I consider myself an averagely educated cosmopolitan from Amsterdam, who doesn't go out to the world in the way he used to-- The visits with you and Jess and Branko I consider "a night out".. I might be an Hibernian, too.

But no savage, sir.

I went with the word "hibernating"- and rambled a bit with it. I meant that I have a tendency to insulate myself, which makes me a Hibernian, in a way.

Coincidentally hiver = winter.. and hibernating = overwinteren in Dutch.

To be honest I didn't know (or just forgot) Hibernia was a name for our beloved Ireland -- I remember a vacation to Ireland when I was a mere boy, horseriding over those beautiful hills- looking for special stones and shells at the beaches and throwing the less special ones into the sea- and at night being tucked in with the nice sounding words "G'night"(as a kid I wondered why the word "night" as it was only 9 or 10 PM..) by the friendly lady who ran the hotel we were staying (since my father was busy getting drunk and my mother had to keep a watchful eye on him), but staying awake to listen to the beautiful songs being sung downstairs..

Fond memories I keep from that time, Dom.

At ease, gentlemen.

Frogspawn Breakfast Update:

A few slices of *good* cornbread, heated by a toaster, a very thin layer of butter on it, and then swiftly adding a few slices/cuts of some quality, creamy cheese, along with a fresh tomato and a glass of cold milk.

..is my breakfast at least 4 days of the week. And it never bores!

<I just got a message from a friend -- she was in a cafe somewhere, with people reading science fiction and playing chess, and she said she'd found my native country... but she forgot the cheese> This was very disturbing for me. I do think there's a chess-cheese connection of sorts (I actually once saw the images of Tarktakover and Jesus in the same slice of an aged chedder on a plate with some toast), but I'm unclear about how she found your native country in a cafe--that would be a very large cafe, methinks.

Off to his curds and whey.

<food + Nederlands> Cheese, coffee, & boiled eggs for breakfast is what you might call the Full Monty. I don't actually get this together very often, but it exists as a sort of Platonic ideal. Cheese (Edam, Cheddar) & coffee is standard. Today I actually had scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, but that was on a train. Great things, these new hi-speed luxury trains with good food and computer connections and AC connections...

<food #2> some days I don't eat at all -- I just forget. Don't have much of a hunger drive. Or much of an anything else drive. I may not be human, actually.

<food #3> Rijstafel and satay (unknown in Ireland at that time) also figured in my Dutch food enlightenment/satori.

I used to go out with a woman -- the same one, oddly enough, who sent me the message about having found my 'native country' with sci-fi and chess -- whose father was a Professor of Agriculture. He was dapper, urbane, stylish, intellectual -- to distance himself from stereotypes about oafish bumpkin agriculturalists -- but there was one tiny flaw in his sophisticated front: he still pronounced the word 'wheat' as 'whey' ... an archaic pronunciation common in the rural accent he'd started off with.

As JP Donleavy said: "When your accent slips be sure to have a better one on underneath."

This was in the 1980s, and several of the Prof's best students came from Iraq, especially the north of Iraq.

BTW, I am working on my underneath accent. Something Middle English, at this point.

<Frogadise Lost> by John Miltoad.

The early history of the World was gratin'
You may remember all that fuss with Satan
But then things settled down for several aeons
Kings got rich and poor folk remained peons
Till I, a puritan and socialist
Looked at the mess and went and got too pissed
To write coherently and minus rancour
I'm blind, but g-d, you see, is the real w--ker.

But even mad blind poets, it seems, must live
The Cosmos has some rules I can't forgive
"Yo, Miltoad!" cry the mob "Go do your thing"
Of man's first 'jaculation I must sing.
Twas premature; I reckon you'd have guessed
A phallic 1.e4, and best by test.
And now, another sequel I must pen,
Frogadice, the 7th out of ten.
My theme, as ever, angels, gods and dogs
And creeping things, rhinoceri and frogs.

I left you, I recall, just as the Flood Noachian
Brought mass extinction to the last Batrachian
That Ark routine was just a holy show
For G-d remade the lot, from high to low
But this time, for a change, Morph played Vienna
And G-d built all his creatures of DNA.
And Man is told that he must never grapple
With helix in the worm inside the apple.

But Lo! Remorseless, Evolution spun
And some unlikely schemes had soon begun
Ere human voices spoke for birds to parrot
They sat in trees and aped the common carrot.
As evidence for utter lack of steering:
Exhibit A, Genetic Engineering.
An enterprise where Man rewrites the rules
For each homunculus, and for its Stools.

But G-d has dealt with stranger in his time
Like Sodom and Gomorrah and such slime.
Again, the sex crimes were all media hype
The 'Sin' was a successful prototype.
Technology, an engine powered by light
For turning nuclear forces into shyte.
And now Genetic Engineering's bad
It must be so; it is; and also mad,
Old Pavlov played a bell to piteous dogs
Now Science brings forth unseen Invisible Frogs.

A blind man cares not if a frog be visible
Genetics thus is proof of Darkness Risible
And if you cannot see the frog, I beg,
By what great magic will you eat his leg?

How else can they so unerringly distinguish their holy visitations from space aliens? Or worse -- the Adversary, in Deity Drag.

So -- not that you're a peon -- it's easy to see how you recognized Jesus. But how on earth did you know it was Tartakower? As I recall, he looked like an etiolated version of the actor Robert Morley: or a bald tire with noble rot.

Aha. You wrote "Tarktakower" ... a cunning allusion to the Maker of Mirror, Stalker, and the original Solaris? Tarka the Auteur?

Of course you know that no post from me is worth its salt unless it has at least one typo worthy of introducing an unrealted (and, one hopes, unintentioanlly funny)meaning; hence, I no longer proofread; I've gone the full loop--from tying to proofread and missing things (I have very bad eyesight--hionest), to being very concerned about all the typos (many on this site who set their sights for for such things), to now not caring at all. Ah, the freedom!

Yes, your descriptions of Tartakower do indeed jive with my recollections of his appearance (from pictures). In fact, I do intend to make wine from the tires I have with noble rot. (THis making wine from non-grape things has become a recurring motif in my recent posts. I'm afraid to pursue that thought any further.)

Strong Dublin accent, anyhow. "That oul' savage indignation has me heart lacerated", he said, "sure it gets on me t**s something fierce, it does."

And then Bishop Berkeley chimes in with "Is that a fact, Johnny? Sure doesn't the whole town know ye're daft as a brush? But 'tis the oul' solipsistic apoplexy that gets me down."

And Swift says "The Berk himself. When ye were a student I said 'I wouldn't pass water on him, not if he was a bishop', and now look at ye -- talk about being promoted beyond yer ability to share the pain!"

"You share your pains mightily, Johnny" says the other guy, "but do they diminish by one tittle?"

A pair of theological fishwives, so they are...

Glad to see you no longer poofread. I discovered that 'deaconstrying' looks oddly like 'deconstructing' -- must be the 18th century spelling. But I'm obscure enough already, so I put the space back in.

"The Lord is my Bus Conductor, I shall pay no Fare" -- much more *relevant* than the old stuff about shepherds. Who today even knows what a shepherd is? A herder of sheeps? Yeah, sure. What for you need somebody who heard sheeps, they all go 'baa baa'?

What about the <Frogessy>?

Or <The Froginator>?

<The Complete Works of Frogspeare>

These are key cultural documents.

Or, simply, <Toad of Toad Hall>.

As I was mumbling some french over at my place I had to translate this simple line- "Sorry for the delay", which would have to become: "Excusez-moi pour le retard"

Obviously, this sounds a bit "silly", so I would suggest <le retard> to be replaced by <le delay>.

"Excusez-moi pour le delay, mesdames et messieurs", rolls off the tongue like a dream, eh? I thought so too.

P.S. I still get a s'hiver at the thought of how the French pronounce "Les grown-ups". (To be honest I shiver even more with English speakers, especially Americans, trying to pronounce French terms, or even worse German -- "Danke schón")

<Synchronicity City> The cafe with chess and science fiction, where my friend said she'd found my native planet, or psychic Urheimat, or whatever, was actually in San Francisco.

(1) The start of <Red October>'s Special Month, which is our froggish version of Ramadan or Lent. Fasting is optional. If you *must* catch flies, use your *own* tongue.

(2) The sci-fi novel by Fred Hoyle, "October the First is Too Late".

"I call my sugar c&y.."