I wonder what the version we play is? As they used to say in a more sexist age, "Men sweat, women perspire, ladies glow".

But there are inevitable problems: the lure of Hollywood genres and story arcs can derail the best intentions. Frank co-directed a 1980s 'Dublin Noir' thriller, The Courier, starring Gabriel Byrne -- which had similar problems.

As an aside -- I wrote about The Courier in a magazine, using some phrase like "it has a brutal realism in spots, but..."

When they later released it on video, some PR genius decided to quote me on the poster, but to shorten the quote to one word: "Brutal".

I don't think they ever understood what they were saying. In Dublin slang - and in other places too - saying a movie is 'brutal' means simply unwatchable crap.

The 'real' Healy, btw, spent much of his life in Scotland and England, and is in his 60s now. I've never met him. He published a chess book -- <Coffee House Chess>, about tactics for non-master type players -- just a coupla years ago.

I agree with you that the 'idiot' stereotype is absurd. I've personally done some *very* intellectual things quite successfully while allegedly in a moron state.

There's a theory in anthropology that hunter-gatherers were more intelligent than farmers, who in turn are smarter than most city folk. Has to do with using your wits to survive. On that score, I think the case for the street junkie as hunter-gatherer could be made.

It wasn't so much the dialogue as the characters 'transformation' that grated, my knowledge of film making is almost nil, but I can imagine even the best scripts can flounder once its in the hands of directors & financiers, & vice a versa.

So you wer a film critic? & I thought 'I'd' done some dodgy stuff, still, the first step to recovery is admitting it.

I tried begging for a few days when I was at my lowest but it wasn't for me, the Big Issue occasionally, that was better, but busking was my real means of survival. I never stole, not from people anyway, I was old enough to have developed a bloody conscience & knew from past experience that hurting people never leaves, it sits somewhere in your psyche waiting for quiet moments so it can pounce.

I'd go along with the smart hunter gatherer theory, 100,000yrs+ in small sustainable groups then BOOM, before you can say 'get offa my land' agrarian society=bigger populations=war=nukes & we're standing on a precipice.

I think of this as the Ghenghis Khan theory of addiction: the Higher Power of the Twelve Steppes ...

Not an ideology I share. But as Mr Harper said, "Come out fighting, Ghengis Smith".

For Capital, it is not sufficient to be an addict and expect to go on consuming the same thing -- watching matches, playing games, taking your chemical of choice, whatever.

Capital also demands regular pointless investments in new equipment, whose only purpose is to show that you are keeping up with your personal Jones.

He said, looking at a *new* wooden chessboard, a *new* book on the English opening, and a very old ticket to the 1986 World Chess Championship match between Kasparov and Karpov, at the Park Lane hotel in London. The old stuff is the injection of nostalgia that sells us to the new stuff.

Indeed a tall tale.

Reminds me of 2 things:

<Colossians 3:5 Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. >

Greed is idolatry. That might make a decent first line of a novel.

If the Bible isn't your thing, a little Motown might be:

I hope he's still in the land of the living -- he was on the rating list until 2004 or so.

Anyhow: BMP, olympiad ... no. Though I think he played in a Swiss-style Zonal. I haven't actually seen him since 2007, I think ... he wasn't at any of the (relatively few, outside Cork) tournaments I've played in since then.

Now I have to overcome my writing phobia (ironic, huh?) for long enough to produce a couple of newspaper articles and some overdue emails.

Writer's block? Sheer laziness? Neither, exactly. An old cartoon that I liked showed a manual worker leaning on a big sweeping brush and saying "We call it Roadsweeper's Block -- sometimes you just can't take another step".

Cheers.

Smoke was actually useful in covering all this up, back in the day (same is true in pubs, which smell worse since the smoking ban) -- when the problem was actually worse, as more players were at that hormonal age. Now the average player is a little older, and many have been in relationships with other human beings, and know how to change a sock.

Of course the sock really has to want to change.

I was sucker-punched by a TV advert that caught my eye yesterday. Normally I tune them out, and rarely watch TV anyway ... but this showed a couple flirting quietly in the stacks of a library by flashing book titles at one another: Great Expectations, An Ideal Husband, What Women Want, usw.

"How strange", I thought. A bookish advert, employing nerd chic to promote reading?

Turns out the product was a *perfume*. Presumably not the scent of old books or their readers, but it had the gall to use some name like 'Bibliotek'. Argh.

On the other hand -- there's a book named 'Perfume', so why not launch a perfume named 'Book' ... ?

As we discussed, nine games vs rated opponents in rated events is the basic requirement. A chess admin type whom I mentioned this to told me that the relevant rating (for the opponent) was the one in force at the time the event gets rated, not necessarily when the game was played. So a league win last November against a 2100 player might only now be a win against a 2000 player, if he'd dropped 100 points in other events in the interim.

As said before, I played six games vs rated players in league matches (just completed, not yet rated) plus *two* more in that Easter swiss. Total eight, result insufficient.

But *now*, checking back, I find that a ninth opponent (one I lost to at Easter) has a FIDE rating. But I don't know if this 9th game will be included or not -- if, for example, he got the rating by completing the 9-game requirement in the Easter event, then presumably he wasn't rated when I played him, and won't count towards the total.

Doing the calculations, it's surprising just how sensitive the numbers are. After six games, I was provisionally 2009. After eight, this fell to 1895. Counting that 9th game lowers it to 1853 ...

Maybe I *should* wait another year, and try to play some high-rated opponents. I scored 2.5/3 against the top three, ratingwise, and 1/5 against the lower ones.

however, this is also the crux why fide can *not* use such an approach: to allow organizers and players of closed (round robin) events to know in advance if im or gm norms will be possible, and which scores they will require, one is dependent on knowing what the pre-tournament ratings of the players are. hence fide uses the official rating of each player at the start of the *event* (not game) for the purpose of rating calculations and norm requirements.

I was put off it by a billboard I saw in Sweden in 1975 for "det nya tuggummit" ... "Get your Kicks with Maribou Sticks". But I don't get those kind of kicks, apparently.

This also helps to explain why 'event date' - in PGNs and elsewhere - is a relevant datum, and normally the same as the date of the first round.