Shopping

Went to ASDA today, mostly to show we have no loyalty to any particular supermarket. You can see the giant ASDA triangle from all around calling shoppers to worship in the aisles like a Muezzin calling people to prayer from a minaret. It's been a while since I was there, so I noticed all kinds of new things.

I was way impressed with the baby changing room. It had complimentary nappies and wipes, which was awesome. As well as being big and clean and what not. Certainly better than having to tie my baby to a shelf in the toilet of a moving train. I bought myself an "All day breakfast" pizza, which I will eat later. And here-in lies one of the many mysteries of ASDA . How come you can get a small pizza for £2.48, and a large pizza for £3.18. The large pizza is like eight times the size, and as I was comparing thin-crust with deep-pan I reckon the extra 70p would give me a pizza with twenty-six times the mass of the cheaper one. It makes no sense, just pay 70p extra and eat pizza all week.

Later on in our shopping tour I discovered an electronic sommelier. I had to try it out. Apparently the best wine to go with ASDA -made all-day-breakfast pizza is ASDA brand Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon. I don't know what that is, but it sounds impressive.

Am planning on making cauliflower-cheese again tonight.

Go vs Chess: Compare and Contrast

Chess and Go have some similarities and some differences. Makes me think it would be a good title for an essay. Now I get to offer my unbalanced opinions, cos it's by blog nhar har har.

Thing is right, there was an article on the news the other morning about chess possibly becoming a part of the national curriculum. They were like, "it's an ancient game that was used to teach strategy for battles in ancient times. It develops strategy and forward planning and critical thinking and whatnot..." I was like, "Go does all those things, AND it's better." Thing is though, it doesn't.

This is the start of a game I played not too long ago.

I think I know my audience a little, and it is safe to assume you know some things about chess and have played the game, but are not so familiar with go. Chess players boast that chess has been around for 1500 years. Whereas go appeared in China in the 3rd century BC, and according to legend was invented two thousand years before that (apparently). Since then it has been embraced into Japanese culture and the Chinese are more into other things, like snooker and swimming. In some ways, go is a much simpler game, having only one type of piece called (for technical reasons) a "stone". In another way it is less simple, because its game tree is bigger. This is because the board is bigger, when faced with a typical board position there are more possible moves for you to choose from and the games typically last for more moves.

After 50 moves things are starting to taking shape.

But what about the games themselves. Chess has six different types of pieces that all have their own rules about what you can do with them. Not only that, but it has a specific initial set up. This makes it messy and complicated; it has obviously been made up to model something else. Whereas go has one rule. Everything else in the game is a consequence of that rule. Go just seems much more natural, it was there waiting to be discovered like some piece of mathematics. I don't think anybody could say the same about chess.

After 100 moves it is still anybody's game

But what about the gameplay itself? Chess is all about strategy and planning. You see gambits that might initially appear to be blunders, but are in fact a way to give up a piece for superior position. You are encouraged to analyse the possible responses to a prospective move, and then look at how you might respond to each of those. Often you end up looking several moves ahead. This kind of thinking rarely helps in go (it would be wrong to say it never helps). Instead you spend your time looking at the strengths and weaknesses of the whole board, looking to exploit weaknesses in your opponents position, or defend weaknesses in your own. You never see amazing and unexpected moves that turn a game. Instead you can play to a fairly high standard just by not making any blunders.

150 moves

Playing go becomes like meditation. If you focus on a particular stone or part of the board then you will forget the rest of the board and loose. If your play is too attacking you will loose, if your play is too defensive you will loose. You learn to look at the board as a whole as you search for the right move. You need to not worry about the level or style of your opponent, just think about the stones on the board.

200 moves. Something cunning has gone on in the bottom right, which probably decided the game. I am not sure how I managed that looking at it now.

However, what I actually like about go is that is it quite easy to improve at it. In chess I think you can easily learn what all the rules are and learn about a few popular openings and strategies, but I really struggle to get beyond that. I suspect there are multitudes of beginners at chess, but not so many intermediate players. Go is quite the other way around. Once you have grasped how the game works and what you need to do to get life and territory and stuff, you can quickly improve. I found it amazing how I could recognise shapes and patterns in the stones and immediately know what was going on and how to respond. That never happened with chess. Go problems definitely help with this. (Obviously chess has chess problems, but I think they are more challenges than a learning tool.) I found the hardest thing about go was learning all the Japanese names for things.

The final position. Black wins by 1.5 points. It was actually a really close game, but I honestly picked it at random when selecting a game to use here.

I doubt my undirected ramblings have actually encouraged anybody to take up the game of go, so I will have to be more direct:

Take some time to learn go, it's great.

In other news, I recently had the Asian Affair Pizza from Penistone Balti House. It was really nice. Proper greasy and spicy and yummy. There was a lot of topping, so inevitably a hunk of curry-cheese-goo would fall off and I would have no choice but to pick it up with my fingers. Mmm...

Something new to complain about

After weeks of complaining about the lack of rain, it has finally come. (Although not a lot). And now I have lots of things I want to do that involve being outside. So I have a great excuse not to do them. I can't cut the grass cos it is a little bit wet. And it is far too wet to think about painting the fences. I have some indoor projects that at first glance I could crack on with, but upon closer inspection they involve sawing outside. In fact I do my sawing on the ground, and I don't want to put my lovely Homebase value wood (from a well sustainably managed forest I am sure) on a slightly damp piece of concrete.

Alium

Not only that, but there is nothing like some rain to make all the weeds shoot up. There was hardly any weeds in my garden last week, but now, they are many and numerous. Please enjoy the above picture of a flower in my garden. It is purple.

Think Professor X. Only with a monocle and a dicky-bow. Oh, and he's an octopus.

Pulling out all the stop

So, I will tell you one thing that grinds my gears:

And that is the phrase "pulling out all the stops."

Thing is, right, being an organist of some knowledge and ability it is clear to me that this phrase doesn't mean what it is supposed to mean. You are supposed to believe the "pulling out all the stop" means going to the furthest extreme or putting in the maximum effort. That kind of thing. However there is no situation on the organ when you actually want to pull out all the stops.

For those of you that may not be so familiar, a stop is sort of like one instrument inside a pipe organ. It is like one set of pipes. Maybe one stop has massive round pipes, and another stop has thin square shaped pipes. Some stops are really loud, some are quiet and delicate. But all the stops are powered by the same bellows. So, if you want to play the organ at its loudest, and most spectacular, then you don't want to pull out all the stops. What would happen is that some of the air will go into the pantsy quiet stops that nobody could hear anyway over the din of the massive loud pipes. This has the effect of taking air away from the loud stops and making them quieter. If you want to play as loud as possible, then you want to choose the loud stops and pull out only those.

Being instructed up to play and enjoy the repertoire of English organ music of people like Herbert Howells and Hubert Parry (as featured in the royal wedding) my favourite organ stop is the open diapason, which I have just learned can by referred to as labial pipes. I certainly don't go in for any of that fannying about with dulcianas of gambas as in the French style.

Hat

In conclusion, pulling out all the stops will make lots of noise, but less is more.

Achievement Unlocked: 25 posts

It has been an interesting few months since I started my blog way back in 2010. And I have learnt some things. Like the existance of a beard liberation front, just how much very old lime marmalade I have in the fridge, and that I still haven't changed broadband provider.

There were some recurring themes in my posts. Below I have indicated how many times the following themes appear in my first 25 posts. I am quite surprised, I thought I would have more to say about climate change, and less to say about food.

• Food 12
• Women 6
• Assorted Rants 5
• Music 4
• How rubbish my life is 3
• Environmentalism 3
• Facial hair 2

In other news, I have been enjoying Campus. And today I put up a shelf and washed the car. I don't want you to think that I care in any way about the appearance of my car. Instead, I felt that there was too much crud on the windscreen that was resistant to windscreen wipers and screenwash. So, in the interest of safety I figured I better clean it off sooner or later. When I had sponge and bucket in hand, I got a little bit carried away, and now the car can almost be described as clean.