Just read the new issue of <Frogspawn> with my coffee.

Will reply in more detail later- but one note:

<Deffi>"s enigmantic allusion carries a <true story>.

There is a very interestng <Scotch> game she played agaisnt her <MacInTosh> Computer posted in her forum.

The <Open Defence> forum.

Well worth a look!!

Regards,
Jess

(I will post the <KingCrush> game- I'm currently entered in a 4 player double round robin at <Letsplaychess.com> with <King>, <Canstein>, and <JRobichess>.

My Correspondence rating there is 2059 at the moment but it's not a "true" rating as it is <provisional> and it jumps all over the place based on some <arcane math forumula>.

I haven't lost a game yet though. I've completed two.

I'm exempt. As a trainee sociopath, I can't tell truth from fiction. Like Norman Mailer and Bobby Fischer.

As for chess, I'm trying to learn from your games now, not critique 'em. This is not due to your elevated rating, but the fact that you're good at crushing weaker players. I generally play fairly well against strong opposition, but do stupid things when I think the game will win itself.

And they don't, as a rule, do they?

I'll check out Deffi's game. I actually used to play the Scotch m'self, back in the really ancient past. It's how I escaped ever playing either side of a Ruy Lopez. Maybe I should try this 1.e4 thing again ...

Innaresting number, 2059. Add 841, or 29 squared, you get 2900. So ...

2059 = 29(100 - 29)

The <Yahoo> server was down for a bit yetsterday so I played several games on FICS. I kept trying to click on a "standard" time control and it kept pitching me up against 28000 rated players at 4/0 Blitz.

I think my FICS rating might be zero now.

No the games don't win themselves thats for sure. <Josh Waitzkin> tutorial spends a lot of time on training yourself not to "let up" when you've got a decisive position.

Yes, Scotch to avoid Spain same for me.

But oddly enough I've been playing the Spanish game with Black recently on Yahoo with mixed results.

I tried it out of curiosity to see if my brain "accidentally" remembered any of the 5000 Spanish variations I've played through in GM games at this website.

Answer: "not really."

AROOOO

<on a role...>

Maybe you should; there's plenty of scope to interpret 1.e4 as something suiting your 'passive aggressive' tendencies. That's what I do anyway - following Suttles' lead, I just over-overprotect the e-pawn, meaning that most of my games look something like this:

click for larger view

And you'll have fun fun fun, 'til your daddy takes the t-bird away. Whatever that means.

Hmm. Does 'prior twiddling' pass the obscenity test? And how will I ever quote Benny Profane, protagonist of Pynchon's 'V', without <profane language>.

I'm sure George Steiner has the answer somewhere. I recently read a piece by him -- somewhere in After Babel -- comparing French, English, and German translations of the sentence "the child was knocked down by the car". Implicit in the German structure, he says, is the suggestion that the child had no right to be standing in the road in the first place.

"Role" was, of course, a pun. Sometimes the author knows not the depth of his own creations, and all that.

Meanwhile, I haven't cracked any clues yet, and that sporty Kuwaiti chap has solved about eleventeen of 'em. He beat me to that last anagram, and now <archives> cracked 'it worked' before me.

Still, can't write Marty off. The old boy can be almost Nabokovian when he tries. Wasn't it Amis who compared Kasparov vs Karpov to a Wimbledon tennis final where the world number three can't even see the ball?

Prior twiddling does pass the censors, assuming you're talking Richard.

I'm sure Steiner probably does have the answer. Curious George seems to have been a peculiar thread through my life recently. After typing up that bit about chess/pure mathematics/music the other day, I went and made myself a cup of tea and sat somewhere I often sit - failing to notice that all this time it was actually called the George @#$%ing Steiner room. Not only that, there was a huge portrait of him on one wall, in which he looks incredibly like Andrew Lloyd Webber.

I wouldn't rule Amis out at chess - to call in Mondo once more:

I read a <Steiner> book once where he was analyzing <Dylan's> poetry (not song lyrics) and comparing him to <Eliot> and <Pound>, lauding him as an heir to the "high modernist tradition."

I read it in Montreal a few years ago.

My friend Clifford lent it to me, he's a poet there but not any more cuz he's dead now.

Regards,
What are you guys doing up discussing literature and chess in the middle of the night again?

Is this practice common in the <Emerald Isle>?

Do Irish people get mad that <shagspr> called <England> the emerald isle?

Also, one of Frogspawn's guiding deities - Kermit the Frog - tells us that it's not easy being green.

On the other hand, it *is* a bit green if one is too easy. I find.

Such as the ever-popular parlour game "I'm Miss Piggy and you're the Marquis de Sade".

But as was informed on this site - http://www.alfredjodocuskwak.nl/ - all the episodes will be aired again overhere from the second half of December onwards! As you can probably tell I'm really excited here- as this cartoon has a timeless quality, described so accurate by you. I sorta knew, upon reading van Veen's creating role in it, that it could be a sure hit with me...

I've always had a fondness for good quality cartoons but the reason I missed it back in 1990-1992 is that I was in the middle of Med studies and in "full swing" regarding my sporting career.

So I figgered it should be catch-up time re Kwak, fueled by my admiration for Herman van Veen. He is one of those rare artists, for me, that turns almost everything he touches into gold.

Really, you're dealing here with an awaking Kwak-o-holic, or something. There may very well be a chance of Kwak being re-released on DVD again in the UK, as well... Shouldn't be hard to find out via the <Herman van Veen> website.

Which literally means "I am rising out of the drink". Who knew?

Is ol related to the scandinavian Öl?

What a game by Carlsen vs Adams today, eh? I think he had the gathered expert crowd on the WC page on the wrong foot as well... Shirley!

Live interview with van Wely here now, on his seconding Kramnik... (may report later)

This quotation makes it clear that the words meant the same thing. Of course, Old English had a number of different dialects and the two words may have been used in different ways at different times and places, but there was at any rate no consistent distinction. Some documents of the period, indeed, do appear to make a distinction between ale and beer, but what the difference was we can only guess.>

<<> A WORD IN YOUR BEER

the etymology of brewing

The Anglo-Saxon (or, more properly, Old English) word for fermented malt liquor was alu (in Anglian) or ealu (in West Saxon), aloth in the genitive case. It became 'ale' in modern English, and it appears to come down from a Germanic root *aluth. (The asterisk indicates that this is a presumed form of an unrecorded ancestor-word.) Words for beer derived from the same root as ale are found across northern and eastern Europe, in Finnish (olut), Lithuanian (alùs), Latvian (alus), Estonian (olu), Old Slavonic (olu again), modern Slovene (ôl), Serbo-Croat (olovina), <Old Norwegian and modern Swedish (ol) and modern Danish and Norwegian (øl).> It also turns up away in the Caucasus, in the Iranic language Ossetian, as aeluton, and in Georgian (apart from Finnish and Estonian the only non-Indo-European example) as ludi or, in a couple of mountain dialects, aludi. Although the Caucasus is close to where beer brewing began, there is no evidence the word 'ale' began here and spread to Europe: it was most likely the other way round. Georgian linguists believe their language took the word from the Ossetians, who are descended from the formerly nomadic Indo-European Alans. The Alans ranged as far west as France in the fifth century AD, alongside other invaders of the Roman world such as the Germanic-speaking Vandals and Goths, and they probably picked up the 'ale' word from one of these peoples and brought it back to the Caucasus.>

So that <cervesia> word came to mean <brain> instead? Und how did 'cakes and ale' become 'caca & ol' = 'scheisse und bier'?

You bark wrong tree up, tatanka...

Kakken & Ól = "excreta con olovina" - that is correct.

Here's a <Frogspawn scoop>:

Anecdote from the <van Wely interview> from earlier this evening on seconding for Kramnik in Me'ico--

He had to carry Kramnik's Laundry to the cleaner's several times- and added that he hadn't expected that beforehand, but had to take as much "load" as possible off his boss...

Also, he had been working on a complex line all night, (seconds don't sleep), and Kramnik dismissed his recommendations the next morning within a few seconds by a certain gesture with his arms and middle finger, accompanied by a nuaah-sound... Van Wely admitted being a bit cranky after that.