2021

 I mentioned in a recent post that this is a time of year for tradition. The context when I wrote it was that I found myself, not for the first time, suffering a dental problem at a time of year when one can't get an appointment with a dentist. That has been swiftly followed by my central heating playing up at a time of year when one can't get hold of a plumber, again not without precedent. So, in order to try to keep warm by typing frantically I am going to revive the annual review of the year, which I couldn't be bothered to do last year. There has certainly been a little bit more to look back over this year, and thankfully quality was mostly high even where quantity was not.

Opera: I saw nine, plus a ballet, and I'm going to give top spot to Opera North's socially distanced 'Fidelio', in large part because it was the first that I had seen for a long time and because it's about freedom. I must give an honourable mention to 'A Little Night Music' in the year that Sondheim died, plus Mahler's 2nd Symphony. I know that's not an opera, but it's my list.

Theatre: I only saw four plays, and the best was 'Wuthering Heights' by the Wise Children company. I note that I also rated them the best in 2019. This production is transferring to the National Theatre in February; you should go. Incidentally, had I bothered to give my views for 2020 the top spot would have been shared between 'Kneehigh's Ubu' and 'Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort of)'. The former starred the wonderful Katy Owen as Pere Ubu, and she also featured prominently in 'Wuthering Heights'; the latter is also just about to open in London's West End and, once gain, I would urge anyone within striking distance to go and see it.

Music: A paltry two gigs to choose from, and I'm going with Martin Simpson, again largely because it was the first in a long time for him as well as me. There might be more of that line of thought in these lists.

Film: A mere three films in the cinema, and the jury has decided to withhold the prize for this year. One of the three was the Bond film: what a load of old tosh, although I did rather enjoy the action sequence in the Italian village near the beginning.

Talks: Talks mainly moved online, and I moved with them. I saw twenty nine, only two of which were in person. The best I think was one on building ventilation given by a member of the government's SAGE advisory committee; I may live the rest of my life outdoors. On a less gloomy note, I very much enjoyed the Royal Armouries talk on 'The Life and Career of Captain William Dawson RN'. The worst talk by some way was 'The Jewellery of Downton Abbey'; what was I thinking?

Books: I read 118 books, it clearly being something that one can do without leaving home. Books of the year were: for fiction 'The Good Soldier Švejk'; and for non-fiction David Hepworth's '1971' about rock music's greatest year.

Boardgames: Apart from the expansion to 'Maquis' - where I'm sorry to say that the French Resistance is not prospering under my leadership - I have only played two-player games. Of those I played 14 different games 84 times. I think I might do a separate post about which of those I would recommend. The local boardgaming club has resumed weekly sessions, and I trust that at some point in 2022 circumstances will be such that I feel comfortable in joining them.

Wargames: I think there were ten wargames played or umpired, although this seems to be the one area where my compulsion to keep records doesn't apply. They were mainly Piquet and its variants except for one game of To the Strongest! and one of X-wing. I enjoyed them all but probably for me the siege games had the edge; possibly because the rules gave a much more enjoyable game for the defender than I thought they would when I read them. During lockdown I have built up a mighty pile of new, unplayed rules and would hope that: a) I can get one or more of them to table in 2022; and b) they work half as well as these did. It was good to see Mark back on a regular basis as well.

Event of the Year: I am very tempted by the time I saw armed police intervening in a queue jumping dispute in a branch of Greggs, which for some reason I neglected to post about at the time. However, really it has to be the first wargame after a hiatus of more than a year. Just because.

I wish you all love in a peaceful world.

The real part of every non-trivial zero of the Reimann zeta function is 1/2

 Or is it?

Otley, the town in which I live, has almost as many churches as it does pubs; and it has a lot of pubs. Because of this - the church bit not the pub bit - I and my fellow citizens regularly get pieces of paper put through our letterboxes informing us of 'the good news'. Indeed one minor upside of Covid is that the various congregations have stopped knocking on the door to tell me all about it in person. Anyway, today being Christmas Eve, I assumed that the home-printed sheet delivered this afternoon was something along those lines. But no, it was someone living relatively locally announcing to the world that they had proved the Reimann hypothesis, a conjecture which as I'm sure you all know dates from 1859 and is one of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics. Now that is good news.

A chap with a beard

After having a celebration cup of tea and mince pie I started to wonder why the door-to-door delivery had been felt necessary, so I re-read the note. It turns out that the writer was appealing for anyone with a modicum of mathematical knowledge to double check her workings prior to her claiming the large prize on offer, which from memory is US $1 million. Sadly, an unimpressive degree in Mathematical Sciences nearly half a century ago is far from sufficient for me to feel qualified to volunteer. Still, it is the season of goodwill to all men, so I wish her joy in her search, even if her chosen method of making it seems a tad unorthodox. If any reader feels better qualified than me to help, then let me know and I'll put you in touch. In any event, when this auspicious event makes the headlines, remember that you read it here first.

It just remains for me to wish you all Gut Yontiff and a happy, peaceful and, above all, healthy time over Christmas.

Moff Off

 We had a pre-Christmas game of X-Wing last night. I've played it a few times before and always enjoyed it. The rules run smoothly and give a game that's light, fun, quick-moving and - to me at least - completely abstract. I have never seen any of the Star Wars films and therefore know nothing of the setting. That only affects the game very slightly, in that it makes a little harder to keep track of pilots' special abilities etc. But if one just goes with the flow, it passes the time quite pleasantly. Interestingly Mark was playing the game for the first time and also turned out to have no interest in fantasy space worlds, but he seemed to enjoy things as well.

James had written the scenario, which came with a sort of fan-fiction style backstory involving a kidnapped Moff. I shan't pass comment on his prose style - which will in any case be familiar to anyone who's ever read one of his Chronicles of Kermit the Hermit - except to point out that he missed a great opportunity offered by the action described therein to make a joke about Moff balls. It became clear that half the players on the night hadn't grasped the exact significance of the presence of His Moffness aboard the escape pod, so James explained it to us, at somewhat more length than it seemed to me that the subject deserved.  In any event the Rebel Alliance, which was Peter and me, won the day by getting the Moff (I decline to use the surname James gave him) out of the asteroid belt and off the table. 

I've just done some research on Wookiepedia and find that the Grand Moff (how can people say all this with a straight face?) in the original trilogy was played by well-known wargamer Peter Cushing. It's a small world; or a galaxy far, far away; one of the two.

PotCXIpouri

 It's at this time of the year that one likes to indulge in tradition, and sure enough one of my crowns has fallen out, just in time to cause me maximum inconvenience over the festive period. On the plus side, someone reading about my camera connection problems using Windows 11 has pointed out that my laptop would almost certainly have an SD card reader. And indeed it has, if one bothers to look for it, so I am now in a position to thrill you with beautiful photos from the annexe once again.

However, instead I think it's about time I posted another random photo of people you don't know or care about, with no explanation:

I lied about the no explanation; the chap in the middle is W.G. Boorer, whose exploits having been shot down over the North Sea were featured previously on this blog.

The Siege Works

 The rules may work, but the link between my camera and my laptop still doesn't. (As an aside, having failed with everything else I have now ordered a new cable. If that does the trick then apologies to Microsoft will appear here in due course.) In the meantime readers are denied the full range of artistic shots that I took and are instead limited to a quick snap on the phone.

The game was closely poised when time ran out. I said that I would finish it solo and, who knows, maybe I will. One thing I rather like about the rules is the sheer variety of things that can happen, and we had a couple of occurrences that we hadn't encountered before. There was an uprising of sorts by the civilians within the town, which didn't amount to much, and then news came that a relieving army was on the way, albeit it turned out to be coming as slowly as it possibly could. 

So, by and large I am happy with the rules, but I think they need to be tweaked to achieve a couple of things: increase the besieger's chances of winning somewhat and make sure a game will finish in two evenings. The main routes to do that are likely to be to start the game with some of the second parallel already built, for it be be possible for siege guns to be placed closer together (either two guns in an emplacement or just making the emplacements smaller), and perhaps reducing the strengths of the walls. The rules as published are necessarily agnostic about scenery definitions, so I think I also need to clarify further what can and can't be done with the pieces I actually have; e.g. how many units can be one one stretch of fortress wall. And I think some escalade rules would keep the defenders on their toes.

In an event, it will be a while before we have another go. I'm going to clear the table - either before or after I finish off the game - and try something else. In the short term Mark has promised/threatened to bring round his classic 20mm Napoleonics (which can be seen here) for some Old School, er, goodness. 

I've Killed the Ghost

 And so to the opera. I confess that I wasn't at all familiar with the work of Gian Carlo Menotti, who, despite having been at one point the most performed of 20th century opera composers, hasn't been in fashion recently. However, I have now seen two of his works within a week, performed by different companies. He is obviously having a moment back in the limelight.

The Rough Guide to Opera uses the term 'overcharged emotion' to describe 'The Medium' and I think that's fair enough. Indeed, I might go so far as to say it was melodramatic. A similar question is posed as in 'The Turn of the Screw': are the ghosts real or the product of overheated imaginations? The usual operatic spoiler alert applies - someone dies in the end - and for some reason the director chose to make that a different person than the one indicated by the composer. I overheard someone speculate that we were thereby to assume that the other character had died offstage at some point and become a ghost himself, but your guess is as good as mine. Obscurum per obscurius.

The travails of the composer when faced with theatrical reality and the egos of producers, directors, performers and, above all, funders is the theme of Richard Strauss' 'Ariadne auf Naxos', which I've also seen; or to be precise I saw the Prologue, the first part of the opera, which deals with the backstage shenanigans before the opera - i.e. the opera within the opera - is performed. Think, 'Kiss Me, Kate' or the Mechanicals from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'.  It was very well done. I felt that the soprano playing the character of Prima Donna - i.e. the soprano playing the soprano who would have played Ariadne had we got that far - had based her performance on Miss Piggy. My companion for the afternoon demurred on the grounds that she - the soprano - was too young to have heard of the Muppets. Tempus fugit.

The other Menotti piece was 'Amahl and the Night Visitors'. This was a seasonal production as the visitors in question were the Three Kings, bearing the usual gifts plus, a new one on me, a parrot. It was quite charming, although in a world where directors feel free to alter things as they see fit, I might have changed the lyric "Little child, may I touch you?". Tempora mutantur.

Smoke on the Water

 If the Epictetus media empire hadn't been offline thanks to Microsoft then it would have been my intention to mark the 50th anniversary of the burning down of the casino at Montreux on December 4th 1971. Better late than never:

Turning it up to eleven

 “It was always cheaper to build a new 33-MegaLith circle than upgrade an old slow one.” 

- Terry Pratchett

In my absence from the blog over the last week or so the shocks have kept coming in the the specific fields of politics and cricket: it turns out that the prime minister is a liar and that England aren't very good. However, it hasn't been any amazement which I may have felt that has prevented me from blogging; rather it has been the after-effects of upgrading my laptop to Windows 11. Much driver updating later, almost everything now seems to work. The exception is that I still can't transfer photos from my camera, which is unfortunate because there has been a game in the annexe. 

I have had, therefore, to resort to my phone to record the intricate trenches with which the besiegers have approached the fortress having learned from the mistakes of the first game. The scenario is basically the same, with only some minor tweaks to how the wall strengths are recorded. Once again it proved to be an enjoyable evening, and we shall resume next week with the bombardment proper. My rules for assaults got a run out when the attackers launched a brief sortie against the sappers in the foremost trench. Whilst I hadn't had that specific situation in mind when I wrote them, the process didn't fall over when put to the test; faint praise, but the most that I'm prepared to give.

Here's why 11 is better than 10: