It may seem fitting to some of the veterans of last game that I drew Austria-Hungary, the easiest country on the map to bone royally. If this is because they believe that the winner of the previous game, regardless of who it turned out to be, should in all fairness be given a handicap in the next, then so be it. If, however, they believe that I was a singularly treacherous player in the last game and, for this reason, deserve to be squashed forthwith at the outset of the new game, let me get ahead of this scurrilous accusation and assure the new players and potential allies that I was nothing of the sort, and deserve no such thing. I am an excellent ally, capable of long-term loyalty and strategic assistance. Consult, if you like, my alliance with Russia until 1904, and the promises I kept to Germany, year after year after year. Know that I consider everyone's slate clean, even my erstwhile bitterest enemies', and ask only that the same courtesy be extended to me. But to those whose strategic imagination has been destroyed by spite, who look at the new map and see nothing but my bloated corpse floating in the Adriatic: Bring it on, I say.
Monday, June 16, 2008
You wouldn't hit a guy with glasses, would you?
It may seem fitting to some of the veterans of last game that I drew Austria-Hungary, the easiest country on the map to bone royally. If this is because they believe that the winner of the previous game, regardless of who it turned out to be, should in all fairness be given a handicap in the next, then so be it. If, however, they believe that I was a singularly treacherous player in the last game and, for this reason, deserve to be squashed forthwith at the outset of the new game, let me get ahead of this scurrilous accusation and assure the new players and potential allies that I was nothing of the sort, and deserve no such thing. I am an excellent ally, capable of long-term loyalty and strategic assistance. Consult, if you like, my alliance with Russia until 1904, and the promises I kept to Germany, year after year after year. Know that I consider everyone's slate clean, even my erstwhile bitterest enemies', and ask only that the same courtesy be extended to me. But to those whose strategic imagination has been destroyed by spite, who look at the new map and see nothing but my bloated corpse floating in the Adriatic: Bring it on, I say.
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1 comment:
My good Arch Marmaduke, the ending of your missive does quite clearly remind me of those superlative line of Virgil, whose Aeneid I so charmingly read while at good old Oxford. I believe the line was from the second book, concerning the fate of Priam. Yes, yes, here it is:
iacet ingens litore truncus,
avulsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus.
he lies a huge trunk on the shore,
his head ripped from his shoulders, a body without a name. (2.557-558)
how clever of you to work allusion into your writing, and how clever of me to have caught you out on it!
- the rear admiral
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