More self-inquiry

Just when you thought it was safe to look at this blog again, I am forced to get personal again. You see, Rob has hit me with a tag.

Rob got tagged with the following question: What are your top five quirks? He answered that in a post here and with devilish glee, tagged me.

So now let's see...what are my quirks? As Rob said of himself in his post, I seem quite normal to myself. So, to help me out with my quirks, I turned to the one person in the world who is foolish enough, er...I mean, loves me enough, to actually tolerate living with them. Namely, my wife. Who better than she will know what my quirks are? So I asked her. The conversation went as follows.

Me: Honey, what are my quirks?
Wife: You don't have quirks, you have disorders.
Me: Sorry dear, I forgot. Sweetness, what are my disorders?
Wife: Who wants to know?
Me: Er...just some people on the Internet.
Wife: Are you getting paid for this?
Me: No sugar-dove, this is pro bono.

Okay, so I am trying to be funny. To cut a long story short, she came up with three quirks without much head-scratching. Then she lost interest. I'll fill in the other two.

(1) She says that I sleep too little. I sleep with the lights on and can't sleep in a noiseless room. Meaning, I need some sort of white noise, like the noise of a table-fan to fall asleep. I like that mechanical lullaby. She says that I fall asleep with the laptop in front of me and with my fingers on the keys. She also says that she sometimes wakes up in the night and tries to move my fingers away from the keyboard, but I fight her in my sleep.

(2) She says that I'm a restless sort who can't sit still for long. I pace the room while thinking, talking, and even eating. I hardly eat at the dinner table at home. She says that trying to have a conversation with me is like trying to have a conversation with a tennis ball in a tennis match. Only more annoying.

(3) She finds it strange that I used to go for months eating nothing but canned food when I was a bachelor. "Didn't you need fresh, hot food once in a while?" she wonders. "Fresh, hot food is nice, but not necessary," is my thinking.

So those are the three quirks my wife came up with. For the record, she said after, "I love you anyway." She then added, absent-mindedly, "What choice do I have?"

Er...ha, ha, she's a regular comedian, my wife.

(4) I smoke, but I am not addicted to tobacco. I'll go out drinking one day and smoke a whole pack (usually by bumming from other people; most smoker friends avoid me), and then go for months without touching a cigarette.

(5) I probably talk a little too much and hold a few too many opinions. Sadly for me and for those around me who suffer through it, my opinion on a topic usually towers over my knowledge on the topic. I'm trying to change. It's hard.

My understanding is this: The spirit of tagging dictates that I pay it forward. Forgive me if you can find it in your hearts, but Balajee, Ashok, Jyoti, you're it.

The Dance of Creation

Thank you Balajee and Rob, for your comments on my previous post. It occurs to me that if the moves that God made as He was going about the business of Creation were recorded using chess notation, the record might look something like the following.

1. Create Light !
2. Create Earth ! 

[Note: There is wide disagreement among experts about this move; some give it a !, while others give it a ??]
3. Create Sky
4. Create Oceans
5. Create Mountains
6. Create Pat Robertson (Wait, Lord...never mind, too late. Carry on.)
...
105. Create Monisha Koirala !!
106. Create the feeling in her that she has acting ability, thereby subjecting millions of people to a mild form of torture ??
...
565. Create cellphones !
567. Create cellphone ringtones that play a tinny, metallic Fur Elise ?
...
...
12,546. Create Sougata !? 

[Note: According to some analysts, this should be ?!]
...

OK, now that we have established beyond reasonable doubt that the stuttery-looking description below my name is not simply a case of keyboard epilepsy, we'll get off this ego trip and move on.

I am cycling backwards through the various comments on the previous posts and trying to respond to them, driven by the rather pitifully buoyant pair of assumptions that the commenters are (A) still around, and (B) give a f***.

Ironluca says that history has a tendency to repeat itself for those who disregard it as well as for those who do not. I find this observation to be wiser than Santayana's original assertion. Even those who are aware of history often repeat it. Foresight inertia, maybe?

Ironluca is the creatively menacing name for an old friend. Welcome, Ironluca. Who sleeps with the fishes tonight?

About me--A bit of narcissism and self-indulgence, perhaps (Does blogger handle such long titles? I'm about to find out.)

Those who play chess will know that there are several notation systems that are used to record the moves in a chess game. The systems and their variations are all quite easy to understand and I will not tire the reader.

A small example should serve. In algebraic notation, which is most commonly used at present because it is culture-agnostic, the chess board is divided into eight horizontal ranks numbered from 1 to 8, and eight vertical files denoted by the lowercase letters "a" to "h". So the square at the lower left corner is called a1 and the square at the upper right corner is called h8. Other squares are similarly named. Under the algebraic notation system, the King pawn moving two squares forward from its initial position would simply be recorded as "e4".

The names of the pieces are abbreviated also. So a knight moving from the square g1 to capture a pesky bishop sitting on h3 would be recorded "Nxh3".

There are also symbols that is used to comment moves. This meta set is used by people who analyze chess games. Pick up any book of recorded chess games of the past or present, and you will find that some of the moves in a game have strange symbols like !, ?, or ?? next to them. Like so: "Nxh3??"

These symbols are used by chess analysts to annotate a move and tell the reader what they think of the move in question. The short list of such comment symbols is:

! -- a good move

!! -- an excellent move

? -- a mistake

?? -- a blunder. Alternatively known as "Ye great gads, what was the moron thinking?" Most of the moves from my own games are annotated with this symbol.

!? -- an interesting move that may not be best

?! -- a dubious move, but not easily refuted


When I started this blog, blogger.com presented me with a space to describe myself. I did. The description appears right below my name at the upper right hand corner of this blog. It is "!?". I struggled with it for a bit because it was a toss-up between the last two on the list. I'm still not completely sure which one of the two it should be, but I went with what I went with.