More numbers

I think I might have to start posting my training scores on my blog again - that really seemed to motivate me to practice every day, without slacking off. So there's something for you all to look forward to.

What a lovely weekend!

All nice and sunny and warm, perfect playing-outside weather. I really hope next weekend is full of rain and hail and sleet and snow and volcanic ash, because next weekend is Printing Things Out Weekend, that most tedious weekend in my memory-competition calendar, when I sit around indoors for at least several hours making sure I've got all the memorisation and recall papers and other accessories ready for the Cambridge Memory Championship.

Speaking of which, confirmed competitor list (TWO people dropped out today, but it's still a healthy number - let's just hope the planes are flying again by May 2nd...):

Nelson Dellis (USA)
James Ponder (England)
John Burrows (Wales)
Mark Aarøe Nissen (Denmark)
Idriz Zogaj (Sweden)
Mattias Ribbing (Sweden)
Taras Bulgya (Ukraine)
Christian Schäfer (Germany)
Nicolai Lassen (Denmark)
Oliver Strand (Sweden)
Dave Billington (England)

Have I missed anyone? There are also unconfirmed competitors who might well be there too, Mike from America, Sam from England, there are probably others I've forgotten, so please do let me know, if you're out there.

Sod it, I'm going to talk politics

I know I've got that self-imposed ban that I only break on rare occasions, but it's general election time, so I'll just get it all out of the way tonight and then go back to my usual drivel. But I've got to write something, just to remind you all that I've been voting Lib Dem since long before it was cool. I don't know, all you bandwagon-jumpers, I suppose it's my fault for being such a famous celebrity and role model for the people of Britain, but you don't really have to copy everything I do.

Also, I characterised this constituency on Wednesday as "going to be a fairly comfortable Conservative win with Labour second" (I wasn't breaking the no-politics-talk rule there, that was a blog entry about daleks), and of course a week is a long time in politics if there's a nationwide shift in public perception of the third party on the Thursday night, so I thought I'd better post something new in case my prediction turns out to be wildly wrong and everyone laughs at me.

Because I was in the barber's today, traditionally always the best place to pick up on the mood of the local populace, and the word on the street of Broxtowe is unquestionably "Be nice if the Lib Dems did win, be a change at least". And this excellent local-politics blog's (somewhat unscientific) poll is predicting an absolute landslide for David Watts, last week's popular-local-councillor-running-for-parliament-as-a-formality-in-a-constituency-the-Lib-Dems-never-get-many-votes-in, this week's MP-in-waiting. He seems to have taken all the "don't like Labour so I suppose I'll have to vote Tory" contingent, and (more impressively) reduced the ever-popular "a plague on them all" vote down to minimal levels! I think once all the silliness has settled down it's still the Conservative candidate's seat to lose, but it's probably fair to say that it's become a genuine three-horse race now, which is awesome. Last time round I was living in a safe Labour seat (it's not safe any more, thanks to Margaret Beckett's tireless work at shooting herself in the foot repeatedly over the last few years, but it was then), and before that I spent my formative years in eternally Conservative Lincolnshire, so I've never voted in a general election that was actually a contest before.

There's also the horrible possibility that I might vote for the candidate and/or party that wins the election - that's never happened to me before, and I'll feel terribly guilty when it inevitably all goes wrong. But I really do like the public mood at the moment - that "if only people believed the Lib Dems could win, they'd win two-thirds of the constituencies in the country" barrier they've been banging on about for years actually does seem to have been broken. Get Rupert Murdoch on board and Nick Clegg is the new PM. I hadn't realised the people whose opinions make the difference were quite so desperate for a new straw to clutch at, but I'm pleasantly surprised.

In the interests of keeping all my election-themed babblings safely confined in one blog post, here's the comment I threw into Sam's blog after Thursday's debate:

I thought it was excellent! A very British spin on the American tradition, with three confident, articulate party leaders putting across their points in a sensible way with only a minimum of squabbling. We all know really that they'd all make perfectly capable PMs, but it's good to see that actually come across for once. The non-applauding audience was an excellent idea, it raised the whole debate to a more calm and intellectual level.

Gordon Brown tried to play to the audience early on with his cracks about posters and Lord Ashcroft, but when he realised it wasn't going to work like that, he switched tracks very smoothly. Nick Clegg apparently was declared the winners in the insta-polls afterwards, which is no big surprise, but I would have marked him down for repeating himself more than the others did and for apparently struggling to remember Lib Dem policy on the care homes question ("I think we all need to work together on this one", followed by a confused mumble about what his party's ideas were). He did score the biggest victory of the night with the right for people to sack (or, as Brown carefully said every time, "recall") their MPs, reducing Gordon to unconvincingly whining "I support it..." at the end. David Cameron stood out less than the other two, somehow, he never seemed to get his message across convincingly.

The ending was probably Brown's biggest victory - I suspect the hand-shaking, baby-kissing with the audience was against the rules, but it really caught the others off-balance and left them looking like they were thinking "What, we're supposed to talk to the commoners now?"

I'm looking forward to the rest of the debates! I think Gordon and Dave will go after Nick more fiercely next time - Gordon had clearly prepared answers to all the Conservative policies but not the Lib Dem ones, and Dave tried to stick to the usual policy of acting as if there are only two parties, which isn't really going to work when there are three people on the stage given equal soapbox time...

And finally, since it's the 21st century, I thought I'd look and see what the candidates' websites look like. A website that makes a party or a person look like they know what they're doing wins a lot of votes nowadays.

Which is a bit unfortunate, because The Broxtowe Liberal Democrats website is awful! It looks like it was designed by a pair of twelve-year-olds as a school project. The site was designed back in the long-gone days of last week when the general election was of no real importance to the Lib Dems - the front page highlights their success in council elections, but you have to scroll down the page to find a picture of David Watts and a tiny-font note that he's the party's parliamentary candidate. Clicking around the site you can eventually find the link to his personal website, but that too hasn't been updated for a long time. His "blog" contains his "weekly news" from February 12th and a promise to post it every week from then on. His writing style is not good, there are typos and plenty of missing apostrophes. And you all know how I despise misused apostrophes.

So let's go to The Broxtowe Conservative website instead. Will the stereotype of Tories being better educated prevail over the stereotype of Tories being computer-illiterate? More or less, yes. A big picture of candidate Anna Soubry as soon as you click onto the website (she was a local TV news reporter in her younger days and still knows how to strike the pose) and the site looks smooth, polished and professional. Except for the phrase "After 13 years in power, Labours' legacy is...", right there on the home page. Aaaaaaaaargh. How difficult IS it to find someone who can write the English language and ask them to check these things? There's also a box saying "Anna's blog" with no clickable link. I can't find anything that could be described as a blog, anywhere on the website. But it does look stylish. And she promises to claim minimal expenses, which is an improvement on the one tatty leaflet I've had in the post from her, in which she basically asserted "I'm extremely wealthy, so I can be trusted" without making any specific promise about money.

By contrast, our sitting MP, Dr Nick Palmer, has sent out whole rainforests' worth of newsletters, spending vast fortunes on conveying the message that he hasn't got as much money as the Conservatives. Let's see what The Broxtowe Labour website looks like. The phrase that comes to mind is my dear departed father's "Looks like a bucket o' muck to me..." It's also awful, but in a different way to the Lib Dem one. That one looks amateurish and lazy, this one looks like it was created by people who don't really know what the internet is, or what you can do with it. It looks like the kind of website that people were creating in the mid-1990s. But at least all the punctuation is correct. And the latest blog update is as recent as last Thursday. The content is the Labour-spin-doctor-ordered line that he's been doggedly pursuing for months - I don't mind admitting that this man gets on my nerves something chronic, however much it damages the neutral tone I've been trying to hit throughout this blog. I think I'd better stop now. The end, all the politics out of my system, blog-wise, until election night. And even then I'll probably blog about Thundercats instead.

Thomas Rivers invented the orchard house

Groovily, they're showing "The Victorian Kitchen Garden" on "Yesterday" (the TV channel that used to be UKTV History). My dad used to love that programme. He had them all on video, along with a huge number of programmes about steam trains. Wonderful person though he was, he really did love boring things on TV.

Actually, though, it's really quite fun to hear elderly gardener Harry Dodson demonstrating how Victorians kept the earwigs off their peaches. I might have to tape it myself.

So many words

As I think I've moaned once or twice before, the most difficult part of organising a memory competition is writing the "historic dates" - short, snappy descriptions of a ficticious historical event. And entirely thanks to Hannes keeping on breaking the world record, I have to provide 142 of them for the Cambridge event. It drains a fellow's creativity.

Also, I need some translation help. I'm all sorted for Swedes, but I would be eternally grateful to any native speakers of German or Danish who could volunteer to translate 142 short phrases and 140 random words. Possibly Ukrainian speakers, too, if there are any such people among my readership, but Taras hasn't told me yet what language he wants. Please drop me an email if you wouldn't mind helping out. Otherwise I'll just ask one of the Germans who I know will do it if I really beg. And start pestering all the Danes I'm vaguely acquainted with. It's fun being a competition organiser.

Why would anyone vote for a dalek?

You just know they'd be dishonest about their expense claims. But despite this, the Radio Times cover this week has decided to celebrate the upcoming general election and the upcoming dalek appearance on Saturday's Doctor Who (alongside, apparently, Winston Churchill played by an actor who doesn't resemble him even slightly) by proclaiming "Vote Dalek!" (again - they did exactly the same thing in 2005) and having three different variant covers with a red, blue or gold dalek.

The funny thing is that I haven't seen a single gold dalek cover in the shops around here. Did RT proportionately represent them in smaller quantities, or are they just the most popular? Or have they cleverly distributed the different colour schemes according to the latest opinion polls in each constituency? I live in a seat that's going to be a fairly comfortable Conservative win with Labour second, and the Co-op down the road had four blue and two red daleks on the shelf. It's a real puzzler, and it's probably a good thing that I've vowed never to buy RT again, since they've made it 'bigger and better' by stopping listing all the programmes that I like to watch.

So let's talk about a different kind of campaigning instead. I got a great leaflet through my letterbox today, advertising STAYwarm hot water heating systems (yes, it's written "STAYwarm" as if to claim that while other heaters might make you temporarily warm, this is the only one with a permanent effect). The blurb starts "We all accept that fuel price increases have reached a frightening level and will continue to spiral upwards. Once, we had no choice but to accept this. NOT ANYMORE. At last you can take control and have a say in your fuel prices. Why be held to ransom by Foreign owned energy companies?"

I just love the bold, underlined, capitalised word 'foreign'. Obviously they're hoping for a reaction along the lines of 'My God, I'm giving money to foreigners! I must give this implicitly British company all my money instead, quick!'

Actually, they probably will get a lot of reactions like that around here. That's why the blue daleks are going to win this election...

Sorry for the shortage of bloggery lately

But I went to bed early last night, and I think I'm going to do the same today. Didn't get enough sleep at the weekend. See you all when I wake up.

Jings!

I found the 1973 Broons book on the Sunday book stall on the High Road today, for only a pound. Not that anybody would call that a real bargain - it's in a condition that any dealer would class as 'poor', before ordering you to get it out of their sight and stop wasting their time, it's falling apart at the seams and several of the pages have been carefully but only partially coloured in with felt tip pens, probably by someone whose name starts with J (I can't make out the name, but he/she was apparently presented the book, with all her love and four kisses, by Phyllis). J saw fit to give all the female characters, including the Bairn, bright blue eyeshadow and bright red lipstick.

Still, I don't care about the condition of the book or the garish makeup on the characters, I just like the stories. And, well, they're okay. Unexceptional, maybe, but the Broons are always fun to read, even the late-sixties-early-seventies ones reprinted in this volume. The funny thing is spotting which ones have been decimalised and which ones haven't - after original artist Dudley Watkins died in 1969, they reprinted old 1950s strips for a few years until they found a new permanent artist and started up all-new adventures again (well, as all-new as the Broons ever gets, anyway; they did keep up the much-loved tradition of using the same three plotlines over and over and over again forever). But during this reprint period, Britain switched to decimal currency, and so the reprinted strips after 1971 had all references to shillings replaced with new pence - taking inflation into account, too, so 'a bob' in the originals generally became '10p', and a half-crown was changed to 50p (sometimes they even re-drew the coin to make it heptagonal, which was a nice touch). But this book I've bought today doesn't follow through this logic, and just grabs the usual random selection of strips from the last few years to compile. So about half of them use decimal currency and half of them don't. It's a bit jarring.

Some of these reprints also redrew the more glaring anachronisms - I suspect the bus in this one was a tram when it first saw print. But I'm mostly posting it here so I can remind myself not to exclaim "Help! It's a Chinaman!" at the next memory championship. It's not really very polite.

Fun fun fun in the Sun Sun Sun

They've cleverly redesigned the layout of the Kings Cross St Pancras tube station so that it takes five times longer to get to the trains than it used to, but even so, I managed to get to our new London Regional venue, the Sun public house, with plenty of time to spare. In contrast to previous London pubs that have hosted othello competitions, there was also somebody at the pub with a key to let us in at the agreed time.

David had booked the room but then been unable to be there and act as tournament director, so there had been a bit of a flap on the mailing list for the past week about who was going, whether it was worth having the competition at all, how we'd get clocks and boards there, etc. (the British Othello Federation does own lots of boards and clocks, but has yet to invent a good system of arranging to leave them with somebody who can bring them to the next tournament - when last heard of, half the clocks were in Imre's office and the other half in Steve Rowe's house). But everybody and everything that had been worried about turned up at the Sun. Lots of boards and pieces, lots of clocks (albeit most of them old-fashioned analogue ones and not the groovy digital clocks that we prefer), enough players to exactly cover the cost of the room hire (this is inconvenient for me, because it means I don't have to bank any money, and so when I come to put together the BOF's accounts in the autumn I'll think I've lost the London Regional's profits somewhere, forgetting that there weren't any), a laptop with a pairings program and everything we could possibly have needed.

Except transcript sheets. The tournament director brings transcript sheets for people to fill in, and nobody had so much as mentioned this on any of the internet forum discussions, so nobody had thought to bring any with them. Still, it turns out that modern technology allows us to create them and print them out at a place down the road from the Sun, so all was well in the end.

We had nine players, which is exactly the worst possible number for a seven-round swiss-system tournament. There's a bye, which nobody likes, and everybody plays all but one or two of the other players, which is just silly. But with not enough time to make it a nine-round round-robin, we just had to put up with it. And it all went very smoothly, we finished in ample time and there was a lot of excitement and intriguing results. Iain won, with Ian second, and I played uniformly badly throughout.

Lunch in the pub was interesting, too - the pub "does food", limited to a choice of pizzas or baguettes, but it turns out that when you order it, the pub phones up a pizza place down the road and orders a delivery for you. This unnecessary middleman did lead to us getting completely different pizzas from the ones we'd asked for, but never mind, pizza is always good food.

There was a bookie's just across the road, but I still didn't have a flutter on the Grand National.

London calling

Othello in the Sun tomorrow, in more ways than one. The pub we're going to is probably called the Sun, unless I'm misremembering, and the weather's nice. And maybe there'll be a major tabloid scandal that'll make the front pages, too.

Cambridge again

I sent the following to Florian to put on memory-sports.com, but he seems to not be around at the moment, so here's a sneak preview. Stop-press news - we've got really quite a lot of competitors, a surprisingly large number of them being from Sweden and Denmark, but also at least one, possibly two, Americans and one Ukrainian! There might even be some British memorisers there too, although I can't promise any miracles...

Oh, and also, the competition will be filmed for Japanese TV!

What is the Cambridge Memory Championship?

The Cambridge Memory Championship is the coolest memory championship in the whole universe, because it’s organised by the World Memory Champion and his extremely cool friends.

I’m just being silly. The Cambridge Memory Championship is a small, friendly, annual memory competition, ideal for beginners to have their first experience of a real-life memory championship, or for seasoned veterans to relax and have fun with the weird and wonderful memory competition people.

So is it a real memory championship?

Completely and totally ‘real’! And ‘official’ too! It’s arbited by top WMSC-approved arbiters Phil Chambers and Nathalie Lecordier, it follows the official ‘National standard’ memory championship format, and everyone who competes in it will get their official place on the world ranking list (or, if they’re already on the list, have the chance to improve their position).

When is it happening?

Sunday, May 2nd. It starts at 9:00 in the morning, promptly (unless we have to wait for someone to arrive with the key to the competition room. It’s the kind of competition where that might happen.) and finishes at around 6:00 in the evening. There will be a break for lunch at around 12:00.

Where is it happening?

This year’s event takes place at Trinity College, Cambridge, an ancient and extremely beautiful old university building. It’s right in the centre of Cambridge, and easily accessible by public transport – although the Cambridge train station is a very long way away from the city centre, so be prepared for a long walk or a bus journey after you arrive. Cambridge itself is easy to get to from around the world – if you’re on a budget, look for a cheap flight to Stansted Airport, which is 25 minutes away from Cambridge by train.

Once you’ve found your way to Cambridge, find your way to Trinity College, which can be seen on the map here: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&q=CB2+1TQ&fb=1&gl=uk&ei=4MG5S7HuAtKOjAeo5bW2DQ&ved=0CBUQpQY&view=map&geocode=FTeWHAMdg8oBAA&split=0&iwloc=A&sa=X

The competition takes place in Whewell’s Court, through a little gate across the road from the main college gate. Someone will be hanging around to point the way. The W in ‘Whewell’ is silent, by the way – it’s pronounced ‘you-ell’.

More details of how to get there, where to stay (I recommend Cityroomz, right next to the train station: http://www.cityroomz.com/ ) and the other things that are happening that weekend can be found here: http://www.msocambridge.org.uk/

What does it cost to take part?

Participation is completely free of charge for beginners (a beginner is someone who has never competed in any memory competition, anywhere, before) and £5 for everyone else. Which is so cheap that it really doesn’t count as costing anything at all, wouldn’t you say? You’ll also need to pay for your own travel, accommodation and food, of course.

What can I win?

The winner has the great honour of becoming the Cambridge Memory Champion. That’s it, basically. Sorry, there aren’t any prizes. But it’s not about winning, anyway, it’s about taking part, and meeting other memorisers.

What kind of things will we be memorising?

The schedule looks like this:

9:00 Welcome and introduction
9:15 Random words 5 min 10 min
9:45 Binary numbers 5 min 15 min
10:15 Names and faces 5 min 10 min
10:45 Numbers 15 min 30 min
11:45 Lunch break
1:00 Cards 10 min 20 min
1:45 Speed Numbers 5 min 15 min
2:15 Abstract Images 15 min 30 min
3:15 Historic Dates 5 min 15 min
3:45 Spoken Numbers 100 sec 5 min
200 sec 10 min
4:45 Speed Cards 5 min 5 min
5 min 5 min
6:00 Finish


Full rules are attached to this email – Florian, can you host them somewhere?

We’ll explain exactly what each discipline involves before we start memorising, but it’d obviously be a help if you know the rules before you get there. Any questions, please ask and I’ll do my best to answer!

You can ignore about 95% of those rules - all the bits about tiebreaks have never, as far as I know, ever been applied in any competition, ever.

What else could I possibly need to know?

If you want the dates and words to be translated into your own language, please let me know as soon as possible. Otherwise, you’ll get them in English.

The competition is now in its fifth year! Three of the four previous winners have been German – Clemens Mayer, Gabby Kappus and Dennis Müller – with just Ed Cooke’s win in 2007 flying the flag for Britain. There might be a trophy one day, if I get round to buying one, and maybe your name could be the next to be potentially inscribed on this wonderful hypothetical trophy!

See you there!

Never forget where you're coming from

I probably should have mentioned yesterday that it was Grandma's 90th birthday. Happy belated birthday to her!

Here's an interesting fact about Grandma - her grandmother, my great-great-grandma, was Scottish. A Graham, to be specific. And I just found out today in the course of randomly wandering around the internet that the Graham clan motto is apparently "Ne oublie" - Don't forget. I think that's quite groovy, and I'll be representing Scotland at memory competitions from now on.

Incidentally, I hear from a friend in Denver, Colorado, that I was on the radio there last night, in some programme about the brain, or something. Talking at the world championship last year. I talked to a lot of people there, I don't remember which particular interview this would have been, but I hope anybody out there who heard it enjoyed it.

Deal!

I must confess that over Easter I've got quite hooked on Deal Or No Deal. I've never watched it before, but now that I have, I think it's completely awesome. The most feel-good game show I've ever seen! A real celebration of the people of this country all getting together to support one another. I'm going to watch it every day after work from now until I get bored with it!

Don't warn the tadpoles

I had a dream last night that woodlice were stealing my sharp kitchen knife. There was a missing floorboard in my flat somewhere, and the woodlice were (somehow) manhandling the knife down it and into their secret lair. I just rapped my knuckles on the floor a couple of times, the woodlice scurried away and I retrieved the knife, thinking to myself "I'll have to keep an eye on those woodlice, I'm sure they're up to something..."

So just be careful, everyone. Watch your backs.

The joys of Easter

It's great to have spent three days doing absolutely none of the important things I was planning to do this weekend, and still have a day left to do them before I have to go back to work. I don't feel remotely guilty, and I can lounge about on my settee, listening to Jive Bunny with a clear conscience!

That said, I really do need to do a lot of stuff tomorrow. It's going to be a busy day...

Kensington!

Hey, remember that blog post a couple of months ago when I found out that the tenth-best-selling toy of 1981 was something called "Kensington", which I'd never even heard of? Well, guess what I saw staring at me from the top shelf of a charity shop in Long Eaton today!

Kensington Registered Trade Mark Applied For

It's actually not a toy, as such, it's a board game! Packaged in a flat, square, cardboard sleeve exactly the size and shape of an LP record, the front cover proclaims it to be "Game of the Year" (it doesn't say which year) in five languages, lists the seven languages the instructions are translated into (Chinese and Arabic readers don't get to know that it's the game of the year) and lists various impressive catchphrases:

AGES 7 to 107
2/6 PLAYERS

A minute to learn - A lifetime to master
Quick to pick up - Slow to put down

Capture small shapes to frustrate your opponent.
Construct large shapes to defeat your opponent.

"Kensington is a really fascinating game, offering a formidable and potentially victorious challenge to such classic rivals as Chess, Backgammon or even Cards. Excellent value!"


© World Copyright 1979 Forbes-Taylor Patents Pending

I think the judgement of the last thirty years is that Chess, Backgammon and Cards have seen off the challenge from this formidable opponent. But hey, that slogan about a minute to learn, a lifetime to master sounds a little familiar, doesn't it? Othello had been launched in Britain just a few years earlier, using that same phrase. Does Othello merit a mention as one of the games that were destined to be blown away by Kensington? Nope, not a word. Indeed, the back of the pack, which tells the story of Kensington's creation in great detail, makes it out to be something entirely new, different, exciting and unprecedented in the world of games!



"Kensington," it modestly begins, "is the brilliant outcome of arduous research by two eccentric British friends to develop a game of pure skill that can be easily learnt and as enjoyably played by children and adults in each and every country of the world, irrespective of language or way of life. Not since chess and checkers (draughts) first appeared from the East a dozen centuries or so ago has there been such a remarkable breakthrough in the games world, where lately most of the running has been made by the trademarked leaders, Monopoly, Scrabble and Mastermind, all of which depend on a measure of luck."

It continues in this vein for a long time. What it doesn't mention is that in the late seventies and early eighties, the games market was completely deluged with "brand new" games of skill that were going to be much more popular and exciting than chess and draughts. Othello was the one that has stood the test of time, in its own limited way, but there were many, many more. Kensington's blurb ignores this completely. It doesn't even mention Nine Men's Morris, the traditional game that Kensington turns out to resemble very closely indeed. No, it attributes its innovative genesis to Brian Taylor and Peter Forbes, "the Rolls and Royce of 1982", depicted on the back cover playing Kensington on the steps of the Albert Memorial with very 1982 hairstyles:



The inspiration for the game, apparently, came from "a volume of ancient Islamic patterns" found on a second-hand bookstall in Kensington, hence the name, and the rest of the description of its origin and creators is actually quite fun to read, so I shouldn't really be so rude about it. It's just that it clearly does believe that they've invented something that would completely revolutionise the board game world.

Open up the double-album-style packaging, and you get the instructions and an interesting photo of people of all ages and cultures playing the game:



There's an old man smoking a pipe, a trendy young woman wearing a trendy young dress and a policeman's hat, a hatless policeman whose face is completely obscured by a hexagon, a young girl with pigtails, a vicar portrayed by either Robert Lindsay or someone who looks strikingly like him, and a black man in a rasta hat. They all look like they're having tremendous fun, except the man with the pipe.

I'm sure it can't actually be Robert Lindsay. Citizen Smith had just been cancelled, it's true, but he can't have been so hard-pressed for acting work that he had to pose as a Kensington-playing vicar.

The rules can be found on the internet, here (the only thing it doesn't mention is the four-player or six-player variant, which simply consists of dividing the players into two teams and taking alternate turns). That website says that it's an excellent game, although the wikipedia page says it's somewhat flawed and one-sided once one player has gained an advantage (exactly like Nine Men's Morris, which it was based on).

So there you have it, that mystery's solved. It was a very brief flash in the pan that beat othello to the top-ten-games-of-1981 list, but disappeared into the limbo of lost board games quickly afterwards. That'll teach them to steal othello's slogan.




Edit: Hey, that's weird. That website I linked to, tragsnart.co.uk is mainly devoted to board games, and especially Kensington, but also has a page devoted to the comic book art of John Byrne, who I mentioned in my blog just yesterday. It praises Byrne rather more highly than even he deserves (even more highly than Byrne habitually praises himself!), but hey, he is a great artist and writer and he deserves some excessive adulation here and there.

Well, now I'm depressed. But in a good way.

Looking for something completely different in the comic shop today (it was sold out, but never mind), I came across the best comic I've read for absolutely ages. It's called "Whatever Happened To The World's Fastest Man?", by Dave West, and it's hugely recommended to everyone who's reading this blog, whether you like comics or not. Especially if not. What are you doing reading my blog if you don't like comics?

It's a very downbeat kind of story, and it did leave me feeling depressed, but only in the sense of having read a real masterpiece. I'll make up for it by reading something more bland and cheerful (I've started on my complete collection of Alpha Flight, like I said I would - John Byrne's initial stories are not at all bland, but certainly cheerful enough to cheer me up, and the unrelenting misery of the Bill Mantlo issues that come after it is something I've got accustomed to by now, so there's no need to worry there).

Know what I'm going to do this Easter weekend?

I'm going to read the entire 130 issues of the Alpha Flight comic. I haven't done that for a fair few years, and it's always good fun.

I'm going to do other things too, but I thought I'd share that particular ambition with you. And now, even though it's late at night, I'm going to go and memorise some binary digits. I've just very nearly got a perfect 468 decimal digits (two images I was blank on, both on the same row) in very nearly five minutes (stopped the clock at 5:00.34, which is close enough really), so I'm happy.

Arsenal!

Wow, that was a good game of football. Arsenal-Barcelona, I mean. Great result, too - yes, it was never in a million years a penalty, but all in all I don't think they deserved to lose. They played really well, against possibly the best club in the world.

Also, it's nearly Easter, and I'm in the mood to spend the long weekend doing some marathon memory training. I'll also do some memory competition organising too, since Cambridge is bearing down on us...

Double Deck 'r Bust

ie "Double deck or bust" and "Double-decker bus". That was the weird original name for the final event in the US Memory Championship in which the contestants have to memorise two decks of cards in five minutes. Then they recall them, taking it in turns to say the next card, and the last one to make a mistake wins. Nowadays they call it "Double Deck o' Cards", which is still weird but perhaps slightly less so. Of course, the top memorisers, if they weren't so polite, would scoff at the concept of memorising only two packs in five minutes, and say that it would need to be at least five packs, maybe more, for there to be any chance of anyone making a mistake. And actually, we're getting to the point where the top Americans are going to be flawlessly memorising their double deckers in five minutes soon, too. They'll have to change it to a triple deck o' cards.

The weirdest two-packs-of-cards record, though, is the one that I've been asked to try to break at the Mental Calculation World Cup's evening show in June. The rules are unusually precise - you have two separate packs of cards in front of you, and you have to simultaneously turn over one card from each pack at a time, and memorise them in the fastest time possible. Single sighting only, spoken recall. Dominic invented it, and holds the world record, set in 2001, of 3 minutes, 37 seconds.

I did think, until I looked it up just now, that this was a record that Dominic and Gunther exchanged between themselves for a while, knocking a second or two off it each time, but it seems I must have been thinking of something else. I did attempt to break the record back in 2004, also at the MCWC, but I was still relatively new to my card-memorising system back then, and I couldn't do it. But I think I've improved a little over the last six years, and I could probably do it this time without making a complete public spectacle of myself. The time to beat is really, really easy and it only stands as a record because nobody else has ever tried to break it. Although I probably will make a complete public spectacle of myself anyway. I'm rubbish at memory performances in front of an audience.