Steve Kubby (Libertarian)

The Joker has decided to reform and is now running for president.

He’ll never get the endorsement of l3rucewayne. However, he gives his own State of the Union address on YouTube wearing some hokey tie. (website)

(I’ll get back to blog-reading and responding to your comments soon. This post was published a week ago, thanks to the wonders of “Edit Timestamp”.)

Celebrating St. Patty’s Day tonight? Here’s my special recipe for green beer:

Mascot Green Beer

Ingredients:
Beer
Green Food Coloring

Recipe:
1. Pour beer in drinking receptacle.

2. Put several drops of food coloring in beer.

3. Mix it around with a spoon. A blender is overkill.

4. Get wasted.

A tournament of a different type. March Madness is upon us, and everyone’s filling out brackets trying to win stuff. Liquid Egg Product recognizes the thirst of the people to brag about their bracketology skills, so is offering a contest of its own via ESPN’s Tournament Challenge.

The Mascot has generously offered to give the winner a Mascot T-shirt or mug! The winner can customize the shirt or mug by selecting any Mascot picture (he’ll even take a custom photo if it’s not too difficult a request) and the winner’s favorite quote from the not-so-wise quotes.

Next year, I hope he offers a prize that someone will actually want.

To join:

1. Register on ESPN.com at the Tournament Challenge. (Uncheck the “offers” so you don’t get a bunch of unwanted e-mail.)

2. Join the Liquid Egg Product group.

3. Create a bracket.

That’s it! Imagine the joy you’ll experience by owning a shirt that has this, this, or even this on the front.

Week 5 Results

Week 6 Matchups

Standings

		 dnk Pol Whr Tac LEP cl  l3r Tom RR  gor
1  drunknknite   xxx --- --- --- 1.0 1.0 --- 1.0 1.0 1.0 5.0
2  Polly         --- xxx 1.0 --- 1.0 --- 0.0 1.0 1.0 --- 4.0
3  Wahrheit      --- 0.0 xxx 1.0 1.0 1.0 --- --- 1.0 --- 4.0
4  Tacticus      --- --- 0.0 xxx 0.0 --- 1.0 1.0 --- 1.0 3.0
5  Liquid Egg    0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 xxx --- --- --- 1.0 --- 2.0
6  chessloser    0.0 --- 0.0 --- --- xxx 1.0 0.0 --- 1.0 2.0
7  l3rucewayne   --- 1.0 --- 0.0 --- 0.0 xxx --- 1.0 --- 2.0
8  Tom           0.0 0.0 --- 0.0 --- 1.0 --- xxx --- --- 1.0
9  Rocky Rook    0.0 0.0 0.0 --- 0.0 --- 0.0 --- xxx --- 0.0
10  gorckat      0.0 --- --- 0.0 --- 0.0 --- --- --- xxx 0.0

Sometimes, you get a little of the “luck of the Irish”, and I certainly got that in my upset win. The game comes complete with an Exchange sac and I’ll be showing it off despite that Tacticus already posted it on his site.

There will be another tournament after this one completes (probably with a couple week break), and sign-up will start soon. Next time around, I want to try a format that’s not round robin and not Swiss, and any ideas are welcome.

Congratulations to drunknknite on hitting the rank of USCF Expert!

are losing 28-6 to the Dallas Mavericks. They may have scored some more points since then.

Jesse Johnson (Green Party)

Mr. Johnson’s strategy seems to be hoping people will mistake his name for “Jesse Jackson” and thus he will steal some of the black vote. Unfortunately for him, this happens to be the year of the Obama.

He didn’t take the time to find out about proper image resizing (see the unantialiased “Donate” graphic at bottom). That means he must be bending his full force of will into the presidential campaign, which is what he should be doing, I suppose. (website)

Today’s π day. March 14 is 3/14 and π is 3.14…. 3.1415926535 was as far as I cared to memorize, and even that was a waste of time.

This is a perfect day to share any π-related stories. My favorite is the day I learned about radians as an angle measurement and that a circle was 2π radians. 11th grade, I think. That had a profound effect on my future development as an adult.

Additional reading: piday.org is supposed to be the “official” π day site (at least, it’s the first site that showed up in Google).

I threw my Knight on the rim for no good reason; it felt like being down a piece. There was also a point where Polly could have won that Knight, but kept up the pressure in other ways. Then I was toast.

And if anyone was wondering how I’d gained 100 rating points by going 1-3 in the tournament, it’s because I’d not lost to anyone else at FICS during that time. Evidence the quality of chess played by LEPers is a notch above your average patzer.

News on our friend Manuel Uribe has been more sparse recently. Probably because he now weighs less than half a ton, making him considerably less interesting to the media. I’m still interested in his weight loss progress, although apparently he still hasn’t broken the 800 lb. mark.

Fortunately, Mr. Uribe decided to go out on a date recently (yes, he has a girlfriend), so the media was actually interested. It went about has well as could be expected for someone who couldn’t even get out of his house for 5 years:

When Manuel Uribe went out on a date, he made all the necessary arrangements: a forklift to carry him out of the house and a flatbed tow truck big enough to haul the formerly half-ton man and his bed to a party….

Uribe was halfway to a picnic near his Monterrey-area home on Sunday when one of the posts holding a sun-shielding tarp over his bed hit an overpass.

Uribe’s blood pressure dropped so much his doctors advised him not to go on and the celebration — being documented by about two dozen photographers and reporters from around the world — was canceled.

Source: Waco Tribune

Hey, I couldn’t help but noticing, but this blob called Uribe has managed to find a girlfriend, and he can’t even leave his house. I couldn’t help but notice your romantic life has been considerably less active than his the past year or so.

Thank you for your insight. I’ve been a little busy recently.

Yeah, sure.

Let me guess, you’re going to brag about your exploits and try to show off.

I was going to, but I don’t want to make you look too bad.

One who dubs himself the Pathology Guy has an amazing page with scores of chess variants, each with a computer opponent to try it. It would take days to try all the variants, but here’s a few I found the most interesting out of the small percentage I experimented with:

Dark Chess: You can only see the squares your pieces are allowed to move to. Knights can be really annoying. In many ways the darkness is an equalizer, certainly more than making up for the weakness of the Java chess engine. Dark Chess II prevents you from moving into check, a luxury not afforded by the first one!

Soccer Chess: Use pieces to kick a ball into a goal. There’s no pawns and no capturing.

Strong Pawn Chess: Instead of their normal movements, pawns act as a weaker version of the pieces behind them in the initial setup. For example, Bishop Pawns move one square diagonally. The center Pawns are very strong and move like Kings–don’t underestimate them!

Unfortunately, the Strip Chess variants are not working at this time.