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Apr-23-12
 | | Domdaniel: Ah, of course. It's Turkish.
Although Geurgle translates it as "Eternal verse you time equal to". Poetic, innit? |
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| Apr-23-12 | | Memethecat: <Bobby Fischer,down-to-earth> Stop it! your making me jealous. My party pooping pancreas no longer lets me partake of tasty mind numbing beverages. So frogs pawn = 1...e6, the penny drops, if I had a penny for every time the yadayada I could afford some quality coffee, any flavour 'cept French, ahh, how they laughed. I had to check opening explorer to make sure y'all weren't joking bout 2.Qe2, I'm just now starting to occasionally bend "zee rulz" of quick development & castle, but only when its safe & seems worth the excursion. Point taken about style & ability forming your choice of opening, we cant all be a Morphy Tal or Fischer. I'm also realizing that all out attack isn't my strong point either, probably the opposite. When someone 'checks my ass' these days, I take it as a compliment, except when its a prostate examination, then its just downright flirting. |
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| Apr-23-12 | | Memethecat: You missed Scottish: Dae ye wahnt mi te caw ye a sumur dae? ur wid ye prefer a taxi? |
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Apr-23-12
| | Domdaniel: Missed quite a few: Irish, Basque, Danish, and 5000 more, gi' or ta'e. Here's the retro Geurgle version (the trouble with typing other languages on an 'English' computer is the brute's insistence that 'respirin' should be 'respiring' and 'excede' should be quietly changed to 'exceed'.) I caught some of these, not all. One got through in Portuguese. Reverse: Norwegian, Dutch, German, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Finnish, Turkish, Catalan, Elizabethan English … Shall I compare you to a summer's day?
Much softer and much sunnier are you
The storm breaks the May flowers, wreaths
And summer 'joy what is as short as the?
Sometimes heat and glare in the sun exceeds
From time to time, or dull the color is golden;
Beautiful beauty sometimes decreases,
Marred by chance or by changing the course of nature;
But your eternal summer will not vanish
They never lose their beauty brightness RIGHT NOW,
The death will not boast, even if you walk in the shade
Eternal verse you time equal to
While the men breathe and eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
I have no idea why the Czechs SHOUT like that. JOY, mebbe. |
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Apr-23-12
| | Domdaniel: <meme> -- < Dae ye wahnt mi te caw ye a sumur dae? ur wid ye prefer a taxi?> Heh. The taxi might be easier to find, in Scotland.
I'm reminded of the chap outside his London club ...
- I say, call me a taxi!
- Certainly, sir. You're a taxi.
- What? Impertinence! I'm an Admiral!
- Right, sir. You're a battleship.
*collapse of stout party* |
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Apr-23-12
| | Domdaniel: Back on the topic of 2.Qe2 -- yep, it's an old anti-French device, used by Chigorin. Black wants to play ...d5, and it stops him, at least for a while. I don't have a very good record against it, though it usually turns into some kind of King's Indian Attack. Some Black players believe in calling White's bluff by going 1.e4 e6 2.Qe2 e5. There's some debate as to whether the sort-of-king's-gambit reached after 3.f4 is better than the original. I've fantasized about the 'Queen's Spanish' ... 1.e4 e6 2.Qe2 e5 3.Nf3 Nc6 4.Qb5 ... but it's strictly fantasy. And I wouldn't play 2...e5 anyhow. |
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Apr-23-12
| | Domdaniel: When I played 1.c4 in the 70s -- that's the 1970s, not the 1870s, btw -- my six-year-old nephew told me yesterday that I looked like a vampire, which I take to mean hundreds of years old but still a bit cool -- where was I? Ah, right. Playing 1.c4 in the 70s was an oddball thing, and few players under 2200 had a regular black system. Most made it up as they went along, even some relatively strong ones. I once crushed a 2150 player who went astray in a complex line of the Flohr-Mikenas Attack. But by the 80s people were used to the English/Reti systems, and club and tournament players had ways of dealing with it. In the present century, after a 15-year break from this addictive game, I started playing 1.Nf3, for the aforementioned transpositional possibilities. But I now see a *lot* of 1800-ish players playing the English/Reti. About as many as play either 1.d4 or 1.c4 -- it's roughly a 3-way split these days, with the odd Bird or Orangutan thrown in. |
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| Apr-23-12 | | Memethecat: Most Scottish folk go to the 'Costa lot more than it used to' for their summer days. Somehow I cant see white going for 4Qb5 so it'll have to remain a dream, its good to have a few dreams unfulfilled anyhow. I've only tried the French a handful of times & that was just so I could practice the closed centre that's a characteristic of it & the kings Indian. <Most made it up as they went along> I'm definitely part of that group, my memory can just about manage the bare bones of a few openings, the price of coming to the game late in life. I don't get any pleasure out of learning variations, because when I do my opponents refuse to follow the hymn sheet, that is, until 'I've' forgotten it. I don't understand the mechanics of prepared openings, how do you make the other chap play along? I'm better of with the fundamentals, it just means I cant play 15min games. I've never even heard of the Orangutan let alone know how to play it & for some forgotten reason I tend to mimic whites initial moves in the English. Its like yoga, the bird, dragon, hedgehog "yes, just stretch your e pawn a touch more, now see if you can get your DSB on a different diagonal" |
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Apr-23-12
| | Domdaniel: <meme> - < I tend to mimic whites initial moves in the English>
A very good strategy, actually. Often use it m'self. I recently acquired a book on the Symmetrical English, 1.c4 c5, by Mihail Marin -- as my only other book on the subject was (a) 25 years old and (b) lost -- and it pointed out that White and Black have essentially the same plans and ideas at their disposal. Obvious, rilly.
I can *just* manage a 15-min game but I refuse to play blitz. And I'm getting to like increments, where you get 30 seconds added on whenever you make a move. Under the old sudden death rules I was too often the one who broke when both flags were hanging. I'm ancient enough to remember when games were adjourned. Then came about 20 years of sudden death, and now increments are de rigeur. Each seems to demand a different style of play. Then there's the chemistry factor. I haven't won a tournament since they banned smoking. At least I still have my portable pack of mood enhancers, and a hit of caffeine or sugar can be useful. Now the powers-that-be are babbling about dress codes. I recall a tournament in the early 80s which had 100 blokes in brown anoraks and two dissidents: a friend of mine in punk chains and me in black leather. Now they want us in *suits*. Whatever they might be. |
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| Apr-24-12 | | frogbert: doesn't suit me either. possibly explains why gordon's "the labour dress code" was a slightly lesser hit than dan's book with a similar title. |
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Apr-24-12
| | Domdaniel: Dan? Dan Dennett, Dan Everett, T. Dan Smith? Or Dan Brown? Yes, I'm sure he wittered on about codes in a vaguely subnormal way. "Brown shoes don't make it" ... in the words of Deffi's favorite guitar hero, Mr Frank Zappa. |
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| Apr-24-12 | | frogbert: brown was the intended common denominator, yes. and code of course. a friend of mine wrote a book titled "innocent code" - on the topic of code that's far from innocent; "brown code" or even "dirty code" would've been less ironic titles, but i guess his point was that the code *postures* as innocent, even when it isn't. a bit like fide's dress code, possibly. |
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Apr-24-12
| | Domdaniel: Hmm. Is it just me, or is there something oddly recursive about anagrams of the word 'code'? Deco, as in Art, and that curiously American term 'coed' - a female person who is educated among those of another gender. ee cummings rhymed 'coeds' with 'Lloyds'.
You can often find Art and Deco in places like suburban Dublin, but their parents know them as Arthur and Declan. |
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Apr-24-12
| | Domdaniel: <Frogspawn Quotes of the day> ... a highly erratic and occasional series. "If He made me in His image then He's a failure too."
- Laura Marling, Failure
"You will be walking into the Thar, but you will not be walking out of the Thar."
- Don DeLillo, The Names
"So much quicker to work it out on his own than suffer through someone's well-meaning efforts to educate him -- and to forge an emotional connection with him in so doing."
- Neal Stephenson, REAMDE
"The present's not that pleasant, just a lot of things to do. I thought the past would last me, but the darkness took that too."
- Leonard Cohen, The Darkness |
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| Apr-24-12 | | Memethecat: Here's one I like.
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.-
Aldous Huxley. |
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Apr-24-12
| | Domdaniel: <meme> One of the great and strange encounters of the 20th century was the meeting between Captain Beefheart - then a young vacuum cleaner salesman and aspiring singer and artist, Don Van Vliet, and the elderly Huxley, author of sundry exquisite novels and the hallucinogenic 'Doors of Perception'. Don knocked on a Californian door and was astonished to see Huxley opening it. Holding up his vacuum cleaner, he managed to blurt out "Sir, this machine sucks". |
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Apr-24-12
| | Domdaniel: I shouldn't omit Huxley's great travel book, 'Beyond the Mexique Bay', in which he recorded a sign seen on a toilet door in Central America. It read simply 'For urin'. I like that. Concise. No evasions, toiletries, Water Closets or Little Boys' Rooms. |
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Apr-24-12
| | Domdaniel: <meme> - < My party pooping pancreas no longer lets me partake of tasty mind numbing beverages> Ah. How sad. Still, Frogspawn has idiotic slogans for every occasion, like... <Live a betic, Diabetic.> and
<Celibate, buy a bit, give a bit away for free.> |
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Apr-24-12
| | Domdaniel: One day, the Islets of Langerhans will surprise everyone at the chess olympiad. |
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| Apr-24-12 | | frogbert: i guess i'm a cheater, i've only read "brave new world"... |
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Apr-24-12
| | Domdaniel: <frogbert> The original one by Shagspere was better. He called it The Tempest. |
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Apr-24-12
| | Domdaniel: Huxley isn't *always* great. The late stuff is good: his mind really did expand with age, blindness, Californication and certain chemicals. But much of the early stuff - widely praised as dazzling satire of 1920s England - seems slight and trivial now. I recently got round to reading Antic Hay - praised as dazzling satire, usw - and found nothing there. Neither as funny as Wodehouse nor as blackly bigoted as Waugh (which is also a kind of funny, come to think of it). Come to think of it. Odd phrase. |
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| Apr-24-12 | | hms123: <dom> Nothing is as funny as Wodehouse. |
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| Apr-24-12 | | crawfb5: Are there no prisms? Are there no Wodehouses? This place scares the dickens out of me... |
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Apr-25-12
| | Domdaniel: Yes, I Miss Prism too.
As Newton's Optics showed, they are useful in determining the difference - not to mention the angle of refraction - between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance. |
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