Video killed the DVD star

On the one hand, I feel like I should buy all the cheap video tapes I see in charity shops, because the day is fast approaching when there won't be any more videos to find anywhere. But on the other hand, if I take them all out of the shops, that day will come immediately, and it will be the Future, and that will be bad for everyone. It's a difficult balancing-act. I did buy an REM video the other day, which is cool. Shiny happy people holding hands...

Remember Cambridge?

I really have to start arranging things for the Cambridge Memory Championship. It is going to happen, fans of cantabrigian cognitive competitions, I just haven't told anyone yet. Sunday May 2nd, I think, although don't book your tickets yet, because I might be wrong about that. I will publish full details, via the medium of memory-sports.com, very soon. Look forward to it!

Morality play

Scene: Barbara's living room. Rotherham Roland is lying under a settee, with just his protruding legs visible. Garstin enters.

Rotherham Roland: Garstin, is that you?
Garstin: Who else would it be?
Rotherham Roland: Five minutes ago, it was a man to read the gas meter, and five minutes before that, it was a burglar who stole the gas meter.
Garstin: How did they get in? You and I are the only ones with keys to Barbara's house.
Rotherham Roland: Burglars, or at least the more successful burglars, can generally enter houses without using keys. And the burglar left the door open, so the gas meter man didn't need one either. However, he considerately closed it behind him after I explained that the gas meter had been stolen.
Garstin: That still doesn't explain why you're under that settee.
Rotherham Roland: You didn't ask me why I'm under the settee.
Garstin: I didn't say that I had asked you why you're under the settee.
Rotherham Roland: Shut the bloody hell up and just get this settee off me, Garstin. It's crushing my head, ribs and nose.
Garstin: All right. Just let me put this Cadbury's Creme Egg on the kitchen counter. I'll be wanting to eat it later, and if I leave it in my pocket or my hand for too long, it'll start to melt, and the two component parts of the chocolate 'shell' will become separated when I bite into it. And frankly, that thought doesn't appeal to me at all.
Rotherham Roland: Any time you're ready.
Garstin: Don't rush me. This operation takes time. Where's my spirit level?
Rotherham Roland: It's probably at your house. Were you expecting it to be in Barbara's kitchen?
Garstin: Because I need to know whether the kitchen counter slopes downwards towards the floor before I put my Cadbury's Creme Egg on it.
Rotherham Roland: Are you even listening to me? You just replied as if I'd asked you why you need your spirit level, but I didn't.
Garstin: Hardly my fault if you don't understand the basic principles of conversation, Phil.
Rotherham Roland: Phil? I'm Rotherham Roland!
Garstin: Oh, sorry, I can only see your legs, I assumed you were Phil.
Rotherham Roland: Phil who? And if you thought I was this Phil person, why did you claim earlier that only you and I have the keys to Barbara's house?
Garstin: It's extremely rude to ask a second question before a fellow has had time to reply to the first. Now I'm confused.
Rotherham Roland: Just get this bloody hell settee off me.
Garstin: I don't know how to get settees off people.
Rotherham Roland: Fine. Then just eat your Cadbury's Creme Egg.
Garstin: I never had a Cadbury's Creme Egg. I don't even like them. I don't know why I claimed to have one earlier, I suppose I just wanted you to think I'm cool.
Rotherham Roland: I do think you're cool, Garstin. And the reason I think you're cool is because you yourself are cool. You don't need to pretend to be someone you're not.
Garstin: That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me, Phil. I'm touched.

Garstin absent-mindedly sits on the settee, crushing Rotherham Roland.

The end.

How misty men like Cromwell ought to live

I'm reliably informed by my mother that "Wolf Hall", by Hilary Mantel, is a great book. It's about Thomas Cromwell, and contains a really groovy description of a memory system used by either him or someone else (I've only got a photocopy of one page that doesn't say who it's talking about). I urge everyone to buy the book, and read not just page 216, but the whole thing.

Anyway, this immediately reminded me of the line in the title, up there, written about Thomas's great-great-great-nephew Oliver [family relationship lazily looked up on wikipedia and so probably incorrect] in 1849, by the Rev. T. Brayshaw (according to this website, which is almost certainly more reliable than wikipedia because it belongs to Russian memory man, othello player and circus strongman Oleg Stepanov and is a transcription of a 19th-century book about memory - and all 19th-century books were entirely accurate and free from factual error). It's part of a mnemonic poem you can use to learn the sequence and dates of English monarchs, and it includes the couplet "Fair MODEL [1625] did first Charles, when martyred, give, / How MISTY [1649] men like Cromwell ought to live."

When I first read this poem, I thought "What a stupid line. In what way could Cromwell be described as 'misty'? It makes no sense at all, and so doesn't work as a mnemonic!" Of course, this meant that the only phrase from this poem that stuck in my head was "misty men like Cromwell", and ensured that any time I've seen a patch of mist since then, I've always thought of Oliver Cromwell [and presumably also his son, who doesn't get a line to himself in the poem]. Three cheers for the power of mnemonics and the golden rule that silly nonsensical images are the most memorable!

The one thing I didn't remember, of course, is what year the word "misty" was supposed to represent, because the Reverend Brayshaw used a system of his own devising that nobody else has ever used since. Still, his book of Metrical Mnemonics sounds downright awesome, and I must try to find a copy. Not least because either his book, the 1885 book that quoted it, or Oleg's transcription of the latter, misses out a line of the poem.

It's the line about King John - 1199, which in this system is [B or C], [T or V], [T or V] ("battle" sounds obvious but seems to be disallowed because all the other mnemonic words in the poem use only the three consonants, no extra ones on the end), and rhyming with the following line "His FACE, IN Parliament, weak third Henry shows." I'd suspect "covet" for the mnemonic, and "goes" for the rhyme, but I can't think of a good way to make a nice metric out of them...

In the long run

Starting tomorrow, I'm going to write big long blog posts every night for at least a week. All this brevity lately, I'm turning into Twitter. And I really don't want to become Stephen Fry.

Drat it

It's hard to find the time to learn Japanese and practice memory when there's constantly football on the telly. The TV people should be more considerate, and show nothing but Coronation Street all night, on every channel. Then I might actually accomplish something.

Up Close And Personal

If you're interested in a lengthy interview with me about memory competitions, with sensible and interesting questions unlike the kind you normally see in interviews with me, click here! If you're not, then click somewhere else. Or switch off your computer and go out and do something less boring instead!

Lateral Thinking

The Israeli journalist I was talking to on Sunday came out with the old chestnut "Do you ever walk into a room and find you can't remember what you were meaning to do there?" I cheerfully replied that yes, I do, all the time. "What do you do then?", she asked. "I do something else,' I replied. "If I can't remember, it can't have been anything important."

She found this quite funny, especially since she'd asked Tony Buzan the same question a couple of days earlier, and he'd spelled out extensive techniques and strategies for remembering what you were meaning to do.

Accomplished

I feel like I've really got things done this weekend. It's more of a state of mind than anything you could objectively point to and say that I've actually done, but even so. A productive weekend, rather than a lazy one. This is the kind of thing that puts me in memory-training mood, which is great. Hopefully I'll do some serious practice over the coming weeks. It's not too long until the memory season starts up again, after all...

Can I also just throw in a recommendation to read Order of the Stick? I've just finished reading the latest compilation book, and there are so many awesome and clever and hilarious moments, it's worth reading even if like me you've only got a passing knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons.

Oh, and also, the weather's better. It's just cold, wet and miserable out there now, with just a few stray lumps of ice in the road. Perfect!

Snowed in

Actually, there's no more than an inch of snow around here, because Nottingham never gets the really bad weather, but it's on top of all the ice and nastiness from last week, so I'm not going anywhere this weekend. I'm staying in the house and hoping everything will have melted by Monday. I even cleaned up my spare room and refreshed my knowledge of basic conversational Japanese!

I've been to Frimley Green

Why does Martin Adams keep winning at darts when he can't hit doubles? Or is it just that whenever I turn the telly on, he gets nervous and starts missing? Because he seems to do a lot better whenever I'm not watching him. Perhaps I'm just intimidating to darts players in general.

Also, whatever happened to those groovy displays they used to have of giant dartboards with lights that would be turned on in a position roughly corresponding to where the dart hit the board? They were extremely cool, but it's all TV screens nowadays. Did they all end up on a tip somewhere? I'll have to go and look.

Tokyo-2

Yep, it's definitely confirmed, I'm going back to Tokyo for a flying visit - flying out on Saturday 23rd, arriving Sunday morning, then back home on Tuesday morning, and back into work on the Wednesday, thus only using up my last two remaining holiday days of the financial year. I think it's fair to say that jetlag will be a problem, but I'm sure I'll be up to whatever memory stunts they're wanting me to perform in the studio.

The weather is apparently really quite nice in Tokyo at the moment, so hopefully it'll be a nice change from the ice and snow and nastiness over here. And even if it's not, yay! Japan! Again! For free! Being the World Memory Champion is great!

Synchronicity

I don't plan my life in advance, generally speaking, so when everything works out nicely like it did at lunchtime today, I feel quite pleased with myself. The meeting at work didn't overrun at all (since someone important had a conference call scheduled for twelve), I was able to honestly say "I'll have to look into it and ask someone else" when someone came up to me afterwards with a mysterious piece of paper and leave at exactly the time I was meaning to. And then I got back home at the exact moment when a postman arrived to deliver my new passport (which has to be signed for and would have gone back to some depot somewhere if I hadn't been around), made myself a sandwich and finished eating it at the exact moment when Radio Gloucestershire phoned for the interview, talked to them for a concise five-minute chat and had ten minutes left to browse through the latest othello newsletter before having to go back to the office. It was quite the most productive and well-organised lunch hour I've ever had, and perfectly timed throughout! I'm very nearly a yuppie!

It's like being Princess Diana

Tune in to Radio Gloucestershire tomorrow for a live, in-depth, five-minute interview with the World Memory Champion during his lunch hour. Work permitting - I've got a meeting at work scheduled to finish at twelve, but it's the kind of thing that's likely to overrun, and I do rather have to give priority to my real job, even in favour of Radio Gloucestershire.

And then on Sunday I'm being interviewed over the phone by the second-biggest newspaper in Israel! This one has come about because a journalist in Tel Aviv has just seen "The Mentalists", which I think is extremely groovy. I'm glad to hear that it's still being watched by people, because it really was an excellent documentary about memory competitions, and it's exactly the kind of thing there needs to be more of if we're going to get new people interested in taking part.

And I tell you, this constant pursuit by the media of the world really takes its toll on a celebrity like me. I'll probably go mad and turn to drugs and shoplifting and cutting all my hair off and things, and it'll all be the fault of the press.

New cooker smell

I've got a new oven. Don't you love it when you turn them on for the first time and they melt the protective covering stuff on the elements and fill the house with poisonous toxic gases? It really takes me back to my short-lived student days when we also got a new cooker and were similarly gassed.

Smells are really good at triggering distant memories, as people always tell me. Seriously, people tell me that quite often. It's the kind of person who comes up to me and says "You're the memory man, aren't you?" and then follows it up with "I've always had a good memory myself..." and then tells me everything they know about the process of memory. I think they're expecting me to say "Yes, that's right, my goodness, you certainly are clever!" But the smell thing is always one of the first things they say. It's true, anyway, and I'm currently trying to formulate a way of cheating in memory competitions by smuggling scratch-and-sniff books into the room, disguised as rough notepaper.

Actually, now I come to think of it, I do say something like "Yes, that's right, my goodness, you certainly are clever!" in that kind of situation. So I've only got myself to blame if people keep doing this to me. Maybe I should just sneer contemptuously at them instead, but then I'm afraid that they might punch me in the nose and destroy my sense of smell, and with it my memory.

Back, back, back to school again

Well, after an enjoyably and completely squandered week off, it's back to the office again tomorrow. Possibly this will motivate me to do some more memory training and the like, although it probably won't. Anyway, I'll do some more heavy-duty blogging soon, I assure you. It might involve giant spiders or something equally exciting, although it probably won't.

Just keep your bottle and use your heads

For want of anything better to do today, I went to see Nottingham Forest play Birmingham in the cup. Freezing temperature and no goals, but it was still a fun experience. Forest were mostly the best team, but they didn't really look like winning. The penalty miss was worth seeing, though - Robert Earnshaw basically minced up to the ball and daintily chipped it over the crossbar.

Maybe I'll become a Forest fan in 2010. It's about time I started supporting a local team, and perhaps it'd put an end to all those people thinking I still live in Derby. It's the internet's fault. Or possibly my fault for not having my own website that tells people where I live nowadays. I've only got myself to blame.

It's not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me...

Someone sent a text message to my landline yesterday, read out by that robot voice, which went along the lines of "Happy New Year, everyone! Just to let you know, I'm moving into my own place, at the following address in Liverpool. Bye!"

I don't think this is from anyone I know, it's probably a wrong number, but just in case, and you're the person who's moved into a new home in Liverpool, send me an email? Because I deleted the message and I don't remember where it was.

Isn't that an exciting way to start a new decade of Zoomybloggery?

Hootenanny!

Note: The following has been slightly edited, much as this goes against my stream-of-consciousness principles, in case I get sued by the person I originally named in Resolution 4. He has been replaced by Wilson, the Space Aubergine, a character I just invented who bears no resemblance to any human or aubergine living or dead.

Happy New Year, everyone! My resolutions:

1) To develop a new kind of trousers that are somewhere between the full-length kind and those weird three-quarter-length ones that cool people wear nowadays, and become a millionaire by selling them. The secret to this will be to buy lots of normal trousers in bulk and sell them to people who are one-eighth of a leg taller than the people the trousers were designed for.

2) To encourage people to wear skirts on top of their seven-eighths-length trousers, thus doubling the profits of my clothing company and making me a millionaire.

3) To start up a clothing company of some kind in order to facilitate resolutions one and two, and encourage gullible people to invest hugely in "Memory Clothes plc - the only clothing company endorsed by a World Memory Champion as far as is known", thus making me a millionaire before I even sell any trousers or skirts.

4) Consult someone like Wilson, the space aubergine for advice on how to encourage gullible people to invest in manifestly unprofitable schemes like the above, but present the request for help in such an exciting way that instead of me paying him for the consultation, he gives me lots of money as well as the advice, thus making me a millionaire before I even act on the advice received.

5) Set some lateral-thinking expert like Edward de Bono the challenge of re-ordering my resolution list in such a way that I don't have to do the resolutions in sort-of-reverse-order-except-for-the-first-two, because that would just be confusing. Also require him to pay me an entry fee sufficient to make me a millionaire, for the privilege. And also, while he's at it, to rewrite resolution number four so that it doesn't look like some kind of scathing Private-Eye-style satire of Wilson, the space aubergine's business dealings (about which I know nothing), because that wasn't my intention at all, but now when I come to look at it... well, I'm too lazy to change it, anyway.

6) Having become a millionaire, five times over, give the money away to someone else, picked at random from the world's population, because being a millionaire would be no fun at all. And besides, what would I resolve next year?

The 2000s

You know, this decade has been generally memory-themed for me, starting with my first competition (and simultaneously my first introduction to the basic principles of memory techniques) in 2000. I sort of feel like the 2010s should also involve some entirely new challenge for me. I should make an effort to enter as many new and unusual competitions next year as I possibly can, in the hope that one or more of them will click for me in the same way as memory has. That way, in December 2019, I can sit back and say 'Yep, now I'm the undisputed world champion snail-shell-rotator [or whatever my new hobby turns out to be], I can move on to the challenges of the 2020s without feeling at all like I've already achieved everything I'm going to be remembered for in this life...'