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.
Kanu is the type of person that makes me proud to support my country, look up the after game footage from the FA Cup at Wembley and check the sweat shirt he had on, this is the message on it: ‘I love Nigeria’.
There’s a word we use to describe it; ‘amorosis‘, otherwise known as ‘Chess blindness’ or ‘parallax‘ in some scientific circles . Painful as the game below was for Mr Bacrot, at least us patzers have hope in Chess when we see that even the super GM’s are capable of the occassional blunder. I just had to put up the picture from the final position, it’s Black to move after Qe7+. (apologies Etienne).
From yesterdays news round-up column in theLondonPaper:
Cop Baton Death Claim
A police suspect died in mysterious circumstances hours after being hit by batons while being arrested, an inquest heard today. Oyinloye Awogboro, 23, of Surrey Quays, died in hospital on Sunday night just 12 hours after he was arrested for driving through two red lights in north London. Coroners added that officers “deployed” batons and CS gas when they caught him after a short chase on foot. After falling ill at Islington police station, Awogboro was taken to University College Hospital, where he died. The hearing was adjourned until 8 July.
You know, I have to ask two questions; 1. is there a Nigerian Ambassador in the UK? 2. how come we keep on hearing of Nigerians in London being killed through police action (albeit in small newspaper columns) while youths in this place kill people with knives, bats and such weapons then get let off with a talking to?
The girl had it all planned perfectly. Get married to the octogenarian millionaire and screw him out of his fortune (literally). Everything was on course, the marriage was about to be consumated on the wedding night in the penthouse suite of the exclusive hotel when the old man suddenly brought out a set of nose and ear plugs. And what are those for ?, she asked. There’re two things I can’t stand, he replied; screaming and the smell of burning rubber.
And this neat one: The 75yr old man was about to get married to a nubile teenager so he decided to visit his Doctor for a quick checkup. After the examination, the Doctor said to him; you know, at your age, getting married to a teenager can lead to a sudden death. Looking the Doctor straight in the eye he replied; if she dies, she dies.
And that’s the way my main man put it. 2Pac. Makaveli. Whatever name you decide to remember him by. The line comes from the ‘Don Kiluminati’ album, track 13 actually; against all odds.
Now isn’t that just absolutely the best way to leave this lovely world behind? I’m not talking about the violence (perceived or otherwise) that surrounded this poet’s troubled 25 yr existence; I’m talking about his lyrics, his music that still lives on today. Whatever anyone says about Tupac Shakur’s life, I think there is a majority consensus that he was ‘the realest’.
I guess this kind of addresses the previous post. For some people, the rewards of short term satisfaction are insufficient to compensate for the overall fulfilment derivable from being a true citizen of the world. ‘True Citizens’ here being interpreted to mean people who say things as they see them. Fela Kuti. Tupac Shakur. Bob Marley. The list is endless.
Ask yourself; are you a true citizen? When push comes to shove, will you speak up and call things the way you really see them? Food for thought.
. Painful as the game below was for Mr Bacrot, at least us patzers have hope in Chess when we see that even the super GM’s are capable of the occassional blunder. I just had to put up the picture from the final position, it’s Black to move after Qe7+. (apologies Etienne).
