12th - A town’s blurred vision – by an American tourist

Unfortunately, we’ll be quite unable to debate the actual topic of miss Marton’s writing; however, it would have been a much more reasonable thing to write about, since she could have been right. Regrettably, I couldn’t peel of out much of this block of subjective experiences of an uninformed American citizen, who seems to be troubled even with deciding who she’d like to blame (other than everybody).

Being unable to find a usable guidebook – I am a qualified guide, and I’d better tell the Synagogue is an important piece when it comes to sightseeing, since Miskolc actually lacks sights compared to other Hungarian cities – she ends up blaming an international publisher first. Then come the local residents, who had no idea about this glorius edifice. It’s quite shameful and somewhat unbeliveable, but who is guilty about not mentioning it? People know about things they hear about. Having the guidebook at hand, why didn’t she ask people about the Forestry Directorate or the wonderful Orthodox church? Maybe it would have turned out that locals are also malicious enemies of both forestry and Greek orthodox religion, fraudulently ignoring the establisments of those.

The interlude with the peroxide-blonde barmaid could be a joke either: how do you expect someone like that to know anything? But then, even the poor Jewish congregation couldn’t get away with it; the ’villains’ just padlocked their own gate with no sign, schedule or whatever, and hid the marble plaques about their dead in their Miskolc-ish ignorant seclusion, if I get it right.

So the old lady hopefully flew back home, and we all may continue our sorry lives in our sour and soulless homelands. Hungarians will roam in darkness forever for ’being devoted nazis’ in the War, like all other peoples formerly being part of the Axis (it’s a way too funny idea to get bored of it in 65 years, as it seems), while peoples in allied countries of World War I. will do the same for their ancestors provoked without fail the whole Second World War-thing by composing some funny ’peace treatries’, and forgot to say sorry about it.

11th entry for 19th February

I happened to read two short stories of Edgar Allen Poe last week, just after finding him in a web gallery of literary drunks and addicts. It wasn’t a reason to look after his inditing, but somehow I found out ’Murder in the Rue Morgue’, which I’ve known as a song before, is one of his short stories. (The song’s story turned out to be seriously altered in order to match the album’s atmosphere.)

It wasn’t long before I realised I’m quite unable to fully comprehend a single sentence of it. I had to find a Hungarian translation to study some of the text at least, which surprised me a little. I thought I’ve found something tough to read last semester, but now I ended up finishing the Hungarian version only. Frankly, the thing I appreciated the most was the introduction about comparing chess and draughts. I never really appreciated chess, nor I had the faintest talent for it. Perhaps I tried to play in a way which, according to Mr. Poe, is useless in this game. I find it quite a clever remark that chess takes attention in 1^st place, and usually the more concentrative player wins.

I downloaded a chess game later from the generation which securely beats any human opponent. I tried it and found it’s still not the game for me. Computers seem to have verified Mr. Poe: winning over humans in chess takes no actual intelligence. I’m going to check draughts next, however, I’m afraid the same type of algorithm – checking all the possible moves in advance – works for it as well, after all.