Bombaclot!

There's been a few things I've wanted to blog recently, but unfortunately working 12 hour shifts has put paid to extra-curricular activities beyond sleep. The up-side is that the job I'm doing - covering for a guy who got burnt by a furnace - only requires 20 minutes per hour actual 'work', and the other 40 'monitoring', so there's a fair amount of time for pondering Chess tactics.

The down-side is that after a couple of 12-hour shifts my poor little pre-evolved monkey brain runs into trouble of the "how does the horsey move again?" kind. The last shift of last week I was back to my normal job. At 2am I wanted to work out if a job would finish by 4am. 50 units to go. Cycle time 2 minutes per unit. Two fifties are one-forty, that's 2 hours twenty minutes.

Dream-logic had crept into my waking mind. It's a perfectly sensible calculation - we do temporal arithmetic in base 60, so 50 + 50 is 1'40". I just had to take a few minutes to work out where the calculation was going wrong, which were the number of units to make, which were the time to make them, when to stop converting between time and units. Bombaclot!

I know a smattering of words from about 20 different languages, although sadly English is the only one I can hold a conversation in. My favourite word from any language I've ever heard is 'bombaclot', it's meaning is so expressive and self-explainatory.

My favourite tactical motifs to play and to solve are decoy and interference. With other motifs, you see the key move and say "Aha! of course!". With decoy and interference, you see the key move and still say "huh?", it's not until the point arrives that you slap your forehead and say "Agghhh! how could I be so stupid?".

A girl I once knew lived next door to a Jamaican gentlemen. Now and again, we'd hear something in his apartment go crash! followed by the inevitable forehead-slap and the cry "Bombaclot!".