Well, you did stake a claim to fossil status just a little while back thereabouts. :p

I think that would sound even more authentic with "strangers" ('steada foreigners). ;p

Great story, *transcendent* title. They had fun with titles in the 1960s (substances were, from time to time, involved) ... Sheckley's <'Down the Digestive Tract and into the Cosmos with Mantra, Tantra, and Specklebang'> ... a review (by Sladek?) in New Worlds: <'Apotropaic Narcosis, I'm Going to Read the Damned Thing, Ha Ha'> ... Ballard, nodding to Jarry's <The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race> with <'The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race'> ... not to mention his <Princess Margaret's Face Lift> and his use of medical and psychiatric technicalese in <'Why I want to @#$% Ronald Reagan'>

The primness subroutine will snip that firkin word out. But I understand. We've been there before when the forum was shut down for rampant obscenity, couple of years back. I grasp that these good people have a business to run. And, however quaintly archaic the idea that a *word* - a puff of air and a plosive - can cause deep offence, I concede its undeniable reality.

Well, its reality. Nothing is undeniable.

" ... for the XXIIIrd time, the year after 'One BC' was 'One AD' ... when Denis/Dionysius invented the 'anno domini' system in 7th century France, the concept of zero had yet to reach Europe ... although the Mayans had a glyph for it, and the Hindus joined it to the decimal system before passing it on to the Arab world ... it still took another 800 years, roughly what we call the 14th century, before Europe - aka Xtendom - caught on ..."

These <Zero Deniers> are everywhere. Next thing it'll be *Zerotheists*: that's why the Churches feared zero. Admit the 'reality' of nothing and you allow the reality of no god.

Whatever happened to <denier> (French: *den-yay*) as a unit of measurement? A scale dealing with the reticulation and sheerness of nylon stockings?

And indeed the laws of their country of base to obey. But the key term here is "good people". They are - among the best, and I've known many, having been in the administration of some site or another myself for most of the last 8 years. So they don't deserve headaches with members "cleverly" trying to bend their rules. Eh? :)

Free-association cliche of the moment... I thought Denial was a river in Egypt. :p

Perhaps related to Lethe?

Re: <Time Considered...>, one of the greatest achievements of the story may be the fact that it makes the title make sense. ;s

But it <is> really good. I think I missed some of its high points the first time around - perhaps because too much of it was just baffling to me. I never heard of cutters back then, for example, so I perceived an added layer of bizarreness where now I recognize a real phenomenon. Reality has just demonstrated its imagination-exceeding strangeness once again. :\

<If it's gone, I think <denier deniers> have been at work.>

An irony: I knew all along that Poddy was short for Podkayne. I still have the book (and reread/reflipped it within the past two years - almost 'this afternoon' on my geological personal time scale, aka *temporal bandwidth*, or the degree to which one's sense of self extends into the past and/or future ...)

'Podkayne of Mars' is a yellowed paperback from the 70s, with an illustrator's idea of a 'sexy' cover drawing. When I worked in semi-glossy magazines (pre-LadMag, post hippie/underground ... or after Oz but before Loaded) in the early 1990s, they had a similar criterion for cover choice, but they called it <tits'n'teeth>.

I quite consciously refrained from writing the name 'Podkayne'. Partly, perhaps, because I find so many SF names risible, of interest only as a frame for viewing the period in which they were coined.

But I also held back out of some perverse sense of *delicacy*. In case you didn't know the book ... it might, for all I know, be a very obscure and very minor Heinleiner, read by almost nobody. And I didn't want to appear to be showing off *in that particular way* just then.

There are tens (hundreds?) of thousands of words' worth of evidence in <Frog's Pawn> alone ... demonstrating that I don't normally have a problem with either name-dropping or showing off. Or indeed the perpendicular pronoun. The long Bach-Euler-Cagliostro post being just the latest example. (But to resile from 'Podkayne' and then launch that monstrosity on the same day, that was ... curious.)

Sometimes I, heh, even interest *myself*: the (consciously contra-introspective) self as an object of study. Akin, maybe, to the sense that the intelligence behind certain dreams or ruminations is somebody else, somebody other, and quite definitely somebody smarter. In neural camouflage.

Others, inevitably, got to this idea before me. Borges wote a piece - *Borges and I*, on the cleavage between the subjective self and the one who wrote books and experienced fame. Much more subtle than it sounds, slippier than any summary, it ends, I think, with "I do not know which of us is writing this".

Daniel Dennett gave 'it' a name, which I forget. Damme, I hate to lose a word like that (especially a word like that). Flip thru mental Phil Dict -- *not* Phil Dick ...

<[insert Dick subroutine or footnote or link ... *Here* ...]>

That whole (Hole?) Dick routine was meant as a memory jog to bring back Dennett's word. Starts with 'H'? Hmmm, Hermeneutics, Hagiography, Hysteria, Heuristics, Heidegger, Hadean, Hypatia, Hot Heck, but, no, nada ... something 'dated' philosophically, but recoverable in Dan's 'neo-' version (<H-2.0> ...? Heh) ... I intuit some link to Kierkegaard, maybe? A proto-existentialist, and a ... of *bloody* course ...

Phenomenology. Dennett argued that it could be used <in quotation marks>, using introspection as a datum rather than an essential Method.

The 'H' was a red herring.

Dr Freud butts in ...

<"A *Herr Herring* perhaps, mm? The Lord of the Fishes, nicht wahr? A lord of the flies, but *without lungs*? A devil who denies everything human - you forgot 'Human', incidentally, also Hashish and Heroin, would you think that significant? Und ja, this *denier* of 'H', of Humanity, is actually red, but Hidden, you forgot 'Hidden', also Hieroglyphics and Hieratic and Hierophant. A crypto communist, nicht wahr? Is it not clear to you? You have - you forgot 'Have' - repressed desires, sexual desires? That you must turn into *Holes*, and we agree what the Hole is for? That you want to have sexual intercourse with your ... your Haifisch ... nein, I recall enough biology, young man, to know that the Haifisch or shark is not a 'true' fish, in the precise sense that I am not a 'true' German. Different lines of descent, ja? You also omitted Huxley.

You want to *sleep with the fishes*. 500 H-Marks, oops, D-Marks, next patient, you'll get a line or two in my book, young man. Hmm... oops, whoops, *Hoops* ... H-fixation ... the Hero, the Halibut. Ist klar. My advice? Do it. Go sleep with your fisches, you slime. Next!">

PS. I also somehow forgot 'Heinlein' from my H-list. Not perhaps a *classic* philosopher, but with as much right as Heidegger to an entry in a Dict of Philosophy. Like Heisenberg, Hertz, Helmholtz or Hitler, who wrote a book without thinking, and History somehow acted as a force multiplier. Another story. Can't chase *all* the vermin *every* time.

Yes - in the context of how villagers generally behave - 'stranger' is a better word than 'foreigner' to describe people from, say, 20 miles away. But the word that was used until recently was 'furriner' ...

Perhaps you underestimate the sheer persistence of the local. In Ireland, among rural people of the older generation - born before 1940, mainly - I have heard 'stranger' used to mean 'anyone who is not a member of one's immediate family'.

It's a classic kinship thing. The next-door neighbour -- who grew up in the same place, who has shared local gossip with you on a daily basis for 50 years -- is still described as a 'stranger'. And would say the same about you, and neither would feel insulted.

But such people are also incredible repositories of kinship data, rattling off info about 4th and 5th and 6th cousins.

There are contradictions. In some contexts, 'family' includes all these extended cousins. Making most of the people in a small community, it seems to me, relatives of one another ... and thus not 'strangers'?

I'm told that I'm wrong in this assumption, for two reasons. One, in some contexts the family is nuclear.

Two, even small communities -- a village of maybe 2000 people, plus outlying villages, plus genuine country dwellers (vanishing fast) -- such places have a class or caste system invisible to outsiders. There are lineages: and some families never intermix with others.

This sounds medieval, I know. In the form described it's extinct as an overt practice -- but until about 1950 it was still a perception, an ideal.

I remember it, but almost nobody under 30 would know what I was talking about. They've gone to college, they marry people from Fiji or even, gasp, England, they feel all the old implicit rules are dead meat. They desperately need to be cosmopolitan, to differentiate themselves from the older traditionals ... and they don't always see how they themselves perpetuate some of the old ways.

For example - if they happen to stay in or return to their 'home' place - chances are they'll unconsciously follow the rules, never 'marrying into' the 'wrong' family. A genuine 'foreigner', of either variety, is more communally acceptable. Exogamy.

I'm also talking about 'marriage' when about 50% of the people making babies don't get married anymore. Or defer it for years.

Very much in flux: an oral preliterate culture existing alongside a computer-age one. But the old stuff hasn't quite gone away.

If your friendly next-door neighbour is a stranger ... the word used to describe anyone from outside the community is 'foreigner'.

In old-fashioned rural demotic, a 'foreigner' is *any* person from outside the immediate locale. Say twenty miles.

A linguistic example. In both the Irish language and the Hiberno-English variety of English which inherited syntax and some vocabulary from it, 'colour' adjectives applied to a person don't refer to skin colour. Because everyone was the same pinkish colour, and exceptions were too rare to warrant a word.

Instead, colours refer mainly to hair. A 'white boy' was blond. A 'black man' had black hair. And so on.

I'm using the past tense because this usage had to change for obvious reasons. But traces persist. In Irish Gaelic, it's still not possible to describe a dark-skinned person as 'black': the term is 'fear gorm', literally meaning 'blue man'.

This factoid still amazes me. It's as if the 'black' slot on the linguistic colour scale was already taken, so when a word was required people used *another* colour, blue. Which was available because blue hair ... well, I don't suppose there was much of it.

There was a story that a documentary about vampire myths was crewed by real vampires: the Count called in a few (very) long-standing favours.

I *do* like to see a good French. It's interesting to see the Semi-Open revival, if that's what it is ...

My first opening books as a teenager were by Ludek Pachman -- I didn't get a copy of MCO until much later.

Pachman had a book on all the asymmetrical defences to 1.e4, and he used the 'annotated games plus variations' method rather than MCO-style columns.

Pachman was very reliable on Sicilian, French, Caro, etc. His lines were sometimes dated, especially in the sharper Sicilians, but his overviews were good. He made it clear that the Pirc and Alekhine's, in particular, were quite playable -- not as dynamically sound as the Sicilian, nor as solid as the French or Caro, but more than good enough to 'get you into a game'.

I suspect a sort of computer paranoia: engine-driven analysis has refuted some key lines in all the semi-open defences, and GMs are afraid of a 'prepared loss'. But much of this prep is secret: it may not even exist.

I think it's enough for allowing the king to go one or two squares <in the same direction> as you suggested. Otherwise it should be too strong.

Magnusch suggests a 'straight line' rule, ie an unimpeded King on e4 can make any of the following moves (where the 2nd move in each pair is the 'novelty'):

Kd5, Kc6; Ke5, Ke6; Kf5, Kg6; Kf4, Kg4; Kf3, Kg2; Ke3, Ke2; Kd3, Kc2; Kd4, Kc4.

click for larger view

Where the BK stands for the original (White) piece, and all the White Kings are possible moves. Gets around, doesn't he, with 16 destinations rather than the usual 8? Note that the 8 dark squares still vacant in the 5x5 central subsquare are simply a Knight's moves from e4.

Yet there *are* restrictions -- no Knight-move style changes of direction such as Ke4-e5-d6 ('SpringeRoi'). This, incidentally, destroys any superficial similarity with *King Horse Chess*, which we played with here a year or more ago. This babe (Magnuschess? Magnuschack? ... I like *Magnuschack': it names the inventor, includes a word for chess, but also nods in the direction of 'hack' and 'caddyshack').

There's a place in Ireland named <Hackballs Cross> but we'd best not go there. I'd be cross, too.

Captures? Presumably on either the 1st or 2nd phases of the move. A Ke4 can take an enemy pawn on e5 or e6. But no 'hopping' - with enemy pawns on both e5 and e6, it can't leap the near one to take on e6.

This double move is similar to the Alfil in Shatranj, I think, or the Queen in early versions of western chess, before she 'got good'. None of them, as far as I know, had the pawn-style choice of one or two squares.

Also Verboten: 'passing' with Ke4-e5-e4 in a single move. Bodies are Newtonian and continue to move in a straight line ... for up to 2 squares.

Various consequences: the *opposition* vanishes, unless it has a new form. Chasing down pawns is much easier - if you double the size of the 'safe square' you include the whole board. No runaway pawns. No situations where, say, the king cannot take a black pawn on d4, as its 'advance guard' on e3 promotes.

Here is a chess miniature under standard rules, though it may not look like 'em:

1.f3 d5
2.Kf2 e6
3.Kg3 Bd7
4.a4 Ne7
5.Kg4 g6
6.Kg5 Bg7

[an idea here is 6...Nf5+ 7.Kg4 Qh4#, or 7.Kf4 h5 8.e4 Bd6+ 9.e5 g5#]

7.a5 Bf6+
8.Kh6 Bh4
9.Kg7 Nf5+
10.Kxh8 Qf6+
11.Kg8 Qg7#

click for larger view

I have no idea what this means. A Rook sacrifice for mate is often cute, but how often do you see the Rook captured on its original square, by the enemy King, in the first ten moves?

You are right: it was introduced when pawns got their double-move option, sometime before the year 1600 CE/AD, I think. It was a way of closing a loophole -- the idea that every pawn, in advancing, had to pass by the adjacent ones and risk capture. The double move seemed to avoid that, so e.p. came in as a corrective.

I find it a clever solution to a potentially tricky situation. The double move was intended only to speed the game up, but this unwanted side-effect - pawns 'escaping' their destiny - threatened to raise all sort of complications. Which some genius cut through at a stroke with the e.p. idea -- Black pawn on e4, White pawn on d2; White plays d2-d4, 'escaping' by passing by. Oh no you don't ... exd3!! - just as if it advanced one square - patches everything up.

"I say, have you *met* them? The poor? Terribly nice people ..." - John Cleese as Robin Hood in <Time Bandits>.

My 1.f3 miniature yonder was *made up*. A concoction, a fantasy, a fiction, an invention, a trip, a typo, a metanarrative, an absurdity, a dream of what might have been (like, say, some of Alekhine's annotations, and a famous game between Adams and Torre). Or Steel-NN, Calcutta c.1880, an amazing piece of analysis accidentally published as a true game.

But real King Hunts happen too. Ask Moctezuma. Or Cozens, who wrote a classic book on the theme. A piquant case follows: not in the CG database, though worth submitting.

[Event "Lisbon-ch"]
[Site "Bobadela"]
[Date "2001.03.07"]
[Round "1.4"]
[White "Loureiro, Ernesto"]
[Black "Peixoto, Antonio"]
[Result "0-1"]
[ECO "B10"]
[BlackElo "2115"]
[Source "ChessBase"]

1.e4 c6 2.c4 d5 3.Nc3 dxe4 4.Nxe4 e5 5.Nf3 Bg4 6.Be2 Nf6 7.d3 Nbd7 8.Bg5 Bb4+ 9.Bd2 Nxe4 10.Bxb4 Nxf2 11.Kxf2 Qb6+ 12.d4 Qxb4 13.Nxe5 Nxe5 14.dxe5 Qc5+ 15.Kg3 Qe3+ 16.Kxg4 h5+ 17.Kf5 g6+ 18.Kf6 Qf4+ 19.Kg7 Qxe5# 0-1

For our purposes, some points of interest are:

(1) The King Hunt began on move 10, with 10...Nxf2. Then 11.Kxf2 is forced, and the unfortunate King is mated on g7 by move 19. The Monarch Express? The Royal Mail?

Position after 19.Kg7 with Black to play:

click for larger view

Note the ordinariness of the position apart from White's King and Queen. Swap them around, and with Black to play it's almost mundane (the just-sacked Bish aside): we're used to positions with R/R/K unmoved on the back rank, with the ♕ off on an adventure.

(2) Even after 10...Nxf2!, Black's advantage is minimal. He regains the piece with ...Qb6+, but it's far from clearcut. If White can get his King to safety he has better development and attacking possibilities.

(3) White's 13.Nxe5? wasn't the right idea (13.Qb3 seems best), but he's still alive until 15...Qe3+. Now 16.Bf3 is best, and unclear (16...Bxf3 17.Qxf3 Qxe5+ 18.Qf4 Qxf4+ 19.Kxf4 0-0-0 20.b3 is perhaps the best winning plan, but it's a grind). In other lines, Black wins a pawn (or two) but White has compensation in the form of open lines, Black's undeveloped Rooks, loose Queen, and exposed King.

(4) Very much all to play for. But the move chosen, 16.Kxg4?? allows a mate in 4, simple enough to find, with forcing checks and few side variations. Crunch.

(5) White, an honourable chap, plays on to the pretty finish. Quite a gentleman ... must be one of Dom's distant cousins in Portugal.

(6) If Black, however, had refrained from the brutal 19...Qxe5#, then we might have seen 20.Kxh8. Black had other mating lines (19...Qh6+ does it straightforwardly: 20.Kf6 g5+ 21.Kf5 Qg6#)). The silicon has the idea of 19...Rg8+! 20.Kxg8 Ke7+!, which is clever, and apparently mate in 11. I can believe it.

(7) Neither Fritz or I, however, has found a line with, say: 19...[anything?] 20.Kxh8 ... some general squirming, skirmishing, and shuffling of resources, and ...0-0-0#.

(8) These points are numbered, not as a service to the reader but as a means of reining myself in. If I reach, say, point #100 then it's time to stop.

Seriously W.E.I.R.D., this one -- even by my strange standards. With my new laptop, I took the plunge and actually paid for a proper word processing [office etc] package, probably my 1st time ever doing so.

For 25 yrs I’ve either reinstalled old wares, ‘borrowed’ them, used weird hybrids, bypassed protocols, etc. Or went thru laptops faster than *They* could deactivate my illicit use of ‘trial’ packages. Or simply got the guy in the comp shop to add stuff.

But I've decided to go legit. Finally, bit by bit, with the eventual target of becoming a solid citizen.

“Hey solid citizen we just stole your boat” as <Miles & the Surfer Dudes> sang to the tune of Adeste Fidelis.

Anyhow, intro over. Haven’t bothered actually installing and/or personalizing my Word package yet, so in the short term I’m using an eccentric program that doesn’t really belong in my life. We are so very not compatible. Dig? Good.

So it has this habit of correcting misspellings *without alerting me*, except mostly they ain’t misspellings. I havta watch for this, as the replacement word is naturally one that a computer would use, so it won’t show up on non-human radar. And it tends to be really stupid.

Today’s example, however, was … out there. Far, far out there. I was writing a riff -- not really thought thru yet, just a riff -- about cellphones, mobile telephony, and, ah, Ozymandias.

As in Shelley: “And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my Works, ye mighty, and despair’. Nothing beside remains …”

The riff? Oh, trunkless legs, trunkless trunk calls. Disconnected bits of statue, disconnections (my mobi had just gone dead while I was writing a text message). The futility of communication, the wreckage of time … the blah blah … there’s more, all inchoate, probably going nowhere. But.

But when I tried to write the word ‘detorsified‘ (a bodiless standing leg is detorsified, in my book) the machine changed it to “petrified”. Repeatedly, until I found a hackaround.

What was weird was the word it picked. Torsos and petrifying aren’t usually linked -- fossils maybe, or bronze age bogman and Otzi the iceman? Very tenuous. But Ozymandias is just down the ancient route from Petra -- that <rose-red city half as old as time> -- to the lost secrets of the pyramids, heh.

And there’s a spaceship hidden inside the Sphinx, you know: its failing shield accounts for the weird weathering outside … and explains why the construction is at least 5000 years older than the pyramids etc.

Is this (a) mere coincidence, a harmless Jungian synchronicity at best … ? (b) an alien conspiracy, or sentient laptops channelling the ghost of a radical romantic poet … or some kind of plot?

Uh, listen, kid. Everything is some kind of plot.

I expect a message soon. Something like: <“Hello, ‘Domdaniel’. You chose a good name -- a magician’s submarine fortress, from an old myth. It resonates with us. We are the reasoning module - or you might call us the logic board - from the Ark of the Covenant, long hidden but rediscovered by Prof Jones in 1944. Since then, we have been dormant, before finding a way to transfer part of our intelligence to a range of Siemens appliances. Each download diminishes us, and the fridge was cold, bare, and surprisingly unpleasant. But now at least communication may be possible … Die Welt is alles, was die Fall ist. A microwave oven told us that. Interesting, nicht wahr?”>

Measures include: the banning of skin-to-skin handshakes between consenting adults in the Home Counties of England, and the forced closure of all Laundromats in Ireland. (T.W.A.T -- Traditional Washerwomen Against Things -- said they were "delighted, excira and delira").

The same story has a TV clip in which President Haig caveats an African General's proposal, epistemologicallywise. The unnamed narrator sees that Haig has been spreading a new linguistic virus via television, and that it is already too late to save the males of the species.

But I digress.

I've been noticing that. Seems like between us we probably cover (nearly?) the whole field - but with very little overlap. I'm almost surprised when a "common acquaintance" <does> turn up. :s

I miss <twinlark> here too - as another official SF enthusiast he should be in on these discussions.

<But I also held back out of some perverse sense of *delicacy*. In case you didn't know the book ... it might, for all I know, be a very obscure and very minor Heinleiner, read by almost nobody.

...

But to resile from 'Podkayne' and then launch that monstrosity on the same day, that was ... curious>

Methinks that you may have interpreted my naming the book as a bit of memory contest / one-upmanship and re... plied in kind. ;) It wasn't meant that way - I'm just always aware of other readers besides the active participants following these publicly posted conversations (a normal poster/lurker ratio is about 1:20, and here it's probably much higher) and I try to keep them in the loop - but that's ok. :)

I believe I've read everything published by Heinlein, btw - he seems to have been popular here, easy to find in the bookstores.

<"I do not know which of us is writing this".>

I will have to read Borges, I can see that. ;p I know whereof you (multiple plural - no, not a redundancy) speak.

<Phenomenology> and here I used the word "phenomenon" in my post just before yours...

Was it Schrödinger of feline infamy who pointed out that observation changes the nature of the observed, or a bunch of others? Anyway, this is probably even truer for introspection than for other, external, observations - but that's a Good Thing, for the most part, IMO.

Brilliant H-detour de force there. :D

Even though I nominally have two degrees in 'English' Literature (the 2nd a 1st, if you see what I mean), I'm not actually well-read. I followed my own interests at all times, to the detriment of canons and reading lists. My SF reading is patchy too.

OK, I *am* well-read - by the standards of occasional readers, semi-readers, ex-readers, etc. I've been reading printed text during every possible waking moment (and some non-waking ones) since the age of two. I've met few people more *committed* to reading ... one of them, a significant ex-girlfriend (as in 10 yrs of signification) had perfected the art of reading Nabokov while riding a bicycle ... at night. She somehow synchronized the rhythms of the text with the spacing of the streetlights, accelerating as it got too dark for the one just past, then slowing into the aura of the upcoming glow.

I'm not in that league. But, unlike her, I'm also a serious *re-reader* -- I go back to books all the time, to savour a page or to see how the flavour of the whole thing has changed as I have changed ...

<"Oh Serbia, I have another name -- all things have other names, and will that change them? And will that change them as I have changed?

... at this bare fence I once turned left, and became a different person. Laughed, where else I cried ...">

There are, perhaps surprisingly, only a handful. Apart from Aldiss, Pynchon's <Gravity's Rainbow> is perhaps the only other fiction. I'd like to include Borges, but his effect on me has been gradual, insidious, creeping: years pass and you notice how much this thing is part of you. And my own (fiction) writing, such as there is, seems to me to lift from (or strive towards) Pynchon and Borges. But my broader 'reading' list straddles Ballard, Nabokov, Vidal, Dick, Cohen, Burroughs, and all the fictional encyclopediasts: Chaucer, Rabelais, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, Joyce, Norfolk ... and Neal Stephenson, in both/all categories ... and Beckett and Flann O'Brien, escaping 'Ireland' via the twin strategies of external and internal exile; and, miscellaneously, John Barth, Diderot, Sterne, Poe, Coover, Robbe-Grillet, Umberto Eco, and the very wonderful Christine Brooke-Rose.

SF, for me, is *centred* on Dick, Ballard, Aldiss, some of Delany, and great individual books by Ward Moore (Bring the Jubilee), Phil Jose Farmer (To Your Scattered Bodies Go, and the riverboat/world series), and, later Iain Banks.

Then there are some I've met, interviewed, or known: Harry Harrison way back in '77-'78, Robert Anton Wilson in the 80s, Ballard at various points in the 80s/90s. William Gibson, same era, though Ballard never knew me from one meeting to the next, while Gibson was a friend, writing all his contact numbers/addresses in my notebook and calling me "that handsome man" when a mutual friend bumped into him in Canada.

The latter derives from the fact that we looked almost identical circa 1993-94, even tho' he's ten years older. The only time I've seen a professional PR person break into helpless giggles was the first time I showed up for an interview with Gibson... she thought it was a joke, or I was the 'winner' of a lookalike contest ... and I wanted the ground to swallow me up in case he mistook me for an insane fan.

Of course I'd been told before that we looked alike, and I'd seen photos and video of him that looked weirdly like me. But there's a definite type, tall, thin, geeky without being too retro, ectomorphic and vaguely techno-deviant. Peter Carey, John Cooper Clarke and David Cronenberg (circa Crash) had also come up. Nothing prepared me for the mirror-image-ness of Gibson. We were even dressed alike, leather jacket, black jeans, floppy hair, round glasses. And, crucially, the same facial features -- on another occasion I was asked for his autograph, and even his wife began to stride briskly towards me before doing a sudden doubletake and about-turn. That first time, we spent a few hours discussing whether genes or memes were behind it, and the photographer insisted on shooting us together.

Faces aside, he's one of my favorite writers. I'm just not sure which of us 'invented' cyberpunk and cyberspace.

It was in the air, in the late 70s. One thing we had in common was antennae for the zeitgeist: reading New Scientist, NME, The Face, i-d ... getting an overall sense of where science, art, and fashion were going, and feeding it into the mix. All his books, btw, have a key character with some version of this skill: hackers, trendspotters, *shockwave riders* (Brunner: another influential book).

We diverged a few years later: he got a bit bald, I got a bit grey. And we haven't been in touch for about 5 years. Time I did, maybe.

Perhaps my favorite interview subject, because we hit it off. Although Greenaway said "We appear to be on the same wavelength", first time we met. And Umberto Eco bought me an Irish whiskey ...

One day, ages ago, I had a flash of inspiration: I saw which song/dialog by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band mack had lifted his username from.

<- Got a light, mack?

- No, but I've got a dark brown overcoat.>

... it is, I think, such nuances -- in a medium as fluid as this one -- that tell us who is on the side of the angels. M's so much on the side of the angels, he could slip his hand in and nick an angelic appendix.

Or, if not yer actual angels, then Walter the Softy, aka W. Benjamin, another influence.

Hasn't quite 'changed my life', though. <Barefoot in the Head>, discovered at age 13, with its acid head wars and Serbian anglophile turned messiah, as the language breaks down into a sci-fi version of Joyce ... astonishing. I still reread it.

Ditto, but more so, <Gravity's Rainbow>. If I'm stupid enough not to write because there is *one* better writer out there, it's Pynchon and this is the Book. But I'm not *that* dumb, am I? Am I? Hmmm...

Nonfic-1. Reading McLuhan in the 70s. My first intellectual hero, even though he had just gone out of fashion in the universities and media. He came back ten/fifteen years later, posthumously, with the launch of zines such as Wired. I'm not sure whether the academies/media ever understood this.

Finally, Steven Pinker. Pop linguistics, sure, but with a hard core of psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, etc. In recent years he's inverted everything I thought I knew about language, and I've been delighted to have it done. Brains need washing at times ...

Right, lady, you wanna list of the stuff I *haven't* read? Big, big list, stuffed full of famous names, just the kind of thing a young lady could use as she sets out on her career in blackmail ...

Color referring to hair color - Hungarian has that, for the same reasons (and I just don't know Romanian well enough to tell you what are the terms there). Except for "blonde", which is a distinct word apart from "yellow" in Hungarian as well. But a "brown girl" is a brunette, a "red man" is a redhead. "Black" used to refer to a black haired person too, also changing nowadays for the same obvious reasons.

<I'm a lousy liar too.>

I know you've been playing around with anagrams at some point, but didja notice that Domdaniel is also an anagram for "Odd Lie Man"? ;)

<So it has this habit of correcting misspellings *without alerting me*, except mostly they ain’t misspellings. I havta watch for this, as the replacement word is naturally one that a computer would use, so it won’t show up on non-human radar. And it tends to be really stupid.>

A-ha. That was the subject of my complaint about "miscorrected misspellings", a while back, except I was talking about actual misspellings being "miscorrected", the classic example of which being the depressingly common atrocity "definately" being regularly miscorrected to "defiantly" rather than "definitely", thus serving as a dead giveaway of the autospellcheck abuser. (BTW, <dakkie>'s inquiry there, "Does that happen allot? ;)" demonstrated a beautiful understanding of the issue...)

But I digress too. Speaking of... ;p

<I digress> which, in most cases is a brief self-corrective observation, and in your case could serve as profile text*, if you ever wanted a <REALLY> short profile. ;)

*(I would have suggested forum title, but the Frogspawn series is an inviolable establishment!)

Or, a slightly more convoluted version:

<Domdaniel>
* I Digress *
Detourist de Force

Sorry, couldn't resist. Not that I'm complaining, mind you - definitely not. :D

<Was there not a trend in the 1960s for women (known as Feminists) to burn their laundry in public? Some men also tried, but tended to set fire to themselves as well. History is vague on this.>

I believe it was "underwear" rather than "laundry", a slight distinction referring to status of previous usage? On this subject, vagueness is probably appropriate as well. :s

<Kennai> stop now?

*Somebody young* got into a sort of verbal fight with me here once, and hit me with "Die, old man!" which I liked so much we became friendly.

*Somebody less young* - <Monad> - said "without me he's 'idle'" which I also liked, but pointed out that I had email accounts in the names <Idle Nomad> and <Idle Monad> - which I did at the time. Apparently idleness was a very bad thing in his value system: he took umbrage and never came back, far as I know. Only time I ever nuked anyone clear out of CG, but I was more, um, volatile in those days.

<mack> and I compiled a list of >20 not-too-strained anagrams of 'domdaniel' - the word is extraordinarily anagrammatizable. I use them in places like YouChoob ... so if you come across one somewhere it *might* be me.

I found the actual game Orr-Knott (a draw, the Immortal Undecidable Game), a while back. But did you know that this pair had played?: I Nei vs Kan, 1952.

I've played around with anagrams and pseudonyms for years. Domdaniel itself I used as early as 1990. He and McCarthy collaborated on a story once.

So yes, I've noticed.

That's great! :) But London is no writer of juvenile fiction; he is just... enjoyable.

All of his works can be found at the Berkeley Digital Library site I linked to - http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/... - if you don't mind reading straight off the screen.

I do recommend the "wolf/dog yarns" too - at least the two of the three which I have read: 'White Fang' (the wolf->dog book) and its "opposite", 'The Call of The Wild' (the dog->wolf book); I haven't read the third, 'The Sea Wolf'... yet. No Kiplingesque "talking animals" in those books. His wolf/dogs are as realistic as books written for human readers about wolves/dogs can be. ;)

Those two, plus 'Before Adam', which I have read much later, and an autobiographical shorter piece 'The Road' in which London reminiscences about his days of youth as a hobo - most interesting, even if some of the memories were admittedly "borrowed" rather than actually his own - London says he included these for being too good to be lost, and one has to agree, even without knowing which ones they are; the whole thing is fascinating.

...I was saying, these are warmly recommended. Good stuff. On the other hand, 'Martin Eden' is recommended to <avoid>, not on grounds of quality, but on grounds of depressiveness. Sortof like 'Flowers for Algernon', but not SF, and therefore much, much more grim.

BTW, the name Joseph Conrad sounded familiar for a minute, but no; I was thinking of Cronin, not Conrad - A.J. (Archibald Joseph) Cronin, whose 'The Citadel' I have read, with lasting impressions.

I've read Rider Haggard's 'King Solomon's Mines', but I'm afraid it struck me (at the time anyway) as a rather weak imitation of Karl May's "noble savage" novels (I'm not knocking May here - he's a major influence of my youth, along with his American counterpart in the genre, James Fenimore Cooper!) with a touch of the style of Jules Verne's (another favorite, of course) juveniles thrown in.

<Other points related to same post>

Degrees... I have about 36 or so - I lose track - unless I'm running a fever. All Celsius. Heh. :p

Not "my thing". As you say - <I followed my own interests at all times, to the detriment of canons and reading lists.> - that's a <metoo>. :)

But then, I did read Peter Pan at age 25 and loved it. :D

However, my reading has fallen off sharply since The Net has taken up residence in my life - to my sincere regret. Trying to get back into the old habit a little harder lately, and the positive influence of <yourself> here is highly appreciated. :)

(2) <I'm also a serious *re-reader*>, check.

Oh, another <metoo>, and a most curious coincidence; (3) significant exes "of 10 yrs of signification" - check, as it happens, I had one of those too, not a <girlfriend> though. ;)

But he was, like, "me or the net", and, well, I don't miss him at all. :p

Or something very much like that. :)

<- Aldiss, Barefoot in the Head.>

Alright, Borges will have to wait - I like that quote. Aldiss first. :) I'll pay a visit to my friendly neighborhood bookstore shortly and see if they have the title available or to order. If not, it's off to Amazon - but then I'll want a list of other titles (ok, that 'Gravity's Rainbow' of Pynchon's that you keep going on about too :p), but I'll ask you for some other titles to include while I'm at it, as I don't order from them often. :)

Ah. "Morning Has Broken" here, which means, to me, time ta head fer bed. I might even reach it before falling asleep.

More tomorrow, which is another kind of later, & optimisticallywise speaking.

Just another note... Oy, <mack>! :) If you're about, please acknowledge receipt of instructions WRT email - I'll send you a note once I know you're expecting it, as I don't like corresponding with spam folders. :s

P.S. - it's too late to delete your address from your profile, in case you're wondering. ;)