Over the last year or so I have created a Chess Opening Mnemonic Major Memory System For The 1.d4 Opening Repertoire for the White chess player. My memory system covers the first few moves (up to as many as 17 in one case) of 184 opening variations in the 1.d4 [Read more…]
Back in 2015 I posted a review of the Ogoola Karuta English poets card game which I had been playing in some of my English language classes here in Hiroshima. Ogoola Karuta is based on the traditional Japanese card-grabbing game of Uta-garuta, which can be translated into English as “poetry [Read more…]
We had the perfect weather for the cherry blossom season this weekend and so I went out on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon to see the blossom. Saturday Evening Hanami and Dinner Party Hatsukaichi is a suburb of Hiroshima. Actually, nowadays it’s a city in its own right. Anyway, it’s [Read more…]
Kneeling together, and well they should, for Othello and Iago are but two parts of a single motive – related not as the halves of a sphere, but each implicit in the other. [Read More…]
Earlier this year I was listening to the Audible version of Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature and was intrigued by his discussion of Flannery O’Connor. It occurs in the last chapter of the book where things take a deeply serious turn and Greene urges us to “Meditate on [Read more…]
Yesterday I attended the graduation ceremony and graduate party for the Heisei 30 graduates of Hiroshima College of Foreign Languages (HCFL). It struck me as I watched the formal Graduation Ceremony that these are the last students to graduate during the Heisei Era (平成時代) as the current emperor will abdicate [Read more…]
Last Wednesday I “unleashed” a surprise attack against my regular chess partner, Dr. M, by deploying the Jobava London system, after watching the first of Simon Williams’ YouTube videos on the topic. Simon is an erstwhile quaffing partner of mine. We met during the British Chess Championships in Llandudno in [Read more…]
Back in June 1981 I was revising for my English Literature and Communications A-Levels. One of the books we’d been studying was The Mayor of Casterbridge and one of the quotations I learned by heart back then has stuck with me ever since. The quotation is: Henchard’s act of violence [Read more…]
I did not intend to write about one of my A-Level teachers tonight. I was going to write about a quotation relating to The Mayor of Casterbridge that I committed to memory for my A Level English Lit exam and which has been buzzing around inside my head this week. [Read more…]
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