Speaking of things breaking down, I hope your bone-spur-pain thing is better. The trouble with legs, I find, is that it's much harder to throw one out and buy a replacement model with more memory.

As far as replacement legs are concerned, I advise you to contact me first; I won a gold with one 20 years ago.

I'm dated... Well - another yummy past tense replacement of < to date>.

Kneadless to say, it is all in good phaiph.

<Dom> What is the last time you spend time analysing games?

I'm throwing myself towards Aagaard, but I have this feeling that he does not really bring together the most important elements...

Excercises are great though...

I miss something; a sort of overall supremacy I expected from a 2500+ player, not on the surface, but a few layers deep.

What he does I could do myself, if I had the time and inclination.

Very few pointers for me compared to what I expected.

Heh. "Paranoia, paranoia, even Goya, couldn't draw ya ..."

OK. Questions like this -- <What is the last time you spend time analysing games?> -- cause me real problems. Simply because I'm erratic, predictably unpredictable and typically atypical. There are a few meta-truths (I read books) but the details, intensity, frequency and topics keep changing.

Yesterday I had three cheese and chutney sandwiches. The day before yesterday, and also today, I had none. This averages out at one per day, which sounds quite orderly -- but in fact my behavior patterns are clumpy and not orderly at all.

Sometimes I spend hours at something related to chess. Sometimes I don't. The variations can be short-term (like the sandwiches) or medium term -- last year, I played about six weekend tournaments plus about ten club match games; this year I've played zero club games, and just two tournaments, both nearby. I can't tell whether this is a fluctuation or the start of a trend.

I wrote about film for a few years, switched to other subjects, and last year began to write about art. I tell people that I need to change every so often, that the old subject gets worn out and I start to repeat myself. But that's not quite the whole story.

As long as I can keep changing then I'm still young enough to be flexible, maybe? I'm not sure, but I know that these Springer-jumps are necessary.

<Navigare necesse est. Vivare non necesse.>

I have a card somewhere with that motto on it, which must seem weird given that I hardly ever travel beyond these little islands anymore. I can't vouch for the correctness of the Latin, but it supposedly says <It is necessary to travel -- it is not necessary to live>.

There's travelling, and there's *travelling*. Not to mention *voyaging*.

But I've now got the opposite problem. Everyone I like is on my 'favourites' list, which is pretty much everyone who posts here. So the 'highlight' function of the friends list is null and void, cos everybody is highlighted.

So, sorry about this, but I'm going to have to defavoritize some of you. Just to give the forum - from my POV - that stripey look.

<everyone, I like>.

But without the comma things are different. I might not like anyone at all. It's possible I find the entire biosphere of all oxygen planets deeply repellent. In which case I'd mean something like:

<If I liked living creatures then everyone I like would have tentacles ...>

Are you always such an inveterate jumper of guns, <Everyone>? I only ask because <everyone else> isn't.

Incidentally, I've sketched out a *true* conspiracy theory so far-reaching in its many barbs and tendrils that it could never ever be posted on this site. I've discovered, among other things, the identities of the founding members of ACE (the Association of Celebrity Escapees), including Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, Walt Disney and Marlon Brando.

That was around 1954. Fischer, Salinger, Pynchon and Marilyn Monroe joined with the 2nd wave. Others followed.

I can't go into detail here, but some members have faked their deaths, while others have really died but gone on living fake lives.

One aim is to avoid media attention. Another is to ensure that any information printed or screened is false.

Sites like CG have been an enormous boon -- members such as JessicaFQ, Domdaniel, Ed Trice & many more have played key parts in a 50-year disinformation campaign.

For instance, the entire history of XXXXX is actually the result of a bet between YYYYY and Bobby Fischer (who has a very high estimation of women, and came up with a typically brilliant way of communicating this fact without 'violating the given cosmos' -- the name that ACE members give to any action that radically alters the shape of the universe as most people think it to be.

Like, say, Einstein reveals a unified field theory at the party celebrating his 130th birthday and his wedding to all four Polgar sisters.

That might set some alarm bells ringing.

But I've said too much. They'll try 'plausible deniability' first -- crazy guy, ha ha, crazy ideas -- and then move on to the ninja hit squad.

I can only offer some snippets -- ACE grapeshot -- in reply:

- Gore Vidal

"You hide. They seek."

Even knowing what I know -- a century of pipe-smoking with Einstein, Pillsbury and Lewis Carroll -- I'm still shocked by the way they turn on their own. But I'm a traitor now, an outcast, and must learn to think like one: there is no return to the timeless bosom of ACE.

"ACE Books" publishing Philip K Dick -- The Man in the High Castle, Time Out of Joint, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, usw -- that was a neat little scam, though I say so myself.

My role these past decades has been *seeming* to give the game away with tricks like that, all designed to multiply divisions and differentiate integration. My hope is that enough of the heavy gang will asume I'm still playing some kind of meta-game ... enough to give me a fighting chance of blowing the gaff.

I understand your pique, but I'm not sure you should be chastising <everyone>.

Did you know that if everyone chastised everyone, then there wouldn't be everyone else?

Please don't kill my sock puppet!!

Interesting-

Everyone and everyone else can only co-exist in grammatical structures involving exceptions- employing "who"-

Everyone who likes <Selling England by the Pound> is sane. Everyone else is insane.

Thus, "everyone" can only ever be a subset if the notion of "everyone else" is to be allowed.

Which is more than a little ironic because the sole purpose of the word "everyone" is to denote a group that has no subsets.

Now, "anyone else" is even more confusing.

I'll be back later with my new sock puppet.

Well you've reached the <Domain> of mathematics now...

About whether everyone's willing is beyond range...

Ooops! Got to draw a couple of Venn diagrams now...

A penny for a Venny?Huh?

4:49pm
Taegu, Republic of South Korea
Temperature: 21 °C
Comfort level: 21 °C
Dew point: 19 °C
Barometer: 1004 millibars
Humidity: 88%
Visibility: 6 km
Wind: 6 km/h from 110° East-southeast

<Trig> I thought of something mathematical today but I forgot it.

Oh yes-

<Pythagoras with his looking glass Beneath the full moon,
You know he's writing
The lyrics
To a brand new tune>

Written by <Peter Gabriel> in 1972.

<More than 100 years ago, an enigmatic explosion devastated 80 million trees in a Russian forest. Today, researchers say the mystery known as the Tunguska event may be solved. They say new evidence suggests a comet -- not a meteor as previously thought -- was behind the explosion. And, as the BBC reported, they're pointing to clouds that form thousands of miles away at Earth's polices to explain the theory.>

Sorry..too bored..

BTW -- <Earth's polices> -- ?

I think the consensus seems to be that it was a small comet, but I think they've also found some elements more commonly found in rocky asteroids than in comets, so who knows. Two arguments against the comet theory have been how no observatory saw it before the explosion (the comet felling in a small angle during the day could explain it) and what happened to its tail (maybe it was made mostly of ice).

Of course there is the UFO theory, which was first advanced in a Russian sci-fi novel, where the aliens ran out of water and turned to the lake Baikal (proponents of it also cite some eyewitnesses who saw the object rapidly changing trajectory).

"Hey, Providence, whatcha do? Step out for a beer or sump'n?"

- Thomas Pynchon, 1973.

That's spooky. You tryin' to cover *all* the angles, Trig?

Oh gawd, it's been done already, hasn't it? All my best ideas get taken by somebody faster.

I'm working on a blend of <Judge Judy> and <Today's Executions in Beijing> with <Justice in the Islamic Republic>. Contestants ... who may or may not have committed a crime or be embroiled in a legal dispute ... throw dice to find what kind of legal system they get judged by. Parked in a space for ambulances, did you? Will it be a stern talking-to, fifty lashes, or a bullet in the back of the head?