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| Feb-06-12 | | hms123: <Annie>
There will be a fine, too? :(
Beer goes <Fine> with a <Reuben>. |
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Feb-06-12
 | | Annie K.: <hms> did you read that in the Lawyer Times? =) |
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Feb-06-12
 | | Domdaniel: Lawyer times a lawyer is still a square, man. Like a chess players' convention ... sixty-four squares and two queens. Man. What would Doc Sportello do?
"Call a lawyer, paranoia ... even Goya couldn't draw ya ..." |
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Feb-06-12
| | Annie K.: <What would Doc Sportello do?> Smoke a joint, obviously.
;p |
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| Feb-06-12 | | hms123: <Annie> heh. |
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Feb-06-12
| | Annie K.: <hms> which? ;)
<Dom> well, that or call one of his girlfriends. :p Have you been reading IV again? :D |
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| Feb-07-12 | | frogbert: dom, i thought lawyer time was equal to lawyer time squared? at least that's what people who actually have had to pay for lawyers tell me. |
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| Feb-07-12 | | hms123: <Annie> Sorry: Lawyer Times heh |
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| Feb-07-12 | | frogbert: <Smoke a joint, obviously.> and if someone opens a window, it'll be a joint venture. or possibly only a venting. but if sportello takes offence at your venting, it becomes a venture after all. |
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Feb-07-12
| | Domdaniel: <Annie> - <Have you been reading IV again?>
Yep. Looking for evidence that Sportello - like Costello - is not an Italian name, but an Irish one. Costello derives from something like O'Coisdealbh, pronounced O'Cush-dawly ... not sure how that mutated into Costello (with the stress on the first syllable: COSS-tell-oh, not Cos-TELL-Oh) ... some colonial Anglo soldier-bureaucrat in late medieval Ireland, not an Ellis Island job ... Anyhoo, Sportello. I'm betting on maybe the O'Spurdealbh clan, who migrated in their entirety from Monaghan to Michigan in the 1840s. Doc Sportello has a cousin, Scott Oof, who also has a cameo in Vineland. Oof *could* be an Irish name - maybe a short form of Uafasaich (oof-aw-suck) meaning 'awful'. It certainly doesn't sound Italian. |
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Feb-07-12
| | Annie K.: I could live with that, I think. :D |
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Feb-08-12
| | Domdaniel: If Lawyer Times married Susan Sontag would their children have been Sunday-Times? |
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| Feb-08-12 | | hms123: <Dom> No, they would have Sued their Lawyer. I would have taken the case. |
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Feb-08-12
| | Annie K.: That would have certainly made some headlines! :) |
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| Feb-08-12 | | frogbert: i played a game of chess today, at a semi-fast classical time control. the funny thing looking at the game now, it strikes me that in 27 moves i made 1 backward move (Nd4-b3)
1 sideway move (0-0)
25 forward moves
the last one was 27. Re1xe7 after which my opponent resigned. i think moving forwards in 25 of 27 moves must be a personal record. anyone with a 25+ move (classical) game with a higher forward percentage than 92,6? :o) |
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Feb-08-12
| | Domdaniel: Uh, is 'semi-fast' the polite way of saying 'slow'? As in "Don't mind young Gerry, he's not really retarded, just, well, you know. Semi-fast". I need to know these things so I can be first on my block. As long as it's writer's block or roadsweeper's block ... anything but those *starting blocks* which give procrastinators the horrors. Ackshly, 'semi-fast' sounds kinda racy and louche, in a semi-detached suburban sort of way: "She moved with a semi-fast set" ... "My pink half of the drainpipe/ Separates next door from me... and I shall baffle you with cabbages and rhinoceroses and incessant quotations from ..." "I see. Well then, is *Mrs* Penguin at home?" |
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| Feb-08-12 | | frogbert: <Uh, is 'semi-fast' the polite way of saying 'slow'?> heh. i "grew up" with 2h/40 moves + 1h/20 moves ("forever"), with adjournments after every 4 hours of play, and up to and including 2011 the norwegian championships have been played with 2h/40, 1h/20 and 30 minutes to finish the game (max 7 hours in total) for as long as i've been participating (first time in 1994). hence, any game where i need to make 40 moves in less than 2 hours feels kind of fast, to me. i stopped playing weekend tournaments too because i didn't like the "fast" time controls. in short, i'm probably "slow", but it feels better to say "semi-fast". :o) |
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Feb-08-12
| | Domdaniel: Oh, btw, I'm thinking of 'researching' the possibility that <tpstar> is really Thomas Pynchon. Certain things fit too neatly: the show tunes, the obsession with 'Them' and 'Us', the polyglottal multicultural omnivorousness, the character in Gravity's Rainbow named 'Der Springer' ... who is a *movie director*. And there's a movie director named Tony Palmer, who's probably an innocent bystander. Also, would *I* have hung around here so much if I didn't feel I was following the trail of the Master? Or at least a sockpuppet who isn't Wanda Tinasky? - You hide. They seek. |
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| Feb-08-12 | | frogbert: which reminds me: curious to read some of your 'real' writings (i.e. 'articles'), i tried to bingle your authorship the other day (ok, i admit it - i googled, i didn't use bing), but i soon realized that you have a few namesakes. so instead of 'stalking' on your production, i wonder if you have examples of your professional writing that you're particularly happy with and would like to share. if you don't care to introduce cg.com acquaintances to your career activities, i totally respect that too. but judging by your writing style <here> i wouldn't be totally surprised if i would enjoy your professional work too. :o) |
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Feb-08-12
| | Annie K.: <G> hmmm, speakina Gravity... not Rainbow, Mission. Impressions? :) |
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Feb-08-12
| | Domdaniel: <A> As in ... Hal Clement? Impressions? I've tried not to leave too many. It should still be readable when you get it back. Rather 'hard', but I liked it. I tend to be a bit puzzled by these strange juxtapositions of *considerable imagination* and *no imagination at all*. I mean, the planet and the bug-things are interesting ... but why do they behave so much like humans? Tribes, wars, phobias, rivalries, flying machines, invaders, progress, etc. Maybe it's the mid-20th century liberal (not 'neo-liberal') outlook: what's out there shares our hopies, fears and emotions. In general, I prefer scenarios with the ineffable strangeness of the out there: off the top of my head, the linguistic problems in Samuel Delany's 'Babel-17' (aliens who can fully describe every aspect of a complex machine in eight words, if they've touched it ... but can't grasp the concept of 'home' ...) or Iain Banks 'Affronters' who play ball games using genetically modified live ball-creatures ... Ah. Pretty human, that one, mebbe. If we could, somebody would. Perhaps the point of 'M of Grav' is that the science of weird spinning things with variable gravity is thoroughly worked out. Not really meant to be imaginative, as such. I'm more of an avant-gardener than a pulp merchant, though I can do crossovers. |
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Feb-08-12
| | Domdaniel: <Frog> If only it were so simple. There are many namesakes, as you say, sometimes even writing for the same publication at the same time. I tend not to keep copies of things, and only a handful are lodged in accessible parts of the internet. More may be hidden behind the Murdoch paywall. And the few pieces I recall as being halfway good were done for small zines that vanished years ago. But I can probably find a few links. |
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| Feb-08-12 | | frogbert: <More may be hidden behind the Murdoch paywall.> i think i ran across a couple of those, ackshly. (oh my, working hard to blend in. can you tell? ;o) |
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Feb-09-12
| | Annie K.: Heh. Yep - 'Mission of Gravity' is at the harrrrrrrd science edge of the SF spectrum, they don't get any harder. :D I was particularly fascinated by the idea that the heavy-worlders would think their planet was a bowl, rather than a globe (or flat...), due to a gravity-related optical illusion. The terror of falling things, and the "unthinkability" of jumping were also quite impressive details. I have to respect Clement's thorough and vivid portrayal of the the hi-grav planet's profoundly different environment. And he's really not half bad at plot and characters either. :) OK, his natives may have been a *little* too human-like, but I tend to side with the idea that most any civilization of individual beings (as opposed to gestalt/hive minds) would likely follow broadly similar social patterns. May be sortof parochial, but it just makes sense. Those so-teddibly-socially-non-human aliens some writers like to create often strike me as completely nonsensical from the POV of why and how any species would develop in such ways... other than for the writer to try and come off as oh-so-original. :p <If we could, somebody would.> Quidditch, anybody? Or shall we just pass out the flamingos for a fine game of croquet? ;) |
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| Feb-09-12 | | mworld: I switched phone apps to stockfish recently and it is now pounding me into the ground on practically every level the game has... so highly recommended? not sure, but it definitely 'teaches'. |
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