I hereby leave all my chess stuff to <Jess>, all my weird arty stuff to <mack>, any other possessions to <Frogspawn>, and my body to Science. Or science-fiction, perhaps.

That's everything, then, innit?

The body of KING DOM is laid out centre stage, clad in his finest royal loincloth...

PRODUCER:

- Stop. Cut. Hold it right there, fella. Royal *loincloth*, did you say? That's some kinda medieval thong thang, ain't it? You want we should get an X-rating already for some stoopid little death scene?

[script, rewrite #324, continued]

... centre stage, clad in his finest royal finery. He is entirely surrounded by one (very agile) henchperson, who attends to the royal henches.

Somebody switches on the *weeping machine*, gets a laughter track by mistake, and hurriedly turns it off again. Silence is heard.

PRODUCER:

- You can't hear silence. Silence is an absence. The human sensory system can't actually observe absences, it can only discriminate between...

DIRECTOR:

-- Yes, yes, very true, most perceptive, you're really very intelligent for a producer, aren't you? But maybe we should do a, you know, a *control experiment* here? Like, you @#£% off, and I'll see how your absence registers on my sensory thangumajigs, yeah?

PRODUCER:

- Okay, okay, I geddit, I'm outta here already. Just keep it short and remember who pays the bills.

DIRECTOR:

Short? Kurtz? *His* famous death scene with Gazza went on for *months*, you may recall. And Howard Staunton, that noted Shakespearean scholar and actor, once made Othello's death scene last nearly three years. His King Lear occupied most of the 19th century. His match with Morphy was so long it never even started...

Enter RAYMOND KEENE GM

-- As I have explained in my new book, this proves that English chessplayers discovered relativity long before Einstein...

KING DOM suddenly opens his eyes. The effect is electric, like a small AAA battery. His lips move.

KING DOM:

... hey, I've thought of some more famous last words. Any chance of squeezing them into the script?

[*to be continued*]

KING DOM:

So, anyway, 'I am dying as I have lived - en passant'. How about that? Or, let's see, the Panzram one, 'I wish the whole world had one isolated d-pawn, and I had my lust to expand round it' -- it's, you know, kinda Nimzo goes serial killer? Very conceptual. No? Okay, no problemo, I got more, being dead gives you lots of time to think of stuff...

PRODUCER:

- I think the budget could stretch to 'clad in his finest royal finery and traditional royal muzzle', if you want. Or we could just have him embalmed first.

DIRECTOR:

- I'm on it.

KING DOM:

- Er, how about this? 'Beggar Bognor, and the Bishop it rode in on'? A tad obscure, I admit, but full of allusions. Or there's...

RAYMOND KEENE GM [waking}:

- I say, who's the skinny chap in the dress? He looks rather ill, and quite backward too. I had a pawn like that once, against Basman in the British Championship, but the wily Armenian fell into a trap of Nimzoesque dimensions on e6, when I sacrificed eight tempi and the right to serve in tennis...

PRODUCER:

- God's Tendrils! Are they *all* like this?

KING DOM:

Anyway, leaving the last words for now, I think the last will and testament needs work. And I'm not sure about the scene where I shoot myself after leaving my clothes on the beach... is there a cinematic equivalent of *overprotection*?

DIRECTOR:

No.

KING DOM:

Very well, then, I'll just say the musical stuff needs to be divvied up more carefully, like <Jess> gets Dylan and <mack> gets the Bonzos, but <Deffi> should have the Captain Beefheart DVD, and <achieve> should get Glenn Gould's Bach even though he has it already, cos I've got a CD autographed by Bach, might be worth something, and...

ALL:

- Bang. Bang! Bangbang bangbangbang!!!

Maybe I can get it on satellite. We can get all sorts of weird stuff over here, relayed via the Death Star through the Bureaucracy on the Other Side.

Yeah, I'm watching my own ass here. I may be dead, but my posthumous rep still matters to me. It's basically a career move.

G'day.

<I wonder if the town of Condom, France is twinned with Dil'do, Canada>

<Bang a gong, get it on>

No trying to fool me with dead rock star allusions.

I read about every one of them.

<T Rex> guy in a traffic accident. I think <Stevie Winwood> hit him.

Get it?

I leave you with this question:

If you attend an <internet conference>, are you?

You thought the *Monty-Shagspr* scenario was *finished*? Uh huh, easy mistake to makes. But we'd only reached Act II of V. Or even VI.

Upcoming highlights include the famous RAYMONDO soliloquy ("solo loquacity, startling rapacity, full to capacity"), wherein we learn the truth about Fidel Castro's fiendish plot to snook a cock -- or is it the other way round? -- at the USA by renaming Havana/Habana as 'Capa City'. In honour, Raymondo tells us, of "the world famous Cuban grandmaster, world famous prodigy and world famous chess world champion, known to readers of my world famous chess column as [insert name]!!"

And there's a speech going "Is this a poisoned pawn I see before me, the felty base enjamb'd in mine feisty nuncle's yeasty ear? I knowest where I'd liketh to sticketh it. Juliet, er, yo, girlfriend, oy, Cleo, hey, Ophelia-chick, wherefore art thou, man?"

A critic writes: you can't make a Hamlet without breaking legs -- but he's a vacillator, a ditherer, an indecisive bum, not some kind of goofy stoner hippie!"

I respond: and the difference exactly is?

Actually, I was planning to end the infamous KING DOM death scene with "bang" or maybe "bang bang", and then vanish from CG for three days before rising again. If not quite a miracle, then at least an alarm clock.

But you know me. Impatient as a wild sheep with a get-out-of-jail-free card. I couldn't spend three whole days lurking in cyberlimbo, could I? Just imagine the deep philosophical discussions with all those unbaptized cyberbabies... makes me shudder, um, shudderingly. So here I am again.

- Was he gone? Why couldn't he stay gone for a while, the long streak of impertinence?

You're clearly right about castling etc, which is why such things have to be included in a FEN if it is to fully encapsulate a position. But I don't think this was really Saussure's point...

His main idea was to make an analogy with language viewed synchronically or diachronically, and with langue vs parole, or performance vs competence (in post-Saussurean lingo). I think he may have been the first to explicitly describe chess as a model of larger structures, whether linguistic or cognitive - an idea which subsequently became all the rage.

And it's true, in a limited sense with the exceptions you mention, that a chess position (eg a problem in a newspaper) does not need the game history (ie the full score) in order to function. Going further, chess 'etymology' (the historical development of openings and strategic ideas) is a valid area of study, but not required to play a game...