Well, they should be.

A *quick* joke can turn into a tasteless one very easily considering timezones.. etc.

More like the other way around i think.

<PS. Just read Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang. Bloody great.> It's a novel, as you'd certainly know by now. Most of Carey's stuff is classic, some winning awards and having reasonably good movies made out of three of them: <Oscar and Lucinda> (the glass houseboat is a sight to see) with Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett as the principals, <Bliss>, and <Dead End Drive-In>.

<Bliss> and <The Illywhacker> are fantastic.

yrs

we, doggimi

I never heard of the Kangaroo Defence either (anyone know where the name comes from? Did somebody like Purdy play it down under? Or was it named on the Dragon model, "Hey, this looks like a kangaroo"? And if so, what were they smoking?)

For latecomers, the Defense in questions is simply 1.d4 e6 2.c4 Bb4+ -- most of the time it transposes into a Bogo-Indian, but if White delays or avoids Nf3 there are some independent lines, like in my game.

I'd have called it a "Franco-Indian" myself (and I vaguely recall seeing it associated with Keres, who was no kangaroo) -- 1...e6 for the French bit, then the 'Indian' move 2...Bb4+ -- and if Black then plays ...f5 it becomes a Dutch (or a Dutch-Indian) while an early ...b6 can transpose to a Queen's Indian.

No need for Kangaroos at all, far as I can see. If you encourage these Marsoop-Eyals, they'll just evict the frogs and take over the whole opening nomenklatura. Big hoppers vs little hoppers?

Actually, lately, as in this very week, I've been looking at another Franco-mutant Defence with many different names. It goes 1.e4 e6 2.d4 c5, and I've tried it a few times in the past.

It's not bad -- but it can turn into an ...e6 Sicilian if White plays 3.Nf3, or a type of Benoni if White opts for 3.d5. (Or it can go 3.Nf3 a6, maintaining tension on d4/c5, with White angling for a regular Sicilian and Black avoiding ...cxd4 -- I like this line.)

It can also start as a seemingly very different opening, a sort of Schmid Benoni: 1.d4 c5 2.d5 e6 3.e4 -- et voila!

As for names: it's been called the Franco-Indian (again!), the Franco-Benoni, and I've got a book about it that insists on calling it the Barcza-Larsen Defense.

Very dubious. If I can work out some new theory I might call it The Bisexual Frog (does he 'do it' like a Sicilian or like a Frenchman? Like Ben or like Oni?).

Which, I suspect, is the standard 'original' joke that *everyone* makes when they hear about your subject ... and which may well irritate you deeply.

You, can, always, add, your, own.

Thass the beauty of this po-mo opera-aperte hows-yer-father narrative style, innit? Or not.

BTW -- I invented something today, while doodling on a train, which might amuse you. It's basically a measurement system for British prime ministers, measured in Centipitts. I tried using plain Pitts, but it led to anomalies like "Blair may, despite current poll ratings, be worth as much as one-twentieth of a Pitt, while Thatcher tipped the scales at one-fiftieth of a Pitt."

Clumsy. Under the modified system -- like centipawns -- Thatch gets 2 centipitts and Blair gets 5 centipitts.

It doesn't stop at either 0 or 100, either: like the Celsius temperature scale, it keeps on going:

"Some have valued Attlee in excess of 140 centipitts, but only extreme loyalists agree with Churchill's self-assessment of 200 cp."

or

I guess it's like the (totally untrue) story about Eskimos having 50 words for snow (they don't, but the *English* do: slush, sleet, pack-ice, off-piste, yellow-snow, etc) or the one about Irish having '40 shades of green'. (What the hell is shalimar anyhow, and how does a breeze get to be sweet as same?)

(The Erse may not even have *one* real word for Green. Colour words behave oddly in Celtic languages. F'rinstance, the usual Irish Gaelic word for green, 'glas', is cognate with Gaulish for blue, chlas. And sometimes it means gray, not green.

But thass not all. In Irish Gaelic, there's no direct word for black. Most objects are described as being 'dorcha', or *dark*. But, if said of a person, this means dark-haired -- so the term for 'black man' is *fear gorm*, literally 'a blue man'.

<Can blue men sing the whites?>

Well, I'm up to 15 now -- recently added Dutch and Farsi.

Just finished an interesting book on language history -- The Unfolding of Language, by Guy Deutscher (2005).

His particular schtick applies something very like geological processes to historical linguistics, showing how words and structures get 'eroded' over the centuries, then built up again as auxiliaries and stray verbs get pulled in and swallowed by the main words. Detailed, surprisingly convincing, and funny.

It's well-known (language families aside) that Japanese and Turkish grammars add on elements in one 'direction', the precise opposite of the way English works. Apparently Turks and Japanese -- despite no direct historic connection between them -- find it much easier to learn one another's languages than either of them do English.

An example of a Turkish word is:

ºehirlileºtiremediklerimizdensiniz

‘You are one of those whom we can’t turn into a town-dweller’

Apart from the fact that Turkish agglutinates all this into one monstrous word where English has lots of small ones, the really significant difference is that the bits’n’bobs of the Turkish monster seem stuck on ass-backwards, to our ears. It translates directly as something like ‘town-someone-from-become-cause-to-can’t-whom-those-we-- one-of-you-are’.

This, sez Deutscher, is easier to figure out in reverse. Hmm.

"Stuck on ass backwards to our ears", eh? When I hit *that* level of Bottomesque clarity it tends to be time to call it a night...

SCENE
Garden of Eden. Ext.

The first day in Paradise has just ended. Eve and Adam sit together on the stoop, watching the sun sink below the horizon and wondering whether it'll ever come back. Suddenly it becomes quite dark. Eve shivers and huddles closer for warmth. Adam throws a protective arm round her, then nods knowingly at the darkness around them.

"Might as well call it 'a night'...", he says.

Scene 2. Garden. Morning sunshine. EXT.
Eve happily hums to herself, pouring freshly squeezed orange juice into a coconut shell. Adam meanwhile has set up a chessboard, and is looking at the pieces curiously. Eve glances over.

"That one looks like one of those horsey animals, dear, don't you think?" she says brightly.

<F'rinstance, the usual Irish Gaelic word for green, 'glas', is cognate with Gaulish for blue, chlas.>

Chinese also has a character qing (first tone) which means either blue or green - or sometimes black! (cf. the blue/black confusion above) This is an older character which is still in use (e.g. a "qing" day, "qing" grass and so on) but Chinese also has characters specifically for blue, green and black.

Some anecdotal material connected to this: both my friend (who has a Japanese girlfriend) and myself (who has a Chinese wife) feel that our partners divide up the color scale a bit differently from us. My friend's wife can say that the traffic light "turns blue", for example.