I would prefer it if you didn't use my username in vain. But I suppose you don't much care whose feelings you hurt, seeing that yours never are.>

I also happen to have an email address under the name <idle-monad> which (and this is true!) is an anagram of Domdaniel that I came up with years ago.

But, with hindsight, leaving a message on somebody's forum that said "watch out for idle-monad" (meaning 'expect an email from that name') was not the brightest thing I've done.

Our somewhat sensitive friend thought I was insulting him. But by then my list of crimes was pretty long anyway.

But it's funny, at least.

It seems lately, Dear Dom, everytime I leave the cuckoo's nest I get my old ego-ass in trouble and my righteous indignation (or the other guy's r.i.) gets run through the ringer. When you're embroiled in your own -- imbroglio? -- I gotta go it alone.

Like a week or so ago when I made a good-faith and sincere offer to help a deserving young man master our language and its conventions. I offered to email him redrafts of his everyday posts so he may compare them. This way he wouldn't have to be peppered with corrections and explanations every day in an open forum until they dig a grand canyon through his skull.

I stepped into a pile of protective angst. (Paraphrased:) "We don't need no stinkin' help. He likes being corrected in front of everybody. He can take it, he's not a kid. Leave him alone."

I was chagrinning from ear to ear when I zapped the posts from my forum. For two days, student and teachers wondered and dialogued why I zapped the posts. But nobody asked me.

Where the hell were you, Dom, when I needed you on the farm? Come back.

In RL, people who repeat themselves drive me crazy. Doing a kind of standard-issue reply here for the idiots wasn't too hard, even if I sometimes felt like going into attack mode.

And it was only while replying to an email last night that it hit me. This affair seems incredibly petty, on all sides - not just from the outside world, but even from other parts of cyberspace. Even other parts of chessgames.com ...

Now that I think we're winning I have a lower tolerance level. Maybe m---d saw that and thought it said something negative about me.

Who cares? For the record, I found m-n-d an intelligent and sometimes brilliant sparring partner, though given to self-centred thinking. He'd say worse about me, I'm sure.

Fri Dec 22: 37.Qd8
Sat Dec 23: 37...Qe8
Mon Dec 25: 38.Qb6

He has played 36...h5 to reach this position (White to play):

click for larger view

And music is the odd one out in the music-math-chess triad, because musical compositions can have the same sort of humanistic/experiential component as novels and poetry.

But, very loosely, let's say the brain evolved a language acquisition device with multiple modules, that have different functions and kick in at different ages. A four-year-old child learns something like ten new words every day, while also mastering grammar, phonetics, etc. A 14-yr-old is already losing this ability, but has a new one to do with interaction, communication, socialization etc (hence teen poetry).

This communication module is good for poetry, and may feed into music, especially songs with lyrics. It doesn't affect chess much, though.

There are some evolutionary theories as to what other function language might originally have piggybacked on. I take it in the other direction: can chess/math/music piggyback on the formalist language module?

One of my favorite pieces of music is 'Damn Life' by John Cale, a deconstruction of Beethoven's Ode to Joy. He takes the Beethoven piece, supposedly one of the great uplifting paeans to the human spirit, and slows it down, adds some discord, and words saying 'damn life, what's it worth? damn life... you're just not worth it' -- with magnificently depressing results.

Question: what causes the change from joy to misery? Is it the title and lyrics -- suggesting that language is strong and specific enough to override the emotional resonances of music? Or is it the tempo & discord -- suggesting that the music still does the work, but listeners are sensitive to tempo etc? Or both?

I don't know enough about music to be sure. I think maybe it's both, but the language component seems stronger. But I'm a word-person -- maybe the tempo would leap out more strongly to a professional musician.

As you rightly remarked not that long ago my english isn't perfect, far from it, to be more specific. Obviously my current level might be enough for a typical 17 year-old, alas, most people strive for perfection. I'm no exception on this rule. Alone I am not able to reach a grammatical/spelling level making it hardly noticable for native english-speaker that I'm a non-native speaker. With help from people speaking the language much better and more correct this ideal may be more in reach.

To help me out with my lingual-problems achieve and brankat offered help, corrections which they found were necessary.

It was around 1-2 am, just before i wanted to get some sleep, when i checked your forum. I saw your offer for help and a post indicating achieve and brankat were already helping me with it.

now, whether this post was aggressive or merely well-meant, I will not comment on, it wouldn't make this case much better. <Let's say it was merely a miscommunication.>.

I did have reasons why I didn't ask why you deleted all posts on that subject on your forum. Maybe you had changed your mind? Maybe I had misread one of the posts? Maybe after I left a small forum-bound civil war had broken out, only to be solved by chopping of the roots? I didn't know. Always saw you as a good person, so was convinced you've had your reasons. But again, let's leave the issue and blame it on a miscommunication or misinterpretation.

I would be very grateful if you still feel like correcting my posts aimed at improving my english, else I will continue to ask brankat and achieve for corrections, as far as they want to.

Take care,

So I shall leave it here. Prob'ly woulda anyway - it's kinda decorative.

btw, does anyone actually speak or write <perfect> English? Apart from Viv Stanshall, and he's been dead for ten years...

Feeling very guilty here. I just reactivated my email account, I know you sent me some writing as I asked, but It is gone. <jessica_fischer_queen@hotmail.com>

If you would consider resending the piece you already sent I would love it, but I've been AWOL and not doing that well. No excuse though. I have just caught up reading your forum pages here. Very interesting stuff, educational forum man.

Merry Christmas-- I have finished my semester (I don't know how) and life is rougher without Dad than I anticipated, even though I knew he was going to die well in advance.

Cheers, I miss you and reading these pages is making me feel a bit sad that I have not been around.

Jess

All kinds of odd stuff going on, as you've possibly seen.

In any case, I've just done some deeper analysis of the line that has convinced me it's completely won in every variation. The mate threats combined with b5 lead to a total black collapse. I now reckon that 38...Qc8 is unplayable, and 38...Re3 is his only chance (though I'm not up to date with the latest analysis on that).

Actually - odd, this - I said 'nonsense' in case a more complete explanation ('scholarly but dilletantish and not particularly relevant postings', maybe?) would have sidetracked me. Just as <dak> was talking about.

The idiocy of the Resident in this here forum gets worse by the hour. At current rates I'll be drooling into an idiot-proof turkey sandwich by Monday.

Since near the start of the Nickel game, my habit has been to save each day's new analysis, my own and others', in a new Fritz/Chessbase file. Last night, after a lot of work on the 40.Rf7 line, I didn't save it. I left the machine to run all night to ponder one tricky line in which there might have been a perpetual.

A brief power outage ensued, as they do. Result: yesterday's work vanished, as it does.

I'm trying to reconstruct it. The last time I lost unsaved work on a computer was around 1986. It's that old 20-year-curse again, innit?