There once was a fencer named Fisk,
Whose thrust was exceedingly brisk.
So fast was his action,
The Fitzgerald contraction
Reduced his rapier to a disk.

Lad's what's the <Fitzgeral Contraction>?

(constitutionally refuses to Google anything ever again)

Thanks for your ruminations on <synchronicity-coincidence>, mates, and here I was ready to start a <cult>:

<And that's the <short> answer? Hmm, Jessica, your friend seems the talkative type ("yeah, he'll TALK AT anyone and I'VE had enough...">

I chose not to read this as a self-deprecating remark about yourself, who could never bore me in a million years-- Instead, I focused on the hidden message signified by you putting them thingys around the word <short>:

Consequently,
I just left yet another angry rant about this topic, but I put it in my forum "just in case."

It's a combined <character assassination> of <Kurtz> and testimonial to <yourself>: Dom Marlowe/Willard (book or film, take your pick)

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...> Hilarious--Truly great stuff ("Sun dancing in the sky. Repeated bolts of Jovian lightning")--also love James's book. My king, both literally and figuratively, all too often reaches h4. Late: must to bed!

It was, um, both, actually. Thanx for saying I could never bore you, but I'm sure I could if I tried. Or didn't try. Whichever ... I just sometimes feel that I rabbit on far more than is strictly necessary.

But you're right, there's no need to acksherly apologize for this, even if true. Them as likes it can read to the end, and them as doesn't can quit at the first extended parenthesis and go back to basket-weaving, masturbation, reading the title page of Pilgrim's Progress while standing on their heads, watching the clock for an hour then setting it back to 00:00 and watching it repeat, jousting with hard-boiled eggs, and other fun-filled activities suitable for sane adults everywhere. But I digreffe.

That Short game, I've realized, is the first time (that I'm aware of) that any of my games has been published anywhere -- apart from losses. I'd never submitted any to the TICAbase, even though I've beaten or drawn with many of the players therein. And I had a knack for picking the wrong tournaments or the wrong year -- everything from Cork 1974 was published, and I only started playing tournaments in '75/'76. Even recently -- I played in the small-scale and unpublished Cork 2006, instead of Cork 2005 which doubled as EU championship. One would almost think I'd been hiding.

I *do* know of two previously published games in tournament books. In both cases I was the top seed in the supporting 'major' tournament rather than the main c'ship itself, and in each case I lost hilariously to a local player with a rating 400 points lower. So naturally they published the fine effort by the local boy.

I met one of them recently -- also a journalist, as it happens -- literally 30 years after the event. And he instantly remembered the game and said it was his 'finest hour'. And this is a guy who's been steadily playing chess through all the years in between. Scary. I was once an 18-year-old scalp, apparently.

It's nearly 7am here -- I'm up early, for a change, after 4 hours sleep. Work to be done, so I'll sign off. I'll send you some meta-Frogspawn ideas soon... think I'd get away with publishing a small-scale greatest hits compendium (chess, Roeg, the Ent Thing, and more...) and selling it thru our Frog-related website...?

Sigh. I know, it's "early" in the "morning" here -- such quaint tribal customs -- but I gotta get my brain up to speed fast to meet a rejigged deadline. Formerly a leisurely noon, now a savage 10am.

George I & George II: Germans. Spoke German. Grew cabbages in the palace. One, probably the 2nd of that ilk, managed enough English to say "I hate all boets and bainters".

George III: mad, but lasted 60 years. Porphyria and other modern disorders have been diagnosed. Still mad. Famous for misplacing his American colonies.

George IV: not much use as king, but a hoot earlier as Prinny, the Prince Regent. Snubbed and ruined the era's greatest celeb, Beau Brummell, for referring to him with the words "Who's your fat friend?"

George V: bearded sailor type, Victoria's grandson, had the helm during World War I (versus Cousin Willy, the Kaiser) and managed the family name-change from Battenburg-Schlemiel-Hohenzollern von Grubstuck, to Mountbatten, and then Windsor.

George VI: 2nd son of aforementioned and parent of present queen. Stammered. Thrust unhappily into limelight when Big Brother abdicated to run off with divorcee Wallis Simpson. "Decent of the chap to become king at such short notice" was the general reaction. Then Hitler started bombing Buck Palace. Quite stressful, that. Died rather young. Can't say I blame him.

George VII: secret Afro-Asiatic-Maori son of Prince Willum, gets the throne in 2008 after a mysterious 'corgi LSD doping incident' leads to the annihilation of his elders...

I deleted the <Kurtz> post I put in my forum, cuz I have had poor results in the past here at CG.com <blowing a gasket>.

My temper fires up- suddenly, then is gone like a prairie storm.

Got to learn some self-restraint.

Suffice it to say, personality-wise, that IMO: Two thumbs up for <Dom>, two thumbs down for <Mr. Kurtz>.

That's all I have to say on the matter of any relevance, I think.

cheers, good luck with your deadlines.

I have deadlines almost every second day now till the end of term.

This, however, is what Science has to say:

Fitzgerald Contraction: see FitzGerald-Lorentz contraction. FitzGerald-Lorentz contraction: see Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction. Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction: see RELATIVITY.

Ah, we're getting somewhere. It's the pre-Einstein theory concerning a material body moving through the ether with velocity v, and contracting in the direction of motion by a factor equivalent to the square root of (1-V/C), where V is the square of the velocity, v, and C is the square of the speed of light in a vacuum, c.

FitzGerald and Lorentz came up with this shrinkage idea to account for the failure of Michelson and Morley to actually detect the luminiferous ether. Then Einstein came up with a slightly better explanation, though the Fitzgerald equation still works, more or less.

Did you make your Deadline? I have one for tonight and another for tomorrow night.

In defence of the "deadline"- If not for you, I'd never hand anything in ever...

I checked your forum a few hours ago and all the FENs were gone... no diagrams functioning anywhere on site... another mystery glitch or FUBAR? Maybe they want us to emulate Amber and <lorn blindfold>?

If your browser doesn't open the page completely, the diagrams don't show up. That's probably it.

Hitting "refresh" or signing out and then back in again solves the problem.

A 'browser'... is that one of those old guys who goes searching for water with a bent stick? (No Larsen jokes, please...)

The <Discovery Channel> ran a televised experiment in which professional "dowsers" were tasked with finding water on a grid of ground which had a maze of pipes filled with water beneath.

They failed to find the water. In fact, the sample group was sufficiently large that they found the number of water spots exactly as random statistical theory predicted.

Ahhh science= Killer of Romance...

Did I say, inter alia, that Mark Leyner "didn't do chess"? That was a mistake. Did I just help CG to disentangle the identities of numerous Shorts, including Nigel, Phil, and J.? Did I just...?

If I'd written the following, I'd be accused of a surfeit of topical lampreys...

<Frogspawn quote of the Day>

Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil! wasn't Typhoid Mary's son, and we never, never had a duel with shish kebab skewers over the same girl, but he did work his way through two years of UCLA as a make-up man's assistant with the Mack Sennett crew, though something about the droopy-lidded, wheels-turning-in-the-head gaze of his reminds one of Brad Darrach's description of Bobby Fischer, "Alone, uncounseled, jouncing to rock music in a borscht-belt hotel, Bobby had outgeneraled the mighty Soviet chess establishment." Phil! Phil! ...