Gerocognition

The Tangerine Turd seems have a bee in his bonnet about proving his (entirely imaginary) mental capacity, which rather reminds me of this:

During a visit to the local psychiatric hospital, Donald asked the Director how they determined whether or not a patient should be institutionalised.

"It's simple actually," said the Director. "We fill up a bathtub, then we offer a teaspoon, a teacup and a bucket to the patient. We ask him or her to empty the bathtub."

"I understand." said Donald "Obviously a normal person would choose the bucket because it's bigger than the spoon or the teacup."

"No. A normal person would pull the plug and let it drain. Do you want a bed near the window?"

Here's Little Feat with 'Fat Man in the Bathtub':

That's no way to run a railroad

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." - Adam Smith

Having pointed out in my last post that I was temporarily relying on a tablet to access Blogger, the aforementioned tablet promptly stopped working. Having eventually figured out how to discuss the subject with Amazon - and given that their customer service is actually rather good, why do they make it so difficult to access it? - I was a bit baffled by their response. They declined to replace the item, which is what I wanted, but instead offered me a refund and asked me to re-order separately. The price has dropped in the six weeks since I bought it, so in effect Amazon have replaced my faulty kit and refunded me £40.

All of which put me in mind of a visit that I made to Sainsbury's last weekend. I bought £20.20 worth of groceries, but had so many money-off vouchers that I only had to pay £1.70. The supermarket is currently running a promotion whereby when one's Nectar card is scanned one can win bonus points. I duly won £5. So, I walked away with stuff to the value of more than £20 and in effect they gave me £3.30 for my trouble.

Seeing as these two large organisations seem intent on giving me things, I shall offer them some free professional advice in return. Speaking as an accountant, the only way to make a profit is to take more money from the customer than you give him or her. That is all.

More reserve undemolition

As we resumed the game James was quick to poo-poo my concept that what we were playing was actually an old school game. His convincingly argued point was that what really distinguished the old school were the incompleteness of their rules with common situations on the tabletop not covered and having to be be settled by 'wargamers common sense'; a resource often in short supply. I stand corrected and won't confuse things like that again.

Anyway, the conclusion of 'Reserve Demolition' produced the expected outcome. If you recall The Prussians started the evening with no morale and in fact James threw in the towel almost at once before, er, carrying on. It didn't do him any good because his units were destroyed one after the other. The standout among them were the engineers on the bridge itself who, despite a somewhat dodgy officer, fought valiantly and destroyed a regiment of Russian cavalry before running away in the face of a second. They hadn't primed the explosives, but then Frederick hadn't sent word anyway.

The early finish allowed us to reset it and start again. This time James commands the Russians and Peter the Prussians. I am the in charge of the second Russian command which hasn't as yet turned up, but in any case contains what seems to be the most useless of heavy cavalry brigades. Not much has happened except that we've managed to lose our howitzers, which may come back to haunt us.

Gone, gone, gone

An interesting point arose in this second game when the Russians wanted to interpenetrate cavalry through infantry and it became apparent that the rules didn't cover that particular aspect of things. It didn't matter though because we settled it by the application of a bit of common sense; that's the modern way of doing it.