Is your pepper shaker anywhere near a volcanic eruption or a herd of firefiles? This could be throwing off you calculations.

<<Magma> (molten rock) radiates light and so do <fireflies>.>

Magma were terrific in their day, embodying all that was best in laid back Wagnerian French apocalyptic Koboïan speaking angst rock.

An entire phylum containing one species and it sure cast a lurid light on other pretenders to angst.

Still rolling on the floor giggling here.

Thanks,

<Zebra> Any time. Welcome. Any friend of the quagga is a friend of mine. Even if I did think at first that the 'monotonous line in rhetoric' was something I'd done. Rhetoric, sure, but we try to multitrack round here. Pile-ups still occur.

There was an Irish reggae band named Zebra once, the name suggesting black-and-whiteness due to the shortage of darker-skinned people in the country in those days. Even so, they had to include a busker from Chicago and a student from the Phillipines, and no actual West Indians at all. I've got a signed copy of their only record, and I'm waiting for it to acquire value. Any value.

<Deffi> is <Old Lady Underpants> any relation to The Virgin Ironpants, one-time ruler of your over-zealous subcontinental neighbour? Latterly more matronly, of course. Salman would know.

<Jess> Kant think at all right now, I'm <Down at the Old Ding-an-sich>...

<mack> Music hall philosophy, innit? Those bovian jovian rogerings naturally got me thinking of Bulls & Bushes, and then it's just a short step sideways to... splat.

<achieve> experimental science needed here. Pardon me while I jiggle the sun around a bit in the sky. There? No, here. Oops, just scorched Australia.

Never mind, <twinlark>, I'm sure it'll grow back. Eventually.

New year, folks. I really ought to exercise my inalienable right as a pundit and dish out my own awards.

Here, do have one each. For patience, diversity, and, um, alphatabulomancy.

<Is your pepper shaker anywhere near a volcanic eruption or a herd of firefiles? This could be throwing off you calculations.> True <Jess>, that's why it is better to just bring it back to Geometry on a plain piece of paper etc. No chance for the magma and fireflies to throw me off.

(Just translating the dutch geometry vocabulary into english poses me enough problems. Reading it I would understand though ;-)

<Famous Canadians>

<I'm sure it'll grow back. Eventually.>

There is a little salamander
Who lost something very important
After meeting an aggro electric sander.

Reminiscing the big win by Lysander
It grew it back without feeling torment
And thereafter used a drum sander.

<Zebra>-- Is that a shot at the people who post in <Dom's> forum, or a shot at the <EU> or whatever they call it these days. <EC>?>

Definitely at the EU, or the people who run it. <Domdaniel> runs an interesting chessforum.

<Plus, if the <Europa> monster had many heads, but only one line of rhetoric, wouldn't that make the multiplicity of heads redundant?>

Only some of them are allowed to speak. The rest are "bad Europeans".

<I'm not criticizing this notion; it's the thesis of <Marcuse's> <One Dimensional Man> >

Tell me more!

Just getting a few glasses of this and that down my gullet.

Here's to

Attlee, Breton, Cooper-Clarke, Duchamp, Europa, Fox (Robin), GMAN, Hypatia, Innes, John (Cale), Kroker, Lawson, Mitchell, Nimzo, Offield, Pynchon, Qb6, Rawlinson, Samuel, Two-Beaks, Underpants (Old Lady), Van Vilet, Womack, X-raymondo, Young (Neil) and Zimmerman. And Zilch.

Brother Saddam couldn't make it tonight. He went the same way as Brother Bigley, killed for the camera by hooded men in a Baghdad basement. In the unlikely event that some form of civilization survives, I don't think the future will differentiate between one killing and another.

Then again. Whatever survives, in any form, will have witnessed an awful lot of killing. They might not even be interested in the pornography of 21st century death...

Basta.

<Zeb> I can't claim to actually 'run' anything here. But the self-organizing rebel hive mind effect is working overtime.

<Twin> Circadian rhythms. I switched from getting up at 5am to going to bed at 5am. The danger is trying to do both. Or neither.

<mack> Exquis list, and thanks for including Mr Cale, greatest living Welshman. <"Like that ancient teenage dream of soul to poisoned soul to poisoned soul...">

<Jess> The Emily Equation -- <All of her poems can be sung to the tune of <The Yellow Rose of Texas>> -- could damage a person's mind. Let me give you another example.

Coupla albums back, Leonard Cohen had a song, Alexandra Leaving. At a time when many of the Old Guys -- Dylan, Cale, Walker, Young, just for starters -- are producing fragments of really brilliant old-guy material, as though a brush with death has finally forced their chosen artform to mature, Len outshines the lot. And Alexandra Leaving is THE great old-guy's song about death.

None of the callow romanticism of rawk. No queer-for-death fetishism. Just loss, and mystery, and a strange kind of soul. Sure, the song asks us to reject rationality: but it also explains why. It gets to the heart of magical thinking and clings to it.

<"Do not choose a coward's explanation/ That hides between the cause and the effect...">

Or so I thought. Until one of those well-meaning know-it-all friends -- hey, we've all got one of those, folks, haven't we? -- reminded me about Melanie. And Alexander Beetle.

Ms Melanie Safka was a 70s chanteuse who sang a fine version of Ruby Tuesday, and was capable of gems like Psychotherapy: <"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the theories of Freud/ He has warned of all the evils that the ego must avoid...">

But Melanie was also a tad hippy-dippy. One of the dips was Alexander Beetle, sung in a little girl voice, a sad tale of a kid who loses her pet beetle. She looks everywhere... <"We searched in all the places that a beetle might be near/ And we made the kind of noises that a beetle likes to hear...">

Same name, same rhythm, impossible to get the damn thing out of my head, and I'll never hear Cohen quite the same way again. Friends, huh?

As I went out walking
The streets of Laredo
The moonshine inside me
Was mostly albedo.

I saw an old Shaker
Dispensing black pepper
He'd met with his Maker
And come back as a leper.

Not angels, but angles.
'One hundred and eighty!'
Three darts all in tangles?
Lettsby Avenue, matey.

ABC...

An American airforce, ah'm awfully afraid
Backed by Blair's Britain, bombed Belgrade.
Clinton commanded. Chiefly, children cried.
Dissent disappeared. Democracy died.

Every evil empire exports empty engineers
For foolish foreigners. Forget faint fears.

Go google Goebbels. Gods, generate
History's horror, here harboring hate.
Ironsides is inside. Invisible inks
Join jackal, joker, jocoserious jinx.
Ku-Klux Klan killers, kindly Krauts
Let loose like lions. Learning late lessons, louts.

Milo married Mira. Milo's Mum
Needed no narcotics, naturally numb:
'One of our offspring opted out of our
Preternaturally patented parenting power.'

Queerly, quaintly, quintessentially quiet,
Ruling Ruritania's rancorous riot,
Slobo screwed Serbia. Some suicides survive.
Thanks to TV, the torturers thrive.

Under useless umbrellas, using uniforms unclear
Vagrants vanish, vermin volunteer.
Who would wish ...? What wiser way?
Xeroxed xenophobia, XS, X-ray?

The age thing is one that I do not know how to account for.

I, unfortunately, know that many people in chess are not well to do.

Many master level players are living in less than ideal financial situations.

One local master player in the Chicago area was concerned about making it back for the next day's rounds at the U. S. Open as his car was not working and in need of repair that was not able to be paid for... he was counting on someone giving him a ride to be able to keep playing.

The up side is... any one who is offered the scholarship does not have to accept it.

I asked for everyone's top three candidates in case a scholarship is declined.

It is impossible in an internet community to know what drives people.

The ultimate idea here is to do something nice for someone.

Our purpose is to say thank you for someone's chess effort and to create more chess.

<ABC...> Do you know Walter Abish's "Alphabetical Africa"? The first chapter contains only words starting with the letter a <e.g. Ages ago an archaeologist, Albert, alias Arthur, ably attended an archaic African armchair affair at Antibes, attracting attention as an archaeologist and atheist. Ahhh, atheism...anyhow, Albert advocated assisting African ants. Ants? All are astounded. Ants? Absurd.>, the second chapter only words starting with a or b, etc.; each subsequent chapter adds the next letter in the alphabet to the set of allowed word beginnings. This continues for the first 26 chapters, until at last Abish is (briefly) allowed to write without constraint. In the second half of the book, chapters 27 through 52, letters are removed in the reverse order that they were added. Thus, z words disappear in chapter 28, y, in chapter 29, etc..

The 'original' ABC poem was written around 1820. A lot of people know the first two lines <An Austrian Army awfully arrayed/ Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade> but it staggers on rather clunkily for all 26. I wrote my version a few years ago but never got around to publishing it properly.

I'm sort of temporarily, well, busy, right now, so I haven't been around here much. Wotsisface hasn't moved yet, has he? Did somebody say Jan 3rd?

I'll check in later today just in case.

<Eyal> Oddly enough -- or not oddly enough, as these things have a way of surfacing -- I'm in the middle of writing a piece about novelists who wrote autobiographic memoirs (JG Ballard, Empire of the Sun; John McGahern, Memoir) thus giving some readers (implied bimbo types, presumably) the illusion of access to an unalloyed truth that the fictions were only straining towards... or something like that.