Good grief that sounds indeed very painful, please (let them) take good care...

Quell coincidence-- I'm on my favourite "cough drink" as we speak, a sort of syrup, like you said, and it does contain opiate derivates i think. I love that stuff. Tastes good as well.

At least 'cough bottle' is the name I remember from childhood. I think people say 'syrup' these days, same as everyone else. This is because local oddities are dying out and the world is becoming more homogen homougin humongous ... more *the same everywhere*.

By the same principle, a bottle of whiskey should be called a 'blotto bottle'. No, wait, that's wrong: a cough bottle neutralises coughs so whiskey is a <sanity bottle>.

<Dom>

I've just been reminded of a cartoon for young kids where the hero was a ... hot water bottle. His name, if I remember correctly, was Walter --- <Walter Hottle Bottle>.

No, no-

Unbelievable! Brilliant terminology. Who would have thought that a simple nationality would hold so many meanings.

I merely stole it.

Similarly, I stole <1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5> from Ruy Lopez. I always tell students I invented this opening.

<mack> don't feel too bad man- You've proven that you are in the "high end" of the Aussie pool, at the least-

"If the Australians stopped drinking Foster's Ale they could save up enough money to leave Australia."

I stole that from <Stephen Leacock>.

You can make up the following concoction to assist you:

Compared to some of the blatant lies and deranged fantasies I come up with, the foregoing may seem a bit pedestrian. That's because it's true.

This includes the people of Ruritarichtenstein, in central Yurp. Every year on February the umpteenth, aka Saint Dozen's Day, the entire population gathers in the town square beneath an enormous foaming replica of GM Stein.

They sing traditional songs such as "Hurrah for the family Stein/ There's Gertrude, there's Ep, and there's Ein/ Gert's writing is bunk/ Ep's sculpture is junk/ And no-one can understand Ein."

Then they hoist flags and banners reading "Democracy is coming to the USA" and "Vote for Baker's Dozen, Blaze's Seven, and Avogadro's Number". Other signs read "Ruritarichtenstein: the lucky-for-some Country" and "A Nation is a Machine for Dying in".

Everyone then gets out a coin -- a Ruritaristeinian Koronagulderflorin, as they refuse to join the Euro, don't recognize the Yen, have already spent their Rubles on nogoodnik footballers, and regard Dollars as a dangerous innovation, like gunpowder and marmalade. With the coin they all *tip the barmaid* -- a buxom blonde alpine lass, who yodels hilariously and falls over. Then the police arrive and arrest all men with moustaches for sexual assault.

But it's all theatre. In the final act, a <few dozen> pints of the local brew, Sadderbudweiser, are lined up, and downed.

Then everyone goes back to work making counterfeit Japanese cuckoo clocks, until next year. But not without a blast of the <national ant hem> which reflects the many languages spoken there, mostly badly:

Which reminds me. Following the unfortunate death of David Carradine ("No, Grasshopper, Mnrglnk!") I saw a tabloid headline which read: <Thrill Kills Kill Bill's Bill>.

Poor guy. He should have known that in 'kinky sex games' of this kind, the Thai's the limit.

Anyhow -- weaselling back on-topic with the cunning of a sloth and the bodily hygiene of a tapir -- I defy anyone to come up with a *kinky sex game* (KSG for short) more quintessentially echt-KSG-ish than <Chess>.

Consider: chess, like sex, takes place in the mind. The wooden or plastic (etc) bits rubbing together as they pass like BOOCs in the night are just epiphenomena.

You take the pieces out of the box and stand them up -- ideally *after* reaching agreement with your partner on the stakes and duration of the match. Then you combine, and chemistry strikes sparks.

As a Roman Catholic Cleric during the Counter-Reformation in *Spain*, Ruy Lopez de Segura is unlikely to have married anyone. He may conceivably (heh) have sired a sprog or ten on the bored and beautiful nuns with which convents were allegedly piled high. But nada de legitimo.

He was, however, thought to be of Marrano Jewish descent. Which, combined with Fischer's obsessive use of <1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5> makes matters very interesting. As we shall see ...

Equally, the concept of Bobby Fischer and *aunts* doesn't fit. The guy effectively divorced his mother, insofar as he could. He certainly dropped his family, and it wasn't an oversight. His mother's subsequent history as an international protestor, irritant, and rent-an-itch is fascinating.

Her name was Regina, which is Latin for 'Queen'.

This is what Bobby and Regina had to say about one another in the early 1960s:

<By the time Fischer was 16, his mother decided to pursue her own obsession of training in medicine. She said that her son would have to live in their Brooklyn apartment without her: “It sounds terrible to leave a 16-year-old to his own devices, but he is probably happier that way. Maybe he is better off without my nagging him to go out for sports, etc, eat, get through his homework, go to bed before 1am, etc. I am tired of being a scapegoat and doormat.”

Good riddance, Fischer apparently thought. In an interview withHarper’s magazine in 1962 he accused his mother of being a “square”, adding: “I don’t like people in my hair, so I had to get rid of her.”>

[btw -- does anyone know just how many squares there are on a chessboard? Counting 64 ordinary squares, one big one, and all the 2x2 and 5x5 subsquares in between ... ?]

NB. Some conspiracy theorists -- I am not among them -- believe that Regina faked her death in 1997 and is still out there, still seeking reconciliation with Robert James.

Naturally, she shares Bobby's distrust-authority gene, and thinks that *he* faked his death as well. (There's also a theory that Fischer now calls himself Mr Trice, but anyone who explores this option tends to get sued -- so, look, it isn't true, okay?)

Now for the tricky bit. In ultra-conspiricist circles (I'm not one of *them* either) it is alleged that <JessicaFischerQueen> is actually Regina Fischer. The name, they say, is a dead giveaway; plus her excuse for living in Korea is pretty transparent.

The reason, they say, that she haunts CG is her belief that Bobby hangs out here in disguise. 'Liberated' by his demise in Iceland -- a brilliant conceptual maneuver, a symbolic return to the womb of the world championship -- he no longer has to pretend to be a strong chess player. Nor does he have to carry on in character as an anti-semitic fruitcake. The posthumous Bobby whom Regina seeks could be masquerading as anything -- another woman, a weak chessplayer, somebody of Jewish (or Irish or Armenian, usw) extraction.

Clearly JFQ has her suspicions. (I'm not among them, and anyway I'm still hiding from Thomas Pynchon's ex-wife, not to mention Nora Barnacle. It's tricky enough being both of the greatest novelists of the 20th century with being the best chessplayer as well)...

Did I mention that Marcel Duchamp faked his own death? He even wanted to sign his death certificate and sell it to MOMA for $500 million -- until Teeny, his 'widow', pointed out that it is not usual in America for the deceased to sign the death cert.

One answer I remember seeing is:

<The answer being 204 (64 + 49 + 36 + 25 + 16 + 9 + 4 + 1 = 204).>

<Dom>

I thought I was whacky enough to invent a blood line but you..

You managed to fabricate <conspiracy theorists>,<ultra-conspiricist circles> and succeeded in creating a completely different ego of one of our most er...um..er exuberant kibitzers...

*shakes head*

I meant, of course, to say <Blake's Seven> -- the name of a popular British TV sci-fi series (in which Blake himself soon vanished and there were never seven of anything -- rather as if Star Trek had been a sitcom whose characters never left their base on the moon, with no stars and no trekking).

Instead, I wrote 'Blaze's. Why? Because I had been reading Ulysses. By James Joyce. Let me repeat that.

I HAD BEEN READING 'ULYSSES'. I'd also been listening to the audio version -- 30-something CDs, over 24 hours long, originally made and broadcast by RTE radio to celebrate the centenary of Joyce's birth.

In Ulysses, Blazes Boylan is the name of a caddish chap who rogers other men's wives. Specifically Molly Bloom, who is married to Leopold Bloom, who is mocked by other characters -- lowlife in pubs, mostly -- for knowing about this situation and not 'doing anything' about it.

In the code of the time -- still the norm in much of the world -- Bloom should either have fought his rival, battered 'his' woman, or got a divorce. But he's a pacifist and a nice guy, so he lets things be. What's a little rogering, after all?

Finally, I'd been reading (and auditing) Ulysses because ... actually, you'll have to excuse me, but that's still top secret.

Interesting word, *cuckold*. There used to be a statute in British and Irish law - and possibly elsewhere - called 'criminal conversation'. A man could sue, and win damages from, another man who had slept with his wife, thus 'criminally converting' her to a 'use' for which she was not intended. Woman as property, in other words.

They changed the law around 1972, in my lifetime. Now they're talking about introducing an offence of 'criminal blasphemy' to stop people insulting religion.

Since I seem to insult somebody's religion every time I open my mouth -- slagging Hubbard or Jesus or one of those guys -- I'll probably spend the rest of my life in jail.

n(n+1)(2n+1)/6

I once knew how to *prove* this -- I still could, in principle -- but right now I just know that it works. And a consideration of the subsquares problem makes it clear that there are 8 x 8 = 64 '1 x 1' squares, 7 x 7 = 49 '2x2' squares [their bottom left squares run from a1 to g1 and a1 to a7, or seven rows of seven], 6 x 6 = 36 squares of size '3x3', and so on.

1x1: 64 [8x8]
2x2: 49 [7x7]
3x3: 36 [6x6]
4x4: 25 [5x5]
5x5: 16 [4x4]
6x6: 9 [3x3]
7x7: 4 [2x2]
8x8: 1

1 + 4 + 9 + 16 + 25 + 36 + 49 + 64 = 204

n(n+1)(2n+1)/6

= (1, 1); (2, 5); (3, 14); (4, 30); (5, 55); (6, 91); (7, 140); (8, 204)

204 = (8 x 9 x 17)/6

The sum of the first n natural numbers (1 + 2 + 3 + ... + n) can be found via the formula n(n+1)/2.