I like to take on the moniker ‘nostradamus‘, albeit mostly in my spare time . But on a more serious note, I will assume that at some time or the other in our lives we have all felt that sense of ‘premonition’, ‘foreboding’, or just simply, a ‘feeling‘ that something is going to happen. Of course, the easy way out will be to suggest a selective reasoning process whereby the ‘right predictions‘ are listed as proof of some kind of foresight whilst false outcomes are ignored, swept under the carpet and forgotten.
Recently, I feel I have been getting more than my fair share of these ‘premonitions’. Regarding the ongoing European Football Championships, I have actually called several results down to a tee, the Swedish win over Greece; Zlatan Ibrahimovich as first scorer and the scoreline, Kuyt to score first against France, Torres to score first against Sweden, Nistelrooy to score first against Italy, Pavyluchenko first against Sweden, the list goes on and on. Ok, all this can be classed as informed guesswork, a lucky streak etc. The trip I’m actually on here is the effect our actions (or inaction) have on the future. Logically this doesn’t make too much sense I agree; obviously the things we do now affect the future, or do they? As individuals, separated by time and space from various events around us, do our decisions (even, our thoughts…) affect future outcomes in those events?
As usual I quote lyrics to illustrate my ramblings , this is from Nas’s ‘Nostradamus album: “the future is nothing but a series of probabilities/made up of decisions that we make right now/these decisions lead to certain events into the future/but every human being has this capability/to determine their own future/some are just more in tune than others…/”
Again; basic logic it can be argued, nothing exciting here. The kicker here is this; if ‘no man is an island unto himself‘ and we are ‘all a part of the whole’, then do our individual decisions not change the future all?
This has always, and will always be a touchy issue. When is it ethical or moral to keep a ’spare’? In the words of Ray Parker Jnr from back in the day; “you should have kept a spare/a backup love affair…”.
Using a simple analogy, let me represent a standard relationship with a car, a motor-vehicle. I look at two main components here; the vehicle and the tyres on which it runs. Taking one side of the partnership as the vehicle and the other as the tyre(s) let us examine typical journeys as against a very important journey, possibly the trip of your life.
For day to day journeys, it would be logical to assume that any careful driver would make sure that apart from having all his mounted tyres in mint condition, there would also be a reliable spare in the boot (trunk?). Well… in the high speed world of Formula 1 the pace is too fast for spares to stay on board, rather tyres are used and discarded with impunity - a high rolling life … I digress as usual. Anyway coming back to the regular journey idea one would assume that the presence of the spare serves as a reassurance for the driver but is not something that would be in the foreground during any such journey. More like some fact that sticks somewhere in the periphery of your consciousness.
Now we come to the very important trip. Obviously for a critical journey the assumption is that all systems would be checked and rechecked, all spares and whatnot would be kept in pristine condition, after all; one can hardly afford surprises due to shoddy preparation on such critical journeys.
In plain english, this seems to suggest that for casual trips, a spare is useful but not essential whilst for critical trips the spare is an irreplacable part of the itenary. Hmmm…. Paradox?
Make what you will of this analogy. On the flipside I wonder, what kind of ‘tyre’ do you think you are? Personally I’ve always felt I’d be great in the trunk, best used sparingly and only in emergencies . Talk about ‘eating your cake and having it’. Heh heh.
You know, I just can’t hold back a large (but wry…) smile whenever I hear news like this. Call me vengeful, spiteful, childish or just plain vindictive but when I see all these massive examples (sorry, allegations ) of fraud (financial mismanagement) and corruption (poor accounting?) in the western world I sit back and think; are African nations really that bad compared to these ‘masters of the game’?
Of course, there are the other stories about continued scandals regarding to UK MP’s/MEP’s expenses misuse and the MoD contract for Chinook Helicopters which came with inappropriate software and have been in storage (at cost) for several years now - an aside, the person who signed the contract is allegedly very difficult to locate.
The second and fourth round produced a couple of interesting games. Yeah, inaccurate play in patches on both sides but overall, two very interesting games of Chess. Check out the fourth round.
Below, there are a few pix from the lovely little town of Oxford and the magnificient Exeter College.
Very nice Chess Congress over this past weekend. Exeter College in the quaint town of Oxford was the venue. Funny enough, the room in which the open section was played had the amusing label (for Chess purposes, a misnomer ); Quarell Room.
Okay, done with the mundane stuff. I somehow (unsurprisingly) ended up in what appears to be my regular Congress position; a shared second/first place. Ah well…
Congress report coming up: pics, games, a blitz tourney, chicken tikka and a surfeit of C2H5OH.
Well, the number one feature of Chess for me is it’s duality as an individual game and a team sport. The team sport takes away the persistent shadows of ‘isolation‘ and ’weirdness‘ or ‘different nature’ that hang over Chess players. One only has to look at the World Chess Olympiad (hey!!, the olympiad is coming up in Dresden in just a few months time! yippee!) to see the gregarious outgoing nature of Chess players. On the other hand, the individual game gives the opportunity to engage in the most basic and primeval of contest formats; mano y mano, one on one. After all, how else can you truly measure yourself against another human being, if not in a game of Chess - against artificial intelligence also, I might add.
Chess, and indeed, the Chess player need not be viewed with trepidation, apprehension and all such similar emotions. Instead regard the concept of Chess as simply a test of logic. Logic in all its rationally bounded forms.
This is for anybody who’s interested in sharing my view of general services providers in the UK, ‘though I’m specifically referring to H3G based on my personal experiences with them.
When I see advertisements in London, I laugh. Cynical laughter. Promising service, reliability, ‘a better product’ than the next competitor, based on a survey which has returned a 99% approval figure! A study of the fine print (literally named because it’s normally very tiny and situated in a corner) reveals that the so-called survey is an opinion poll from some anonymous happy current customers. Hah! I maintain, a lot of these activities would surely fall under the criminal code ‘419′ back in my country.
My submission; the H3G mobile broadband service is cr*p, sh*t and absolutely fraudulent. My first month with them produced a broadband package of 3gb of data to be used over 33 days (incredible, but true!), their billing system somehow can calculate a month as 33 days, they also somehow managed to sneak in an extra data usage of 170mb, calculated at a convenient cost of 10p per mb.
This is London; the ‘rip-off capital of the world, or the city that hosts the biggest ‘rip-off’ companies in the world. I call it the way I see it. Nuff said.
In pure scientific terms (or otherwise actually) the term ‘forever‘ is definitely a gross misnomer. Infinity is a much more preferrable (and aesthetically correct, if I might add!) choice. See, infinity provides a much needed open ended space which can be utilised to such wonderfully creative purposes as; making quantum leaps to arrive at conclusions, terminating unwanted debates (most common use) and introducing a veritable plethora of related (quite a few unrelated concepts also) ideas to link up with your original views.
Let’s look at this in practice; why say something lasts forever? Diamond, in pure technical terms lasts a pretty long time - some ridiculously large number of years - but the fact remains that all things decompose/disintegrate in the end. It’s the relatively long amount of time (compared to the paltry life-span of basic organic items, of which man is the most prominent) that gives rise to the idea of ‘permanence‘ or everlasting nature of certain minerals, diamonds included.
Anyway, before I digress too much, this post is kinda related to one of my earlier rambles where I was talking about “laughing too/and no one would suspect/…“. The part of that talk that has me going off now is the idea of politicians in particular becoming so caught up in spin that self-delusion becomes a ‘clear and present danger’, the norm rather than the exception.
NOTHING lasts forever.
But…, of course, people forget this daily. I’ve been listening to some music and I’d like to share a few lines with y’all. First off, Lauryn Hill: “you can get the money/you can get the power/’keep your mind on/the final hour…“, the other view is from reggae music, Chezidek: ”on your way up/make sure you find a way how/on your way down/there will be no helping hands around…/climb up to the skies/but you can’t stay up the air/don’t care how you bad boy/ cannot walk inna thin air/must come backa earth/’say you haffi touch ground again/…“
For all those leaders out there who feel they will last forever; the world existed before us, it will be here after us, no matter the attempts of guys like Mr Bu**sh*t out there to take the whole place into a hole with him. Nuff said.
. But on a more serious note, I will assume that at some time or the other in our lives we have all felt that sense of ‘premonition’, ‘foreboding’, or just simply, a ‘feeling‘ that something is going to happen. Of course, the easy way out will be to suggest a selective reasoning process whereby the ‘right predictions‘ are listed as proof of some kind of foresight whilst false outcomes are ignored, swept under the carpet and forgotten.
