Subject was something of an amateur imagineer in those days. But the dark square bishops found me and dragged me back in -- or down -- or up.

Heh, brilliant. Your mother seems to be a more subtle drug dealer than some, though. Last time I bought anything like that - about a month ago - Mr Pharmacist quite literally tossed my little sachet of happiness to me from ten feet away in a pub. I was alarmed, as you'd imagine. I mean, you've met me -- can you imagine how I'd get along in prison? There'd be hilarious consequences, I'm sure.

I also have a large collection of new and used ones at home, which is not generally the case regarding other entities with which I have had love affairs.

But each to their own.

Robbie Robertson:

"Take what you want, and you leave the rest..."

For verily it is coded: Nintendo is a jealous God.

"I ain't lookin' to compete with you, Beat or cheat or mistreat you..."

- <Bob Dylan, My Back Pages>

++++

<One's Back Pages>
by Charles Windsor Battenburg de Wales

One's pages will bow
And scrape for you,
Tread your grape for you,
Jape for you and tape for you

One is looking to meet your kin
Measure your chin and your risk of sin.
All one can really bear to do
Is beget one's heir on you
And beget one's spare on you.

Fe.

You are a hook
I am a Crook
You are a Book
I am a Duke
Fear Me.

No? OK, give me a 2nd guess. Prospero? No, wait, he's a fictional person invented by Bill Shakespeare for Peter Greenaway. I'll try ... the Duke: John Wayne?

(An occasional chess player once described by his agent as 'a good country player', whatever that meant -- either he was a GM with olympiad experience, or he tended to open with 1.a4, the Meadow Hay Attack.)

Note how everything connects, incidentally. Wayne's final film before his death from cancer was The Shootist, in which he played an elderly gunfighter dying of cancer. His name? J.B. Books.

No relation to the guy in <Indiana Jones and the Barn of the Amish> -- eh, sorry, I meant Peter Weir's excellent film Witness, starring Harrison Ford as John Book.

Or the great Finnish master Eero Böök, with umlauts, most famous for being on the receiving end of one of Alekhine's best attacks. OK, he also beat Keres once, and received an honorary GM award in his 70s.

I'd quite like one of those, but of course I already have a GM title.

Wayne could have called his 'Truman' -- Harry S was ultimately responsible for the nuclear tests that irradiated Monument Valley, where Wayne and John Ford went on blithely making Westerns.

Now *that* was a Truman Show.

Meanwhile I'll raise the tone by imagining how Sam Beckett would handle the situation.

Scene. A crossroads with a dead tree in a flat country. Ideally, the whole country should be set on stilts -- to suggest post-apocalyptic Dutchness, or an author with no understanding of the economics of set design, or both.

Two tramps appear.

Tramp A: When you are in the last ditch there is nothing to do but ...

[a two-dot pause]

[beat]

[a longer pause, a three-dotter]

[another beat]

Tramp A: Ummmmm.

Tramp B: Ehhhhh?

A: Yes fugget, I've forgotten my lines again. I can't for the life of me remember what one is supposed to do with the last dyke.

B: Ditch.

A: Eh?

B: Ditch, not dyke. And you're supposed to sing.

A: Seems a bit daft.

B: It does. But you know who to blame for that.

[pause]

[whispering]

A: Himself?

B: Himself exactly.

- I am a *star*, Herr Schnippisch, and I will my Hotelzimmer trash! Und my Banner I will Spangle! When do I a Sausage become?

And there's young Gauss, figuring out at eight that n(n+1)/2 equals the sum of all integers from 1 to n, after his teacher asked the class to add all the numbers from 1 to 100. Which is 5050, as anyone can see.

Or Fischer 'getting good' - as good as a GM, nearly as good as Carlsen - at about 12. And playing the game of the century.

And Capablanca, using induction to work out the rules at four and remaining unbeaten - more or less - until Alekhine caught him in the Preparation Trap 30 years later.

Also Sammy Reshevsky, Wesley So, Carlsen, Negi, Caruana, Karjakin, Arturito Pomar, and whoever else you think qualifies.

Me, I'm naturally more interested in the veterans, the old guys: Korchnoi, Smyslov, the ones who kept on keeping on, or even got better at an advanced age.

Nothing, however, compares with the French writer Paul de Kock -- his name allows a couple of smutty puns in Joyce's Ulysses, and his books weren't much better.

In the spirit of research, however - the spirit that makes small boys look up 'fart' in the dictionary and learn something about methane or perhaps hydrogen sulfide - I, ah, happened to check out Paul de Kock on wikipedia.

Where I learned that "Paul de Kock began life as a banker's clerk."

I'm no expert. But -- while this is clearly prodigious, I would suggest that any child showing such proclivities nowadays should be gently steered in another direction. As long as they're less than a month old there's still time for chess.

I loved their well known songs like "Uncle Sam", "It must be love", "Our House" etc

Sometimes an opening line apparently goes out of fashion because an alternative line has been revived. I think that's what happened with the Winawer, btw -- the ...0-0 line used to have a poor reputation, but new resources were found - at which point it became more popular than the alternatives.

There are a lot of confounding factors. And I've stopped believing in memes ... or, rather, I don't think that superficial analogies between cultural and biological evolution are strong enough to permit an actual science of memetics.

Chess openings aren't even properly described or differentiated, most of the time. The 'most played opening' according to CG's statistics page is no such thing: it's just the most frequently used name. Often wrongly.

*Quid voliunt grabiturque restum remnant.*