And I trust that Ireland's 0.5/3.5 score against Russia at chess - despite lacking Baburin, Kelly and Quinn, top three boards last time, so young Alex Lopez makes his olympiad debut at board 2 - is no reflection of the upcoming football game between the same countries.

I admit to the 'casting doubt' thing: old habit of mine. But I do *not* have a 'fixed expression'. I make it move around at least once a month.

What are the <Scunthorpes> called?

Do they have a firm? Are you on the muscle end?

Why are the top three not playing?

Manchester will never be untied. They just buy the next Chrrrrrrrrristiano Rrrrrrrronaldo.

What a pratt. He's never said one word in his life that wasn't boasting about his football- or hair!

This is the sequence of the musical box: Young Cynthia whacks Henry's head off with a croquet mallet. Much like poor King Sweeney, Henry is refused by both Heaven and Hell.

So imagine Cynthia's surprise when years later she opens her old musical box and out pops Henry. Henry is an old man now, but he retains the mind of the schoolboy he was.

Which accounts for his words to Cynthia.

Greg & I are sadly missing Galway this year, mainly for money reasons. I'm travelling to New York later that month and don't get paid until the month after, y'see. But I know that Greg will definitely be playing Gonzaga, as it's his lucky tournament. By that point I should have a few pennies as well as, more importantly, the first draft of my thesis done, so it's highly likely I'll make it to that one.

I'll survive. I've been a cult figure four times over, and there are plenty of gallery heads and film people who think I'm the best art/culture critic around.

This is not a view shared by senior editors, proprietors and bean counters. The bean counters have a habit of axing the wrong people, but I presume that's just auto-arse-preservation. Rupe's minions spend so much time guarding the rear approaches that many of them are more arse than human.

As ee cummings said about pols: <A politician is an arse upon/ which everything has sat except a man>.

I used to wonder where this left Mrs Thatcher. Best not to go there, probably. But didn't Lady Gaga do well, turning out for Papa Ratzi? Lest Old Aquinas be Forgot ... and all that.

But those journo types are almost interesting, anthropologically. They refuse to understand that sport and 'culture' - which is everything from opera to pop celebs, TV and conceptual art - are now the reasons people buy newspapers. They persist in thinking that politics/current affairs is more 'serious', weighty, important -- despite ample evidence that most folk *despise* it.

Never mind old CP Snow and his 'two cultures'. These newspaper types don't get *either* science or art, and yet they persist in thinking their own shtick is significant.

There's nowt as queer as ... people who formed their prejudices in a different era, and don't know how to adapt.

Incidentally, England is one of the few teams that is stronger this time. Could be worth watching, though I expect Russia 1 or 2 to win it. Armenia are slightly weakened. Ukraine and USA have strong teams, but their lower boards are unpredictable. Actually, with Nakamura and Ivanchuk leading, they're *totally* unpredictable.

I love it when the Cold War comes down to an insanely weird contest between the USA and the Ukraine (which both begin with the letter U and are both allowed to put a definite article before their name).

BTW, speaking of letters. Some folk pronounce (the name of the) letter 'R' as 'Arrr', while others say 'orr' (in Anglo-English, where the R-sound is disappearing, along with rhoticism and rhoticity, this sounds very like the name of the letter 'o'). I ask because I'd like to 'shorten your handle', as it were. But should I say 'Argie' or 'Orgy'?

I love watching olympiads. Players in the 2200-2500 range who act dominant and aggressive against me (and win quickly) play like scared rabbits against 2700+ guys. It shows, again, that *nobody* really 'plays the board'.

And then there are the players with utterly mysterious ratings. I looked at a game from the women's event (Irish Player vs NN) where both were rated about 2050 ... but NN just kept giving away material, which IRP took. Nobody rated 2050 has *ever* played that badly against me - it wasn't just a blunder, it was about 6 of them, not including playing on when down a rook and under attack.

But it's all fun. I don't understand people who only want to see Dortmund-style category 23 events, where the 2690 guy is the rabbit.

Swings and roundabouts.

Good lord, I seem to be getting mildly nationalistic in my old age. C'mon Lopez, Heidenfeld, and you other Hibernian-sounding chappies.

In at least one case, literally so. Alex Astaneh Lopez may look like one of those chessplaying Mediterranean gazelles, but he has a Cork accent.

I don't, despite living there for 15 years. The singsong tone - as in certain Welsh and Norwegian accents - is impossible for outsiders.

I guess it wears you down. You may recall the era of the Great Frogspawn Obscenity Trial Closure, when a certain CG insider actually emailed me looking for the details of a 'joke' that had been made, en passant:

Q. Which three English football teams have 'swear words' in their names?

A. Scunthorpe, Arsenal, and Manfookinchester United.

The natives call the place 'Scunny', I'm told. A 'thorpe' was an Old English village (or Hamlet), so Scunthorpe is 'The Village of the Scunt'. They sound like an especially scary sub-caste of Jutes, subsequently forgotten everywhere but this one town.

<Ye Anglican-Sassenach Chronicle & Sun, April 1st, 693 Anno Domini.

Hairy Scunts!
An invading force of Scunts - allegedly like hairy vikings, but they beheaded our reporter and sketch man, so we're not sure - has taken over East England. Well, one village, up north. The Kings of Mercia and Cumbria are hoping they'll stay there.>

I remember that Football joke it's so great

ahhhh

I'm glad you are enjoying the Olympics so much. You seem to have a rather comprehensive understanding of what's actually going on there.

I'm not sure which is easier, to understand the Olympiad now, or one in 1935.

There's tons of information about the contemporary lads- you could even ring a few up- so it would take a lot longer to understand today's event. But it takes a long, long time to find snippets of info about the old ones and yes I know all about Olimpbase and the info is still minimal.

I'm sorry to hear <Rupert> is causing more mayhem. His influence seems all out of proportion for a story book bear.

You don't see <Beano> or <Billy Bunter> laying people off.

I'm a little amused that your editor got sacked- you see, you'll be able to continue, but what about him?

Where's he going to find another *you* now that <Rupe> has foreclosed on him?

I wish you many freelance contracts. And quite right, if anything the "entertainment sector" has been outpacing the "serious sector" for fifty years or more.

A five year old could tell you that. And he probably will tell us both, when we're working for *him* next year.

You see, thanks to the internet "time" itself has sped up. I mean literally. Kids used to be willing to wait forty odd years to dance on their parents' graves but no more!

I say hats off to the little beggars. Anything's better than the old lot, except you of course.

Your comedy skit reminds me of <Harold's> stirring race up to the sea side where he put the boot in on a bunch of <Magnus Carlsen's> grandparents.

By the time they got back to <Hastings> the Frog was sure to win.

Bloody cheek with their <1...e6> and hanging about waiting for something to happen.

High times in Sarajevo tonight. I do *not* suffer from the *anyone but England* syndrome -- in my experience, it's more a Scottish thing than an Irish thing, certainly not prevalent in this end of Ireland ... but, hey. Bosnia & Herz beat England? That's a turnip for the books.

Adams (0.5/2) seems to be a tad out of form. A pity.

Even during the Blitz, England only had to play against the Hun.

Might have been a different story if they'd had to play <Kraut and Japanovenia>.

Don't count out <Peru>. Remember the "Peruvian Immortal"?

Okay, it isn't like the old days when every half-point counted in the final tally: winning the match is the priority now. But a tendency to drop points against weaker teams can't be good. Not a calamity, like England's, but not good.

Must check to see if anyone is on 8/8. I reckon there should be a couple left. Lots of teams on two wins, of course, but from now on the points dropped en route matter more.

I think I preferred it when it was a straight race to collect the most points. And the USSR aka CCCP won by several versts.

A verst is about 0.66 miles.
A kilometer is about 0.6214 miles.
Engineers think that any measurement to more than 2 decimal places is for nancy boys. So a Km = 0.62 miles.

I bought a very weird art/chess book recently. I'd never even heard of it, so I wouldn't have searched for it online - I found it in a bookshop, reduced from about €40 to €10.

It's basically one of those 'quality' art exhibition program books - the kind that hardly anyone buys, but I used to get for free until this week. Now that I'm a civilian again, the sources may dry up.

In this case, the USP was that Marcel Duchamp played in a chess olympiad in Folkestone, England, around 1935. And some artist had made an installation, setting up 8 permanent chess tables in the park next to the original venue.

Each table has a normal chessboard pattern, so you can use it to set up your own pieces and play. But, on closer examination, each board is also a diagram, showing the final position in each of Duchamp's games. A nice twist is that the diagrams use Duchamp's own designs - quite readable, but with a few eccentricities like queens that lean sideways. He'd invented them for playing correspondence games, and had his own set of rubber stamps.

It's really quite a nice piece of public art. Useful, because you can play games, but also commemorating the olympiad and Duchamp's dual fame in art and chess.

The book is mostly frame grabs from a video somebody made about all this, plus a small number of words. I'd have opted for more words myself, but writers are funny that way.

BTW, the first olympiad I was personally aware of was Nice 1974 - it was in the very first chess magazine I ever bought. They hadn't introduced the swiss system yet, never mind scoring by match points -- there were a few preliminary rounds, then teams got allocated to groups A, B, C, etc. The shock was that tiny little Wales got into the A group.

Poland also on 8. Anyone else?

<Kraut & Nihonovia> would have been formidable, at least playing Battleships. Or maybe Go.

But if <Jersey & Guernsey> - two of four Channel Islands, the others being Alderney & Sark - won't play together, who will? Contrary to legend, there is no <Channel No. 5>. Wait, there's a *Channel Five* in Australia ... do they play chess?

Sadly, no team this time from the <British Virgin Islands>. I suppose the deaths of Bill Hook and Craig Vantilbury (RIP) had something to do with it, though maybe British Virgins have become extinct. US Virgins are still going strong, however.

Chessplaying Promise Keepers? And why doesn't *Virginia* mount a team, as it were? Not to mention *British Columbia*? Gotta be some British virgins there, maybe preserved in amber or aspic... like lark's tongue.

The final 3 rounds the medals are decided and I expect Holland to stummble right at- or just before- those final hurdles.

There are 3 teams on 8/8: Ukraine, Poland and Cuba. An Interesting mix.

Of course recent olympiads have shown that the trick is to keep winning matches - the margin isn't quite so important. I'm just showing my vintage by thinking in terms of game points.

I would still argue that a team hitting a string of 4-0 results is showing the kind of killer instinct needed to win. Even with a healthy rating advantage, wins with black are far from automatic.

Many of the names on the 'lower' Russian teams are new to me too. Where do they get 'em from?

The dutch outrank their opponents on 3 of 4 boards, yet the 4th board was where, and should be, it did happen... 250 rating points vanishing and denying us a few valuable bones.

Good (remarkable) call on the L'Ami game. Spectacular.

The Dutch average holds somewhere around the 2660 mark. Enough for a qtr final?

This isn't quite as bad as it sounds (nor as much fun). It is best avoided.

Typically, if I begin to 'follow' a player it's because they play openings that I'm familiar with. This goes right back to Korchnoi in 1974, and the world's first big chess showdown after Fischer-Spassky. I was a total chess innocent when Fischer-Spassky was happening, so I didn't identify with either of them. Two years later, however, I was ready: and Korchnoi's blend of the French as Black and the English as White became something I could relate to.

Another such influence was Vaganian, playing the French and the Reti/KIA. And I began to understand Botvinnik and Petrosian a little better -- I never even *tried* to play in the style of Alekhine or Tal, but I felt the Karpov/Capablanca model a bit too direct. I didn't want clarity, but nor did I want utter chaos.

Sometimes - rarely - a player's approach to the game seems to chime with me, regardless of their opening repertoire. This happened with L'Ami -- I felt I could *understand* his moves without needing to analyze too deeply.

This is really an illusion -- analysis shows up long-term ideas, plans within plans, andsovoort. I wouldn't see a quarter of it OTB. Yet the resonance is there -- there are other GMs, of roughly the same strength as L'Ami, whose every move confuses or bewilders me.

Alex Baburin once told me that it's good to select a player as a model and study their games in depth. But that was after he'd beaten me in 16 moves, and I'd said that my normal opening repertoire was almost identical to his -- so in our game I'd made a spur-of-the-moment deviation which worked out badly.

I enjoy L'Ami's mix of strategy and tactics -- especially the notion that if one white move somewhere in the Bezgodov game was different, then Erwin could have happily settled down for a 100-move endgame grind. But give him a chance and he'll opt for mayhem.

I'm a bit like that, or anyway I aspire to be that now. In earlier times my models were more purely positional - I was never really that good a positional player, looking back at my old games. But over time I acquired a few positional reflexes, the way others have tactical reflexes.

But, hey, enough about moi. I think the current Nederlands team (like a few others - including Ireland, at a weaker level) is a transitional team, with the accent on youth. Not Carlsenesque prodigy youth, but a bunch of players in their 20s who have some experience of playing strong GMs, and aren't scared of them. They may not do brilliantly this time, but could be a real force two years from now.

Or, as you suggest, they may even be good enough to push into the medal zone in the latter stages of this event. They'll need to feel capable of beating the USA, Poland, Israel and various Russian kombos -- but I reckon they're up for that.

Ireland are due to play Russia soon at football - a world cup qualifier. I hope nobody agrees a draw or scores half a goal. In that sphere, 'we' are good enough to beat 'them'.