If you're naive enough, you follow their instructions to some file deep in the OS/registry that just happens to look like a load of viruses. Then they ask you for money.

I hung up on both, and reported it to the service provider. As predicted, I'm turning into a cyber-fascist.

<Possibly I will choose a Russian lad for my next boyfriend.>

Heh... well, I dunno if I recommend that. The tame Russian in question is my mom's longtime SO, and it took her the better part of about 20 years to get him tamed... :s

<Quite> incidentally, the Hungarian expression 'Orosz lány' means 'Russian girl', while the word 'oroszlán' means lion... or lioness. Just sayin'? ;p

Although, given the time of year, maybe "krasivaya devushka" wouldn't go amiss.

Or, scuse my decyrillicizing, *blestyashchaya zhenshchina*.

<"The last time I saw Richard
Was Dunedin twenty twelve.
Working part time as a hobbit
And drinking with some elves.

He said that all romantics
Meet the same fate someday,
Still playing e4 and f4
And hoping this'll be the one.

'Look at your eyes', he said,
'they're full of smothered mates'.

But that was all, really,
Because of the pillow.

?!

Oh my goodness these are long term projects, it seems.

http://www.chessintranslation.com/2...

You'd do well to navigate to the home page and read all of the impeccable translations of stunning interviews with Russkies, done by our own User: Polar Bear.

I do in fact have the "Art of Chess" volume on Duchamp, with Jen Shahade- her role is to analyze a few games. I rank her contribution to be, arguably, the only section worth taking seriously.

Do you have this book already? I read it and I'm unimpressed by the two "theoretical art articles"-

Very unimpressed. They reminded me of why most serious people don't think there is any such thing as the social "sciences."

If you're going to talk about art, talk about art. Any attempt to erect a theory, especially about the confluence between chess art and other art, is doomed to failure- or at least unreadability- if your "theory" consists of nothing more than the uncritical pronouncement of sweeping, grandiose, and largely baseless, truth claims.

I'd have preferred a straight up "biography" on <Duchamp>. Can you recommend one?

In a much earlier book, The Bride and the Bachelors, Tomkins was the guy who wrote - about Duchamp's desire to prove the 'art mind' could play chess as well as the 'math mind' - that "The memory boys were tougher".

Love that name. I've wanted for ages to use it as a title: a play or film called 'Marcel and the Memory Boys'.

For raw footage, as it were, I also recommend Duchamp's selected letters, <Affectt Marcel>, eds Naumann and Obalk. But wait ... isn't Naumann one of the artcrit writers in the Shahade book? Hmmm. I always had the feeling they cut out much of the chess material. Not even one corr game. But at least you get unfiltered Marcel, in French with (sometimes bad) translations.

Until recently, the art crowd revered Duchamp but didn't know a thing about chess. I've seen scholars (of Beckett as well) who thought an Endgame was just the last few moves of a game, never mind whether it's a forced mate or a pawn duel.

It's improving, though. Communication is getting through. Allan Savage has played a big part in this.

Thanks <Dom> those are very helpful bread crumbs which I will follow.

However, it may take three years to make a <Duchamp> video because apparently I can only make them very very slowly now.

I suppose I could make them faster but I have this horror of uploading "facts" that turn out to be bollocks, so I keep hunting digging and reading. I have "finished" a video on <Rossolimo> but in fact I'm going to tinker with it for months, since the sound track is done so I can fool around with it after work and such.

I'm still on vacation so I'm trying to write a soundtrack for <Nezhmetdinov> but I whiled away the entire day tracking down some obscure bit of information about him that I won't even put in the video probably.

I do have "folders" now so I'm gradually collecting material on every chess player.

But there are so many interesting stories- for example did you know <Rudolf Spielmann> was interesting?

I didn't?!

Now I do though.

But I avoided crypto, PoMo, artcrit jargon, even reviewer jargon. My weakness was a tendency to namecheck Duchamp too often, mainly because everybody now seems to be influenced by him. There's even a market in fake readymades, which is funny. My editor used to claim that 50% of all Duchamp refs in the Rupertine media were by me.

I finished with a bang, though. A feature about the friendship formed around 1960 between the elderly icon and a young Irish doctor - Brian O'Doherty aka Patrick Ireland. Who later created an ECG 'portrait' of MD. The other MD, I mean. I should get in touch with him, see if he kept a record of their games.

Art folk, even chessplaying ones, can be quite cavalier and downright careless when it comes to chess records. Don't they see that here, in one technologically endangered scrap of paper, is a combined (a) exercise in conceptual art, (b) play-by-play record of a sporting contest, like the ur-version of a football video, and (c) a stripped down basic narrative...?

Guess not. We do, though. My own bi- or even tri-textuality in this area seems to make me one of the world's leading Duchamp experts. Not scholars, though: I perished rather than publish. Suppose I could make a living at it now, though.

That McCarthy person is getting above himself. A new game has appeared, where he beats up a hapless Arab chappie who played for Bahrain in a few olympiads: G McCarthy vs Hameed Khonji, 2007

He overlooked your rook discovery on a loose piece and you pounced- it's not a sac because not only do you get all your material back, you also get his- two pawns up or worse with INITIATIVE: WHITE.

He showed you some decent respect by resigning that position, as well.

It would have been a horrifying experience for him to play on missing two center pawns with your pieces already stuck in his face like that.

It's been tried. The general population can be seduced with imaginary money, but there are some holdouts.

A domestication program is currently underway on one of these, but the early results make no sense.

[Event "Blitz:10'"]
[Site "FICS"]
[Date "2011.02.16"]
[Round "?"]
[White "NN"]
[Black "hms123"]
[Result "0-1"]
[ECO "C02"]
[Annotator "?"]
[PlyCount "?"]
[TimeControl "?"]

Wot Dom sed. Then again, "early results" is a key term, but I dunno if I have Mom's patience. :p

Re.: <Nuklu>, our great seasonal deity -

I don't know if the 3...b6 opening is really that brilliant, just yet. I think it may be a little too passive, and a little too committal. And your opponent played some very weak moves, to be sure. All this <can> mean that you may be successful in this line against opposition that relies on experience/book and will be thrown off by a novelty; but I think White can get a pretty good position out of this opening, with a bit more solid play.

Good to be alerted to this variation, though - it may become more popular. At the moment, I'm thinking to counter it with 4.Bb5+.

Is this true?

I'm prepared to believe <Yoda> is a real person if you say so.

Karlsbad, 1929, won by Nimzo. The tournament book he wrote - first published in Russian, but there's a recent English edition - is wonderful. Nimzo offers pen portraits of Spielmann, Capa, Euwe, Vidmar and the rest, praising those (such as Tartakower) who embody the spirit of hypermodernismo, and those (such as Spielmann) who have made valiant efforts to change their style, and even Vidmar (who combines the ingenuity of a great engineer with the good-humoured cunning of the Slavic peasant). From Nimzo, that's praise.

He reserves nowt but scorn for Becker, who came 6th despite his 'antiquated' openings - the Giuoco Piano, 'which everyone else has forgotten' - and a blunderbustic style to match. He will not, says Nimzo, reach such heights again.

He attributes his own success to a regime of fitness exercises, which he found in a Danish book conveniently titled 'My System'.

One trick to watch for is an innocent-looking White c3, intending Qa4+ ... eg, 3.e5 b6 4.c3 Qd7 (obviously not ...Ba6). But this theme tends to recur in all these lines. So does Bb5+, usually forcing ...c6 -- it's What Tony Miles played against me. One of those dangerous, but harmless if treated with respect, lines.

A related line is 3.Nd2 b6 4.e5 Ba6 5.Bxa6 Nxa6 6.c3, and what is Black to do with the misplaced horse? I think I've played 6...Nb8 (and won - moves like that are an invitation to overreach) but 6...Qd7 is sensible.

Anyhoo, I'm having doubts about this whole LSB-exchange thing. Is it worth the effort? Is it motivated by fear of White's 'attacking Bishop' or by the assumption that Black's Bc8 is 'bad'? Both reasons are a little exaggerated, maybe.

I've been looking at the Fort Knox line in the Rubinstein (as a potential anti-Kurtz device). True, it *can* be an LSB-exchange line, but not always. Somebody mentioned it here recently, and I've only tried it maybe twice before, without very deep preparation. So I took a closer look.

The main line is 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3/d2 dxe4 4.Nxe4 Bd7 5.Nf3 Bc6 6.Bd3 Nd7 7.0-0 Ngf6, and now we reach an innaresting crossroads. Short has played 8.Ng3, the main move, but other options exist. The sharpest is 8.Neg5, when two of the 'obvious' Black replies allow dangerous sacrificial attacks:

8...Be7 9.Nxf7 Kxf7 10.Ng5+ Kg8 11.Nxe6

and

8...h6 9.Nxe6 fxe6 10.Bg6+ Ke7 11.c4

are *not* the sort of thing I'd care to be on the Black side of, thank you.

The databases I've looked at are pretty hopeless in this line. CG has almost no games, and the existing ones have misleading results. '365' is worse, with some miserable games and distorted stats. Chessbase seems better. I haven't done a complete check-round yet.

Incidentally, I find it very telling, when looking at an opening line, to see who has played it. The Fort Knox, as Black, has been played by Karpov and Kramnik, neither usually a French player. Korchnoi, famous for playing the French? I've only found a few games where he played the White side. Innaresting, that.

What emerged, I think, was a feeling that ...b6 wasn't quite satisfactory. The English Defence (1.d4 e6 2.c4 b6) turned out to be good -- Korchnoi won a Candidates match with it -- but neither Owen's proper nor the ...b6 French seemed good enough. The ...b6 Sicilian, previously tried by Nimzowitsch and also resurrected in the 1970s, turned out even worse.

One problem was that ...b6 develops a Bishop, but commits Black to a passive pawn structure on the queenside. Often, you'll really want the pawns on a6 and b5, as in respectable lines of the Sicilian etc.

So why not start by doing just that? Get your queenside pawns right the first time ... with 1...a6.

This, roughly, was the train of thought that led Miles to play 1.e4 a6 2.d4 b5 against Karpov, Skara 1980, game of the century (in terms of affronted dignity, anyhoo).