You're probably right. But people have been known to pay me to spin these verbal riffs, so it must be up there with other money-making activities like sanitation engineering, police work, bank robbery, accountancy, etc.

Click. Right, that's the last of my shares in sense gone. I'm 100% daft now.

Still haven't managed to pick up the new Half Man Half Biscuit album, but I did get hold of the Magnetic Fields' latest offering, 'Distortion'. One song, 'The Nun's Litany', contains the most wonderful lyric:

I want to be a cobra dancer
With little Willie between my thighs
I may not find a cure for cancer
But I’ll meet plenty of single guys

Now that we're officially *daft* we're going to dabble in foretelling the future. We're not choosy: scientific and statistical methods (principal component analysis) will be used alongside traditional forms of divination (haruspication is the ancient Roman art of reading the entrails of a sacrificed animal, while *taghairm* - a word with deep chess connections - is an old Scottish rite performed while wearing a bullock's hide and sitting under a waterfall, in order to see the future).

Combining all methods we have seen the future of chess. Within the next year or two there will be a complete changing of the guard. The big 2700+ beasts that have been dominant since the 1990s will suddenly fade away - I expect Kramnik, Anand, Topalov, Kamsky, Gelfand, Adams, Shirov, Ivanchuk, Leko, Svidler and others of that generation to fall back down the rating list quite rapidly.

They will be replaced by the new generation of stars: Carlsen, Karjakin, Nepomniachtchi, Mamedjarov, Grischuk, Jakovenko, Navara ... and others. Possibly Arik Braun. Probably that young Italian whose name escapes me.

And some of the established elite GMs such as Aronian should be able to hold their place.

Otherwise, elite tournaments in 2009-10 will have a completely new line-up.

Also, the first elite GMs to be schooled right here on CG should be ready for roll-out soon. <Jessica> is already making waves, and <Just a kid> will start collecting master norms before long.

A cherssgames.com team at the world team championships? I won't be at all surprised.

Alphatabulomancy, btw, is the black art of divination by extracting Scrabble tiles from a bag in the dark.

Magnetic Fields, 'The Nun's Litany' http://idisk.mac.com/olneyce/Public...

We can probably do better than that. I'll need a <getaway driver>, for instance. Are you perchance familiar with thse <automobile> things, as in knowing how to make them move?

All I know is that there's a wheel for aiming it, and buttons and pedals and stuff for other functions, eg stopping. Not much of a basis for a <Car Go Cult -- No Va Express>.

"C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas La Peur."

Misunderstanding haunted Cale at this time. Nobody was sure whether his song 'Mr Wilson' referred to Beach Boy genius recluse Brian Wilson or Labour Prime Minister Harold.

"I believe you, Mr Wilson, I believe the things you say ..."

The correct answer is *both*. But Brian W thought it snide and Harold W is not known to have commented, not even in private with Lady Forkbender.

<Frogspawn Amazing Trivia & Entirely Unknown Facts, #p in a series of 2p-1>

*Fact*: British prime minister Harold Wilson got *married* to Israeli Paracutlerologist Uri Geller in a secret ceremony at 10 Downing Street, London, England. Witnesses were Joe Haines and Golda Meir. The 'lost' film footage has turned up in a Moscow KGB archive and will be seen in an upcoming documentary by J. Figgis.

The bride wore red.

"I believe you, Mr Wilson, I believe the things you say ..."

Harold Wilson took his regular summer holiday in the Scilly Isles.

"I believe you, Mr Wilson, I believe the things you say ..."

HW was the last public figure to smoke a pipe unselfconsciously and non-ironically. There was no hors-texte.

"I believe you, Mr Wilson, I believe the things you say ..."

I can finally understand where White Van Man and White Bread Woman and White Muesli Sprog were at ... La Fatch versus the likes of Foot and Kinnock ... no contest.

Admittedly, the nearest Irish equivalent to Foot was Garret Fitzgerald -- absent-minded academic, wore odd socks, spoke very fast using long words, and compensated for his lack of interest in culture by memorising airline timetables as a hobby -- and he successfully got into power a few times. Admittedly he was running against Haughey -- think Nixon crossed with Bobby Sands in a Charvet shirt and a French mistress and a hand so deep in the public till he could buy mansions, estates and helicopters without anyone 'noticing'.

Hmm. Maybe the analogies don't stand up. The militant left has never had a sniff of office here: just a few dissident backbenchers in centrist Labour coalitions. Or Conor Cruise O'Brien, whom the comrades felt had turned fascistic on becoming a minister - but he himself saw it as dealing firmly with 'provo fascism'.

The old monster is 90-something now: he once said he couldn't rest until Haughey had a stake through his heart. As far as anyone can tell, this has been achieved ... unless there's something they aren't telling us.

What a surprise *that* would be.

Anyway, cheer up. No May Day nonsense next year, what? National Sebastian Flyte day will do wonders for the teddy bear industry instead ...

Yeats was always easy to parody -- all that sex. Another (entirely innocent?) line I had was "The Holy Ghost goes first/ And comes ..."

Which sounds more like Eliot in Sweeney mode ("polyphiloprogenitive/ the sapient sutlers of the lord ...") than it does Yeats. Now that I think of it.

Incidentally -- the train of thought here runs on accessible tracks for once -- I've seen pics of the covers of the three Suttles books. Nowt remotely fat about him -- nor revolutionary, for that matter. But the weirdness is curiously internalized in chess players, who are rarely given to display (exceptions: Grischuk's auto-erotic hair a couple of years ago, or Jon Speelman as 'Specimen' in the 1980s - the woolly mammoth as white male mathematician).

Even the godlike Nimzo looked like a Copenhagen importer of English cheeses, regarded as suspiciously Boho and worldly by his fellow blond Scandi-business types, who spent their time naming automobiles after orifices.

One of the strange parallelisms between Fischer and Spassky was that both knew they were weird, and each expended some effort in 'passing for' normal - with a conspicuous failure to pull it off, as it were, in each case.

Suttles? A Canadian choreographer for cinema, I'd guess, designer of a new CGI interface for turning live dancers into quasi-autonomous pixels. Or the beneficiary of a trust fund created by the inventor of SAM, the famous Suttles Adding Machine, back in 1881.

I was born on May 7th 1958, missing TP's 21st by just a couple of hours. I guess all that avant-garden chatter -- tendrils, entropy, beatniks, Charlie Parker and Norbert Wiener -- might have been a bit over my head just then.

That makes Wednesday my birthday. I'm 'celebrating' with a trip to Denmark next weekend. I'll set aside a few hours to go mad in here too.

Now - there were several very interesting points in your Dylan and Mitchell, wait I have to scroll way up mow... yes this:

<He's [Dylan] constantly moving out, back into the world. She moves deeper into her own head ... something of a problem with that 1970s singer-songwriter Me Generation.>

That rang a few bells, the "moving out, back into the world" motion...

Similar observations were pretty much the main course in Masterclasses given by V. Askenazy - on the Beethoven Sonatas and the Rachmaninoff Pianoconcertos.... Difference being that that movement to the outside, that generosity if you will, was discussed as it manifested itself "within" the oevre of that one composer.

And mind you, we're talking about the universal musical language (unlike "song lyrics"), in the works of these men.

Just like with songlyrics, the number of notes (economy) used to transmit a certain feeling is discussed... The ego-centrism... loathing... generosity in moving towards the listener, or in fact moving away from them and moving inwards...

These elements all surface at different points of time in the life of the artist, and are highly personal.

The evolution of an Artist, like a Chess GM, also shows these movements I think...

Off to bed now - as usual I feel I've failed to pinpointedly convey my thoughts... Perhaps I am more of a listener.

And I will geurgle 'Hard rain' at a later time.

Bon Soir, Maestro. (I'd like to be the <getaway driver>)

How *dare* you! I've never touched one of those beastly 'driving seats' in my life, and I have no intention of ever starting. I know full well that if I were to start, I would only ever pass my test by fluke, and within about a week of being loose on the roads I'd have killed at least nine children. Accidentally, like.

<Fatch>

Harold Macmillan's last known words about the Milk Snatcher General say it all really: 'I do wish she would read a book.' It's a lot easier to forget that people are Tories if they're interesting and cultured - it remains an absolute joy to research and write about Harold M. himself, for example. Peter Catterall, who has been editing his diaries for publication, put together a wonderful table showing all the books that Supermac read in the years 1950-66 inclusive, and it looks a little something like this:

Anthony Trollope (81 books read, 1950-66); Sir Walter Scott (58); Henry James (45); Charles Dickens (43); Jane Austen (36); R.L. Stevenson (21); W.M. Thackeray (20); Sir Winston Churchill (16); Rudyard Kipling (13); William Shakespeare (13); R.S. Surtees (12); George Eliot (11); James Boswell (10); Philip Guedalla (10); A.L. Rowse (9); Joseph Conrad (9); Pamela Hansford Johnson (8); Marion Crawford (7); Keith Feiling (7); Storm Jameson (7); J.E. Neale (7); C.P. Snow (7); Stendhal (7); Leo Tolstoy (7); G.M. Trevelyan (7); Horace Walpole (7); John Buchan (6); Benjamin Disraeli (6); J.A. Froude (6); Graham Greene (6); Charles Morgan (6); John Morley (6); F.S. Oliver (6); Lord Rosebery (6).

The only bloody thing Mrs Whippy ever read were Committee findings. It's all very well being a soulless machine, but at least make an effort at hiding it, dear.

Wahey! Far-out man! Let's get loadsa tabs and put on Jefferson Airplane!

<...to Denmark...>

So you want to drive the spaceship, eh? You're licensed for FTL (faster-than-light) travel, I assume ... ?

Never mind ... one *more* crime won't hurt us at this stage.

Anyway, good to have you on board. Accommodation etc will be assigned once the ah ship is operational. I'm looking at FTL warp engines that actually run off *music*, which should please you.

- Engine Room? You know that we forgot to include dilithium crystals in our weekly shopping list ... ?!

Just checked and that's *exactly* the line, in fact. And it's followed by 'They edify your integrities so they can play on your fears'. Not noticed this before - yuck.

Simplicity in pop can be a valuable asset, sometimes. I'm reminded of what Pete Hamil writes about 'Buckets of Rain' in the liner notes to 'Blood on the Tracks'. It's a straightforward ditty, isn't it - 'Life is sad, life is a bust, all ya can do is do what ya must'. Pete calls it a 'simple song. Not Dante's Inferno, and not intended to be. But a song which conjures up the American road, all the busted dreams of open places, boxcars, the Big Dipper pricking the velvet night.' And that's the thing about Dylan: he's so wicked & literate that when he steps back a bit it takes you by surprise, and the words are all the more resonant for it. My favourite line in 'Sara' isn't anything to do with kelp or children on the beach or radiant jewels or Methodist bells; no, it's the one about 'Staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/Writing "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" for you'. It's nice to remind people, just occasionally, that *you* exist as well as your work.

Reminds me of when I was aged 9 or 10 and discovered Biggles, and read 20-something of 'em in the first week. Then, of course, I was hooked, and had to get the other 59. A whole month of my precious young life down the tubes, learning about Ginger (common), Algy (posh), Huns (beastly) and aeroplanes (simply wizard).

I could Geurgle it - hey, it's called 'Pylons', isn't it? - but I don't want *Them* to know about my interest in electricity, phallic symbolism, and poetry. They'd just try to sell me shares in <Powergenitalia>.

I remembered the full Lou Reed quote but didn't provide it, as I doubted my sanity/memory. "They edify your integrities" ... oh yes, my integrities are getting edified all the time, often against my will.

"Life's a drag
A series of jokes
With a built-in lag
But Navier-Stokes ...
With incredible precocity
And human luminosity
Exhibit an atrocity
And calculate viscosity ..."

(The Ultra Violent Catastrophe)

By the power vested in me, I hereby declare you to be only 50 years old. Feel better now?

Happy birthday, kid.