Those is <David Jones> lyrics yer postin <Idle No Man's Land>...

I thought you didn't care for the 70s long-haired screechy set?

Well, like, I hope, kinda, that a few people would, y'know, miff me for a few minutes, before Liff went on ...

But the other 'miff'? With you? Never ever. If I can't be insulted by sundry morons who're actually *trying* to disturb me - or whatever it is the little creatures want, assuming that their reasoning processes extend as far as cause and effect, action and reaction ... which I seriously doubt ... Anyhoo, if *they* can't annoy me, how could you? Unless you *really* wanted to, in which case you prob'ly could, though I can't imagine why [etc].

So that's enough of that.

It might have been a tech error my end, when I briefly Iggy'd the Shark. Maybe I Iggy'd you ... ? Nope. Didn't happen. won't even wash as an excuse.

Truth is, I haven't really been *here* that much for the past week or so. Oddly, I was 'away' viewing an exhibition called 'Cutout & Cutop - the work of William S Burroughs and Hans Christian Andersen': whoever thought of that combination deserves a Frogspawn award.

I kept up a facade of posts, but I was just grabbing odd moments. And my posts did a lot of pontificating and very little responding to anyone, apart from the mysterious Haifisch Syndrome - now gone down.

Speaking of which, there's a village in County Donegal, Ireland - yes, this is Newfie Bilbonics territory again, I fear - called 'Muff'.

I've heard ads on the radio exploiting this fact ("From Dublin to Cork, from Effin to Muff, everyone is buying *reusable knickers* ... and electronic bubble-wrap satisficers ... and crack ...")

That should perhaps be given in the Irish spelling, <craic>, meaning "a jolly inebriated good time". So the Muff Tourist Authority, if it existed, would say "Come to Muff where the Craic is Mighty!"

It would, if it existed, also employ everyone in the village. We're not talking about a muffin metropolis here.

The Madcap Laughs
The Mad Captain Luffs
Laugh? I almost Died.
Life? I almost barfed.
Barf are open late, but make fure nobody meffes with you or muffes your hair...

I hope etc that this ... QED.

Your Friend,

Noticing that (a) it's Sunday, when most weekday people have their 'weak end', (b) I'll have a 50th birthday quite soon with obvious consequences like bits falling off, and (c) *some* people say that I'm an old softy beneath the vicious facade.

Heh. They said Burroughs was a softy as well, and *he* shot his missus. Luckily, I have neither a gun nor a 'missus' to shoot at, nor indeed a large tequila-plus-opiates habit. Because my grandpappy didn't invent the adding machine (a well-known technicality used to escape murder charges in Mexico). Also, this isn't Mexico.

So ... are you picking Neil Young songs on purpose to take the piff?

I could reciprocate, but I can't think of any Korea songs, and kd lang cornered the market in Canada songs, aka 49th parallel.

So I'll try China instead ...

1. Chinese Envoy (John Cale)

2. China My China (Brian Eno)

3. China Girl (David Bowie/ Iggy Pop)

4. Chinese Takeaway: Hong Kong 1997 (John Cale)

5. China Sea (Cale, again ...)

old china --> china plate ---> me old mate.

So there.

Aha, there's a song by Bob Neuwirth that goes ...

"Sitting her talking 'bout old china
And how the lady's hair will turn to grey
Hoping for a speedy resolution
And wishing that these crimes would go away ..."

or

wait less ??

Ang Lee ??

You tryin' to *shame* me into action? It'll never work. I'm shameless.

Oh, wait, hold on, that was the other guy, the one who didn't like 1970s screechers. The new Dom is a Bowie fan and is, like, totally mortified.

Mortefaction has set in already. You don't even want to imagine how he smells.

- How does he smell?

Hey, this could be fun. I get to be a Bowie fan, quoting megalomaniac lyrics and making chess-related posts *at the same time*.

"And you, you will be Queen ..."

Right. I got a real, genuine serious *historic* question, and I want an answer. Here we go ...

In the past, kings and queens - and maybe dukes and duchesses and pukes and puchesses too - went round with a royal entourage. As in flunkeys and bellhops and lickspittles and foodtasters. The lickspittle, btw, was a kind of food-taster reserved for kissing. If the king wanted to tangle tongues with a wench - or a llama for that matter - the lickspittle's job was to, well, lick the spittle first. To make sure it wasn't poisonous. "Hard to be certain, your majesty. I'd better stick my tongue down her throat just one more time, some of these poisoners can be very devious ..." Nice work if you can ... argh. [*drops dead*]

My question, however, does not concern the humble lickspittle. It's about the <entourage>. Royalty used to have them. Now pop stars and movie actors and celebs etc have them. But where did entouragers go in between times? Who, if anyone, had an entourage 50 or 100 years ago, when royals were on the wane but celebs hadn't really developed yet?

Rudy Valentino? Picasso? Pope Piux X? Florence Nightingale?

I knead to know.

"And we frightened the small children away"

Me: "Dalgi? Na-il? Issayo?
<Call that a banana? Is there a smaller banana anywhere? Is it actually your spine?>

Angry Fruitseller: "Dalgi!! Oppsayo!
<Western fishwife in insane clothing! My snipe would overwhelm your whole tribe!>

Very condensed context-heavy grammatical elements there. Were there any, y'know, crotchocentric or phallogocentric gestures? If there were, it means "I'm in love with Jacques Derrida, read a page and I know I need to take apart my baby's heart".

vice versa = a gripping poem

or

vice versa = a backward member of the vice squad

or

vice versa = the number two poet who gets the top job when the poet laureate is assassinated.

The original Assassins, or Haschischin, mostly killed poets. One theory is that Hassan-i-Sabbah, The Old Man of the Mountains - leader of the Ismaeli sect and founder of the Assassins - had gone to school with his famous Persian contemporary, Omar Khayyam, the astronomer, mathematician, and author of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

This gave him a lifelong hatred of poets. Astronomer-mathematicians were luckier, as even then - at the peak of Islamic society, possibly the most civilised period in the history of the world - there just weren't many of 'em around.

But there has always been a poet surplus. Hassan-i-Sabbah did what he could to address this.

Unfortunately - centuries before Alfred Nobel or Henry Ford - he also accidentally invented the suicide car bomb, by drugging his killers and promising them narco-heaven after their martyrdom. This piece of psychological chicanery survives and prospers.

William Burroughs was very impressed by Hassan i Sabbah. His views on Omar Khayyam are not known, but the original poems are sophisticated Farsi verses, quite unlike the Victorian travesty/translation by Fitzgerald.

"The moving finger pokes and having prod
Moves deftly on; great is the detail planned by God;
Thus each man, be he killer, poet or wastrel
Is free to delve into a second nostril."

And nobody else is currently talking to me.

I can't see how *either* Ziggurat or me can be construed as saying 'worse is better'. Depends on context, doesn't it? In the right context, you might sound relatively intelligent.

This isn't it, though, is it?

Zig, as I understand him, is saying something more nuanced: low-bandwidth and/or pre-digital media could require a level of interactivity, and therefore thought, often lacking today.

"Listen to my last words any world - I bear no sick words junk words love words forgive words from jesus - I have not come to explain or to tidy up"

I'm almost sure that's in the Bible, but it could easily be Dianetics or the Book of Mormon.

It's hard to be proven wrong as almost nobody has read all three all the way through. I have.

My apologies for the math geek stuff ... but certain parallels occur to me.

Part of the greater Frogspawn project of demonstrating that chess was behind every significant development in Western - and possibly human - culture and society in the past millennium.

Which, uh, brings us right back to <Knoop Microhardness Anisotropy>, where both the width and the length of the long diagonal are equally significant, but the width is typically measured in integers while length is a multiple of 2^(1/2) - root two, length of the diagonal of the unit square, which can be approximated by 17/12, 41/29, 99/70, 239/169 etc where the fractions get increasingly closer to the target but never reach it; and can be derived from solutions to various simple recursive equations. One neat way of putting it is this: if a/b is a solution, then (a+2b)/(a+b) is a closer one.

Pythagoras had a guy wasted for knowing that, back in the old days of the Greek Numbers Mob.

<Frogspawn Dick Shunnery Corner> -- Our linguistic advice for the day is this: be careful when using the familiar Latin phrase 'inter alia', meaning 'among others'. If you get the case/gender wrong you'll wind up talking about 'inter' (= in spite of) 'alium, alii' (garlic).

Yes, of course, *everything* means something, all tree searches are infinite, and 'backwards ass' is ass backwards ass backwards.

Did you know that the Romans called Holland 'Batavia'?

A barber who lived in Batavia
Was known for his fearless behavia
One day a baboon
Came into his room
And he shouted "I'm damned if I'll shavia".

Ever been there? Ghastly, my dear Frogs, ghastly.