lol

I'm so used to your unassuming, albeit grandiose, expansive, allusive, and generally incomprehensible tone that I didn't even notice you had issued a command.

Bloody good show though!

The price of chocolate is at risk of huge rise after a single speculator bought up a huge amount of the world's cocoa beans.

The £658million deal for 440,000 tonnes of cocoa - equal to around seven per cent of annual worldwide production - has already driven prices up to their highest level since 1977.

Investment fund Armajaro is banking on prices rising even further ahead of Christmas production.

One analyst said: "By doing this they've cornered the market and taken control of the entire cocoa supply in Europe."

Willie's Wonky Chocolate Factory star Willie Harcourt-Cooze - who imports his own beans from South America - said big firms like Nestle and Cadbury would have to raise prices or use "inferior" ingredients.

The International Cocoa Organisation said: "Almost all chocolate companies have increased prices in the past two years."

er... if you're going to spam information, maybe you should learn how to hotlink a web page properly?

You do it like this:

The inferior mass-produced products of the choc cartels are made from a blend of cast iron and sugar dissolved in cola.

Funny old word, innumerate. It makes me think of the price list (or 'room rate') displayed in hotels, especially cheapo motels with faux-medieval names designed to persuade overseas tourists that they're made from hand-carved Anglo-Norman breeze blocks, and the dirty windows are really stained glass. These places have names like Ye Olde Hibernian Travelodgers Inn.

And when you check in they give you the Innumerate.

This is not unusual. I frequently find myself, and it can happen in an art gallery as plausibly as anywhere else.

The painting was a portrait of a portly, smug-looking gent with a moustache and bowler hat, circa 1925. Dressed in a Sunday-best respectable suit, plus some curious adornments. These included a sort of jasmine mini-shawl, plus two large buttons or badges with the letters "GM" and "LOL".

Whaaat? Could I have stumbled on a painting of the inventor of LOL? The mysterious proto-lollard in person, hiding behind a moustache in an Irish art gallery. Maybe Bill Gates or somebody would pay 100 million for it, and I could negotiate a finders fee?

Alas, no. Although it transpired that GM did in fact stand for 'Grand Master', it was the wrong kind of GM. And LOL was not the LOL we know, but an acronym for 'Loyal Orange Lodge'. The shawly thing was an Orangeman's Sash, as in that popular Belfast ditty 'The Sash me father wore'. And the guy was simply a grand master (or head honcho) of an 'orange lodge' (a sort of club named after King William of Orange, and devoted to defending the known universe against heresy, Catholics, and evil).

These colourful folk still hold big parades on the 12th July ('The Twalfth') ... and they still wear badges reading 'LOL'.

Does a player get in among the balls, but have to use an extension and a spider ... ?

Employ 'English', which is never called English in England ... ?

See several moves ahead, but have to change plan because of tiny chaotic deviations whose cumulative effect grows exponentially ... ?

Do players carry a finely shaped stick which they rub incessantly with a calcium-based powder derived from ancient fossils ... ?

Have tributes been played to a Hurricane (who influenced a Whirlwind and a Rocket) who finally blew out last week ... ?

Did this Hurricane produce a note from a doctor saying that the standard playing costume impaired his breathing, weakened his play, and threatened to damage his health (thus winning an exemption which allowed him to play while differently costumed, and 'protecting' his health while continuing to consume the cigarettes and alcohol that eventual killed him) ... ?

Answer?

Ummm ... sounds like anglo-arachnid penile scrabble, apart from the balls. Mugwump Synchronized Erection-building? Tarantula tarantella softball? Cricket-kickboxing? Howzaaaat?

None of the above. It's <Snooker>, which has been described as chess for people who think a sport has to have balls. Fencing is sometimes suggested by those who say that the balls can be replaced by a deadly weapon.

My seconds will call on your seconds to check their equipment and plan escape routes (an ancient duelling code of practice which would liven chess up no end.)

I mention this in tribute to Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins, the most extravagantly gifted player and human disaster area to ever pick up a snooker cue.

A chess analogy would be something like the illicit offspring of Tal and Attila the Hun ...

"He coulda been the champeeeen of the wooooorld..." (Bob Dylan, Hurricane)

He *was*, Bob. Twice. And the first time was even before your Hurricane song, so no Excuses. Though a more suitable Dylan song might be Positively 4th Street ("You got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend/ You just want to be on the side that's winning ...")

Every so often a snooker ball does something that seems to break the laws of physics -- stops dead, pirouettes, jumps in the air, goes back the way it came, swerves the wrong way, or all of these. Snooker pros blame a 'kick', a mysterious phenomenon the scientists have never fully explained -- though popular theories include microscopic chalk particles at the point of contact, quantum weirdness, electrostatic repulsion, a fifth fundamental force linked to dark matter and energy (it happens most often with the high-scoring black ball) and, well, poltergeists.

"can spring be far behind" I should think

Did you know his sister was married to Victor Frankenstein?

I got your Snooker Quiz off the first clue, because I just happened to know what an "extension" is.

HAHAHAHAA

Ok in the King's English (American English) we don't call that brace an "extension" and "spider."

Do you know what we call those two things overseas (where we speak English properly)?

You know what's funny (as opposed to all I've just written so far) is that in Korea 99.9999999 percent of all their exposure to English is "American version."

So when a poor sod from your neck of the woods gets over here, he/she is perfectly incomprehensible- not only to the students, but to the Korean English teachers.

And so I've often had to translate for my colleagues.

You know we don't realize it as NATIVES but there really isn't any relation between "car" and "car" in pronunciation.

I had to translate that one.

"Sung soo, when he said CAWWWWWWWWW, he meant "CAR".

Sung soo: "?????"

This is my rigorous proof that nothing is *perfectly* incomprehensible. If you cross Murphy's Law with Godel's Theorem you get Lem's Domma. Sorry, Dom's Lemma. I knew you'd get what I mean.

Which, translated into humeme, states that no matter how much noise you assemble, information - sometimes loosely referred to as 'order' - keeps leaking through.

I mentioned *stained glass* before. This now is the second area in which stains add value. The more stains on the wall, the better your chances of selling your house for a million currency units. Baht, maybe.

Half man, half baht, half wit.

<"He would answer to 'Hi!'
Or to any loud cry
Such as 'Time, now!' or 'Gentlemen, please!'
His enemies knew him as Paddy the Fly
His friends called him Piss-in-the-breeze.">

My bedroom wall has a large area that looks like Torquemada. Hey, lotsa folk see Jesus. I see infamous religious maniac inquisition torturers.

I also have a potato a bit like Saddam Hussein. I'm thinking of opening an Atrocity Exhibition. I may have to cheat, by superglueing a toothbrush to a yaller dog in order to emulate Adolf. He occurs so rarely naturally that one is always tempted to cheat.

And art, like life, is carbon on an excursion.

Why is order not equivalent to information? Cos you can't say "I was just following informations" and avoid being nailed.

Very good post <Dom>.

But where does the order come from?

I maintain that it comes more from our brain wiring than from any kind of "intrinsic order" there might be in random things like language.

However, I'm aware that "Chaos theory" does demonstrate that random systems such as smoke from the end of a cigarette still follow some kind of predictable ordering.

It doesn't demonstrate that to *me* because I'm thick, but I'm quite willing to take their word for it.

Anyhoo- I was jogging once late at night on Mont Royal, which, predictably, is in Montreal, and I almost jumped out of my skin because I "saw" a giant raccoon about to bite my legs off.

Now when I say "saw" I mean I really saw that. I can remember what it looked like to this day.

But "it" was never there. It was just shadows on a log.

But my "brain" "saw" the racoon- my "brain" ordered the patterns into something I could recognize-

you can see where this is going.

Human evolution- the brains predisposed to order the shadows into dangerous animals are more likely to survive...

ad nauseum.

But of course your example is about language which is a different subject.

Or is it?

Our brains are biologically determined to "recognize" or "order" phonemes.

Or phones!

So you could make an even more random collection there and yes of course we would still "order" it and "comprehend."

Comprehend what, exactly, is anyone's guess.

I like your mini story though.

Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica (Airport) Updated: 1 hr 10 min 10 sec ago -55 °C
Snow
Wind: 32 km/h / from the NNE

I can relate to your raccoon experience. I once saw a large rat-kangaroo thing hopping up and down in an old garage. And I was about ten at the time, so substances were certainly not involved.