What was I trying to say?

...executed? (Sounds odd, as does the word odd)

Well, I actually played *through* one today - Anand's loss to Aronian. For me, even *looking* at a Ruy is a sort of rarity. I can only remember a handful of others -- a drawn Topalov-Anand game with a novelty piece sac, and the famous "Bobby's Back!" first game of the 1992 Fischer-Spassky match.

And there's another famous one, Tal mangling Hjartarson in the 1980s. Beautiful game, with positional subtlety before the fireworks. That kind of thing I can relate to, even though I couldn't actually do it in a million years.

As for *playing* one ... I dunno. I never open with e4 now, and I haven't in about 25 years. And my short-lived schoolboyish experiments with it led to either the Scotch, Italian, or (ehhh) Ponziani. I just never could play 3.Bb5.

And I've never played 1...e5 as black either. Though I found myself on the white side of a Latvian once, via the move-order 1.Nf3 f5 2.e4 e5. So I've no objection to e4 on move two.

I mean 'serious' games, btw - I'd play any old rubbish in blitz. Even now.

I've got a mental checklist of openings I want to try sometime ... Alekhine, Blumenfeld, Benko, Budapest ... 'R' and 'S' are a long way down the alphabet.

But now you've given me the idea, I might try the Ponziani again: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.c3 -- it seems more logical than a bishop move ...

Spanish Virgin? I'm practically an Apparition, as seen by teenage girls in rural Catholic countries.

"There was a young man who said, 'God
Must find it decidedly odd ..."

[I love that word 'decidedly' -- as far as I can tell, it doesn't mean *anything at all* -- it's a sort of primal intensifier, an adverbalised adjective reduced to its raw primal state ... or something. Decidedly.]

Intensifiers are among the most common words in English speech, but the usual ones are decidedly banned here.

It *should* be used in a context like "I was in time trouble, had to select a move really fast, so I chose Kh1 and decidedly played it."

I was just translating in my head: <it's a sort of primal intensifier, an adverbalised adjective reduced to its raw primal state>

Het is een soort oer-bekrachtiger; een verbijwoordelijkt bijvoeglijk naamwoord, teruggebracht tot zijn ruwe vorm...

Hmmm, yes... That rases the question if the reduced raw primal state, is equal to "not meaning anything at all"...

In Dutch, as in any language, intensifiers are used in the most disturbing, twisted ways... like:

I never ain't got no nothin' to do wit him, man! (thief being interrogated down-town LA)

And unfortunately I now decidedly need to go look for some shut-eye, or else I ain't gonna be much to look at in the mornin'...

G'nite

There's an apocryphal story about a linguistics professor telling his class that many languages use double negatives to make a positive - but you never find a double positive making a negative.

I wrote: "... go *look* for some shut-eye" -- I may be in well over my head here, juggling along with the likes of you... Difference being that I can "drop a ball", from time to time...

You can too, of course, but it rarely happens.

<Apocryphal story: -- And a voice in the class says "Yeah, yeah..."> The kid (I'm assuming the *voice* is a kid), is one heck of a freakin' genius.

My typo in the previous post - rases (the question) - is bugging me btw...

Therefore I increased my font size to extra large, to compensate for deteriorating...

I remember someone said: "You know you're getting old when..."

Did you recently (couple of weeks) edit your profile?

Unless I'm seeing things, it reads even better than before, and there are a few elements in it I didn't recall, like the "Drowning by Numbers" personal anecdote... (I noticed a little while ago, but forgot to mention it)

You know you're getting old when you do something like this.

Re the profile: most recent change was the Nimzo and Aldiss quotes right at the top. I tweak it now and then, but the Greenaway story has been there a few months. I think.

Speaking of, are you familiar with the word 'perseity'? And if not, can you make a good guess at what it might mean? I ask this because when chatting with a group of well-respected 'scholars' of one sort or another the other day, I used it, thinking it was as common as cormorant or welly or hiatus. Turns out I was very wrong, and looked like a showy-offy bastard.

Isn't there also a word 'supercity' with the stress on 'per': sue-PER-sity, not 'super city' ... ?

"A chessplayer's perseity involves knowing the moves..."

This is wrong, isn't it? Howabout, er, some kind of sensory process like proprioception?

The very sad medical condition in which a man is biologically incapbable of sensing where his hand stops and his female co-worker's breast begins.

This condition, needless to say, has led to numerous tragic minunderstandings.

And lawsuits.

If only people paid attention to science!!!

Why didn't they include *wandering hand syndrome* in the manual?

That was the hippest neighborhood. I lived there at Ave. du Parc and St. Viateur.

Folk from every corner of the globe, almost all on the dole, not too many students-- mainly starving artists (in most cases, rightfully so)---

A vibrant place to be sure. When I was there it was a good place to do stand up comedy on the fly and the dam place was so run down that there was danger of being mugged on the way home.

In fact there was a "cat serial kidnapper."

Turns out he was selling them to McGill for medical experiments.

How did you hear about it? I imagine you'd like such a place.

Very cheap rent, but you definitely got what you paid for. Hovels, really.

Not *my* Mile End. Jarvis Cocker once wrote a song about the place which had the refrain 'Ooh, it's a mess all right / Yes, it's Mile End', and he wasn't wrong...

Exhibit A:
http://cache.viewimages.com/xc/7503...

Exhibit B:
http://www.derelictlondon.com/cd430...

Exhibit C:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/sp...

Sigh.

The "derelict" building looks exactly like the kind of place we used to have our poetry/comedy/music cabarets...

<Dom> YES BUT IT'S ACTUALLY CALLED <MILE END> FOR CRIPE SAKE.

Even your witchcraft, however, can't shake my irrational faith in the arch-rationalist <Richard Dawkins>, who makes even <Stephen Hawking> seem like one of those "faery-believing" hopeless Romantics.

But you are coming close.

"Interstitial"???

I'll have you know the muscles connecting my ribs are quite private thank you very much!!!

I don't want to have to sic <Deffi> on you.... She made it quite clear (in a terrifying manner) that certain "dark craters" are OFF LIMITS to you menfolk...

All hail the menstrual Moon Calendar and human sacrifice!!

Ooops I'm getting carried away...

<Dom>: "That didn't make any sense, did it?"

HAHAHAHAAHAH

heh

cf Inapproprioception.

That, in turn, had me laughing.

But for what reason exactly, I shouldn't say...

FUN FACT: Former Dutch PM Ruud Lubbers suffered severely from inapproprioception, and it cost him his career at the UN, for starters -- difference being that his hand often went down and through the back, so to speak, rather then plain public breast-grabbing.

He was nicked "The Dirty Dutchman"