All-Time Greatest Gators

I ran across this poll of the 50 Greatest Gators of All Time. I found it hard to disagree with it too much (but not impossible ... c'mon, I'm as big a fan of Chris Leak as there is, but he's just not the 5th greatest Gator; he didn't win that National Championship by himself), except for the impossibility of comparing a linebacker from 1970 with a quarterback from 2010. I know, I know, the list is there to generate conversations and arguments, and as I said, I can't argue with it too much.

That doesn't mean I can't come up with my own list. If you know much about me, you know I can't do it the same way as everybody else, so my list creates the Greatest Gator All-Star team. No weaseling allowed, so just eleven players allowed on offense and eleven on defense. And some special team players. And a coach. The addition of an entire second team isn't weasely; I prefer to call it musteline.

I've limited myself to players I have seen play, although Alvarez and Youngblood were allowed in because they just missed the cut, and I read plenty about them at the time, and I'm not about to tell either of them that I left them out.

You will notice a quite a few players from the last year or three. My biggest complaint against "greatest" lists is that recent entries are waaaay too common (see here for an example that will make you weep like a schoolgirl; I know I did), probably because the lister was too lazy to do any decent research. Rest assured that I created the list originally without the recent guys, and only added them in after careful consideration. Such are the drawbacks of supporting a successful team.

I'll admit I can't tell the difference between a guard and a tackle, so I just lumped them in as offensive linemen. I can tell the difference between a cornerback and a safety, but historically they're often listed as just "DB", so I combined that category, too. I most definitely can tell a linebacker from a defensive tackle, and I realize that Sammy Green is listed today as a linebacker, but I saw him play and dammit he played nose guard, so in this list he's a defensive tackle.

	First Team	Second Team
QB	Tim Tebow	Danny Wuerffel
RB	Emmitt Smith	Fred Taylor
RB	Neil Anderson	James Jones
WR	Carlos Alvarez	Wes Chandler
WR	Percy Harvin	Cris Collinsworth
TE	Aron Hernandez	Chris Faulkner
C	Jeff Mitchell	Phil Bromley
OL	Lomas Brown	Crawford Ker
OL	Reggie Greens	David Williams
OL	Burton Lawless	Jason Odom
OL	Jeff Zimmerman	Donnie Young
DE	Jack Youngblood	Alex Brown
DE	Kevin Carter	Jevon Kearse
DT	Brad Culpepper	Sammy Green
DT	Ellis Johnson	Trace Armstrong
LB	Wilber Marshall	Ralph Ortega
LB	Brandon Spikes	Fred Abbott
LB	Scot Brantley	Tim Paulk
DB	Louis Oliver	Will White
DB	Jarvis Williams	Lito Sheppard
DB	Reggie Nelson	Wayne Fields
DB	Joe Haden	Fred Weary
P	Ray Criswell	Shayne Edge
K	David Posey	Bobby Raymond
KR	Brandon James	Jacquez Green
Coach	Steve Spurrier	Urban Meyer

Alas, Babylon!

Why is Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon my favorite post-apocalyptic novel? It certainly has it's share of problems.

It's old. Written about 1960, it is sorely out-of-date. The cold war politics don't make sense any more. The lack of knowledge about electromagnetic pulse leaves the survivors with resources that they probably wouldn't have had. I'm not sure that fallout from a medium-sized nuclear strike described in the novel would end the world ala On The Beach, but it wouldn't be as localized as Frank would have it, either. The sexual mores are ... well ... quaint.

So why do I like it? The writing is good. Short, declarative sentences that do their job and then get out of the way. That's what you want in a survival story. The Last Ship would have you believe that surviving polysyllabic words outnumber surviving humans.

It has varied characters, who react in reasonable, but different, ways to the situations they encounter. Randy becomes a leader, but maintains self-doubts. Doc tries to help others, but he isn't fanatical about it. Malachi displays courage and fear. And the characters change over the novel, which means the book is not Patriots, thank God.

The cold war politics are outdated, but the political situations described are reasonable for the time. Although it is never stated who starts the nukin', a mistake by an American pilot provides the trigger event. The plot is not just a thinly-veiled political screed like ... well ... Patriots.

It has interesting details that add to its verisimilitude, such as opening the windows to prevent breakage from a distant explosion, the necessity of salt in the diet, diabetics dying early due to lack of refrigeration for their insulin, the use of bicycles as gasoline supplies dwindle. But it doesn't reduce itself to a thinly-veiled how-to manual like ... well ... oh, you get the idea.

I like that the ending is reasonably upbeat. I've read plenty of dark, depressing post-apo books (On the Beach, Level 7, The End of the Dream, and Warday to a lesser extent) but that theme gets old quickly. On the other hand, it's not overly optimistic either; there are some grim moments, without jarring Pollyannaish comments like "I might have to have four (babies), for every three we keep" that almost ruined an otherwise outstanding Tommorrow.

It wasn't easy to make this choice; there are a number of other top-notch Armegeddon stories: The Postman, the previously maligned Tomorrow, and of course, Earth Abides, which shines despite some of the same problems as Alas, Babylon. But I think that Alas, Babylon is just a little bit better.

Diamonds are where you find them

I was driving home from work, listening to NPR, when they started in on a book review. I don't remember a single word of it now, except for the idea that human civilization is literally shaped by the shape of the continents, but I was hooked. "I'll have to read that book someday," I thought to myself.

If you know me, you know that thoughts like that mean one thing -- I'll never do it. But for some reason, I pulled off into a bookstore and bought Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond.

What a find! The author was asked by a New Guinea friend why Europeans came to New Guinea, instead of vice versa. Diamond spent the next twenty years trying to figure it out. Here's my understanding of his reasoning.

Civilization developed first in Mesopotamia, because the winters are cool and wet, and the summers are hot and dry. This is ideal weather for wild wheat. The hot, dry summers forced wheat to grow hard, nutrient-enriched, seed-bearing kernels to survive. These kernels normally fall off before they're good to eat, but some defective plants hold on to them longer than others. Humans ate these defective kernels and defecated the seeds near their homes. Over time, this process of "unnatural selection" wiped out wild wheat and replaced it with the "defective" stuff, which then became "normal".

Rice (East Asia), corn (Americas), and sorghum (Africa) are reasonably nutritious, but wheat has them all beat, so the Mesopotamians had a head start, aided by the blind luck of having all but one of the fourteen domesticable animals over 100 pounds. Their stored nutrition gave them the ability to specialize, which allowed cities to grow, which nurtured diseases, which eventually they developed resistance to.

Here's the best part. The Mesopotamian culture spread because the habitable portions of Eurasia run east-west. They could move without changing their lifestyles, and take their wheat with them. Cultures also arose in Africa and the Americas, but the north-south orientation of these continents meant that the inhabitants were restricted to fairly small areas. Without stored nutrition, they never developed cities and the resultant resistances, and were eventually decimated when contact came, although Africa gave as good as it got in that regard.

The only quibble I have with this book is at the beginning, when Diamond lays out the multiple ideas he originally had for why European culture dominates. One of the ideas was racial superiority of some kind. He rejected this out of hand, never bothering to test the idea. Now I'm not saying that he missed the right answer, but this doesn't sound like the Scientific Method that I was taught.

If I had just five books on my bookshelf, this would be one of them. It's that good.

Great, just what I need

Just when I thought I'm ready to improve myself...

I was gonna paint the mailbox post, read to elementary school children, learn to play the bassoon, travel to exotic places, reform health control, and reverse the current trend of casual profanity. But I waited too long.

I ran into BrokenPictureTelephone.com. Thanks a lot, Va., I blame you completely.

This is a site that raises time-wasting to epic new heights. It combines the best of Pictionary and Taboo. I no longer play the latter, after a rushed trip to the emergency room following the GB's attempt to remove the buzzer battery with a kitchen knife. It wasn't pretty, and Julie was left behind to clean up, which was not an appropriate task for someone who once fainted when a teacher mentioned that he gave blood.

Where was I? Oh, right. This game is more addicting than crack ... er ... so I'm told ... and is simply hilarious. The drawing skills range from superb to what-the?, but it just doesn't matter. A high level of twisted humor among the participants certainly helps things along.

The only drawback is that there is some pathetic 14-year old who attempts to ruin as many games as he can. The players have learned to just ignore him ("don't feel the trolls") and press on. An interesting experiment in self-correcting social interaction.

This one gets 5 stars, highly recommended

Wait til next year

Football season is just six weeks away. College football, of course, the other kind doesn't count. The Florida Gators set out to defend their national championship, and by golly, they just might do it.

I can hear you now. They won it last year. They won it two years before that. They won it in 1996. What's the big deal? Everybody hops on the bus when it's a winner.

But they haven't always been a winner. Oh, they've only had two losing seasons in the 37 years I've been following them, but you gotta know the history to understand why I'm so excited.

When I first paid attention back in 1971, the Gators were mired in mediocrity. Although Bear Bryant knew their potential when he referred to them as a "sleeping giant", they never realized that potential. Up to the early 1980's, their history was ... well ... kind of sad.

1906 Gators play first game against Gainesville Athletic Club. So embarrassed that their first game is not even against another school, they officially move the game later in time by two months.

1911 Gators finally win a game against somebody you have heard of (Clemson).

1916 The ultimate futility -- zero wins, three points scored for the season.

1918 Undefeated! Played just one game against an army unit.

1928 Undefeated and headed for the Rose Bowl, Gators fall to Tennessee. No Rose Bowl.

1935-1951 The "Golden Age" -- Gators enjoy exactly one winning season.

1942 Gators lose to Georgia 75-0. Georgia's Heisman winner Frank Sinkwich plays the entire game.

1966 Gators steal a game from FSU when Lane Fenner is ruled out-of-bounds. You decide.

1968 Coach Ray Graves gets so disgusted with assistants blaming each other that he switches them, making offensive coaches coach defense and vice versa. Bad idea. Gators lose 51-0.

1969 Gator QB John Reaves sets national record by throwing 9 interceptions in one game.

1971 The Great Gator Flop. Defense lets Miami score so Gator QB can break a record.

1974 Gators miss out on SEC championship when they lose to Georgia.

1975 Gators miss out on SEC championship when they lose to Georgia.

1976 Coach Doug Dickey goes for it on 4th down from his own 20 yard line. Georgia wins going away.

1984 Herschell Walker destroys Gators on national TV, 44-0.

1979 Penultimate futility -- Gators go winless (although they tie one).

2001 Undefeated and headed for the Rose Bowl, Gators fall to Tennessee. No Rose Bowl. Hey, that sounds familiar.

2003 FSU steals a game from the Gators in the Swindle at the Swamp. Five turnovers are decided incorrectly by the officials -- all of them in FSU's favor.

Ok, I think you see where I'm coming from now. The most common word associated with the Gators when I attended was "choke". "Wait til next year" was the unofficial motto, often shouted by students near the end of yet another disappointing loss. My roommate and I had a long discussion about whether the Gators could ever (meaning in our lifetimes) win a national championship. Conclusion: doubtful.

So today I enjoy every success the Gators have. I ain't no front front runner. I've put up with a lot over the years; now it's time to enjoy the rewards.

Genealogy math

I recently discovered that my parents were 24th cousins, once removed. That's the closest known link, anyway, and even that link supposes that birth certificates, gravestones, oral family history, professional genealogists, and Google searches can be trusted, which of course, they can't, except for the last one. I had a point here, and I'm coming to it as soon as I remember what it was.

Oh yeah. When I mentioned this fact to my niece, her response was "gross", or perhaps some more contemporary version thereof. She didn't like it any better when I pointed out that her own parents are fifteenth cousins.

What bothered me about her reaction was that she apparently thinks that everyone must have these pure, unadulterated ancestral lines, when math screams to me that this would be impossible.

If you go back one generation from yourself, you have two parents. At least I do. Two equals 2 to the 1st power. Go back two generations and you have four grandparents (2 to the 2nd power). Three generations give eight great-grandparents (2 to the 3rd power). In general, going back n generations gives 2 to the nth ancestors.

Let's assume a generation averages about 25 years. So going back 10 generations (say, the American Revolution), you have 1024 ancestors. Go back 20 generations (Queen Elizabeth I) and you have about 1,000,000 ancestors. Go back to Jesus (maybe 80 generations) and you end up with 2 to the 80th (about 1 sextillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) ancestors.

That's a lot. Now, the total number of people who have ever lived is a much discussed question. The commonly repeated "fact" that half of the people who have every lived are alive today is just silly, but the actual value is tough to calculate. This website estimates there have been about 100,000,000,000.

Clearly something is wrong here. You have a hundred trillion times more ancestors than have ever lived on the earth. The only way to account for this (well, other than virgin birth) is by massive intermarriage. So get used to it.

It's not even icky. Second cousins (same great-grandparents) can legally marry in the U.S. I have some just a few generations back. First cousins (same grandparents) can, and do, legally marry in many countries, including Spain and most Spanish-speaking countries. And there are plenty of closer cases than that, including one in a collateral line of mine that involved double-first cousins marrying -- two brothers married two sisters, and their children married. Their offspring had only four great-grandparents! Ok, maybe that is a bit icky.

The upshot of this post is that this was obvious to me even when I was quite young. Math is innate to me, and I wish it were to everyone. Of course, my niece has the innate ability to carry herself well in social situations, while I stumble through conversations, unable to express myself and inadvertently insulting others. *sigh* I suppose I could prove mathematically that her skills are more important.

100 Greatest Americans, my foot!

As usual, I'm late coming to this -- fashionably so, I hope. Jeff sent me a link to the Discovery Channel's 100 Greatest Americans, along with a number of comments, one of which I quote here.

"%$&!!"

If you knew Jeff, you would know that he can accurately call balls and strikes from an obstructed view seat out near the foul pole at Fenway, while waxing philosophically about baseball's dim past, and carrying only one thing in his pocket which was thank God the confirmation number for our tickets. You would also know that the quote indicates that he expresses strong reservations with the list. And rightly so.

Tom Cruise? Laura Bush? Ellen Degeneres? Brett Favre? Michael Moore? Rush Limbaugh? John Edwards? Dr. Phil? Dr. Phil???? The absence of John Adams, Thomas Paine, and Andrew Jackson? Every president but one since FDR made the list, but only four before him. And their choice for number one just makes me want to cry. I don't care whether you like the man or not, approve of him or not, he's just not the Greatest American.

Every single person I discussed this with expressed similar feelings about the list. Everyone had a long list of people to strike from the list. But once the ranting ended, the women stopped weeping, and the apoplectic stroke victims were made comfortable, rationality raised its ugly head. It is, after all, a list of 100, so it seems to me that if you are going to pull someone off the list, you ought to replace them with someone else. This turns out to be much harder than it looks. Nobody was able (or willing) to do it.

I think a list like this should stand up over time. Fifty years from now, anyone should look at this list and nod their head in agreement, or at least recognize every name. I can't believe that the current list qualifies in this regard.

Well, here's my shot, with additions in blue and deletions in magenta. Maybe it's a bit writer-heavy, but that's better than being pop-heavy. There's still a few who ought to go, and I'm embarassed that I can't think of any decent replacements. When I do, I reserve the right to edit the list.

Ali, Muhammad
Angelou, Maya
Anthony, Susan B.
Armstrong, Lance
Armstrong, Neil
Ball, Lucille
Barton, Clara
Bell, Alexander Graham
Boone, Daniel
Bryan, William Jennings
Bush, Barbara
Bush, George H. W.
Bush, George W.
Bush, Laura
Calhoun, John C
Carnegie, Andrew
Carson, Johnny
Carter, Jimmy
Carver, George Washington
Charles, Ray
Chavez, Cesar
Clay, Henry
Clinton, Bill
Clinton, Hillary
Cooper, James Fennimore
Cosby, Bill
Crazy Horse
Crockett, Davy
Cruise, Tom
DeGeneres, Ellen
Dickenson, Emily
Disney, Walt
Douglass, Frederick
Earhart, Amelia
Eastwood, Clint
Edison, Thomas Alva
Edwards, John
Einstein, Albert
Eisenhower, Dwight
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Faulkner, William
Favre, Brett
Fitzgerald, F Scott
Ford, Henry
Franklin, Benjamin
Frost, Robert
Fulton, Robert
Gates, Bill
Geronimo
Gibson, Mel
Giuliani, Rudolph
Glenn, John
Goddard, Robert
Graham, Billy
Grant, Ulysses S
Hamilton, Alexander
Hanks, Tom
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Hefner, Hugh
Hemingway, Ernest
Henry, Patrick
Hepburn, Katharine
Hope, Bob
Hughes, Howard
Irving, Washington
Jackson, Andrew
Jackson, Michael
Jay, John
Jefferson, Thomas
Jobs, Steve
Johnson, Lyndon B.
Jones, John Paul
Jordan, Michael
Keller, Helen
Kennedy, John F.
Kennedy, Robert F.
Kennedy Onassis, Jacqueline
King Jr., Dr. Martin Luther
Lee, Robert E.
Lewis & Clark
Limbaugh, Rush
Lincoln, Abraham
Lindbergh, Charles
Lucas, George
Madison, James
Madonna
Malcolm X
Marshall, John
McGraw, Dr. Phil
Melville, Herman
Monroe, Marilyn
Moore, Michael
Morse, Samuel
Murphy, Audie
Murrow, Edward R
Nixon, Richard
Obama, Barack
Owens, Jesse
Paine, Thomas
Parks, Rosa
Patton, George
Pocahontas
Poe, Edgar Allan
Powell, Colin
Presley, Elvis
Reagan, Ronald
Reeve, Christopher
Rice, Condoleezza
Robinson, Jackie
Rockefeller, John D
Rogers, Will
Roosevelt, Eleanor
Roosevelt, Franklin D
Roosevelt, Theodore
Ruth, Babe
Sagan, Carl
Salk, Jonas
Schwarzenegger, Arnold
Sinatra, Frank
Sinclair, Upton
Sitting Bull
Smith, Joseph
Spielberg, Steven
Steinbeck, John
Stewart, Jimmy
Stewart, Martha
Stowe, Harriett Beecher
Tesla, Nikola
Thoreau, Henry David
Tillman, Pat
Truman, Harry
Trump, Donald
Tubman, Harriet
Twain, Mark
Vanderbilt, Cornelius
Walton, Sam
Washington, George
Wayne, John
Whitman, Walt
Whitney, Eli
Winfrey, Oprah
Woods, Tiger
Wright, Orville & Wilbur
Yeager, Chuck

Behind the curtain

I like Wikipedia. I enjoy browsing random pages like an vitamin-deficient Ethiopian ruminant in Greener Than You Think. And unlike the GB, I trust what they say. Pretty much. Usually.

But the real fun is behind the curtain. Every single Wiki page also has a Discussion page where the editors talk about ... well ... darn near anything, although they are supposed to confine themselves to changes to the page content. I've seen it all: Respectful requests. Shrill complaints. Arcane discussions. Uncalled-for epithets. Misplaced criticism. Life stories. Lugubrious toadyism. Prim reproach. Righteous indignation. Shameless self-promotion. Wanton vandalism. Abject apologies. Disgusting profanity. Edit wars. Monotonic pedantry. Duologic sentences.

The main page is what most people see. It's the facade of the grand hotel. It's the parlour where you entertain your guests. It's the debutante at her Quinceañera. It's the web page of the semi-private government agency that makes no mention of the fact that they lost their only customer and therefore their reason for existence (I mention no names, but if a random link falls into this posting, I can't help it).

But the discussion page is the interesting place to be. It's the alley out behind the hotel with stinking dumpsters, tired working girls sneaking a ciggie, steam rising from the manhole cover, and don't look in that doorway cause you might not like what you see. It's the kitchen of a fourth-floor walkup where a stubble-faced dock worker in a wifebeater backhands his kid for talking back. It's the same debutante forty years later, sixty pounds heavier, centuries wiser. It's the agency that lost its funding in a strapped economy because it hid too many of its problems -- I can dream, eh?

In short, it's the classic Heinleinesque bar scene consisting of the worst refuse of humanity, but the more you read it, the more you find the tortured Unmarried Mother, the fun-loving-in-a-grizzly-bear-wrestling-way Korax, and the free-living but ultimately self-sacrificing Sam Anderson -- the people who make life exciting and worth living, the ones who ultimately improve mankind through their mistakes instead of just settling for what they have.

Go read a discussion page, particularly for a controversial subject. As Friday said, you'll find "it's the liveliest, most exciting and dangerous place you can visit, and be sure to get a blood test afterwards!"

The Bits

With apologies to Edgar Alan Pogle.


Learn some math by using bits,
Abstract bits!
Look how well into my brain the one and zero fits,
How they toggle, toggle, toggle in the bright fluorescent light
Of the classroom where profs thunder,
"It's not error, it's a wonder:
One plus one is ten, all right!"
Counting twos, twos, twos,
It's the radix used by Zuse,
Til the number overflows and makes twos-complement'ry fits,
Of the bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits,
Of the adding and the padding of the bits.

Now define some useful bits,
Carry bits!
Just build a J-K flip-flop and you'll find a bool var fits.
In an adder (full, not half; don't repeat that newbie gaffe)
It announces its result with great panache.
What a stream of data pours from dynamic RAM, and cores,
And SanDisk flash,
Oh, unless it's on the fritz,
What a gush of open/closed, true/false, and dahs and dits,
How it thrills! How it fills all your memory! How it kills
Bandwidth til you're taking pills
For the shifting and the drifting of the bits, bits, bits,
Of the bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits,
Of the twiddling and the fiddling of the bits.

Feel the terror of the bits,
Quantum bits!
What a world of strangeness as the light traverses slits,
Among dice not rolled by God, we've lost parity, how odd!
Now I cannot seem to get a dial tone,
And we're never certain that
The life of Schrodinger's cat
Is quite known,
And the boffin, ah, the boffin
Who comes up with this stuff off in
Goedel space,
And who, droning, droning, droning
To make good his clever case
Caused the space-time that old Einstein lived for
To become erased.
I can't call a man a hero
Who says "It's not one or zero,
It is both."
And the universe, it roars,
As it pours, pours, pours
Cosmic rays upon the bits
And their value strangely flits
From reacting to the blitz,
Til their p-n junction quits
Over time, time, time
As their MTBF's climb,
Til you're picking at your zits.
Damn those bits!
Over time, time, time
As their MTBF's climb
To the jangling of the bits,
Of the bits, bits, bits,
To the mangling of the bits,
Over time, time, time
Til your furrowed browline knits
From computing every prime,
To the shaking of the bits,
Of the bits, bits, bits,
To the breaking of the bits,
Of the bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits,
To the thrashing and the smashing of the bits.

Savage Kingdom

I've finished listening to Savage Kingdom by Benjamin Woolley. I don't know if you'd like it or not, but if you're a mixed bag, it will suit you to a T. It covers the first few years of the Jamestown colony and is written in a style sometimes academic and sometimes folksy.

The former style comes out in the droning telling of the mundane operations of the Virginia Company in its attempts to raise enough money to send the next supply ship. Yes, I was restless here.

The latter style is used to relate the mundane day-to-day life in the colony. It's amazing to me that a colony that struggled so hard just to keep from starving should have spent so much of its time executing its dissidents. It's not so surprising that so many of its colonists should have run away to live with the Indians, although their new diet was usually only marginally better than before. I've dug gardens in Virginia soil before, and I can tell you that it's not good for much.

Perhaps what kept my interest was that Jamestown is just a few (score) miles away, so it has local interest. "The Chickahominy River...say, shouldn't that have 'confounded' in the phrase?" "Hog Island? That's where the nuke plant is". "Morgart's Beach! He's talking about the rivah house!" Toss in the fact that the GB has traced all but one of her immigrant ancestors and they all came ashore not more than 50 miles from J-town. The book gets a another free point because it mentions Stephen Hopkins, my gggggggggggg-grandfather, who was both an early immigrant to Virginia and a Mayflower passenger, thereby giving him the unique distinction of being a member of the First Families of both Virginia and Massachusetts. I try not to let it go to my head, but I do have 0.012% of his genes, along with the rest of his 20,000 or so descendants.

Breaking with long tradition, I've re-read this post before publishing it, and realize that I haven't been too positive about this book. I guess it meant more to me than it would to most. Come to think of it, even a glowing review wouldn't sell more than half a copy, given my readership. And maybe that's just as well.

A great middlegame book

I have a shelf full of chess books, but How to Reassess Your Chess by Jeremy Silman is the last one I would get rid of. There are lots of good books on the openings, and some good ones on the endgame (Pandofini's Endgame Course for beginners who can tolerate typos, or Averbakh's out-of-print multi-volume series for the truly masochistic), but there's a cricket-chirping dearth of decent middlegame books.

Time after time after time in my mumbledy-seven years of chess I've worked my way through the opening, either by rote or by the time honored trio (develop your pieces, attack the center, protect your king), only to find myself stumped regarding what to do next. The pros are no help; they say "develop a plan", but none of them tell you how. Nimzovich's My System is opaque. Pachman's Modern Chess Strategy gives you a few ideas, but it's not easy to read a condensation of an English translation of a German translation of the Czech original and key-ripes! it uses descriptive notation. Well, stand back fellas, because Silman tells you how.

To grossly oversimplify, Silman suggests you analyze the position for seven key imbalances and develop a plan based on those imbalances. He devotes a chapter to each imbalance, showing you what it is, how it is good or bad, and most importantly, WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT. Maybe because he is not a grandmaster, he is able to talk down to my level so I can understand the concepts. At the end of each chapter are some problems that involve the imbalance in question, and whaddya know, I can occasionally answer them correctly.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a weekend chess camp run by Gregory Kaidanov. At one point, he went around the room asking for each person's favorite chess book. Each response was met with "uh-huh" until I mentioned How to Reassess Your Chess. His response of "Great book!" gave me some much-needed confidence. And, heck, it's only US$12.

Carcassonne solitaire

I've played a lot of Carcassonne lately, thanks to Andrew, who first told me about this game. I'm even the reigning champion of Montserrat (ok, it was just the GB and me playing). Not many games are equally fun for 2 or 6 players.

When I can't find an opponent, I play solitaire Carcassonne, a version of my own invention. Remove everything but the basic set -- ditch the river, inns & cathedrals, dragon & princess, laurel & hardy, etc. Forget the meeples; you won't need 'em. Start with the starting piece and play tiles one at time. Your goal is to get a complete city, surrounded by a ring-road around the city, surrounded by an unbroken chain of completed cities around the ring-road, surrounded by another ring-road around the chain of cities. Oh yes, it can be done; I did it the first time I tried, although I have never repeated the accomplishment. Sometimes I'm just a tile or two short.

Scoring makes it more interesting. Count your innermost city as usual. If it is surrounded by a ring-road, add in any other complete features (monasteries and cities only), double the total, and add a point for every tile in the ring-road. If the road is surrounded, add in any other features, double the running total, and score the ring-cities as normal. If the ring-cities are surrounded, repeat the process. I've scored over 200 points.

Beatlesfest

I was at Abbey Road on the River in Louisville, which bills itself as the "world's largest Beatles-inspired music festival". Well, maybe it is...68 bands performing over 5 days on four stages. Bands with names like "Eight Days a Week", "Savoy Truffle", and the "Sun Kings" (not bad, the latter), some with cleverer sobriquets like "Backwards", and the rest, of whom "Nervous Melvin and the Mistakes" were a pretty decent local band that Jeff likes.
The low point was the "Beatrips" -- perfect instrumental sound and good costumes, but the Japanese accents were hard to take. Rovely Rita, indeed. The highlight had to be when a band announced they were going to play the second worst Beatles song ever and I knew immediately it was "Mr. Moonlight". No, it was the look on the GB's face when some band started into the day's third rendition of "Hey Bulldog", a song she despises heartily due to Rick and me playing the piano part for 38 consecutive minutes (honestly, no alcohol was harmed during the performance) but thought she was safe from for the weekend because who ever heard of that song anyway?
All in all, I could have done with a little more and the GB could have done with a little less, but at least I ate twice at Steak n Shake (it's a meal).