Will there be any touching involved?

Mrs. Gossip

This works for me, anyhow.

I am already the first kibbutzer on your new old game!!

Canadian girl hint: don't let them touch you unless they pay for the drinks. Canadian girls are as cheap as you let them get away with being.

Taking its cue from the aforementioned Elvis Costello song, it is called <King Horse Chess>.

The rules are simple. Everything is as normal, but the King moves like a Knight. It is checked etc in the normal way, but it must make knight-type moves in reply.

Thus, for example, the move
1.Kd3
is a legal way to begin the game; though maybe not a very good one.

One thing that emerges is that a King on the edge, or even worse, the corner, is in real trouble. Here's a sort of 'back rank mate':

click for larger view

White plays 1.Ra8#
The black king's flight squares, f7 and g6, are blocked by its own pawns - so it's both a smothered mate and a back rank mate, in a way.

This related position is interesting:

click for larger view

White to play, plays
1.Ng6+
Which is mate. But note that if there was no pawn at f5, black could reply with 1...Kxg6 -- it's OK for kings to occupy adjacent squares in this game, as long as they're never a knight-move apart.

Like this similar position, where we change the black rook on f7 for a queen, and remove the f-pawn:

click for larger view

Black has just played 1...Qf7+

Now white can, and should, move his king away. But he thinks that the knight interposition will at least force black to give up his queen ...

2.Ng6+??

In fact black can now play either 2...Kxg6(!) or 2...Qxg6+. I haven't analysed further, so I don't have a forced win in either line. But I do in a similar position, as follows:

click for larger view

Black to play:
1...Qe5#

The queen checks in the normal way, while covering the escape squares g7, f6, f4 and g3.

A king on the rim, his chances are slim.

If, for example, you try to construct one on the basis of standard fool's mate - white pawns on f3 and g4, black queen on h4 checks and mates - then you instantly run into problems. The white king can hop out to d3: if you cover that (not particularly easy) it still has an escape square on g2. Which you've created by moving the g-pawn in the 1st place. Cover that with Bg2, and the king does *not* have an escape square on f1, at least ... but it's far from elementary.

Here's an 8-mover I came up with. I call it <Jockey's Mate> because finding it was harder than a jockey's ballcocks. All the moves aren't entirely stupid, but some are.

1.e4 a5
2.Nf3 a4
3.d3 a3
4.bxa3 c6
5.a4 Rxa4
6.Bb2 Rb4
7.Bc1 Qa5
8.e5? Re4#

click for larger view

Note that the White King's escape squares -- c2, d3, f3, g2 -- are all blocked by his own pieces; while the double check avoids interpolation, forcing a king move. But there isn't one.

OK, then? You know the rules. Can anyone find a shorter mate, ie less than 8 moves? Or construct a problem, perhaps illustrating some principle I haven't cottoned on to yet ...

En passant as normal. Castling, both 0-0 and 0-0-0, as in standard chess. Everything standard, really, but the king move -- and I can't find anything else that *must* change because of this, though I could be wrong.

Castling, especially kingside (!) seems dangerous, because of the particular weakness of a king on the rim.

One major dynamic in the game seems to be striking a balance between the king's vulnerability to mate (it's still the most important piece) and the fact that its new move system seems to demand centralization, just as a knight works best from the centre (8 squares) rather than the edge (4 squares) or the corner (2).

I wouldn't go so far as to play something like 1.e4, 2.Ke2 (at last, the Wannabe Gambit finds a role!), 3.Ke3, 4.Kd4 etc -- but the King may well be surprisingly safe out there, and relatively doomed on g1.

Nah, she's my Big Bird. You'll always be my Miss P------....

Ouch! Hey, I was only joking. That was uncalled-for, I -- ouch! Yarooh!

Thank you m'dear, terribly useful, but I've been 'out' with more Canadian girls than Irish ones. That's out as in unconscious, of course. And either way we're talking single digits (which is all they left me ...)

I'm such a sponge. A soak. Now I'm starting to sound like a pun-spring-loaded Costello song ...

<A single digit
Was all she left me
When I try to fidget
I feel bereft, me
Of all the streetwise people on the street
Of all the operators you will meet
In theatres and elevators
High-rise cranes
And alligator's blues.

A single digit
Is a pythonless Cleese
Like half a V-sign
Signals half a Peace
A Churchill cut in twain
A broken-down toff
Just what is he sayin'?
Is it 'fahk' or 'orff'?

A single digit
Better grab the wall
Better brace yourself, Bridget
If you brace anything at all ...>

Yep. Gone all Costello. Simultaneously, I got this quasi-academic litcrit theory about song lyrics -- rejecting standard positions (a) "inferior poetry", and (b) "superior-quality poetry", just not meant to be read on the page, requiring context, performance, music, voice etc to 'complete' it. Incidentally, the same can be said of Beowulf, The Iliad, and other cases of historical orality.

My idea is that (the better) song lyrics (Cohen, Dylan, Costello, Cale, Bowie, Young, Mitchell, Pollard, Stanshall, Reed, and, um, me) are comparable to the <Lost Postmodernity> of Silent Cinema.

Silent Cinema never developed. For technological and commercial reasons it became suddenly defunct -- well before its 'natural' sequence through realism, modernism, pomo, etc could be enacted. It got killed off in an early melodramatic narrative phase - with some exceptions like Dadaist shorts and later pastiche/reconstructions, silent pomo films never stood a chance.

Yes, clearly I must be on one of those. But don't worry, you're on the business end of the camera, as a semi-salaried expert advisor and volunteer pimp patriot (they have them in China, I heard, so I thought I'd import the concept). You're not *directly* in the cross-hairs, anyway ... but, of course, saying that could be one of my blarney-tongued ruses...

<Irish Guy Hint>
Very cosmopolitan. Will want to "go Dutch" in the restaurant, "go gonzoid" in the bar, "go French" in the taxi, and "go to sleep" in the bedroom.

They'll also Finnish first, nibble your Erse, refuse to pose for your Picts, tell you that "the Thai's the limit" and explain their absence/lateness with a lame "Iran all the way here" ... but it was the wrong here.

And they can't read their own handwriting.

Personally I abandoned all conventions concerning gender, money, payment and male chivalrousness ages ago. Which may explain why I don't get asked on dates anymore.

*Weird street conversation today*

Burly guy, bigger and younger than me, otherwise sorta bog-standard male:

- Hi.

Me:
- Nghn. [minimal grunting noise]

Burly:
- Are you English?

Me [detecting Scottish accent & ensuring there is distance betweeen us]: - No.

*At a greater distance, curiosity gets the better of me, and I call back to him*

Me:
- Why do you ask.

Burly:
- You look cool.

Me:
- And the two go together?

Burly:
- Nae, but yeh sounded English, and... [*remainder inaudible, as I kept going and got out of earshot before he decided I was lying about my Englishness]