They never are chess. Chess with no clothes on! Chess in their birthday suits! That kind of chess. Chess men!

 One thing I do spend quite a lot of time doing on the internet is playing chess. I discovered chess.com last year, and play five- and ten-minute games when I have a spare moment. I aim to keep my rating over 1000 in the former and 1200 in the latter; I'm realistic about my skills as a chess player. The site provides a year-in-review summary that suggests I've fallen infuriatingly short of breaking even in games played in 2023, and I know if I try to fix it by playing a lot more games, my ratio will inevitably get worse, so perhaps I should leave it at that.

Anyway, the site is trumpeting a 2024 "daily chess championship", and I was wondering if I should enter it. Time control of "one day per move", which is apparently challenging to the players who take online chess seriously. There are prizes for best blogs and best video analyses of it, and maybe I could become some kind of chess-blogger. It would be different, anyway.

Thing is, I've never really played a proper game of chess, the kind where you think about your moves for a long period of time. Even the ten-minute games on chess.com seem very relaxed to me, even accounting for my brain slowing down in my old age. At school, Noddy and I would find a quiet corner on a twenty-minute break and play about twenty games, all while having an extensive and enlightening conversation about comics or TV or how great we are in general, or singing extremely cool songs.

This kind of tournament doesn't sound like all that much fun - "Opening databases and opening books are permitted in Daily Chess, but the use of engines and tablebases is never permitted," says the rules. I only really play one opening; I'd get lost if I was keeping track of some other standard opening, even before we get to the point where the players are supposed to be using their own brains. I'd turn to the wrong page of the opening book and do something ridiculous with my queen.

But on the other hand, I do play othello on eothello.com all the time nowadays, and you get a long time to play your moves there. And apparently lots of people sign up for and drop out of these big tournaments on chess.com, so maybe I'll win the entire championship by default. Or else my opponents will be caught cheating - three times on chess.com I've had a message saying some dastardly opponent was using unfair means to beat me, and I got my rating bumped up by a few points. I don't know how they catch cheaters - are they watching me right now?

A ten-pound-fifty pig

 Among the Christmas presents I got from my generous brother this year was the Dennis the Menace Book 1976!

We used to have this book, long ago, second-hand (it came out about a year before I was born; British annuals are always released the autumn before the year on the cover) and it always felt a bit strange to anyone used to Dennis as he looked in the 1980s. 

Even back in 1975, it must have seemed a bit off to new readers - at that time, Dennis had been the full-colour cover feature of the Beano since September 1974 (shunting Biffo the Bear to the back pages) and had probably attracted a new audience keen to see a book full of Dennis and Gnasher to supplement their weekly dose!

But inside the full-colour hardback book with the modern-looking Dennis on the cover, readers could only find Gnasher in the various text stories, pin-ups and other features. All the comic strip adventures were reprints from old Beanos of the days before Gnasher's 1968 introduction, when Dennis was in duotone red-black-and-white single-page strips, and drawn rather differently from the way he appeared in the seventies.

The dialogue had to be updated here and there whenever someone mentions money - decimalisation had happened in 1971, and the young readers being given this book for Christmas were the first generation to grow up without shillings, tanners, threepenny bits and the other stock currency-phrases of comics from the old days!

This particular strip, though, causes more problems than that...

Not only does Dennis say "We don't have a dog, Dad!", the whole punchline relies on pre-decimal currency!

The speech bubble has been dutifully corrected - "two shillings" becomes "ten pence", "eight shillings" becomes "forty pence", but they can't really change "ten guineas" and have to leave it as it is. Well, grown-ups even in 1975 would still probably have said that kind of thing if it was funny, and they could always explain it to the kids, so there's no harm done.

Except to Dennis's backside, of course - this was the era when every comic story had to end with the protagonist getting a ferocious whacking, and it's always nice to see an innovative implement being used instead of the slipper for a change! That's what people really read these things for, isn't it?