Busy day

Well, there was a lot of tennis and Doctor Who on telly that needed watching, but I still fitted in three hours of memory training, so I feel good about myself. Or I would feel good if not for the fact that I've eaten a big bag of liquorice allsorts and feel sick. But overall, everything is good. Tomorrow I'll do more memory stuff and then win the German, UK, French and World championships. Probably. If I get a job and can afford to go to them.

And any other memory championships I end up going to. There's an Indian one, I understand. Maybe I can hitch-hike out there.

High-five!

Woo, two days, two interviews that both went really well! I'm sure I'll get a job offer out of one or more of them. And there's the added advantage that they're both really great jobs that I'm pretty sure I could do very well, too. So yay! If you're American, celebrate by setting off fireworks tonight in my honour. Got a complex display in the shape of the star-spangled banner? Rearrange it into a gigantic picture of my face!

Or not, if you don't want to. Anyway, it's the weekend and memory training is upon us. Let's see how much I can cram into my brain in a series of half-hour periods. Yay! I'm very excitable today for some reason. Yay!

Busy doing nothing

I seem to have got behind with things I've been meaning to do, despite being a jobless layabout. There are lots of people I need to email and generally keep in touch with, plus I need to write some entertaining articles for the othello newsletter before the deadline on Sunday. I'd say I'm going to make an effort to do it tomorrow, but I'm going to another job interview. And then this weekend I want to spend a lot of time practicing memory, just in case I get a job and can afford to go to the German championship.

Today's interview went well, anyway, so who knows, maybe there'll be a job there. Hope so, because it sounds like a good one. Tomorrow's interview incorporates an Excel test, which makes me all nervous for some reason. Last time I had an interview with an Excel test, long ago, I thought I did really badly at it, although the people testing me subsequently said I'd done very well. They didn't employ me, though, so perhaps they were just being polite. Or perhaps I just have unrealistically high expectations.

Hairy face: good or bad?

I'm thinking about shaving off my beard. I've had it for nearly six years now, and I was wondering whether it might be a good idea to see what I look without one now, just in case I like it. What do my loyal blog-readers think? Especially the ones who remember my pre-beard days and can make a comparison? I think I look good right now, and not having to shave in the morning is very nice, but who knows, maybe I'd look better and enjoy the shaving experience if I was beardless?

But on the other hand, I haven't shaved for six years. Can I still remember how to do it? Can I cope with advances in shaving technology? Last time I was shaving regularly, two blades was still considered an acceptable number for a razor to have. Nowadays they're up to six or seven, I've lost count. I'm not sure my face could cope with the ultimate close shave, 2008 definition.

Oh, and also, interviews tomorrow and Friday, wish me luck, you know the drill.

Overheard conversation in the street

"... and it looks like the doctor's sucking Jesus's tits. It's not Mary Magdalene, it's his doctor friend..."

I'm guessing they were discussing a photo from a fancy dress party, but I think it would be great if they were archaeologists who had unearthed an amazing lost first-century illustrated Gospel manuscript.

Supporters

Well, I take back most of the things I've been saying about Andy Murray. I've been going around predicting that he wouldn't stand a chance at Wimbledon because he still can't play a five-set match without collapsing, but he seems to have got that problem licked. Fantastic match tonight, although you had to feel sorry for Richard Gasquet, with all the British fans yelling their heads off.

I had a similar experience today, or at least I had one man on the street tell me that he and his wife really enjoyed watching me on The Mentalists, and wish me good luck in this year's memory competitions. It really is great that I still get this kind of thing quite regularly here in Derby and other places around the country, nearly six months after the programme was on telly. The Mentalists really seems to have struck a chord with a whole lot of people! There really would be a huge audience interested in watching TV coverage of this year's world championships, anyone out there who might want to broadcast it? Hello, Channel 4, I'm talking to you, it's exactly your kind of thing and it'd be a hit!

I should probably be cheering

I just can't find it in me to support Spain in a football match, though. I somehow find it impossible to have an opinion one way or the other about them. I need to meet some Spanish people, get some kind of emotional attachment to the place that would let me cheer them on when they're up against the likes of Germany in a big final.

But since I can't support Spain, I was hoping Germany would win this one, and memory-competition international rivalries be damned. So now I'm all disappointed. Still, maybe all my rivals will sink into deep depression and be unable to memorise quite as much stuff, allowing me to win despite incompetence and lack of practice (did a half-hour numbers today but it didn't go very well - I'm feeling a bit slow-witted lately, and I was below optimum pace of going through the digits. At top speed I can go through 1640 digits three times with a minute or two to spare, but I was 200 short of the end third time through when the 30 minutes ran out today).

What?

I got a water bill in the post this morning. Dated 14 June 2007, for the period 18 August 2006 - 12 November 2006, 'please ensure that your payment reaches us by 5 Jul 07.'

And it's not a bill for this place. It's for the flat in Boston that I used to live in until November 2003. I mean, what's going on here? It says 'this is a copy bill' on it, so I assume the people who live there now have asked for a copy and through some confusion of the computer system it's come to me by mistake. But the enquiries phone line isn't open again until Monday, so I'll just have to remain confused until then.

It surprises me that Anglian Water have got my new address in the first place. Unless I'm misremembering, I didn't pay the water bill at the Boston flat, the landlord did. I don't recall telling the water company where I was moving to. It's all extremely strange. Possibly it's all some kind of elaborate practical joke performed by a really uninspired new TV show.

Must... resist... temptation...

Sometimes it's so hard to refrain from poking gentle fun at companies that might possibly be going to employ me. Tell you what, if I don't get this particular job, I'll deride them at length next week. In a harmless kind of way, of course - there was even a thing on the BBC news website a while ago about stupid corporate jargon, so I'm sure it wouldn't really hurt to write about it on the blog. But better safe than sorry, eh?

I'll complain about the BBC instead. That'll teach them. Is it me, or is their coverage of Wimbledon more rubbish this year than it has been in the past? They seem to have cameras on fewer courts for people to watch via the red button. I like to watch the doubles games if I've got nothing better to do, but they've barely been televised at all this year so far.

Nothg. happened

Sorry, twenty to eleven, watching hilarious comedy "The Inbetweeners", have divided day between chasing up jobs and somehow not remembering to blog earlier, no time to write more. Or to frame complete sentences. Will make up for it tomorrow. Pronouns too.

He's called David Higginbottom?

"I've already killed three people with my skimmer, but that hardly counts - they were all Senior Citizens."

So says Dano Gazzard, slipped nonchalently into a paragraph describing himself and his surroundings, so casually that it goes unnoticed by a ten-year-old reader looking forward to some kind of science-fiction children's story. By the time this ten-year-old gets to the end of "Time Trap" with its ingeniously tightly-knotted time-travel circular insanity plotline and the pretty horrific ending where the good guys don't win, he's hooked on the works of Nicholas Fisk for life.

So it was nice to find out that the favourite author of my boyhood years has acquired a Wikipedia page since I last tried to look him up on the internet. And hey, check it out! Not only is his real name David Higginbottom, he shares my birthday! And he's, as far as whoever wrote the wiki page knows, at least, still alive, and nearly 85. I need to find a way to send him a long-overdue fan letter.

Words can't describe how cool the books of Nicholas Fisk are. Calling them children's sci-fi does them a real disservice - I'd never read anything so adult in tone (and still haven't read much that can compare with his best stuff, even now). It's criminal that he's not better-known. I'd love to see his stuff back in print again, because most of his books I got from the library. All I've got on my bookshelves now are tattered old copies of "Time Trap" and "Robot Revolt" and a more recent edition of "Trillions" I found a few years ago.

Now my interest has been piqued by that bibliography (including some that the libraries at Horncastle and Boston didn't have in their collections), I really want to track down copies of the likes of "A Rag, A Bone And A Hank Of Hair" ('And please do not tell me that Jack cannot be killed, because I say he can') and "Space Hostages" (the rather graphic description of the dying, deranged Flight Lieutenant sticks with me even now). And so many other long-lost favourites on that list, too - "Leadfoot" was always a particular favourite, no sci-fi in that one, just a boy and a car, Oddiputs the evil robot from "Sweets From A Stranger and other stories", "On The Flip Side", which gave me weird dreams for a month afterwards (those blobs were scary!)...

I need to start trawling eBay and charity shops. And re-reading the handful of books I've still got. Starting with Robot Revolt - great story, bad title. I think a lot of his titles were forced on him by the publishers, but this one especially - sure, it's snappy and it lures readers in, probably, but the point of the book is that while it is about a robot revolt, we don't realise that until late on in the story. We think it's about Hez and Abi and the Pastor, until things come to a head and we see that Max has been using the heroes for his own purposes. And then there's another twist to come after that...

Great stuff. Seriously.

Idleness

Curse this self-imposed ban on blogging about jobs I'm applying for. While it does reduce the chance of me inadvertently offending a potential employer, it does leave me short of something to write about when I haven't done anything else of interest all day. I get the feeling people are going to read this and think I'm living a life of vacuous sloth, when in fact that's only partially true.

I suppose I could pretend I've done something exciting. I could make up a thrilling tale about how I rescued a kitten stuck up a tree - poor thing, it was blown up there by the gales the other day, it didn't climb up there by itself. In fact, it can't climb, it was brought up by pigs after its mother died in an unusual helicopter accident when it was only a baby, and it believes itself to be a piglet. And I must confess that while I was rescuing it, I accidentally let slip that it looks more like a kitten to me, which has thrown the poor thing into a state of terrible confusion. It went straight back to its surrogate mother and demanded to know whether it was adopted.

Mind you, these modern kittens adapt pretty easily to this kind of thing. I'm sure it'll be okay if someone just reads it the story of the ugly duckling. The cat-language version, obviously, in which the ducks and swans are all eaten by kittens at the end. That'll put a smile on any kitten/piglet's face.

Okay, I'll make a point of doing something bloggable tomorrow. I'd hate for this thing to become dull and devoid of content.

Right, that does it, no more reindeer games for you.

I knocked over one of the piles of old paper in my living room (remember that exciting post last week about unpacking my box of old paperwork?) to be greeted by a loud, high-pitched, bleepy, acoustic version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer". Constantly repeating itself. It took me about five minutes of digging through all the old rubbish before I managed to find the Christmas card that was bleeping at me. I was beginning to think that I'd just have to get used to the constant jingle for the rest of eternity. It would certainly get me into a Christmassy mood, and I think that's something there should be more of in June. Let's celebrate Jesus's half-birthday!

Reunited

I got my keyboard back, if you were worried. By way of the neighbours leaving it out in the hallway. So that's all okay, unless they still think I'm a maniac rock star. Maybe one day I'll learn to play the thing, if it still works, instead of just using it as a window-prop.

Anyway, new week beckons. No football till Wednesday. How will I survive? It's surprisingly easy to get addicted to an international tournament, even when England aren't in it...

Rock star lifestyle

I might have mentioned before that I own an electric piano keyboard thing that I use for the sole purpose of propping my bedroom window open. Well, yesterday, the inevitable happened and I accidentally dropped it out of the window into my downstairs neighbours' yard. Big bang. I did go down and knock on their door to apologise and ask for my keyboard back please, but there was no answer. Looking out the window a little later, I noticed the keyboard had gone, though. I don't know the new people in flat two, they only just moved in recently, and I suspect they think they're living below a temperamental rock musician who occasionally throws his instruments through the window in a fit of booze-addled creative insanity. I'm now hoping to bump into them in the hallway and assume the keyboard incident will come up in the conversation in a way that we can all laugh about it.

Meanwhile, this morning, I was in WH Smith's, and an unfamiliar voice hailed me across the store with "Memory man!" Ah, a fan, I thought to myself. And an unusually loud one, too. No, wait, I know this guy. Who is he? He's coming over. "Hi, Ben, how are you?" Ah, that's who he is. "Hi there... Angus."

"No, try again." Dang. Why did I think he was Angus Walker, former World Intelligence Champion whom I haven't seen for eight years? I've barely thought about him in the intervening time, either, so why did he pop into my head if this person isn't him? "Three more guesses," said the mystery man, clearly enjoying experiencing my famous inability to remember people's names. I flailed around for a minute or two, apologising for having not the faintest idea who he was. "Think numbers," he hinted.

"Ah! Robert! Yes, I knew it all along," I said, unconvincingly. Of course it is. Robert Fountain, Mental Calculation World Cup winner, whom I haven't seen for a mere two years. He does look quite a bit like Angus Walker, you know. And I'm sure I would have recognised his voice, only he'd just been to the dentist. He's just moved in to the neighbourhood, so I'll have to make a point of remembering who he is in future.

Anyway, this afternoon I decided to roll up my metaphorical sleeves and get stuck in to a real memory training session. Half-hour numbers, half-hour cards and half-hour binary, crammed into a six-hour time period, exactly like in the German championship. I did the numbers and cards, but had to give up on the binary after ten minutes, conscious that absolutely nothing was sinking in to my brain. Despite my reputation for working harder than any sane person would at memory training, I just haven't been up to world championship winning standard in my preparation regime for a very, very long time. I really need to work on my stamina. Or maybe schedule my training sessions for a time when I don't know Doctor Who is on the telly.

No problem with the memory in the numbers or cards, though - marked them during the first half of the football, and I got 1340 digits and 17½ packs, which would be two new world records if I did it in Tuttlingen. Would've been nice to get a binary score of some kind to go with them, but we're still a month away. If I'm serious about training, that three-world-records plan of mine might just be possible.

Millennium

Well, if yesterday's blog was number 999, I suppose that means that this is the big one thousand! Woo!

So, I've been racking my brains, wondering what kind of post I should make for this historic occasion. Some kind of song and dance routine? An analysis of my life over the last thousand blogged days? A shocking personal revelation? A blank blog to really subvert expectations?

No, what I should really do is stop talking about myself for once, and say "But enough about me. How's things with you?" What's happening with you, my blog readers, today? I'd really like to see in the comments thread a paragraph or two of what you would be blogging about tonight if you were a blogger. And if you already are a blogger, well, write something else.

Call the police!

This note has been added as an afterthought, realising that a large proportion of my blog readers are American, German or Other. 999 is the phone number for the emergency services. Just substitute it in your mind for 911 or 112 or whatever outlandish number you prefer to use whenever you encounter "999" in the following blog. Thank you for reading.

This is, apparently, blog post number 999 in Zoomy's Thing. Wowee!

Actually, the only thing this inspires me to write about is a question I occasionally get asked about the "Ben System". Doesn't it make more sense, people say, to have, for example, 999 be a policeman, because that's the first thing that comes to mind when you see the number 999, and not Mr Burns's teddy Bobo, or whatever image you might create with the Ben System.

Actually, people who say that are invariably people who currently use the Dominic System, which recommends this kind of thing. People who started off by reading Tony Buzan's books, like me, have never encountered the idea. So that's probably why I always reply "No, that's not the way you should do it. Make a Ben-system or Major-system or Dominic-system image for each number/card/whatever, don't break the rules. Easier to learn them then, believe me."

However, this response of mine is, I think, a worthy one. When you're learning a lot of images, especially if you're trying your hand at a 1000-image system, it takes time to drill them into your head. And the way to think about the "Ben System" is not as a way of converting numbers into words and pictures, but as a way of learning to read a different alphabet. You want to get to a point where you're looking at the piece of paper and not seeing numbers at all, but automatically seeing the appropriate image. And you will get to that point more quickly if during the learning phase you're thinking "that's buh-oh-buh... Bobo!" instead of "that's 999... policeman!" Really, you will. So pick a system and use it for EVERYTHING. No exceptions. Your brain will thank you for it.

Probably. I mean, Dominic hasn't exactly been a failure at the whole memory thing...

Yah! Fatty!

You'd think, with being unemployed and penniless and everything, that I'd be losing weight, but in fact I'm pretty sure I'm doing the reverse just lately. Looking at some of the pictures from the party on Saturday, I have to admit I look decidedly blubbery. I'm giving that weighing machine in Woolworth's a wide berth. I need a job that involves a good long cycle ride or walk every day. Or in a liposuction clinic that gives free sucks to its accountants.

Superliminal advertising

The boxes of sweets/chocolates/jaffa cakes etc on the shelves lining the queue for the tills in Woolworth's have got big, visible yellow stickers on them saying "IMPULSE LINE - PRE-TILLS" or something along those lines. As a customer, I find it quite offensive that they're owning up to strategically placing goodies in the eyeline of people waiting to pay for the things they came into the shop for! What happened to the long-standing tradition of pretending it's all just a coincidence? The decent, honourable thing to do is to be sneaky and underhanded and insult your customers' intelligence.

Warning: Not for the faint-hearted

Well, you see, it was my brother's thirtieth birthday and he really wanted lots of cool costumes at his party, so I had to make an effort to do something unexpected. So this is what I looked like:

Attractive, eh?



On the right of that one you can see my regular blog-commenter Ian, who had a magnificent costume himself:



Whereas my brother himself was a destructo-robot with a slightly alarming tight-fitting leotard:





And all in all, the evening had a lot of this kind of thing going on:





So yes, don't say I didn't warn you, and I probably won't be wearing another miniskirt for quite some time, probably. I did look good, though. Maybe the costume will find its way into my regular rotation...