My lady love, my dove

 I've had lunch today with a magician who wants us to do a mind-reading act together. This is something that could be really cool! I could be Magic Ian!

Which is a reference to a Supergran story (the books, not the TV series), in which I first learned about this particular kind of magic act. Although the title of this post is from a Roald Dahl story which was probably my second encounter with it. I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually performing the trick live, but I'm sure I could be great at it.

Anyway, this magician turned out to be a Hereford fan, and they happened to be playing Boston Utd today in a crucial game for the Pilgrims' chances of making the play-offs in the National League North, and Boston did indeed win, two-nil. So this is probably a sign that I should definitely do this magic act, although that might just be because I want to do it, and I'm seeing signs everywhere. We can perform at the promotion celebration party!

The vast unknown powers of the sun and moon

 There's a total eclipse of the sun in America today, and not nearly enough people are talking about this guy!

Another great Bob Haney creation who I said I should write about some time, and still haven't. I'll do it one day! Maybe the next eclipse...

The Bendertaker

 Remember that time Boris photoshopped my head onto Christopher Dean's body? Seventeen years ago? Wow, that's a long time now I come to look at it. Thankfully, I've just made more friends since then who do things like that - Don Michael Vickers in a conversation about wrestling on Facebook said I'm his favourite wrestler!

I would be great on the WWE. I can totally see the storyline already. It would involve The Miz and guest-star Lars Christiansen, perhaps the only memory master who could pass for a WWE superstar. I should write it down and send it to whoever writes their scripts nowadays.

An Actor's Life For Me

 Remember the short-lived sitcom with John Gordon Sinclair? It was sort of okay. But the point is, I'm an actor now, and a puppeteer too - I write this on the way home from a weekend's rehearsals, with a whole new appreciation for the cleverness and complexity involved in a stage production! I've never done this kind of thing before, and the whole experience is just brilliant! I don't care if it's a thing none of my blog-readers are going to see, or want to see, I'm officially considering myself an experienced stage actor from now on!

A good Friday

 I like four-day weekends. There should be more of them. Especially when I've got nothing I needed to do except arrange travel and accommodation for a trip to London tomorrow for puppet rehearsals. I can't really afford it, but sometimes you need to splash out a tiny bit. Likewise, I've got my bike fixed (more money) and went for a ride this morning, trying and nearly successfully managing to avoid the downpours and only be out in the sunny bits.

And I had a bath and played a memory league match against Tohirbek O'rolov in my pyjamas. Why he was wearing my pyjamas I'll never know, but he won, which puts paid to my chance of promotion to division 2 for next season. But that's fine - I still play reasonably well without any training, and I know what it would take to improve.

Here's an alternative take of that joke: I played a memory league match against Tohirbek O'rolov in Uzbekistan. Why I went all the way to Uzbekistan to play on the internet I'll never know, but it's really great to see new explosions of memory competition enthusiasts in parts of the world are new and exciting to me. I'll never get tired of seeing the constant expansion of memory sports! What unexplored territories are still remaining to us? I should investigate which countries have never had a competitor, and go over there to introduce the people to an all-new national pastime!

I came 53rd

 Well, it's an improvement on 72nd. I stupidly rearranged the order of part but not all of the data page and had to go back and fix it, or I would have had time to do a bit more, but really, this is unimpressive. I need to get better at this.

How to excel at Excel

 It's the third battle of this year's Excel esports on Thursday morning, and it's fair to say I haven't done excellently so far. I came 72nd in Battle II. That doesn't really qualify as excelling.

I don't think I've got worse at it; there are more people competing this year who are really good at it. But this is something I need to work on, and it's all about speed and technique. I'd really like to do with this what I did with memorising cards, and devise a way to solve problems using Excel more quickly and efficiently than has ever been done before. I don't know if that's possible. You can't invent new Excel formulas. But Excel has a LOT of formulas, most of which nobody in the world ever uses. There's scope for believing that if I can get familiar with them all, and how to apply them... it's definitely possible.

Brilliantly, the spreadsheet provided for Battle II accidentally had a formula left in the example box for task 4 - if you noticed that (which nobody did), you just had to copy it down into the answer boxes! No brainpower required! But the point is, it's a really great formula!

=SUM(ABS(OFFSET(Customers!$B$2:$F$2,MATCH(G169,Customers!$A$3:$A$102,0),0)-OFFSET(Wines!$B$2:$F$2,MATCH(H169,Wines!$A$3:$A$102,0),0)))

That's so much more efficient than the way I did it, which had lots of intermediate steps. I did those steps really quickly, but I need to get to the point where I can instinctively see that one complete formula, and set it up! It gives me something to aim for, at least...