It won't be long now, and it could be anyone.

Gravity's Rainbow is endlessly quotable (and yet quotes, perversely, detract from the awesome interconnectedness of the whole) -- the ones I have in my profile just happen to be vaguely chess-related.

The Jamf section about carbon -- where he goes on to say that life should be based on ionic bonds, not covalent ones -- "The lion does not share; the lion seizes" -- and suggests Silicon-Nitrogen, or SiN, as a starting point... is wonderful.

And that interlacing of chemistry with Nazi politics is just one thread among thousands. Kraft, Standfestigkeit, Weisse -- Strength, Stability, Whiteness -- not a Nazi slogan but "plasticity's central canon" ...

Another favorite: Enzian, the Black German rocketeer and Schwarzkommando leader: "This is what I have become, an estranged figure at a certain elevation and distance..."

Or mathematician Roger Mexico, the antipointsman, worrying about his fading relationship with Jessica Swanlake: "Oh, Jess... I'm losing you to the War..."

Or the conversation between 'Doper Dad' and his 'electrofreak' son: Dad: well, son, you know I've had some 'trips' myself, but this electricity thing... Son: <Dope never gave you immortality. You hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat! But We can live forever, in a clean, honest, purified Electroworld...>

(Which is probably the source of the meat/cyber polarity later used by William Gibson, and now commonplace.)

Or: "All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic."

And, finally:
<It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted... secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology. . . by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, "Money be damned, the very life of (insert name of nation) is at stake", but meaning, most likely, "DAWN IS NEARLY HERE, I NEED MY NIGHT'S BLOOD, MY FUNDING, FUNDING, AHH MORE, MORE...">

What Pynchon does so brilliantly, and can sustain over hundreds of pages, is a multi-level many-register effect, simultaneously 'high' and low' culture, mixing quantum physics with comicbooks, King Kong with history, biochemistry, metaphysics...

Take Jamf's 'cosmic humiliation' that life is based on 'something so mutable, so soft as a sharing of electrons'. It's insane, and funny, and Jamf in the text is not merely a buffoon; yet it also reflects the historic lunacy that was National Socialist Chemistry (everything from chess to physics had to officially come in a 'good' Aryan form and a 'bad' Jewish one).

Thus actual characters [sic] like Rudolphe Tomaschek, director of the Dresden Institute of Physics, who wrote "Modern Physics is an instrument of world Jewry for the destruction of Nordic Science..."

Maybe somebody should give Bobby Fischer a copy of Gravity's Rainbow for his birthday. Then explain the concept of satire. And...

Wouldn't work, would it? You can only hold ideas like his if you've been thoroughly satire-proofed. The satire-detection circuits and credulity neurons got filled up early on with the Sozin and Gruenfeld, while chess amplified and exacerbated the human need for pattern -- aka cultural paranoia -- and the result... sadly predictable.

Perhaps the species, noting the damage that can be done to brains, will exercise caution before trying to create further Fischers.

We salute Lin Tie-shyong, a professor at I-shou University in Taiwan, who suggested to the authorites that -- in order to assist the annual migration of the Euploeini or milkweed butterflies -- parts of the Linnei section of Freeway #3 should be closed. The authorities have agreed. Huge butterfly nets have also been erected along the motorway to keep the butterflies at a safe height...

<Butterfly Nets> were also used by Vladimir Nabokov -- novelist, lepidopterist, genius. His books include Pnin, Pale Fire, Lolita, Ada, and The (Luzhin) Defence. One ends with the exquisite sentence "a nice night for mothing". Nabokov named a species of moth, taught Pynchon at Cornell, and composed chess problems.

In his memoir Parla, Memoria (Speak, Memory) he describes the composition of this problem:

click for larger view

A 'Meredith'. White plays. Mate in 2.

William <Meredith>, the American problemist, gave his name to the mate-in-2 variety. The actor Burgess Meredith was a star in his youth, and in old age become known as Stallone's trainer in the Rocky movies. Hollywood has always tried to defy the (male) ageing process by persuading us that desiccated old guys were deeply attractive to women a third of their age. A 60-ish Robert Redford, maybe; Stallone at 60? Woody Allen at 120? Hmm.

The Rocky movies have a minor historical claim to fame: they extend the science of kino-gerontology to that *other* male attribute, violence, by showing us how musclebound elderly males can still whup anyone they wanna pick a fight with. Burgess Meredith also played The Penguin in the first (1966) Batman movie, with Adam <West>. With more sinister charm than Danny DeVito, too.

East is east, and <West> is west, and the butterflies in Taiwan fly north to breed, and penguins live near the South pole. EW-NS. Anyone for a game of Bridge?

Meaningless coincidence, of course. If you pick 23 random persons the odds of two sharing a birthdate are over 50%.

Born under the sign of the Computer, actually. Ballard calls it "the Taurean Computer, seeding its limitless possibilities" in an effort to link his neo-Zodiac to the old Chaldean one, with its farm animals and water carriers (now replaced by psychotics and ballistic missiles).

The ♘

I object in the strongest possible terms to the preceding 70 pages of this forum, and demand that they be stricken from the record on the grounds that I wish to climb higher on a meaningless statistics list.

The CG caste system has evolved since then, and folk mostly stick to their own tribes, where everyone is a registered favorite and strangers get snarled at.

Didn't know one could favoritise oneself, though. Hmm. Do I like myself that much? Must consider implications.

Yet again, it shows the variety of ways in which people use this place. <twinlark> -- who won't mind if I say that he and I are not entirely dissimilar, having served together in the Nickel Wars and gone on benders on the Beer page to celebrate -- recently left a message saying, in effect, "like most people I often run a 'search kibitzing' on my name..."

He beat the stuffing out of <Frazier> in Manila, toe to toe in the center of the ring.

We therefore declare <jihad> on this forum and everone who has even heard of it.

I knew this day would dawn. I'm going to have to say something I never said before, not even in the vilest days of Forum University Capablanca Karpov.

Nobody tried to solve the Nabokov puzzle or asked me for the solution.

Conclusion: we have zero readers left.

There are more readers of FROGSPAWN than there are Angels on the head of a Pinhead.

They just take time to absorb oxygen through their skins.