(Weather check – 84 F)

Here he is with his brothers on <The Carol Burnett Show> (a old variety show)

<Jess> Thanks for your kind words, and let me express the utter joy I'm experiencing now, following- and while- watching that Carol Burnett Show clip... I laughed, smiled, all the way through this, and Carol is hilarious all way through, but the way she tried (and failed!) to start clapping on the after-beat had me rolling on the floor!

And let's face it, those little 'This Old Man' choruses by Jermaine and Michael there are already miiiiles ahead of the likes of "Timberboy" et al... That one minute, or even less, is worth countless times more than all of the albums of those other hilbillies put together...

HANDS DOWN!!

Now I'm getting excited even...

(unbuttons shirt collar..)

But really, what Michael does there is way beyond his years, and unreachable for many in their lifetime.

Thank you *very* much; I most

t-h-o-r-o-u-g-h-l-y

enjoyed that...

600, aka DC, is the number of electric currents and superheroes.

You are both, my lady of the voltages, and the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of your face.

I'm assuming, here, you mean something like 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 with 3.d4, where black does *not* play ...cxd4 when given the chance. There are some juicy transpositional sequences, including even a kind of English, and the so-called Barcza-Larsen system which can arise from 1.d4 c5, or from a French, or a Sicilian, or even a type of Benoni. I keep trying to make it work. I keep trying to make a lot of things work. Success, it seems, is not an option.

If I'm wrong about this, just ignore me. Not forever, if you don't mind. But I may well deserve 24 hours in the void for the crimes I am committing here and the crimes I am about to commit, not including pointless prolixity and verbiage.

Don't you think that every civilized tongue -- along with every half-decent language or even a dialect with ambition -- *must* have a verb tense of the <to be about to ...> form.

Auxiliary? I was coming to that.

Seriously: please post this game. Here, or in Doc Euwe's Joint, or *Chez Ma Alekhina* (the babushka of rapid attacks) ... or even the freshly repainted <Phrogspawn>. (I've had it done up for you, in case you ever need a place to not-crash ...)

As you know, I'm not a 1.e4 kinda guy. But when I'm not digging the French I sometimes experiment with these quasi-Sicilians, pseudo-dragons, Pelagian piece-play, and the antipositional excesses of <Nimzo the Pseudo-Areopagite> ... as *Black*.

So naturally I'd like to know what I should fear from the beasht that lurks within.

Pull-ease? For the <phases of the Queen>, and <for every passed-out pawn in this whole dam universe>. And even for the chimes of freiheit flashing...

And worse.

Curses, foiled again. By *Jansenists*, even. In the 1970s I brought out a publication which made the same claim -- complete with adverts for angel wings (gold, silver, natural, or invisible) and clouds (the cumulus escort 1973 was a popular model on the used cloud lot).

There was also a Turin Shroud Kit free with every issue. All the reader required was a credulous friend and some heavy hob-nailed boots. The friend had to lie down and cover himself with nothing but some pages from the zine, while one donned the boots and jumped ... I'll omit the gory details.

And, as I recall, the zine was partnered with Radio Heaven -- "broadcasting 24 hours a day on faith alone".

You'll note that 30 years have passed and I still haven't been struck by lightninZZZZZZZZZZZP.

I quote:

The guy got waxed; Jess cut through him; he had NO counterplay and NO hope;

and you guys are asking for a bloody PGN?

It's like complaining about ND Short that he could have given more "concrete lines" in his LIVE commentary on Gamba-Toplove, for crying out loud... It was PERFECT imho...

Show some restraint; a S-T-O-R-Y of an entire game was told, and the skinned one let his clock run out for about an hour!

That's more info than you get from any bloody PGN. Her maj has moved on to the prep for her next game by now, if you read the post.

Well, that's my opinion and I thought for a brief moment that I "longed" for the score, but I don't. One or two FENs might have been pleasing for the eye, but that even ... etc ...

<You'll note that 30 years have passed and I still haven't been struck by lightninZZZZZZZZZZZP.

(?!)

>

heh

HAHA!!

Damn, that story is just too good to be true...

- Postillion? One of the great titles ...

If you were a *rich geezer* in the 18th or 19th century, you probably owned several magnificent carriages (including your wife, who may have been magnificent and of a queenly bearing, but was still a chattel).

And we know where the word 'chattel' comes from. Think of the plural of 'cow', and I don't mean cows, or kine, nor herd of livestock ... just the word that rhymes with chattel.

In fact both chattel and cattle come from a Latin word for *capital*, which in turn derives from 'caput', meaning 'head'. Old Karl was right on target with <Das Kapital>. But I digress.

You're this rich geezer circa 1820, Bonaparte is dead - the poison worked - and Waterloo is being forgotten apart from a lot of limbless beggarmen on the streets of Europe, and bygones are bygones. So you pay a pittance to some plebeian postillion to ride on the outside of your plush carriage, while you relax inside. If he got rained on, better still.

This, of course, served to underscore the vast social space between rich you and poor him.

Later, they tried the same thing with private railway carriages. But, while the American hobo learned to ride the rails and sometimes even survive, the *iron road postillion* was less fortunate, hampered by a silly flunkey's uniform and the need to keep one hand free for forelock tugging.

So the poor lads were torn from their perches by the wind and whirled away into the ionosphere at terrifying speeds of up to *twenty miles per hour*.

No wonder it all ended in revolution.

BTW, selected phrases from language guides have a history: Brian Eno and John Cale constructed a song, Cordoba, whose lyrics came from a Spanish-English phrasebook and which seemed to describe two terrorist bombers planning an attack.

And perhaps the single most resonant and mysterious line in the English (?) language was found in a similar place: <To craunch a marmoset>.

"OK, we'll do it. We'll transfer messages from Mrs. Alekhine's forum to yours, provided that we can have the following:

(list of requirements)
"

I will create a new account for this discussion. You will need to confirm your approval by getting into contact with Daniel Freeman at chess@chessgames.com. Their requirements include complete agreement from you, and date range of the posts to move. We will specify a date range, and they will move everything that was within those dates, into the new account. Whatever they move will disappear from your forum.

I have yet to purchase the new account.

But Phil Collins was most unstarlike in this regard. Just him, quietly sitting down and trying his best to answer questions about his, um, thespian ambitions ... he'd acted in a movie, Buster, about the life and times of one of the Great Train Robbers from the 1960s.

In contrast, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Val Kilmer -- who had each merely played the role of a rockstar on screen (Velvet Goldmine and The Doors) were full of rockstar arrogance, despite the fact that they were only pretending. Worst of all in this regard was Christopher Lambert, possibly the worst actor of the past 30 years, as even fans of Subway and The Highlander will have to admit.

I talked to him about playing the part of a chess grandmaster in a dodgy 'thriller' -- 'Dangerous Moves' or some such title -- and he was full of it.

He also went to great lengths to explain that he had no interest whatsoever in chess -- well, he *is* French, after all -- and had used his command of *La Methode* to portray a conflicted hero, who might have been a cycling master or a Proustian writer as easily as a chess player. It's all to do with the exquisitely honed skill of employing thirty-one distinct muscles to raise an eyebrow with a look of incredulous Gallic genius, far beyond the ken of us mere mortals.

Or is that Highlander? I forget.

Could be, could be. I measured him in the metric style and he came out at 1,0668 meters. But he hadn't gone *completely* bald yet in those days.

IT'S A FACT>