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The 34th issue of your beloved Zine had me thinking… 34, give or take a few articles, each one dedicated to a supply center on a standard Diplomacy board, with various themes… How can you top so many articles dedicated to diplomacy? Most probably you can’t. But because it is past midnight… well it occurred to me that I should give it a go. I will try to trump that with just one article, and I call it “The Great Diplomacy Article Search.” Where do I begin? What do I write about? Hmmm… the Internet! Now that should have some useful information for a basis of an article. Ah… here is an idea. Lets use the Google search engine and see what articles that brings up. Hmm… lets start with London. Lets see… google… search string “London Diplomacy”… Click Google Search. Wow! 206,000 articles. That is just way too much information for this time of the night. Let me pick another supply center… say, Sevastapol. What's this!? Google asks me if I really mean Sevastopol, but anyway, it brought up 189 articles. Now that raises an interesting question. What is the proper spelling of that southern Russian port? Brain… malfunction… shut down imminent. Okay lets see Mr Google… click on “Sevastopol Diplomacy”… 2,890 articles. Wow! I think I see a pattern emerging here… but two data points a pattern not maketh said the famed statistician Don. Okay lets try another supply center. Search string “Warsaw Diplomacy” then click… 23,600. Ouch… that is a lot of articles to read before going to bed. I give up!!! I don’t think I can top producing an article of sufficient quality to trump the effort of the last Zine. I think I will change tack. Instead I will produce the following statistics. That is a difficult word to annunciate at this time of the night! How about a nice looking table listing the number of articles for each supply center that a diplomacy article was found by Google.
Okay, so this is what the article distribution looks like… Rolling out the map…
 Now you wouldn’t think how such a map could be useful. Looking at the legend, white regions represent less than 10,000 articles while purple less than 25,000 and so on. What does this all mean? Well, for an author of a number of articles and reader of many, many more… let me tell you. A simple glance at the map tells me that there is a definite shortage of articles on the supply centers Brest, Kiel, Marseilles, Trieste, Naples, Tunis, Smyrna and even Sevastapol/Sevastopol… whichever. Well I suppose that most of the hits on Google do not pertain to our beloved game. But who said that those articles couldn’t be the source of useful background material for diplomats, tacticians and general scoundrels amongst us? Looking at the map, for those insomniacs amongst us, London is in a league of its own with a lot of reading potential. I am surprised that Munich rated so lowly considering its strategic position in the middle of the map. It is interesting how much is available covering the Balkan countries, yet Trieste gets little mention. Is there any reason for Kiel to be lowly rated? I don’t know but, it is starting to get late. I need to go to sleep… Yawn! So please, sharpen your pencils and get that carbon copy paper out… it's time for all budding authors to start writing so that by next Zine’s milestone there is less white and more red on the map.
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Theo Kermanidis (  )
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