You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January, 2008.
Slow news day, originally uploaded by Kevglobal.
The world’s stock markets are on a wild ride right now. Volatility is high, and now talk in the United States is not whether a recession will happen but whether the recession will be long and painful.
But, hey, Britney Spears actually made it to the courthouse today before leaving, and shock horror, an error put a horse ad in the food classifieds. Is the news day that slow with the bottom falling out of the market? Guess there’s still room for news of the weird.(In other news, I used Jing to grab this screen shot and then automagically upload it to Flickr. Very fast, and very, very good.)
Thou shouldn’t rip up the road in the middle of the night, originally uploaded by Kevglobal.Why did Transport for London authorise night time road works in a residential area in north London? Why can’t they be done during the day instead of disrupting a residential area until past midnight? Transport for London, it would be nice to have an answer.I guess we missed the notice about the hyper-space bypass. (I have updated the headline. Suw told me that I was making an archaic English faux pax.)
Headphones are dangerous, originally uploaded by Kevglobal.
Why? “If you are wearing a head Phone, how can you hear the beneficial information via our Public Address system?”
Oddly, while I was taking this picture, someone came up to read the valuable ‘Service Information’ and read this. Lovely handwriting, but is this as important as the delays on the District, Circle, Central and Piccadilly lines? (But all other lines are operating a good service mind you.)
Of course, someone with a marker could be having a little fun with the ‘London Underground Tube System’ signs.
chess, originally uploaded by malias. Some Rights Reserved.
I grew up with chess although not a serious player. My brother ‘taught’ me chess, although in his eagerness to win, he had his own set of rules. And his rules were not anything that people would recognise but rather something closer to the weird world of quantum physics where the rules changed when they were observed. For instance, the rook would at certain points in the game attain new and special powers that usually overwhelmed me. I only learned later that my brother’s arcane rules of chess were specific to him. But the damage had been done, and I grew up with a chess inferiority complex.
Many of my friends played chess, which isn’t surprising considering that I went to a high school for ‘gifted students’. I’m sure that you can attribute some of this to a chess frenzy in the US after Bobby Fischer won the world championship in 1972, the year I was born.
I read his obituaries with an odd curiosity, and I was struck by the beauty of the language of chess grandmasters about the game and about Bobby Fischer’s creative genius in a New York Times article about his life.
Chess writer and teacher Bruce Pandolfini said:
“After 1972, we lost so many great pieces of art,” said Mr. Pandolfini, the chess teacher, “hundreds of masterpieces he would have created if he had stayed a sane being. We feel the great loss. All chess players do.”
And in recounting a masterful 1964 tournament, there is sublime quote by Robert Bryne:
”It was one of his brilliant counterattacks,” recalled Mr. Byrne, who would go on to become the chess columnist for The New York Times. “He was playing Black, and he made a deep sacrifice, so deep that I did not understand it. It was a very profound combination, very beautiful.”Mr. Byrne ended up resigning the game while he was still materially ahead. The result was so unusual that it confounded grandmasters analyzing the games for spectators.
I was moved by the quiet passion that these chess masters had for their game and the beauty that they saw in it, even in sacrifice and loss. Bobby Fischer’s life was a tragic one, only half lived. His was another beautiful mind lost to madness.
With wedding plans and my normal level of busyness, I’m late in blogging about this, but a freak January tornado roared just south of my parents’ home in Illinois a week ago. My childhood home was spared, but Edwards Apple Orchard, where I went on countless school field trips and where I held my first job, was hit. The large barn that served as their store and storage and where they served apple cider, cider doughnuts and apple pie was flattened. The newspaper in nearby Rockford has video of the destruction. It sounds like they will carry on, but it won’t be quite the same without the old red barn. Suw and I visited the orchard last September when I took her home so that her parents could meet my parents and so I could show her where I grew up. We had cider doughnuts and cool cider, not hard cider like here in the UK but unfiltered apple juice.
Our Seesmic friend Kitten Fluff sends you a message to get your 2008 off to a good start and shows the classic art of sabre-ing. The only way to open your finest bubbly.
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