Oh dear, we nearly had a dangerous typo there, by simply misplacing the most common letter in the language. First time round, I lost the 'e' at the end of 'here' and put in on the end of 'gaff' by mistake -- pretty dam freudian, huh? -- "I'll stick it in her first, then your gaff" -- oh Christ on a pogo stick, that ain't what I meant to say...

Outta here. Note final 'e', pleas.

<Bill> Looking froward to the 'romace' (a Catholic Tarot card, perchance?) and the 'Buldingsroman' (a novel about taurean xylophonists?)...

<"In the same way that a near-death experience purports to give a taste of death without the victim actually dying, chess's expanse skims close to infinity for players to peer over the ledge and envision the fall.">

David Shenk, The Immortal Game, 2006

That's one anyhow, even if I'd dispute his understanding of infinity ... all the zillions in the cosmos don't come a nano-increment closer to the real deal where infinity is concerned, though Shenk may have an accurate take on the typical human understanding of the word.

<"Believe me, Fritz is intelligent," Frederic Friedel, cofounder of Chessbase software, says of one of his company's most popular programs. "It is a *kind* of intelligence. If you look at anyone playing against a computer, within minutes they say things like, 'Oh God, he's trying to trap my Queen,' and 'Tricky little bloke,' and 'Ah, he saw that'. They're talking about it as if it is a human being. And it *is* behaving exactly like someone who's trying to trick you, trying to trap your Queen. It seems to smell the danger.">

Shenk, same source. Excuse the quotes within quotes within quotes factor (you could easily make it Friedel alone). The *asterisks* are *italics* in the original.

<"Every creature desirous of self-transformation must hit upon this sort of subterfuge: the replacement of an indifferent environment by a rational one.">

- Stanislaw Lem, Imaginary Magnitudes
(... the supercomputer speaks...)

<"Life is a kind of Chess, in which we often have points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of it.">

- Benjamin Franklin, The Morals of Chess

<"Hamm is a King in a chess-game lost from the start. From the start he knows he is making loud senseless moves.">

- Samuel Beckett, on Hamm in the play 'Endgame'.

<"The game certainly touches upon the conflicts surrounding aggression, homosexuality, masturbation and narcissism... The King stands for the boy's penis in the phallic stage, and hence rearouses the castration anxiety characteristic of that period.">

- Reuben Fine

[Utter tosh, of course -- although Dali and Duchamp touched on similar themes in a more elegantly playful manner...]

<(George is playing chess with girlfriend.)

George: Well, you got no place to go. I'll tell you what your problem is: You brought your Queen out too fast. What do you think? She's one of these feminists looking to get out of the house? No, the Queen is old fashioned. Likes to stay home. Cook. Take care of her man. Make sure he feels good.

Liz: Checkmate.

George: I don't think we should see each other anymore.>

- from 'Seinfeld'.

[take your pick...]

HEY!

I already wrote your biography, mister, in part to defend you against veiled imprecations from that <antedeluvian guy who's name cannot be typed>.

Who's this <Boswell> fellow? Isn't he the guy on <Charlie's Angels>?

I'll sue the cad.

I swear.

<Dom> has the <Seinfeld> scene there- it's funny-- but "chess scenes" in popular culture drive me nuts because they invariably present an unlikely or impossible scenario.

<I was channel surfing the other day in a desultory fashion and happened upon a <<<"dramatic-style Japanese anime soap opera.">>>

WEll!!> I'm in Asia so might as well check it out.

So I lasted all of two minutes until they showed a "dramatic chess game" where the hero had TWO LIGHT SQUARE BISHOPS.

Needless to say, I turned off the TV immediately.

<Two LSBs? LUXURY>

As Black, Beliavsky had to play this position against Spofford in Curacao 1990. You had it easy!!

click for larger view

What-o croakers.

On 7th August 2007 I sent out a request in my forum for interesting, out-of-the-way quotations relating to chess. This was sparked in no small way by the fact that, as wonderful as the Royal Game is, the usual collection of 'bon' mots as seen on most chess websites are either drab & ephemeral or as common as muck. Sadly, this also applies to the Quote of the Day feature at this fine, fine site. So the first aim in putting together 100 chessy quotations was a practical one: to provide CG with a nice little well of QOTD material, just as a little thank you for all they do.

The second aim was decidedly more bombastic, and certainly Domdaniel, the chief contributor to the anthology, certainly had no idea what I was upto. In all my (hopefully forgiveable) arrogance & grandiosity I wanted to build something that, in my mind, would stand up as a testament to the permanence of chess and its ability to infiltrate every art form imaginable. Whilst there are plenty of quotations here from chess-centric sources (Harry Golombek and Jaan Ehlvest, for example, are well represented) the range of pickings is quite startling. We have raided novels, political biographies, journal articles, manifestoes, letters, interviews and speeches in search of chess nuggets, traversing antropology, cod psychology, computer science, self-improvement, radical populism, art history, bioconstitutional analysis, statistics, proper psychology and new historicism with relative ease. The truth is, of course, that chess is the sickening, obsessive haemoblobin that runs through the veins of each of the above and gives them their uniform colour. It is doubtful whether there's any real need to rubber-stamp the permanence of a game that is a squillion and three years old, but I don't see a problem in trying anyway.

It is now 7th November, exactly three months on from the inital call for contributors, and though there have been a few hiccoughs and dry spells along the way, hitting one hundred has not been too arduous. Which means that the work on Volume II begins here and now. The only real annoyance with Volume I was that it was mostly myself & Dom working on this; whilst everyone's favourite Irish uncle is worth at least ten contributors, I kinda hoped and dreamed that I would have CG-ers posting bits and pieces in my forum all day, having spent the night rifling through obscure Dutch fishing magazines. Chess unites us, but we all have other interests besides - so please, if you come across a weird chess analogy in What Shrapnel? or E.D. Plonkerton's Complete History of Termites, then I want it.

OK, if you have six pawns on the h-file-- and cunningly convert them all back to pawns--

This creates what <Najdorf> called the <blockade of nothing>, not to be confused with Pink Floyd's <return to the sun of nothing>, which was subsequently renamed <Meddle>.

With this <negative blockade>, the other side has "no move"... a kind of <quantum zugzwang> that was investigated thoroughly in <John Nunn's> very fine study <Endgames, and Why I know Way more about them than You do>.

Highly recommended.

Hint: forget endgames.

'Rustam Kasimdzhanov Beating the French Vol. 1 & 2'

http://www.chessbase.com/shop/produ...

This is a truly flagrant and disgusting act by Chessbase. It is this kind of thinking that encourages both flawed ideology and/or funtamentalism the like of which our beloved faith ill deserves.

Whatever next? ID cards whereupon we are forced to declare which endgame setup we prefer to head for in a Steinitz Variation??

So, tightening up our corsets thus restraining any belly-laughs in out opponents new found confidence seems to be a good plan.

Reporter Tomlinsky

Toys R Us