What Power!

Reporters spend their lives observing world events, but never become the subject of scrutiny themselves... so you can imagine my surprise when I clicked on this link to find that Guy Holloway—one of my dearest friends with whom I have remained in contact despite long stretches of time between some of our correspondences—has not only started his own blog, but that his first blog entry was about me!

Cheeky bastard... I'll fart you back a blast or two! (In case you thought I suddenly got gratuitously profane, that's an Aristophanes reference from The Birds or The Frogs or The Aardvarks or some other such play he wrote with animals in it.) (Although I guess Aristophanes was pretty gratuitously profane, huh? What dramatic purpose, when you think about it, can flatulence ever serve?)

Guy's primary character flaw is that he reawakened my interest in chess on the first night we met, at a cast party at his house. After that, too many Saturday mornings were spent at his Paris flat musing about literature, drinking tea, and playing with fancy wooden chess pieces atop a plastic green and white fold-out board. It wasn't long before he showed me the old bar where Oscar Wilde used to play chess whilst in exile in Paris. Yesterday, I finally returned the favor by introducing him to Its Your Turn. A hit—a palpable hit!

I've added Guy's blog to my list of blogs, simply because I know Guy well enough to suspect that his blog is bound to be replete with enough Hollowayisms to equal and even surpass my Rossonianisms. Guy is far more the world traveller than I, mainly because living in Europe provides him with a geographical advantage. His blogs will most certainly illustrate that bohemian flair, if not his mischievous Anglo-Saxon wit.

Guy and I love recycling the more amusing stories we've shared—his girlfriend once almost set their flat on fire from not tending to the oven and then sincerely responded, "Why are you making such a big deal out of it? It only happened three times." Another time, I recall entering his flat and seeing 20 cases of Heineken beer in the hallway stacked all the way to the ceiling; when I inquired about them, he said they were free and added, "The irony is I don't even the like the stuff." Or the time I watched Guy purchase his first pair of jeans when he came to visit in New York.

And then there's our favorite story—how we both still laugh ourselves to tears when we remember ourselves thinking cutting edge computer technology once included the Timex Sinclair 1000, a computer so far ahead of its time that it was actually made by a watch company. To outmatch its competitors, the Timex Sinclair included a whopping 16 kiloByte memory expansion. What power!

Welcome to the Blogosphere, Guy!