Ntuple Indemnity

Let P = the set of all problems; T_n = the set of properties belonging to n little people; W = this crazy world.

Blaine’s Theorem: ∀x: x ∈ P∩T₃, ∃ a hill of beans h ∈ W such that Σx < h.

I’m to play a number of pieces at a wedding that is taking place on Canada Day, and the task of preparing them is my first serious return to the rigour of practicing small-C classical piano for the sake of performance since completing my Royal Conservatory ARCT three years ago. Skill at a musical instrument is something that atrophies quickly, but comes back with the kind of whoosh that brings to mind Stephen Chow, eyes shut and enlightened, reawakening to his repressed Shaolin or Buddhist Palm powers or what have you. It seems that if you spend a nontrivial proportion of your adolescence perfecting a tricky Liszt cadenza, it’s programmed into your fingers for life. The power that courses through your digits upon its return is a release of energeia so magnificent, you are led to think you can harness it to fry a rack of bacon. You would be wrong, but never mind those mortal limitations.

For this event, I was given a list of requests at a few weeks’ notice, with instructions to throw in any other favourites I deemed appropriate should the guests be taking inordinately long to seat themselves. Naturally, in addition to the standard corpus of the pretty Chopin waltzes nobody ever thinks of because they can’t remember the indices, I entertained the notion of sneaking in “Han and the Princess” from The Empire Strikes Back for good measure. “Across the Stars” is the more relevant cue in a wedding scenario, but playing it by ear is not a straightforward initiative, not because the compound rhythm is hard to pin down on first listen (it’s simple once you figure out which beat to think of as your anchor), but because Williams introduces a very subtle modulation with each iteration of the theme: the key you finish in is a whole tone lower than your key of origin. So you can take it for as long as you want, hitting five other keys before you loop back to where you started; the subsequent transpositions generate a cyclic group modulo 6. Whenever it comes up in the score to Attack of the Clones, a meandering transition escapes the cycle after only about two iterations at a time, and it’s a hard one to capture without having some sheet music as a guide.

The requests were an item of interest, though – and two of them in particular, both by that most temperamental of legendary German folk, Ludwig van Beethoven. They had two things in common: everybody knows them, yet after over a decade with the instrument, I’d never learnt them.

The first is “Für Elise”. Its popularity is unfathomable. I sometimes wonder what Beethoven would say should he return from the grave to discover that this innocent little Bagatelle in A minor he wrote for some chick is not only the default ringtone on the biggest overnight hit in the technological history of mankind, the mobile phone, but is – no joke – played by Taiwanese garbage trucks to signal their presence, like how ice cream cars over here use Joplin’s “The Entertainer”. It’s not a very spectacular composition – a simple ABACA with no modulations except for brief jaunts into the relative major a few bars at a time, and only meagre hints of Ludwig’s trademark tantrums – and one wonders if it is the phenomenon it has become because of its technical simplicity. It’s very easy for a beginning pianist to pick it up and woodshed it, and at the same time rewarding, because it has just enough musical elegance to not sound as dinky as a lot of early piano repertoire is wont to be.

The second piece to which I refer is the First Movement of the Sonata quasi una fantasia in C-sharp minor, perhaps better known as the “Moonlight Sonata”. I’m pointing out the obvious here, but like “Für Elise”, this composition is, to borrow what John Lennon said of the Beatles, bigger than Jesus. It was significant enough to be the namesake of an infamous German bombing operation – indeed, the source of one of Winston Churchill’s most controversial wartime gambits, a classic game-theoretical case study. Again, I have very little idea why it has penetrated the cultural consciousness so deeply, to the layman it bears on synecdoche for what classical piano sounds like. It is said that on the sonata’s popularity, Beethoven once wrote Carl Czerny with the remark, “Surely I’ve written better things.” And if we speak of quality in terms of the intricacy and range of his manoeuvres in the dimensions of harmony, melody and rhythm, he’d be right. But maybe the simplicity of the piece – long pedal points that change up in broad strokes under the controlled pianissimo of periodic triplets overhead – is what attracts the casual listener.

More to the point, in both of these selections, Beethoven doesn’t go very far, but what he does is sit on universals. Now, the musically literate may harp on this idea of universals as good old-fashioned Western European paternalism, but the precept that makes Beethoven tick – the very property of Mozart that makes babies smarter – is the binary relationship of tension and resolution that occurs when you frame music as consonance punctuated by dissonance. “Für Elise” and the First Movement of the “Moonlight” are similar in this respect: they are, fundamentally, grounded in minor-key consonances that are broken and arpeggiated, thinned out so the listener can in effect capture everything. And for the performer, as I am discovering firsthand, these ideal patterns spin a safety net of technical comfort.

I would deem it likely that it is because of this property of traditional forms underlying a proto-Romantic versatility of expression that they persist, while in the latter half of the twentieth century, the experiments to dissolve the binaristic “othering” of dissonance in opposition to consonance (or in the case of John Cage, silence to sound) led the methodical compositions of art music down a path that an untrained listener would consider highly esoteric. Yet the divergent rise of popular music in the 1950s with the emergence of doo-wop and rock-and-roll went in the opposite direction – back to simple harmonies and catchy melodic constructions.

The implication is that there is a disposition present in all of us, and arguably not something merely constructed, to be receptive to consonant harmonies and furthermore, retain them not in their harmonic form, but in terms of the melodic variations built on top of them. It is like how we feel the push and pull of a conflict in a dramatic setting, but we don’t remember the different kinds of conflict in terms of their categoric labels. On the contrary, we retain instances: Hamlet and Claudius, Rhett and Scarlett, Linus and Lucy. In primary school some talk about conflict as a 3-vector of man against man, himself and nature, but even that is demonstrated by example, and remembered by example. Like melody over harmony, it is not a relation of part to whole, but of building to foundations.

There’s a much bigger question that comes out of all this, one that strikes out at what it is we acquire that one equates with a heightened cultural literacy. For the sake of not obfuscating the above with interminable length, this is a thread I will leave hanging for now.

From page 62 in the paperback:

BLOG n pl. -S a website containing a personal journal

BLOGGER n pl. -S one who maintains a blog

BLOGGING n pl. -S the act or practice of maintaining a blog

Yep – BLOGGING is going on the magic -INGS list, one of the biggest sources of phoney confusion in the lower divisions (along with the many creative prefixations of RE- and UN-). WEBLOG sits on page 652 along with WEBCAM, WEBCAST (which takes -ED and -ING as well as the expected -S), WEBPAGE, WEBRING (which goes on the magic “can’t drop the -ING” list) and WEBSITE. INTRANET is in, INTERNET* is not; it seems generic internets, which were once playable in SOWPODS but subsequently deleted, weren’t in any of the dictionaries consulted. And let’s not forget this gem of a prospective bingo: CYBERSEX.

Crazy stuff is going on in the Z section. ZYZZYVAS has lost its claim to fame as the last word in the hypothetical pseudo-English of the Scrabble Crossword Game, dethroned by the interjection ZZZ. ZUZ (pl. ZUZ), I’m told, is yet another piece of foreign currency – a silver coin of ancient Hebrew origin. And who actually uses ZA as slang for “a pizza”? I gather it must have been part of this whole Ninja Turtles revival that’s been taking place over the past few years.

Then there’s the Qs not followed by Us, whose ranks are joined by the likes of QABALA, QABALAH and QADI. The newly-added BURQA looks familiar, thanks to the popular media and the unpopular French. And then there’s QI, which – like ZA – opens to North American players the possibility of scoring over 62 points with only two tiles should the opponent be imprudent about vowel placement. It is defined on page 456 as “the vital force that in Chinese thought is inherent in all things.” It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.

I actually thought it would be defined as a variant of chess, as in xiang qi, or Chinese Chess – an elegant board game for a more civilized age. I’ve never been very good at it myself, primarily due to a sparsity of English-speaking opponents to practice against. An uncle of mine, who was a distinguished ivory carver before the trade was banned, was a master of the game’s many strategic nuances, but all I ever managed to pick up was some rudimentary tactics like lining up the two cannons on the same file.

DOOWOP is in, and it takes an S. See, this kind of lexical overhaul only happens once in a Blue Moon.

That’s enough of the new OSPD for one night, methinks. Amusement aside, it’s not a book that will serve much purpose in the immediate future; I received confirmation yesterday that it will not have any effect on what I thought would be my next rated tournament, the Western Canadian Championship in Calgary (9/28-10/2), and certainly no effect at all until the corresponding OWL is published with all the juicy new dirty words we don’t know about yet. The word is that the hard deadline for incorporating the new word list in tournament play will not be until January 2006, so at this point it is better far to live than die and study the existing list. Then once the OWL2 is out, it is just a matter of putting the two editions into plain-jane text files and running diff.

I said I thought the WCSC would be my next rated tournament, but that is no longer the case. Ken Middleton, who directs the Sherwood Park club, is running Edmonton’s first-ever rated Scrabble tournament on the weekend of 17-18 September. Ken hosted an eight-round mini in the Park back in April 2004, but this time it’s a full fourteen rounds over two days in Edmonton proper.

Needless to say, this is a big deal and is exactly the kind of thing that will hopefully get Scrabble off the ground in this municipality that fashions itself a cosmopolis of champions. Aside from the admittedly huge kink of a dictionary transition happening directly afterwards, this is also a great opportunity for those of you who like the game but are hesitant to try it competitively to get your feet wet.

Over the past few weeks I’ve played against some local Scrabblers already on the club scene, some of whom have never left the city for a tournament or played under time constraints, and they are reachable – they won’t clobber and intimidate the recreational newcomer, though they will be a welcome challenge. The Division 3 roof is a rating of 800, and if you’ve never played a tournament before, that’s where you’ll go.

Seriously – if you are tired of beating your friends and have an interest in taking your game to the next level, that’s almost all you need to walk in and do well. I would recommend this much preparation: memorize the 96 two-letter words, know the Qs-without-Us, at least look at all the three-letter words, and play two or three practice games with the clock to get a sense of how long you should spend per turn and how the hold/challenge procedure works. Three months is plenty of time to get ready; last year, Dan Lazin hit the WCSC after just a month of doing the same, and this time the field is easier.

None of the local clubs are active in July and August, so if you want to practice, contact me and we’ll set up a game. (Pay no attention to the predatory salivation behind the curtain!)

Or simply, trashed.

You’ll notice that I haven’t posted here about Scrabble lately – not since the beginning of February, as a matter of fact. Until about two weeks ago I was away from the game for a very long time, which turned out to be detrimental to my health, as I quickly learned the hard way.

In the intervening time, the biggest change to the game in ten years fired its first salvo off the bow: The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, Fourth Edition. It hit shelves only two weeks ago, and mining the Internet has yet to turn up any meaningful list of changes besides the well-known ones like the addition of QI* and ZA* and the invalidation of EMF, and I hear a lot of words listed in the Dictionary Committee online beta didn’t make the final cut, but I plan to pick up my copy straightaway.

Like the current edition, getting the OSPD4 is primarily for definitions and getting a head start; as longtime readers should be aware by now, the mass-market dictionary is censored (with famous consequences) and does not reflect changes, if any, to the “offensive” list. The next edition of the Official Tournament and Club Word List, available only by direct purchase from the NSA store, does not arrive until August and will not come into effect until after Reno Nationals that month. The actual transition in terms of competitive play is at this time ambiguous.

So with my next tournament not until the WCSC in late September, and who knows what dictionary it’s using (though I just thought to ask), the OSPD3 and I aren’t exactly parting on good terms. Months of not studying harbinge destructive ramifications. And yes, I know “harbinge” isn’t a word, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Right now I’m hoping a number of things. One is that the transition comes late enough that I can actually get some mileage out of my most excellent Mike Baron Wordbook before it is rendered outdated, because lord knows I’ve hardly touched it since Christmas; another is that I don’t plummet below the 1200 mark, not just because it would mean a year-to-year ratings drop of 200 points, but because it would drop me a division at the WCSC. While I might get some money out of it, that’s just not fun.

This game is stacked. Incomplete and diminishing lexical knowledge just exacerbates the problem. In six of my fourteen games – just under half – one player or the other scored consecutive bingos. (In five out of six cases, it decided the game; the sixth was a miscalculated endgame on my part that put me under by 19 points when I projected I’d lose by 1.) That’s luck for you – playing off all your tiles, then drawing straight to a second bingo common enough to see with the bag half-empty (or half-full, depending on whether you’re a Marlin or a Dory), and having a spot to play it. For some perspective, the probability of drawing a bingo with a full bag is one in twelve, and that’s when you don’t need to account for your opponent’s rack management.

Granted, one of those sequel-bingos was a (successful) phoney of mine: HARBINGE*. The verb for the action that a harbinger performs is just that – harbinger. Now I know.

Speaking of successful phoneys, this tournament – while a disaster for me – produced a great story. As I believe I’ve mentioned in the past, Calgary tournaments award a trophy of a horse’s ass to the player who gets away with the one deemed most outrageous by vote. One game in my division began with Jefficus playing IN to open – and it sure looked innocent enough. Then his opponent, Saskatoon club director Al Pitzel, responds with a bingo: JAILERS, with the A hooked in front of Jeff’s play to make ANI.

Read that again carefully.

Jeff makes no complaint, and only after he is no longer able to challenge does he realize that Al had inverted the board and hooked his seven tiles in front of NI* to form… SRELIAJ*.

Final notes: Canada has its first two-time national champion, mathematics professor Adam Logan, who now teaches at Oxford. The tournament took place over the weekend and the online coverage is stellar; as with last year’s NSC, you can play through key games and see how your appraisal of the board positions match up with the experts.

I also finally made my way to Edmonton’s two local Scrabble groups in late May. The NSA-sanctioned and more competitive one in Sherwood Park is on holiday until after Labour Day, but ordinarily meets Mondays at 6:30pm in the Strathcona County Library at Sherwood Park Mall. There’s a more casual one just northwest of downtown, a games night that meets 6:45pm Thursdays at Queen Mary Park Community Hall, and they are switching on and off this summer in an erratic, flickering sort of way. Both offer good people and a welcome place to start, but are not so good in terms of tournament preparation.

I’ve been contemplating this since first year, but I do wonder if there is any interest in a Scrabble student group on the U of A campus. It would be a good way to foster some new opponents, as I reckon there are a lot of living-room players out there who are on the cusp – they can beat all their friends, but haven’t had the exposure or opportunity to move beyond that. Campus is also easily accessible without a vehicle, and that’s a big deal. But seeing as how I might be on my way out in a year, it’s not an easy project to get underway. The game, on a serious level, just isn’t for everybody.

The above is not a bitter declaration to the people who have been bugging me about updating this Hole-in-the-Wall, Wyoming of mine by every pedestrian means possible. I was really hoping for a request by telegram, but it seems that nobody has caught on to how I tend to reward my kind of scum – fearless and inventive. I’m not saying that you should barge in on my desert palace with a captive Wookiee in one hand and a thermal detonator in the other every time my blog traipses off and hibernates in a block of carbonite without prior warning, but telegrams are cool.

The above title is, apropos, a reference to Charlie Brown’s summer camp bunkmate in an amusing Peanuts story arc published in July 1971 – and if you caught it, dear sir or madam, I salute thee.

So here we proceed to the substance of my return, and unlike the disgraced coverboy of Punch-Out for the Nintendo Entertainment System, there’s no Kevin McBride to stop me. The only thing that may stop me, as I have discovered to both my detriment and yours, is a promise.

You’d think I would have picked up on this by now after almost two years of aperiodically pushing mountains of ideas onto the metaphorical stack and never bothering to pop, but I should never, ever again promise a future post – not to myself, for sure, and especially not to you guys up there in the loft who pay a nickel in time every night to see this two-bit digital cabaret.

Vonnegut’s last novel, to which I often refer in spite of not having opened it in eight years, is (to oversimplify) a book about the author’s inability to write the book. At this very moment, I am operating in that spirit. Yes, I know I promised a modem-breaking photo journal of the eleven-and-a-half hours I spent in my Jedi robes lining up for Revenge of the Sith at South Edmonton Common. To my credit (but acknowledging Watto’s reminder that Republic credits are no good out here), I do have those photographs at the ready. I’m reluctant to post them here at the full resolution, but I’m just amateur enough a photographer that the vast majority of the pictures do not show much of discernible value once shrunk to manageable dimensions. Clearly, I need something more efficacious, perhaps along the lines of the sockless house-elves or typewriter monkeys that run the Jones Collection.

I’ll work around the limitations somehow – maybe just post a few choice shots instead of covering the entire day-long chronology as originally projected – but for the time being, take my word for it that the costumes were awesome.

And that’s the kind of thing that has kept me from writing here lately, but it is not alone in that regard. I came across a number of observations as I started planning a framework for a whole series of dissertations on Episode III, which certainly instigates as many potential controversies as it resolves on the surface.

The first obstacle I recognized was that every time the credits roll (and here I should note that I’ve only seen ROTS a couple of times), I feel that I am not yet ready to tackle the subjects I want to tackle until I see it just one more time; not because I don’t know what I want to say, but because I seek reinforcement, and I’d prefer to test my theories vigorously before unleashing them upon the unsuspecting public.

The second was known to me: with little exception, I loathe discussing Star Wars with laypeople. This is part of why the idea was to do a number of standalone posts that responded and answered to nobody, because the overwhelming majority of people who broach the subject don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. In fact, I think this of most cinema in general, which is why I am more hesitant to discuss film in polite company than politics or religion by several orders of magnitude. Most people don’t know how to watch it. However, some folks are swell and receptive enough to pick it up, and that I don’t mind at all, as we all have to start somewhere. But those landlocked in their own binary reduction of “criticism” into either liking something or destroying it, when it is properly the understanding and inference of a hypothetical literary system at work – those I won’t deal with. And that includes, as a proper subset, a lot of otherwise smart people.

The third obstacle is an extension of the second, and not an intuitive one: with little exception, I loathe discussing Star Wars with other self-proclaimed Star Wars fans. A good chunk of them fall into the category of people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, but think they do. Some of them are too blindly polluted by the licensing project’s inflicted travesties; others have yet to move beyond the elementary misconception of critical thinking I mentioned earlier.

There do exist others still with some measure of intelligence who have not retreated behind the curtain out of frustration, and I respect them. Even if they disagree with me on certain key judgments and interpretations about George Lucas’ six-episode cycle (which happens, as I have a higher opinion of Episodes I and II than most), at least they do it in a reasonable fashion where conclusions follow from premises, and the premises aren’t apocryphal junk. Over the years I’ve managed to pick out a few people from the forum scene who are not categorically idiotic, and it turns out the ideal solution was to go off and discuss the films in and out in a private community by invitation only. Ironically, though, analytical prowess under a common umbrella of knowledge and passion breeds a swift compromise of mutual comprehension, and discussions don’t go for very long before most of the bases are covered and everyone who is late on the game (recently, that would be me) is left nodding in agreement with little to add.

I love writing about Star Wars. I hate writing about Star Wars. And that’s why I haven’t been writing about it, though this may just be an elaborate excuse to avoid building a precarious house of cards that begs to collapse under its own weight before it has even come into existence.

There have been other delaying factors shuffling in and out of play, and while I may discuss them in a subsequent post, I make no promises.