Monday, August 07, 2017

Pin-up of the week

Here's the Men's Health article I was talking about a little while ago. So it's official - I've had my picture in two different continents' editions of Men's Health, holding me up as a shining example of masculine well-being. They asked me for a photo for that sidebar, and I admitted that I don't own any pictures of myself - I did try taking a selfie, but it looked so hideous I didn't want to inflict that on the healthy men of America, and they found a rather nice one somewhere, so it all worked out all right in the end.

Sunday, August 06, 2017

The new season!

Yes, it's an important sporting weekend! The football season has started, if you care about the Community Shield, the extra preliminary round of the FA Cup, or the Championship. But while you're waiting for the real football to start next weekend, the Autumn Season* of the Online Memory League Championship has also kicked off. Well, started. We don't kick things in memory competitions.

I've ended up in division 1, which makes me a favourite for relegation, and considering that it was my job to randomly choose the schedules, the random number generator on Excel really hasn't been kind to me. My first five matches are against Simon, Katie, Marcin, Hannes and Alex, all of whom are likely to thrash the pants off me (not literally - we all keep our pants on in memory competitions). All my games against the few opponents I have a half-chance of beating come towards the end of the season, so I think the best I can hope for is a miraculous last-gasp escape. It's great fun, though!


*Simon Orton pointed out that calling it the autumn season is inappropriate in Australia - I can see we're going to have all kinds of confusion about this. Maybe it's the August-October Season instead.