250
250 is, among other things, the total number of intersections on my newly acquired go board (on the below photo, together with a full set of plastic stones). Hopefully this new feature of room 715 (what a boring number!) will prompt the few curious visitors (”What is it that you’re doing?” “How do you play?”), as well as my roommate, to ask some more questions and maybe even to learn the game :-) . We shall see how the master plan works, bwahahaha.
250 is also the natural number following 249 and preceding 251. More interestingly, as a Mandarin slang term, 250 (二百五 pinyin èrbǎiwǔ) is an insult meaning “stupid person”, which brings up an interesting (though quite pointless) question:
Why are the dimensions for the small go boards 9×9 and 13×13? Is it possible that the wise monks planned this ahead of time in some sort of an inside joke on people that play on them?
I’m still trying to banish the idea about how smart the happy owners of such boards are.
Otherwise, life has been interesting this past week. The Prague ZOO is great even when the weather is not good (and you get make some photos of people in winter coats and scarfs taking a stroll in a jungle). Yes, I said hi to all cousins and even tried to get the tiger to play go. No such luck :-) . The lights went out for the second time in the past month (or quite probably the third time), so the 250 board might have just been some sort of a foreshadowing. On the other hand, because of that the prospects of playing Tarok more often are looking up, so all is well.
Source: 250 (Wikipedia)
