Moneyweek Magazine: A Little Plug

I don't normally like to plug products, but I recently discovered Moneyweek magazine and have found it to be so useful I thought I'd share with you. It's a weekly paper that keeps me up-to-date with markets, investment and all the relevant political issues. It's concise enough that I can read all the relevant bits in an hour or so, and browse some of the other articles (How to Spend it, etc.) at leisure during the week. On economics it presents many ideas that I just haven't read anywhere else.

The website gives a test of its content, but a paper subscription (£17 per quarter) is excellent value.

I should point out that I have no connection with magazine or any of its writers etc.

Blunder of the Season (I hope)

First round of the Dorset Closed Championship and I'm feeling reasonably happy with this position, which came from a rather poorly played line of the Queens Gambit Accepted.

How often is it unsafe to complete development by castling after an opponent has just made a K move? Almost everytime, yes?

Black has just played 14...Kg7, and without thinking I returned to the board (metaphorically) and swapped my K & R. As I was writing the move down it occurred to me that Rc8 would be a nuisance. Wrong again.

Not a nuisance but a disaster. Black's rook was sitting on c8 before I had even looked back at the board. Disgusted with myself, I resigned after sticking my Q on a6. But to make it worse, my opponent - whose 161 grade presumably means he's not always so wrong about things - started droning on about how the position was obviously loads better for him even before my wretched castling ("of course the a-pawn is going to just run down the board").

I asked black to take a look at it with me and show me just how he was going to "run the a-pawn", which he did for only a short while (black's pieces are a bit awkwardly placed, really).

Gah!

13 Guillotines

I don't believe that dreams have any greater significance (at least, I've not seen any evidence they do), but the other night I did have such an odd dream that I remember it now.

It was about The 13 Guillotines. In the dream, I picked up a typically swollen Sunday supplement and find therein an article stating something like:

Not many people know that during the French Revolution that the heads of nobles were cut off almost entirely by just 13 guillotines. They each had a different design, and some have been preserved.

The article - which in my dream I found too compelling to ignore - then went on to picture each guillotine (I can even now remember some of the designs), accompany it with some words and a summary of who met their grisly ends at its blade.

I can't imagine how I came up with this!

Expect a Freezing winter ahead.

Back in the bad old 70s & 80s a certain kind of weather would frequently occur at this time of the year. A big high pressure system world swing down from Scandinavia, ushering in an easterly air flow. The forecaster would talk of "much colder" temperatures to come, and we would all freeze for a while. This almost always seemed to begin between Xmas and new year.

The weather in the UK is notoriously 'changeable'; but this set of conditions would generally persist, usually for the rest of the winter. Brutally cold temperature for months on end.

It looks to me that the same thing has happened this year. Spring could be a long way off.

For no particular reason...

(1) It was Terry Pratchett who pointed out in Lords & Ladies that Chateau might translate in French as Cat Water. All the more surprising then that it's used so often in the name of wines?

(2) From Passage to Juneau, Jonathan Raban.

Death is wilderness in which we are all lost for words

(3) The sweetest blackcurrants I ever tasted were growing wild in Reading cemetery.

(4) David Sandham, a fellow chess player who plays just as well as me.

Chess is like a language played by a downtrodden minority, that no-one else speaks.

(5) Have you ever noticed that enema sits next to enemy in the dictionary?

(6) Time is the most precious resource. Now is its most critical aspect.

(7) Whilst waiting for a train a few years ago, my wife, Jeanette, exclaimed:

My brain is so big that I cant find anything

A little music

A friend of mine writes and plays music; just for the hell of it, not professionally (though I reckon he's got more talent than much of what I hear around about). Anyway, he's just done this, which I like and would like to share. You may need to sign up to get the download (which is free, by the way).

Would You Like to Know the Truth?

This was the title of a leaflet put through my door by those nice J.W. people this afternoon. In a totally non-threatening way, it asks and then answers a series of the Big Questions. Or at least, it tries to answer those questions. Because the authors' thinking is constrained by a biblical narrative, it can only recite those Iron Age writers whose thoughts survive. But still.

One question is "Is there any hope for the Dead". The "answer" includes the words:

"...those resurrected as humans will have the opportunity to live on a paradise earth."

which it later promises is "forever".

Now, forever is a long time: and I thought about whether I would personally welcome this: paradise forever. No stress, no hassle, no pain or death (presumably), no risk, no work etc. Wouldn't we all just get soooo bored?

And if we did get soooo bored, then for amusement we might decide to create a universe to inhabit where none of those things are true. A place where we could experience the delicious frisson of danger, choice, peril, uncertainty, pain and pleasure. In fact, such a universe might look a lot like the one I see around me today. The inhabitants would need to be completely ignorant of the fact that it is a construct, at least for the period of their residence here. And as far as I know, most of us are.

I can, of course, not prove that any of this is true (or untrue), and to be clear, I don't see any point in believing it. It won't be useful to you in making sense of your situation. You might as well believe that this universe is empty of everyone but yourself, that it's all about you. Everything here is for your amusement, and indeed the universe doesn't exist except for your immediate environs.

Another wholly unhelpful thought, but again, not one you can prove or dispprove either way.