You rang? Or do you mean Ms. Sélavy? (Infuriatingly, like you and Pynchon, we miss sharing a birthday by mere hours.)

I was in Bangor, Wales as opposed to Bangor, Northern Ireland, yes. But of course, I'm going to be in the Republic of Ireland early next month,* and that's practically the same. Dunno why they don't shove the two together really. Sure it wouldn't cause any controversy.

I finally got round to sending another game in (sheer hubris), but it doesn't seem to have settled in to the database yet. Or maybe I just attract error messages.

Actually, in last year's Galway my rating was already too low for the top section - they let me in because I had been above the cut-off mark in the recent past. Now it's a year later, I've sunk even lower into numerical mediocrity - bah humbug ratings - so it may not be a question of choice.

Looks like the problem is a skipped closing bracket in the Black ELO line. Here's the text I get when I switch the Java viewer from Deluxe to None:

[BlackElo "1849" 1. d4 e6 2. Nf3 f5 3. g3 Nf6 4. Bg2 Be7 5. O-O O-O 6. c4 d6 7. b4 Ne4 8. Nfd2 d5 9. Nxe4 fxe4 10. c5 Bf6 11. Bb2 c6 12. a4 b6 13. Na3 bxc5 14. bxc5 Nd7 15. Qc2 e5 16. Rfd1 exd4 17. Bxd4 Bxd4 18. Rxd4 Qf6 19. e3 Ne5 20. Ra2 Bg4 21. Rb4 Rf7 22. Rb1 Raf8 23. Rf1 Nf3+ 24. Bxf3 Bxf3 25. Rfa1 Qh6 26. Qc1 Qh5 27. Nc2 Rf6 28. Nd4 Qxh2+ 0-1

Will spies two chaps on the ground, far below. They appear to be well-dressed, probably aristos.

Will: Halloo! I say! Where am I, please, chaps?

Chap #1: Mama mia! Disco volante!

Chap #2: No, no, es ballonista Inglese! [shouts up to Will] Italia, Signor! Verona!

Will (scribbling) "memo to self ... 2 chaps in Verona, look like gentlemen ... cd be a poem in it?"

Voice from below: Eh, Signor Inglese! You buy painting of San Marco? Con gondola?

Trouble with the Rule of Inertia is, it tends to be recursive. As Will Shagspere must have known when he wrote "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow ..."

Any excuse for inertia. The actual game is ridiculous, btw -- I refrained on purpose from playing two earlier winning moves because I wanted to finish with something flashy. But the resulting flashiness is too simple for even a basic 'Mondayesque' puzzle.

Oh yes! :) I used to have something like that as a signature line once:

<Attention - we are planning to open a Procrastinators' Club! Sometime...>

Almost everybody at the site had at some point expressed their intentions of eventually joining.

<...consultation French...>

<Frog's Pawn>??????

DomDomDomDomDomDomDom.

Meanwhile, two highly relevant news stories:

<A lost world populated by fanged frogs, grunting fish and tiny bear-like creatures has been discovered in Papua New Guinea.>

Note that Papua New Guinea is often known as 'PNG' - an anagram of PGN. Although olympiad success still eludes PNG, it can't be long now.

<They saw vegetation laden with so much slimy green frogspawn it seemed to be 'dripping with life' ...>

- Scientists report back from PNG.

Then, in an unrelated incident, BBC newshound and TV star Jeremy Paxman spoke of his love for frogspawn. "Each spring", he said, "the frogs will be down there in the pond, copulating and spawning in a frenzy. They'll be at it long after we're all completely forgotten."

So next time you see Paxo battering a hapless politico with repeated questions, just remember he's really thinking about frenzied frog copulations. And take great care if he sidles up to you at a party and says "Let's make mad passionate tadpoles".

Their thin skin makes them particularly vulnerable to increasing global UV radiation due to the Ozone holes.

The <Great Canadian Northern Frog>, for example- sometimes called <Pierre Eliot Trudeau>- is already extinct.

It's all *dommage* round here, innit?

An obscure "bad magazine" published in Canada, called <Rustler>, printed a photo of <Maggie's> "fertile delta" which a papparazzus "snapped" while she was at a Stones party sitting against the wall in a short dress hiked up "too far" and not wearing any "nether apparel." This photo was subsequently reprinted in every single magazine in existence, including, it is rumored, <Reader's Digest> and <Shakmaty>, if you can believe it.

Which is funny enough by itself.

What was funnier (to me) was that this happened in the middle of <The Great Frog's> efforts to create a new Constitution for Canada while laboring under a minority government.

When the House next sat, a gleeful <Conservative party> backbencher called out "How can we trust you to lead the nation when you can't even control your own wife?"

<Trudeau> snapped back that he wasn't in the habit of attempting to "control women."

So more humor to follow- the Press ran with this story and there was an uproar of support for <Pierre> from Canadian women.

This became front page news- "Trudeau a feminist" screamed the headlines, "Refuses to 'control' his wife."

At any rate, the husbands of these delighted Canadian women obviously thought it was in their best interest to "toe the line" and <Pierre> was re-elected but with a majority government this time.

And he managed to push through the Constitution, which became a "fully legal instrument" in 1982.

In world history, there are only two people who were elected four times to the office of head of state in an actual democracy.

<FDR> and <Pierre>.

But unlike in the US, Canada has never passed a "Roosevelt clause" in its constitution that limits the number of terms a head of state may serve.

To this day, a person could legally be elected and re-elected head of state (a new election must be held within a five year period) as long as he/she lived.

All that is a true story from the Great North.>