7/4

My best solution was lots of practice in the days before the gig. I'm also usually too busy playing to notice the audience.

WE have more posts.

Requisite? My, what a big word...

I just hope for one of those photos where I can see up her skit and she ain't wearing any undies. She isn't even my type... EWWW!! There's lots of women I'd like to see naked, and she ain't even in the top 1,000,000. I'm just curious. Not curious at all.

I just hope for one of those photos where I can see up her skit and she ain't wearing any undies. She isn't even my type...and I still look.

Thanks for helping me plan lunch.

January 18, 2008 Bobby Fischer, Chess Master, Dies at 64 By MODEM Bobby Fischer, the iconoclastic genius who was one of the greatest chess players the world has ever seen, has died, a close family friend, Gardar Sverrisson, confirmed Friday. He was 64 and died on Thursday in a hospital in Reykjavík, Iceland. No cause of death was given but he had suffered for some time from an unspecified illness. Mr. Sverrisson, who lived in the same apartment building in Reykjavik as Mr. Fischer, said: “He was a close family friend and we all miss him very much.” Mr. Fischer, the most powerful American player in history, had moved to Iceland in 2005. He had emerged briefly in 1992 from a mysterious seclusion that had lasted two decades and defied an American ban on conducting business in wartorn Yugoslavia to play a $5 million match against his old nemesis, the Russian-born grandmaster Boris Spassky. After he won handily, he dropped out of sight again, living alone. He avoided arrest on American charges over his Yugoslavia appearance and stayed in touch with his few friends in the United States by telephone, compelling them to keep his secrets or risk his rejection. He lived in Budapest -- and possibly the Philippines and Switzerland -- and emerged now and then on radio stations in Iceland, Hungary and the Philippines to rant in increasingly belligerent terms against the United States and against Jews. Mr. Fischer’s 1992 victory against Mr. Spassky was a sad reprise of his most glorious triumph. It was in summer 1972, in a match played in Reykjavik, that Mr. Fischer wrested the world championship from Mr. Spassky, becoming the first — and as yet only — American to win the title, which Russian-born players had held for more than four decades. Mr. Fischer won with such brilliance and dramatic flair that he became an icon, an unassailable representative of greatness in the world of competitive games, much as Babe Ruth had been and Michael Jordan would become. “It was Bobby Fischer who had, single-handedly, made the world recognize that chess on its highest level was as competitive as football, as thrilling as a duel to the death, as esthetically satisfying as a fine work of art, as intellectually demanding as any form of human activity,” wrote Harold C. Schonberg, who reported on the Reykjavik match for The New York Times, in his 1973 book, “Grandmasters of Chess.” In July 2004, he was seized by the Japanese authorities when he tried to board a plane from Japan to Manila and was accused of trying to leave the country on an invalid passport. He was detained in prison for nine months while the various governments, as well as a staunch group of supporters in the chess world, tried to resolve the issue. In 1999, in a series of telephone interviews he gave to a radio station in the Philippines, he rambled angrily and profanely about an international Jewish conspiracy, which he said was bent on destroying him personally and the world generally. On Sept. 11, 2001, he told a radio talk-show host in Baguio, the Philippines, that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were ”wonderful news,” adding he was wishing for a scenario “where the country will be taken over by the military, they’ll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews and secure hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders.” The world championship match against the elegant Spassky was an unforgettable spectacle, the cold war fought with chess pieces in an out-of-the-way place. Mr. Fischer’s characteristic petulance, loutishness and sense of outrage were the stuff of front page headlines all over the globe. Incensed by the conditions under which the match was to be played — he was particularly offended by the whirr of television cameras in the hall — he lost the first game, then forfeited the second and insisted the remaining games be played in an isolated room the size of a janitor’s closet. There, he roared back from what, in chess, is a sizable deficit, trouncing Mr. Spassky, 12 ½to 8 ½. (In championship chess, a victory is worth one point, a draw a half-point for each player.) In all, Mr. Fischer won 7 games, lost 3 (including the forfeit) and drew 11. Through July and most of August, the attention of the world was riveted on the Spassky-Fischer match. Americans who didn’t know a Ruy Lopez from a Poisoned Pawn watched a hitherto unknown commentator named Shelby Lyman explain each game on public television. All this was Mr. Fischer’s doing. Bobby Fischer the rebel, the enfant-terrible, the tantrum-thrower, the uncompromising savage of the chess board, had captured the imagination of the world. Because of him, for the first time in the United States, the game, with all its arcana and intimations of nerdiness, was cool. And when it was over, he walked away with a winner’s purse of $250,000, a sum that staggered anyone ever associated with chess. When Mr. Spassky won the world championship, his prize was $1,400. Mr. Fischer’s victory was widely seen as a symbolic triumph for Democracy over Communism, and it turned the new champion into an unlikely American hero. He was invited to the White House by President Richard M. Nixon, interviewed on television, hounded by journalists, wooed unsuccessfully by commercial interests. Sales of chess sets skyrocketed; so did fees for chess lessons, as scores of poverty-stricken chess players benefited from the cachet that Mr. Fischer had conferred on them. “That’s really how chess teaching began,” recalled Bruce Pandolfini, whose career as a teacher and writer was launched after he appeared with Mr. Lyman on public television. “Chess teachers didn’t really exist before 1972, not in any real numbers, but people started calling in to PBS, and they gave me a list of names, about 300 people. I charged $15 an hour and I encouraged others to do the same. I went from shelving books at the Strand bookstore to being a well-paid chess teacher.” But Mr. Fischer was incapable of sustaining himself in the limelight, and by the beginning of 1973, he had withdrawn into the weird, contrarian solitude he more or less maintained for the remainder of his life. Over the years, he turned down huge financial offers to play, among them a bid of $1.4 million from the Hilton Corporation to defend his title in Las Vegas and even larger sums from dictators like Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and the Shah of Iran to compete in their countries. He said the money wasn’t enough. At the same time, he tithed the Worldwide Church of God, a fringe church he had become involved with beginning in the early 1960’s. The church, now defunct, followed Hebrew dietary laws and Sabbath proscriptions and believed in the imminent return of Jesus Christ. For a time, Mr. Fischer lived in Pasadena, Calif., the church’s home base, or nearby Los Angeles, where he was said to spend his time replaying chess games and reading Nazi literature. There were reports that he was destitute, though the state of Mr. Fischer’s finances was never very clear. In chess circles, rumors surfaced intermittently that he was playing, that he was training, that he was about to make a comeback. He invented a new kind of chess clock, which automatically rewarded players for moving quickly toward the end of the game, restoring time each time a move is made. He began railing to other chess players that computers, with their ability to analyze deeply into a position, had ruined the mystery of chess, making it knowable. He advocated a variation on the game in which the pieces on the back rank, at the start, are lined up randomly rather than in their prescribed formation. But he did not emerge publicly until 1992, when he accepted the offer to play against Mr. Spassky again on an island in the Adriatic. A man of narrow interests but great intellectual gifts — he reportedly had an I.Q. of 181 — Mr. Fischer was a hugely demanding personality (some said charismatic, some merely infuriating) who felt his prowess as a chess player entitled him to exorbitant privilege. For much of his life, he fought imperiously on behalf of that entitlement, demanding uncompromising loyalty from his supporters, concessions from his opponents, special treatment from tournament organizers and unalloyed respect from the world at large. It was an outlook that became ever more skewed as his life went on. In the end his self-involvement was his undoing, isolating him from all but the most obsequious chess-world worshipers. Robert James Fischer was born in Chicago on March 9, 1943. His father, a German-born physicist named Gerard, Gerhard or Gerhardt Fischer — his name appears variously spelled — and his mother, the former Regina Wender, divorced when Bobby was 2. Shortly thereafter, the elder Fischer left the United States and his family for good, and Bobby and his older sister, Joan, were reared by their mother, a Swiss-born registered nurse and schoolteacher. Regina Fischer moved her young family first to California and then to Arizona before settling in a Brooklyn walkup, where Bobby grew up. The strong-willed Mrs. Fischer, who would later study medicine and become a political activist on behalf of pacifist causes both in the United States and Europe, had an uneven influence on her willful son. When he was a teenager, she tried to dissuade him from concentrating solely on chess. “She keeps in my hair and I don’t like people in my hair, so I had to get rid of her,” Mr. Fischer once told a reporter. But she also helped raise money for her son to compete in international tournaments and even picketed the White House in an appeal for aid to the American delegation at the 1960 Chess Olympics. Still, after the Spassky championship match, when her son spoke of his admiration for Mr. Nixon, she campaigned vigorously for Senator George S. McGovern, Mr. Nixon’s opponent in the 1972 Presidential election. Mrs. Fischer was Jewish; her son developed a hatred against Jews that became more virulent as he grew older. Nonetheless, mother and son evidently kept in touch over the years, and when she died in 1997, Mr. Fischer was said to have been distraught. His sister died soon afterward, and acquaintances of Mr. Fischer speculated that the two losses further taxed his fragile hold on rationality. Having never married or had children, Bobby Fischer leaves no immediate survivors. It was his sister Joan who bought Bobby, then age 6, his first chess set, and taught him the basic moves. By the age of 8 he was taking lessons at the Brooklyn Chess Club and by age 12 he was holding his own among America’s strongest players, who gathered at the Manhattan Chess Club and the Marshall Chess Club. His adult opponents called him “the Boy Robot” and, for his unwavering wardrobe and insatiable will to win, “the Corduroy Killer.” He was fiercely competitive — some said he was driven by an abject fear of losing. At the chessboard he possessed the pitilessness of a tyrant — “I love to see them squirm,” he once said of his opponents. From early on, he buttressed his penchant for original thinking with monumental study, and he became known for his mastery of the game’s literature. “Practice! Study! Talent!” was his formula for success. In a short time he would become incomparable at all phases of chess, from openings to endgames, and though renowned as an attacker, he was, like Garry Kasparov after him, an underrated, even brilliant defensive strategist. He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, but, indifferent to study and classes because they took time away from chess, he dropped out at 16. Mr. Pandolfini remembered: “When I was a kid, I’d go to the Marshall early in the morning, and Fischer would be there. There was a cabinet of filed games from the 19th century, thousands of games that someone, maybe a lot of people, had put on index cards and diagrammed by hand, and Fischer would be playing them, one at a time. I couldn’t understand why he was doing it. These were games using discarded ideas — the King’s Gambit and so on.” The King’s Gambit — an opening strategy in which White sacrifices a kingside pawn to get a quick attack — had long been dismissed as too risky and romantic, seductive only to the blindly attack-minded. Bobby Fischer, along with his contemporaries, favored other strategies, known by names like the Sicilian Defense (the epitome of a sharp counterattack by Black) or the Ruy Lopez (a slowly building game of maneuver for White). “But Fischer’s argument was that the old ideas were not necessarily bad ideas,” Mr. Pandolfini said. “They had merely fallen out of favor, and by injecting new thinking into an old idea, you created state-of-the-art logic.”

About as news worthy as Britney Spears shopping for a pregnancy test kit. I hear Ronnie Wood had a hernia operation....they're holding a press conference to discuss it at Starbucks in the morning.

I think these got reissued with bonus material, maybe that's why you're seeing the old copies in the bins. Yeah, and the only thing keeping me from picking up the cheap used copies is the lingering thought that I should spring for the new ones with the bonus material. Soon as I see the new ones cheap enough (or the old ones REALLY mega-cheap), I'm there. (And the fact I still haven't pulled the trigger yet (in over three months) would tend to favor me waiting to get the remasters with the bonus cuts.) hehe...I knew it.

Thanks. I knew it was something like that. The most I remember was that sex with twins is probably fun, so also this gum should be. They really knew how to sell stuff back in the day... ...anyways...the AAJ critic uses two names.

Review by John Kelman aka David Binder. Sort of like DoubleMint gum - two! two personalities in one!

She even moved you to start a thread about her. How about that. I haven't even noticed the latest about these people, but if you're really into that celebrity thing there's the Tom Cruise thread and an earlier one about your idol Britney Spears.

I think these got reissued with bonus material, maybe that's why you're seeing the old copies in the bins.

No they didn't. I'm not following this too closely, but I also noticed this: Britney pregnancy rumors are a hoax ‘They’re just toying with the paparazzi,’ says a friend of the couple Access Hollywood updated 7:07 p.m. ET, Wed., Jan. 16, 2008 While images of Britney Spears and new pal Adnan Ghalib apparently shopping for pregnancy tests at a pharmacy have sent the baby bump rumor mill into a frenzy, a source close to Spears tells “Access Hollywood” it’s all a joke. “It’s all bull---t. They’re just toying with the paparazzi,” Spears confidant Sam Lutfi told “Access.” The couple was seen perusing the pregnancy test aisle at a Rite Aid in Studio City, Calif., on Tuesday. However, the validity of the rumors was questioned as the photos of the couple were taken by FinalPixx — the agency Ghalib works for. Spears lost custody of her two kids (Sean Preston, 2, and Jayden James, 1) in October. She is still embroiled in a very public custody battle with ex-husband Kevin Federline. Copyright 2008 by NBC. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Oh, come on...just one more. Sleeping With the Enemy: What's Britney Doing Now? Spear's Relationship With Photographer May Be Akin to Stockholm Syndrome, Say Psychologists By MARCUS BARAM Jan. 17, 2008 — It's a well-documented phenomena that abducted hostages sometimes grow emotionally attached to their captors, despite the danger of the situation. The condition is called Stockholm syndrome, and it was most famously used to explain the transformation of heiress Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped by a guerrilla warfare group and later took part in a bank robbery with the gang in 1974. Now some believe that Britney Spears may be experiencing a mild version of the disorder in her relationship with British paparazzo Adnan Ghalib. "When you see her seeming like she's friends with the paparazzi, she's got, like Stockholm syndrome," actress Patricia Arquette told Contactmusic.com. "I mean she's becoming friends with her captors. She's being torn apart by this business." Ghalib, 35, who works for the FinalPixx photo agency and has been inseparable from Spears since New Year's Eve, has photographed the 26-year-old singer for years as part of the horde of shutterbugs who follow her every move. In the last two weeks, they've checked in to hotel rooms together and he's accompanied Spears all over Los Angeles, according to published reports. The singer's relationship with the paparazzi has certainly fluctuated over the years, from her posing sexily outside nightclubs to last February's temper tantrum in which she attacked a photographer's SUV with an umbrella. But her new relationship with one of her tormentors strikes some clinical psychologists as a sign of co-dependency or a variation of Stockholm syndrome, named after a 1973 bank robbery hostage standoff in Sweden. In that case, the victims became emotionally attached to their captors, even defending their actions. "When people are struggling with psychological problems and substance abuse, their experience of the world is altered and they will often gravitate to the people who create the most intense stimuli," says Patricia Saunders, a New York psychologist. "Some of the characteristics of persistent paparazzi are similar to stalkers. And for Britney, she's looking for any port in a storm. The elements of Stockholm syndrome come from that sense of "If you can't beat them, join them." Saunders said the relationship also reminded her of some of her own clients who enact a savior/victim fantasy. "It might be that he has some pathological attachment to her, to rescue her and to save her," she explains. "To someone who's drowning, like her, they're drawn to that." Dr. Carole Lieberman, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who often testifies as an expert witness in high-profile trials, believes the relationship is more akin to co-dependency than Stockholm syndrome. "She's looking for that feeling of security, and she's obviously familiar with him," explains Lieberman. "And from years of following her, he knows the buttons to push with her. He knows how to play her like a violin, and he wants her pictures. And she doesn't even know that she's being held hostage." The case of a star falling for one of their paparazzi is apparently unprecedented in the annals of celebrity, according to entertainment journalists and Hollywood veterans. Some stars have always had friendly relationships with the photographers that hound them, but not to this extent, says Us Weekly senior editor Ian Drew. "If you go on YouTube, you'll see Amy Winehouse getting paparazzi to carry her groceries for her," he says. "But Britney is obviously deranged right now." Drew says that the relationship is not that hard to imagine considering how Spears and Ghalib have been in close contact for so long. "You do get a sense of somebody by hanging outside their house all the time," Drew explains. "They talk to each other. He's always on the Britney beat. It's just like anyone hooking up with one of their makeup artists." Although romantic pairings can be complex and sometimes inexplicable, he thinks that commerce may be at the root of the relationship. "It also makes you question if there is a business motive behind it. Is she getting a cut of that money he's making by selling pictures? There has long been speculation that she's made deals with paparazzi. She's sold pictures of herself, of every baby, of every wedding. I wouldn't say she's a victim of captors. I would say she's been in on the game all along," Drew said. Ghalib and his agency didn't return calls for comment. Some celebrity photographers were equally cynical about the relationship, noting that Ghalib's agency recently posted pictures of the two of them looking at pregnancy test kits in a Rite Aid pharmacy. "He, out of anyone, knows all their tricks," says one shutterbug who asked not to be named. "And could make it so she was not photographed all the time. It only leads me to believe that is what she wants." An agent for Spears did not return e-mails seeking comment. Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

January 17, 2008 Four Paparazzi Arrested After Chasing Britney Spears By REUTERS Filed at 1:16 p.m. ET LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Four photographers were arrested for reckless driving after a late night car chase of pop star Britney Spears on the outskirts of Los Angeles, police said on Thursday. Los Angeles police spokeswoman Sara Faden said the four were among a group of paparazzi seen driving at high speed in the Mission Hills area of the city around 11:30 p.m. on Wednesday on the trail of the troubled singer. "Britney Spears was part of the group, but was not driving recklessly," Faden said. She said four men were booked for reckless driving and each ordered to put up $5,000 bail. According to the celebrity Web site TMZ.com, Spears told police that one of the cars, which she could not identify, may have tried to run her off the road. Spears, 26, has been trailed by paparazzi day and night for several months as her personal and professional life has fallen apart following her divorce from Kevin Federline and bitter battles over the custody of her two children.

Iannis Xenakis - Xenakis Percussion Works

google up some interviews, they're out there.

I'm sure I did. I was really busy at the time.

A massive improve'lence.

Can't say that I have, although I do know the neighborhood.

I wonder what's up. I just checked mine and it works.

...and they're in New Jersey.

I spotted a SUV with a set of those a few weeks ago. It looked pretty silly.

Nah...that's a Borbomagus, a beast in a leisure suit.