Aim Here

Division A Table and Outstanding Results Division A P W D L Pts ancientnoise 18 16 2 0 50 DearyMe 18 16 1 1 49 AimHere 21 15 0 6 45 The_Curmudgeon 20 13 2 5 41 stewartmathers 20 11 0 9 33 KenDeans 20 7 2 11 23 AlbinoRov 18 4 2 12 14 invergowrie 17 3 4 10 13 AH13STU 12 4 0 8 12 Arabjoe 18 3 3 12 12 beef2711 16 3 2 11 11 The_kid1433 16 2 2 12 8 Still tight at the top, with only 1 point between the two front runners, and 3 outstanding results to come in for each. Also plenty of outstanding results at the other end of the table, so the tail-enders can still avoid the drop! Here's the game results yet to come in. Get these challenges sent, games played, and results reported! 5 AH13STU vs beef2711 9 DearyMe vs AH13STU 10 beef2711 vs The_kid1433 12 The_kid1433 vs AH13STU 13 beef2711 vs Arabjoe 14 AlbinoRov vs AH13STU 15 AH13STU vs Arabjoe 17 invergowrie vs The_kid1433 17 AH13STU vs The_Curmudgeon 18 AH13STU vs invergowrie 18 beef2711 vs DearyMe 19 ancientnoise vs AH13STU 19 The_kid1433 vs AlbinoRov 20 ancientnoise vs invergowrie 20 Arabjoe vs The_kid1433 21 invergowrie vs AlbinoRov 21 DearyMe vs ancientnoise 21 KenDeans vs AH13STU 21 The_kid1433 vs beef2711 21 stewartmathers vs The_Curmudgeon 22 DearyMe vs invergowrie 22 Arabjoe vs AlbinoRov 22 ancientnoise vs KenDeans 22 beef2711 vs AimHere 22 AH13STU vs stewartmathers

Wikipedia reports six notable, living, holes, so we'll get those jabs in, eventually.

If we get an influx of titled players I may have to consider a system of giving the untitled players piece odds!

The league season is winding down. All the fixtures have been sent out and I'm just waiting for them all to be played. In a few weeks I'll start the next season, I'll ask in this thread who wants to play, and if you pipe up with your chess.com ID, we'll slot you in.

According to Wikipedia, Hibs have a player from the World War 1 era called William Dornan who played 357 league games for Hibs without ever scoring a goal. He didn't score in any of the 25 games he played when on loan to Leith Athletic either. Eventually, he scored a single goal in one of this 107 appearances for Queen of the South.

We've just established that ancientnoise's wean is open to bribery, so I'm not about to discount underhand jiggery-pokery here. The question is which, if any, of the P&B chess crowd would stoop to such skullduggery.

I'm pretty sure that's right. You're probably due a lifetime achievement award for hogging the first blood bonus like this.

This digging up of last year's bodies is giving me the fear again. Thankfully nobody picked yer last year, either.

Division B Table and Outstanding Fixtures Division B P W D L Pts redVtop 22 21 1 0 64 pleslie999 21 17 1 3 52 PnbMathematics 22 14 2 6 44 Basedgodsa1nt 21 13 1 7 40 Dandies1983 17 10 1 6 31 N5_Spur 22 8 1 13 25 mackieboz 19 7 1 11 22 RBWatson 21 7 1 13 22 markf268 17 6 0 11 18 DieHardDoonhamer 18 4 0 14 12 Dustysghost 20 4 0 16 12 XCTR94 16 2 1 13 7 |-------+-----------------------------------| | Round | Fixture | |-------+-----------------------------------| | 8 | markf268 vs Dandies1983 | | 12 | XCTR94 vs mackieboz | | 14 | Dandies1983 vs mackieboz | | 15 | XCTR94 vs Dandies1983 | | 16 | markf268 vs mackieboz | | 17 | XCTR94 vs markf268 | | 18 | DieHardDoonhamer vs XCTR94 | | 19 | Dandies1983 vs markf268 | | 20 | DieHardDoonhamer vs Dandies1983 | | 21 | Basedgodsa1nt vs DieHardDoonhamer | | 21 | XCTR94 vs Dustysghost | | 22 | DieHardDoonhamer vs markf268 | | 22 | pleslie999 vs XCTR94 | | 22 | Dustysghost vs RBWatson | |-------+-----------------------------------| There's a bit less to catch up on here, and we now have newcomer redVtop / @Caro-Kann mathematically assured of the top tier, but what I said for division A goes for division B, too. Please catch up on your outstanding fixtures!

Division A Table and Outstanding Fixtures Division A P W D L Pts ancientnoise 17 15 2 0 47 DearyMe 17 15 1 1 46 AimHere 19 13 0 6 39 The_Curmudgeon 19 12 2 5 38 stewartmathers 20 11 0 9 33 KenDeans 18 7 2 9 23 AlbinoRov 18 4 2 12 14 invergowrie 17 3 4 10 13 AH13STU 10 3 0 7 9 Arabjoe 16 2 3 11 9 beef2711 12 2 2 8 8 The_kid1433 15 2 2 11 8 All the fixtures have been assigned, so now it's just a case of catching up on old results. |-------+----------------------------------| | Round | Fixture | |-------+----------------------------------| | 5 | AH13STU vs beef2711 | | 9 | DearyMe vs AH13STU | | 10 | beef2711 vs The_kid1433 | | 11 | AimHere vs beef2711 | | 12 | The_kid1433 vs AH13STU | | 13 | beef2711 vs Arabjoe | | 14 | AlbinoRov vs AH13STU | | 15 | AH13STU vs Arabjoe | | 16 | beef2711 vs AH13STU | | 17 | invergowrie vs The_kid1433 | | 17 | AH13STU vs The_Curmudgeon | | 17 | ancientnoise vs beef2711 | | 18 | AH13STU vs invergowrie | | 18 | beef2711 vs DearyMe | | 18 | Arabjoe vs KenDeans | | 19 | ancientnoise vs AH13STU | | 19 | The_kid1433 vs AlbinoRov | | 19 | KenDeans vs beef2711 | | 20 | ancientnoise vs invergowrie | | 20 | AH13STU vs DearyMe | | 20 | Arabjoe vs The_kid1433 | | 21 | invergowrie vs AlbinoRov | | 21 | DearyMe vs ancientnoise | | 21 | AimHere vs Arabjoe | | 21 | KenDeans vs AH13STU | | 21 | The_kid1433 vs beef2711 | | 21 | stewartmathers vs The_Curmudgeon | | 22 | DearyMe vs invergowrie | | 22 | Arabjoe vs AlbinoRov | | 22 | ancientnoise vs KenDeans | | 22 | beef2711 vs AimHere | | 22 | AH13STU vs stewartmathers | | 22 | The_Curmudgeon vs The_kid1433 | |-------+----------------------------------| If you've played these and not reported the result, please report it. If you've not started these games yet, you should send out a challenge. If you're already playing these games, then please carry on! As usual, results and calculations are on the spreadsheet at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YwODlp2A0TBMf2VuyjJox4ZaiyNKmLk37TH0_HrC-jk/

@alta-pete is doing that experiment this year. If he wins with a record-breaking 12 hits, all with unnatural causes bonuses from defenestration, then it might be time for a rule change.

Yeah, usually it doesn't matter about the exact date, except if it's before or after the birthday or in December, so I'm a little slipshod about hitting the right date. In this case, it does matter because of the bonus situation.

The 'Players' worksheet in my results spreadsheet gives you an at-a-glance view of which of your picks is a solo or not (deep blue = solo, light blue = duo). In your case 8 solos, and 3 duos. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yfhdssUxqb8bZfMcgZKdPigZNqp83pJHRVdMR23MnyY/edit#gid=0

People seem to be ramping up their solo shots this year - from 442 to 517, with almost the same number of players. I don't know if it's that all the low-hanging fruit got picked last year and nobody knows who's going to die next, or they're actually putting in more research into the slightly-off-the-beaten-track picks. The two big risers in the popularity stakes are Bruce Willis, from 5 picks last year, to 30 this time round, while Esther Rantzen stops being a deadly duo, and gets a whopping 42 picks. Right at the top, experienced old Dead Pool hands Jimmy Carter (57), Rob Burrow(51) and Shannen Doherty(49) are still putting in a good showing, popularitywise. Long may they continue to do so! The two most similar teams this year are The_Craig and last year's runner-up psv_killie who share a whopping *eleven* picks between them. I suspect there's a good chance that it's only captain and vice-captain bonus points that will separate them this year.

Not to mention that a number of the police 'heroes' in Simon's books and who formed the basis for characters in his earlier shows later had their names mentioned in miscarriage of justice scandals. There is a corrective of sorts in 'We Own This City', Simon's later show about a real-life corrupt Baltimore police task force, where the show is less sympathetic to the individual police officers, shows them being far more corrupt than in THe Wire, and it shows the policing system as essentially unfixable.

The rules are that they can't be famous for being terminally ill. It's to weed out all those people who get in the news for doing a charity marathon before they croak, or for announcing they're off to guzzle a few glasses of Chateau Dignitas or for legal battles after their parents trying to stop the doctor turning off the life support system, that kind of thing. Some hitherto famous person who announces that they have stage four cancer or MND is perfectly fine as a pick.

Young, extremely ill, dies in the first few days of January. Derek has @Ned Nederlander pick written all over him.

I'm annoyed that I missed this thread. I'd have given a full ten points to Heimat (presumably getting it some notice on the score table) and a second place to the Wire (helping push it closer to the top spot), and given the unjustly forgotten Edge of Darkness at least some points. I'm also pondering Das Boot. Are you sure all the Das Boot votes were for the newer minseries rather than the 1980s version, which was an extended version of the movie and the format I remember first seeing it in?

Brigadier Frank Kitson, who wrote infamous counter-insurgency manuals advocating tactics such as 'counter-gangs' (using terrorist groups against insurgents) and 'pseudo-gangs' (forming fake insurgent groups to entrap activists), and who seemingly put those tactics in place when he ran the British Army in Northern Ireland during the disastrous early years of the Troubles, has died aged 91.

procedure obituary (readerisprogrammer : boolean; readersage : integer); begin writeln('Computer Scientist Niklaus Wirth, who died on January 1st'); writeln('was a famous name for computer programmers of a certain vintage'); if ((not readerisprogrammer) or (readersage < 50)) then begin writeln('He was famous for writing some ancient computer languages'); writeln('that you''ve never heard of and for advocating a style of'); writeln('writing computer programs in an orderly fashion that most'); writeln('programmers use today.'); end else begin writeln('He was most famous for developing Pascal, EULER and variants'); writeln('of ALGOL, as well as his advocacy of structured programming'); if (readersage < 50) then begin writeln ('You probably use structured programming in'); writeln('every computer program you write without even knowing it.'); end else begin writeln('He also coined the famous slogan ''GOTO Considered Harmful'''); writeln('often misattributed to Edsger Dijkstra'); end end end;

I can see either one or two mistakes, and happily, my top-spot place isn't one of them. Ben Cull seems to have conflicting birthday information; the Daily Mail puts him at 23, while the Mirror and Wikipedia put him at 24. It just means that sparky88 might be on 415 rather than 416. alta-pete is on the high-score table twice, at 139 and 199. The 199 score is the right one. Happy with the win, though it was about the tightest one possible. I'm still half expecting to turn on the news at Easter and hear that the body of 70s Crackerjack star Don Maclean was found in a bedsit in Cricklewood after the neighbours complained about the smell and his demise has been forensically backdated to New Year's Eve. Thanks to Miguel for an excellently run competition, as always, and to all my picks, especially Ryan O' Neal for punching far higher above his weight than any octagenarian should ever be expected to, in this game.

Patrick Stewart didn't even have hair back then. He went bald in the early sixties. He's wearing a wig in Claudius.

You might be mistaken. Maybe some other Camilla, or some other Batman.

Among other things, yes.