd got some terrible results in my previous match against Guillaume, just because I'm out of practice. I'd done a bit more training since then, but I found this set of words tricky, and didn't get up to the end of the list in the sixty seconds. Islom seemed to do the same, though, and I managed to get the win. 3-2. Still match point!

So Islom chose words again, and this time we both found it easier - which is interesting, since I normally have troubles when I do two words games in a row. 40 isn't a world-beating score by any means, but I was happy with it. I finished before Islom did, and watched his score ticking up - I thought it might be a draw, but I just barely won, 40 to 39, levelling the match.

So my fourth and final choice of discipline could only be images - I'm never going to choose names, am I? And I think we were both getting a bit tired after all this exertion! I was annoyed to get two pairs of images swapped around - I memorise them in groups of three, but I knew one couplet had interacted over the last of one group and the first of the next. I just forgot which one it was. So I ended up dropping four points, and Islom only dropped three, taking him to 4-3 and guaranteed at least a draw.

He had to choose numbers or cards for the last one, and sensibly went for numbers. I figured he'd go slowly, and decided to look at them all twice instead of once. And I still couldn't remember one image! Actually, I tend to make just as many mistakes if I review the data, so I don't know why I ever think it would be a good idea. It was all academic, anyway - far from going slow, Islom did a fast 27-second time and got them all right! So he ended up a very deserving 5-3 winner!

The day might eventually come when people who beat me in memory competitions no longer tell me I'm a legend who they admire, but it hasn't happened yet. I'll need to train harder to catch up with these new young legends again!

A rare treasure

 I'm delighted to hear (from fellow Krypton Force fan Andrew Joseph) that another copy of "The Mask" has shown up on eBay after all this time!

Until now, the copy I own was to the best of my knowledge the only one ever released in the UK! Nobody else ever seems to have even heard of it, not even the BBFC listings! But hey, it looks like they made at least two of them. Maybe there were even more - in Australia, it seems a whole four volumes of Mission Promete came out, although it's almost impossible to find any trace...

See this classic blog post for full details of the wonders of Krypton Force, if you haven't already. You probably have, though - it's the single most visited page on this blog, according to the Blogger stats page! There's a whole army of Krypton Force lovers out there! And quite right too - those videos are wonderful!

An amazing fantasy

Spider-Man turns sixty this year. He must be getting a bit arthritic as he swings around New York, unless he's got the proportional lifespan of a spider as well as all the other stuff. But the internet tells me that "many male spiders reach maturity within two years and then die after mating," so he probably wouldn't want to.

In any case, we're getting a big celebration comic for the anniversary, and I do like the look of the creator lineup in the ads!

I mean, I'm probably sold already by the time I'm half-way down that list, because I'll buy pretty much anything with Kurt Busiek's name on it, and wouldn't want to miss Neil Gaiman's take, or Jonathan Hickman's. And Dan Slott's pretty great, too. And Armando Iannucci? Seriously? That's got to be worth a look, at least.

But one name that nobody seems to be getting excited about in the comments section of the internet posts I've seen so far is Rainbow Rowell, whose revival of Runaways was just brilliant, and exactly the kind of thing you'd want to see in a Spider-Man anniversary special! I could go on about it for hours, using phrases like "Rainbow Rowell's revival of Runaways" quite recklessly and regardless of my difficulty pronouncing the letter R. That's how cool I think she is!

So yes, I'll be getting this comic, however overpriced and minimal its content might be. I do have a problem with calling it "Amazing Fantasy #1000", though. I don't really know why sticking "#1000" on the cover of American comics is still cool, especially when it comes to something like Amazing Fantasy. It's not like there's a long history of Amazing Fantasy comics that we're celebrating - there were six issues of "Amazing Adventures", followed by eight more of "Amazing Adult Fantasy" (because in 1961, calling a comic 'adult fantasy' meant 'ten-year-old kids who are worried they might be too old for comics will buy this one'), and then one "Amazing Fantasy #15" that was the first appearance of Spider-Man. And then they cancelled it and decided to give Spidey his own self-titled comic instead.

Couldn't they call it "Amazing Fantasy #60"? Or #720? Or #735, as if it had come out monthly ever since #15? I'd buy that.

This must be how TV newsreaders feel

I'm wearing pyjama bottoms and a proper work shirt, complete with cufflinks.

I don't think I've sufficiently embraced the possibilities of zoom meetings before now. I should vary the way I clothe my lower half every time. Just imagine all the strange things I could be wearing, when everyone's only seeing my serious top half! It'll be particularly fun if I stand up without thinking and show the Queen (I assume I'll be having a zoom call with the Queen some time soon; my invitation probably just got lost in the post) my frilly pink tutu.

Top of the table

 Season Fifteen is go, in the world of Memory League! And just when I'm busy with easily half a dozen little projects all week - seriously, they do all come at once, with a vengeance!

But I'm in division 2a this time, with an interesting lineup of opponents, and hopeful of doing better than last time around. First match is against Guillaume, who's a tough cookie - in fact, they all are. Against most opponents I generally hope to get a win in cards, and less definitely in numbers, but everybody tends to be very good at images nowadays, and are often better than me at words, and you need a win in at least one of those to get to the four points you need for victory. I'll just have to see how it goes. And hope my opponents make mistakes.

The best thing, of course, is that I'm top of the league! Thanks to the wonders of alphabetical order - and isn't it a good thing that I changed my memory league name from "Zoomy" to the regular Sunday-go-to-church "Ben Pridmore" to set a good example in the early days when people were complaining about the anonymity of nicknames? I'd hate to be in the red zone to start with...

A busy schedule

Things always seem to come along all at once, rather than patiently taking turns. I've complained about this before, but the universe hasn't reconfigured itself to suit my preferences yet.

So I'm going to London tomorrow in my latest chapter of celebrity status as a mind sports competitor - I won't give any more detail than that, since I haven't asked the people organising it if it's okay, and I'm perhaps more cautious about that kind of thing in my old age than I used to be. Indeed, it's just occurred to me as I write this that they asked me for links to my social media accounts and I said my only presence on social media is my facebook. In fact, this blog probably counts too, doesn't it? I suppose it doesn't really come to mind when you say 'social media', and indeed there's not so much of a social side of things since it's basically just me shouting into the void that is the internet. Does anybody actually read this? Post a reply if you read it! But it is the kind of thing a TV person might want to check to see if I'm in the habit of publicly saying things that would cause a media frenzy. I'll tell them about it tomorrow.

And anyway, I really don't ever cause a media frenzy. Except maybe that time with the chimpanzee, and even that was kind of low-key frenzy.

And then a week tomorrow I'm starting a new job. Or actually, I'm having induction sessions on Tuesday and Thursday mornings next week, even though I won't have officially started the job then. Which makes it okay that on Wednesday I'm having an interview for a different job, which was arranged fractionally before I accepted the job I'm actually starting. It's very poor form to have a job interview in your first week at a new place, but I don't think there are any rules about having one the week before you really officially start somewhere.

I need the practice at job interviews, you see - I'm awful at them. I never get jobs based on an interview (this new one, like the one before, was I think mainly a result of having worked with someone at the new place before now) and I need to get good at them. I need to practice not replying to "Why do you want to work for us?" with "Well, I don't, really." And replying to "Can you give us an example of when you did x, y and z?" with "Must I? I don't remember things like that, I just do my job..."

So this interview on Wednesday will be a good no-pressure way to practice interview technique, without worrying that I'll be jobless and penniless if I don't get it. And it's a good job of the kind I'd really quite like to get, so maybe I'll end up with the luxury of being able to choose between two jobs! Although if either company are among the hypothetical people who do read this blog, that would be a bit embarrassing - maybe I could avoid this kind of complication by not telling the internet all about me, but where's the fun in that?

I like a nice spreadsheet

Have I mentioned that before? Sorry, but Excel spreadsheets are my thing, and I happen to think they're great. So I like to find a nice one in the wild, and this is a real doozy. It's the end of the football season, you see, and as always at this time, fans of small non-league clubs all around the country are asking each other "how does promotion and relegation work, then?" It takes a lot of research and investigation to find out exactly what the rules are at any given moment, and then a ridiculous amount of calculation to figure out whether your team's points-per-game lands them in a play-off or what. So I'm delighted to see that the creator of this spreadsheet has laid everything out in a comprehensive, concise and comprehensible way. It's a delight to read through it, and I'm sure even people who aren't weirdo number-crunchers like myself really appreciate it too!

Good weekend for my former local team, anyway - my old home of Belper Town won their play-off final to move up to the same level as my current local team, Redditch Utd, next season. Long Eaton Utd, who were sort of almost my closest local team before I moved to Belper, topped the United Counties League Premier North and will be just one level below those two next season. I should buy some sort of three-way scarf and support the whole lot of them!

I think this goes a bit too far

 Following on from the post about Quality's line of funny animal heroes the other day, let's move ahead a few years, and look at one particular story from Marmaduke Mouse #26, dated October 1951.

Writer and artist unknown - they didn't credit people in those days, and it doesn't look like Ernie Hart's work. Nobody on the internet seems to have ever bothered to research the creators of lesser-known funny-animal comics, which I think is a great shame. Maybe we can pin down individual artists from variations in the costumes - this one, like quite a few Marmaduke stories around that time, doesn't draw the strap on Louie's overalls, but does pay quite detailed attention to Marmaduke's safety pin.

Anyway, this is a pretty typical kind of slight and unoriginal storyline, it just gets a little interesting towards the end...

Marmaduke gets an official title here - he's more normally just a general sidekick and dogsbody to Louie. This is pretty typical of the life they lead, though - for a king, Louie always seems to be down on his luck!

And this confirms what the story is this month - we're doing Jack and the Beanstalk. Obviously, this is seventy years ago, so a lot of the familiar tellings were still to come, but it's fair to say the story would be expected to be well known and seen many times before by all the readers. There had already been two Mickey Mouse cartoons on the theme by this point! It's the done thing for a story like this to give a new and funny twist to it - updating it by selling the car rather than the family cow!

Incidentally, it's worth mentioning that Marmaduke is an adult. That he wears nothing but a nappy is just part of his character design; it's rarely mentioned and never explained. His big brother, Manly Mouse, appears in one story, and he wears them too, so maybe there's some kind of hereditary condition. Although since Manly is hugely muscular and works as a fat lady in a circus, justifying it with "I get so cold in winter and the stuffing and inflating I wear as the fat lady keeps me warm!" he seems to run the gamut of every popular fetish culture you can find on the internet in the twenty-first century. Anyway, back to the comparatively normal adventures of Marmaduke and Louie...

It's not uncommon for Marmaduke to be confined to the dungeons. Working for Louie doesn't generally seem to be a very rewarding career...

It's interesting that Louie calls for the guards repeatedly, and they do what he wants off-panel without making an appearance. The early Ernie Hart stories used quite a bit of creativity with background characters, but these later anonymous entries into the series weren't quite so inspired. And so Marmaduke climbs the beanstalk... my favourite twist on the old story comes from an Order of the Stick book, in which Elan tells the tale and ends it at the point where the giant beanstalk first grows - Jack and his mother cheer that now they have all the beans they can eat, and can sell the surplus for a profit! They'll never be poor or hungry again! The end!

The giant doesn't seem particularly unreasonable or unpleasant. But still, Marmaduke feels it would be a good idea to rescue the duck that lays the golden eggs. For it to be a duck, rather than a goose or hen, is unusual, but there might just be a reason behind it...

Whoa, that final panel - the punchline to this story is that our heroes KILL and EAT the friendly chap Marmaduke has been cheerfully chatting with for this whole page?

I mean, like I mentioned last time, the life of a cartoon animal tends to come with the understanding that there are people out there who will eat you if they get the chance, and everyone tends to be rather blasé about the whole idea. Plenty of more modern cartoons have subverted the trope - one of my favourites is a fun moment in Rocko's Modern Life (1993) in which his chicken neighbour goes for a job interview with a poultry packaging company, and gets turned into the product. But it's really pretty striking and unique for the central characters of the story to cheerfully tuck into the roasted corpse of Marmaduke's 'pal' like this, isn't it? Makes you think he's not as wholesome as he appears...

One final thing worth noticing -  this duck is definitely referred to as a 'he', and proves his gender by wearing a man's hat, but he does apparently lay eggs. The world of Marmaduke Mouse is a strange one.

It's all kicking off

 A new season is about to start for my two favourite online competitions! First off, we've got Memory League, where it's time to sign up for season 15:

And what's more, it's Memory League May - play every day to get a free subscription! This is the best way to get into the whole Memory League thing, and I heartily recommend giving it a go even if you're a novice to the high-speed memorisation world.

And then it's also a "new season" of eOthello, although in that case it just means that we've got to the end of the previous list of eight unrelated tournaments and it's time to start a new one. But this is what the next 16 months or so have in store for othello players, and the first one starts in a week or so!

So one way or another, there's plenty to keep you busy online all the way through May! Never leave your home again!

The Quality Comics Funny-Animal Universe

 

I write a lot about superhero comics on here, but there's a lot more to the history of comics than just the long-underwear types. Let's go back to mid-1940s America, when the heroes were on the way out and the next big thing might just possibly be anthropomorphic animals. Mickey Mouse and his friends were big business, after all, so it's understandable that a lot of comic publishers turned to copying whatever they were doing...

Quality Comics, a fairly small publisher who had one big superhero hit with Plastic Man and one big war-comic hit with Blackhawk, decided in time for their 'Spring 1945'-dated comics to branch out into the animal kingdom, and recruited the great Ernie Hart, who'd created the popular (if not hugely original) Super Rabbit for Timely/Marvel Comics a year or two previously.

Ernie Hart's connection with Marvel continued into the superhero rebirth of the 1960s, tenuously - he wrote the dialogue scripts (under the pen-name "H.E. Huntley") for a handful of their comics when Stan Lee was too busy. One of them was the first appearance of the Wasp, which has led to him being rather dubiously credited as her co-creator. But it's with the animals that he was truly creative, and nowhere more so than for a little while at Quality!

It all started in Hit Comics #35 - you can read it and all the rest of these public-domain comics at that link!

Kid Eternity was the headline hero of Hit Comics - he's not as famous as he should be, he's got the interesting super-power to summon any person from history or mythology to help with his crime-fighting. His costume is rather cool, too; I like the red sash around his waist. But in the pages behind him (Quality still had 56-page comics, while market leader DC had been forced by paper rationing down to 48) are a lot of other features, including two new ones with the 'Hart' signature - Marmaduke Mouse and Egbert.

Marmaduke is the most significant one, because it doesn't just introduce the two central characters of that series (Marmaduke and Louie the lion), there's one panel - the one that started this blog post - that shows us a whole range of other characters too, prototypes of the ones who would later get their own stories. Ernie Hart was obviously planning right from the start on launching a whole line of funny animals for Quality!

It's also interesting to note that Hart originally saw the animals as actors who'd play different roles in each story. In Hit Comics #35, Louie is the evil king of the forest, and Marmaduke is the smallest animal but the only one who dares defy him (mainly because he doesn't know what 'defy' means). In #36, Marmaduke lives in a little suburban house of his own, inherits a million dollars and is kidnapped by Louie, a crook. In #37, Marmaduke skips school to go fishing and truant officer Louie tries to catch him. In #38, Louie is a homeowner trying to get rid of Marmaduke the mouse who eats all his food. In #39, Louie is a farmer, and Marmaduke a bum trying to beg a nickel for a cup of coffee.

The other strip, "Egbert and the Count" works in the same kind of way, although Egbert the chicken's personality is more consistent - he's extremely stupid, but somehow always gets the better of the Count, a fox who wants to either eat Egbert or rob him of his money. Their first adventure also introduces a Mr Owl, who mispronounces words to comic effect.

And comic effect is the key feature of the dialogue in these stories - there's no such thing as too many gags! The very best ones are when Ernie Hart manages to work a play on words or silly joke into every single speech bubble, whether they make any sense or not...

(Indeed, he's not above using the same gag repeatedly - hey, if they like a horse, then they'll like two horses twice as well!)

The funny animal invasion seems to have been a hit with the readers of Hit Comics - or maybe just with the publisher - because when the American paper rationing was lifted at the start of 1946, Quality launched all-new solo comics for their favourite heroes. Kid Eternity got one, but so did Marmaduke and Egbert! And they were both written and drawn entirely by Ernie Hart!

The comics each cram eight stories (plus the obligatory two-page text story that all American comics were required to have in order to qualify as a magazine and get a reduced postage rate) into their 48 pages (with #12, they're cut down to 32). Here's a rundown of all the characters:

Marmaduke Mouse is the one who really stood the test of time - his comic continued to be published until Quality went out of business in 1956 (though the last couple of years were just reprints of old stories). After all the role-switching of the earliest stories, it soon settles down into a fixed situation - Louie is the king of some unspecified country, and Marmaduke works for him. They get into scrapes caused variously by Marmaduke's bungling, Louie's idiocy or outside forces. Louie generally gets furious with Marmaduke and vows some excessive punishment, but they're always friends again by the end.

Cholly Chipmunk is fat and loves to eat food. He's perfectly happy to steal it from other people, or anyone who's left a pie to cool on the windowsill, and gets into all kinds of scrapes as a result. But he also dreams about being a hero and is regularly ordered by his conscience to do good deeds instead. In the first issue of Marmaduke Mouse, Cholly appears in the first Marmaduke story, then continues into his own strip, in which he reads Egbert's comic. He's really tying this shared universe together!

Frowzy and Fuzzy are a big stupid dog and a smaller, smarter cat, perpetually penniless, who travel the country looking for work, but always end up just as jobless and poor as they started out. It wasn't a terribly original idea, with its roots in the great depression, but maybe it introduced the concept to post-war kids! They're a very likeable pair, anyway.

Sad Sam Skunk has the usual problem of cartoon skunks (I think his cameo in the first Marmaduke story just predates the first Pepe le Pew cartoon, incidentally) - the other kids won't play with him because he smells. The interesting thing about Sam is that his smell isn't a natural feature, it comes from a scent atomizer that he always carries with him - it's part of his skunk family heritage. Sad though he is, he can never bring himself to just leave the scent at home - and he does still sometimes come out on top, usually when another character has a cold...

Giddy Goose gets around - he also had a story in every issue of All Humor Comics, yet another one of Quality's new titles launched in spring 1946. But despite the double exposure, there's nothing all that distinctive about Giddy - he's unintelligent and nonetheless gets the better of people who try to trick him, despite not knowing what's going on. He's got a nephew called Gaddy who serves as a general sidekick.

Buggy Corners (population - wow!) tells the story of Flip the Flea and Anson Ant, who are rivals for the love of Beetrice Bee. She's extremely fickle, and often ends the story by going off with the bad guy, but our heroes never give up. They face a lot of dangers along the way, too - it's a regular theme in these stories that being eaten is a normal occupational hazard of life as a funny animal, but these smallest creatures are always threatened by spiders, anteaters and natural disasters like rainfall, and they take it all in their stride!

Egbert, like Marmaduke, gets multiple stories in each issue of his own comic. And like Marmaduke with Louie, Egbert is mostly paired with the Count, but sometimes has solo adventures too. He's probably best with the smooth-talking scoundrel Count, but I think you can see why this was the less successful comic. There are still plenty of laughs to be had with dim-witted Egbert, though!

Nero Owl is an interesting one - he has his own story, titled "Nero Owl" in each issue, but they mostly (not always) feature Egbert as a supporting character. Nero, who speaks mainly in spoonerisms, is a doddering old fool who works as a private detective. And like all the great cartoon heroes, he usually comes out on top somehow!

Rollo Raccoon, always accompanied by his loyal sidekick Picklefoot Pig, has rather generic adventures. The first couple show him with a talent for talking his way out of a problem, but that rather goes away in subsequent stories. Still, he's distinctive in appearance thanks to the red bow tie he always wears, with no shirt.

Bunnyhunch and Buzz, the Bunny Boys, are a pair of brothers who get into all kinds of trouble thanks to Buzz's insistence on disobeying their mother and going to look for adventure. Hunch, who can't pwonounce his Rs, is always scared but gets dragged along anyway - but as soon as they actually find a frightening situation (wicked witch, big bad wolf, etc), Buzz is terrified and Hunch has to save him. The interplay between the two of them is a lot of fun!

Beanie Bear, the Cub Scout, tries to do a good deed every day - and everyone else tries to take advantage of his good nature, especially Mr Bindle, the bum. I really have no idea what kind of creature Mr Bindle is supposed to be - he's green, with floppy ears. But Beanie's complete innocence is always funny, anyway.

Foolish Fables is another series set in a town of bugs - indeed, it's sometimes called Buggy Corners, but sometimes Bugville. And it mostly chronicles the misadventures of Abercrombie Caterpillar, who is elderly and comically deaf. 

And if you were wondering what happened to Solly Sparrow and Frankie Frog from that original gathering of prototypes, well, Solly makes a cameo appearance in the first story in Egbert #1, but nobody very much like Frankie ever shows up in these comics. I wonder where he hopped off to...

But isn't that a fantastic line-up of characters to all flow from the pen of one writer-artist? There should seriously be a cinematic universe with all the gang interacting and entertaining the world! Nobody could fail to be amused by moments like this, could they?

Come on you Reds

 I went to watch Redditch Utd play their last home game of the season today. I really should go more often, since they always seem to win when I'm there - it was a comfortable 2-0 victory over Stourbridge, a result that mathematically confirms their remaining in the Southern League Premier Division Central. Mid-table Stourbridge had already achieved that, which might explain why only one team today really seemed to care about the result, but it was a good game, played in good spirits (the Stourbridge player breaking his nose was an accident) and enjoyed by all! Maybe I'll get a season ticket after the summer break.

What a life it would be

 There was a thing going around on the internet yesterday where someone asked which was the better album out of Definitely Maybe and Arctic Monkeys - and for once the entire internet was united in saying "Well, Definitely Maybe, obviously. What kind of question is that?"

And quite right, too. But plenty of people around the net have their opinions on that classic album, such as this one ranking the songs on it. Just reading the start of that article, I thought "I bet it puts Digsy's Dinner in last place and gets all snotty about it, thus proving to the world that the writer knows nothing about Oasis or about good music in general..." and indeed it does exactly that. There are some very sadly mistaken people out there.

Everyone reading this should now listen and sing along, celebrating the wonders of Digsy and his lasagne!

He's clearly a Time Lord

 In the Look and Read series Sky Hunter (1978), Geoffrey Bayldon plays Mr Trim - or rather, he actually plays Doctor Who, doing a note-perfect imitation of William Hartnell's performance!

Look and Read is intended for seven-to-nine-year-olds, so the audience wouldn't have been familiar with William Hartnell's era, but the director and actor very clearly were! Apparently the Doctor Who team were considering him to play the First Doctor in The Five Doctors in 1983, but John Nathan-Turner thought he'd be too familiar to viewers from Catweazle and Worzel Gummidge - which I think is a great loss to the series, with all respect to Richard Hurndall.

I definitely watched at least one episode of Sky Hunter, even though I was below the target age when it stopped being shown - I distinctly remember the "Welsh telegram" episode, which I quite probably saw in the autumn half-term immediately after my sixth birthday. I don't recollect anything about Geoffrey Bayldon's role in it, though, so it was a great delight to watch it today and see him.

Really, he should have been the First Doctor. I mean, they let Jon Pertwee be in it, even despite Worzel Gummidge!

Fair's fair at the fairground

Here's a YouTube channel everybody should be following: Look and Read Fans!

It probably works best if you went to primary school in Britain, although there's a long period of time you could have done it, because Look and Read went on for many, many years. There were two series each year, telling an exciting adventure story interspersed with a friendly presenter and a flying alphabet-festooned orange creature called Wordy teaching the viewers all about reading and writing.

Having spent this weekend watching The Boy from Space, Dark Towers and Fair Ground (the fault lies entirely at the door of my brother for dredging up these old memories), I can safely say that the only bits I remember are the songs - both the theme tune for each series and the educational songs in it ("Think big, big, big at the beginning; put a capital first and you're winning!"), but the stories themselves are excellent! You can see why it was a highlight of Friday mornings in Mr Cook's class.

I still need to watch Badger Girl, to complete the quartet that were on the screens in my day. That's one I don't even remember the theme tune to, so it must have been less memorable than the others. Still, I'd like to know if it's the series that inspired an epic dream I had around that time, which could have made a whole BBC series in its own right, and feels like it must have been inspired by one. I'll describe it in more length some time, and see if it rings any bells with anyone.

Last night, though, I just had a dream that I was a wrestler. This happens surprisingly often, and I don't know what it says about my psychology...

Defenders on a Rampage

 Some fifteen years ago, I blogged about Rampage magazine, and I expect all my readers to remember it vividly - but do go back and refresh your memory if you really must.

I've acquired plenty more old Rampage reprintings of Defenders comics since then, and learned a little more about the strange choice of which ones to reprint (the first two Marvel Feature stories with the Defenders appeared in Mighty World of Marvel magazine, and the third in the first issue of Rampage, before the second issue printed the first issue of the Defenders' own American comic), and I'm still fascinated by the variations in covers between the American and British titles! Some of the Rampage covers were word for word identical to the Defenders originals, rather more of them were rewritten to convey the same idea in slightly different words, and a wonderful few were wildly different in many ways. So here are my favourite, in no particular order, cases of translating Defenders into Rampagers!

Rampage 16 / Defenders 17

The most interesting one, of course - obviously Rampage was using an earlier draft of the American cover, before it was reworked to make the Hulk more prominent. The British dialogue sounds more like Cage's usual speech patterns, too...

Rampage 17 / Defenders 18

I just like how Defenders has 'Rampage' as a subtitle and vice versa. This is also a good demonstration of the way the British team didn't seem to have the coloured covers to hand, but just the line-art. They normally get the characters' colour schemes right, but the Wrecker is very wrong on this one.

Rampage 13 / Defenders 14

Spot the difference? The melodramatic "Alas" in the American cover caption was changed to a much more down-to-Earth "And" in the British version!

Rampage 32 / Defenders 32

But this one goes in the opposite direction - "take a look at" became a much more Death-like "behold" when this one crossed the Atlantic! Nighthawk is twice as horrified by it!

Rampage 28 / Defenders 28

Need we say more? Well, the good people of Rampage obviously thought the cover needed to say much, much more, and added a whole lot of excited-sounding captions! The robot shooting at the Hulk has been pivoted just a little, too, I guess to make the cover fit right on the Rampage page.

Rampage 27 / Defenders 27

With this one, the Rampage version is correcting a problem with the original comic - we're not meant to know these creatures are the Baddoon women until next issue, so it's a very intelligent rewrite! Even more interestingly, they've had to lower Dr Strange slightly to make the picture fit in the different dimensions of the Rampage cover - British comics were physically bigger than the American equivalent, but the cover illustration had to be squashed down a bit, or extended to the sides, to fit on the British covers. In this case, they did both - there's a good chunk of art to the left of the British cover that must have been cropped for the Americans.

Defenders 29 / Rampage 29

This one is a particularly great adaptation of the Defenders original cover. Not so much for the colouring - the aliens are meant to be green, not orange - but again for the subtle repositioning. Nighthawk is lower down, to reduce the height, and that meant someone had to re-draw the viewscreen behind him. Originally at an angle, it's now directly facing the reader. But the British cover also restores some things that must have been edited out of the American version - some kind of piece of wall, still at the angle the original viewscreen was, and also an extra alien soldier on the far left!

Rampage 6 / Defenders 5

With this earlier cover, the illustration stretches out quite a lot further to the right than it does on the Defenders version, but the really fun part is the speech bubbles. I think they must have just stuck them on the Rampage cover in the wrong order - if they'd deliberately decided to change the structure of Yandroth's sentence, they would probably have also fixed the punctuation...

Rampage 4 / Defenders 3

And this one is really great - they've amputated the Undying One's wings!

Rampage was great, though - a complete Defenders story every week, as the covers always boasted, plus backup strips too! I think black-and-white comics have gone sadly out of fashion now, but I'm sure with a bit of good marketing, Marvel UK could get British kids interested in this kind of thing again!

Sweets from a Stranger

 Now this is another favourite from Nicholas Fisk, although one I discovered quite a bit later than the many other books of his I'd read - I can't exactly fix a date on when I read it, but I would think I must have been a teenager. It's a collection of ten short stories, and re-reading it now all these years later is quite fascinating...

The cover has nothing to do with any of the stories in the book. It's credited to Dave Holmes, and it fits the generally creepy-sci-fi theme of the stories, but I assume it wasn't specifically commissioned for this edition. I don't remember the cover of the one I had from the library (Boston library, I think) in the old days. The illustrations inside the book aren't very good, though - by David Barlow, they actually depict the scenes nicely, but the faces are horrible and spoil the whole effect.

Anyway, you don't buy this kind of book for the pictures. What interests me about these ten stories is how familiar or unfamiliar I was with them some thirty years later - does that reflect on how good or bad the stories were, or on my appreciation or understanding of them at the time? Here's a run through the contents:

1. Sweets from a Stranger

I remembered this one almost word for word; it's very good. Eleven-year-old Tina can't help but laugh when a car driver makes an inept attempt to persuade her to get into his car with an offer of sweeties. It turns out he's an alien, doing a terrible job of trying to prepare for an invasion, and Tina has to help him phone home to tell his bosses he just can't do it. Grateful, he offers to show her his home planet, she goes along with him... and finds she actually has been cleverly kidnapped. Brilliant.

2. The Thieves of Galac

This one, though, didn't ring a bell at all. Mala and Tal are among the few remaining humans who stayed behind on Earth after a successful conquest by robots sent from Galac. It's a pretty miserable place, and now the sentinel robots have started stealing pointless junk for their senile masters back home. The short story seems to go through at least three different plots that would fuel a full-length sci-fi novel of the 1950s, and I'm surprised nothing stuck in my brain, but it's not the most compelling one in the book.

3. Space Invaders

I remember this one well, though the ending didn't stick in my brain at all. Jason is addicted to playing video games at the arcade, and he's stolen money from his mum's purse to do it. He wins a lot of money on the games, gets tired, keeps playing, and loses it all. But as he's on his last few coins the arcade games talk to each other in machine-language, and one of the games decides Jason is such a nice player, it will let him win! It's a nice story, even if the only bits that I recall were the bits with the arcade games - this book was published in 1982, and it's a very 1982 idea of the future of video games, which seemed strange even when I first read it. Still fun, though!

4. Mind-Milk

No recollection of this one in the slightest. Alien creatures use their mindprobe to 'milk' the daydreams of children, only for it to turn out that one boy is daydreaming about destroying those same alien creatures. I probably don't remember this one because I just didn't get it... and I still don't really get what Nicholas Fisk was going for here. I suppose there'll always be a dud or two in a collection like this.

5. Perfect Paul

This one, on the other hand, I remember well, just because I remember it being a surprisingly stupid story from a great writer. Young Paul is a perfect child in every way, and when he dies in a bike accident, he's far too perfect to go to the normal good people's afterlife; he gets exclusive VIP treatment and gets sent to Uppermost, where his perfection even annoys the people there. So they give him the ultimate punishment, and have him reincarnated as a schoolteacher. It's a very lame punchline.

6. Oddiputs

From the worst to the best, this is one I remember very vividly, and it's brilliant. Oddiputs is a robot who doesn't quite work properly, and is the victim of constant teasing and mistreatment by evil eight-year-old Sally. Eventually, Oddiputs' flawed thinking process leads him to the conclusion that he must kill her. It's a very creepy battle of wits, with a great ending!

7. Swap-Shop

Again, this is one I remember clearly, though I'd forgotten there's an extra bit at the end. Bogey and Jo discover a hole in the wall that seems to be a portal to some other universe. If you put something in it, the other side will send back a superior alien equivalent, always powered by a little button with a golden worm spinning in it. After a lot of experimentation and attempts to communicate with the other side, Bogey climbs through the hole himself, and comes back... different. Very creepy and cool, but I remembered it as ending with the moment of his return and was surprised to find it goes on a bit beyond that, while still remaining inconclusive. Still fun to read, anyway!

8. Nightmare's Dream

This is why I wanted to write about the stories I remembered and didn't remember, because I don't remember reading this one at all, and I have a worrying feeling that this is because I completely missed what the story's all about. A normal boy has horrible dreams that he's a hideous alien monster chained up in a yard on Earth... or is it the other way around? Very cool, and although I hope my younger self did get it, I rather think he didn't. Oh well, at least I can appreciate it at the age of forty-five!

9. Cutie Pie

Another one where I didn't remember the ending. Is it a weakness with the stories that makes them a little anti-climactic, with the really good ideas earlier in the narrative? Or is it me not being an attentive reader? Maybe a little of both. Anyway, an adorable alien creature is brought to Earth from an inhospitable alien planet, and becomes the latest international sensation. But Cutie Pie doesn't thrive in the perfectly-recreated atmosphere of the planet he came from - and no wonder, because he's not a native of that planet, he'd gone there to endure the conditions as a test of manhood. Nearly killed by his captivity, he escapes, finds Earth's atmosphere much more liveable, and recovers. And then in a bit I don't remember at all, makes friends with a baby and goes back home. I think it IS the endings being anti-climactic, because the really great storytelling in a lot of these ones is already done by the middle of the tale!

10. Teddies Rule, OK?

This one's a complete blank in my memory. Little Mandy is inseparable from her teddy bear, and her father decides to surprise her by giving it artificial intelligence so it can talk back to her. And it all gets a bit creepy from there. But the story is rather vague about everything, and it's a slightly limp ending to a collection that's definitely got more hits than misses.

I really recommend this, and the rest of Nicholas Fisk's oeuvre, as essential reading! Please do find as many of them as you can, and maybe we can re-introduce him to a whole new generation! I'm sure nothing could go wrong with that idea, unless their teddy bears and robots start giving them ideas...

Mind sporting

Here's some advance warning - the British Othello Championship will be in Cambridge on July 23-24. Go here to read more and register! There will also almost certainly be a proper Mind Sports Olympiad in London at the end of August, with all the usual fun and games! Maybe even a memory competition, you never know. In any case, I'll be going to both.

Now this is the kind of thing the internet is made for

 You can get miniature arcade games nowadays, small enough to fit on your desk with a two-inch screen, but playing the arcade classics. You can get a Bubble Bobble, but it's the NES version - decidedly inferior to both the original arcade game and the Sega Master System one - so you probably shouldn't. But I stumbled across a blog belonging to a dedicated game fan, who ripped his miniature Pac-Man apart and discovered that the PCB inside contains six different games, but only one of them is unlocked for each different commercial release! Now that's the kind of money-saving hack the world really needs in these difficult economic times!

This is why I try to restrict random browsing of internet articles - now I'm feeling compelled to hack into the inner workings of everything I possess and see what transpires...

Madness at Maxy's

 If, like most people, you have friends who only tolerate your presence in order to play your computer games, it's important to buy the right ones - as this classic advert tells us.

Now, think about this. There's no way Maxy had enough money in his pockets to buy the entire range of Atarisoft games. Is he a surprisingly accomplished shoplifter, or do his unfortunate parents not keep a close eye on their wallets? Either way, Maxy's desperate attempt to buy the feigned respect and appreciation of his peers has started him on the road to a life of crime. I worry for his future.

I'm all right, though - I've still got Arcade Smash Hits for the Sega Master System, and I was just playing it yesterday. I could get a girl like that any time I like! Until she gets it for her dad's computer and dumps me, anyway.

Found it at last!

The book with a talking dog called Bob and the hole in the ozone layer was almost certainly "Hole in the Head", by Nicholas Fisk! Now after all that exhaustive internet research, I just need to find a copy...

I may have been posting quite a lot about old books just lately, but I DO have several other fascinating things going on, it's just that I don't want to write about them until they happen, so I can only really think to blog about the books. I've just re-read Annerton Pit by Peter Dickinson, and it's even better than I remembered!

The dangers of memory

 I just noticed a fun letter in Synapsia magazine, summer 1991, about the imminent first World Memory Championships (which had just been moved from Rome to London and dropped all mention of $10,000 prize money). From one Caro Ayre, it says:

I fear that there is a danger that some contestants in these events will devote too much time and effort perfecting a particular feat, to the point where "normal life" ceases. Will they become famous? Probably. But will they live fulfilled and rewarding lives, or will they be stuck with a shallow self promoting existence, which will preclude emotional fulfilment? No doubt there will be some with a well rounded disposition who will use their skills outside the competitive field. But there will be others for whom winning will become of such importance that failure could destroy them.

I hope I'm one of the well-adjusted, emotionally fulfilled ones, but since I make a point of not using my skills outside the competitive field, I think I must be one of the others. So I hope everybody's going to let me win in memory competitions from now on! Failure could destroy me!

Wordle 2 - the sequel

 You see, this is what happens when an evil corporation like the New York Times takes over a thing like Wordle - they start to destroy the competition!

I've been playing the originally-named Wordle2 since quitting while I was ahead with the real Wordle - Wordle2 is exactly the same, but better in every way because it has six-letter words instead of five, and you get to play it twice a day instead of once. But the similarities were obviously too much for the evil New York Times to tolerate, so today Wordle2 has changed its name to Word Hurdle and added an extra little announcement to the top of the page:

This game is not associated with The New York Times. We will soon be moving to www.wordhurdle.in

I'm sure that will help them hide from the evil world-dominating New York Times corporation (who in my only other experience of them wrote that really nice article about the Extreme Memory Tournament). I've played "Word Hurdle" 64 times so far; I'll quit when I get to 72, for the golf-themed reasons I talked about in February, so the evil New York Times can go ahead and destroy it in another four days.

Even more space

 Here's another book I looked up while I'm in the children's sci-fi frame of mind - Space Trap, by Monica Hughes!

I didn't remember the title, or the writer - I thought it might possibly have been another Nicholas FIsk, though it's not entirely his kind of style. Luckily, I remembered that there's a slightly tetchy robot called Mr Isnek Ansnek, so it was easy to google. All books should be so convenient - I'm still drawing a blank with "the one with a talking dog, possibly called Bob, and a plot involving the hole in the ozone layer"...

But Space Trap comes with a description on Open Library saying "When twelve-year-old Valerie and her brother and sister fall through a space trap and are transmitted to an alien planet, they seek ways to return to the thirty-second century." - which isn't exactly what happens. They're still in the thirty-second century, they're just on a different planet. And really, it's all about seeking the one unique way to get back to the planet they started out on, but that's just being pedantic.

Blame it on the weatherman

 Taking a break from reading old Nicholas Fisk books, I decided to branch out into Peter Dickinson, and read The Weathermonger...

I hadn't read this one since I was a teenager, but thanks to that wonderful resource, Open Library, I learned something entirely new - the American edition is strikingly different to the British one! Not just in the usual changes of spelling and understandable adjustments like changing the colloquial "Nigromancer" for "Necromancer", but the whole Merlin plot at the climax of the book was completely rewritten, removing the whole morphine addiction idea and replacing it with, well, something a bit incoherent, really.

There's an interview with Peter Dickinson here, in which he says that the rewrite was an improvement, but then he was talking to Americans there. Having read them both, I think the British original is a lot better - the American version isn't really clear about to what extent Mr Furbelow is still contributing to Merlin's condition, or exactly how Geoffrey and Sally resolve it. Be like Merlin - stick with England and ignore the rest of the world!