I'm well below par (which is a good thing in golf)

 At the start of the Wordle craze that gripped the world (the portion of it that waste a lot of time on the internet, anyway) a month or so ago, I saw someone say that in golfing terms, par for Wordle is 4, so if you're averaging better than that, you're doing well.

So since I played it for the 36th time early this morning, just before it was swallowed up by the New York Times, that seems like an appropriate time to stop playing the silly thing, and move on to other more exciting wastes of time. And after the full 36 holes, I can proudly say I'm 5 under, which is usually enough to make the cut, isn't it? Eat your heart out, Tiger Woods (and any other golfers whose name is made up of five-letter English words).

The League is on again!

It's a new season of Memory League! This is season 14, although I'm not sure exactly when the numbering started - I could go back and look, or, you know, just use my memory which is supposed to be so good, but I prefer to just stay satisfied with my vague recollection that we had sort of less official seasons before it properly started with season 1.

Anyway, I've got my first match on Wednesday at 10:00 GMT, against Emanuele Regnani, and I might try streaming it live somewhere, somehow. We're supposed to record it anyway, to minimise cheating, so why not do a live broadcast to the world? It might be fun to watch how badly I do, since as usual I'm wildly out of practice...

More cornflakes airliners, more creative editing

The people at Kellogg's really had a lot of model airliners on their hands in 1985. Hot on the heels of all the ones they gave away with the Transformers comic, as documented in my blog here, they stuck a whole load more the next week to the cover of Secret Wars no. 10.

Secret Wars, from Marvel UK, was the same kind of thing as Transformers - fortnightly, half colour and half monochrome, containing reprints of American comics. But this one was printing Secret Wars, the big epic 12-issue limited series featuring all the coolest Marvel superheroes and supervillains in one big epic storyline! They do one of those practically every week in American comics now, but in 1984 it was a brand new concept and very exciting!

And, like Transformers, the British comic needed a backup strip to pad out the American material. They sensibly chose Alpha Flight - a comic that didn't feature any of the superheroes who were involved in the main story. As luck would have it, in fact, the only significant guest stars in the first twelve issues of Alpha Flight were the Invisible Woman and the Sub-Mariner, neither of whom were in Secret Wars, so it worked out very nicely!

Also like Transformers, Secret Wars was about to move up to weekly publication. This seems to have caused a bit of confusion for the editors and awkward juggling of the available pages. Unlike Transformers (which at the same time as going weekly switched to 24 pages and full colour), Secret Wars remained at 32 pages until no. 19, and so someone decided it needed another backup strip.

This issue, no. 10, was the last to follow the pattern of roughly twelve pages of Secret Wars and roughly twelve pages of Alpha Flight (American comics of the time usually came in at 23-24 pages). For the weekly issues, it changed to eight pages or so from each of Secret Wars, Alpha Flight and Iceman. Trouble is, no. 10 started new American issues of both its stories, so splitting them up was going to be a little complicated...

And so Secret Wars no. 10 proudly boasts a whole fourteen pages of the American Secret Wars issue #6, backed up by the first ten pages of Alpha Flight issue #4 - with just a bit of fiddling from those ingenious British comic editors.

Alpha Flight #4 was cover-dated November 1983, six months before the first issue of the American Secret Wars series. It was written and drawn by John Byrne, who was also doing Fantastic Four at the time, hence the crossover. And it starts by referencing what was happening in the concurrent Fantastic Four comic, naturally enough...

Which is pretty easy for the UK editor to adjust, since Secret Wars was also about Mister Fantastic being mysteriously abducted (it happens to him a lot) - only the last line of Sue's speech bubble needed to be altered, to give British readers the impression this was happening simultaneously with the Secret Wars story in this issue!

The change in handwriting was always so obvious when UK comics made these alterations - the Planet Terry ones were less glaring, weren't they? But that's the only dialogue change that was necessary to reprint this issue of Alpha Flight. There's just the problem of the page count to deal with. Most of the early Alpha Flight comics had a 17-page main story and a backup strip of 6 pages detailing the origin of one of the heroes. This one issue is the exception to that - the main story takes up the whole comic, clocking in at 22 pages. And it does rather look like John Byrne stretched it out to that length with a bit of unnecessary padding, so for the UK comic to trim it down a bit might have been a quality judgement as well as a practical one! These are pages 10 and 11:

Yes, that's what it looked like in the original American printing, with the colours messed up on the second page and a big white border between the two halves of what was supposed to be one big panel at the bottom. The UK reprint, which ended the episode at this point, decided the first half of that big panel was quite enough to establish the scale of the Master's base, and cut out a couple of panels from the top row to give us this cliffhanger ending:

I think that looks rather better than the original! So, just one week later, we get the next UK issue of Secret Wars!

Now weekly! And really crammed with comics! The 32 pages (which, unlike American comics, includes the covers) contain 10 pages of Secret Wars, 10 pages of Alpha Flight and 8 pages of Iceman! There's barely room for a couple of text pages explaining the changes to the readers, and certainly no space for the usual number of ads and other filler!

I don't really see why it was necessary to add the Iceman limited series to the comic - Secret Wars maybe needed to go down to 8 pages to avoid catching up with the American printing, but Alpha Flight was old enough that they could have increased the pagecount of that without a problem. They probably just didn't want it to be two-thirds of a comic that was meant to be about Secret Wars.

Anyway, we've already stripped out one page from the Alpha Flight story. Is there anything else we can cut, to make sure everything fits in this UK reprint? Oh yes, it seems John Byrne's got a bit lazy towards the end...

That's pages 19 and 20 of the original comic. And while you might say it's justified and necessary to show the sheer scale of the explosion, I think filling two pages with it is a bit much. Still, it made it easy to trim another page out for the UK reprint!

And so, once again, the day is saved, thanks to Alpha Flight and some clever editing!

Nice to know that people are still talking about me

Or at least about Ben Pride-more, from Durby in the UK. Starting about four minutes into a video otherwise dedicated to people born with unusual medical conditions, we get a brief feature of a memory man so extraordinary, you won't believe he exists.

 

I wonder that that guy will think when he hears about the many mnemonists nowadays who are much, much better than I am?

The robots have landed!

 What a lovely day! The sun's shining, it's almost warm outside, and I saw on Facebook a couple of days ago that the Golden Orbit comic fair is in Birmingham today, so I went along to see what was on sale...

These things have been going on since I was very young, and the little A5 flyers have always been in exactly the same format - the whole thing is very nostalgic! And what's more, there's always some treasure to be found in the many cardboard boxes full of comics being sold there - but today, I actually found EXACTLY the kind of thing I'd gone there hoping to get! New 'reading copies' of early Transformers comics from a 20p box! Including a copy of no. 2 that's superior to the one I've already got!

That's a great cover, by John Ridgway. I do love the little girl resolutely playing with her doll and paying no attention to the giant robots marching towards her! It's true - Transformers were very emphatically "boys' toys" in those days.

The original owner of these comics (2, 4, 5, 7 and 8) has punched holes in them to keep them in a ring binder, but that's not really a problem, because these comics had very wide white margins around the artwork, so the holes mostly don't affect it. Most importantly, this copy has the centrespread poster still intact! My other copy for some reason has the right hand half of it cut out.

This is another great example of how the British comic adapted the American source material (I assume everyone reading this has already read and enjoyed my excessive posting about Planet Terry in recent weeks). In the American version of Transformers #1, this double-page spread is part of the story - the British comic takes the pages out of sequence to put them in the centrespread, blacks out the two story panels at the top of the first page and (most fascinatingly) rewrites all the speech bubbles! They're replaced with more legible typewriting, and convey the same basic information, but often in slightly different words. Here's the American original for comparison:

The new copy of this comic I bought today isn't entirely complete, though - the original owner has cut out a picture of Ravage's roaring face from page 20!

Lucky I've still got that other copy, so I can assemble a complete story! I wonder what the previous owner did with that picture. Probably stuck it to the front of a school book, or maybe a private diary to scare off intruders!

Well worth 20p of anyone's money!

In another dimension, with voyeuristic intention

Okay, this is a thing - 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel. You can move pieces back in time and create alternate universes in a staggeringly complex way. Do people actually play this and know what's going on? I'm working on it, but I'm still not at the level of comprehension just yet. It does take me back to my schooldays, when we loved to play strange variants of chess games and fairy pieces. I'm sure I'll get the hang of time travel with a bit more practice, and then I'll use my new powers to take over the world!

I am Ben, son of George

 That's the best way to introduce yourself at Pridmore family gatherings, it seems - helps everybody keep track of the family tree. And I'm very glad I went to this one, and had the opportunity for a lot of family talk with Andy (son of Mick), Pete (son of Bill) and Alan (son of Syd).

Did you know that Walter Millership, who played for Sheffield Wednesday in the 1935 cup final, was a relative?

Continuing the theme

Want to get a lot more readers for your blog all of a sudden? Use a Simpsons quote and get shared on the sub-reddit Unexpected Simpsons! That really was an unexpected pleasure! Welcome to everyone who found my blog through that, and I'm sorry that this post isn't at all Simpsons-related.

But continuing the theme of things I'm not good at but occasionally feel I should try to become good at - driving a car. I'm going to a funeral tomorrow, down south, and have hired a car for the occasion. I really don't like driving, but once I've done it for a little while, I get back into the mood. And I only very rarely crash into things, so I'll probably be all right.

Or I could still chicken out and get the train. I'll see how I feel.

Why must I fail in every attempt at masonry?

 Among the things I've been trying to do lately is It, Myself. I'm not what you would call great at DIY, but I'd quite like to be more 'handy', and occasionally make attempts to do ambitious home-improvement projects.

The windows in my bedroom, you see, are skylights in a sloping roof. They've got roller blinds fitted, but the springy thing (I think that's the technical term) in one of them broke, and both of them are pretty useless at keeping light out - almost entirely transparent, in fact, which makes me wonder what the point of them is in the first place - so I decided to be practical and replace them.

It's harder than it sounds, you know. You can't just buy blinds of that unusual size off the shelf. But I got some inexpensive ones from Argos that cover the whole of the window area, and by means of bits of plastic and cardboard I had lying around the house improvised a way that they can be pulled down, stay in place, and block out maybe 90% of the sunlight. And it only took, well, a huge amount of getting things wrong, giving up, tearing it all down and starting again. But they're working now, more or less! And don't look completely ugly!

I'm cheering for Čilić

And not just because of the nice alliteration. He was really impressive against Rublev yesterday, and I always do like to see people who've been written off as past their best make an impressive return to top form against younger opponents. On the other hand, now Čilić is up against Félix Auger-Aliassime, who I also like to cheer for on the grounds that he's young and cool, so it'll be very conflicting.

It's all about date of birth, of course - I've described before how fascinated I am by the continued dominance of tennis players born in the 1980s, to the total exclusion of the younger generation, and it's still continuing now. There's still that total gap with men born in the first half of the 1990s, but there are quite a few top players now born in 1996 and later, so the interestingly small number at the bottom of this chart might yet get rather more boring and relatively large.

But on the other hand, there are also good players born in the early 2000s coming through now - Auger-Aliassime and also Jannik Sinner in the last 16 of the Australian Open. I'm hoping, for the sake of having an interesting piece of trivia, that these 21st-century boys will entirely squeeze out the nineties gang in years to come!

Feeling... unproductive

 This really is something I should know about myself after forty-five years, but whenever I set time aside to do all the cool "this would be a great thing to do if I had some spare time at my disposal" things in my head, I never actually manage to do anything. But never mind! With perseverance and forgetting about the whole concept expressed in the first sentence there, I'm sure I'll eventually get all those things done!

Shocking family secrets exposed

A sequel to the previous post, in which I wondered who the Barbara Pridmore in the 1939 register might be. Well, the answer is simple and obvious enough, as it turns out.

Just to recap, May Foster married my great-uncle George Harry Pridmore in 1917, shortly before he was killed in the war. By June 1921, she was a boarding house keeper in the census. By the following year, it seems she'd had to give that up, because she had a daughter, Barbara, on July 29th, 1922.

I'm thinking the registrar is a little unreasonably judgmental here - in the box for 'Name, surname and maiden surname of mother' he's just put "May Pridmore, of no occupation". Too obsessed with those empty father's name and occupation boxes to put 'nee Foster', or 'noble widow of gallant officer tragically killed in His Majesty's service', I assume.

Anyway, what May did for the next decade I'm not sure - a boarding house might not have been possible - but she married one Leonard Elliott in 1934, and as seen in the previous post was living with him and Barbara and also May's younger brother Harry Foster in the 1939 register. There's another name blacked out there, who'll just have to remain the subject of curiosity for now.

Barbara then married a John Foster in 1943. He must have been a connection of May's, you would think, but doesn't seem to be a close relative; I've tried to follow their family lines back through the old censuses, and I can't see where the two Foster families join up.

Barbara gives her father's name as George Harry Pridmore on the marriage certificate. Which isn't technically correct, what with him having died four years before she was born, but never mind. John is a lance sergeant in the army, and they probably had at least one baby after the war, but it would take more research of a type that I really won't allow myself to spend the time and money on right now to be sure of it. Nor am I going to dive into investigating who the 'May Pridmore' who witnessed the wedding could be! Surely Barbara's mother was still going by the surname Elliott at that time?

Still, Barbara officially joins the ranks of 'honorary Pridmores', like Billy (John William) Pridmore, the son of Albert's widow Margaret! It's an uncommon surname, it's nice to see it get an infusion of new blood here and there!

Detox

 I've said it before, once or twice over the years, but I really need to break my addiction to cherry coke. The amount of it I'm drinking has steadily increased just lately, so I'm going to go sort of luke-warmish-turkey and reduce my intake to much smaller and healthier levels for a while. We'll see how it goes...

Ahhh! A happy ending!

I'm sure you all remember my post from a week and a half ago about the fascinating adaptation of Planet Terry for the British Transformers comic, and have been eagerly awaiting the sequel ever since.

Well, I've finally acquired a copy of Transformers no. 25, and it's intriguing in many ways!

It came with a free gift of a Kellogg's Corn Flakes model airliner. So every copy of this comic you find in the wild, like this one, has a big rip on the cover and a strip of decaying 36-year-old sellotape. All the airliners no doubt fell apart and were thrown away within a few days of getting them, but at least some of the comics still survive!

Apart from all the intrusive cornflakes, this cover uses the cover of the American Transformers #6, the second half of which is reprinted inside. The speech bubble is a UK original addition, though; there isn't one on the American original. Simon Furman, at a guess, enlivening the cover with his characteristic speech patterns and tying in to the cornflakes airliner theme with the call-sign CF-one. It's those little attentions to detail that made the British Transformers comic so special!

Inside the comic, as it winds down towards the big new weekly full-colour relaunch, we find the penultimate two-page Chromobots episode, the final eleven pages of the American Transformers #6, the final five pages of Machine Man #19, the letters page, Robo-Capers, Matt and the Cat, fact files for exciting new toys Warpath and Ramjet, a mega Kellogg's Corn Flakes competition, and of course the final three pages of Planet Terry! The first year of British Transformers comics were mega!

The British Transformers no. 26 printed the entire American Transformers #7, incidentally - a whole 23 pages of Transformers in the Transformers comic! British readers had never seen the like - and never really would again...

But to return to the final appearance of Planet Terry, he's squeezed into the final three inside pages of this issue, all of them in monochrome. Here's how it starts:

We get an extra title at the top, which weirdly calls this story "The Saga of Princess Ugly, part 6". That was the title of the American Planet Terry issue #2, which was spread over the British Transformers nos. 20-23. The way it was spread over them was also interesting, so if your eye has been drawn to the much more interesting part of the pages above, feel free to skip the next couple of paragraphs, but...

"The Saga of Princess Ugly" in the American comic was split into three chapters, as per the old American comic tradition, but those chapters were of very irregular length - the kind of thing that's a real inconvenience for British reprint comics. Part 1 was six pages, part 2 was a whole nine, and part 3 was seven. The way they dealt with it is a great indication of how the British Transformers comic worked - for no. 20, they didn't have any American Transformers material available to them, and were printing the British-original "Raiders of the Last Ark". There were six pages of that in the British comic, backed up by the usual filler material including the last part of Machine Man issue #18, and the first part of Planet Terry issue #2.

With no. 21, they had a mere five pages of Transformers content, concluding "Raiders of the Last Ark", and so ample room to print the full nine-page part 2 of Planet Terry, if they dropped Machine Man for one issue, allowing his next story to be spread over nos. 22-25. The other pages of Transformers no. 21 were filled with the usual kind of stuff, including a thrilling four-page historical comic about Erik the Red.

Then for Transformers no. 22, the long-awaited American Transformers #5 was finally available, and the Transformers content could go back up to 11 pages per issue of the British title! The third part of "The Saga of Princess Ugly" could be chopped in half and spread over two issues, with a "part 4" added to the top of the first page of no. 23.

As we saw in the last blog post, the American Planet Terry issue #3 was titled "Secret of the Space Warp", and that was the title shown in the British Transformers no. 24, which printed five pages' worth of material from the first 19 American pages. So why they reverted to "The Saga of Princess Ugly" for the title of these final three pages (in which Princess Ugly neither appears nor is mentioned) is hard to fathom.

But that's just a sideline to the most interesting part of this British printing. Not only is the dialogue rewritten to explain what the Devourer is, the second panel is entirely different! I didn't remember that at all, but it came back to me as soon as I looked at this comic. It's been lifted from the bottom of page 9 of the American comic - part of the large chunk that was chopped out for the British Transformers fans!

A scene that really happened in the American original has been repurposed as a flashback to Terry playing a video game! Now that's some clever editing! Although it does raise the unanswered question of why this Devourer knows who Planet Terry is, and specifically wants to eat him!

Slightly less clever is the way the page number has been very clumsily scribbled out at the bottom right of the British printing, but with that excitement out of the way, there's not much to note about the final two pages...

Ahhh. From the British comic-readers' perspective, Terry has found his long-lost parents at last, and everybody's happy!

From American comic-readers' perspective, next issue they turn out to be statues, and Terry's quest continues for nine more issues. And he never does find his parents; it ends with him still endlessly searching. I prefer the British one!

トロン・ボーン

 "The Misadventures of Tron Bonne" is a PlayStation game from 2000. Someone mentioned the character and the game to me in passing twenty years or so ago and I hadn't thought about it since then, until it popped back into my mind yesterday morning for no reason at all. So I had to look it up and find what it was all about, and it does look like fun. Someone should re-release it on the Switch.

Rhyme chime

Have you ever noticed how many songs use the word 'again' as a handy rhyme for pain, rain and all the other things that song-writers like to agonize about, but the singer invariably pronounces it 'agen' so that it doesn't rhyme at all? Lots of songs that I really like do this, so I probably shouldn't be too horrid about the whole thing, but even a wonderful piece of music like Don McLean's "Castles in the Air" is very slightly marred by a sequence of pain/agen/remain/plain.

But on the other hand, the Victor Meldrew song in "The Beast in the Cage" rhymes 'then' with 'again', but John du Prez pronounces 'again' to rhyme with 'rain'.

Following the herd

It's "trending" on "Twitter" and all kinds of other "new-fangled" and "cool" things, but I have to admit Wordle is a really great game nonetheless. Not only do you only get one puzzle a day, avoiding the likelihood of getting hopelessly addicted to it, but it's a real brain-stretching kind of exercise, searching your vocabulary for a word that can fit the letters you know. Plus I got it in three guesses today, and that's way better than anyone else I know!

Overthinking it

 Okay, the Simpsons episode "I'm Spelling As Fast As I Can" was on TV today, and I've always had a serious problem with it, which I will now discuss at great length, because I've got nothing better to do with my time on a Sunday night.

Lisa Simpson is competing in a spelling bee and the evil organiser wants an adorable little boy to win it for publicity reasons, so offers Lisa a bribe of a college scholarship to throw the contest, and she refuses. And then it goes like this:

Evil organiser: All right, your word is 'whether' [or 'weather']

Other contestant: Which one? Can you use it in a sentence?

Evil organiser: Certainly. "I don't know whether the weather will improve."

Other contestant: Umm... W... E...

Evil organiser gleefully presses the 'wrong answer' button. Adorable little boy comes to the microphone.

Evil organiser: Your word is 'rigged', as in "this contest is rigged!"

Adorable little boy: R-I-G-G-E-D. Wigged.

Evil organiser: Bravo, my pet! You shall be champion! Assuming Lisa misspells this next word... The word is 'intransigence'! As in "the little girl's intransigence cost her the college of her choice!"

Lisa: Attention, everyone! I was asked to take a dive, but I won't do it! I-N-T-R-A-N-S-I-G-A-N-C-E!

Evil organiser: You fool! It's E-N-C-E!

Lisa: Oh my god, you're right!

Evil organiser: And now you lose everything! And I go back to whatever it is I do!

Okay, George Plimpton as the evil organiser is hilarious, and the whole scene is brilliant, but it annoys me. If he could eliminate another competitor with the weather/whether gag, he could have done that to Lisa too! Much better, and funnier, would be to have the first competitor be given the word 'sellout', spell it X-J-Z-Q-T and be cheerfully thrown a huge sack of money with a dollar sign on it, adorable Alex get 'rigged', then have Lisa be given the whether/weather gag and the evil organiser realise that she got it right because he hadn't noticed there are two words that sound the same, adorable Alex get another hilarious word, and then have Lisa get 'intransigence' wrong. That would be much better all round, and not an insult to the viewers' intelligence!

I have made this point before, every time the episode has been on telly. One time, I was in Cambridge the next day for an othello competition, and a very intelligent person, an actual Cambridge University professor and everything, who doesn't normally watch the Simpsons, was still laughing about having seen that episode and saying how brilliant the whole weather/whether bit was. It almost makes me think that the episode wasn't so much an insult to intelligence as to pedantic quibbling, but no. It's the rest of the world that's wrong.

Urble-durbly burble-urble!

 35 years ago today, the Thundercats episode "Berbils" had its first showing on British TV. It's the third in the series (or the second if you run the first two together into one big episode, like the BBC did), and it continues the gradual introduction of the characters and concepts - they build the Thundertank, meet some of the inhabitants of Third Earth, tangle with Mumm-Ra for the second time, and start to build the Cats' Lair.

The episode is cut down dramatically on the video version of "Exodus" that I blogged about before. The opening scenes are restructured - the previous episode "The Unholy Alliance" ends with a Mumm-Ra scene and "Berbils" starts with one, so when they're run together into one full-length animated film it starts with the scene of Lion-O and Snarf exploring the forest, then jumps back to Mumm-Ra and his attack on the Thundercats and their newly-constructed tank, then goes on to Lion-O meeting the Berbils for the first time. But then the video chops out a very large chunk of the episode, in which Lion-O defends the Berbils from Trollogs and Giantors, going straight to Mumm-Ra launching a final attack on Lion-O as a swarm of insects. Then it inserts a bit of the earlier Berbils scene from immediately before the Trollog attack, and then shows Mumm-Ra arriving and continues to the end of the original episode.

It's a strange decision to remove that plot entirely - it's a sequence that perhaps doesn't work quite right, since it basically involves Lion-O messing up the balance of co-existence among the races of Third Earth and not entirely learning the lesson that one shouldn't do that, but it's not a particularly bad part of the episode at all. You can chop it out without harming the narrative, but why did they need to?

I'm feeling productive

 I've successfully had a brief conversation with someone today in which I said I'd do something, which definitely counts as a successful accomplishment in itself (but I won't tell you exactly what I said I'd do just yet, in case I don't do it and end up looking stupid), and I also remembered I'd decided to resume learning Japanese on Memrise, and firmly resolved to do it tomorrow. So that's two significant achievements in one day!