Hook a duck

There's a really quite big funfair squeezed into the small market place car park just up the road from me. It's got four hook-a-duck stalls. Fairs were so much better in the olden days when they had arcades, full of all the coolest new video games of two or three years previously (with the volume cranked up to deafening levels and most or all of the buttons not working). Nowadays, they're just dull. Ghost trains seem to be out of fashion, too...

Bathtime

I like baths. Can't start a day without one. But why isn't the standard bathtub size "big enough so you can stretch out your whole body in one"?

Meanwhile, I got under 20 seconds twice in a row today in XMT images, and got closer to consistently nailing a 21-22 second pack of cards too...

I really should cheer for Sheffield Wednesday

And not just when they're 1-0 up against Arsenal. Supporting the Owls is sort of a Pridmore family tradition. Come on you Owls!

XMTeeing-off

Hmm, how to maximise my qualifying scores for the XMT? I need to be scientific about it. Qualifying will start in January, apparently, and almost certainly be based on the same 100-points-for-the-world-record system as last year, so obviously I need to consider which disciplines can get me the most points and also which ones will give me the biggest edge over my potential rivals...

Cards - world record 52 in 23.34 seconds. That's fast. And although sub-30-second times are becoming more and more frequent lately, it's fair to say most of the memorisers in the qualifiers still can't do it. If I can get myself somewhere near that time of Simon's, it'd give me a great head-start. I did three tries at everything today and my best time was 25.38 - it'd be good if I could get it into the 24s or 23s consistently by January.

Images - world record 30 in 14.40 seconds. That's not just fast, it's freaky-fast. And quite a lot of people have been going very fast in training, apparently. I need to work on whizzing through the images more quickly than I do at the moment, because I think they'd stick in my memory just as well if I didn't consciously think about them quite as much. In three goes today, my best time was 21.64; let's see if I can get down into the teens consistently.

Names - world record 28 in 60 seconds. Yeah, I need to work on this quite a lot, don't I? The best I managed today was 12, though I know I can get up to the dizzy heights of 15 or 16 if I carry on in my usual way. But instead, what I really have to do is sit down and think about it; start pre-preparing mental associations for common names and facial features, make a proper effort to do it. I need to make a short-term resolution to get above 20, and then move on from there...

Numbers - world record 80 in 21.01 seconds. Very fast, but the problem with numbers is you don't get any prompting for the possible sequence in the recall like you do with cards and images, so it's easy to make mistakes. I know this from experience, since my three tries today all had errors in the recall, but the third one was 24.16 seconds and I just carelessly typed one digit wrong (if I'd bothered to go through and read what I'd typed instead of just clicking 'finished' I would have caught that - no more laziness, even in practice, from now on). In qualifying it's going to have to be a safe-ish time first to make sure I get all 80, then go for fast after that, but I can hope to aim for a time of 22 or better.

Words - world record 49 in 60.00 seconds. Someone's going to get all 50 in 2016, I'm sure. My best today was 40, but having got a freaky 47 in the actual XMT itself this year, I don't see why I shouldn't do it again some time. Maybe I'll get lucky and it'll be during the qualification? Or maybe, rather than relying on luck and flukes, I could work on it a bit more seriously? I'm pretty happy with my technique here, actually, but I could concentrate on pinpointing the optimum number of words to read before repeating, and so on. Let's aim to get consistently into the mid-40s here.

Science! Dedication! Let's keep it up! (I'm being my own cheerleader here; I think that'll help.)

Extreme Memory Training

Since I can't go to the world championship for money reasons, I think I need to dedicate my time to practicing for the XMT next year. For one thing, that's the only kind of training I've been able to get excited about for quite a while now. I don't know if I'd ever be able to come close to winning the thing, but you never know what you can do until you try...

When time it went back

It must be officially winter, or at least autumn, because the clocks go back tonight and people are already setting off fireworks. I would say that time flies, but on the other hand 2014 seems like so long ago I can barely remember it, so I guess not. Still, can't we keep summer going a bit longer?

It's time to get Extreme again!

Dates have been set for next year's Extreme Memory Tournament, which now has a brand new and unbelievably extreme logo! Go and check it out!

I'm excited about it already, although perhaps I shouldn't be, since I'll have to qualify for it this time (unless they change the rules - nothing's really been set in stone yet) and that makes me a little nervous. In all my long experience of memory competitions, they've all either invited me specifically or else been open to everyone; qualification is a pretty new innovation in the memory world. Possibly I won't be very good at it.

An underappreciated Doctor Who villain

I've been re-watching the seminal Doctor Who adventure The War Games, an episode a night, for the last week. People say it's too long and dragged out, but I've always liked it a lot. And a main reason for that is the evil Time Lord, the War Chief. Quite brilliantly played by Edward Brayshaw, very much like Roger Delgado at his best, he's confident, intelligent, nasty, a great villain all round.

I do like the theory that he's an earlier incarnation of the Master, fannish though the idea is, and even though it clearly wasn't intended by the writers at the time (the War Chief is shot dead towards the end of his only adventure, and it was many years before it was decided that a violent death causes a Time Lord to regenerate into a different actor, rather than just to die) - but really, what's the point of being a Doctor Who fan if you can't make up your own back story for a favourite character?

Back To The Future Day

Actually, it's tomorrow. See, they arrive in the future at 4:29pm, California time, which is half past midnight tomorrow morning in Britain, so we can't celebrate yet. It's still not the future.

Here come the muppets tonight!

The new series of Muppets has finally arrived on Sky 1 - they've been hyping it for months, obviously seeing it as a big priority for them, with marketing including making sure it's talked about prominently on social media, which really sums up the whole 21st-century muppet experience: it's unapologetically modern. Which is a good thing; muppets are a timeless concept, they shouldn't be locked in the 1970s. The new show is actually quite a lot of fun, I was pleasantly surprised. The format might turn out to be a bit too restrictive, I can see it getting repetitive, and obviously the general tone is more American than previous series, but all in all it's really enjoyable and I recommend it to anyone, even if they're not muppetationally obsessive!

Good grief, more Peanuts

Ah, the 1980s. The decade when I was around the same age as the characters in Peanuts are supposed to be - although the idea that they're children has long since been abandoned by this point, of course. By 1980 the strip has settled on its central cast, and not many others get a look-in...

Shermy is gone and forgotten by this time, and it's become very rare to see Patty, Violet, Frieda, Roy or 5, but we get a bit of a resurgence for the ones who are still showing up in the animated cartoons - 1980 sees a storyline with Pig-Pen (he goes out with Peppermint Patty) and one for Schroeder (going to music camp in Snoopy's doghouse aeroplane). The biggest rise to prominence comes from Snoopy's brother Spike, though - the mid-80s is the time we see him most, still living alone in the desert. He basically takes over a share of the strips that was previously given to solo Snoopy stories, which has the interesting effect of reducing Snoopy's appearances down to just about exactly the same level as Charlie Brown's - from here on in, their lines stick close together at the top of the chart.

Eleven new named characters make their debuts in the 1980s, starting with Harriet, another of the Beagle Scouts. Although still indistinguishable from Woodstock and the others, she's female. Harriet and Bill get married in 1983 and apparently leave the scouts at that point; immediately after the wedding there are more strips with four scouts, but a year or so later their names are given as Woodstock, Conrad, Olivier and Wilson, so I'm taking the view that it's Wilson with them from the wedding until Bill and Harriet are namechecked again in 1986. It makes very little difference, I know, but Wilson never gets enough credit among birdwatcher Peanuts fans.

Joe Richkid is Snoopy's golf opponent in one story, "Bad Call" Benny is his tennis opponent in another. Marbles, meanwhile, is another of Snoopy's brothers - he never really catches on like some of the others, but his short visit produces some classic funny moments. After that, we move away from the period when everything revolves around Snoopy and start to meet some new characters who don't just exist as his supporting cast...

Harold Angel basically exists to be a punchline to a Sally storyline, but then we get the first human to become a regular recurring character for many years - Lydia, Linus's irritating and fascinating classmate. One of those who really deserve a cameo in the upcoming movie, but I guess she showed up too late in the day for that. Maynard, who briefly tutors Peppermint Patty, is more forgettable.

The great time-capsule moment of the decade comes in 1986, with Tapioca Pudding. Remember that brief period when Strawberry Shortcake merchandise was absolutely everywhere? It came and went pretty quickly, but it's immortalised in Tapioca Pudding for a few months. It's interesting, really - back in the fifties, things like the craze among kids for Davy Crockett got a reference or two in Peanuts, but contemporary fads of the eighties seem to have passed Schulz by. Not a single joke about the toy-commercial cartoon mania that gripped us youngsters back then, but we did get jokes about Tapioca Pudding...

Our last two new faces of the decade are animals again - Raymond joins the Beagle Scouts, and you can tell him apart from the others because he's shaded in with the same greyscale as used with Franklin's skin (hi-tech shading, not done by hand, is a new innovation in the eighties Peanuts strips; Raymond is probably more of a reaction to that than to any racial issues of the time - his different colour isn't mentioned at all, in any way). And finally we get Snoopy's brother Olaf, the ugly one. Unlike Marbles, he sticks around until the end of the strip, but his partnership with Andy doesn't come along until the nineties. Stay tuned for the last decade in this thrilling series of blogs!

That's a lot of ones and noughts

My super-longstanding 30-minute binary record is no more! Johannes Mallow beat it in Spain today, with 4356!

I'm really surprised it took anyone eight years, to be honest, but now onwards and upwards! Who'll be the next to beat it?

I'm Big Ben, and I'm coming!

Remember that extremely cool promo video for Chinese TV earlier this year? I'll hopefully be filming something similar along those lines in a month or so. I need to assemble all these things into a compilation of video clips just about me - there's more than enough of the things out there...

Rugger

I keep meaning to watch rugby and get more than a sort of vague understanding of the rules. I mean, I know how it works, broadly speaking, but since most people who occasionally watch the game only have that kind of basic knowledge of it, I can't help thinking it would impress people with my sportiness if I actually knew what offside is...

Flight of Dragons

Soar in the purple light, in the sky, or in my mind... I've had the seminal 1980s cartoon movie on video for years, but haven't watched it for ages. I put that right today, and it's still a classic! Go out and find a copy, everyone, and watch it too. I insist!

And we'll paint by numbers till something sticks

Check out what Nelson's been up to! A children's memory book!

Hmm.

I'm very nearly 39. This isn't good.

Mustn't grumble

I get annoyed by the way that I always have just barely enough money these days - whatever my income at any given moment, there's always some expense that matches it exactly with nothing to spare. But I can't really feel like I'm desperately impoverished, because then I remember that I've had trips to America and China this year that have been paid for by memorising a few numbers, which you'd have to say makes me a lucky kind of person.

I could still do with winning the lottery, though.

Whoof

I've been working for the last two weeks straight without even a weekend off, but tomorrow's my last day at it, so then I get to spend three days in bed. And the middle one of them is my birthday, too!

It's getting wintery...

I really prefer summer. One of these days, when I'm a millionaire, I'll spend winters in Australia or somewhere like that. New Zealand, maybe, because everyone goes to Australia and I wouldn't want to be accused of following the herd.