That's better

Ahh, a day sitting at home doing nothing. You can't beat it. Well, nothing with a side order of memory-training, but I've talked about that more than enough here already.

Let's talk about my brother, instead, Doctor Joseph Pridmore. He passed his viva yesterday and got his PhD, which comes as no surprise to anyone but him - he's one of those genius types who goes through life assuming everything he does is going to be some kind of abject failure even though it never is. It's a good way to be, really - you're always sure to be pleasantly surprised. Anyway, I'm terribly impressed. I sometimes think about going back to university and trying to get at least a degree, just so as not to feel quite so inferior to everyone else. I know too many doctors already - lots of othello players and memory people have PhDs too, and there's only so much satisfaction you can get from boasting about being an unusually young university dropout (I went there at the age of 17 and gave up on it after a few months).

Still, now I get to introduce my bro to people as "This is my brother, the doctor." And I can always add under my breath "(albeit only a doctor of English literature, which isn't a real kind of doctorate)" if I get too envious.

Green Grow The Rushes-O

The poohsticks gang are meeting up tomorrow in a pub called the Seven Stars, in London, but I'm not sure whether I want to go or not. I feel like I haven't been at home here for years, what with being away last weekend and the last two weeks in Cheadle (surprisingly enough, the new building in Burton still isn't ready, so I'm back in the hotel next week too), and I feel like I need to recharge my batteries, rather than having another late-night drinking session.

It's been quite a fun week, though - we went into Manchester on Wednesday night to see the football. There were six of us, proudly walking from the car park to the Old Trafford stadium for the George Best tribute and a quite good game too. The tickets were very cheap by Man Utd standards - £19 each, and in the front row, right behind the goal, and everyone got a free George Best poster, to hold up during the minute's silence. 50,000 people being silent in a big stadium like that is quite a thing to experience. The game itself was enjoyable, too - for the benefit of non-football-liking readers, it was a Carling Cup game, which often means one or both teams aren't actually trying to win (the Carling Cup is not seen as an important trophy, so teams who want to concentrate on doing well in the league, FA Cup or European competitions traditionally field teams made up of reserve and youth players). But Man Utd, realising it was the first home game after Best died, played not quite their best team, but a team that most clubs would be happy to have playing for them in any competition. West Brom took the game seriously too, but they were outclassed, and lost 3-1.

You get a great kind of mob psychology going at football games - we were sitting with the Man U supporters, and so even though I'm cheering for West Brom this year (they survived a great relegation battle last year and I hope they can stay up in the premiership now they've got through that difficult first season) I was yelling for United on Wednesday night. The day before, we went to a pub to watch Doncaster playing Aston Villa. Villa are one of the rare top-level teams who always try to win the Carling Cup, so it was fun to watch them get comprehensively thrashed by Doncaster (who are two divisions below them in the league).

Anyway, I'm back home at number five now (although the 5 symbol at the door is still missing - someone really needs to get a new one) and I don't feel like leaving it for a weekend out in London. I might change my mind tomorrow, I'll see how I feel. But I'd quite like to do a bit of memory training this weekend (beat 30 seconds in the cards for the first time this week, now I need to practise the longer events that I don't have time to do at the hotel), with just a quick walk into Derby for fresh air and a bit of pre-Christmas shopping. I need to get a new book to read next week. After forgetting to bring one the first week and having to make do with Gideon's Bible (which, with the greatest respect to the Gospel makers, isn't an enthralling read), I've been making do with re-reading Stephen King and Flann O'Brien since then, but I could do with something new. I have to read something for twenty minutes or so before I go to sleep - it's a tradition.

Anyway, I need to have a think about memory things - Aubrey de Grey suggested not one but two great ideas for me to work on last Saturday. The first was an offhand remark about my ideas for memorising othello games - I'd said that the problem was there being so many possible moves to remember, to which Aubrey replied "I didn't think that would bother you." And he's right, of course - I've been trying to think of ways to minimise the amount of information I'd have to take on board, but why would I care about that? If I can memorise 50,000 digits of pi without batting an eyelid, why would I care how many othello moves I need to cram into my brain? I'll just do it the long-winded way, and see how far I can get! The other suggestion was for names and faces - apart from the idea a lot of people have toyed with over the years, classifying faces according to things like shape, hair colour and so on and converting that information into something that can be memorised, he suggested memorising a list of faces, and a separate list of names - and that way if both lists are in order, you don't need to associate the name with the face at all. It's food for thought.

Also in memory news, Boris Konrad's Speed Cards Challenge looks like it's definitely going ahead next year - a whole day of people memorising packs of cards, head-to-head against an opponent. It'll be great fun, and great TV - we'll have to see if we can get someone to take an interest. It'll be in Germany, during the World Cup, so there'll be press interest in an 'alternative sport' like that. There'll even be prize money! I might win it, although I'll have at least three rivals who stand a very good chance - Clemens is very fast with the cards, Lukas is great and Andi might just come along to this kind of thing too if we're lucky.

I can't think of any topic to discuss that might involve a reference to lily-white boys clothed all in green-o, so I'll give up on the ingeniuously themed blog and just observe that anyone who's ignored my previous advice to read Ozy and Millie needs to know that the last couple of week's comics have been on the subject of blogs. They answer a lot of important questions about what a blog should be like and why. And I hope my blog comes close to the obvious perfection achieved by Timulty's. Read it here!

Oh, and I've got another documentary-maker calling me tomorrow. I gave her my number especially so I can practice saying no to people over the phone. I do have a very good excuse for not wanting to get involved in this one, after all...

Christmas in Cambridge

Having finally got home from Cambridge after an adventure that involves missing one train, having the next one cancelled and trying to get back to Derby by an ingenious and circuitous route that took roughly three times as long as the original journey would have, I find myself needing to pack for next week's (hopefully) final jaunt up to Cheadle, but feeling like I'd rather spend the time recounting the fun I've had this weekend while WZebra (the othello program) chugs away in the background analysing my games from Saturday and telling me what I did right and wrong. I only ever pay attention to the things I did right, having no interest at all in being told I'm not a brilliant player. This is why the vast majority of my analysis goes into the ones I've won. And why I'm actually not a brilliant player, of course.

Before that, though, I should transcribe the conversation I had at dinner-time when Jenny and I went to a cafe in Cambridge city centre. There was quite a long queue, probably because while there were three women serving food to the customers, one man was entrusted at the end of the line with serving drinks and then working the till. Although a charming, friendly kind of chap, he didn't seem entirely focused on what he was doing, and the following is an extract from the dialogue that passed between us:

Man: And what would you like to drink, sir?
Me: Coke, please.
Man: Small, medium or large?
Me: Medium, please.
Man: There you go. Oh, I've done you a small one there. I'll only charge you for a small one, don't worry. That's £7.70 altogether, please.

[I gave him a five-pound note and three pound coins, and he gave me 30p back, then put my money into the till. He paused and looked at the note in his hand.]

Man: Oh, wait, that's only a five, I gave you change for a ten.
Me: No, I gave you a five and three ones, and you gave me 30p back. That's right.
Man: Oh yes, sorry. [Turning to Jenny] And what would you like to drink, sir?
Jenny: Um...
Man: I mean madam, sorry. I'll get my head working right in a minute...

Anyway, going back in time a day and a half, I got up on Saturday at the ungodly hour of 5:15, in order to catch the 6:00 train down to Cambridge. It turned out that 5:14 would have been a better time to set the alarm for, because I was seconds too late to catch it. That left me to get the 6:53 and still get there more or less in time, although it put a dent in the plans of Nick, who had come down to film me at it and had wanted to tape me arriving and talking a bit about memory in scenic surroundings before the tournament started. So he went off to a meeting and came back later, and everything worked out fine.

The traditional Cambridge Christmas Friendly was a little unusual this year. Not because of the date, it's traditionally held at the end of November, but because of the unusual number of people there. Apart from Nick and his camera, there were three new players (very rare at othello tournaments), and two people lurking outside the door armed with giant waterpistols. It turns out that they were lying in wait for one of the aforementioned new players, who's a student at Cambridge and part of the 'Ring of Death', in which students try to assassinate each other with waterpistols, poison (vaseline) and other such nefarious means. My best friend in days gone by, David 'Noddy' Page, was involved in that in his Cambridge days too. Aidan, the assassinee, spent the first round hiding in the toilet, arranging with friends via his mobile phone to get rid of the assassins.

I beat one of the other new people in the first round, which is always a nice way to start. Although we probably should encourage new people to come back to future tournaments by not beating them, I don't feel too guilty, because I at least had the decency to beat Fran 45-19, whereas Aubrey wiped out the other new bug, James. Other people probably beat other people too, but I haven't got all the results to hand - the ever-reliable Roy strangely hasn't posted the final scores on the mailing list yet, which he normally does via his mobile on the train home.

Anyway, after round one, we paused for a quick filming break. Nick had roped in Aubrey, who is very very good at interviews, to come over to the Trinity College quad with me and walk around talking about science and memory. I think it went very well, mainly because I was able to just name-drop some technical-sounding words like 'anterior cingulate' and let Aubrey talk about them at length. Incidentally, there's further proof to my theory that Nick is secretly evil and planning to make me look bad - he made a point of advising Aubrey to wear his hat because it was spitting with rain. Which might be quite innocuous, obviously, but Aubrey's hat is a crotcheted woollen bonnet that does look a little silly. He does have the accompanying genius that makes things like that and his yard-long beard qualify as 'eccentric', rather than just 'weird' like my own silly hat, so it's quite alright.

With Nick buzzing around with his camera, we went back to the Junior Parlour for round two, which put me up against Imre Leader, one of the absolute-tippy-top players in the country for the last twenty-odd years, British champion and the kind of guy the mention of whose name produces awe and respect from anyone with a basic knowledge of the othello world. And my win against him was duly captured for posterity, which is nice. Hope it makes it into the final film. I then beat Aubrey (also an othello legend) in round three, also under the watching eye of Nick's camera. The game was scintillatingly complicated, and I look forward to having Zebra's opinion on whether some of the weird moves I played were brilliant or awful, and what I should actually have done in the endgame when time-pressure forced me to cut short my calculations and just make a best guess.

Having thus made myself look much better at the game than I actually am, we adjourned to the pub for lunch and the committee meeting, which was quite productive. We settled on a probable venue and date for the Nationals next year, made at least one or two other decisions that were probably important, and the sausage, egg and chips were both cheap and delicious. Aubrey discussed his work in detail for Nick, who it turns out runs an annual charity event in which a scientist and an artist debate some fascinating issue. He felt that bringing Aubrey together with Damien Hirst to discuss aging would be a dream combination, and Aubrey wholeheartedly agreed, as did everyone else there. I'll certainly be going to see it if it happens.

Nick went back home after that, and it became clear that the presence of the camera had either spurred me on or put off my opponents, because my fourth-round game against Geoff Hubbard (who had also beaten Imre, and was the only other player on three points) was a complete disaster. It went wrong for me somewhere around move 20, which meant Geoff had the last two thirds of the game to contemplate at leisure the best way to go about completely thrashing me. Neither of us could quite work out a way to wipe me out, and he had to settle for winning 63-1 in the end.

My camera-inspired abilities didn't really come back to me in the remaining three games either - I did beat Yvette Campbell, but lost to Jeremy Dyer and Roy Arnold, which is nothing to be ashamed of, but I don't think I was playing half as well as I had been in the morning. Geoff won his first six games to make sure of winning the tournament with a round to spare, but then lost his final one to Aidan, which must have been some consolation for missing the first round and still ending up being assassinated after all.

All in all, it was a tournament that had everything. And as I said a few days ago, if anyone reading this likes the sound of it and wants to come to future tournaments, we could always do with more players. Check out the British Othello Federation homepage for more details - the next one's not till February, so there's plenty of time to make your mind up. And remember, othello is the same thing as reversi*.

*Footnote: Othello isn't the same thing as reversi, if you're going to be really pedantic about it. I've explained it here before somewhere, but it's really not important. For all practical purposes, anything you see called 'reversi' is exactly the same thing as anything you see called 'othello'. All clear?

Hotel Hypocrisy

Sorry I didn't post anything last night like I promised - the planned moving of the servers down to Burton has been postponed, so we're staying in Cheadle for another week. What's more, I might miss tomorrow night too, since I'm staying over in Cambridge after the othello, so as to meet up with Jenny on the Sunday. Although I might find an internet cafe and bring you all up to date on the othello world, devoted readers.

Or you can just wait a year or so and see the movie - Nick will be filming me there, probably (we haven't actually arranged to meet anywhere, but I'm sure we'll manage to get together somehow - I object on principle to phoning the guy up to make sure he's going to make a film about me, it just sounds a bit desperate for the fame and glory...)

Anyway, this last-minute-ish change of plans (well, actually I'd been thinking of staying overnight anyway, to avoid the football fans who always share the trains from Cambridge to Derby at that time of night - there's invariably a match somewhere in the country with away fans who use that route) meant finding a hotel in Cambridge, and annoyingly enough my first choice is fully booked.

Sleeperz, while I'm on the subject, is the best hotel in Cambridge by far. It's literally right next door to the train station, it's staggeringly cheap, and much much nicer than any hotel that charges so little has any right to be. I discovered it one night many years ago, when my train was delayed by something like three hours due to a fatality on the line (this happens to me surprisingly often) and I couldn't face looking for the B&B I'd booked on a cold late night. And I've been a big fan ever since.

But seeing as it was full up this time round, I had to find another, and so I decided to splash out on an expensive one in the city centre. Then I remembered that the last time I booked a hotel and wrote about it here, I decided to splash out on a relatively expensive one for once too. Obviously, despite my mental image of myself, I'm not the kind of person who stays in cheap hotels after all. I'm the kind of fat cat who squanders his hard-earned cash on posh hotels and extravagant luxuries when it could be used to better the human condition. I mean, £80 for a night, it's disgraceful. Daylight robbery of the kind that happens at night, and I'm giving it my enthusiastic endorsement. Ah well.

It has robbed me of the wee bit of sense I had

So as I was saying last night, football. I do like watching football, and while you might say to that 'so what', I think that's something that's still worthy of comment. For all that it's the most popular sport in the world, I think a clear majority of the people I like to hang out with don't like the game. It's a matter of principle for a lot of people, a way of emphasising how they're different from the masses, but I think they're missing a treat. It does make me wonder, though - I'm a self-confessed nerd, and proud of it, and in theory I should go on at length to anyone who'll listen to me about how I have more intellectual things to do with my time than watch stupid games like football. I could say that whole speech off by heart, actually, having heard it so many times from my nerdy friends.

The nerds who do like football generally like it in a nerdy way - they memorise the winners and runners-up of every FA Cup in history, can tell you how many consecutive seasons Arsenal have spent in the top division and who came third in the fourth division in 1977. And then they fall asleep if they ever find themselves having to sit through an actual game.

But I'm quite prepared to make a stand on this point - footy is great. If I ever have to miss Match of the Day on a Saturday night, I get all grumpy about it. I'd go to live games every other weekend if there was one within cycling distance that didn't charge as much as Derby County do. There are very few things in this country as exciting as watching a good game of football, and anyone who refuses to watch a game on the grounds that they're too clever gets the same withering stare from me that I normally reserve for people who refuse to read the Harry Potter books because they're so popular.

Obviously the moral is that I should stop hanging out with nerds and start associating with different social circles, but football fans scare me.

Then again, I haven't written anything like this for a while...

When Harvey published the proof of his newly-discovered process for turning raisins back into grapes, he was awarded three Nobel prizes (literature, chemistry and peace) and the freedom of the city of Doncaster. Overcome with joy, he declaimed the following song:

I have more fingers on my left hand than my right;
Horses often look at me in an unusual way.
But receiving such honours brings me great delight,
And therefore to Doncaster I will journey today.

Setting forth in his clockwork-powered car from his home in Bognor Regis, he drove in a roughly eastward direction for three hours, hoping to see some sign that would tell him the way to Doncaster, but in vain. Finally, finding himself stuck in a deep pool of mud in the middle of a field, he shouted to a farmer slaughtering animals nearby, phrasing his request for assistance in verse, thus:

You there, farmer, with sharpened farming tool,
Allow me to trade my vehicle for a horse or mule,
Thereby traversing this muddy field the faster,
In order to speedily arrive at the town of Doncaster.

The farmer considered the request carefully, before responding in the following manner:

Bog off.

Harvey, a little disheartened but still determined to exercise the freedom of a city he had never so much as heard of the day before, climbed out of the car and walked across the remainder of the field, losing his shoes, hat and underpants to the mud along the way. Climbing over the stile, he found that the field bordered a supermarket car park with integrated international airport. A passing Boeing 747 stopped and asked him if he needed a ride anywhere, to which Harvey answered:

Aeroplane pilot with protruding nose,
I do indeed need a ride somewhere.
But please tell me where your aircraft goes,
So that I can know whether I should go there.

The pilot ventured that this was the worst example of improvised poetry that he had heard in his thirty-seven years as a commercial airline pilot, and asked Harvey why he didn't talk properly. Harvey explained by means of a shrug and offensive hand-gesture that while normal people might speak in such vulgar, non-rhyming ways, anyone who had the freedom of the city of Doncaster was surely honour-bound to convey their every thought and feeling by means of elegantly-crafted song. The pilot replied that his plane was in fact going to Doncaster, so if Harvey could refrain from polluting the air with further manglings of the English language, he would be happy to provide a ride. Harvey said:

Okay then. Suit yourself.

Seventy-three minutes later, the plane crash-landed in Venezuela. The pilot explained that he had pressed a wrong button, but that he wasn't to blame as the button in question did look very similar to the one that he should have pressed. If anyone was to blame, therefore, it was the person who built the aeroplane in the first place, who obviously didn't know anything about their business. Harvey, despite his earlier promise, was moved to comment on the situation in this way:

Although this morning I set out with the intention of visiting Doncaster,
Events have taken a series of unexpected turns.
And now I find myself somewhere in the mountains of Venezuela,
While all around me a Boeing 737 burns.

Will someone rescue me from this plight?
Has anyone yet pulled my car from that mud?
Will I reach Doncaster before EastEnders comes on tonight?
Or must I watch the omnibus on Sunday, which isn't anywhere near as good?

Upon being told by the pilot, the only other survivor of the crash, that the plane was a 747, that his song barely rhymed and didn't scan and that there is no material difference between the EastEnders omnibus and the daily episodes, Harvey added the following verse:

Why must you always criticise my verse?
I am the winner of several Nobel prizes!
I have the freedom of the city of Doncaster!
Which I will be able to exercise if the opportunity ever arises!

The pilot, already somewhat irritable as a result of the crash, was unable to tolerate Harvey's bizarre rhyming of 'verse' with 'Doncaster', and beat him to death with a severed piece of the wing. Harvey's last words were these:

Ow. If only I had remained in Bognor Regis,
And paid - ouch, stop it - the normal price for everyday services,
I would be - aargh! - in a much better situation than my current one is,
Oooarrgh, aieee, ungh.

Regretting his actions, the pilot developed a technique for bringing dead people back to life, only without an inclination to improvise songs, and used it on Harvey. He was awarded a number of Nobel prizes too, and the freedom of several cities, which he always made a point of never visiting, having been taught a valuable lesson by the day's events. Harvey missed three episodes of EastEnders while he was dead, and never found out whether or not Harold and Desiderata got married without Richard Burlington-Sykes revealing that they were in fact one and the same person. The farmer sold Harvey's car for fifty pounds and a bag of carrots and later denied that he had ever laid eyes on the vehicle.

The goose is getting fat

Christmas is coming. I can tell, because not only did I hear 'Fairytale of New York' playing in a shop this morning, the fabulous singing tree has reappeared in the shopping centre. If you're ever in Derby, you really should go along and see it. It was there when I first moved to the big city two years ago (doesn't time fly?), and its appearance coincides with other good things about the festive season, like late-night shopping and pretty lights everywhere. I love this time of year.

Also, I'm really on fire with the memory training. I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record here, but this kind of thing is important to me. I've never really managed to express how frustrating and upsetting it was to have the memory equivalent of writer's block last year, but it really did bother me no end not to be able to sit down and stare at numbers or cards for long periods of time. It seems that the only problem was that I was the world champion - the solution, and key to lifelong happiness, is obviously to try my best and only come second every year. But the way I'm going now, I'm pretty sure I'll win it next time unless someone else gets really good between now and then. Perhaps overconfidence will be my downfall. That would be good.

I'll add some more later - two posts in one day will make up for missing all those days in the last couple of weeks, and I feel like talking about football.

Pumping Iron

Well, I'm back home again after a longer-than-usual car journey - to avoid a big traffic jam on the M6, the drivers among us opted to sit through a series of smaller traffic jams on a lot of minor roads, getting lost three or four times along the way for good measure.

But apart from that, it's been quite a fun week. I actually went swimming before breakfast twice. The first time it very nearly killed me - after six lengths I got out of the pool and went back to the changing room not feeling too bad, then tried to restore my breathing rate to something close to normal and realised I was on the point of having a heart attack, or at least being sick all over that nice hotel's floor. It was about five hours later before I felt more or less okay again. But this morning I swam a bit further and recovered a lot quicker, and I think it's more or less done me some good, probably.

Not that I'm quite the slob I do my best to convince people I am. It's one of those secret skeletons in my cupboard that I don't tell people about, but I do thirty press-ups a night, whenever I can be bothered (about four times a week on average), and as many sit-ups as I can manage whenever I get a spare moment on my own. It started out a couple of years ago as part of a secret plan to become huge and muscular and impress people when I took my shirt off. It never really worked out like that, but on the other hand I suppose I could look worse. I've got a pot belly that I don't imagine I'll ever get rid of, but I'm not what you'd call fat. And maybe the swimming will build up some muscles, although since I'll be stopping after next week when I'm not in a hotel with a free pool any more, maybe it won't.

I'm coming home on Thursday night next week, and working in Burton on Friday, so only three more days without a blog entry before I get back on my surprisingly reliable schedule.

Anyway, I haven't just been pushing my body to the limits of physical effort this week, I've been really doing great with the memory training too. It's not having the internet or cable TV to distract me in the evenings that does it, I think. I beat my personal best time at speed cards twice in a row - 30.23 seconds is my new record. Which is quite encouraging, since I normally do better in competitions than I do at home, so I might well beat my official record next time I'm competing, fingers crossed. Also did quite a bit of training on numbers, and I think I've got past my minor mental block there. I'm really in the mood to win the world championship now - if only I didn't have this documentary thing ready to annoy me out of it...

Hey ho, away we go

Sigh, another week in a nice hotel, all expenses paid. I shouldn't moan, really, but I think I'd still rather not have to work for a living at all. Although when I've tried that in the past it turned out to be excruciatingly boring. Anyway, since work's reducing me to only blogging on the weekends, this will be the last one till Friday. I'd like to say I've had a flood of emails and phone calls, letters, smoke signals and messages conveyed via swarms of locusts telling me people missed reading this thing every day last week and begging me to come back and entertain the masses, but I don't honestly think anyone but me has really noticed it was gone...

Perhaps if I actually wrote about something it would be more interesting, but then nothing has really happened to me. I could talk about my magic rubber duck, Mandrake, but he's the quiet type and wouldn't really fill much more than a paragraph or two.

I think I'm going to get one of those little pocket DVD players with the tiny little screens. They're really cool, and I need a new CD player since the one on my computer doesn't work properly, so it's a completely justifiable expense. The really top-of-the-range ones are only about £200, anyway, so it's hardly any money at all when you're as rich as I am. And, you know, the starving millions in the world will probably be okay anyway...

Oh, for anyone who's following my progress in memory training, I topped 3000 in half-hour binary practice today, which was great. I'm still a way short of my best (exactly 700 digits short, to be precise), but I love to see an improvement in my scores like this. My problem, though, is that I should be practicing with decimal digits, where I'm much further off the pace, rather than binary (only me and Gunther have done 3000 in competition), but I like binary more. I'm going to force myself to practice some speed decimals this week in the evenings and hopefully get my mind thinking they're fun too.

Unexpected sweeties

I've just found half a tube of cherry drops down the back of my settee. They're a bit sticky and difficult to separate from the plastic wrappers, but it's always good to find something like this that I'd forgotten about. Especially since I always consume sweets as soon as I've bought them, so gawd knows how I didn't scoff these ones.

If my memory was as good as everyone seems to think it is, of course, I would have known about these cherry drops all along, and finding them would have been much less fun. What always bugs me a bit about the memory thing is that everybody who hears about it assumes that it's some kind of natural genius on my part, rather than something I've had to do a heck of a lot of work to achieve. The question I get asked most by people (even more than 'why the heck would you want to do it?', which is a perfectly good question that I'd like to hear more often) is "How do you practice something like that?" whenever I mention that I've been practicing memorising cards or numbers or things.

I think I'd rather be sort-of-famous for achieving something by virtue of years of training and hard work, rather than by being freakishly clever. It's certainly closer to the truth, anyway, although of course I only do the 'work' because I find that kind of thing fun.

In other news, Hideshi Tamenori did win the Othello championship, although Takuji Kashiwabara gave him a scare in the semis - they drew the first game (it's best of three) and Kashiwabara won the second before Tamenori came through and won the last by a higher margin. After that, the finals were comparatively easy. That's Hideshi's sixth win in nineteen years, which is a heck of a long time to be at the top of the world like that.

I bought a lottery ticket tonight for the first time in ages. I don't know why, since I've already got more money than I know what to do with, but I didn't win anyway, so I don't have the burden of additional wealth to worry about. But that did remind me that I haven't decided what to do with that pile of cash sitting in my savings account now. Saving it for a rainy day seems contrary to the Zoomy philosophy. I'm still delaying the decision until I'm sure I'll be at this new job for a while, but now I'm rather less worried about being sacked for gross incompetence (I'm pretty sure I can at least bluff my way through the job) I probably should start making my mind up. Any suggestions would be gratefully received!

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig!

Hooray for the weekend! I didn't have a chance to keep the blog updated while I was in the wilds of Cheadle this week. I did write an entry every night with pen and paper, intending to type them up when I got home, but I can't really be bothered. Sorry. Maybe if I'm bored tomorrow.

Anyway, the World Othello Championships have been happening while I've been incommunicado - Britain's star players Graham Brightwell and Imre Leader both narrowly missed out on making the semi-finals, and so did reigning champ Ben Seeley. The semis and grand final are tomorrow, and I don't think anyone would bet against Hideshi Tamenori winning for the sixth time. And not just because bookies don't take bets on othello championships.

Incidentally, anyone wanting to come to the Cambridge 'Christmas' championship on November 26th might end up on the documentary I've been moaning about for the last month or so. If that encourages you rather than scares you off, we could always use some more othello players.

Hmm, what did I write about this week? I could put the edited highlights here... nah, it wouldn't be much fun for anyone. Except the bit where I call Sam a blithering idiot, since he was complaining that I don't insult him enough.

I'm So Tired

Staying up till 6am drinking and having a deep discussion about my identity/identities ("Is Zoomy the same as Ben, or is Ben the same as Zoomy?") seemed like a good idea at the time, but I probably should have considered that I needed to pack my stuff and get things ready to get up early tomorrow and go to Cheadle for the week. No time or energy to write anything more...

It was four hundred years ago today...

I'm going to Crispy and Sleepy's for fireworks tonight, so I'll get the blogging in a bit early while I've got a moment. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to keep up the daily updates for the next three weeks - as I mentioned a few days ago, I'm going to be staying in a hotel in Cheadle during the week, so as to maximise the time I can spend in the soon-to-be-closed Cheadle office, learning what everyone does there. Whether I'll be able to get internet access from the office, the hotel or a handy internet cafe, I don't know.

What I am going to do is take my trusty narrow-ruled A4 pad with me and try to write a bit of How To Be Clever. I often write best when I'm using pen and paper rather than typing, for some reason. I'll take some cards and random numbers with me too, and try to practice memory rather than slumping in front of the telly all night, every night.

As for the review of the week's work that I vaguely promised to write, it's gone pretty well. Yesterday was fun - the Cheadle people all had the day off to celebrate finishing the annual accounts, or being made redundant, or something like that, so I was in Burton helping out with anything anyone could throw at me, which mainly involved impressing people with my Excel skills. This I think could turn out to be a problem with the job, actually - I've found in the past that the further removed I get from number-crunching and more into the realms of deciding which numbers need to be crunched, the worse I am at my job. But people always assume that because I'm good at the former, I must be great at the latter, so they keep promoting me. Is a mindless, repetitive job with no prospects too much to ask for? Anyway, we'll see how it goes.

Interesting fact I learned yesterday - it's illegal to set off fireworks after 11pm, except on Bonfire Night, New Year's Eve, the first day of Divali and Chinese New Year. So now you know.

I am the Weakest Link

Apparently my Weakest Link appearance was repeated tonight, but I didn't hear about it until after it had finished. Still, it's always nice to know thousands of people are laughing at my difficulty with pronouncing the letter R, or remembering what word means an item used in cleaning and a student charity week.

Still, this very appropriately reminds me that I'm not Anne Robinson, and so shouldn't go around being rude about people. With that in mind, here's a corrected version of part of last night's post:

I've just discovered a great webcomic I haven't read before - Mullein Fields. I've only read the first few strips, and it's (entirely coincidentally since the artist has never even read the comic I'm comparing it to) very like Ozy and Millie - which is a good thing to be. Go and read it, I'm sure you'll like it.

Actually, MF is only like O&M in the sense of humour and the general friendly feel to it - while Loretta is a similar kind of character to Millie, there isn't an equivalent of Ozy there, so the implication I put across by casual use of the word 'clone' is entirely wrong. As I said in the comments to last night's entry, I do apologise, and I won't do it again.

Ozy and Millie, of course, is a Calvin and Hobbes clone in the first place.

Which brings me onto the subject of the comments attached to these blog posts of mine. If you don't read them, you really should, because as they're not generally written by me, they're often a whole lot more entertaining than anything in the main text! But just in case anyone doesn't read them, I'll throw in another apology to Peter Davidson, whose art (on The Broons and Oor Wullie) I completely unfairly described as 'rubbish' a few weeks ago. Check out his website and see how great he actually is. He's still not as good on the Sunday Post strips as Ken H Harrison was, though.

And also, check out the comments to October 13th, where there's a plug for Aubrey de Grey's SENS thing. Get involved and live forever!

But the moral to all this story is that I really do like reading comments. If you're reading this, post a comment and let me know! Don't wait for me to insult you! It kind of bothers me that I only got to have a really fun discussion on the subject of the approach artists should take to drawing The Broons because I was rude about somebody. Is that the way the world works? People don't talk to people about the things they like unless the people they're talking to don't like them too? Well stop it, all of you!

I was going to summarise my first week's work at the new job tonight, but I seem to have been blathering on about other subjects for ages already, so I'll save it for tomorrow. I should also mention, after my whining last night, that both my trains were on time today. I'm not quite ready to feel guilty about complaining about trains just yet - I think that's a part of British culture, and I never poke fun at the French or Americans (which is also completely acceptable, and indeed encouraged, in this country) so I've got to vent my spleen at something. But on the other hand, I do actually really appreciate the train service. I should be nicer about it in future.

One more thing - this is me and my younger brother when we were that age. So comparatively speaking, I'm a very nice person nowadays!

I hope this old train breaks down

I've now been commuting to Burton-on-Trent for three days, and I've yet to go there or back on a train that was running on time. Today was particularly good - the 8:27 this morning was cancelled, "due to a fault with the train", and the 8:38 was five minutes late, but that doesn't count as late as far as the train companies are concerned (their statistics showing how many trains run late only count those delayed by more than ten minutes), so they didn't bother with an explanation, let alone an apology. Then tonight the 5:20 was 27 minutes late, "due to vandalism and trespassing on the line at Chepstow". So I got the 5:43, which was running on time, but I'm not counting that.

I don't have to go up to Cheadle tomorrow, so I get to work in my actual office for the first time. They have dress-down days on Fridays in Burton, which doesn't really thrill me. It's not that I like dressing up in a suit and tie, but if I don't dress like an accountant, I have a hard time pretending to be one. Besides, everybody else will have cooler casual clothes than me. And should I wear my Zoom-Zoom t-shirt, or one of the ones without big holes in?

I've just discovered a great webcomic I haven't read before - Mullein Fields. I've only read the first few strips, and it's a bit of an Ozy and Millie clone, but done well enough that I don't mind. Go and read it, I'm sure you'll like it.

Go first class or third; marry a duchess or her kitchenmaid

I agree with Mr Hardfur Huttle on this point - I always avoid buying medium varieties of things if I can avoid it. This is one of those hard and fast principles of mine that I violate on a daily basis without thinking about it, but when I do, it bothers me. Cheddar cheese, you see, comes in four kinds - mild, medium, mature and extra mature. And while I would never even consider buying the medium kind, I do prefer the mature to the extra mature. Does that count as buying one of the medium varieties of cheese? Am I betraying my deeply-held beliefs? Am I only writing about this because I can't think of anything else? Who knows?

Anyway, nothing of any great interest has happened today. That lengthy minibus ride has for some reason inspired me to write superhero comics heavily indebted to Kurt Busiek's Astro City, about a couple of morally-ambiguous heroes - I'll have to see if I can find an artist willing to draw them for me. Might be difficult, though. There are a lot more would-be writers looking for artists than would-be artists looking for writers.

Well, that wasn't so bad

Although they want me to stay in a hotel down in Cheadle next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, while I'm learning the job. Funnily enough, one of the other new people is Patrick who used to work at Parkhouse for a few months a year or so ago, so I wasn't entirely surrounded by complete strangers. I've got a headache, presumably as a result of more or less working today for a change, or possibly the stress of a new job, or maybe I'm under telepathic assault by space aliens, I don't know. But for the rest of this week we're going to Cheadle on a minibus every morning and back in the evenings - spending four hours on the road in total and a bit less than that actually at work.

Anyway, enough of this accountant-talk. I've just been watching a new cartoon called Robotboy about, well, a robot boy. It's quite good, if not an all-time classic. There's a new series of Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends too, which is an all-time classic, so I'm happy. And then there's the second half of one of tonight's football matches while playing othello online. Perfect new-job-stress relief!

Witches bad, pumpkins good

There was a really good cartoon called 'Pumpkin Moon' on Sky yesterday, chronicling the great Halloween conflict between pumpkin lanterns and toy witches.

Which is a small comfort, but doesn't entirely stop me being scared about starting a new job tomorrow. What if it's nasty? So, in an attempt to ignore the whole thing and wallow in old childhood memories, I've been embarking on a train of thought set off by Scholiast's train of thoughts relating to her birthday.

It occurred to me that while I can't remember my sixth birthday party, I can remember writing about it in school the following day. Or rather, not writing about it. I got as far as something like "Yesterday it was my birthday. Robert Brown, Robert York, Robert Hodgson..." and then got lost in reminiscences about the party and the interesting fact that my three best friends were all called Robert, and didn't write anything else. The Roberts wouldn't have been the only ones at the party - I always had six guests at these things, that being the number of screaming children my parents had decided they could cope with. And that must have been quite a feat in itself - me, six other six-year-olds and my brother being four and doubtless embarrassing to virtually-grown-ups like us.

I'm pretty sure Juliette Wilson, who lived down the road, would have also been there. Possibly also James Small, if he was at the school at that time and friends with me (I can't quite remember), but I don't know who else might have made my priviliged guest list. It was the done thing to invite Gavin Barnes to parties, but I have a feeling that at the age of six (and having only been at my new school for a month) I hadn't quite realised the importance of getting in with the coolest kid in the class, so I don't think he was there.

This provokes further memories about Robert Brown, who I remember practically nothing about. He and I were both new at Clinton Park school that year - my first year of primary school was at Tumby Woodside school, which closed down at the end of the year and forced its 28 pupils to the schools up in Coningsby and Tattershall. I went to Clinton Park, where my dad was a teacher, while most of the rest went to Coningsby, so I was forced to find a new best school friend to replace Robert Hodgson.

Not being a naturally sociable type even then, at playtime I found a spirally snake painted onto the tarmac playground and amused myself by running around in circles on it until Robert Brown came up and started a conversation: "What are you playing?" "Running." "Can I play?" "Yes." And we were best friends after that. But then he moved away almost immediately afterwards and I never saw him again. Clinton Park's pupils were mostly the children of people attached to RAF Coningsby, so people were always coming and going when their fathers got posted to another base. Even so, most people stuck around for more than a few months, so I don't know what was going on there. I shifted my best-friendship allegiance to Robert York, and we were inseparable for the next few years until he moved away too - and even then we wrote to each other for a while and a few years ago got in touch through Friends Reunited.

Robert Hodgson, meanwhile, I met again when we both went to the grammar school and found that we didn't have anything in common any more, so we didn't hang out together. But I haven't the faintest idea what became of Robert Brown, or whether we'd find something to talk about if we met up again today. He's unsurprisingly not on Friends Reunited for Clinton Park, and you can't really Google someone with such a boring name unless you want to read a million articles in the hope that they'll mention where the subject went to primary school for a few months in 1982. It'll just have to remain one of those mysteries.

Memory loss

While I was memorising thousands of binary digits this morning, part of my brain was adding up how much money I've got and working out what to do with it. I remembered that I'd spent a fairly significant amount of money some time in the last couple of weeks, put it on the Barclaycard and thought it was a good thing I was getting this extra money at the end of the month, because otherwise it would have stretched my monthly pay a bit. But I couldn't remember for the life of me what this expenditure was for.

I spent absolutely ages racking my brains, trying to work it out. I knew it was something unavoidable, not a regular monthly payment but something that I had to pay every now and then, and for about a hundred pounds, but what could it be? Okay, I'm pretty relaxed about my money, but could I really have spent such a lot of it and forgotten? After running through every kind of household expenditure and tax I could think of, I'd just about come to the conclusion that I must have either dreamt the whole thing or been hypnotised into handing over my hard-earned cash to Paul McKenna. I gave up and decided to wait for the Barclaycard statement to see if that would remind me, then took my glasses off to clean them and remembered - "Oh yes, the new glasses!"

I'm not sure what the moral to this story is. You can still become world memory champion even if you've got a memory like a sieve? I really am so relaxed about my money that I can spend it and not consciously register it? My memory is going as I spiral helplessly towards thirty years of age? I really was hypnotised, possibly by an evil optician like in 'The Miserable Mill' by Lemony Snicket? Or perhaps I'm just plain mad.

In other news, I've been spending quite a lot of time lately playing othello/reversi at Kurnik, a Polish games website where you can play just about any weird game you like, without downloading things or signing your life away. It's where all the cool othello players hang out nowadays, and I've been sort of meaning to start playing there for ages now, but only just got round to it (and then only because I was bored stiff at work). But the whole site really does deserve a plug - not many people go out of their way to provide a place where you can play connect 4 with people from all over the world.

Also, Kurnik is Polish for henhouse. I think that's an excellent name for a website.

Anthology of Interest

Okay, it seems everyone wants me to do this documentary. Fine. If he does turn out to be evil, it'll be your fault. So, having decided that, I'd better get on with writing my books, so they can be launched to tie in with the theatrical release of this oscar-winning masterpiece.

I haven't really talked about my literary aspirations here before except very vaguely, so for want of anything better to write about, I'll describe 'How To Be Clever', so that anyone reading this can steal the idea and write it first before I get round to it.

The basic idea of the book is that, unlike some others that promise to increase your intelligence, aptitude, intrinsic moral worth, all that kind of thing, HTBC shows you how to make other people think you're clever, while actually remaining just as thick as you naturally are. This is an art that I've cultivated over the years.

It will include lessons in things like how to memorise a pack of cards (actually quite easy, with just a little bit of practice and the right technique), how to get into Mensa (there are actually very few different kinds of puzzles in IQ tests, so if you know what to look out for, and practice them a bit, you can increase your "IQ" a few notches), how to work out square roots without a calculator (they don't teach that in schools any more, so anyone who knows how to do it must be a real genius, right?), how not to play chess (trust me, once people think you're clever, they'll automatically assume you're a great chess player. The trick is to avoid actually playing a game, at any cost) and much more.

There'll also be lots and lots of useful random facts that you can slip into conversations, encouragement to be more creative and spontaneous (if you're going to be a genius, you have to be eccentric) and probably pictures too, just in case the book gets bought by the kind of person who doesn't like reading.

I've been writing little bits of it every six months or so for the last couple of years, and one of these days soon I'm really going to sit down and put metaphorical pen to paper, then try to get the thing in print. I don't want to approach publishers until I've actually written the whole thing, in draft form at least, because I'd hate to have to meet a deadline. I'm very bad with those.

Of course, I also resolved recently to write another book, didn't I? I've got ideas, but I think in the end I'll just sit down and write the first thing that comes into my head, and see what happens. It might be a masterpiece. It might be the complete works of Shakespeare. It might be about a terrapin called Dean. We'll just have to see.