But because, after months of teeth-clenching diplomacy during which I struggled, cajoled and flattered daily to keep diverse persons involved with the collective effort, I felt free to reveal that I was not, in fact, a nice guy.

And my tolerance for prima donnas had just dropped sharply. One such skittish type was so startled that he vanished forever.

1. Ursula, the lemming in *Gravity's Rainbow*.

2. Ludwig, Ursula's owner.

3. Tyrone Slothrop, of the Massachusetts paper dynasty, who prays "Let Ludwig find his lemming".

4. Mark Twain.

5. Mark Taimanov.

6. Marcus Aurelius.

7. Hannibal Lector.

8. Dvoretsky.

9. Any of the Rutles, Beatles, Plastic Ono Band, Grimms, Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band, Temperance Seven, Monty Python, Blackadder, At Last the 1948 Show, David Frost, Richard Nixon, Tony Hopkins, Hannibal ... oops, a loop.

10. Your blue-eyed boy, Mr Death, Buffalo Bill, and the Carthaginian guy with the elephants.

11. Richard Dawkins, who has a good idea where small rodents came from and why - apart from gerbils - they make unsuitable pets.

List's endless. To the sufficiently paranoid, all tree-searches are infinite *and* lead to themselves. I wrote a thesis on that once, so it must be true.

Two proverbs for paranoids:

- You hide, *They* seek.

Brits 2, Indians 0.

Since he had a list, and could even show me many links ... I cannot argue with him.

What others tell me ... remains as simple hearsay, even guesswork. I am curious about some things. Why - for instance - is old Bruce Lee (MA) flicks all over YT. Yet other stuff gets pulled for (supposed) copyright infringement. (I could cite lots of other examples - but this one should suffice.)

Now here - you hit the nail right on the head.

Most of the people I deal with are NOT experts, in fact, they sometimes barely have a passing knowledge of chess. I often spend time going over and over a game. When I had tons of local students, (a few years back); I would often go over the game with them - free of charge / off the clock. The point was that they might ask one more question ... and this question would be one that a lot of people might ask. (Anticipating the most-often asked - and sometimes banal - questions was something that Chernev excelled at.)

A guy buys a painting some sixty years before, only pays a few dollars for it. Stiepevich - today its worth $15-20K.

3. You should always know who your friends are. >

Everyone is free to have their own rules, but #4 for me is something like:

<moronovich> Your rule #5 is also good. I do think it is implicit in the set I gave. Nonetheless, making the implicit explicit is often very useful.

2. Real friends help you move bodies.

Unless you collect disturbed and unstable 'friends' as a kind of hobby, I suppose. Which would make them specimens rather than friends.

So, um, yes.

I'd heard a bit about Arthur the Druid before. An entertaining fellow, and a fine example of British eccentricity, but he seems to have his timelines in a knot.

He hangs around Glastonbury and Stonehenge in south-west England. But archaeologists broadly agree that Stonehenge was erected by earlier inhabitants of Britain - pre-Celtic and therefore pre-Druidic.

The actual centre of the Druid cult seems to have been the island of Ynis Mon, aka Anglesey. A Roman general flattened it.

It's curious, actually. The ancient Romans had a reputation for not really minding what gods their subject people worshipped, as long as they paid their taxes. Or this was the case until the Roman Empire was Christianized by Constantine and his successors, when 'spreading the faith' was added to the imperial mission statement, and once-popular cults such as Mithraism were put out of business.

Yet they *always* crushed Druids, whether it was in Gaul or Britain.

Not surprising, I suppose, that old Arthur thinks the druids had some secret power.

According to Mick Farren, who helped organize an early (as in 1969) music festival at a druidic site, many hippies were worried that earthing the electric power in a ley line would cause the planet to explode.

They took the chance anyway. It didn't explode, yet.

One of Stephenson's little tricks is to introduce visitors from some other Earthlike planets - but by then we're so embedded in the minutiae of his world that the visitors seem like aliens. Even when one of them says his name is Zh'vaern from LaTerre ... spelt Jules Verne Durand.

The best *alien math* in nonfiction is the one on CG.

Name used from online gaming, our house team Data Tribe, ponder then use same name for here

He's able to be so prolific because he doesn't communicate with fans. Without having to do the all-in full-recluse el-hombre-invisible Pynchon thing ... he simply puts a polite <note to the readers> at the end of his books, saying, in effect, "If you enjoyed this novel then please give me some peace and quiet so I can write the next one".

Apparently it works. Wish I'd thought of that.

In those days, if you had an idea that you thought could be applied to people in general -- if you thought that human beings were XYZ -- then you could call your book 'XYZ Man'.

If you do this today, of course, you're being sexist. And I agree with this: you can't just leave half the species out of your equations.

I have a few books, more recently published, that try to redress the balance by putting women in the title, eg 'Angry Women'. It can be done directly ('The Female Man' by Joanna Russ, 'The Female Eunuch' by Germaine Greer) or indirectly ('Galileo's Daughter'). The trouble with this is that the book becomes about gender politics, not your theory of XYZ-ness. And the same goes for that burgeoning genre of male-vs-female books, the ones with titles like 'Men are from Iceland, Women are from Liberia'.

One solution is to go biological: hence title such as 'The Language Animal', 'The Numbers Animal' and so on. This seems to work ...

... until somebody objects, saying "I am not an animal -- I am ... a man."

Can't please 'em all.

And I don't know how to drive a truck.

<Cyberspace amplifies selection bias.>

One minor point, just mentioned in passing, is that there are currently about 40,000 games played each year between players who are both within 400 rating points of the top ten. Both over 2370 or so, now: and these are the games that end up in databases.

Statistics are great for showing you your places in the great scheme of things, aren't they? There are none of my games in that 40,000. Probably none of yours either.

One of my favorite chess one-liners came from the Irish IM Sam Collins, in the introduction to his book on the Advance French. He had looked up the line in his Megabase - back around 2008 - and found over 29,000 games.

"I'll be honest with you", he wrote. "I'm not going to play through 29,000 games."

So he reconfigured his search for games between GMs, and based his analysis on those. It's not an ideal method - IMs can have good ideas too, as Collins knows. But if they're any good, then some GM is likely to try them out.

Yes, the origin of the name 'Domdaniel' came from a French edition of the Arabian classic '1001 Nights' - also known as 'Arabian Nights' or 'The Book of a Thousand Nights and One Night'. In it, Domdaniel - or Doma Daniel - is a magician's castle, hidden under the sea.

I'd never heard about a Tunisian location, but it makes sense. It is a land of coincidence. My brother went there recently, and met by chance one of his heroes, a writer who was staying in the same hotel. They spent an evening in conversation, which made my brother very happy.

I haven't been there myself. But I've never been *anywhere* on the Mediterranean. I stick to the frozen north and the windy west.

That was a young *horse* you encountered, I hope? Pony? Cheval? The animal that a chess knight looks like? Or was it *hors de combat*?