Friday Coffee, Chess and Potpourri
Coffee with an Attitude!
Happy Friday, everybody! Today I take a look at coffee news, the FIDE election and some chess-bashing by MSM this past week! As well, several hand picked potpourri items. Enjoy!
So, it is finally official: this week a LA judge ruled that all coffee sold in California must carry a cancer warning label. If you have been objectively following this issue (all about a substance called acrylamide that is produced when ever you roast something) like I have here on this blog, then you and most of the remaining sane people in the world must share the same frustration of what can happen when lobbying gets out of hand.
The above mentioned article linked above, however, is a rational attempt to explain that, despite the relative absurdity of putting such warnings on coffee that is sold, the positives of such (Proposition 65) lobbying outweigh, historically, the negatives.
That may very well be true. But in my book, a stupidity should never pass for being the right thing to do.
All those pesky coffee studies…
I chanced upon the above webpage with all those references to studies on Coffee. Quite informative, to be sure, but also I found myself chuckling more than once. For instance:
It seems very improbable to me that any scientific link could ever be proven here, but I suppose ‘observational study’ has very limited science to it in the first case.
My god! Do scientists actually get paid to produce stuff like this? Coffee is hot, and therefore should be good for you when it is freezing outside…
Again, highly improbable, except if you repeatedly try to drink it thru your ear…
Sounds reasonable, maybe even self evident. I consider myself a journalist of sorts…but luckily I am only mildly addicted to coffee.
I found it quite entertaining flipping thru the list of studies involving coffee and health issues. Take a look at them! I recommend it.
Chess, Sex, Murder and MSM
One of my favourite topics on this blog is how MSM (main stream media) more often than not goes out of its way to give chess a bad name. Any ugly story that might otherwise go unnoticed soon becomes headlines if the main character involved ever played a game of chess. The narrative immediately changes from ‘a random crime was committed’ to ‘one more chess player goes crazy’.
Witness the Women’s World Championship being played this week. Does MSM report on it? No way! But this past week has seen a higher than average number of articles in MSM linking chess to sex crimes and even murder. Here are just three examples. Ofcourse there are more!
To be continued in a couple of hours