Blog is an anagram of glob (but then again so is oblg)
Highly personal choices, but I love these names:
Bloggerdygook
Brand Autopsy
LiquidEggProduct (’cause you know that’s on an actual food carton somewhere)
Lookit
Magnosticism (maybe you have to be in publishing to appreciate this one fully)
Pasquinade (just a lovely word)
Every day on the way to work I drive by an apple orchard. A couple of years ago they planted a row of new trees at one end – tiny branchless whippets at the time. No fruit on them that summer. Or the second summer. Or the third summer. But this year – apples!
Since I periodically carp about the weather or the traffic or the New England Speech Impediment, I should also take time to note some things big and small that are great about living here.
- Not only apples but also Asian pears. Right off the tree, crisp and juicy, yowza, best fruit on the planet. Or, ala’ Ming Tsai: Slice Asian pear into julienne strips, squeeze on fresh lime juice, crack some black pepper over the top. Or, ala’ my wife, use hand-picked Asian pear and apples to make applesauce.
- Low stone walls, old houses and barns, old mills.
- Good chess scene. Lots of Russians and Ukranians and semiretired Fischer-boom masters. 30 minutes or so to my fantastic Tuesday night chess club.
- Good restaurant scene. In fact I’m roughly equidistant from Boston and Providence, which has been described as the best per-capita restaurant town in the US.
- The Black Cow. Creative homemade ice cream. The Tiramisu ice cream (which he hardly ever makes) is by a wide margin and without exaggeration or hyperbole the best ice cream in the history of the cosmos. When you can’t get that, the Ginger Snap is also fantastic. Frequently he makes flavors with Baileys or Kalua.
- Good sports scene. Golden age for the Patriots. Sox had their breakthrough. Boston College joining the ACC brought some semblance of college coverage up here.
- Foliage. Autumn is spectacular.
- Lots of smart, interesting and thoughtful friends, neighbors, co-workers. That might be true everywhere but I’m grateful for the ones I’ve got.
What’s great about where you live?
Previously I mentioned Kotov’s recommendation for increasing your tactical ability.
In a rare example of putting my money where my mouth is, I recently did this exercise, spending 45 minutes or so on this position:
This is Guganashvili – Gurevich, Chicago Open 2007, right out of Chess Life.
To recap the concept of the exercise:
The objective is to increase the organization, speed, clarity, depth and breadth of your calculations. You do this by repeating the exercise using lots of different positions over time. Depending on the particular mental muscle you are trying to isolate, you can vary the task: gradually shorten the clock to increase your speed, predetermine a required calculation depth, etc.
I am not going to post the lines I calculated (because like all bloggers, I’m shy) but I will say that I was modestly pleased at the breadth of ideas I came across, and dismayed by the lack of organization in my thinking (indicated by the degree of confusion I suffered when I tried to record my efforts at the end). The key is to not allow yourself to become discouraged, whatever your result may be. It’s all about improving the second, third, fourth, fifth times.
If anybody cares to give this position a try, let me know and I’ll put the Chess Life annotations in the comments to this post.
Returning again to the happy topic of molds, spores, mushrooms and algae…
These days it’s good to be a fungus and bad to be a frog. Seems that the Chytrid Fungus is on a rampage, and it’s killing the world’s frog population. The infection of amphibians by this fungus was first observed in 1998; nobody seems entirely sure how it works, but it may asphixiate the frogs by clogging their pores.
This bodes ill for the newly discovered, poisonous golden frog of Supata, which is known to live only in a very small area of Columbia, South America. As well as the Panamanian golden frog and many other species.
Zero Sum Mind again displays a talent for finding interesting video clips.
Maybe the idea of Matt Phelps parachuting into an office park is worth pitching to the networks…
Tonight Andrew Zimmern took his gastric horror show to Alabama and Florida.
He ate mullet. (Fried mullet roe becomes the second food I’ve seen him gag on, after stinky tofu at Mrs. Somebody’s House of Stink in Taiwan.)
Okay, see how all my blog themes are coming together?
What’s next? Adrian Belew and William Gibson playing checkers under the Baobob?
Liquid Egg Product put me up to this.
Rules:
1. Post these rules before you give your facts.
2. List 8 random facts about yourself.
3. At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them.
4. Leave a comment on their blog to let them know they’ve been tagged.
Random facts about me:
1. I was in an opera. I played the silent altar/firepit boy in Aida in Memphis in about 1977. I appeared onstage wearing a loincloth, white body paint, purple eye shadow and a curly black wig. I accidentally went onstage during the intermission.
2. I studied fencing with one of the US Olympic Team coaches.
3. In spite of my texture issues and hinky food limitations, the only thing I’ve ever, um, ejected (for reasons other than illness) was broccoli.
4. I have lived in: North Dakota (Fargo), Tennessee (Memphis), Texas (Houston), Kentucky (Fort Thomas), North Carolina (Chapel Hill, Durham, Cary), and Massachusetts (Framingham, Sudbury, Ashland, Marlboro, Medfield, Medway). And Germany (Nuremberg) for five weeks, if that counts.
5. I earned a minor in History but because I was a double major in Linguistics and German, they wouldn’t recognize the minor. So I added it to my diploma with a Sharpie.
6. I’ve never smoked pot or eaten an artichoke. But I have jumped out of an airplane.
7. When I was a wee tot, I had to wear leg braces to straighten out my lower legs.
8. I’ve been in most of the prisons in eastern Mass.
The 8 Random Facts About Me game is much more fun if you omit or embellish key details.
I’ll tag, um, geez. Globular, Blunderprone, David, other players to be named later. (If I get around to it. Deplorable, no? Chessloser’s copout is even worse.)
Plane travel (which, overall, stinks) affords the chance to read. Next in my book queue is Howard Goldowsky’s Engaging Pieces, but first I wanted to finish The Samurai’s Garden by Gail Tsukiyama.
You might correctly infer that I started it some while ago. It’s a slow read. In a way, not much happens. (Okay, Japan invades China, but that’s mostly off-camera.) Or maybe more properly, much happens but it’s as though you are watching through a thin piece of silk, which seems to mute the sharpness of the events.
In fact (it dawned on me late in the process) reading it is much like sitting in the Samurai’s garden, both requiring and imposing a certain patience, a tranquility of the mind.
Sneaky.
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