And the education system seems to work.

Heh.

In my "research" on the first game with <Arno Nickel>, I ran across this header: User: FAQ NR

With this information in it:

<<Q: What is a Freelance Nuisance-maker?>

A: User: Domdaniel>

Though I *have* begun to use smileys. Annie, poor deluded star that she is, thinks there's still some hope of turning me into a regular human being. Or even a *less irregular* one - a sort of human version of 1...a6, perhaps.

If memory serves, Deffi had an anecdote about signs in public places in India, saying something like "Do not make nuisance here". Nuisance being a perfectly Indian euphemism for a certain bodily function of an excretory nature.

Around the same time, during the Nickel game, I announced that I was retiring from forum duties but would carry on as a 'freelance nuisance'.

Good thing I wasn't drinking anything when I read <this> sentence...! 8s ;p

<I am frequently deluded myself, and suspect that people who aren't are living in cloudcuckooland.>

Deluded? Why, that's <almost> insulting. Unless you're using that as a euphemism for "crazy", in which case, I agree. :)

Linares for later...

"Death to Everyone"
and the infamous 'Meaulines' ...

'And he came by the way of a half-million murderers
And he came by the way of a long list of ironies
And he came by the way of the road to Sioux City
And he came by the way of the half-breeds and lesbians'

... I was dimly reminded of Sioux City when seeing the Lakouta votes in Strudel Cookie...

Maybe we should tell them about homophobia. Hey folks, y'know those preachers and politicians who get *really worked up* about gay people. You know *why* they do that, dontcha? Yup, even the pillars of mother church.

I had a pleasant chat with a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses yesterday. I was tempted to do a Sir Henry routine ("The hounds are all fagged out from yesterday's Jehovah's Witnesses and we don't want blood on the lawns again") but I remained polite. Didn't even mention that I was Vice Pope Erik II of the Harvey's Bristol Witnesses ("For lo I have witnessed many a fine pair of Bristols in my godless youth...")

It was only when they observed that somebody 'made' my house - the good old argument from design, minus Paley's watch - that something snapped. "Look", I said, "I have no wish to insult you or your faith. I'm interested in it, but interest doesn't mean what you think it does. And I had this exact conversation at a door in London twenty-five years ago, and it's cold, and I'm still incorrigible."

So they went away. Must remember to read their stuff, just in case The Lord has issued any new edicts against the likes of me.

The Forbidden Wing just growed. One month it was nominally a 'guest bedroom' or two, then it sprouted 5000 books and 6000 magazines, all in unseemly piles.

That isn't a computer stack in the window, btw. There is a disused one in that room, but much further back. The image is some kind of optical artifact ... possibly a reflection of the vehicle doing the photography.

An architect chappie *was* employed to design the 21st century extension, but he made an almighty mess of it. Apparently these new-fangled 'European building regulations' are to blame - if you want a pagoda you have to include a bathroom (or a 'wet room' as they call 'em now) too.

I'd heard that bathing frequently necessitates the use of water, which is often wet. I wonder ... do euphemisms evolve too, or did the L--d plan them all from day one?

Anyhoo, the Witnesses. I gave them the short version: "Ah, the house. The well-wrought ironwork. That tells me that human beings are given to making analogies, even when they're completely pointless."

Some biologists have argued that there's a time-lag of about 50,000 years in human evolution. Our genes are now neatly equipped to deal with the conditions prevalent 50,000 years ago.

Interestingly, that's just about the time that *Wanderlust* kicked in. After 100,000 years of chipping away at identical stone hand-axes and hiding from lions, Hom Sap got a sudden urge to go exploring, and got from Africa to Tasmania in the blink of an eye.

So, um, maybe our genes are just about ready to cope with travel? Where will we go? 'The Stars My Destination' or 'The Outward Urge' or 'Down the Digestive Tract and into the Cosmos with Mantra, Tantra, and Specklebang' ...?

Bester, Wyndham or Sheckley, in other words.

Hmm. Could be a metafiction in this ...

Unfortunately, my mother spoke to a careers guy at my school, and came away convinced that I could do anything in the world - probably brilliantly - with the sole exception of architecture. Some statistical combination of test results said so. And she still believes this - despite the fact that chess, for example, shows a certain facility for visualization.

In fact there was one 'career' where I'd have been bottom of the class. My linguistic, mathematical, spatial and delinquency skills were exceptional, but I was completely useless at something called 'clerical speed and accuracy'.

This was a test which involved ticking items in a list which were the same as items in another list. Most people just went bam-bam-bam and ticked off 100 per minute. I thought it looked too simple to be real and started looking for hidden codes instead.

So I had no future as any kind of civil servant. Except maybe the ones who are *meant* to look for hidden codes.

I began to study Law instead. Bad move. But I found a backdoor into postmodernism, and I soon understood that it doesn't matter a whit what, if anything, one 'studies'. What counts is what you're *innarested* in ... everything except clerical speed and accuracy, in my case.

We recently considered furniture. How it was mobile (meubles, meubilair) in several European languages, and which De Maupassant story featured literally mobile movables ... a clear case, incidentally, of Maupassant employing Raymond Roussel's word association device, as seen in Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa and described in 'Comment J'ecrit certains de mes Livres'.

Anyhoo, here's another furniture angle: from Chambers Dictionary, that repository of all things Scottish, including Taghairm.

'Stouth' simply means 'theft'. But 'stoutherie' can mean theft, stolen goods, provision, or furniture. One can see a certain vaguely criminal logic here: if it isn't nailed down, maybe I can steal it ...

'Stouthrief' is a Scottish legal term, meaning "theft with violence (later only in a dwelling-house". I love those legalisms: highway robbery is one thing - what business have people going oot and aboot and not expecting to be robbed? - but doing it in a fellow's home, with violence, is too much. A hanging matter, I don't doubt.

Finally, for some reason, 'stouth and routh' means simply 'plenty and abundance'. The slight implication that Scottish persons only achieve abundance via robbery with violence is a matter for our legal dept.

Stouth - unlike 'strewth', 'sblood' and 'zounds' - does not seem to be a minced version of God's Tooth.

And none of this has anything to do with Stout -- which can be a dark beer like Guinness or 'a dysphemism for ventrally challenged'.

I am, however, compiling a game collection to be named <Collapse of Stout Party> in which overweight grandmasters get clobbered. This usage was coined by Tony Miles to describe the finish of a victory against Geller.

For the phrase itself, check out http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa...