As it turns out the equally brilliant <Guy Deutscher> is teaching at the famous and prestigious University of Leiden!

So what am I waiting for! (he says while quickly grabbing his voordeelurenkaart to catch the Intercity Amsterdam - Leiden)

There's a brilliant story about ADH from around 1964. He was set to appear on some tv programme or other, and was being tarted up by the dressing room ladies. They barely touched him, however, and he didn't exactly look different or shinier.

'Oh,' said ADH, 'is there nothing more you can do?'

Re: <Kangaroo Defence>

Oz is the wrong track.

The christening of <Kangaroo Defence> was in 2002. In 1987 she still called it =Keres Defence=. Assume much smoking in between to create new name.

bread crumbs:
- There is also a <Kangaroo Variation>, arising after 1. d4 e6 2. c4 Bb4+ 3. Bd2 Bxd2+ 4. Qxd2 b6 5. Nc3 Bb7 6. e4 Nh6(!)

There is also a <<Kangaroo> in <fairy chess>>>, moving like a grasshopper but jumping over 2 pieces

<It moves like a big frog> a whiteshark definition for E.Winter definition column (unpublished)

A <Kangaroo> is a hybridization of frog and horse

Still unexplained are e.g.
<Kangaroo ~>:
~ system
~ strategy
~ drawing method
~ sacrify

LOL!

I responded to your post about <Nietszche> in my forum but they got buried immediately.

I am VERY interested in discussing his IDEAS not just INSULTS.

I know <Antichrist> and <Geneology of Morals> quite well and would LOVE to discuss them or other philosophy topics with a <sea going predator>.

Please don't hesitate to email me if you really want to get into it.

Trust me. I'm a pedant. I love talking book learning.

Last year they implanted me parts of a monkey brain. Now I can solve one-digit addition tasks within one hour. At the same level are my linguistic possibilities.

Many thanks for your understanding...

Carry on with your official duties as <the world's most feared animal>.

Just talking to someone about etymologies last night. And I just picked up a terrific looking reference book--The Facts on File Word and Phrase Origins--not so much etymologies as descriptions of the origns of things. (And I also have the OED). "One for the road" is not in it, but I do recall it had to do with execution day in merry olde England. Perhaps you know it, but the condemned would make his way to the scaffold, accompanied by a growing crowd who would be ultimately be the witnesses to his demise, by making a trek from pub to pub, where he would have a drink in each "for the road" (to the scaffold).

Rather grim, actually!

As noted historian John McEnroe said of 'em: "You guys are the Pitts of the Earth!" ... but that, of course, was in the days when 'of Britain' was pretty much synonymous with 'of the world'. As Mr Leonard Cohen said of Queen Victoria: "The slim unlovely virgin floating among German beards/ The strict governess of the huge pink maps ... Queen Victoria, do you have a punishment under the white lace? Will you spank me with a mechanical corset?"

Hmm-mm. Enough of that, maybe. Thomas Pynchon (he was bound to show up, nicht wahr?) also figures in the Centipitt Story. In 'Mason & Dixon' there are two small boys -- certain Exciting Portions of the Narrative, which involve Pirates, Sea-Battles, and Wild Indians, are told to them by their Uncle, the Revd Wicks Cherrycoke. Pynchon genealogists will note that there's a minor character in Gravity's Rainbow named Ronald Cherrycoke.

These twins are named Pitt and Pliny. The idea being, I think, that they can interchangeably be referred to as 'the Elder' and 'the Younger' according to the Mood of the Day.

However -- as <mack> suspects -- I haven't yet really fine-tuned the Centipitt System when it comes to actually evaluating prime ministers.

Is it popularity-based, like a poll? Or linked to election success (which would be unfair to those who needed a popular mandate as opposed to those who were rich enough to buy a bucketful of Rotten Boroughs in Ye Good Old Days). Of course modern politics is highly ethical and has no unseemly connections with money whatsoever. Ahem.

Just like journalism. You know the rhyme:

<You cannot hope to bribe or twist Thank God, the British Journalist.
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there's no occasion to.>

Or this, from e.e. cummings:

Professional linguists (and I have friends who lecture in the subject -- including one in Sweden -- and who keep me vaguely informed) have tended to sneer at it, loftily.

The attitude was that historical linguistics was either:

(a) unreconstructed 19th century Philology, still having trouble coming to terms with Saussure, let alone Bloomfield, Chomsky, or anyone later;

(b) amateur lunatic theories of language origin, in the eccentric mould of Benjamin Lee Whorf, a Connecticut insurance man and part-time Hopi scholar whose eccentric views became popular in the 1960s (and I myself once wrote a paper on the unlikely triad of Whorf, McLuhan and Chomsky -- I really should revisit it and throw in Nimzo as well...) -- homemade linguistic relativism, plus the yo-he-ho theory versus the hi-de-hi theory... ;

(c) mad Russians and others making loopy proto-historical connections in a vain attempt to reconstruct Nostratic, the supposed 12,000-year-old ancestor of all human languages;

(d) valid enough when done properly, but an unsexy backwater compared to the cutting-edge computational work being done in the zone between Artificial Intelligence and techno-phonetics (and potentially valuable practical inventions like superior voice-recognition algorithms and software).

But suddenly, hooray, historical linguistics is back, and sexy -- and forging connections to other hot areas like psycholinguistics, magnetic resonance brain imaging, und so weiter...

I felt like writing to Deutscher with some of my own crazy ideas ... forged in the underwater castle of the last insane Germanic Philologist in exile ... chess-as-language, and Grimm's Law as it applies to pawn structures ...

That's not <entirely> a joke, btw. Apart from (1) the idea that chess 'fluency' piggybacks on brain structures that evolved to stimulate language fluency -- thus creating the Prodigy Effect seen in math, music and chess ... there's also the idea that (like Japanese/Turkish vs English/etc, or prepositions vs postpositions, or VSO/ verb-subject-object vs OSV/ object-subject-verb (etc) ... chess also contains key either/or sub-structures.

One obvious example is Black pawn structures in the Indian and semi-open defences. If you play ...e6 you'll probably also play ...b6 [with queenside fianchetto], and either ...f5 or ...d5. But if you play ...d6, you're likely to also play ...g6 [plus kingside fianchetto] and either ...e5 or ...c5.

Like languages, all it takes is one small decision, possibly random, to set a whole <ripple effect> of other patterns in motion.

I can get even weirder than this, btw, on the topic of chess/language. I can never decide whether to tidy it up, make it civilized, and write a proper nonfiction pop-academic book ... or go the other way, push it out in gonzo territory, make it seriously crazy, and distribute the ideas Pynchon-style in a work of fiction.

Wouldn't it? "Wooden tit be luvverly" as the boys inside the Trojan Horse sang while waiting for Helen of Troy to visit.

Basta. I'll come back to the topic of colour words some other time -- another fascinating area. Anthropological research shows that colour words across the world seem to develop in a regular order -- if a language has only two colours, they're invariably dark/light or black/white. If there's a 3rd, it's always red. And so on ... puce, smaragdine, and mauve tend to come pretty far down the list.

"And G-d separated the Puce from the Mauve, and did Banish the Prepuce to the Lake of Fire. "Come into the Garden, Mauve" he thundered, "for the Black Bat Knight has flown..."

Oh Gawd, we're back *there* again, and blaspherously to boot. I'm outta here... gonna go scribble in an offline notebook for a change.

How many colors does a chess-playing sasquatch see?

One --- yours.

In fact, games like this were part of the reason I gave up the Benoni as Black. If Black is going to saddle himself with that weakness on d6, a generally dodgy pawn structure, much less automatic counterplay than there is in the King's Indian, then he really needs some sort of aggressive positional compensation. Just having ...a6, ...Re8 and the Gufeld bishop on g7 isn't enough.

I think now that it's better to gambit a pawn -- either the Benko or Blumenfeld with ...b5 will do -- to get play for Black. This game is a good example of what happens when Black's g7-bishop is exchanged (it usually happens with something like Bh6xg7, or Bf4, ...Be5, Bxe5 -- this mutual exchange sac here is... different. But the fact that Carlsen wasn't totally forced to play ...Rxf4, and Aronian was happy to 'sac' the Ra1 for Black's DSB is proof how central the piece is to black's game, and how everything gradually collapses without it.

btw, this just about qualifies as a game with three exchange sacs. I've seen a few games with four. Anyone know of a game with *five* Exchange sacs (captures, not just offers)??

Er.. So If I follow you, the <dutch> "defence" is really a <reverse English> "attack" that the <Germans> invented as Chess went up the <Volga> changing <Sanskrit> into <Kalmykian>?

I haven't worked out the details yet.

However -- if you scramble 'em all together -- the cut-up effect takes over -- things get aleatory, and the aleatoric vote Liberal Democrat ...

"We see the past through the binoculars of the people..."

Great things, verb tenses, conditionals, pronouns, etc -- "I am one of those who would have been about to ask you something" -- I bet you can express that with one word in Turkish.

And also Hopi, though the 'sense' changes slightly due to 'reality' being carved up in a different way. Something like "One-finger sunrise downwards this-person male gossip/humint seeker-after-lies would-have-been if-not..."

Looking at all the results, it's great to see a spread of match types and result patterns. A surprising number of Black wins overall. Long sequences of draws, then a single decisive game -- or a total collapse from one-up, like Mickey Adams. Crushing wins, eg Leko. Total ding-dong two-way mayhem, like Aronian-Carlsen (which seems like the best match -- and Aronian looks like the most impressive player overall to me, though I haven't played thru all the games yet.)

Reminds me of St John, Newfoundland, in 1988 -- I wasn't there, but I have the Chess magazines from that year. Speelman, Hjartarson, Short, Korchnoi, etc. Ratings may have gone up, but the players in 1988 certainly weren't any weaker than 2007 -- nearly 20 years on.

The only regrettable thing is that this bunch of matches won't lead all the way to a candidates final, as in the old days, but to a match-tournament: a weird mix of 1948 and 1988, without even getting into personalities, who's there and who isn't and who <should> be...

Curt. Cute. Cuts. Cull. Cubs. Cues. Cuff. Cure. Cuss ... hmm, there's almost a condensed short fiction there...

"You *can* guru, you can!"

"The Estonian Who Hopped it: how Keres Became a Marsupial..."

Hmm. There's an echo of something else there, nothing to do with Keres. Some master-strength player in the Baltic states in the 1930s, who emigrated to Australia after World War 2 and became one of the strongest Australian players, participating regularly in the Oz Championship. Who the heck wazzit?

He was also known as a theoretician -- he did a lot of work on the Dutch Defence, especially the 'Leningrad' lines with ...g6.

Much later, it emerged that he was wanted for war crimes and collaboration with the Nazi puppet state in the Baltic (Latvia, Estonia or maybe Lithuania -- I'm not sure.)

I can't remember his name, either -- nor whether there was any truth in the Nazi stories. If I remember correctly, he defended himself by saying that, like thousands of others, he was 'caught' by the war, stuck in a Nazi state, and forced to join some official organization. His opponents argued that it was much worse, and that he played an active role in the killing of prisoners. He died in the 1960s, I think.

Does anyone know more about this guy? There was a biographical feature -- possibly in Chess magazine, late 1980s or 1990s. And I'm sure Herr Dr Winter has done his usual job on the subject.

Let's see ... does his name begin with 'O'? Or 'S'? ... if I look up the Leningrad Dutch for games in Oz by Baltic-sounding players ... nah, nada, nothing rings a Pavlova.

<Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas> by Tom Robbins (1994).

Of which it is said:
<"Over these fateful three days, you are jerked from one trial and one revelation to another; forced to confront things ranging from mysterious African rituals to legendary amphibians, from tarot card bombshells to street violence, from your own sexuality to outer space. The weekend isn't from Hell, it's from Sirius the Dog Star.">

This, my fellow frogspawners, sounds like our kinda turf. And if that ain't enough, here's what Thomas Pynchon sez:

<"Tom Robbins has a grasp on things that dazzles the brain...">

<but a finely-honed grasp will always do the trick...> depending, of course, upon what one graspeth.

Comme on dit.

Or as we say (in the presence of slugs, usually, but certain persons of the nominally human persuasion have the same effect):

"My Screech exceeds my Gasp."

Cleopatra, 'tis said, put it yet more pithily: