If you're a man and you want to be healthy

Then you could probably do worse than buying the latest issue of Men's Health magazine, available now for £3.95 from all good newsagents. Or just ask me if you can borrow the free copy they sent me. I'm on page 108, the fifth in the series of profiles on 'superhumans', incongruously sandwiched between Lance Armstrong and Sebastian Coe. "The Genius", they call me - I won't disillusion them if you don't.

You can also find that interivew I did with the Canadian news agency on the internet with a quick Google search, if you really want to. It covers essentially the same ground as the Men's Health article.

I'll leave you with a quote attributed to Tony Buzan in an email I got from some Australians:

Quite Simply...
"Good Food = Good Brain
Junk Food = Junk Brain”

Tony Buzan

And an alternative quote from someone whose brain is generally held to be not too shabby:

Junk food is great! What are you talking about, Tony?

Ben Pridmore (genius)

Cambridge? Yes, I probably should do something about that.

Haven't booked a hotel for the weekend yet. If I end up having to commute from Beeston and back every day, I'm really going to be worn out by Monday...

There just aren't enough puns in the world!

On BBC2 tonight, there was a trailer for a programme about Kew Gardens, followed by the snooker. And nobody made a "and now a different kind of cues..." quip! What is wrong with everybody nowadays? Don't they know there's some kind of depression happening, and the best cure for depression is jovial banter from BBC continuity announcers?

A thought occurs

Do you think that some fervently anti-Communist heraldist has ever reworked the old 'Better dead than red' slogan to make it 'Better ghouls than gules'? If not, do you think I could trademark it somehow? Because it really makes me giggle.

Anyway, tonight I'm going to do something productive for once - a bit of memory training, a bit of finishing off all that printing for Cambridge, maybe even a bit of typing up my othello transcripts from London, like I've been meaning to do for quite a while now. And a minimum of snooker-watching.

I work for MI5

I spy on people, memorise what they say and do, and repeat it with roughly 85% accuracy. They hired me for my binary-digit-remembering skills, obviously, but we're still waiting for the first terrorist attack (or whatever it is that MI5 investigate, if indeed MI5 still exists and is still called that - I don't keep up with the news as much as I should) that somehow involves a need to memorise up to 4000 1s and 0s in 30 minutes. The bosses were thinking of letting me go, but then someone realised that I'm quite a bit cheaper and easier to secretly install in someone's house than a hidden microphone.

It's a printing-things-out weekend

I always forget how long it takes to print all the papers for even a tiny little memory competition like Cambridge. It does give me a much greater admiration for those wonderful people (ie Phil and maybe a couple of other helpers if he's lucky) who do all the preparation work for the world championships.

I also forget how much paper and expensive print cartridges it takes - I had thought I'd be able to use my Boots staff discount this year (it's got to be good for something - normally the only thing I buy at Boots is earplugs, which cost £1.99 for five pairs, so my discounts are pretty negligible), but I left it to the last second as usual, and the big Nottingham store had run out of the kind of cartridges I need, so I had to buy them for full price at Dixons.

As a tangent, why does every type of printer take differently-shaped print cartridges? Is there any reason why all Lexmark printers couldn't be made so that they use a universal kind of cartridge? It's all a big conspiracy, I tells you.

As another tangent, yes, I still call it Dixons. If they're too lazy to change their colour scheme along with their name, they've only got themselves to blame. The general public's collective brain just processes the colours and doesn't look at the words.

Crash! Shatter! Tinkle!

Some of the lights in this place have sort of strange frosted glass globe lampshades instead of normal ones. I was just sitting down to eat tonight when there was suddenly an almighty crash-shatter-tinkle kind of noise from the kitchen. The lampshade thing had spontaneously fallen to the floor and shattered into a zillion pieces! I was standing roughly directly underneath it not more than a couple of minutes beforehand, too! I could have been killed! Well, actually, the thing weighed practically nothing and seems to have been fairly fragile, but I might have got Bond-villain kind of scars on my bald shiny head. I'd sue the landlord if not for the fact that I changed the bulb a couple of weeks ago and clearly didn't put the stupid lampshade back properly.

Weight a minute

To celebrate the launch of a scary-sounding miracle weight loss pill in pharmacies, there were weighing machines at work today, inviting everyone to come along and see what they weigh. Just like the one that used to taunt me at Woolworth's before I engineered the closing down of the entire company just to shut it up. Only this Boots one was even nastier to me - it tells me that anyone with a Body Mass Index over 28 can benefit from a weight loss plan, and mine is 28.6.

I'm being forced to the conclusion that I need to start making an effort to eat properly. This last couple of years, I genuinely have got much too chubby. It's just that the very thought of trying to lose weight sends me scurrying to the Co-op for a bag of Tangfastics. The idea of dieting seems to be against all of my principles, somehow. Like wearing a cycle helmet or sunscreen. It's the kind of thing that a certain kind of person does, and I don't want to be that kind of person, however sensible it would be. It's hard to explain.

Character-building

Watching some snooker player trying to conceal his annoyance as he snappily answers questions like "What's your favourite colour" in the BBC's attempt to convey the personalities of players makes me think about the marketability of memory competitions.

It's a regular complaint nowadays that there used to be "characters" in snooker, whereas now the players are all interchangeable, boring young men. This complaint is generally made by old men who forget that the old players were also boring. But I think "The Mentalists" showed that we could do a big feature about all the top memory athletes, sum up each of their personalities and quirks in a soundbite and make the general public genuinely interested in us. You know, Gunther's the German mastermind, Ed's 'the upper-class chap' (as someone I met in the street a while ago repeatedly described him), and I'm the working-class hero. Or maybe the weird nerd with the beard and hat, take your pick.

I bet I could describe the whole top twenty in the world in their own unique phrase, if I put my mind to it. But I don't think I will - I'd only end up offending everyone by using some harmless phrase like "the big fat idiot who can't remember anything".

Lots of phone calls

Well, two of them, anyway, which is two more phone calls than I like to deal with of an evening. But hopefully they'll result in an article appearing in the Cambridge newspaper about the upcoming memory championship, and in Canadians coming to film the UK and World championships later in the year, so it's worth it.

Meanwhile, to make up for me not replying to Florian's email because I haven't got round to it yet, have I plugged memory-sports.com on my blog before? I don't think I have, but you should all go and look at it anyway.

The things I do for memory

A journalist from a local Cambridge newspaper said he'd call me at some point tonight for an article about the Cambridge Memory Championship, and I needed to go out to the supermarket, so, with great reluctance, I had to change the message on my answering machine.

It's not an actual answering machine, you understand, it's the normal 1571 service, but I've got an outdated vocabulary. Anyway, it used to say something like "Hi, I never check this thing, but leave me a message and if you're lucky I might hear it some time and call you back. Or you could just email me like a normal person." I don't like phones.

But so as not to offend this intrepid reporter, I changed it to a bland hello-I'm-Ben-I'm-not-here-right-now thing. And did he call? Did he heckers. That'll teach me to compromise my principles just for the sake of not being rude to people.

Pound for pound

As I think I've mentioned, I've been browsing around coin-related sites just lately, and in the process discovered something I didn't know - there's one different design of pound coin for every year from 1983 to 2008, but from now on they're sticking with the same shield design along with the new versions of all the other coins. So, naturally, this means I need to collect one of each, just for the sake of having a complete collection. 26 of them, you see - one for each location on one of my journeys, it's fate. The minor problem is that some years' pound coins weren't manufactured in bulk because there were already enough of them in circulation, so I'd have to buy one of those official Royal Mint collection sets from some official Royal Mint coin collector, and that seems like an excessive length to go to just to satisfy a 'hey, I should get hold of one of each kind of pound coin' urge. Maybe I'll just limit myself to what I'm doing at the moment, and putting aside a kind that I haven't got yet every time I get one in my change...

An interesting side-effect of paying attention to pound coins is that I can now spot a forgery if need be. You know how there are stories in the news every now and then saying that 10% of pound coins in circulation are forgeries, or something like that. I got one in my change today - it's quite obvious, if you're paying attention; the writing on the edge is wobbly and not deep enough, the heads and tails sides aren't lined up with each other right and it's slightly the wrong colour. I'm not sure whether to start a collection of fake pound coins alongside the collection of real ones or just to buy something with it next time I'm in a shop. I think it's probably illegal to knowingly spend fake money, but I think that's a monstrously unfair rule, punishing you for being clever enough to know a forgery when you see it. Fair laws should punish stupid people and give extra money to clever people. That's how things would work if I ruled the world, anyway. Also, cleverness would be legally defined in some way that includes me and excludes anyone I don't like.

I'd make a really great evil dictator, wouldn't I? Maybe that should be my next career move. Anyone want to be my henchman? I'll pay you a pound!

Capital fun

When the weekend brings such lovely, warm, sunny spring weather, what better way to spend the day than sitting in a room above a pub in London, playing othello with thirteen other enthusiasts?

Othello returned to its regular London home of the Bath House, just off Oxford Street, and we had a very big turnout for a regional - just about all the regulars and semi-regulars, including the likes of Steve MacGuire and Jeremy Dyer (whose rhyming names make me want to turn this blog entry into a poem), who haven't been to a tournament for quite some time. And a brand-new player (new to real-life othello, anyway, but not to playing on the internet) by the name of Stephen Spencer, too! I've mentioned it on other forums before, but the point is worth mentioning - Stephen Rowe was also at the Bath House today, and I went to primary school with a boy originally called Stephen Roe who changed his name (for some reason I don't recall) to Stephen Spencer. As you all know, I have a history of getting othello players' names mixed up, and this kind of thing really doesn't help me!

Still, the tournament went surprisingly well for me - I lost to David Beck, but he squished everyone he played today, and I also lost to Ian Turner (I did beat Kali in my first game, which was a relief), but Ian then lost to Geoff Hubbard and I finished the day by beating Geoff, so the three of us ended up jointly in second place!

Since David, Geoff and Ian all didn't come to the first regional of the year, and since Iain Barrass, who came second in Oadby, had a bad day today and ended up joint eighth, this gives me a big impressive lead in the British Grand Prix standings! It probably won't last, of course, with three regionals to go and there being so many people who are better than me, and me probably not going to the last one since it's down in Farnborough and getting there is a hassle and it's my brother's birthday the next day, but still, yay for me!

And although it's true that the BGP has a tendency to be a prize for the player who turns up to the most tournaments, the winner does get to play in the World Championship! (If it doesn't clash with the memory one, of course - it's normally in November, and the WMC is currently scheduled for that kind of time...) And there's even a trophy now! It made its debut today, all gleaming and shiny, the George Greaves Memorial Plate, and was presented to last year's BGP winner Iain.

It would be extremely groovy to see my name engraved on it (I've never had my name engraved on a trophy before - the WMC used to have a trophy like that, but hasn't for years now, it's a long story) and who knows, if I get another couple of flukey wins or second places, it's possible...

Also, since I dissed the local Labour/Lib Dem council in my blog recently, I feel I should record that I got a leaflet through the door today from the Conservatives that spells 'sincerely' wrong. Bunch of illiterates, I'm not voting for them...

Simpsons

I do watch the Simpsons quite a lot. It's just that it's always on in the evenings when I'm sitting around and feeling lazy. But somehow, even though season one seems to be repeated over and over again and they never show season 2 or 3, I don't seem to have seen "Homer's Odyssey" for years and years, until tonight. And it's quite good, actually! Maybe I'll get the DVDs and watch all five million episodes in one sitting...

I realise I should probably be spending my evenings memorising numbers instead of watching the Simpsons. But, you see, I just can't be bothered. It's Friday.

Oh Canada

I was feeling really productive and fired-up at work today for some reason, and considering staying late even though I didn't need to, just to get lots of stuff done. This isn't the kind of mood I'm often in - I do do a good job as an analyst, but I don't generally get so into it that I want to be in the office all night when there's football on telly - so it's probably a good thing that I snapped out of it with remembering that I'd agreed to do a phone interview with a Canadian journalist tonight.

If you're Canadian, and read newspapers (I don't know which ones - any or all of the publications printed by Sun Media), make sure to check it out, sometime in the next couple of months, probably. It's not going to contain anything I haven't said in dozens of other interviews before, but I'll be saying them in a different order, probably, so you'll want to read it anyway.

In other news, I notice that there's a programme on BBC1 tonight called "The Narnia Code" in which, according to the Radio Times, a Dr Michael Ward claims to have discovered a "profound subtext" to "the books' ostensibly fairy-tale events". Um, is that really a new and shocking idea? Perhaps poor Dr Ward is the only person in the world who's never noticed the subtext before, and thought it was just a story about a magic land with a talking lion?

Things I don't own but which people seem to think I should own

A mobile phone
Hammers, nails, screwdrivers, electric drills, basically anything you can buy from B&Q
A microwave
Nail-clippers
A car
A frying pan
A razor
More than one pair of shoes
A DVD player that isn't my laptop
Paper tissues
An ipod, or for that matter a CD player that isn't my laptop
Basic cooking ingredients like eggs, flour, spices etc
A wig.

Big city othello

London regional this weekend, and I've been playing online a bit to see if practice helps me or hinders me. I can't quite understand my othello-playing ability. Some days I have a run of great games where I spot all the clever little moves and plan ingenious strategies far in advance, other times (and against the same opponents in the same positions) I find that I have no idea what's going on and I just make really stupid moves. Possibly there's some kind of loose connection in my brain. I need some kind of brain scan. Actually, there is some kind of neurologist or something who wants to talk to me, maybe I'll get round to emailing him back and have him check my wiring...

Holidays

Well, it's back to work tomorrow after four days off, and naturally this puts me in the mood to plan not going to work again at some point in the near future. It's a new financial year, you see, I've got 25 days between now and the end of March next year, and I'd quite like to plan it out properly for once, instead of taking them all whenever I feel like it and ending up with no holidays left for the second half of the year. If I wasn't so lazy, I'd sit down and work out how much time I'd need for each memory competition, including recovery time afterwards, then plan a couple of other little breaks at appropriate times in between them. I'm not going to, but it's definitely a step in the right direction for me to acknowledge that it's a good idea to do it.

Breakout!

I've got worryingly addicted to playing Arkanoid since I discovered it online yesterday. It's a very compelling game that I haven't played since the BBC Micro version when I was still at school. Although I have got the extremely similar Breakout on the Master System, and had a good long game on that tonight, too, in an attempt to get it out of my system. In fact, I'm pretty sure I got further than I ever have before, in the whole history of me playing video games - perhaps it's all the memory training and discipline that I've instilled in myself since the days when I was regularly playing it!

Tomorrow, I'll finish creating the memorisation papers for Cambridge (just need to write all those historic dates...) and send that long-overdue email to all the definite and possible competitors.

Why do these things always involve horses?

Flat 7, Gordonstoun Court, Suffolk Street, Oulton Broad, Suffolk is the subject of an interesting law, enacted in 1537 by Henry VIII and still in effect today. The law requires two living horses to be within the flat at all times, failure to adhere to this law carrying a minimum twenty-year prison sentence for the owner, occupants and any visitors to the property in the previous seven weeks. The last time anyone was prosecuted under this law was in 1987, when building works forced the then resident Humphrey Dalmas to briefly move one of the horses out into the corridor in order to access a leaking gas pipe. The team of twelve police officers who constantly monitor the flat sprang quickly into action and had Dalmas taken into immediate custody.

The current owner, hippopotamus breeder Hugo Bugeleisen, has made sure to keep at least four horses in the flat, so as to avoid prosecution should one or two of them spontaneously drop dead, and describes himself as "happy" with the situation, "although not as happy as those whose flats contain no horses at all, obviously."

The law was introduced at the request of Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham, whose cousin, Derek Tunstall, lived in Pakefield and kept a mistress in Camps Heath. Oulton Broad being roughly half way between the two locations, the law enabled Derek to ride as quickly as possible to his mistress's house every Saturday afternoon, changing his tired horse for a fresh one at Oulton, steal a quick kiss and return home again before his wife had finished her weekly bath. The law originally applied to a large country house with attached stables; this was destroyed in the war and a block of flats built in its place in the early fifties, when it was ruled that for the purposes of the Living Horse Law, Flat 7 should be considered the successor of the original property. A small, one-bedroom, three-kitchen flat, the presence of two or more horses leaves no room to swing a cat, let alone breed a hippopotamus.

The law serves no practical purpose today - Derek Tunstall lived to a surprisingly ripe old age but was eventually executed in 1667 on the posthumous orders of Oliver Cromwell for treason and unlicensed dispensing of rat poison - but an attempt to pass a bill through parliament invalidating the law was unanimously defeated in 1992, with even the MP who introduced the motion deciding to vote against it.