Thursday, December 18, 2014

(280) Parsifal and the magic of the quest for The Holy Grail

Circa 0:30 a.m. on December 18th 2014 I was continuing to view some clips from interviews with the late Robin Williams. I had, just a few minutes earlier, heard John Lennon ́s Mind Games playing from my son ́s room. - https://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=youtube+mind+games+john+lennon&type=2button&fr=ush-mailn

At 1:12 there are the lyrics -

Some kind of Druid dudes lifting the vail
Doing the mind guerilla
Some call it magic, the search for the grail

Then I watched Williams' appearance with Oprah from 1991. I noted something which prompted me to attempt to alter the list of points given in the synopsis of and also alter Point (57) within the narrative itself. - http://james-plasketts-coincidence-diary.blogspot.com.es/2006/03/part-two-narrative-epilogues-and.html

(57) I note that in Terry Gilliam ́s 1991 film The Fisher King, Robin Williams plays the part of a man called ́ Parry ́ - a diminutive form of Parsifal (See 6.20 mins into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT4G_jwwMSo) - and he claims that he has glimpsed a photograph of The Holy Grail which he must seek in a FEBRUARY 1988 edition of a magazine, i.e. the same date it all irrupted into my life. -

In each instance I was merely adding the Youtube link to the point in The Fisher King where the significance of his adopted name is given.
In the midst of doing so, I mistakenly jogged the laptop and switched it off.
I restarted the computer and this somehow activated the above link to her show right from the start. That generated, at 1:32, a clip to Williams as ́Parry ́, responding to Bridges ́ dissing of the very concept of a grail quest and describing Parry as a nutcase, or "only partly insane" who could get a normal job.

Williams responds that he has a normal job: his quest for the Holy Grail.



Tuesday, December 16, 2014

(279) Lyuboyevic Vs Karpov, Linares 1981

On the evening of December 15th 2014 I turned to www.chessgames.com . Here I searched for the games of Mikhail Tal from his astounding victory at the Jurmala Interzonal of 1979.

But before doing that I, for some intangible reason, found myself drawn to the games between Anatoly Karpov and Jonathan Speelman and later between Karpov and Lyubomir Lyuboyevic.

I played through some forty or fifty of these games from those three selections. I saw a game from Linares 1981 where Lyuboyevic playing white had been gradually and progressively worn down by Karpov. I had seen this celebrated ending annotated before in a book on endings, but I do not believe that I had ever before played through all of the moves of this game.

About four hours later I turned to Facebook and saw that, also, some four hours previous a friend, Bogdan Lalic, had placed on his wall a position I recognised from the minor piece ending which arose in that very game, although he had given neither the names of the players nor the venue and the date.



The challenge of BLACK to play and win is hardly a very difficult one. For there is really only the one plausible tactic. (1...Nxf4!) And that made it very difficult from the usual kind of position he would put up on his wall, where some I recognised as having been cribbed from A. Baburin ́s daily newsletter, others were quite tricky and several had occured in the very games of Lalic himself.

Thursday, November 13, 2014

(278) Sceptic Michael Shermer´s Anomalous Events That Can Shake One’s Skepticism to the Core

V
Circa 18:40 on November 13th 2014 I was adding something to Michael Shermer's Wikipedia entry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shermer
This was some seven hours after I had posted this at my Facebook wall (somebody else having earlier posted it on Facebook) -

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/anomalous-events-that-can-shake-one-s-skepticism-to-the-core/

I added a line or two referring to the above article. I then tried to add a link to the article by adding it to those listed at the foot of the page. Mine was link 65. But it was not quite the same as the others and so I tried to alter it.
To my great surprise an announcement came up that somebody else had just then added that very link!

Their link was given as 44. Since there already was a link 44 I do not know if it replaced that link. Number 65 vanished whereas the line or two of text that I had added to the section headed Personal Life remained.
Within half an hour my appended lines vanished to be replaced by somebody else ́s brief sentence saying that on June 25th 2014 he had married a lady called Jennifer Graf. I added words similar to those that I had given earlier.
Those too were later removed so I just put them back.
But those did not remain there for all that long, so I stopped the replacements.
I also found it particularly odd that this link should have been simultaneously provided by two people a full two months after Shermer's published article in Scientific American.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

(277) One armed bandit

V
Circa June 18th 2014 I pointed out to my wife a lady with only one arm who was on the beach with us at Cala Cortina. Her right arm came down only a few inches from her shoulder. I had never seen her before and had been frequenting said beach for eight years .
Two days later I was resting at some traffic lights two to three miles away when a car hit me from behind. I turned off the engine and got out... and discovered very little damage... and also that it was the very same lady.
She confirmed that some dents incurred at the front left side of her were from a previous collision.
The only other time I saw her was on the same beach on the morning of July 6th 2015.