|
< Earlier Kibitzing · PAGE 625 OF 963 ·
Later Kibitzing> |
Nov-25-10
 | | OhioChessFan: A King may look at a cat
Playing chess or wearing a hat
I suppose that this ditty
Inspired by a kitty
Really isn't all that |
|
Nov-26-10
 | | Annie K.: Love it... heh. :) |
|
Nov-26-10
| | Annie K.: <Dom: <There's a smug entity, once known as 'emigrants' or 'the Irish abroad' but now called the Diaspora (wonder where they nicked that from, eh?). I find it amusing to see the Irish Times letters page full of angry missives from Sydney, Singapore, Dubai, Frankfurt, Vladivostok (and maybe an old-timer from Boston) ... all shouting about 'our' government and what 'we' need to do with it. And unlike certain other jurisdictions, these far-flung buggers neither vote nor pay tax here.>> I was gonna get back to this, too... :)
They do have a certain "right" to an opinion, ackshly... because they are the ones who keep hearing from people around them what "their country" should be doing - whether they like it or not. There's a phenomenon... lemme put it this way: take the Jewish immigrants from Russia, for example. Back in Russia, everybody called them "Jews". They came to Israel, and here everybody calls them "Russians". See? ;) Same for me, btw, mostly (not recently though), but I could always confuse the issue by correcting them to "Hungarian" when they called me Romanian, and to "Romanian" when they called me Hungarian. ;p Anyway... inasmuch as anybody unrelated to a country bothers to take an interest in its affairs at all, it will be the expats, emigrants, etc. who'll be getting an earful of their opinions. That's why they want to pass it on. ;p |
|
Nov-26-10
 | | Domdaniel: From that reading (The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald): "Everyone who is sensible enough not to have a job to go to is up there. Old men and cats have never been sensible." |
|
Nov-26-10
| | Annie K.: That doesn't make much sense... :s
...but at least now I know what you've been reading. ;) |
|
Nov-27-10
| | Domdaniel: <Annie> Strange phenomena in this our multiverse, part 4097 ... A big chunk of my wetware seems to be wired in a kind of writerly mode. This can have odd effects on the reading experience. F'rinstance, if I'm tired or sleepy - and reading - I often seem to enter a parallel universe ... where I write/dream/imagine the book's continuation as *I* would write it ... then I snap awake to find that whole scenes, paragraphs, conversations, plot twists etc *never happened*. They're just my projections onto the text. You have this? |
|
Nov-27-10
| | Annie K.: :) It happens now and then. Usually I can tell my variations apart from the actual book, but I've confused myself a few times too. BTW, good news - Mom announced that she was getting rid of a part of her library due to allergy to old paper, and invited me to take first dibs. Now, paper and such allergies aren't much of an issue to me, as I'm allergic to cats... :p Anyhoo, the loot seems to include a few books I haven't seen yet, including a Ballard book - 'The Crystal World / Crash / Concrete Island', and a Borges book of short stories - but it's in Hungarian, and hard to tell what the English and/or original title may have been. Possibly Ficciones, but it may be a collection from other places as well - the Hungarian editions of short story collections don't always follow the original selections. I'll see when I get to it. Currently reading Inherent Vice... ;) |
|
Nov-27-10
| | Domdaniel: <Annie> Congrats, sounds like a nice word-hoard. (When the original huns came spilling out of central Asia, the Europeans put up signs saying "no hordes balled", but that's another story ...) Borges could be anything. Even in Spanish and English his short pieces have been repackaged many times. Any version of Ficciones would probably have the core texts (Tlon, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius; The Aleph; Funes the Memorioso; The God's Writing; Emma Zunz; usw). The Ballard collection is slightly unusual, in that Crystal World belongs to his 'surreal psycho-apocalypse' novels (The Drought, The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World ... I have a boxed set of four of them with exquisite cover art. And I have Drowned World in Hungarian, somewhere ... "Vizby fult V ...??"). I forget. Crash initiated a new series of urban/sexual dystopias, of which Concrete Island is a minor example. High Rise is better. But feel free to make your own judgements, naturally. I'll be interested, always. Ditto Inherent Vice. El Vicioso |
|
Nov-27-10
| | Domdaniel: There's a tree standing tall, Chief Sequioa
In a masterpiece painted by Goya
Is this Plaza del Once?
Natalia, she won't say
But the branches suggest paranoia.
Hmmm. Now *this* is innaresting ... http://www.nthposition.com/plazadel... |
|
Nov-27-10
| | Annie K.: Quite. How do you happen on these things?
<When the original huns came spilling out of central Asia, the Europeans put up signs saying "no hordes balled"> Uh, that took me almost a minute to figure out. Heh... Drowned World would be 'Vízbe Fúlt Világ' - you've mentioned that one before. Thanks for the intros! :) |
|
Nov-27-10
| | Domdaniel: < How do you happen on these things? >
Same way you do, hon. Curiosity and synchronicity and a dash of serendipity. If the writer was really a chess player he might have noticed that 64,000 is not a perfect square. A rectangular board or a dropped order of magnitude? Ersatz Borges, methinks. |
|
Nov-27-10
| | Annie K.: Well, I don't really do synchronicity much - it just looks like it. :p Hold it with the Borges references plz, I didn't read the book yet, I just got it! Doesn't work by osmosis, yanno. ;) If the writer was really a <chess> player, he woulda dropped those naughty naughts altogether. 64 squares are quite enough... ;s |
|
Nov-27-10
| | Domdaniel: Naught is naughty ... sounds like a version of the saying attributed to Hasan i Sabah, the Old Man of the Mountains: <Nothing is true, everything is permitted> ... the deregulation of the binaries, haram/halal, tref/kosher... |
|
Nov-27-10
| | Annie K.: Heh. It's the PC Generation, innit. All hail Tolerance. :p Da Pynchon, I think me likes, so far - just 3 chapters in to be sure. Gets a bit tedious with the details, like views-out-the-windows and traffic descriptions - not a very good mix with me, 'cause I pay a lot of attention to detail, and there's a bit too much of it - but his dialogues are clever and funny. 'nyway... time to turn in. So exit left, with a slight vowel shift... Nighty night. :) |
|
Nov-28-10
| | Domdaniel: "On panavision esplanades
Where only nighty night
Will cover us in light ..."
Mr Form, <Leisure Commands>, 1980 "Turn off the sunlit beach." |
|
| Nov-28-10 | | dakgootje: <If the writer was really a chess player he might have noticed that 64,000 is not a perfect square. A rectangular board or a dropped order of magnitude? Ersatz Borges, methinks.> Who knows, perhaps it is a 3-dimensional board with 40 layers of 40x40 squares. The pieces would get lonely then.. |
|
Nov-28-10
| | Domdaniel: <dak> I knew that, I knew that ... why didn't I think of that? Sigh. I thought the numbers were my friends. Such a neat solution too. |
|
| Nov-28-10 | | dakgootje: Perhaps the imaginary numbers are your friends :D |
|
Nov-28-10
| | Domdaniel: Heh. Oh, some of 'em are. I'm quite close to -1/2 + (sqr3)i/2 ... one of the complex roots of unity ... |
|
Nov-28-10
| | Annie K.: :p ...being less of a pure mathematician, and more of a chess purist, I vote for a breakdown of the 64,000 squares into 1,000 boards of 64, each fully populated with pieces, which would simply mean a match of 1,000 parallel games of chess. Regards, and most sincere indifference to mathematical aesthetics, Conservative Heretical Indifferent Pragmatist |
|
| Nov-28-10 | | Ziggurat: <Naught is naughty ... sounds like a version of the saying attributed to Hasan i Sabah> LOL! (I'm talking about the character in This is England, of course) |
|
Nov-28-10
| | Annie K.: Btw, pardon the (slightly more pronounced than usual) ;) contrariness, dears; I'm overtired tonight, and therefore as cranky as any baby. :p ♘♘! |
|
Nov-29-10
| | OhioChessFan: <daktari: Perhaps the imaginary numbers are your friends > Just because they aren't real doesn't mean they don't have some good ideas. |
|
| Nov-29-10 | | dakgootje: True! Hobbes had some good ideas! |
|
Nov-29-10
| | Domdaniel: Hobbes ... that would be Calvin's tigerish friend rather than Thomas 'Leviathan' Hobbes, who swore tolerably round oaths when he discovered geometry in a gentleman's library? Both Hobbeses had good ideas. |
|
 |
|
|
< Earlier Kibitzing · PAGE 625 OF 963 ·
Later Kibitzing> |
Kibitzing
