Like, uh, "Woody Allen Manhattan audience laugh", or something like that, which somehow pinpointed the quote I was looking for. I could have thrown in "gamma rays" and "brains" to narrow the search, but they were the bits I needed to find.

<Everest:

<<<dark>>>.

forbidding.

Good to see you. Holy Cow we are all very busy with our "real" lives this fall-- and good for us, I say.

Thanksgiving (cheo-sok) is Korea's biggest holiday- five days off for the whole country. It was in September.

"Canadian" Thanksgiving is a fact- but we have it in the "wrong month"- October.

I told my students all about OUR Thanksgiving and how WE killed all the Indians after they gave us some turkeys.

They seemed to find it quite funny, for some reason.

Yes- BLED for the first third, then Zagreb and another city. 1959 Candidates Tournament- one of the strongest ever, IMO.

I'm up to round 8 now. I'm going through every game very slowly, and using my new "Shreddies 3" to help me understand some of the moves.

But many of the moves by these players are not recognized as strong by my SHREDDIES.

I bet Tal could whup it.

I've also been going through my own games with my SHREDDIES.

In fact I was so pleased with a game I played last weekend -- I was getting slaughtered, lost my queen, and yet still won somehow- that I was going to post it.

Then I ran my SHREDDIES over it and SHREDDIES told me that me and my opponent played like THE WORST PLAYERS ON THE PLANET.

So I decided not to post it.

Sigh.

Stupid computers.

But I'm forcing myself to go over my losses with my SHREDDIES. It's torture. But I want to get better.

Sigh.

Well I love chess. Even the HARD WORK part.

If it were easy, everyone would do it.

Yeah, Bled was some tourny--frightfully strong. Fischer's win against Tal (I believe it was his first) is quite a game, with its queen sac for an overwhelming position. I am inclined to agree with <Eyal> regarding Tal being too strong for everyone. Botvinnik wrote just after this tourny something to the effect that for the next 20-30 years, the chess world would be thrilled to follow the games between these two young geniuses. What a tragedy that prediction didn't come true.

And what a tragedy Tal's career was. Such a gift, such promise, but his health issues were just too pressing.

BTW, there's also another famous Tal-Smyslov encounter, in addition to the one <Eyal> mentions--it's from the 1959 Candidates Tourny, a Caro Kann. You may remember that from Tal's book (it's on page 148). Quite a remarkable game. (I remember Tal saying somewhere of a huge attacking/saccing game he'd won something like: "Without talent [or art] this would have been difficult; without luck, inpossible." That might not quite be right. Help, <Eyal>!)

Btw, Fischer's first win over Tal indeed took place in Bled, but only two years after the candidates tournament (Fischer vs Tal, 1961); in 1959 Tal won all his four games with Fischer. Here's how Gligoric begins his book on the Fischer-Spassky 1972 match:

<A scene shot by a Yugoslav film director at Bled in 1959 will remain an impressive memento of the world's chess in the latter half of the twentieth century. Tal raised his big, black eyes, looked at Fischer, and directed an overly scornful smile at the sixteen-year-old-boy. The manner in which he stared at his rival (rules of good manners ask for concentration upon the board) could only be accounted for by Tal's taking particular pleasure in psychologically challenging and outwitting his even younger rival who, absorbed in the problems of the play, was obviously unaware of what was going on around him.

Had he been forcing himself to not smoke and drink to keep himself healthy, he wouldn't be Tal anymore :)

Who noo, Broon coo?

Everest ... Defense de Montagnard ... Berg ist Verboten ... iceberg lettuce is a verb, let us assume (and none of that FBI crap about 'making an ass out of U and ME').

Gives me pins & needles, it does. Ou en Frog: j'ai des ♗rmis dans les jambes/ j'ai des 4mis dans les calembours/ Caesar adsum jam forte.

Latin is mostly just <Olde Frogge>. You got a frog in the throat, lady, you need to see a croaker with a writing arm.

And, and ... <basta! uncle! "Ei Ssorrenda">, they cry, but I Carry On At Your Convenience ... the Boyle (in the bag?) fictioneer wrote about Mungo Park *and* Dr Kellogg's Original Cornflake, which trumps Little Miss Muffet (the muppet) and her <whey-faced Kurds> (ahhh, the moppets) ...

Tal? Lat op!

Corraghessan? Mulligatawny? Sorrentino ... "See Di and Naple ..."

In this week's favorite* Dylan song, <Eejit Wind>, toggling between three versions (can you do a triple toggle, or is that a topological impossibility, like a Klein Bottle of Guinness Extra Stout?), I discover a classic Mondegreen. What I heard as "near the sacristy as the springtime turned" was really "near the cypress tree".

Boo jinx and boojum snarks. I prefer 'sacristy', of course, as it's a slightly obscure item of church architecture ("the priest wore black") suggesting that Saint Bob's Godly phase began earlier than anyone suspected ... but I was wrong. R-O-N-G.

Or 'wirrongo' if Bill still needs a rhyme for Mongo.

Bongo-Shaftesbury
Fashoda
The Upper Nile

"Denial is river in Africa".

*PS: the German chess term for 'favorite move' is 'Lieblingszug', which I think is bleddy exquisite. "Fischer played his beloved Lieblingszug, 1.e4, 'best by test' ... "

<Dom> Absolutely brilliant! I really have no idea how you come up with this stuff! And thanks for <wirrongo>--it'll come in mighty damn handy. Always glad to learn a new "mongo"-rhyming words. (And BTW, my fascination with "mongo" may well stem from the old Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials I saw as a kid in Chicago.)

I believe Biggles went 30 over and 500 under in that epic match.

<No...>>

Oh, neither did I.

<there better be a punch line soon buster!>

Is that the very, very long one? A veritable <shaggy chessplayer> yarn, featuring Jon Speelman circa 1980 -- 'shag' doesn't begin to capture the hirsuteness of <Specimen, le Grand Maitre Poilu>.

The French have two distinct words for '1960s hippie' and 'present day neo-hippie' -- <hippie> and <baba cool>.

Speely got the nickname 'Specimen' because of a wicked misprint in a newspaper - which ran a report of a tournament going something like <"1 Miles, 2-4 Nunn, Specimen (pictured), Short ... ">. Who could resist *that*?

Until the day he turned up on TV looking handsome, with a sharp new 1990s haircut and a devil-may-care drop-dead-dictionary panache that saw him use words like 'theriomorphic' -- a god manifesting in the form of a wild beast.

The dog meanwhile is none other than Fang, the Talking English Dog in person as himself. Raising the not-so-trivial question as to whether a canine, being denied the state of personhood by both civil and ecclesiastical law, can still be said to appear 'in person'. If he (or she in the case of a bitch) is -- like, say, Lassie -- sufficiently well-known to support stunt doubles, stand-ins, body doubles, full frontal doubles and of course 'dogging' doubles -- then a personal appearance must count for something.

Since Fang is a talking dog he should be able to shed some light on this. But bright lights frighten him -- it goes back to a murky incident with a certain Pavlov during his Russian tour -- so he kinda clams up on the subject.

When a talking dog clams up on you, you're in excreta creek sans oar. Also, it throws that nice Carl Von Linne's <Linnean System> into chaos, with dogs, clams and orator parrots all perched on the wrong branches.

Meanwhile in 1920s Moscow, Capablanca is playing in a chess tournament and being filmed for posterity, while Pavlov does unspeakable Pavlovian things to the defenceless but speakable Fang.

Well, you'd speak out, wouldn't you? Never mind the Bolsheviks, you'd complain. And anyway it's still the 1920s, they don't have their Gulag fully kitted out yet.

So, enter the Animal Liberation Front, and its fearless leader Alf Mann aka Alf Biskitt.

The bomb ruptures the spacetime continuum. Fang escapes into 18th century London and a nice chat with Dr Johnson, who is no more astounded to meet a talking dog than he would be to encounter a woman standing on her hind legs, for example.

Yeltsin shells the Duma, Kurtz wins his match against Gelfand, Specimen is trapped in a Groundhog Day loop and collects his 187th Grandmaster norm without qualifying for the title.

"Sod this for an enantiomorphic lark", he sighs, "FIDE's left hand doesn't know what its right hand is scratching. I'm quitting chess. In fact, I always wanted to be a fireman ... wonder if the Observer needs a Conflagrations Columnist?"

As the time-space disturbance dies down, an n-dimensional hypercraft arrives to shuttle everyone back where they belong. It is vast and Tardis-like on the inside, but on the outside it looks like ... a broken fire truck.

FIDE rectified Speely's GM title, and his 185 spare norms were redistributed among needy Ukrainians. And Fang lived a long and litter-producing life in the 18th century, where the smells were more interesting.

That's a complete "minature" short story there, <Dom>.

thanks for Publishing it in my forum!!

(I now own all proprietary rights)..

Look for <Jessica Fischer's> "BLOOD ON THE BOARD- Jack London's Dog Learns How To Play Chess and then Runs for President of Russia"

In your local bookshop.

Only 50 quid, lads!