Same word was attibuted to killed animals (nefesh), too, and basically the dichotomy between body and soul, was introduced somewhere around the third century, if I recall.... Blurry on the details.... Lots was going on at the time.

Maybe <Annie> can shed some light on both meanings of "nefesh" and "roe'ach" (spirit ?) - Greek: psuche...

And (2), the 2nd thing I was reminded of was a JG Ballard story called 'Garden Airplane Traps'. So I went with that.

But <Frogspawn> never actually, you know, *dies*. And if it did, it'd be back on that karmic wheel faster'n a hamster.

Are hamsters known for their high rate of karmic turnover? I don't *think* the topic has come up before, but I could be wrong.

Then they brought in new colour machines with digital enhancements and on-the-spot photoshopping. Which I could do at home by then anyway. The romance was gone.

Romance takes some odd forms, though. I knew a guy, an artist, who 'religiously' visited the photo machine every day for about ten years. He used to turn the results into short films and watch himself getting older. Then it turned weird. He'd travel to dangerous parts of Northern Ireland - dangerous then, just tough now - and try to get all his clothes off inside the booth.

Luckily he was never torn apart by feral kids or their gun-toting elders. Last I heard, he was rescued from this sordid existence by a good woman, and retired to a farm to paint. Not even self-portraits, thankfully.

Life always takes odd twists and turns, doesn't it? I feel sorry for those 17-year-old who've been told that 'failure' in some stupid examination will forever ruin their chances of happiness. Some of them even kill themselves, and they never learn about the twists in the road, the ups, the downs, the lateral shifts and amusing full stops.

Far as I'm concerned, telling a child that 'everything' hangs on an exam result is up there with indoctrinating a kid with religion. Both are forms of child abuse.

> tell me about it.. I was told repeatedly that all I had to do was to pass my Class X Exams with a good score...

I did, then I was told that I had to get a good score in my Bachelor's Degree...

I did, then I was told I had to pick a career..

I did, then I was told I had to get an accounting classification...

One of the advantages of being independent and, say, 30, is that you can decide to change course and direction...

In my limited experience of the type, accountants either count beans forever or take a rake-off and become crooked politicians. Some become prime ministers, a fate so much worse than death that it hardly bears thinking about.

I guess you could have laundered mob dough in that pastry chain. Croissants for pissants ...

Thomas Harris - the Hannibal Lecter author - isn't exactly a great stylist but sometimes he can choose the perfect word for something. In one book he described the 'ablative' tension of media exposure.

Ablative is also a grammatical term, but the meaning I take here has to do with friction, erosion, relentless rubbing away (with a hint of abrasion). The heat shields on space capsules are meant to protect them from ablation on re-entry: otherwise they burn up.

It can also mean weathering, melting, evaporation, or the surgical removal of an organ. An interesting mix. And very redolent of yer 21st-century pap.

The grammatical/linguistic usage - as in 'ablative absolute', for anyone who ever studied Latin - has a few meanings as well. But they also seem to cluster round the concept of words being 'weathered' or worn down by the process of linguistic change.

Which was one of the places we came in, wasn't it? In that discussion which began chez Annie a while ago.

I've taken the next week off 'sick', btw, to give myself a chance of recovering from whatever's been stopping my brain working. I understand that some folk take these 'sickie' things regularly, but I don't think I've ever done it before -- apart from a six-month escape break which was only health-related in a vague mental way, and maybe a couple of spells in hospital, years ago. But - as a freelance - taking a week off for whatever reason boils down to begging permission to be allowed not to earn any money. Which could be why I don't bother.

'They' also seem to prefer the way I write when semi-comatose, as long as I don't start hallucinating hot metal laptops again ...

Pattern behavior scan: just noticed that I 'defended' young people *twice* today, in different contexts. An aberration like that will be filed with the Paranometer in room 47.

One more thing. I miss Joe Wms too. He was the founding father of puns, paronomasia, and not talking about chess. An inspiration, and the last great American. We broke rules and stole horses together, and both the rules and the horses are better for it.

"Have you stolen horses with him?" (old-time underworld saying, meaning 'do you trust him?')

His story was written down about 4000 years ago but is accepted as being much older. With many elements which the biblical flood story seems to have lifted wholesale. Hard to get decent copyright protection in the bronze age, I suppose.

There was an episode of Star Trek: Next Generation called, I think, Darmok, where Picard tells the story of Gilgamesh to a dying alien. The catch is they can't understand one another at first - the alien is Tamarian, and their cryptic language defeats starfleet's computers. It's all based on myth, story, and metaphor -- as if we said "Romeo, and Juliet on the balcony" to denote love. Which might be a problem for any aliens who didn't know Shakespeare.

Picard figures it out, of course, tells the story of Gilgamesh - which is somehow worked into the alien's mythplex - and averts war. It's actually one of the few really good episodes, I think, even if some of the language stuff is hocus-pocus.

No, I take that back. What's hocus-pocus is the universal translator in most other episodes. This one actually tackles some of the inherent problems of xenolinguistics: like, how do you start translating without *any* cultural history in common?

Pointing at things and animals led to notoriously dubious results in Australia and North America ... so what do you do if somebody doesn't know what pointing means, or even have a convenient pointer on their body? Ever try pointing something out to a cat? And cats and humans share a lot of genes and some cultural history.

And indeed I remember "No horse, no wife, no mustache" like yesterday... Quite an embarrassment at first. Quite in a hunting mood - I was. You even told me you were much thinner, and I believed you.

Remember how Joe blew up in Trice's face when Joe solved that riddle within 30 minutes, and Tripod declared the answer invalid?

"Up yours, Tr*ce... Three times a mustache..."

Priceless. As you say.

Back later for <[...] how do you start translating without *any* cultural history in common?> - which will also capture the interest of <Annie>, I assume.

Just too many minor bad habits sustained across too many decades, is all, and wondering which ones I can keep and which to sacrifice. Trouble is I think of 'bad habits' like I think of 'bad language': somewhere between a category mistake and a story to frighten children.

Oh dear. Child reference #3, in a context suggestive of gross moral turpitude.

And the compliment on the pics. Re <shortage of pix> - heh. I know the problem. Three of those were actually taken just now on my birthday, as I declared an emergency pic shortage crisis (knowing my game was in the queue to be uploaded) and demanded of all available family members to take their best shots. :p So that's one way to solve it. ;)

Alternatively, you can look around on Google Images yourself, and see if any of your namesake pics are actually yours - you never know!

<Then there was the photographer who dressed me in leather and made me look Draculoid, for an exhibition. I don't have a copy. The snapper gave the only unsold print to my then girlfriend - she was in the shot too, crouched at my side looking vaguely bitten - and, to cut a long story short, they all became different people, buddhists and film directors and such.>

Quoted for being fun to read. :) How does one go about looking "vaguely bitten"? :D

Buddhism... if having <some> religion was absolutely mandatory, I'd probably pick that one. (Otherwise, no, thanks.) Mind you, Wu Cheng'en's "Journey to the West" (in Hungarian translation directly from Chinese) having been one of my favorite childhood books may have something to do with that. ;)

<Remember all those evil old white guys with their stories about "primitive tribes" who believed that the camera "stole your soul"? Utter nonsense.>

Yeah, I learned that a couple of years ago. At the time I was actually looking for a reference to support the urban legend, and found to my surprise that serious sources negated it.

You should probably ask <Eyal> about those, if you want to know all about their etymologies... but in common usage, "nefesh" does serve more as a "living being/soul", or as a reference to spirituality/emotional well-being, as in "it's good for the soul". It's also used in counting - you'd say a family counts "x nefashot" (x souls).

Ruach is more closely related to matters of the mind - spirituality and philosophy - but we're still talking about the living, except for the specific "ruach refa'im" which means ghost - but I have no idea where and when this term was introduced.

Useful term. :)

<Open Defence: <or alternatively the age where the middle gets to be rather prominent>>

But wouldn't that optimistically imply that the prominence of the middle should then go away as soon as you reach old age? :s

<Dom: <Or is it just Nieuw Hamster Dam again?>>

Quoted for truth. Actually this one should be framed and hung on the wall somewhere prominent.

<But chess - as Michael Basman keeps saying - actually teaches kids to *think*. And to make decisions based on their own reasoning. Priceless, that is.>

Well, pointing doesn't work very well, that's for sure. :)

But I've noticed that when one of my cats stares somewhere intently, if the other one sees her doing it, she will almost always come around and check out what she's staring at. I've tried using the same trick myself when I want them to notice something, and sometimes it works - but only if they feel like making the effort to check out what's so interesting for me just then. ;) It may have to do with their experience that what interests me doesn't always interest them.

I was persuaded, to some extent, by a recent interview with Basman. He's been running gigantic chess competitions for schoolkids in England, mostly under ten, and claims that the thought-training is very useful. He may have a point - for one thing, there's a pretty even divide between the sexes at that age. When hormones and puberty etc kick in, the boys acquire this competitive urge which is all too simplistic for the girls. In many ways, competitiveness is about the least interesting aspect of chess -- in the sense that what matters about a game is winning it, in order to crush the other guy's ego and preserve one's own.

The only thing worse, in my opinion, is chess as sports-fan-worship. Worse yet if nationalism is the basis.

I like mathematics too, though I never was a prodigy. I was, however, reading at the age of two - and I read a sci-fi novel for grownups at four, which indicates some sort of prodigyhood. But as for maths: its defenders argue that it's good for general thinking skills, even if you never have to any actual trigonometry again. And yet most people go through life with a *terrible* grasp of probability.

According to Gerd Gigerenzer ('Reckoning with Risk', 2002) this inability to think statistically applies to doctors and scientists as much as anyone.

The downside is, I occasionally lose - or mislay - a day. But another one usually comes along pretty soon...