There's also a highly controversial theory that the 19th century actually lasted for 110 years. There was a 'lost decade' -- a ten-year period which was so miserable they decided not to count it. The latest calculations place it between 1829 and 1830.

Meaning that The French Defence could have incubated for a whole decade in there. Also, of course, mathematical boy wonder Evariste Galois was actually an old man of 30 when he invented Group Theory.

Bishop Berkeley agreed with you. In 'Discourse to an Infidel Mathematician' he wrote of Newton's Calculus and its infinitesimal fluxions:

OTOH, some people reason that when a move has been out of fashion for nearly 150 years that it might have a certain, ah, shock value. This, however, does not seem to be the way your opponents were thinking -- although it might have been the logic of whoever they were copying.

I saw one of his books, 'Et Tu, Babe' in a bookshop once, newly published, but had no money with me. I went back for it about two weeks later and was told it was already out of print and totally unavailable.

I'm such a bonehead. <Fischer,> of course, does the annotations for <Morphy v. Duke> Philidor game.

THAT'S THE GAME I WAS LOOKING AT YESTERDAY.... It wasn't a Fischer game at all, I don't know why I forgot that in the space of 20 hours...

Is there anything you don't know?

I'll have to repeat what I told <Eyal>....

Cut it out! You're making us all look bad!

<My Maria/
She's a simple kind of girl/
Goes to church/
Sees the blood of Jesus flow...>

The French may be an act of religious devotion to some, but it is not usually seen as a <locus of blood-letting> in the way that, say, the Dragon is.

But the French is frequently the location of minor miracles, including almost all games won by Black.

The ultimate example -- Reshevsky vs Vaganian, 1975 (there should be a link in my games collection under 'Theriomorphic French Games') isn't so much a miracle as the sun dancing in the sky, repeated bolts of Jovian lightning, mass hallucination, etc.

Beyond a religious experience, or at least a Variety of same that would have shocked and scarified Mr William James. Varieties of Religious Experience? When your King reaches h4, you can pray to any deity you like...

Cale again ('Chinese Envoy'):

"She could talk about things that never mattered ever/ One person's lying miserable life after another/
She could talk to the French/
Germans, at will ... they'd never listen...

I have it ... can mail it to you if you want. Also, as I wrote above, "The tetherballs of Bougainville" is pretty hilarious.

<And I haven't seen anything new in at least 5 years... is he still writing, do you know?>

Don't let yourself forget the score of a game. OK, it was fast and tense and wild stuff happened. But if you work at reconstructing it, immediately afterwards, you should be able to recall it. It's all in there somewhere, stored by those zillions of chessic neurons. Dredge it up, like fishing for a dream before it fades.

Admittedly, such reconstructions can be difficult enough when both players are present. When it's just you, it'll take all your resources. But the act of reconstructing the moves can be very good for your other chess skills.

If it comes down to trying to fathom exactly which order your opponent made his blunders in, don't worry -- improvise.

And do this *before* you jump in here to shout "YIPPPEEE", strong as the temptation must be. Discipline, Ma Reine, is how the French conquered the best bits of the planet (France, Quebec, Montreal, Tahiti, New Orleans, Beirut, Vientiane, Senegal, Algeria, St Pierre & Miquelon, etc) -- even if they had to give some bits back later.

You will soon catch <Acrice> and be the boss of this place!!

Ahhh <Boethius> and his beloved <Fortuna>...

<DomDaniel> shut down, imprisoned like <Boethius> in apparent ignonioninimony, only to rise Phoenixishly to not only get one of his games in the <CG.com> database, but to continue his rise to the apex of kibbitzing glory!!!

All hail the <Dominate>! May he continue to be <luckier than Augustus, better than Trajan>...

And I have questions about <synchronicity>.

When we experience what we call <synchronicity>, do you think there is a metaphysical, or at least unknown-to-science, force in operation, or do we merely notice coincidences? Here is why I ask, conveniently numbered for purposes of orderlinessosityness...

1. I went through the <Morphy> game last night, reading <Fischer's> notations, finding a great move against the <Philidor>. I immediately post here, crowing about beating someone with the move.

2. You direct me to the VERY game I had mistaken for <Fischer's>!

3. Flush with Yahoo victory (8 wins, 1 draw and 1 loss against equal or better rated players last 10 games) yet again--- I decided to play another game today (usually I play one per day)---And of course, he opens with the EXACT SAME MOVE SEQUENCE as my previous game today, allowing me to play my newly beloved <Bc4>...

4. Naturally, as your Chess Protege and ecstatic once again, my first impulse was to post in your forum crowing yet again... Only to

5. Run smack into your post telling chessplayers to try to reconstruct their last game from memory before exulting and crowing... Then, red-faced, realizing that I remember the game I just played in broad strokes, but also realizing that I could not reconstruct the move sequence from memory!!!

Is this just coincidence, or are GRAND MYSTICAL FORCES at play?

I need to know...

But a protege wants to please her mentor--

My <composite> (averaged rating of all my Yahoo IDs) is now just a tad shy of <1700>-- I never believed this would happen---

I'm considering joining an OTB chess club... There's one about 45 kilometres downriver that meets every Monday Night...

I've never played at a chess club in my life!! But I feel ready now...

(practices steely <Mikhail Tal> glare in mirror)

Example. I hadn't consciously thought about Faulkner in ages. There was one exception -- a couple of months ago I found a Wm Burroughs reference, where he wrote that Faulkner's brother was the narc squad detective who busted him in New Orleans, sometime around 1948-49. An innaresting angle, if true. Which Faulkner, one wonders, was the black sheep of that family?

So a friend and I spent an afternoon online chasing it down -- the friend, John, plays chess pretty well, is writing an MA thesis on certain writers mentioned here, and is much better than me at finding web stuff.

But we found little. Weird blogs where the words Faulkner, William, Burroughs, police, heroin, bust, New Orleans and Mississippi Vice etc can all occur in the same sentence but yet have nothing at all to do with the topic.

I haven't read any Faulkner biographies, either. But the story rings true. Burroughs described the incident in 'Junkie' without naming the cop -- it was only years later he told someone 'by the way, that was Wm Faulkner's brother... not a bad guy, for a narc, and at least he knew what a typewriter was and why a citizen might possess one...'

End of incident. Then I see Faulkner in your list, find a copy of 'Go Down, Moses', ask your advice, etc.

Since then, Faulkner refs have been coming at me from all angles. Some, like Robert Anton Wilson (who wanted to sell me his Apple Mac around 1990 when he was moving back to the USA from Dublin... I turned him down... long story, but it's the nearest I came to owning a famous writer's instrument...) actually mention Go Down, Moses... und so weiter.

The Number 23 stuff is similar.
23 (neither too big or small, too common or unusual) works because, once you draw a person's attention to it, they tend to see it everywhere. This actually happens. It's exacerbated by the fact that the aforementioned Burroughs and R.A. Wilson were icosatriologists (though the word itself, I think, is mine)... but since Hollywood found out, the whole thing has gone stale. Though the psychology experiment might still work with some other number.

I reckon all such stuff is the brain's pattern machinery in action. Chessplayers and paranoids have good pattern detectors, making Bobby Fischer a giant. Some people -- and I'm probably safe in including you and me in that list -- have some sort of hypertrophied pattern capacity.

In another era we'd have founded empires or religions, become major philosophical figures or been burned at the stake. In this our secular age, we do Frogspawn.

But I gotta plan to expand the Empire of the Frog Sensei ... keep checking out those website concepts ... it could be time to *act*...

Oh,wait, isn't that due to happen... yesterday? Damn these time equations, Dr Einstein? What happens when the infamous Fitzgerald Contraction gets us, huh?