Weekend!

And I have to say, it's been a pretty successful week all round. I've got lots of clever stuff done at work, I've refrained entirely from eating anything between meals, despite Colin bringing a box of doughnuts into the office today, I've done a proper memory training session every evening, and I've watched every episode of Bagpuss!

Now it's a three-day weekend, and I'm going to win lots of games of othello, memorise lots of numbers (both decimal and binary) and cards, and catch up with lots of friends who I've been sort of neglecting lately.

Or else stay in bed all weekend doing nothing. We'll see how I feel.

Sheffield again

Othello again on Saturday. And I'm in such a memorising mood at the moment that I'm going to take my abstract images images (pieces of paper with the 'abstract images' patterns on one side and the name of the image they represent on the other) with my on the train and bone up on them in preparation for some more heavy-duty training on Sunday and Monday.

It's great to be back in the routine of doing an hour or so of memory every evening, seeing my times get a bit faster and my scores get a bit higher every time. I'm still some way away from the level I was at last time I was seriously training, but I know there's the potential to be better than ever before by the time of the world championship. Which is a nice thing to aim for, even if I don't win the thing.

I suppose it wouldn't hurt to practice my othello a bit, too - it really would be nice to win the BGP and go to the world championship and lose all my games there against the best in the world. But on the other hand, I often find myself playing quite well when I haven't so much as thought about the game for a couple of weeks, so maybe I'll follow that strategy again...

My brain doesn't work

I just thought to myself "Hmm, I'll look that up on Google while I'm sitting here at my computer..." and then by the time I'd clicked onto Google I'd completely forgotten what I was going to type into it. All those articles about me are right when they say I always walk into a room and forget what I was going to do there. And when they say a chimp beat me in a memory test.

I do realise, incidentally, that my blog entries for the last week or so have been a bit lacking in length and substance. I just never seem to remember to write anything until last thing at night, and then I can't think of anything cool to write about. I'll make up for it tomorrow with some big long essay about something exciting. Like whatever it was I was planning to look for on Google.

World champion standard

I'm really back into the swing of memory training, it's great! And what's more, I'd forgotten it's a bank holiday weekend coming up, so I get an extra day to do all sorts of useful and productive things! Furthermore, I've cut down on snacking in between meals and I feel extremely slender and healthy for a change! And the weather's relatively nice, in between rainstorms! And the recession and swine flu don't seem to have been in the news lately, so I assume somebody's sorted them out! Life is great.

I've got Bagpuss

Here's something I forgot to mention about the weekend - in a charity shop I found the complete Bagpuss on video! For 50p! Well, I wasn't going to pass up that kind of opportunity, so I'm watching it right now. It's the ship in a bottle one.

A little bit more memory

I did manage to remember the Online Memory Challenge today, which pleased me. I didn't perform terribly well in it, of course, but I'm sure with a bit of practice I can catch up with all these really good Germans who dominate it at the moment. I want to get back in the habit of doing a bit of speed memory every night when I get in from work. That'll have a knock-on effect in improving my results in the long disciplines too.

Anyway, enough memory training minutiae. From tomorrow I'll be back to blogging about whatever drivel pops into my head...

Dreißig Minuten

Ooh, I feel accomplished tonight. I've done practice sessions of half-hour cards, half-hour numbers and half-hour binary - with an hour's recall time for each, that's four and a half hours of proper training for the German championship. If I can do that kind of thing most weekends between now and the end of July, my brain will be ready for anything!

Didn't get particularly great scores, mind you, especially in the numbers where I made oodles of annoying little mistakes, but the important thing is that I didn't have nearly as much mind-wandering as I'd expected to have. Considering I haven't done a big lengthy memorising session for aaaaages, in fact, I was on really great form. I'm happy!

Another good memory-related thing - I found a half-eaten bag of tooty frooties in my jacket pocket this morning that I'd forgotten all about. I love when that happens!

Someone please remind me

I keep meaning to do the Online Memory Challenge on Sunday mornings, but I always remember it when I'm in the middle of something else and anyway it started twenty minutes ago. This is, of course, the first memory-based challenge, and I tend to fail it. So could someone give me a poke to remind me beforehand? Thanks.

Statto

"How does it feel to join Herbert Sutcliffe, Denis Compton, Geoffrey Boycott and Graham Gooch as the only English batsmen to score centuries in three successive Test innings?" an interviewer asked a bemused Ravi Bopara after today's play. Clearly it was news to him that he'd accomplished this quite impressive but rather obscure feat, but he managed to come up with a nice answer. I was impressed.

And it put me in the mood to find some statistic I could use to motivate myself to do some memory training - I like achieving statistics. And here's a good one - from the Austrian championship in November 2004 to the World Championship in August 2006, Clemens Mayer won seven consecutive memory competitions. I'm on five at the moment, so if I was to win the German and UK championships this summer, a world championship win would beat that record. Woo!

Of course, winning the German championship is pretty unlikely, since they don't generally do English translations, but it's still something to aim for...

Fat and useless

That's me. I never do anything productive these days. Well, from now on, starting tomorrow, I'm going to be hard-working and efficient and also eat less and exercise rather more. That's a Zoomy guarantee!

I am going to Pittsburgh in July, you see, and I intend to be perfectly in shape, body-wise and memory-training-wise by then. Like I said, starting tomorrow.

I don't normally write about work, but...

Gah, I've had too much to do at work this week! And it's only Tuesday! I need a holiday!

Actually, I'm wondering whether I should go to AnthroCon (the world's largest gathering for lovers of funny-animal comics, cartoons etc) in Pittsburgh in July. It would be nice to get away for a week or so and see the sights of a place I've never been to. But the only thing stopping me is the fact that I went to New York in March, I'm going to Hamburg at the end of July and then probably Bahrain in November. Four foreign trips in a year is rather the kind of thing I disapprove of in others. If you tell me you go overseas four times in a year, I'll decry you as some kind of bourgeois snob who the working classes need to rise up and overthrow and probably not want to be your friend. So I'd feel like a bit of a hypocrite.

On the other hand, I can just about afford it, more or less, and I really want to do it...

The superhuman power of eternal youth

There's an article about me in the Derby Evening Telegraph (and you can read it on the website even if you're not fortunate enough to live in Derby), telling the locals who might have missed it that I'm in Men's Health magazine.

Someone from the Telegraph did call me, at work, last week and ask for a quick interview. I told him my home number and asked him to give me a call outside office hours, but in the end they seem to have decided that my input wasn't necessary, and just gone ahead and written the article without it.

The best thing about this is that they've assumed my status quo is still what it was the last time they interviewed me - so the article says I still live in Derby, and, best of all, that I'm still 31! I'm never going to do another interview with anyone again, so as to stay youthful forever!

If you're roughly my age and from the same country

You'll be pleased to see that this is available on YouTube.

If you're the wrong age or the wrong nationality, or if you were hoping for a more interesting blog tonight... sorry.

Othello transcripts

This is a public apology for not typing up my transcripts from last Saturday yet, like I said I would. I seem to have spent the whole of the last three weeks or so not typing transcripts, and it's inexcusable. I'll do it tomorrow, if I can be bothered.

Hamburger Sammich & Sum French-Fried P'tatoes!

With Cambridge out of the way, I can start planning for the German championship in Hamburg! July 31st and August 1st! And if I'm going to do well in this, the second-most-important memory competition of the year, I'll need to spend the next few weekends getting back into the habit of 30-minute memorising. A half-hour cards, half-hour numbers and half-hour binaries, all in one day, really takes it out of you, but once I've done it a few times, my brain remembers the knack of keeping the concentration going for that length of time, and before you know it I'm all ready for the world championship and the hour-long disciplines.

I really want to do well in Hamburg - historically I always used to do badly at the German championship, but then I had a great one in 2007, couldn't afford to go last year, and I think it'd be nice to win it this time...

It's gone!

SAS Furniture, down the road! That shop's been there forever, and now it's turned into Bubble-It! I don't even know what Bubble-It sells! Maybe it... bubbles things. Anyway, it doesn't sell furniture, probably, and it's an outrage!

As I mentioned in a blog only a month or so ago, SAS Furniture has always been on the corner there. Whenever we used to drive into Beeston on the way to Grandma's house (being modern, and keen to avoid big bad wolves, we took the car via Beeston instead of skipping through the woods), we'd go past the place. What with that and Woolworth's, I'm getting extremely fed up with the modern age. When I work out exactly who's responsible for the entirety of the world's problems, I'm going to go around to his/her house/bungalow and shout at them. Loudly.

He hits ye and ye gang tae the hospital

One interesting thing you notice when you watch enough cartoons and read enough comics from the olden days is that plagiarism isn't as modern an invention as you might think. Even in the thirties, when it was still possible to think up a new gag that hadn't been done before, you'd still see examples galore of stealing a joke from a rival and hoping to get away with it.

Even so, it surprised and entertained me to find the original (or maybe just an earlier iteration) of an Oor Wullie strip in an earlier Popeye comic:

Thimble Theatre starring Popeye, December 18, 1932

Oor Wullie, January 30, 1938


Five years and the Atlantic Ocean between them - I wonder if there's a missing link here? I don't think Thimble Theatre had made it to British newspapers yet at that point, huge though it was in the USA, and I don't think that gag was ever used in the animated Popeye cartoons...

See, this is the kind of thing that really fascinates me, so I thought I'd share it with the world in general.

Further news from the weekend

I realised today that while I was trying to make the attendance at the CMC sound as international as possible, it didn't occur to me that one of the English competitors had an Indian name. And now I'm worried that people think I'm either some kind of racist, or some kind of excessively politically-correct berk, or both.

Another thing I forgot to mention is that although I didn't see fit to provide any prizes for this year's competition, I did get some extremely cool gifts from competitors - Dai gave me several cool and interesting coins to add to my collection (an old-style 5p to add to my 10p and 50p!) and Christopher presented me with a giant chocolate gold medal, by far the best and tastiest medal I've ever got from a memory competition!

I should also mention the fun with the window in the competition room - it had been recently broken and patched up with brown tape, and half way through the championship we found out why. It seems the window has trouble staying open and slides down closed of its own volition. Luckily, my screeches of "Catch it!" and James and Jenny's quick reactions saved it from shattering any more panes.

And just to save the best till last, I heard today that Marco proposed to Jane in the evening after the competition, and she said yes! So, you see, memory competitions lead to romance! Another reason for everybody to come along and take part!

Ahh, Cambridge

It makes all the tedious preparation work feel worthwhile when we have a fun and successful Cambridge Memory Championship at the end of it! I'm back home again now and looking forward to catching up with the various things I haven't been doing just lately, like not ignoring everybody unrelated to the Cambridge Memory Championship who's been wanting to talk to me.

Anyway, here's what I've been doing this weekend. It was othello on Saturday, and lots of people turned up again - 15 of them, plus a non-playing Adelaide and Aubrey, who was in the country for once and able to organise the whole Cambridge MSO. Which all seemed to be a roaring success, except that there were too few events on the Saturday (the stratego was cancelled) and too many on the Sunday (the draughts was extended to cover both days). This led Aubrey to greet me with ominous questions like "Do you actually need tables for the memory competition?" and "There's no real reason why it has to be indoors, right?"

The othello itself went reasonably well, all in all. I beat Geoff in the first round, which I seem to be making a habit of lately, then lost to Imre and David, who are both much, much better than me, but who I manage to beat once in a while and was hoping to this time as well. Still, I was on four wins out of six before the final round, and just needed to beat Jeremy to end up in joint third with Geoff (who beat Imre, who in turn beat David - if you're interested in the statistics that don't involve me, you should probably check out the British Othello website instead, I'm too self-centred) and keep my undeserved comfortable lead in the BGP. But I lost the decisive game 33-31, ended up a comparatively rubbish joint fifth with Ian (not that Ian is comparatively rubbish compared to Geoff, although I can see how you might draw that inference from my last two sentences), and am now only seven points clear of David. Still, maybe I'll win or be the only person who turns up to the last two tournaments.

After the othello, I decided it might be a good idea to check out the possibility of alternative venues for the memory the next day, to avoid sharing a room with backgammon players or sitting outside in the courtyard on those chairs with little wobbly mini-desk attachments. In the spirit of nothing-ventured-nothing-gained, I went into the Royal Cambridge Hotel at half past seven on Saturday evening to ask the receptionist if there was any chance of getting a cheap conference room for nine o'clock on Sunday morning. Funnily enough, they didn't seem to think there was anything at all unusual about this request, and provided us with a perfect venue - much more swanky than the usual location, and not at all expensive, especially since Aubrey chipped in with a part of the cost from the MSO funds.

The international turnout of the memory competition was extremely impressive - two Swedes (one of whom has an Albanian name), four Germans (one of whom has a French name), an Italian (who lives in London and whose accent veers between Italian and cockney at random), one Welsh and even two English participants! We really need to get more British people involved in memory competitions.

We also had a huge and me-very-grateful-making turnout of helpers who ran the competition and marked papers promptly and accurately, ensuring everything worked out exactly the way it should, ran on time and suffered no major disasters and hardly any minor ones either (slight technical hitch or two with the spoken numbers, but nothing worse than usual) without me having to do much real work at all!

Star of the show was Dennis Müller, who's only been doing memory stuff for six months and is already confident enough to attempt a 20-second pack of cards and talk in terms of beating me next time we go head-to-head (Hamburg, end of July). It's a bit worrying, but on the other hand, really great. I look forward to seeing how well he does after a bit more training!

Dennis joins the illustrious list of Cambridge Memory Championships winners (Clemens Mayer, Ed Cooke and Gaby Kappus), while Mattias Ribbing joins the equally illustrious list of Best Beginners at the CMC (James Paterson, Fan Kai Yoon, Katie Kermode), who have all (except Fan Kai Yoon, who never came to any memory competition ever again) gone on to great things.

So, a good time was had by all! Now I'm going to go to bed, because it tires you out, organising events. Normality resumes tomorrow!

The loveliness of Leicester

Getting to Cambridge from Beeston tonight took less than three hours, which only happens on very rare occasions when you can change at Leicester without waiting more than a few minutes and get a direct train to Cambridge. But the 17:08 tonight was one of those times, and I managed to leave work early despite having to cover someone else's Friday-afternoon report that always takes ages to gather various different people's input.

So I was already in a good mood when I went in to the cafe at Leicester station for something to eat, and it only got better when it turned out that the till wasn't taking cards and I didn't have quite enough money to pay for my crisps, ham salad roll and bottle of coke, only for the man behind the till to cheerfully chip in 50p from his own pocket to make up the difference!

And then, if that wasn't enough to convince me that Leicester station is great, the announcer over the tannoy described the next train to arrive as "the chronologically disadvantaged 17:30 to London" and got a chuckle from the crowd of people waiting for it. Most big stations like Leicester have a robot announcing the trains, or else a low-paid, non-English-speaking temp. Hooray for the traditional British sense of humour and the traditional British sense of giving someone 50p to pay for a sandwich!

That's made me all cheerful and chirpy about the weekend ahead, and was just what I needed after lots of busy-ness at work and lots of running around frantically for the last few evenings getting everything sorted for Sunday (I still need to create the spoken numbers program on Powerpoint, but I can do that in the comfort of my hotel room. All the memorisation papers are printed out and safely stored in my small rucksack - which I was carrying on my front, like some kind of baby harness thing, because my big backpack was on my back. And in a way, these memorisation and recall papers are my babies. A strange way that only a certifiable lunatic would use, but a way nonetheless. I laboured over the things and printed them out, using the very last drop of ink my Lexmark cartridges would allow me. Wait a minute, I opened a set of brackets about 500 words ago, let's close them before we go any further). That's better.

On my journey down here tonight, I must have given people the impression that I'd recently come from Bahrain - I was wearing my souvenir Bahrain T-shirt, and my big rucksack has still got the little white band around it saying "Bahrain International Airport Security" from my trip there six months ago. People probably concluded that I'd been to the grand prix. Perhaps that's why the guy gave me that 50p - he must have assumed I'm a millionaire playboy and would reward him with gold bars and mansions!

Anyway, I'm rambling. I think I'll go to bed now. Othello tomorrow, memory on Sunday!