Raymond Chandler once said that chess was as elaborate a waste of intelligence as you could find outside an advertising agency. Still, it had always been a human waste. As a last redoubt of the rarified mind, it was an irresistible target for programmers and purveyors of the new “thinking machines.” By the 1980s, computers had reached a level of sophistication that allowed them to challenge a grand master. As it happened, the world’s greatest chess player in the mid-80’s was a restless genius named Garry Kimovich Kasparov (pronounced “Gary” in Russian).

Now if you’re anything like me, you’re British, wear only white socks and sometimes cry yourself to sleep. You’ve also had it up to here with these constant Marijuana-related revelations. Every day it’s either The Sun printing some story about an asthmatic 95-year-old AIDs victim dying after one joint, or it’s some heavily-dreaded druggie’s blog stating that the enigmatic herb can now cure cancer. As you can imagine, it pleased me to no end when a new study sauntered in and debunked every single one of these mad-hat theories, as well as shedding some light on the drug for us non-users.

Good evening, internet audience. My name is Nick Hilbourn and, yes, I am a father and a competent authority on parental advice. It came to my realization around 2:34 am this morning that children ask many, many questions. They are curious beings. As parents we should usually encourage these questions, although we should discourage stupid questions.

I know what you’re thinking: hey, Stephen, you’ve been with your girlfriend for about seven months now, and even though you talk about her all the time, I bet the sex is starting to cool off. Sure, I’ve heard that old cliché about relationships—the beginning is steamy and adventurous, then settles into routine. So I can imagine why you’d think that about me and Kristi.

I overheard what I think was a three-person writing group in a coffee shop the other day. There was a woman talking about all of the interesting things that had happened to her in her past, and how whenever she tried to write them down, the “voice” was wrong; it came out all wrong and it wasn’t any good. I thought, why didn’t she just write that down instead of saying it to her friends: that was, the way she told the story, just then, was surely as good as the story was ever going to be, so why not write it down, or record herself telling it and transcribe it later, and look at it to see if it’s a good story, or nearly as good as it would have been if, when you’d written it down, the voice had been right and it had been good.