Wow!

Have you seen the 'Street View' feature on Google Maps? You can see right in my living room window! What if I'd been dancing naked when they took the picture? Actually, you can't really see anything past the reflection of the glass, and anyway the picture must have been taken before I moved in, because there's no curtains, but even so! This is a wonderful piece of technology, and I'm all in favour!

A letter to the council

I have a rule that I don't talk politics in this blog, but since my post today consisted of a glossy leaflet from my MP (who, despite being acquainted with Chris, isn't someone I've formed a good impression of during my time in his constituency) and a council tax bill, and since I can't think of anything else to talk about, let's poke fun at the stupidness of the booklet that comes with it.

Council tax around here ("around here" meaning I'm pointing fingers at Nottinghamshire County Council and Broxtowe Borough Council, specifically, just so everybody knows who I'm deriding. Wouldn't want to offend any neighbouring councils) is extremely high, so it's fun to see how they try to justify it. The best part is a section called "Setting the record straight", a summary of the complaints that a 'Citizens Panel' came up with, and the Council's answer to them.

The consultation exercise gave rise to a number of comments, we would like everyone to know the real situation:

"Our roads are in a poor state"

Compared to other counties, the condition of our major roads is amongst the best in the country and our minor roads are above average condition.

"You have too many people on high salaries."

75% of our non-school staff are paid less than the national average. A few years ago we reviewed our senior management structures and saved £1 million.

It goes on in this vein. I just love that kind of "if you don't like it, go and live in Russia" response! It is of course true that the roads around here are awful and the top-pay-grade council staff are vastly overpaid, and I suppose it's nice that they're not denying it, but are they really implying that because the situation is arguably worse elsewhere, they don't need to do anything about it?

Really, it's this kind of hypocrisy that someone ought to do something about. Come the revolution, brothers, they'll be the first against the wall. Meanwhile, I'll just go back to not reading these stupid council pamphlets and watching cartoons instead.

Traditionally built

I was meaning to write about the BBC adaptation of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, which started a six-episode series on Sunday. I'm quite a fan of the books, but I didn't see the one-off special a while ago. I normally avoid TV and film versions of good books, because they invariably ruin them (I might still go and see Watchmen if I get a chance, though - I've heard vaguely encouraging things). But this one was actually really good! Particularly the casting - all the characters look exactly like they should (with the possible exception of Mr J L B Matekoni, who I thought would be taller and thinner), and the conversion from book to screen is done very nicely. I approve! It's nice to have something to watch on the telly of a Sunday evening for once.

Throw those curtains wide!

We're officially at the point where, even if I'm starting early or finishing late, I'm going to and from work in broad daylight. Words can't describe how great this is. Quite apart from the savings I make on batteries for my bike lights, there's nothing more depressing than spending every daylight hour in the office.

Well, it's also quite depressing to have to be in the office while it's so lovely and warm and sunny. Ideally, in non-depressive terms, it's best not to go to the office at all. Well, maybe when it rains. Really heavily.

I don't remember

It's the Welsh Memory Championship the weekend after next, and I've done no training for it. I'm probably going to do really really badly, like in France last year. But at least that competition put me more in the memory-training mood, and I went on to win some other competitions (as far as I can recall).

I should spend next weekend practicing for it, but then I should have spent this weekend doing that too, and I didn't. I'm still really struggling with the motivation.

Ode to Oadby

Yay! I won an othello tournament! I was going to leave that revelation until the end of the blog post, but I'm too excited. Admittedly it wasn't a big, big othello tournament - the Oadby regional only attracted five people and no clocks to time the games with (Geoff was meant to be bringing them, but he was ill), but even so, it was a great event. And more importantly, I won it!

Actually, I wasn't playing all that well and probably deserved to lose, but still ended up winning all my games. And that's what counts, after all. That gives me a good head-start in this year's British Grand Prix, especially over the people who didn't turn up (the BGP title, and its accompanying entry into the world championship, generally goes to the only half-decent player who goes to most or all of the five regional tournaments in a year - maybe that will be me this year!)

Or maybe I'll end up coming last in all the others. If I was a betting man, I'd go for that.

3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds

I'm wondering if I should go to the Speed Memory World Championships. This is a different thing entirely from the World Memory Championships, if you were wondering. We use the word 'memory' to mean something entirely unrelated to what these people are talking about. Memory, of course, is a concept that encompasses a whole lot of things, and to be honest, we really should change the name of the WMC to something a lot more specific - it'd stop me being constantly mistaken for someone who's an expert on teaching people how to remember where they left their car keys.

"Speed Memory" is basically a photographic memory kind of thing - looking at a small handful of numbers or other information for 2 seconds or so and trying to recall them perfectly. It's a discipline that basically is only done by one guy, Ramon Campayo, and he's the one who sets the rules and regulations for this championship - which is organised in an old-fashioned "challengers' tournament to decide who gets to compete against the reigning champion" format. It would be fun to take part and try my hand at it, because I've never done this kind of thing before. On the other hand, it's in Munich, the week before the German Memory Championship in Hamburg, and I can see myself taking a week and a half off work, touring around Germany, and ending up using all my holidays long before the end of March, like I did this time round. And working five days a week, every week for months on end is no fun at all, I tells you.

Five million channels and nothing on

It's true, you know. Sometimes I find myself flicking through the channels after watching a fairly uninspiring Man City v Aalborg game, and find not a single thing worth watching on any TV station! I should set up my own station and broadcast something good, 24 hours a day. I'll call it "The Good Programmes Channel" and it'll be quite popular.

The worst thing about holidays

Is coming back home and going to work all jet-lagged and tired. I want a big long holiday. At least a month, in some exotic foreign place! And then maybe go back to the office when I get bored with having fun...

New Mork

That title is meant to represent 'more New York', only phrased in an entertaining way. I've got a feeling it didn't really work.

Anyway, to continue my random reminiscences about my holiday, Ronnie White, who was comfortably the best of the competitors there and unquestionably deserved the win, has some interesting training techniques. Wanting to prepare for the inevitable distractions you're likely to suffer while memorising at the US championship (there's more hustle and bustle there than at any other competition I've been to), he memorised packs of cards in unusual locations, with his nephews and nieces climbing all over him and, most brilliantly of all, underwater. Seriously, he says - with plastic cards and a snorkel. There really should be a world record for underwater memorisation. There probably is, actually. There's a world record for everything nowadays.

Also at the US Championship was Tom Groves, a British memory competitor from the very early days of the sport, who now lives in America. Tom has the honour of being the first person to describe the basic principles of memory techniques to me, and being the first person (some time later) to convince me that they actually do work. I decided to give it a go, and the rest is history. So it was good to see him again, and I did my best to persuade him to come out of retirement. I'm becoming the old man of memory sports, and we need some of the real old-timers back in the game!

Outside the competition, I bought volume two of the complete Popeye comic strip, which I'd been looking for for quite a while. 1931 was a bad year for Castor Oyl - having been downgraded from funny-man to sidekick, the former star of "Thimble Theater" was finally dropped altogether from the storylines in favour of Popeye - but a great year for comics in general, and Popeye and Olive in particular. Popeye wearing a skirt and being mistaken for a particularly ugly old grandmother is a highlight.

It's not a New York reminiscence, but Steven Gerrard's incomprehensible scouse mumblings after a game always make me giggle. I'm sure he's making some valid and interesting points, but I can never make out a word he's saying.

But back to NY, and the US Championship takes place on the 19th floor of the Con Edison building. The funny thing about it is that the lifts go from floor 1 to 11 and then straight up to 19. The contents of floors 12 to 18 are cloaked in mystery. I suspect that's where they plot to take over the world.

Also, Men's Health want to do a "stylish, sophisticated photo shot" of me, to accompany the interview they did the other week. With a real photographer with his own website with pictures of Bafta winners and everything!

LN4 4XH

Now, how am I going to do this? Lots and lots to write about my New York visit, but doing it all in chronological order is so passé these days (I did that when I went to NY in 2006, and I hate to repeat myself). I'll just randomly talk about incidents, I think, over the next few blog entries, unless something else comes up.

Firstly, I should report that scary internet acquaintance number 1 and his equally scary-sounding friend turned out to be the most fun people I've ever met! Seriously, my existing friends should prepare themselves to be bumped down my favourite-people list a couple of places. I might even start referring to them as Dee and Ry, rather than continuing to describe them as scary strangers, that's how much I like them. And likewise, I had an enormous amount of fun with scary internet acquaintance number 2 (or, as I might want to call him from now on, John) - we went to the enormous FAO Schwarz toy store, as featured in the movie "Big", and played on the giant lighting-up piano! And saw sea-lions playing in Central Park, which I didn't realise was a thing you could do in New York. AND had a genuine New York hot dog from a cart and found to my surprise that it tasted quite nice!

Also, the city is teeming with squirrels! There are a whole lot of them in Central Park, who come scampering up to see you in case you're bringing them nuts, and another gang who hang out in Union Square, who I spent an enjoyable time feeding cashews early on Saturday morning.

I got recognised by one (geordie-accented) person in the city while I was seeing the sights, and two people on the plane home, one of whom was American. Obviously my fame is becoming a global phenomenon. I've just had another email from David Blaine's people, saying he wants to talk to me, too. I'm going to say no thanks, but it's very flattering.

While I'm talking about memory-related things, let's mention my pretext for a holiday there in the first place, and congratulate Ronnie White for winning the US Memory Championship! He really was on another level to the other competitors, and I'm looking forward to seeing what he does in the future. He's also got a book out, if you're one of those people who collect memory books - called "The Military Memory Man" and subtitled "An Afghanistan war veteran shares his secrets of memory techniques", or something along those lines. Personally, if I'm looking for a good book on memory, the author's war record isn't the first criterion I use for making my decision, but presumably that kind of thing goes down well in Texas. Ronnie, although a very nice person, is what the Americans call "conservative".

By one of those funny coincidences that make me suspect that my subconscious has got a mind of its own, I randomly picked a book from my bookcase to read on the plane (couldn't make up my mind, so thought to myself 'I'll move my finger along the shelves, and see where it's got to when I've counted to ten'), which turned out to be "Are You Dave Gorman?" I'd completely forgotten this, but during their travels chronicled in the book, Dave and Danny stay in the Roosevelt Hotel, just like I was doing. It's a very nice place, if you ever want to go there. Right next to the awesome-looking Grand Central Station, which certainly lives up to the 'Grand' part of its name (and also the 'Station' part, although that's less of an exceptional thing to say about it. It's a little bit too much to the south of Manhattan to really justify the 'Central' name, though...)

It was in Grand Central, in fact, while I was heading back to my hotel on a break from hanging out at the US Memory Championship and being told by everyone present how great my memory was, that I heard someone say "Hi, Ben," and turned to see who it was. I was a bit surprised by the casual (and midlands-English-accented) greeting, as if from someone who'd expected to see me there, since I didn't recognise the woman at all. "It's Kelly, from Boots," she explained, and I said "Ah, yes," as if that made everything clear.

I still have no idea who she is. But the important thing is that the American memory competitors and hangers-on think my memory is wonderful, so who cares if it turns out that I work alongside people who I completely forget as soon as I'm away from the office?

Finally for today, a conversation between two American women I overheard in Times Square one night, talking about one of the many, many groups around there of shouting people informing the world about their religious beliefs:

"They were wearing, like, Jewish symbols, but they were reading from the Bible. Shouldn't it have been the, you know, the Jewish thingy?"

"The Torah?"

"No, that's not it..."

I still heart NY

Yep, New York is still a cool place to be. And just like every time I go to America, the weather has been lovely, warm and sunny all day, even though the city's still blanketed in snow! In many, many ways I'm the exact opposite of the Selfish Giant - spring follows me around everywhere I go (except in Britain)!

Just briefly dropping by internet land to see if any of the people I've arranged to meet up with over the next couple of days have sent me a last-minute message. They haven't, so you get a quick bonus blog before my net-cafe time runs out. Itinerary for the weekend: tomorrow morning, meet scary internet acquaintance I've never met in real life before, who's bringing along an equally scary-sounding friend too. Afternoon, meet a different but also scary internet acquaintance I've never met in real life before. If I'm still alive at that point, evening dinner with a memory man I have met before and who isn't scary at all (accompanied by a 'memory researcher' who probably is a bit scary). Saturday, hang out with numerous non-scary (mostly) American memory championship competitors, and hopefully a meet-up with another "internet acquaintance" who I've known for the best part of ten years now and have almost stopped being scared of - funnily enough, Crispy's in New York right now too.

Sunday morning, back home. Monday, work. I'm going to be asleep at my desk.

Miscellaneous babblings

My GOD, Excel 2007 is rubbish! Who the heck invented it? I've got it on my new laptop, and I'm going to have to download 2003, or better yet whichever version it was before that. Have you tried drawing a graph with 2007? It's the stupidest system I've ever seen!

Still, to compensate for that annoyance, I have got an old-style 10p coin, courtesy of Roel Hobo at the weekend (I swapped it for a legal-tender new-style one). It was minted in 1968, one of the first batch that were made as 10p rather than two shillings. I've added it to my collection of vaguely interesting coins!

Andre who posted a question as a comment to my blog entry of a few days ago: Yes, my memory system is the same as the one described here. And I've never used photos to keep track of my mental images. That seems to me like it would be very limiting - the images in my head have changed and developed as I've got used to them, and I don't think that would have worked so well if there'd been a real picture in my head rather than a vague idea.

New York! Getting the train down to London tomorrow evening after work, flying out early on Thursday morning. Woohoo!

And before I go, you could listen to Radio Nottingham tomorrow morning, at nine o'clockish. It probably won't be the worst thing in the world if you miss it, but they're interviewing me. Record it and play it in the evenings for the next few days, it'll make up for not having my blog to read!

A few more things that happened at the weekend

It's a bit more difficult to get to Cambridge from Beeston than it is from Derby. And even Derby was somewhat difficult - Cambridge boasts about its frequent and fast service to and from London, but tries to discourage northerners from being able to reach the city. They set the wrong tone, you know. Nonetheless, I was able to work out how to get there and wasn't delayed too much by a train breaking down in Nottingham station. However, it was while getting off that train and on to a new one that I noticed someone wearing a nice T-shirt, and idly thought to myself "Which T-shirts did I bring with me for the weekend? Oh, drat, I forgot to bring any. The only things I packed were my pyjamas and a change of pants and socks."

This still left me with at least options for the othello championship - go there dressed in the clothes I'd travelled down to Cambridge in (my work trousers and shirt, which look horribly like the kind of thing an accountant would wear and were also somewhat sweaty from cycling); go there dressed in my pyjamas, which are stylish but uncoordinated (it's the trousers from one pair and the top from another, so as to maximise the amount of remaining buttons on the ones I'm wearing); go there dressed only in my underwear and hat (it was a bit cold, unfortunately); or buy some cheap and stylish clothes from a charity shop.

I went for option four, and got myself a very groovy shirt with lots of pink on it. It got a fair few comments. As for the competition itself, I mostly played very badly, as I said yesterday. Bintsa Andriani played staggeringly well, beating everybody in the eleven rounds of swiss only to lose to David Hand on disc count in the final when they drew the last game. Epic stuff. Despite not achieving very much of note beyond losing to Kali Turner (who's 15 now, so it's entirely acceptable to lose to her), I was able to retain my 100% win record against Takuji Kashiwabara, which dates all the way back to 2003. I beat him that year and have always avoided playing him again ever since.

It's Oadby in two weeks - clearly I'm never going to have a free weekend to practice memory, but never mind. I'd love to mount a serious challenge for the BGP this year, but I don't think I'm going to without a lot more preparation. And I just don't seem to have the time to do anything these days, what with having to go to New York for a fun sightseeing and friend-hanging-out-with holiday and everything...

Ol' hotel

CityRoomz, formerly known as Sleeperz, is a really nice little hotel right next to the train station in Cambridge. I always stay there for othello tournaments, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who might want to come to an othello tournament or any of the other things that happen in Cambridge.

Anyway, fun weekend. As I predicted, I played pretty terribly, apart from a quite nice win over Phil. I did develop a new theory about othello games, though, which I'll write in more detail if I really can't think of anything else to talk about tomorrow.

Weekends

It occurs to me that I'm going to have no time to get into any kind of practice routine for memory competitions for the next couple of weeks. Othelloing in Cambridge this weekend (so no blogging for the next couple of days, Zoomettes*), then New York the following weekend-and-a-bit (so again no blogs, most likely, from Wednesday to Sunday, Zoom-fans** - try not to forget about me).

*I've decided that followers of this blog should be called "Zoomettes"
**I've subsequently decided that "Zoomettes" sounds a bit silly and decided to phase it out of use

I really really need to do some long-discipline training, too. It's been a very, very long time, and I know I'm going to be rubbish when I finally sit down to do it. Almost as bad as I'm going to be at othello this weekend! I haven't played that, or thought about it, or found my clock, or anything for ages and ages.

DVD people are stupid

I can just about understand them releasing Thundercats DVDs with the episodes all in the wrong order - there are lots of episodes, there's rarely any direct continuity from one episode to the next, and it is just a 1980s cartoon that very few people are obsessive about to the extent that I am. But there's no excuse at all for the people who made the DVD of Police Squad and got the sequence of episodes wrong. There's only six of them, for crying out loud, and the end of each episode explicitly lists all the previous ones, and they still couldn't get it right!

I repeat, DVD people are stupid. Bring back videos.

Go team!

I do like watching Champions League football. I've turned into a bit of a Man Utd fan these last few years, especially in Europe, in an attempt to discourage Chelsea from winning things. It's working, too. Perhaps if I devoted myself more determinedly to supporting Boston Utd, maybe they'd win something one of these days...

A little bit of memory

One thing people often say to me when I'm explaining my system for turning three-digit numbers into images is "Surely it makes more sense to have 999 be a policeman [or 112 or 911 or whatever the number for the emergency services is in the asker's country] and so on?" I know Dominic does recommend diverging from his system if the number itself suggests an image to you, but I disapprove.

The 'Ben system' and any other system for turning numbers into words and thus images is best compared to learning another language. If you've got it working properly in your head, you don't see the numbers as such, you read '999' as 'b-oh-b' and think of Bobo (Mr Burns's teddy bear) or whatever your favourite word starting with that sound is (I recommend the cartoon series Bobobobs, or the German children's book series 'Bobo Siebenschläfer', but I'm just weird like that). Reading it as a number in some cases and a word in others is just confusing.

Look at it this way - if you speak French and read the word 'pain' in a French text, you don't automatically think 'ouch', because you're mentally pronouncing it differently and taking it in context. That's how it works with reading a story in a 2000-digit number too.

Coronation Stone

I hadn't been to Kingston for a relatively young donkey's years, and it's funny how much the place has changed. First glance on emerging from the train station suggests that it hasn't been a change for the better - Books, Bits & Bobs, the cool little shop that sold comics, costumes and party gimmicks is standing derelict and waiting to be demolished along with that whole block of buildings, but judging by the snazzy new cinema just over the road, it's going to be replaced by something shiny and modern.

And most of the city centre has gone all 21st-century too. I don't know what it is, exactly, but there's something smoother and shinier about shop-fronts these days. A few little redecorations and a place becomes unrecognisable. And with the Bentalls centre I had the usual fun of visiting a place from one of my memory journeys and realising how very different it looks in real life - my journeys tend to stylise the layout of a place like that, shrinking the parts in between locations and subtly changing the positions of significant places. Doesn't help that they've turned the fountain into some kind of weird plant-display, either.

Still, at least the combined ice-cream-and-burgers van is still in the same place it's always been, just outside Woolworth's, despite the shop itself being all closed down and empty.