<Nanobrain's Birthday> : August 9

<Whitney Houston's Birthday> : August 9

1st Conference First Edition

Organizer(s) : Wesley Chess Cafe

Tournament Director : Israel Landicho

Town : Imus

Date : 2012/02/18

Final Ranking

Rank Team Gam. + = - MP Pts.

1 ECO Driving Academy 5 5 0 0 10 12

2 Amirzon Telecom Imus 5 3 1 1 7 9½

3 Eagle Star Crew Management 5 3 0 2 6 7

4 Coca-Cola South Luzon 5 3 0 2 6 6

5 JRCM Bacoor Chess Club Association 5 3 0 2 6 5

6 IPI 5 2 1 2 5 8½

7 Dusit Hotel 5 2 0 3 4 8½

8 ODP Gamblitz B 5 2 0 3 4 3

Si NM Pau, na-upset din. Di ka makakasigurado dito sa blitz.

Full house.

Now, Houston, do we have a problem? :)>

I just looked at the pic closely, your WGM is right: in this shot, magkamukha talaga ang dalawa, haha!

1. What do a pizza delivery boy and a gynecologist have in common?

2. What is the similarity between a take home KFC chicken meal and a beautiful woman?

Answers:

1. They have what they want in front of them. They can look at it, smell it, touch it--but they can't eat it.

This is a four interconnected short stories dripping with melancholy. The narrator is said to be a fictive character from an earlier novel "Street of Riches" but I haven't read anything else of Gabrielle Roy yet except her most famous work, "The Tin Flute."

The first story, "My Almighty Grandmother," has the narrator at six years of age. From her eyes we see her old grandmother with her dimming eyesight, failing memory and a host of other infirmities. The girl, her mother and her grandmother: three women of the same bloodline separated by generations. The girl hears her mother ask her grandmother, when the two thought they were alone--"When one reaches your age, Maman, what does life seem to be?" The old woman answers: "A dream, my daughter, not much more than a dream."

The second story, "The Old Man and the Child," has the same girl, her grandmother already dead. This is now about an old gentleman neighbor who lives alone by himself, separated from his own kin, and the beautiful Lake Winnipeg (in Manitoba, Canada where Gabrielle Roy was born in 1909) he had seen countless times when he was much younger and how he made it possible for the girl-narrator to see it for the first time.

The third story carries a chess-sounding title, "The Move." But no, it's not about my favorite game. It's about going places, the oft-repeated story of the child's mother about her trips on a wagon, across the vast Canadian prairie, in the old days when she was just a child, then the child's own attempt to discover the same joy her mother had, her disillusionment that came afterwards, this "terrible distress of the heart." And when she confesses to her mother of what she had done and had found, the mother was in anguish. She knew, one day, her daughter too will leave to find her own place in the world.

The book's title is lifted from the last story, "The Road Past Altamont." The narrator is now a full-grown woman and her mother now old like her grandmother in the first story. They now live oceans apart but the daughter has come for a visit. Together, on a trip, they saw--or they thought they saw--the little hills the mother had known as a little girl. And there, seeing her mother painstakingly climb one of these hills with her 70-year-old legs, she asks herself: