He took a sip from his frosted latte.

"To get to the lake, you must walk through the forest. To get to the desert, you must swim across the lake. To get to the mountain you must trek through the desert. And when you reach the base of the mountain, that is where your true journey begins."

The Master began smearing marmalade on a freshly toasted piece of bread and then stopped. "And it’s a big fucking mountain."

He continued scooping large, mountain-like dollops of marmalade out of the jar.

There was a rustling among the Disciples.

"And this is just applicable to men, is it?" One Disciple asked, with a definite edge on the word ‘men’. The other Disciples shifted subtly, eyes rolling in the direction of the one who had spoken, as though they had been collectively wading in shallow waters only to discover that they were, in fact, frolicking at the very edge of a bottomless trench.

The Master stopped mid-bite, sticky toast crumbs decorating his beard in mystical patterns.

"Well," he said cautiously, clearing his throat and scattering crumbs on the tabletop, "I don’t think it only applies to men, per se, but it was generally men that I had in mind, er, yes. I suspect women have other… things… that they… have… uhm."

"Only," continued the Disciple, whose name was Allegedly Dennis, "it seems like men think they have some sort of deathgrip or something on being deep and interesting, like it takes having a penis to wonder about the inner nature of the Universe. And, if you really think about it, having a penis is probably counter-productive to doing any thinking at all. At least," Allegedly Dennis added in a dark mutter, "that’s always been my experience with men."

The Master frowned. "Look, Dennis," he said, "when you applied to join the Brotherhood, did anyone explain-"

"What if you don’t like forests?" Interjected another Disciple.

"What?" said the Master.

"What if you don’t like forests?" repeated the Disciple. "Could you have an inner carpark, instead of an inner forest?"

"An inner carpark?" said the Master incredulously. "Who in the name of Grod wants an inner carpark? That’s a horrible, soulless, desolate metaphor for an inner landscape!"

"Oh, but what, an inner forest is, like, amazingly better?" said the Disciple. "Huh, I’d rather spend my time crossing a desolate inner carpark than staggering through a self-actualising forest with creepy-crawly-things-with-claws-and-poison-darts-and-great-big-bloody-bitey-whatsit-fangs!"

"Unless you got mugged," observed a third Disciple, whose name for some reason was Inappropriate Ralph. "Most of the carparks in my neighbourhood, you’d be lucky to make it across alive even if they gave you a headstart first."

"I can’t swim," said a morose voice from the back of the group. It was a voice that knew no-one was listening to it, because no-one ever did, and in this it was perhaps the wisest voice in the room, because, in fact, no-one was listening to it at all. "I just know I’m going to drown in my inner lake."

"What I want to know," said one very intense Disciple, stabbing a finger at the air as though he meant to do it physical harm, "is whose brilliant idea was it to put Enlightenment at the top of a fucking mountain? I mean, forest, yes. Lake, whatever. Desert, okay if you absolutely must. But I get nosebleeds getting things down from the top shelf in the kitchen! Even if I go through all that other crap, I’m going to be spending all my Enlightenment leaning my head back and wishing I’d brought more tissues!"

"Look," said the Master, "the thing about Enlightenment is, you don’t just get it by going through the motions, right? If you climb to the top of the mountain and you find that your nose is bleeding, yeah, then chances are you climbed to the top of the wrong mountain. Do you see?"

There was a long, contemplative moment among the Disciples.

"Wait," said one Disciple. "There’s more than one fucking mountain?"

‘No,’ Jacob said. ‘No more talk. I’m done with talking.’

‘But,’ Jack said, ‘maybe you’ll get used to it?’

‘Get used to it?’, Jacob said with a snort. ‘I’d rather kill myself than carry you around for the rest of my life. In fact, I’d rather kill myself than carry you around for just one more day.’

‘Oh that’s lovely,’ said Jack, ‘you really know how to make someone feel like shit, don’t you?’

‘It’s nothing personal,’ Jacob said. ‘I didn’t ask to be cursed, you didn’t ask to be the curse. But here we are. Now shut up, I’m trying to read.’

‘Shut up, he says,’ Jack muttered bitterly to himself inside the box. ‘All I’ve really got is the ability to talk, and he says shut up.’

‘Shut up,’ Jacob repeated, and flipped another page of the very old book. ‘Okay, it says here that Goldmeadow was able to get rid of Evil Pixies with some sort of potion. Are you a Pixie?’

‘How the hell would I know if I’m a Pixie?’ replied Jack. ‘What does a Pixie look like? While you’re at it, what do I look like?’

‘I could tell you what you look like, but you won’t let me open the box.’

‘Yes! Don’t open the box!’ Jack said emphatically. ‘Something bad will happen if you open the box!’

‘So you keep saying, but it occurs to me that I only have your word for it.’

‘Please don’t open the box!’ Jack begged. ‘I promise you something bad will happen!’

‘Okay, okay,’ Jacob said with a sigh. ‘There’s a drawing here of a Pixie. You don’t sound like you look like that.’

‘Show me?’ said Jack. ‘You can open the box just a little bit. But,’ he added hastily, ‘only just a teeny, tiny little bit!’

Jacob held up the book and pulled the lid of the box up a fraction, so a small sliver of darkness showed from within. There was a scuttling sound inside the box, and an eyeball pressed up against the sliver.

‘This Goldmeadow,’ Jack said after a moment, ‘was he completely right in the head? I thought Pixies were supposed to be cute with an extra helping of cuteness. That thing looks like it could eat through concrete.’

‘Who knows?’ Jacob said with a shrug. ‘Maybe you need to be a bit mental to write a Grimoire about banishing Demons and Devils. And Pixies. I mean, it’s possible it might help with trafficking with the dark arts, if you’re already a little snorting mad to begin with.’

‘What’s in this potion he talks about?’

Jacob scanned the page again. ‘Doesn’t say. Just says that it’s a ‘vile and most profane concoction.”

‘Right, well, I can’t say I like the sound of that. ‘Vile and most profane?’ That sounds pretty bloody unpleasant, actually.’

‘No-one said getting rid of a curse would be pleasant. Or easy, for that matter. Don’t worry, I already assumed you weren’t going to enjoy it.’

‘Oh, that’s a weight off my mind,’ said Jack. ‘You know something? I’m three-and-a-half thousand years old. Maybe you’re my curse, did you think of that?’

‘Nice try,’ Jacob said with a razor-edge smile, ‘but you’re in the box, and I’m not. I’m going to get rid of you, and you are going to be got rid of. See? At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter who is being cursed.’ He dropped the book back onto the table and got up. ‘I’m going to see what I can find in the house to make a ‘vile and most profane concoction.’ You stay there.’

‘Oh, very funny,’ said Jack inside his box. ”You stay there.’ You should be a bloody comedian, you really should.’

A few minutes later, Jacob returned, carrying several bottles. He set them down on the table, and added a ceramic pouring jug that he had been clutching under one arm.

‘Okay, let’s see,’ he said. ‘I have bleach. I have turpentine. I have weed killer. And I have creme de menthe. If that doesn’t make a ‘vile and most profane concoction,’ nothing will.’

He reached for the first bottle and at that moment a loud thump was heard from upstairs.

‘What was that?’ Jack asked.

‘Is it 6:15?’ Jacob said, as he poured a measure of bleach into the jug. ‘It must be 6:15. At 6:15 Mrs Sphyx always hangs herself upstairs. She’s my landlady.’

‘Wait, wait, your landlady hangs herself every day at 6:15? I mean, she hangs herself?’

‘Has every day since I rented my room from her, yes.’ Jacob said with a shrug. ‘Nice lady, though.’

‘Is she not good at it? Not that I’m an expert, but I thought most people only hang themselves just the once.’

Jacob leaned closer to the box. ‘Yes,’ he said helpfully, ‘but this is Elsewhere, you see. Things are always a little different Elsewhere, haven’t you noticed? You get used to it after a while. She’ll be down in a few minutes and cooking dinner.’

‘Wow,’ said Jack. ‘You can get used to your landlady hanging herself every evening, but you can’t get used to a talking box. What does that say?’

‘It says,’ Jacob said slowly, as he measured some turpentine into the jug, ‘that you are much, much more annoying than my landlady.’

A short while later the jug was full, and while the contents looked and smelled unpleasant, neither Jacob or Jack were entirely certain it was the vile and most profane concoction mentioned in Goldmeadow’s Grimoire.

‘I have to give you extra points for adding in the creme de menthe,’ Jack said. ‘Not everyone would have the courage to do that. It definitely makes it technically evil, but I don’t know about vile and profane, exactly.’

‘Only one way to find out, I guess,’ said Jacob, taking the jug by its handle and lifting the lid on the box a fraction.

‘No, wait!’ shrieked Jack. ‘Why don’t we-’, but he didn’t get a chance to finish the thought.

‘Aargh!’ Jack yelled as Jacob poured the potion into the box. ‘No! Please! It’s…! NooooOOOooo!’

Once the jug was empty Jacob set it back on the table and listened to Jack’s shrieks and wails. Eventually Jack fell silent, and Jacob frowned.

He used a finger to open the lid a fraction, and peered inside. ‘Did it work?’ he asked hopefully.

There was a short silence, and then a sarcastic voice said from within, ‘Depends. Were you trying to make me sticky and smelly? Because, if so, I am completely fucking sticky and smelly. Well done, if that was what you were trying to achieve.’

‘Okay,’ said Jacob, ‘but no feeling like you’re going to die, or be banished, or just generally, you know, disappear?’

‘It stings a little,’ Jack said. ‘I guess that’s a plus, from your perspective.’

Jacob sighed. ‘Okay, Plan B. I brought the electric drill from the garage as well. Let’s see if that works.’

‘A drill?’ Jack said. ‘But hold on, to use a drill you’d have to… DON’T OPEN THE BOX! Please don’t open the box! The bad thing will-’, but he didn’t get a chance to finish that thought, either.

There was a sproinging sound, followed by an uncomfortable silence. Jack was hanging limply over the side of the box, his shiny wooden face and improbably large hook nose glowing with embarrassment and humiliation.

‘So,’ said Jacob calmly, ‘when does the bad thing happen?’

‘When does the… Isn’t this bad enough?’ Jack demanded. ‘I’m just hanging here, like some sort of useless idiot! I hate it when people open the box. It’s so… so… demeaning, is what it is.’

‘I can see that,’ Jacob said with a nod.

There was a soft knock on his door, and a pleasant voice said, ‘Dinner will be ready in 10 minutes.’

‘Thank you Mrs Sphyx,’ Jacob called out. Then, ’10 minutes gives me enough time to see if the drill will do any good. It’s cordless.’

‘No, wait!’ yelled Jack, but there was no waiting to be had.

I thought to myself, I could use a free hug. Who couldn’t use a free hug? Free hugs, as far as I’m concerned, are good things.

So I said to him, “I’d like a hug,” just to see where the conversation would go. It didn’t go far. He just gave me a look, and sort of pretended he needed to be standing somewhere else. Like, “Oh, that’s right, I was supposed to be standing at the other end of the platform, where the freak-per-square-metre rating is slightly lower.”

It occurred to me that he thought I wanted him to give me the hug. I thought about following him to clear this misunderstanding up, but in my experience there’s a fine line between being helpful and having to explain yourself to the security guards again.

Still, there is one joy to be had whenever I take up chess again, and that’s in trying to get Darren Saturday to believe in the existence of the ‘en passant’ pawn capture rule.

Yes, this post is going to be very dull, and very chess-nerdy. You are encouraged to go do something more interesting while I rant about this; which shouldn’t be hard to achieve, and why the hell are you still here? It’s not like you haven’t been warned.

A strange sense of Deja Vudoo

Saturday has conveniently forgotten this, but I fought the long, hard and bitter battle of convincing him that the en passant pawn capture rule truly exists, once before.

Back then – probably more than 10 years ago now – he was calling it “Murray’s Bogus Umpy Pumpy Manoeuvre”, and his unwillingness to acknowledge that maybe he was wrong led to a breakdown in communications that eventually saw him fleeing the State ahead of the mighty wrath that is Murray @ Midnight when he’s miffed [1].

Funny thing being, it’s one of the two standard rules of chess that predictably freak out everyone when they first hear about them [2].

Even so, the en passant rule is the kind of thing you really want to know about if you ever decide to rock up to a chess club. Let’s face it, chess players are not universally known for their finely-honed social skills [3], and they’re not the kind of people to forgo the making of snide comments about your lack of basic chess knowledge, given the chance.

The Umpy Pumpy Rule

The whole point of the en passant rule is that a pawn that hasn’t yet moved has a special ability. On its first move, it can jump ahead two squares instead of just 1. The player doesn’t have to move it the two squares if he or she doesn’t want to, but the option is there, just in case.

Because pawns get this special, once-off ability to rush a little faster into battle, they also take a small extra risk should a player decide to go ahead and move his or her pawn those two squares. But that risk only materialises if an enemy pawn is in a position such that it could have taken the moving pawn if it had only moved one square.

This is probably best described with a diagram, and oh look, here’s one now.

Right. Imagine the black circle is where the black pawn started from, and the white pawn is sitting there, smugly, on g5.

The person playing the black pieces decides, ‘Hey, you know what? I’m going to move my black pawn from f7 2 squares to f5, instead of just 1 square to f6, because that pawn hasn’t moved yet, and it would be amazingly cool if I did so. People will acknowledge my chess superiority, and I will get all the girls, because they are obviously into guys who know these things.’

But not so fast, player of the black pieces! You haven’t taken into account the en passant pawn capture rule!!

You see, as the player of the white pieces, I also have this once-only opportunity to take that daring black pawn as it whizzes past the normal capture square (in this case, the white pawn on g5 would only normally be able to attack pieces diagonally, on f6 and h6). This is because, in theory, the black pawn passes through [4] the f6 square, and for a brief instant was vulnerable to attack by the white pawn on g5.

So, as the player of the white pieces, I have the option to sneakily ambush that evil black pawn as it’s rushing into battle, which means that the black pawn is removed from play, and the white pawn ends up (in the case of the example in the diagram) on f6 where ‘x’ marks the spot in the diagram.

Simple, right? … Hello?

Yeah, but…

Why people have trouble believing in the existence of the en passant rule is because most of the other pieces in chess can also move multiple squares (with the exception of the King), and yet they can’t be attacked ‘in between’.

This is absolutely true, and no-one really knows exactly when this strange little arrangement for the pawns made its way into the game.

Current theory is that it’s a relatively recent development in the history of the game, first added somewhere about the 14th or 15th Century AD. It’s also thought that the pawn’s ability to move 2 squares on its first move and the ability to take that pawn if an enemy pawn is placed in just the right position were both adopted into the main ruleset of the game at about the same time.

Beyond that, the rest is mystery.

Some further reading, just in passing…

For a brief summary of the rules of chess, see: Wikipedia, Rules of chess

For a slightly more in-depth look at the en passant rule, see: Wikipedia, En passant

And from there, well, Google is your friend.

Murray @ Midnight

Google has failed me in trying to find out where this phrase came from. Probably the mammoth Oxford English Dictionary explains how the phrase developed, but since I don’t have access to it, I’ve been left with pure and utter guesswork [3].

Currently I’m wondering if it comes from the idea of agreeing to meet someone somewhere like a street corner, and if you don’t show up you effectively ‘leave them standing there’, or ‘stand them up.’ My other vague theory is that perhaps if you fail to meet someone at a restaurant that has a bar attached, you ‘leave them standing at the bar,’ or again ‘stand them up.’

Of course, I’m probably wrong about this. Anyone else have any thoughts?

But something is missing…

My Lucky Bamboo plant needs a name!

Normally I don’t have any problems naming things [1], but this time I thought I’d enlist the devious services of the Voodoonista to find the perfect name. Failing that, at least a name that wouldn’t make a Lucky Bamboo plant cringe with shame or embarrassment or lots of shame and embarrassment simultaneously.

I can’t believe it isn’t called Bamby

Please shove your suggestion in the comment box below, feel free to argue with each other and call people rude things, since I know you will anyway.

The winner will be immortalised by, well, having a plant sitting on a desk in Brisbane bearing the name you submitted. Sweeeeeet!

He was my Father, my hero and my friend.

He was the best man I have ever known, and he has left me in a world that is less bright and less beautiful and less full of wonder because he is no longer within it.

Today, for me, was the day the stories died, and I desperately wish tears could bring them back.

I miss you Dad. I love you. I will keep the promises I made to you.