Day of rockening

Well, we're not going to win the Eurovision Song Contest again this year. After Lordi's win last year, you just know gimmicky costumes are going to feature in every performance this time round, so the great British public have selected "Flying the Flag" by Scooch, who dress up as flight attendants and can't sing. Admittedly all of the songs to choose from this year were terrible, but this one was particularly so. Terry Wogan and Fearne Cotton also made a mess of announcing the winner (they tried to do a gag where they each said a different name, but of course Terry bellows so loudly that nobody could hear Fearne saying anything), and it all ended in confusion. But still, John Barrowman was on it so the experience wasn't all bad. And yes, I could have spent the evening doing something other than watching this rubbish, but Eurovision just appeals to me. If I confess that another of my unfulfilled dreams is to win the Eurovision Song Contest, would you just laugh at me?

I also went to Nottingham today, and I must say the newly-unveiled market square looks fantastic! I've got so used to the whole area being boarded off and hidden away while noises of construction emerged every now and then, I'd forgotten it wasn't meant to look like that. There are squirting fountains and everything. The layout is brilliantly designed and original, and I think it's fantastic. When I'm a zillionaire I'll get the same person to design my back garden.

What I need is some kind of telepathic typewriter

I seem to have a great talent for writing, but only when it comes to composing bits of the book/website/exciting superhero comic in my head at any time when I'm not sitting at my computer and typing. When it actually comes to writing it down, it doesn't work anywhere near as well. I should make some kind of resolution to sit down and transcribe what I'm thinking about as soon as I think of it, because I have a habit of sitting down and mentally composing huge long essays without bothering to write anything. I sometimes suspect I'm not a natural writer. Natural writers are the ones who write.

Not pretending any more

This is the real post for tonight, seeing as the one this afternoon was just pretend. But I haven't really got anything to say, seeing as I spent most of the day either waiting for a plumber or waiting for a TV crew. And I've already pretended to blog about the filming, and the plumber adventure really isn't exciting enough to merit a blog post to itself.

Tomorrow, though, I'm sure I'll manage to do something worth writing about.

Pretending to do my blog

I've got the TV people here, and the guy thinks it would be good to start with them pretending to interrupt me typing my blog. So while they wait outside, I'm sitting here pretending to type. Well, not pretending as such. I'm actually typing. I'm honest, you see, unlike television producers and their cinematic fakery. I suppose I'm going to pretend to say hello to them as if I'm meeting them for the first time when they come in, but that's the limit to the deception I'm prepared to perpetrate here. The whole thing is going to be a triumph of cinematic verity. Although I might not post this, which would make it a fake/pretend blog post of some kind, because the camera's pointing at me now and it's making me all nervous and I keep spelling things wrong, which just makes me look bad. Also, this whole thing is kind of incoherent, and when the guy came in I said "hello, I'm pretending to write my blog", which I thought would be funny at the time but actually came out sounding really stupid. Why did I agree to do this again? I should probably stop with the stream of consciousness stuff before I end up typing something really embarrassing.

The above paragraph is a shining example of why I don't write my blog when there's someone else in the house. Still, if this thing does get made and shown on Current TV, and you see me typing on my laptop, that's what I was typing. The inside story, brought to you by Zoomy.

Blue CHEATer, more like

I watched Blue Peter today, because I'd heard they were going to apologise for the slight mix-up in a competition last year when they awarded the prize to a passing child in the studio rather than anyone who'd phoned in. It turns out that the show is exactly the same as it was when I used to watch it regularly however many years ago that was, which is rather comforting. Well, except for all the modern technology, and come to think of it they didn't make anything today, which is a bit disappointing.

They did have the results of another competition, to design a new Bash Street Kid, and I couldn't help notice that one of the winners was a girl with a split personality called Rose and Thorn - you know, like the old DC comics character with a split personality, Rose and Thorn. Frankly this doesn't restore my confidence in the fairness of Blue Peter competitions. But then, I'm just jealous because I always wanted a Blue Peter badge and I never got one. I never entered a competition or wrote in to them, but I wanted a badge anyway. They could have just sent me one to be nice.

I've got the Current TV people coming to film me tomorrow. I watched a bit of Current TV yesterday to see what it was like, having read about it. I'm not terribly impressed. But still, you all have to tune into it now in the hope of catching a five-minute chat with me.

I'm currently wondering whether to risk destroying my laptop in order to listen to an old CD. It's a cheap one that I haven't listened to for years, vaguely remembering that it was broken, but I took it out and tried to play it tonight and it turns out it still sort of works - it plays okay but makes rattling, grinding noises and periodically stops, freezing up my computer in the process. But I can't remember what one of the tracks goes like, so I won't be able to sleep tonight unless I play it. I'll risk it, after I post this.

St James Infirmary Blues

Check out this fantastic post on Dennis Hyer's blog! He's pieced together the sensational backgrounds from the Betty Boop cartoon "Snow White", and that's quite a feat since Koko is dancing in front of them in the cartoon itself (also check out Dennis's previous post for a clip of the song from the toon - it's an unmissable Cab Calloway performance).

I've probably said it before, and I'll certainly say it again, but in the early 1930s (if not in the whole of cartoon history) the best cartoons in the world, by a long, long margin, were the ones produced by the Max Fleischer studio. They are insane, surreal, clever and absoluely hilarious, and it's really quite criminal that they're not better known these days than they are. "Snow White" is a fine example of all the best points - like a lot of these cartoons it starts off with a story, a fairly straight telling of the fairy tale (years before Disney's, I would remind you), but then lurches into the song and dance routine, and finishes with the Queen turning into a monster and chasing our heroes, who defeat it in short order (Bimbo pulls on its tongue and turns it inside-out) and then dance in a circle to celebrate. The seven dwarfs have vanished by this point, forgotten in the way that the setup plots in Betty Boop cartoons usually are.

There are so many great moments in Snow White - I just love Betty dressed in her cold-weather outfit (her usual skimpy dress, plus a tiny woolly hat perched on top of her head), the animation is fluid, detailed and looks wonderful, and the musical number (one of three Cab Calloway Betty cartoons, and they're all timeless classics) accompanied by those amazing backdrops is maybe the most visually arresting sequence the Fleischers ever did.

It's often said that if not for the Hays code, which came into effect in 1934 and severely limited what you could put on screen, Betty Boop and Max Fleischer would have gone on to be as big as Walt Disney and his gang. They certainly deserved to. But Betty (being basically a personification of sex) had to be drastically toned down under the new rules, and people forgot how great she had once been, watching her awful late-thirties cartoons where she dresses in modest outfits and points at series of weak visual puns. It's a crying shame, it really is.

Bimbo and Koko are the ones I feel sorry for - at least people still remember Betty Boop today, thanks to the revival of her merchandise in the last few decades. Her sidekicks, scrapped in the mid-thirties because they weren't allowed to have characters openly lust after the heroine any more, have disappeared into cartoon limbo, the poor things.

Ooh, I could crush a grape!

I'm really annoyed with myself. Memorising binary digits this morning, everything was going fine until well into the recall, when I realised I'd used a wrong journey by mistake, and hadn't even noticed. My journeys are in a fixed sequence (a completely arbitrary one based on the order I wrote them down on a piece of paper a couple of years ago, but a fixed sequence nevertheless) and I always use them in the same order. But today I realised I'd skipped to an entirely wrong one (the Queensgate centre in Peterborough) somehow, and then gone back to the normal sequence after it.

Very strange. But it doesn't matter, of course, as long as I remember where in the sequence I put this rogue journey (I used six-and-a-bit journeys in total). And that wouldn't be a problem, because I was doing that thing where I link the last image in each journey with the first of the next. It's a sort of double-check failsafe thing. So I concluded that I'd done Queensgate after Meadowhall, and wrote it all down. Something still didn't feel right, but I knew it had to be that way round. When I came to check my answers, it turned out I'd got the sequence wrong - I'd blanked on the last image of the Burton journey, and that same image was one of the final group of images in Meadowhall too, so I'd got them mixed up. I actually did Burton-Queensgate-Meadowhall. So I'd written two whole journeys - 52 rows of 1s and 0s, 1560 digits - in the wrong places.

I hope that makes some kind of sense. I have great difficulty describing the inner workings of my brain. The simplified version is that I made a really major fundamental mistake that I didn't even think it was possible for me to make. The most irritating part is that my recall was excellent - even without those two journeys I ended up with a score of 2830. With those extra rows in the right places, I would have scored a bit over 4000. I can take comfort in the fact that it was caused by an unlikely combination of circumstances - the wrong journey (which I've never done before) and the annoying duplication of one image in just the wrong places (which is statistically unlikely) - so I'm not likely to do the same thing again at a competition. But it's still infuriating!

The recurring image, incidentally, was Skeeter from Muppet Babies. I think this is some kind of karmic retribution for not going to see Howie Mandel in Las Vegas.

Still, I shouldn't complain. I also got 79 in abstract images, which is a timely reminder that I really need to work on that some more, and a more than acceptable 1920 in hour numbers. And got it all done with plenty of time to spare for sitting around watching TV! It's great having no social or professional life.

Willy!

The champion of Crufts 2007 is a dog called Araki Fabulous Willy. Seriously. What kind of person calls a dog 'Fabulous Willy'? It gives the poor thing a lot to live up to in life. Still, congratulations to it. Similarly, congratulations to David Thomas, who did win the US Memory Championship yesterday. Now if his parents had decided to call him John I could have had a really rude joke there, couldn't I?

Anyway, I haven't spent the whole day giggling at words that stopped amusing most people around the age of seven - I've decided to spend the next three days doing a full world memory championship's worth of practice events, all ten disciplines, even the ones I don't like. So I've been getting memorising and recall papers ready for that. This is going to take up a heck of a lot of time, and I'm not entirely sure whether it's feasible - at memory competitions you have someone else to mark your papers and work out your scores for you, and you very seldom have to cook your own meals in between events, but I think it'll be fun.

Then on Thursday I've got the latest TV person coming to film a typical day of mine, so I'm going to have to think of something to do. A genuinely typical day for me wouldn't really be worth filming, after all. I'll do exciting and telegenic things and pretend I'm like that all the time.

Let's hear it for me!

Yippee skippee! I won! Well, not won as such, but I came second, and that's considered in modern fashionable circles to be even better than winning. Seven of us at the Oadby Regional, which is a nice number for a seven-round tournament because you can do all-play-all. Eight is even better, obviously, because then you can do all-play-all without someone having a bye each round, but I shouldn't complain. I got off to a flying start, in fact, beating Steve, Roy and Geoff to be in the lead at lunch, then lost not too horribly to Jeremy and Phil before rounding the day off with a win over David... hang on, I can get this right... Beck. There were a lot of close games and interesting results all round, it was a superb advertisement for the game. Although the only people who would have seen this advertisement would be the seven players and the occasional elderly churchgoer who wandered in during the competition (which took place in the lobby of the Baptist church).

Phil won, with 5½ wins, me second with 5, then Steve on 4½, David on 4 and the others on other scores that I can't remember. I don't know why I'm quoting the full results like this when I can't even be certain that I'm right about them - look them up on the yahoo group when somebody who thought to write them down gets home and posts them, if you're that interested. The important thing is that those wins over David and Geoff will give my rating a boost - it's been in freefall for ages, so maybe this is a good omen for the 2007 season. I might even start to entertain thoughts of having a chance at the British Grand Prix title, although that would just be silly - I might occasionally get a good result like today, through luck rather than skill, but I'm fairly certain I can't do it at all five regionals. Still, I'm happy. I've never won one before, and I've only finished second a couple of times - I'm trying to decide whether this second place (by a mere half a point) is cooler than that time in London when I beat everyone except Graham (who's so much better than me that it hardly counts as a loss when I inevitably lose to him). I think I'll arbitrarily say that it is, so that I'll feel good about myself.

At the train station on the way home, I saw a notice appealing for information about an incident on a train recently. What kind of incident, I don't know, because all the notice said was that there was "an incident involving a white male" and that "the male at one point was spoken to by a member of staff". Passengers who might have been on the train are asked to come forward if they noticed "unusual behaviour from a male between Leicester and Kettering". Is that really all the detail they can give us here? I mean, trains from Leicester to London are generally packed full of white males, and most of them are spoken to by train staff at some point, unless it's one of those trains where nobody bothers to check the tickets. Clearly the incident was so memorable that people who witnessed it will understand what the poster meant, and such a transgression of the boundaries of British decency that they couldn't bring themselves to describe it, but that's hardly fair on the members of the public who weren't on the train and are now trying to imagine exactly what might have happened, based on this minimal information.

You've come a long way, baby

Oadby (near Leicester) tomorrow, for the first othello regional of the year. Also traditionally the regional I can't go to because I'm doing something else exciting, but this year there doesn't seem to be any reason for me not to go there. I'm not sure if I should be happy about that or disappointed. Technically I could be in New York again for the US Memory Championship, but I've done rather too much frivolous world travelling this month as it is, and since they're still not allowing foreigners to take part I couldn't justify the trip as practice for the WMC.

Oadby is almost certainly the shortest distance I've ever had to travel for a mind-sports-related event. The World Memory Championship this year, depending on how far away Bahrain is in relation to Malaysia or Brazil or the USA (I need to get better at geography, I know) is going to be one of the longest. Assuming it happens, of course - this time last year we were assured it would be Malaysia again. But there have already been complaints from a lot of the European memory guys, who are probably going to have to pay their own way over there or miss out. Unless the organisers have such an amazing amount of money that they'll pay for everyone's tickets, but I can't see that happening somehow.

Of course, the WMC that I still rate as the best ever, Kuala Lumpur in 2003, was squillions of miles away from all the world's best at the time, and they all competed anyway, and a fantastic event it was too. So who knows, maybe this one will be the same.

I probably should also make a prediction for the US memory championship while I'm here - Josh Foer isn't going to defend his title, and Maurice Stoll also doesn't seem to be on the list of registered competitors. But David Thomas, who apparently lives over there now or at least can claim citizenship, is, and assuming he's kept more or less in practice since he last competed anywhere, he should be in with a good chance. I kind of hope he doesn't win it, though - I'd rather see the title go to someone who doesn't describe themself as "the world's leading authority on memory skills" with a straight face.

Shooting Pridmore

That's not the title of next year's hit movie, but a document that a TV guy has sent me detailing the way they want to film me. It sounds like fun - for some new channel that nobody's heard of, they're doing little five-minute interviews with interesting people. There's also someone else who wants to do an 'art project' about the Cambridge championship, which sounds like it'll be a bit different. And on top of that, I'm finally at liberty to say that the world memory championship is going to be in Bahrain this year (unless it changes again at short notice). I'd say more on the subject, but I'm still unwell after yesterday's excesses.

Drunken stupor

Vague memory of handing over all the money in my pocket to homeless man (whom my brother assures me is close personal friend) while lying on the pavement near Nottingham station. Subsequently taken to bar called "Prohibition" for more alcohol. Note to self: don't accept invitation to lunch with brother without expecting it to turn into all-day boozing. Really, really going to regret this tomorrow.

Book Revue

Another good thing about long plane journeys is that they give me a chance to catch up with my reading. I like to get a new book or two to read whenever I go somewhere far away. This time round, I was planning to get "Lisey's Story" by Stephen King, but while wandering around the bookshop I noticed "Making History" by Stephen Fry, which I'd somehow never heard of before although it was published ten years ago, so I decided to get that instead by way of apology. When I got to the second chapter and realised it was going to be about killing Hitler as a baby I started to regret my choice - could there be a more overused plot for a time-travel book? Heck, I wrote (or at least started to write) one myself as a teenager. My annoyance with the unoriginal concept lasted until about half way through, when they'd almost got round to actually changing history and I realised that rather than reading it as a novel I was just waiting for it to detail how the act had changed the world. I clicked a few mental cogs into different positions and started paying attention to the characters, and realised that it's actually a really great book. It's funny and clever and very readable, and I'd certainly recommend it to anyone. The basic changing-history bit was pretty similar to mine, too, and while I wouldn't have created a protagonist with the nickname "Puppy" in 1993 it's very much the kind of thing I'd do if I was writing that story now - I suspect that Stephen Fry is also a time traveller and has stolen some yet-unwritten masterpiece of mine. But then, I think that about all good books.

For the journey home I was again going to buy "Lisey's Story", but the airport bookshop only had it in a hardback edition so big I would have had a hard time fitting it through the door of the plane, let alone fitting it in my overstuffed rucksack. So I decided to go for "The Gunslinger", because I've always sort of meant to read the Dark Tower books, and it's only the fact that I don't really like early King as a rule that's stopped me before. But this is the 2003 revision of the original from 1970 or whenever, so I decided to give it a try. But for some reason I still couldn't get into it. I'll try it again another time, but in Minneapolis I decided to get something else, and ended up with "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" by Alexander McCall Smith. This is another series of books I've been meaning to read for ages, and this one has completely hooked me. It chronicles the exploits of Mma Ramotswe, the only lady private detective in Botswana (so no complaints about an unoriginal premise here), and the wide range of unusual cases she has to deal with, her unique thought processes that lead her to the solutions as well as a variety of conclusions about morality and the meaning of life. It's very well written - funny, touching, compelling, dramatic, clever, really everything you could want from a book. I've read the second volume since getting home, and I've just bought "Morality For Beautiful Girls" today.

I know I could be more profitably spending my time writing books rather than reading them, but I really am sort of getting somewhere with "How To Be Clever" too. Honest.

Skeeters, vocation, fell

When you've only got a limited amount of time and money to spend in Las Vegas, you have to carefully choose which shows to go and see. So when I got to my room, the first thing I did was to check the previous week's entertainment guide considerately provided by the hotel (on Thursday they replaced it with the following edition, which by then was also out of date), and a look at the cover made me think "Ooh, Howie Mandel's in town! I'll have to go and see that!" Then it occurred to me that I only know Howie Mandel as a voice actor in Muppet Babies, and not even a very good one at that - he left after the first series, and his roles were taken over by much better actors (Skeeter by the great Frank Welker, Animal and Bunsen by Dave Coulier). I'd come across references to him here and there over the years, enough to gather that cartoon voice acting isn't his real vocation (he fell in my estimation when I realised that, obviously - if I got the chance to voice a cartoon, I'd forget any other career you might care to offer me) and that he's mainly a comedian of some kind. But I don't think I'd seen a picture of him before, and I'd certainly never heard his name spoken out loud - I found out when I saw an advert that it's Man-DELL, not rhymes-with-handle like I thought.

So I didn't go to see him. Maybe next time. I gather that Dave Coulier's also mainly a comedian, incidentally, but if he'd been on in Vegas I would certainly have checked him out. His voice acting in Muppet Babies was wonderful.

How I wish that there were more than the 24 hours in the day

Back home again, to find that Sky have removed all their channels from NTL (or Virgin Media as it now is), and that Blogger have forced me to update to the new version, which is displaying what I'm typing in a slightly larger font. I hate change. Neither of these is particularly world-destroying, though - I didn't have Sky Sports in the first place, and I'm pretty sure nobody in the universe has ever watched Sky News, so it's really just the Simpsons and Futurama on Sky One that I'm going to be missing out on. And I've seen them all a hundred times already, so I can live without them.

Anyway, Viva Las Vegas indeed! There's a place that hasn't changed much since last I was there - there are always new hotels and casinos being built, of course, and while I was there the Barbary Coast closed down and started relaunching itself as Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon, but the general character of the city is one of those constants in life. Getting there is the difficult part, though. I flew into Minneapolis-St Paul without any difficulty (even remembering that Rocky lives in Minneapolis, or possibly somewhere else with a similar name, so I picked a house that looks like hers in a place we flew over that had a 50% chance of being the right city, and gave her a wave, just in case she was watching the plane with a powerful telescope), even though the Twin Cities seem to be under ten feet of snow at the moment, but then ended up staying there for quite some time. The plane was late, and when it arrived and we'd got on, we trundled up to the runway only for the pilot to announce that there was a technical problem with some piece of equipment that he assured us was essential, so we had to go back to the gate and have someone fix it.

So when I eventually got into Las Vegas, all tired and grumpy (you don't want to be around me when I'm up past my bedtime) having been up since half past eleven the night before, local time, it was very late at night, and I went straight to bed without even squandering a bit of money in the casino first. That seemed to crack any serious jetlag problem, though - I got up at about half past five every morning, which is fine in Vegas because everywhere's always open and the major shows are all finished by nine.

The Gold Coast hotel, as I might have mentioned before, is my absolute favourite Las Vegas hangout. It's off the Strip, but walkable in fifteen minutes or so. Not that you would want to walk, because there's a free shuttle service every ten minutes or so. There are also very big and comfortable rooms, a very nice buffet restaurant and single/double-deck blackjack. I didn't actually play much blackjack this time round, because I was enticed by "Ultimate Texas Hold'em", a new innovation which is basically hold'em poker played on a blackjack kind of table against the dealer, with a fabulously complex system of bets and wins. This game being based almost entirely on luck rather than skill I didn't have much opportunity to use my amazing memory techniques, but I refrained from losing quite all the money I'll ever have on it, so I don't mind.

I also had time to check out the many things that make Las Vegas so cool - the white tigers, the Venetian canals with singing gondoliers, the dancing fountains and the hourly artificial rain storm in the Desert Passage. On Wednesday morning, though, people homesick for British weather could just stick their heads outside, because it snowed. I'm fairly certain it's not meant to snow in Las Vegas, but it did. I also saw Dirk Arthur's Xtreme Magic Show, which is basically Siegfried and Roy's old routine but not as spectacular. Still a lot of fun, though. And the Blue Man Group, which defies description, and the Cirque Du Soleil's Beatles-themed extravaganza, Love, which is just sensational.

It's an hour and a half of dancing, acrobatics, slapstick, rollerblading, trampolining and everything else you expect from the Cirque, all choreographed perfectly to Beatles music and themed around the lives and times of the Fab Four. You have to see it to believe it, really, it leaves you breathless. Next time I'll need to take another Beatles fan along with me, to join in with me singing along to all the songs before and during the performance. In the usual Cirque style, the clowns were wandering around the audience before the show and one of them stuck a little plastic star to my forehead. When I got back to my hotel room, I stuck it on the mirror, up in the top corner, and hopefully it's still there now.

The new-look Blogger template has a box where you can enter labels for your post, "e.g. scooters, vacation, fall". Scooters? Actually, I can mention scooters here - one morning on the shuttle bus I noticed that the people in front of me were talking in broad Midlands accents, so I said hello and we got talking. They were from Mansfield and Lincoln, and were in Vegas for some kind of scooter convention. I'm not sure why anyone would go to Las Vegas just to look at Lambrettas, but it seems that people do. At least it's a good excuse for a vacation there, I suppose. As long as you don't fall off.

Going back was equally frustrating - it seems that planes have a real problem leaving Minneapolis. This time there was a problem with the in-flight entertainment system that had to be fixed before we could take off, following which the plane had to be de-iced. So when I finally got into London on Saturday morning, even tireder and grumpier, I decided not to incur the annoyance of travelling across London and getting the train back up to Derby (there was a real chance of me punching somebody for looking at me in a funny way) and spent the night in a hotel. Eighty quid, but worth it to keep the world a peaceful place. I found fault extensively with the bathroom (the door to the shower was bizarrely designed such that you couldn't get into the shower after opening it unless the bathroom door was open), went to bed and got up this morning (well, midday) feeling fully refreshed and happy again.

Best conversation of the week: Talking with an old American in the lift at the hotel - he asked me what part of Britain I was from, and when I said Derby, he thought about it for a minute and said "Like Derby County? Brian Clough? He's dead!" (this last in strangely jubilant tones). I agreed that he was, and the guy added "He was a good coach." Then the lift got up to my floor before I could enquire further how the heck he'd heard of Brian Clough, let alone been so wronged by him that he was still celebrating his passing. That's like someone in Derby NOT having heard of Brian Clough. Unusual, to say the least.

I'm leaving on a jet plane

Well, tomorrow I am, but I'm already down south in preparation (ever tried booking a flight to Las Vegas from Birmingham? Without going via Amsterdam? Well, I have, and it seems it can't be done). I'll be back on Saturday, and I'm not planning to hook myself up to the internet any more than is completely unavoidable for the next week. So only five or six hours a day, then. I sometimes worry that I suffer from net addiction, but whenever I turn on my computer to look up the symptoms I just get distracted by some other website and forget all about it until I next emerge from the world wide web ten hours or so later.

A conversation, or "Sorry, it's late and I'm in the middle of an othello tournament and I can't be bothered to write a real entry tonight"

Have you ever considered horses, Thatcher?

I'm not sure I really understand the question, Devereaux.

Horses, Thatcher. Have you ever considered them?

Well, if you put it like that, I suppose I haven't.

They have legs, you know, Thatcher. Legs. Four of them, I believe, although I haven't ever counted the things, of course.

Really, Devereaux? I didn't know that.

Ah, well, you're a country boy, aren't you? Not so many horses where you come from. Not like round our way.

Barnsley?

Barnsley, yes, that's right. A lot of horses in Barnsley.

Trees too, I would imagine.

Horses, Thatcher. We're talking about horses, not trees.

I thought perhaps you might have both horses and trees.

Do stop interrupting me, Thatcher. Listen to what I'm saying about horses.

I did in fact wait for you to finish your...

Horses, Thatcher, and their legs. Just bear that in mind.

Bedtime For Sniffles

Last time I went to Las Vegas, two years ago, I got the flu and spent most of the holiday in bed all feverish and delirious. Which was fun, in its own way, but it meant I missed out on a lot of the stuff I was meaning to do while I was there. So I haven't really had a proper Vegas experience since November 2002, which was the last time I decided to give up working and be an unemployed layabout. That time I saw Siegfried and Roy, before Roy's tiger-mauling (which I heard about on the plane back from the WMC in Malaysia a year later), and was completely amazed by it. Yet another of the things I'd love to be is a magician, but I've never really been good at magic tricks. I never had the patience to get the sleight of hand right. It would be good to do a memory/magic show, so maybe I'll force myself to make more of an effort some time.

And so, once again, the day is saved...

Thanks to the ability to memorise long numbers!

From this week's Civil War #7, which was okay if you like that kind of thing. The series as a whole has been very entertaining, although it's been more interested in big fight scenes than exploring the possibilities of the very original storyline. I would have preferred a better artist, too. But it's done its job of establishing a new status quo for the Marvel Universe, and some of the upcoming series spinning off from Civil War look like being fun (Dan Slott writing "Initiative" is sure to be brilliant). Almost makes up for Thunderbolts, Exiles and Runaways losing their writers and becoming in two cases at least (Joss Whedon's Runaways hasn't started yet) absolute rubbish. I'm a bit disillusioned with Marvel comics as a whole at the moment.

But more importantly, it makes me giggle to think that we're supposed to take his recall of a 69-digit number as further proof of the Black Panther's genius. Any old eejit can memorise 69 digits with a bit of practice! Really, boasting about something like that just shows what an insecure person he is (although you could maybe have guessed he's a bit strange by the way he wears a mask with little cat-ears on top).

Anyway, I've had enough of rain and not writing books. I've decided to have a holiday in Las Vegas after all. I really do think the change of scene will help me churn out a bit of writing, and I want to see that Cirque show with Beatles music.

I remember

I came tantalisingly close to a perfect 200 in spoken numbers today - just two digits wrong, and both of those were memorised wrongly (ie the digit was 0 and I memorised the image involving a 1 instead) rather than recalled wrongly. Of course, the first mistake was on the 35th digit, meaning a score of 34, which is rubbish, but this is still a good result for me, because it's the first time I've attempted 200 and got the recall spot-on without any problems. Now I just have to sort out this problem of memorising mistakes, which I think is caused more than anything by anticipation - I hear the first couple of digits in a group of three and I'm already thinking of a three-digit group that makes an image that fits in nicely with the story I'm creating. I need to make sure I listen to all three digits rather than making them up as I go along. But I'm definitely hopeful of getting a good score in the spoken numbers at the WMC this year. Of course, this probably just means it'll all go wrong for me in another event...

As mentioned previously, though, while the memory training is going fine, the book-writing and stuff really isn't. I'm having great difficulty sitting down to do it. I need some kind of slavedriver to stand over me with a whip.