Brackets

 Or 'pairings' as we call them in the kind of competitions I usually enter. But people are throwing brackets at me today! Two different sets of them!

Firstly, it turns out a sufficient number of entrants to the Microsoft Excel World Championship WERE equally or more stupid than me, and I scraped through to the first round proper! So tune in (metaphorically speaking - my match probably won't be streamed live) on October 29th, at 5pm British time!

Here's my quarter of the draw:

I'm playing one Ben Rotblatt, of the USA - there are a good number of Bens among the 128 qualifiers, actually. It must be an Excellent kind of name. He skipped the 'very hard' one of the five tasks, and had a mistake in the fifth. I think it could be a close contest, and I'm going to have to do some serious training!

And then if I win this one, I'm up against Justin Merson of Canada, probably. He did all five tasks perfectly, so he's obviously good at Excel. I might struggle to make it to the last 32. But I can see this is going to become my new "thing"! Competitive Excel! What a brilliant idea!

Meanwhile, my old "thing" is still doing its thing. The next Slam in Memory League is the African-European Open (that's the one in the most convenient time zone for Africa and Europe), and I'm only 17th on the list of seeds, so it'll take two rounds of qualifying to get to the finals...

Hopefully I can get through a match against the winner of round one (they're both beginners, but you have to watch beginners; they might get very good very quickly), and then I'll have to beat Ewelina (very difficult!) if I'm to get to face Andrea (entirely impossible!) in the first round proper on November 5th.

It's all good fun, if you like that kind of thing!

Competitive spreadsheeting

 Did you know there's such a thing as the Microsoft Excel World Championship? I only found out that it exists just recently, but it's been going for a few years now, as an offshoot of the Financial Modelling World Cup (which I also didn't know existed). Someone should tell me things like this! You know I'm downright weird about playing with Excel spreadsheets for all kinds of unlikely purposes!

Anyway, last night was the qualifying round for this year's competition, and it was brilliant. I think they're probably going to make the task free to download at some point in the future (previous ones are already available - check them out!), and I'd hate to spoil it, but it was divided into five tasks, requiring you to create complicated Excel formulas to find the right answers. It's hugely enjoyable, if you're the kind of person who likes that kind of thing.

I did four of the five tasks in the 60 minutes allotted time, realised I wasn't going to have time to do the last, so submitted the file with five minutes or so remaining (time counts as a tiebreaker). Then I went on to have a go at task number five, looked back over the previous ones and realised I'd made a boneheaded mistake in the second and highest-scoring task - rather than copying the answers into the boxes on the front page to get the total of all twenty sub-tasks, I just summed the whole lot I'd worked out on the other tab, including the example (which had an answer of 1). So the answer I cheerfully typed in for the most valuable question on the whole challenge was 8714 instead of the correct 8713.

If I was at work, I'd give myself the sack for that kind of carelessness. As it is, and since I'm unlikely to qualify for the finals unless everyone else in the qualifiers was equally stupid, I see it as a good learning experience, and I'll practice some more for next year's event! And I'll have a lot of fun watching the grand finals over the next couple of months!

Do Not Alter

 I did eventually get that DNA analysis thing that I mentioned a while ago. It's good to see links to distant relatives who, next time I'm more in the mood for family tree research, I might get in touch with and interrogate.

One feature of the Ancestry website analysis is slightly dubiously estimating your ethnicity based on comparing your DNA to "a reference panel made up of DNA from groups of people who have deep roots in one region." This probably works better for people in places like America, rather than people whose entire ancestry basically lived their entire lives on the same street in Sheffield (and not one of the nicer streets, either). But I do get a surprisingly big chunk of "Sweden and Denmark" from my mother's side - doubtless from her father, who came from London, where I hear all kinds of inter-breeding with foreigners goes on.

And 1% of Norway from my father's side, which I find more unlikely. Some wandering Viking, centuries ago, maybe? I do wish my ancestry was a teensy bit more exotic...

Disrespectful comics

 People quite often find this blog by searching for details of when Thundercats was broadcast on British TV, and stumbling across an old and rather lacking in details post of mine. I really should write a better one, with dates and everything, some time. I mean, I've researched them extensively over the years, primarily so my brother and I can celebrate the anniversaries of the classic episodes. I'll write it up tomorrow, maybe. But today, you see, is the 35th anniversary of "The Astral Prison" being shown for the first time on the BBC, and we need to celebrate the debut of the Astral Moat Monster!

I never had the toy of the Astral Moat Monster - that picture is stolen from the excellent Toy Archive website. But it was a strange kind of toy - the first range of Thundercats had action figures, vehicles... and also this one weird big monster, big enough to come in a box rather than on a card. It didn't seem to fit with the rest at all, it looked downright weird, and it also didn't show up in the cartoons and comics that first showed up in Britain in early 1987.

Until, that is, "The Astral Prison", in which Lion-O travels to the astral world, and confronts the monster that lives in the moat around the villain's castle! It was very exciting! And the monster, as befits an episode of the cartoon whose primary reason for existing was to persuade people to buy the toys, is extremely cool and threatening! Its peculiar appearance is minimised by focusing on its big sharp teeth and claws. It probably did boost the sales, with Christmas coming up!

But also available at around this time was the Thundercats Annual from Marvel UK. It will have been on the shelves from September 1987, but of course annuals were something you got for Christmas and so not many people will have read the text story in it yet (and for that matter, most people probably never did - nobody read the text stories in annuals). But in between the reprinted comic stories (the early American comics that were printed in the first four issues of the weekly UK comic) there was a text story that also featured the Astral Moat Monster!

The credits attribute the plot to Simon Furman, Marvel UK's head writer, but credit the story to "Steve Alan" - a quick bit of internet research tells me that was a pseudonym for John Tomlinson. Obviously written without any knowledge of the cartoon episode (annuals notoriously had to be produced ridiculously far in advance of publication) and just based on being given this weird-looking toy and told to write a story featuring it, the story takes the decidedly un-commercial approach of making the poor Astral Moat Monster into a comical figure.

"The Astral Moat Monster was in a particularly bad mood. This was partly because there was no Astral Moat to guard anymore, which left him at rather a loss for something to do. But the root cause of the Astral Moat Monster's ill humour could be traced back much further - thousands of years in fact - to when he was grown in the Chemical Pits of Grizquetr. An incompetent spellbinder had left him in the life-giving fluids just a fraction too long, bloating his ducklike blue body out of proportion, gifting him with a pair of ridiculous (and quite useless) red wings, and speckling his huge slack mouth with teeth like ill-fitting dagger rocks.

The Astral Moat Monster's pride and joy had been the Astral Moat, which he guarded fiercely. So fiercely, in fact, that it fell into total disuse, soaking into the earth to be overgrown by a limp grey pondweed. The Moat Monster continued to march up and down looking peevish and dangerous for a few years after that, but a lot of the fun had gone out of it."

The Thundercats can't help laughing at how stupid he looks. The story, which doesn't make so much as a token effort to explain the adjective "Astral", ends with the moat monster going back in time to when his moat was still new, and making friends with his own past self.

That's really not the way to encourage people to buy the toys. But then, Marvel UK always seemed to miss that memo, and instead write stories to entertain the readers rather than sell them things. It probably worked out best in the long run. The Thundercats comic, a bit later on, produced an equally mocking fact file for Mongor - who in the cartoon was a terrifying foe - portraying him as an entirely failed attempt by Mumm-Ra to summon a fearsome monster, turning out to be meek and inoffensive and fond of gardening. It probably had a rather negative effect on sales, so the writers should be glad the people responsible for marketing the toys never bothered to read the comics.

I would be tempted to blame "Steve Alan" for this disrespect towards cool characters, but there's no denying that even the great Simon Furman could be guilty of that kind of thing too. Take a look at Transformers No. 96, dated 17 January 1987 (meaning that when this comic was in the newsagents', "The Slaves of Castle Plun-Darr", the fourth Thundercats episode, was the one on Thursday afternoon). Probably written around the same time as that annual, thanks to the aforementioned lead times, it continues the ongoing plotlines (fitted in neatly between issues of the American comic as usual), by using Motormaster as the unfortunate pathetic figure who gets on the wrong end of Megatron's temper.

The thing is, Motormaster was still a relatively new toy! The Special Teams (of one of which Motormaster was the leader) had been introduced with great fanfare in the early summer of 1986. The UK comic, for once, was ordered to feature them immediately and make them out to be extremely cool - which, since the American comics in which they were created weren't available yet, forced Simon Furman to write it as a prophetic dream of the future). But now, just a few months later, the Teams weren't so special any more, the peering oversight of Hasbro had turned away, and poor Motormaster is reduced to this kind of snivelling cameo.

It annoyed me rather, at the time. Not that I particularly wanted the toy of Motormaster, which was rather unimpressive compared to some of the others on the toy shelves, but his whole personality as described in his fact files and tech specs was along the lines of 'his only weakness is the fact that he's so darn awesome, everyone else hates and fears him', and I sort of expected that to be reflected in the comics.

But no, this story focuses on introducing the Predacons - who were extraordinarily cool, and everyone wanted the toys, but nobody in Britain was going to get them because they weren't available over here. And they're introduced by a bit more bullying of Motormaster...

The toy of Shockwave also wasn't available in Britain. The Transformers comic always did tend to make the unavailable toys seem the coolest. I can't help thinking there might have been people who got Motormaster for Christmas (not many, maybe - the movie toys were the real must-haves at Christmas 1986) and were sadly disappointed by this comic in January.

Much as I admire Simon Furman, I think someone needs to unleash the Moat Monster, Mongor and Motormaster on him to have a word about their portrayal in the comics!

Powdered wigs

 Walking past the barber's shop in the town centre, I saw the proprietor having a smoke outside, and a teenage boy came up and asked him "Do you sell, like, the powder hair products? And how much is, like, a little bit?"

Powder? Is this a thing? I looked it up on the internet when I got back home, and yes, apparently hair styling powder is a thing that people use. I never knew that before today. I know I've got no hair, but I thought I was at least au fait with what more hirsute people do with their lustrous locks. Apparently not, though.

I don't go to that trendy young people's barber, anyway - I go to the one outside the town centre, which is much more of an old man's barber, once every six months or so to trim my remaining tonsure. I bet he doesn't put powder in his hair. How does that even work, anyway? It's all a mystery to me.

Also, someone's put a pair of drumsticks and a bouquet of flowers on the statue of John Bonham, to commemorate the anniversary of his death. This is the kind of old man thing I can entirely understand and sympathise with! Young people today, they don't know they're born.

It's a King thing

 I'm in a bit of a Stephen King mood lately, although to be fair I'm almost always in a bit of a Stephen King mood - you can always pick up his books and be guaranteed a really good read. I've got plenty on my bookshelves, mainly because I always like to pick one up in an airport to read on plane journeys.

Looking for something to read on the way to the MSO in London last month, I randomly pulled "Duma Key" from the bookcase, which is a silly thing to bring to a memory competition considering the central character is recovering from a traumatic head injury which left him with severe memory problems. Doesn't quite put you in the right frame of mind. And also, finishing the book on the train back to Redditch, I looked out of the window at the canal that runs alongside the railway line and saw we were passing a narrowboat with the name PERSEUS in big letters on the side. As anyone who's read the book will know, this is more than a little creepy.

Not daunted by this, I've just started re-reading "From a Buick 8", which I bought in Malaysia, back in 2003. That was a great trip, and it's a great book too, although if I'm finding excuses for not winning the world memory championship that year I might try to blame it on the minor pedantic annoyance with the book's many chronological inconsistencies. The narrative structure works very well, with present-day sequences narrated in the first person framing third-person flashbacks covering a twenty-something year history, but the dotting back and forth in time leads to some careless mistakes that a proof-reader or editor really should have picked up. Stephen King tends to thank his editors in the forewords, but it must be a very easy job - anything he writes is going to be a bestseller, so just put it into book form and job done!

That said, I've also got on my bookshelves the original six-part publication of "The Green Mile", including the wonderful moment when Percy has the tape over his mouth removed, rubs his lips (described at length by the narrator) and then is released from the straitjacket that had been confining his hands and arms. Stephen King did fix that part for the collected one-volume edition. But he left a mote in the comic-collecting reader's eye - the pornographic Popeye comic is sadly just anachronistic by a year or two. I wouldn't change that bit even if I was an editor, though...

In fact, let's have two posts in one night!

 I did think about going to watch Redditch Utd tonight in their game that was happening at the same time as England v Germany. I mean, the international match was a dead rubber, and the one just down the road was an important game for the Reds, who have been winning away and losing at home all season. And whenever I go to a home game, they always seem to win, so my support would almost certainly have been crucial.

But it was cold, and pouring with rain, so I decided to stay in and watch the big game on the telly instead. And Germany got a late equaliser to make it 3-3, while Redditch failed to get a late equaliser and lost 2-3. I feel entirely responsible for this loss, and I'll have to make sure to go to the next one.

Good news, bad news, bad news, bad news, good news and bad news

I'm not going to come up with six items of news to justify the title, I just want to remind all my readers that Shadowstone Park continues to be the most intriguing and hilarious cartoon on the internet.

  

But I have some items of news, at least - I've mostly finished the thing I've been doing that I'm supposed to keep confidential, but it'll be January before I'm supposed to tell everyone about it. And that's probably building it up too much, so it won't live up to those kinds of expectations.

I really should post on this blog more often. I'll try to think of trivial and unimportant things to impress internet people with.

Tennis: the next generation

 As you might recall from the couple of times I've mentioned it before, I've developed a sort of elderly-man glee at the way men born in the 1990s have spectacularly failed to break the stranglehold of men born in the 1980s on grand slam tennis tournaments. It's probably attributable to working alongside young people who had the temerity to be born in the nineties and yet somehow be adults. I came to accept that there are people born in the eighties who are grown-ups, but the nineties just feels like a step too far.

But I'm entirely delighted to see Carlos Alcaraz, born 2003, winning the US Open! I don't think my mind can get around the idea of someone 27 years younger than me being a grown-up yet, so I can cheer him on as a rebellious teenager, teaching those uppity nineties types a lesson! It's actually a great way to end a year characterised by top players not being allowed to compete in the top competitions, with the launch of a new era! Come on, young tennis stars, let's keep that 1990s line on the chart hilariously small! 

Excitement and adventure in GMT+9!

 My own performance in the Asian-Oceanian Open was embarrassingly bad, even for a match at one o'clock in the morning, but it's been a great tournament for the Japanese players who got to start it at a healthy daylight time! Almost a clean sweep of the semi-final slots, with just Simon carrying the flag for the rest of the world!

Tune in tomorrow, bright and early, to watch it all happen on MemorysportsTV!

Return of the mojo

 It's the Asian-Oceanian Open this weekend!

You may remember [first and only memory joke in this blog post, I promise] that we have three 'slam' opens each season, at different time zones, so that everyone gets at least one that happens at more or less convenient hours. This is the one that's hugely inconvenient for me - it starts at one o'clock in the morning - and I've taken advantage of the absence of several of the world's best players to qualify for the event this time round!

But more importantly, I've rediscovered my mojo when it comes to memory league and memory competition in general! I've got reasonably good results in online matches recently, and I'm feeling enthusiastic about the whole thing again! It's been a while since I was in that kind of mood about memory!

Of course, getting past the round of 16 seems a bit unlikely - Koba is really a lot better at all the disciplines than I am...

But I did that 23.83-second pack of cards today in a friendly game, the first time I've gone really fast in head-to-head competition for a long while, and it worked very nicely. I can go a fair bit faster in numbers, too, and images. And although I've not had a good words attempt for ages, it's still possible for me to do better than the top 5 recent scores up there. I'll try to set some personal highs in the early hours of Saturday morning, even if my opponent still does better!

Marvel's lowest ebb

Marvel Comics actually have a history of almost boasting about this period of their history. There have been editorials along the lines of "we were once on the absolute bottom rung of the American comic-publishing ladder, and look at us now!" But there's no denying that the summer of 1957 was not a good time for the company that had started out with great success in the superhero boom of the early 1940s as Timely Publications and by the mid-fifties was going by the name of Atlas.

The indicia at the bottom of the first page of their comics, incidentally, gave a different publisher name for each comic. All of them registered at office of publication 655 Madison Avenue, Atlas comics were apparently published by the likes of Warwick Publications Inc., Chipiden Publishing Corp., Sphere Publications Inc., Canam Publishers Sales Corp., Foto Parade Inc. and many, many more. I have no idea why that was necessary, but I assume it saved someone a few dollars in taxes somehow.

Whatever they were called, Atlas/Marvel had found themselves without a distributor, and had to go cap in hand to Independent News Distribution - which, far from being independent, was owned by DC Comics. Independent limited Atlas to publishing eight different titles a month. Even choosing to go for sixteen bi-monthly titles still required a big cull of the Atlas range. I think it's interesting to take a look at the sixteen comics that boss Martin Goodman and his editor in chief Stan Lee decided were the ones to stick with.

So, if 65 years ago you were browsing the American comic book stands in your local newsagent, what could you see from Marvel? You'd probably have trouble spotting them - the Atlas logo that used to adorn the top left corner of the cover has been replaced by the stark capital letters "IND." and there was a lot of other, more popular, competition on the shelves. Superheroes were still few and far between, though - DC had already launched their all-new Flash, which some people pinpoint as the start of the Silver Age of superhero comics, but it was still the very early dawn of that era and nobody else had followed suit yet. The Marvel comics went with six different genres and carefully monitored them to see which ones were selling. Here they are, in roughly ascending order of significance to Marvel's resurgence in the early 1960s and beyond.

Homer

Homer the Happy Ghost, a shameless clone of Casper the Friendly Ghost, seems to have been popular enough to justify his continued existence; the only one of Atlas's kiddie-comics to make the cut. But it seems he wasn't able to capitalise on the axing of his rivals; Homer was cancelled the following year when Marvel re-evaluated their range, and that was the end of trying to copy the popular Harvey Comics titles for many many years.

Girls' Romance

There were a lot of comics aimed at girls in those days - what had started out as a boys' industry had branched out into another gender by the late forties and discovered an apparently insatiable appetite for romance stories. They seem to be the same story over and over again (and these comics, as was normal at the time, had four or five short stories in each issue) - girl loves boy, something seems to get in the way of true love, but everything works out okay in the end. Marvel's titles seem to incline more towards 'good girl gets her just reward' than 'bad girl gets her comeuppance'. Our heroines are spared the worst possible fate for any woman, "becoming an old maid"!

War

The theme of the war comics being published in 1957 was generally "smash the commies", in stories set during the Korean War. But there was also an increasing interest in stories set during the second world war, which the young comic-readers of the time will only have heard about from their parents. There was usually a theme of clever individual soldiers outwitting the enemy, rather than graphic depictions of gunfights.

Westerns

There were occasional gunfights to be seen in the Western range, but more importantly there were individual heroes with distinctive costumes! Kid Colt and the Two-Gun Kid were very much prototypes of the superheroes who'd soon make a comeback. Wyatt Earp was a real person, of course, but his comic depiction had long since drifted away from reality. This issue of his title is the one where he shaves off his historically-accurate moustache, remaining clean-shaven until the comic was cancelled in 1960.

 

Patsy and Millie

Patsy Walker was Marvel's biggest star of the fifties. Marvel don't seem to have been all that interested in publishing a teenage boy comic in the style of Archie, but threw themselves quite enthusiastically behind Patsy - three of their precious sixteen titles were devoted to her! The high-spirited fun with recurring characters makes more interesting reading than the romance comics, even if Patsy's adventures can be almost as repetitive. She remained a central part of Marvel's line well into the superhero-dominated sixties. Millie the Model, reduced to only one title of her own in 1957, was just as enduring.

Fantasy

These comics seem to have been the ones that really went down well with the comic-buying audience. A year later, when Marvel re-appraised their sixteen titles, they launched four more comics of the fantasy style - resurrecting "Journey into Mystery" and introducing "Strange Worlds", "Tales to Astonish" and "Tales of Suspense". The comics dropped were "Homer the Happy Ghost", "Marines in Battle", "Navy Combat" and "Patsy Walker in Miss America". Suspense and mystery was the big thing, it seems!

The stories are a heady mix of vaguely sci-fi thrillers, perhaps finding their origins in the Crime Does Not Pay narratives, but with a twist ending usually along the lines of someone turning out to be an alien. The strange tales soon developed into monster stories, and then after that gradually gave way to superheroes once those had become fashionable again. 

Strange Worlds and World of Fantasy were dropped in the 1959 reshuffle (replaced by "Kathy" and "A Date with Millie" as the teen girl comics fought back against the monsters and aliens), but the other four titles lived on longer than any of the others on this list, albeit as the homes of Thor, Captain America, the Hulk, Iron Man and their friends!

Looking down this list of comics, I have to say it's impressive that Marvel kept going at all. And it makes you appreciate just how much Stan Lee was starting from scratch when he dreamed up the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and all the rest!

The double spiral of life itself

 Back at the dawn of time (April this year) I thought it might be fun to do one of those online DNA analysis things that some people believe tell them actual non-made-up things about their ancestry. It would be nice to see how I match with relatives in the family tree, anyway. So I sent my saliva sample, and then never heard anything back. I assumed it had been lost in the post, but perhaps it had just been put on a shelf somewhere, because four months later I've had a notification that it's been received. So I might possibly be able to say things about my DNA at some point in the future! Stay tuned!

It CAN be done!

 I've done a full day's practice for the Marathon Memory Championship! 30-minute binary, numbers and cards, and three tries at spoken numbers. And though I'm so hugely out of practice generally, and my mind was wandering to a disturbing extent before long, I still achieved almost acceptable results.

I mean, it's not world-beating, but attempting four journeys' worth of data in each of the half-marathons seems like a sensible start, and I can build on it in the future if I've actually got my mojo back and found a way around my mental block. Woohoo!

Battery life

 You know, the last entry was meant to be called "Miss Bindergarten is an old lady", or something along those lines. I changed it just before posting, and must have accidentally deleted the second half entirely. Either that or Blogger automatically removes anything that casts aspersions on Miss B, which would be fine with me. Those books really are awesome.

Anyway, it's been a very long time since I used my speed cards timers, you know. When did I last memorise a pack of cards at speed in real life, rather than on the internet? It must be ages and ages ago! Long enough for the batteries to have died, anyway, so I went out and got some more to recharge my whole collection of timers (five of them still work, after all these years). You have to put some serious thought into which brands of battery to buy, of course - personally, I think you can't do better than Ordinary Zinc Batteries. I think they get a bad press. Don't listen to what the bunny tells you.

Miss Bindergarten

 If you're not familiar with the wonderful Miss Bindergarten series of American children's picture books, then you jolly well should be. There are seven of them (plus some more simplistic early-readers books), written by Joseph Slate and quite amazingly beautifully illustrated by Ashley Wolff. Go and check them out if you haven't already!

The first book was published in 1996, so there might well be people out there who've grown up with the books and are thinking 'those kids must be thirty years old by now; that's a bit depressing, isn't it?' - well, sorry to depress you further, but actually they must be even older than that!

See, "Miss Bindergarten Stays Home from Kindergarten", as you can calculate from the calendar and the number of school days they've had so far, takes place in a November when the first of the month was a Saturday:

And the most recent year that happened when the first book was published was 1986! Miss B's class must therefore have been born in 1980 and 1981, and thus be 41 years old by now. She herself must be in her sixties - she's probably retired.

But I imagine she married Chief Dave and lived happily ever after, and Coco the cockatoo is no doubt still going strong - they live for absolute ages. So cheer up, old people who've been depressed by reading this!

I'm an actor

Okay, I'm not an actor. I don't really claim to be one, but I do have an account on backstage.com. Nobody has ever used it to contact me for my services as a memory man (they find the strangest, most obscure ways to get in touch with me, as a rule), but it's worth it alone for the contact I got from a student film, back in February. They asked me if I'd like to audition for the part of Eugene, father of a young wizard who wants to break with family tradition and study agriculture instead.

I look like the kind of person they imagined Eugene to be, apparently. Also, I'm under five foot nine, which was a requirement for the production due to low ceilings. I suspect they contacted everybody on backstage.com who fitted the height and age range they were looking for.

I was quite delighted by the idea, and immediately got to work recording my performance of the script they sent me! Since the scene involved collecting washing from the line, I went out to Poundland and bought a washing line and pack of clothes pegs, roped in my brother (a rather better actor than me) to play the part of 16-year-old Duffy, strung the line between the bannister and bookcase at opposite ends of my living room, and got to work with some serious acting!

Firstly, here's the script, in case you think I'm interpreting it wrongly:

In the previous scene, Duffy told his parents that he wants to follow a career in agriculture instead of one in magic (which is the family tradition). Only the mother, Clementine, shows a reaction to these news (since she strongly disagrees with this decision). Eugene, on the other hand, does not like confrontation, leaving the serious talk for his wife.

Duffy eventually leaves this space, wanting to be alone. Clementine tells Eugene to go to their son and reason with him. He obeys to this order, goes to Duffy’s room to ask for his help to pick up the washing that is outside. The scene starts right after this.

EXT. COTTAGE - GARDEN - DAY 

Duffy and Eugene unpeg washing from the line outside. Robes. Bed Sheets. Stuffed and dead animals. Scrolls. Etc. Duffy picks a tattered old wizard hat off the washing line. 

 

EUGENE

I -- I hope you know what's coming your way. Oh, boy. 

 

DUFFY

Permanent groundings. Overloaded with chores. 

 

EUGENE

Permanent groundings. Overloaded with chor -- See, yes, exactly.

 

DUFFY

I thought we were only meant to hand wash all of the old clothing? 

 

EUGENE 

Early bedtimes. No pocket money.

 

DUFFY 

The stitching had already started to tear. Now, look at it. 

 

EUGENE 

I get it -- you -- how it doesn't seem a big deal right now...

 

DUFFY 

It's too delicate for our janky old machine. That's the problem. 

 

EUGENE 

But, being apart of a community like ours, your uncles, aunties, cousins. You're meant to be the one setting an example for, for -- forget about the washing!

 

DUFFY 

If you make sure to spot treat it, then maybe you can salvage another couple years -- in a clean-esque and hygienic-esque way. 

 

EUGENE 

How the ones with it in their blood are the only ones who can truly excel. Duffy, did you hear what I said?

Duffy wiggles his finger through a hole in the hat. 

 

DUFFY 

Colour faded. That smell! And all these holes, like a rat chewed right through – 

 

EUGENE 

Gimme that!

He snatches it from out of Duffy's hand. Tosses it in the laundry basket. 

 

EUGENE 

What you have is a birthright, passed down by generations. You have magic--

 

DUFFY 

Running through your veins. 

 

EUGENE 

Just, freeze! Please. To be a wizard it's like...

 

DUFFY 

Am I supposed to stay frozen while you search for a metaphor? 

 

EUGENE 

Duffy!

 

DUFFY 

Dad, no! I'm not -- I can't turn back now. Look, I'll always have my wand. To walk away from this. That isn't what this is. 

 

EUGENE 

If you don't go down a certain path... not something you can come back from... you won't... this family... old fashioned... without doing exactly what they want, they might turn their back on you.

 

DUFFY 

Would you?

Silence. Rain starts to fall. 

 

EUGENE

Quick!

Duffy grabs the laundry basket and dashes in. Eugene whips the bed sheet off the washing line and lifts it over his head as he runs in. Eugene trips as the bedsheet drops down over his eyes, blocking his vision.

And here's the video! This was my favourite take, mainly because of a minor mishap at the end...

I really thought the bookcase was solid enough that that couldn't happen, even if I got the sheet tangled up. Here's a take without all the damage...

The students picked someone else for the part. I thought the finished work would have been posted online by now, they must have finished for the summer and gone onto whatever film students do after they graduate, but it doesn't seem to be. I think we've given more than enough spoiler space to stop my audition tapes ruining the story for any potential viewers, so here you go! Admire my performance skills!

The MSO is on!

 It's now possible to register for the Mind Sports Olympiad 2022! It'll take place 25 years after the first one, you know - this makes me feel old. But please click on this link to register for the events of your choice. If you're going for the whole week, the best thing to do is buy the all-you-can-play ticket for £130 (it was fifty quid in 1997; I feel even older now), but if you're just in it for the memory, then you need to look for Marathon Memory (£15, all day Sunday 21 August), Natural Memory (£10, morning of Monday 22 August) and Speed Memory (£10, afternoon of Monday 22 August). These three competitions can be entered separately, but if you take part in all three, it adds up to an overall MSO Memory Championship!

Here's how the whole thing works...

Please pay attention to that one. This year's MSO competition, for the first time, will be done digitally, using this software. Competitors should bring their own laptop - although it might be possible to provide one for people who arrive without.

That's the marathon memory - it's a long and mentally draining day! Only for serious professionals or masochists! Or weirdos who actually LIKE this kind of thing, such as me...

To pad out the Natural Memory competition, I'd also like to add these three quick bits too, from the Memory League competitions. I haven't yet agreed this with anyone, though. What do you think? It would be fun! We might have to save it for next year, though - it's a bit late to be changing the format now...

And as for the speed memory...

Speed cards will be done with REAL cards! Bring your own real cards, or alternatively we'll provide them for you!

Again, these two are something I would like to add in - maybe next year, when everything won't have been arranged in such a hurry...

I hope that all makes sense, but I will gladly answer any questions people might have. Hope to see you there!