As usual, Eco can't resist showing off his vast erudition concerning medieval times and the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. So the book spends a long time in the 13th century, then fast-forwards to the Eiffel Tower.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Henry Adams had a similar idea in 'The Virgin and the Dynamo', over 100 years ago.

And it's worth pointing out that the whole ugly/beautiful or ugliness/beauty distinction - that thing on which the fashion industry, among others, is built - has its distant origin in a time when everyone assumed that ugly people had ugly souls, and beautiful (or even *clean*) people had clean or beautiful souls. This was medieval common sense in Europe: everyone 'just knew' it.

There were some exceptions. Very powerful demons, such as Lucifer, could trick you by appearing beautiful. (An unfortunate side-effect: anyone who washed regularly was probably a witch.)

Where, today, does this aesthetic survive? Why, in the world of net-based multi-user (MUD) games.

The Xtian meme and the ugly/beauty meme have joined forces for survival. I'm not sure yet which is piggybacking which.

That's the level of info which one can't really reveal to newspaper readers, though I dropped a couple of hints.

*Here*, my droogs and zapkinder, is a different story.

Christianity has co-opted games before -- most notably chess. 'The Game and Playe of Chesse' wasn't a bestseller among incunabula (early printed books - no connection to *incubi*) because the world wanted a chess manual, but because literate people thought the game might include a code for saving their souls.

Unfortunately, the only code was the one implanting the idea that the Bishops had a right to stand on both flanks of the King and Queen - protecting and legitimizing them.

Well,the word does seem to suit you.Although you are not exactly among the senior members at CG.

About language someone wanted to comment about 'votes for' on another page. When we Google translated it ~ <Vote for me it's a crime that can lead dislike, but also that time> another said that sentence is incomplete, are they right?

There are some old slogans such as "Votes for Women" which were much in use about 100 years ago - a time when women could not vote in Western 'democracies', but had begun to agitate for change: the suffragette movement. I think New Zealand was the first country to make the change. Now, of course, the countries where women cannot vote are mostly the conservative Islamic ones.

So my first thought was that "Votes for X" had taken on some newer idiomatic meaning, perhaps in America. But a check with the Cambridge Dictionary of Idioms - http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/ - failed to show anything useful. Hmmm.

There are some idiomatic slogans/jokes/catchphrases with 'vote' in them, such as "Don't vote, it only encourages them" and "If voting could change anything, it would be illegal". But these don't help much.

Another approach. Your <Vote for me it's a crime that can lead dislike, but also that time> is close to meaningless, but not utterly devoid of sense. It might be garbled poetry, or a bad machine translation of something that was obscure to begin with.

The only obvious ways in which it is 'incomplete' are (a) the lack of context, and (b) a few grammatical loose ends, such as "that can lead dislike". That *might* mean something like "that can lead to disliking" or "that can lead to being disliked".

Lead is usually followed by 'to', though not always. I can say the road leads to the North Pole, or just 'the road leads north'.

Dislike is a verb, and they don't usually have that position in a sentence -- which is why I tried 'disliking' or 'being disliked' instead.

Maybe I'm zooming in too close, and the trick is to stand back and scan the whole thing, like a map. <Vote for me it's a crime that can lead dislike, but also that time> What this seems to say - and I can't tell if the time/crime rhyme is accidental - is, roughly: "Vote for me" (maybe a literal vote, or maybe meaning 'support me' or 'take my side') "It's a crime/ that can lead dislike" -- ie,

Some people may not like it if you vote for or support me, and it may lead to you being disliked.

"but also that time"
And, just when the thing seems to be making sense, we find this complete non-sequitur, with apparently no connection to what went before. This is probably where the 'incomplete' concept comes in -- a new idea ('that time' -- a time in the past? the future? time itself? time considered as a helix of semi-precious stones, to quote Chip Delany?).

A possible extrapolation - including the 'translation' I've already done - might go:

<If you take my side, you may make enemies, like that time [when something similar happened] ...>

An alternative reading is that the 'crime' is not the 'vote', but something else - something not mentioned, but understood by writer and readers. Then we get something like: <Vote for me, because X is a crime, and we all dislike it, but my leadership will remove it, in time ...>

Where X could be anything.

This, I'm afraid, is my best shot. For now. The Domputer will continue to work on it. As a rule, the Domputer can crack almost any linguistic code eventually.

The hard ones, surprisingly, sometimes aren't really codes at all ... just fragments of bad writing that have passed through too many computer processes. They can be unscrambled, but the result might not be worth the effort.

Luckily, the Domputer *likes* this kind of effort. Especially for a friend.

True, and an interesting point. 'I' have actually been here longer than 'Domdaniel' has. One might even say that Dom is a sockpuppet who consumed his creator.

Which is why there is, or was, a line from Antonioni's film 'The Passenger' - aka 'Professione: Reporter' - in my bio: "I used to be somebody else, but I traded him in".

It's still true that I haven't been here since the year dot, or even 2002-03 when some of the early homesteaders arrived.

An intriguing sociological point: very, very few of those first-wavers are still here and active. Some maintain membership but hardly ever post. There may be some kind of natural time-limit on the amount of time an individual can spend heavily involved with CG.

I'm sure the admins have some very interesting statistics on this topic, much more detailed than anything we can see on the ChessGames.com Statistics Page.

But take a look at that page anyway, especially the top 40 posters. Quite a few of these are 2nd-wave arrivals like me, dating from around 2005-07 (with a concentration in the later part of 2006).

Some determined 3rd-wavers - post-2008 arrivals - have begun to make an impact. But it takes time to accumulate that many posts, and it's hard to do it by talking to yourself. I racked up a lot of mine during live game kibitzes and challenge games, especially the first Arno Nickel game, where I took on certain organizational duties.

Of course, it's possible to make an impact from the start, by fighting with people. Not my style. And we've all seen where it leads.

So now, mostly, I chat to the people who turn up here, and sometimes I find an unkibitzed game worth a comment, or join a conversation elsewhere. Even dabble in controversy, on occasion.

speaking of doyens - anything on "perfidious"? Absent since end of september and no letter of excuse from his parents.

Somebody probably knows more, but I'm not sure who.

Was the end of september a long time ago? I'm not sure how humans measure these things.

I hope you don't suspect my friend AJ of involvement -- I doubt whether he even noticed. After all, he used to be a cop ... and cops are famous for paying minimal attention to reports of missing persons.

Obviously, with an exception regarding dwarf pirates. They are awesome.

<dodo>

I have quite limited experience with whiskey - and much less drinking whiskey with Eco.

I'll add the book to my list-to-read for curiosity. The only book I've read of him (? of his sounds strangely natural as well) is the name of the rose - which is completely different of course. So even without much original thinking - it's not as if I'd probably notice it a whole lot ;)

Quite a mysterious person, Ngoc Lan. And she was the same age as me, but died about ten years ago?

Fascinating.

And I like the actual music: it seems to have absorbed French chanson, added a subtle overlay of East Asian chords, and packaged the whole into a version of American pop music.

Of course, I'll never speak Vietnamese well enough to grasp what's really going on. Even so. I like this.

[ENG SUB] Chot là noi dau (Suddenly I feel pain).flv http://youtu.be/56wKPLqrqPc

Meanwhile, changing tack, I found this quote from John O'Brien of the Dalkey Archive Press:

< Over the years I have found that many Americans-from readers to reviewers to critics to academics to publishers and of course to politicians-take pride in knowing almost nothing about the rest of the world. Academics will probably bristle at this thought but, at least in relation to literature, all you have to do is look at the courses that are offered featuring the literatures of other countries. Not only don't they teach these literatures, they don't read them.

As a rule, British and Irish cities are not laid out in rectilinear blocks. Like much of Europe, they grew organically, over centuries. Roads and streets meander along ancient rights of way, follow contour lines before changing their minds and veering off. The space between them is filled in haphazardly, with anything from a maze of medieval hovels to a gaggle of gated communities.

As a result nobody gives directions in terms of 'blocks'. Nobody knows what sort of distance an American means by "two or three blocks" ... do you count *every* intersection, in which case you're effectively there already, or just the major ones - in which case three blocks might land you in a different country?

Anyhow, reading American comics as a kid, I encountered the phrase "be the first on your block ..."

Note that 'block' is also a slang word for head, as in "I'll knock his block off".

I pictured hundreds, maybe thousands, of Americans, cartwheeling and pirouetting manically in a race to stand on their heads. For some mysterious American purpose.

Years later, I even put the line on a magazine cover: "Be the first on your block".