<Reddi, Your Reverence> - <is money worth more if you spend it or if you save it ?>

No idea. I've only ever 'saved' some via serendipitous accidents like the Silman Save. And Serendip used to be just across the bridge from Tamil Nadu before they monkey-wrenched it.

I find the whole 'rainy day' philosophy absurd -- the notion that one refrains from spending now, in order to spend in the future. While it's clearly useful to have some spare capacity for emergencies, people overrate it.

If I may analyse a line or two ... ?

First, ironically, the very people who carefully put money aside for emergencies and accidents are the very ones least likely to have them. While chaotic types like me are always getting into trouble: yesterday I pretty much cleaned out my bank account, buying books, DVDs, a meal, train travel, etc etc. Not *exactly* the high life, but closer to the edge than many folk would like. If an emergency arises I now can't afford it. But it probably won't.

My solution? Well, I *might* get a paycheck in the post for work done ... or it could take another week. Meanwhile, lie low. I can get away with this, having arranged my life to contain no offspring, dependent persons, mortgages, major drug habits, etc. And I'm not a total idiot: I paid my phone/broadband bill before going gonzo.

Dom's Fiscal Law: only worry if They can cut the thing off.

And karma balances out. The fifty I found partly makes up for the many fifties I've lost.

To get back to the underlying philosophy... It seems to me that for many people it's not just "put up with minor inconvenience now, so that you'll be able to handle a major problem, if it happens".

This is reasonable, even though it's backed up by the usual human inability to grasp statistics. I've taught myself to think statistically: like a bookie, I can put practical odds on some outcomes, and assess the impossibility of assigning a number to others.

The classic case here is Blaise Pascal and Pascal's Wager. He noted that even if the chance of God existing was a quintillion to one against, one should still pray. Because all finite numbers are insignificant compared to infinity, and the tiniest possibility of eternal life was worth doing *anything* for.

He just made one key error: he assessed only two scenarios -- no god and Christian god. He didn't allow that satanists or animists might be right, or that a god could exist with a personality quite unlike anything in the holy books.

Unless 'God is Mad' by Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias is your holy book. It says:

<Got a message from your maker I'll keep it short and sweet
Death will come at midnight
For those of you who wear false teeth
... and those of you who wear glasses
Had best beware.>

Hmm ... how did I get from money to god, when I don't 'believe' in either? Well, I believe money exists: as a set of symbols dreamed up by humans, invested with great importance, and used daily to guide most life-related decisions. Just like G-d, rilly.

So: if my choice is between (a) suffer definite pain now in order to alleviate possible future pain, and (d) avoid today's pain and see what tomorrow brings ... file me with (e) and send in my prescription for painkillers.

That, I believe, answers (g) one small rhetoric query that did not ask for an answer, (x) everything else.

I'm practicing ... gonna write a self-help book to, er, make millions, and, um, convert the world to something more rational. Just an old hippie idealist under that twisted cynic exterior.

"God is love. Love-forty down on his own serve. Not looking good here at St Wimbledon's - but luckily for this unique father-son senior-junior tennis *singles* partnership, Jesus saves -- with some superb backhanders to his self-styled earthly representatives. And the Holy Ghost, hovering on the baselines, makes three. This is strange tennis, but spookily watchable." - Apophis Does Wimbledon.

Some people (sniff) have written about 13,000 more posts. Short ones.

If some dedicated character-counting Turing-enabled machine or person had the capacity to calculate a word-per-post average, I could prove it.

Drinkez up. Aux chiottes, C'est une conseille de la famille et la topique d'import.

Too important for Franglais so I'll switch back to vernacularity. Language and chess have a vermiculate, squirmy quality: even if you sit immobile in your seat, weird stuff happens.

Oh, sod this for a game of heavily armed invaders. The war will not take place, but I wouldn't get too cocky about <Impending Doom> (Lack of).

So write your own nonsense already. For deep, hah, background, il y a: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documen...

<A gamelet>:

1.b4 e6!
2.Bb2 b6
3.e3 Bb7
4.f4?

[one of those thematic and reasonable-looking moves that can turn up in any opening, weird or mainstream, and turn out to be blunders with tactical refutations. Moral: keep your eyes open.]

Many books deal with opening tricks and 'traps' -- some good, some silly, some terrible. One book that I like is <101 Chess Opening Traps> by Steve Giddins (Gambit Publications, 1998/2006).

The title is actually a bit misleading. It implies that the book is about <hope chess> -- traps that you hope your unprepared opponent will fall for, but which do not consist of particularly good moves. The infamous <Blackburne Shilling Gambit> is a classic case -- if the Victorians had an internet, Blackburne would have lost his shillings instead of mating his hapless adversaries.

It's an important distinction. The games -- almost all genuine miniatures -- given by Giddins nearly all involve sound play, or at least not-unsound play. But, if your opponent is unfamiliar with the line or unable to sense what's coming or work out the details at the board ... Zap! Pow! Crunch!

Many fascinating details emerge -- such as the number of games in which the potential *winner* doesn't know the trick, and blithely plays something else.

I'll provide a few examples later, if anyone is interested.

Back to our gamelet (Jamieson-McCarthy, Irish championship 2007 -- not in the CG database but it shows up in other ones. Alas.)

After 4.f4? black wins a pawn in safety.

4 ... Qh4+
5.g3 Qh6
6.Nf3 Bxb4 with clear advantage

Instead I played a slightly murkier line -- yep, I was Black, with my 'Universal Frogspawn' 1...e6 -- which wins the pawn a different way:

4 ... Qh4+
5.g3 Qe7?!
6.Nf3 Qxb4 [unclear? w/ compensation?]

I'd seen both lines, but thought the queen would be active on b4 -- but it just gets in the way, hindering black development. Already behind in time - I spent too long looking at a fantasy queen sac that was never going to happen -- I eventually got into acute Zeitnot and was mated while hammering out moves.

I'll have more to say on these topics too. Now that you've got me talking chess again.

Hmmm... do you recall a time- when I had a chess puzzle in my forum,,, and a certain "Majeur de Frogge" was dropping by regularly with a series of <Not very long at all> posts, which got erased, and then the "Majeur" requested his <not very long at all posts> not be deleted whereupon the "hostess" promised not to and applauded the "Majeur" for his stance on "free <not so long> speech", whereupon the "Majeur" somewhat sheepishly (as opposed to froggishly) confessed he was actually "pulling an Ahab"- Viz- hunting the <Great White Whale> who proved elusive even for a series of "Majeur" posts of <somewhat more reduced length than usual in the service of revenge>?

I hope that's cleared a few things up.

BTW, I also noticed <just now> while you were denigrating the "short post"- for example, say- a post of the single word <quack!> repeated several thousand times-- that my forum is <precisely> 100 pages "bigger" than yours?

Not that anyone's counting. Except when we were BOTH racing to be first to 300... and when "Majeur Ahab" was racing over that Nantucket brine in search of <Databsse Statistics Glory>...

Oh what times we live in etc.

You've heard of <Force Majeur>?

The alternatives are unthinkable. Non-Cartesian, meme. Mise nu par les celibitaires, comme un rockstar bi.

Here -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkCl... -- par exemple -- is a scene from the early life of our iconic ami, Tap Sum Bong.

Ou est l'eau de bongue d'antan?

Il faut boire quelque chose pour deranger le tete. Deja foutu, comme on dit.

Still, we'll always have Paris...

La Defense Francaise, les accents execrables, un pint de chateau d'yquem, des vieux pillules codethyline houde, L'Etron Fou Leloublan sur la dansette, M. Duchamp et M. Beckett en train de kibitzer ... et M. Cocteau, il dit "Tout ce qu'on fait dans la vie, meme l'amour, on le fait sur le train express de la vie qui roule vers la morte: fumer l'opium, c'est quitter le train ..."

Majeur Force retired (as a Colonel) in 1984 and his hobby is organizing coups in anglophone Africa, shrugging in a gallic manner when sussed, and implicating family members of English VIPs, royalty and prime ministers mostly.

Ever hear the music of Yma Sumac? She claimed to be a genuine Inca Princess, but she turned out to be Amy Camus from Brooklyn, cousine of Albert and a passable goalkeeper too. The Camus family have a gene for goalkeeping and black feet, almost unique. However, nobody ever saw Peter Schmeichel take his socks off.

So it may not be so rare. Dino Zoff wore leggings on the nudist beaches of the Costa Smaragdina. La vita e una spiaggia, like I said.

I made everything up except the names: Zoff, Schmeichel, Albert Camus & Yma Sumac all are, or were, 'real' people, at least as 'real' as you or me.

Do not pass Go, do not collect 50 euros.

I was so small at the time that I only remember two things about the experience.

The ground (outside the car) was composed of a most pleasing shade of brown.

Gary Cooper was not any kind of shade, which I regarded to be curious. He was in BLACK AND WHITE.

Tumpa seemingly means Earthquake. So I wrote this tribute to Yma Sumac, the footprint of Godzilla, and the brave people of Los Angeles, city of absent-minded Rilkean angels in denial.

<Tumpa Trumps Aloo Nada>

Ellay people
Better watch out
Tumpa's coming
Like a nuclear rout.

Ellay people
You first in line
When Tumpa strikes
No more me, no more mine.

You may drive a Caddy
You may drive a Bumpa
You'll have no roadway
The day of Tumpa.

Ellay People
Yma Sumac said
Deserve a Tumpa
For the Inca dead.

And all the Plagues
That we gotta cram in
Like War and Poison
And Potato Famine

But if it isn't already obvious, I love Yma's voice. The management crowd did her no favors with the Carmen-Miranda-on-Ayahuasca routine -- but I guess there weren't many image options back then.

People made music worldwide, but World Music hadn't been invented, and Folk was getting started (or being rediscovered by earnest intellectuals) in places like Ireland and England. And then Dylan borrowed Folk, the Rolling Stones borrowed the Blues, and they never gave 'em back.

Innaresting. When *I* was young (yes, humans could speak by then, or at least you could call it speaking) a popular question was "Do you dream in colour or black-and-white?"

Don't know if anyone's ever done the research, but I suspect this question only made sense between 1955 and 1985, roughly.

Any earlier, and the b/w visual experience was near universal: most photographs, all TV, most movies. So everyone dreamed in mono, because dreams take their form from movies, TV, etc.

Then you get 20 or 30 years of co-existence, where B/W & Color modes existed side by side on TV and movies and 'serious' photography. People dreamed in both.

Now colour dominates, colour dreams are natural -- just like jump cuts, fast edits, a hi-bpm neural soundtrack, usw.

When I was a film critic watching new movies every day, my films followed the same structure. I was rarely in them myself; neither were the people around me in RL (or whichever movie stars I met, for that matter). My dreams were fictional narratives; 'I' was the viewer, not the director -- so sometimes I was impressed (while still inside the diegetic frame) by some directorial conceit or other.

I was writing occasional short stories at this time, too -- that may have fed into it.

It lasted a long time too. Only recently, in the last year, have I seen the return of 'normal' dreams -- surreal disconnected narratives involving me and people I know.

As long as I've known it, I've thought his music better than Zappa's -- normally I hate to get into who-is-best long-distance urination contests, in music, or chess, or anything else. *And* I admire Zappa's approach to the biz, his way of making music, his parodic genius in the recording studio -- plus "We're Only in it for the Money" is among the best pieces of 20th century satire, in any medium...

And yet I'd rather listen to Trout Mask Replica. I can remember summoning up the courage to buy it in the 70s - it was already about ten years old - and playing it over and over until it began to make some sort of sense. Now it only sounds a little bit strange, but it makes much other music seem bland.

I know he returned to painting for a while, but I think he had to give it up, and has been quite ill for some years.

I've met people who got to be rich & famous by hard work plus luck, having the right image at the right time and applying themselves to the job of success. Others (Scott Walker, Thomas Pynchon) actively reject celebrity - yet produce brilliant work.

There's another category in which I'd put Don Van Vliet, John Cale, and Vivian Stanshall. All enjoyed critical success, were widely praised for many years, but never made very much money and had regular doubts about the direction of their work, or even the chosen form (Cale was a classically trained avant-garde musician, Vliet & Stanshall both excellent painters).

Sometimes they resented *themselves* for 'selling out' while simultaneously thinking that they didn't sell out *enough*. (I never knew Stanshall and I'm now unlikely to meet Vliet or Pynchon, but I've written *about* all three and I've interviewed lesser figures who had similar bouts of doubt.

Then comes an ill-thought-out attempt to be populist, and it alienates the critics. So the artist turns to self-parody, churning out repeats of a famous work. Even Dylan did this around 1970.

Meanwhile they see their less-talented contemporaries making lots of money.

It could be named De Chirico Syndrome, after the surrealist painter whose early sinister landscapes were much praised and prized around 1920. Then he made the mistake (like Woody Allen) of trying to move on. Nobody liked his new stuff, everyone wanted spooky streetscapes -- he was eventually reduced to forging himself ... dashing off pieces in a simulation of the' spooky style, backdating them by 20 years, and claiming to have found them under the bed.

Art isn't often truly sad and funny at the same time. You get artists *trying* to be sad and funny, which is very different... but the fact that poor old De Chirico eventually found 200 paintings under his bed is both tragic and hilarious.

Something analogous happens in chess, particularly in the US. The game demands both talent and hard work, it makes extreme demands on body and mind, yet tangible rewards are few. At least the old Soviet stars were treated like kings. And chess players see their peers turning to something like, say, trading derivatives ... until quite recently this seemed like a good career move.

Some GMs have the right temperament -- write some columns and books, play in some open tournaments, pick up occasional invites to elite events, and keep things ticking over. Others give up playing, or stay on as a seething mass of resentments.

I wonder what drives Korchnoi now. Apparently he needs an enemy - not just an opponent - to push and struggle against.

<Yma + Carmen M.> ....

"Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay,
I like your Yagé Vine,
Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay,
it makes me feel so fine,
Ay, ay, ay, ay, Ayuahasca,
I travel in my mind up to Alaska ..."

I once knew the lyrics to We're Only In It For The Money by heart, but today I hardly remember more than "What`s the ugliest part of the body?"

I also liked the Bonzo Dog Band, especially the Urban Spaceman and their Monster Mash.

When I knew him, van Vliet was also a painter, and preferred to be treated as a struggling painter.

What Dylan music do you think was self-parody? I can't think of any, unless you mean the "Watching the River Flow" songs, or Self-Portrait.

But of course. Le mot juste, ma Reine.

"Not" -- Exquisite, Toronto Daily Mussel.

"that" -- Piquant and perfectly placed, Old Belfast Atheist Times

"anyone's" -- Is it one word or two? The blunt morphology at work makes this one of the curtest, most condensed moments in contemporary art praxis ... for a nanosecond, FischerQueen is indeed "anyone's". The Gleaner, Jamaica Inn.

"counting" -- Fundamental and profoundly realistic portrait of All That is Sacred -- Weston-Super-Mare Index of Probabilities, with FREE Bayesian Shopping Trolley.

+

OK, OK. As for, um, "Quack", did I ever criticise it? It is true that I did not.

Anyhow, speaking of numbers that none of us looks at, for a remarkably long time now, your total posts number has been tracking <Eyal's> in a ratio of 2:1.

I don't even know when this began, but I first noticed it when the totals were about 6000 and 3000. Ever since, neither of you has deviated much, even with occasional quiet patches on each side. Plus bursts of mania ... a consistent 2:1 all the way --- Jess, 6000: Eyal, 3001 up to Jess, 22,000: Eyal, 11,000 ... and beyond.

I don't think the 2:1 ratio has ever held *exactly* overnight, but it's been very close a few times. And it has certainly hit it during the day. You can demonstrate that mathematically, using a basic theorem from calculus. Cauchy or Euler, perhaps, or even Kummer.

Is this just a random oddity, my queen? Or are you twice the man ... ? (etc)

I'd better stop. Some people are (properly) sensitive about fractions.

A recent proposal in the European Union suggested setting up a department for Differentiated Integration. Mathematically, these procedures negate one another -- so it is perhaps a good thing that the proposal was dropped on the grounds that it would "multiply divisions".

Would it have taken away additions as well?

"Quack" -- if it walks like a dcuk, The Grauniad.
"Quack! Quack!" -- All fine and dandy but who these days is so blithely Warholesque?

"Kvak, Kvetch, Kvir & Kvatermass: the Phonetics of Otherness in Upper Kaskadia" -- "Meisswerk's paper is a landmark in the rapidly expanding field of Gonzo Anthropology, which has been compared to the Universe during an inflationary phase. If matters continue in this vein, it may wind up being *cited*. Have your ticker-tape ready for the big day!" - The Vancouver Vector (incorporating the Victoria Vehend & the Kamloops Kvaternion, the Quadra Biker and Squamish Squab).

Inside:
- The Probability of it Raining on a given Parade, p.2 - Our Page Three Sasquatch, Beau O'Besity, Sheds a Red Hair, p.4 - False Creek Resident Apprehended with Fake Moustache: local politician was 'after ethnic vote'. - Monashee Man wins Annual Sneezing Competition with 'Hypermodern' Strategy: putting the 'tish' back in British Columbia and the 'oo' back in Osoyoos. All together now: A-tish-oo. - Vancouver 'really in Australia', scientists say. Dramatic discovery by Darwin [shurely 'in Darwin'? - ed.] changes face of Geography. - Chess Column by J.F. Queen: another 61 Fischer books reviewed.

Prez @ Gov to Major Frog
Remind Korean Envoy: we have dog.
The party's on @ a secret venue
Expect a canine on the menu.

Major Frog to Prez @ Gov
Good Diplomacy, but lousy love.
In future, stick with fizzy water:
Or we consult the First & Second Daughter.