Thursday Coffee
Thursday Coffee
Kasparov, Water boarding, Ballet and so on…
Good morning, Thursday! I got a kick out of a tongue-in-cheek Aussie newspaper article that I read this morning about how one’s daily coffee habit helps keep us in perpetual debt. In particular, if one were to simply quit coffee today then we could pay off our 25-year mortgage several years earlier…
The , Nicole Pederson-McKinnon, is a financial adviser of sorts, and clearly has done her math. She has figured things out to how many years, months, weeks, days and even minutes a daily coffee habit keeps us from paying off our debts.
Of course, such reasoning must be flawed from the out set. Life is neither mathematics nor is it rational. A full life is often just a balancing act between what one wants and needs. Coffee seems like a pretty good compromise…amongst other things.
Some takes on Kasparov’s comeback
It is always painful to bury the dead. Especially a legend of Kasparov’s category. I have been this week watching attentively on how the on-line community has reacted to Kasparov’s comeback earlier in the month. Not on the spin of the MSM or the bogus self-promotion of the more popular chess-news sites, but instead I was curious on just what the ordinary chess fan (or grandmaster) had to say about Kasparov’s little adventure in St.Louis.
From what I can see, the general reaction has been a sort of muted disappointment. The top grandmasters prefer to say as little as possible. Kasparov himself found it difficult to find a positive note to his over all performance, and his final interview with Maurice Ashley seems at times like a sad mixture of recollections of past glories and present day excuses.
Perhaps it is just too early for things to really sink in and for us to grasp what happened in St. Louis. We might need more time to articulate our feelings. However, not everyone has remained ‘muted’… for instance the popular American grandmaster Ben Finegold did not sugar coat his words when he described the first two days of the tournament.
Infact, Ben’s prediction was pretty much dead-on when the smoke had cleared and the points tallied.
GM Alex Colovic’s reaction
“Money can not buy the humiliation and destruction of the legend he created with his magnificent career.”
My friend and colleague Alex Colovic has one of the most popular chess blogs in the world and is always worth reading. A life-long fan of Kasparov’s play, Alex did not conceal his disappointment:
On Jen Shahade and Waterboarding Islamist terrorists
The american Jennifer Shahade is no stranger to this blog, I have written close to a dozen blog articles on this multi-talented artist,, chess grandmaster and poker star. Jennifer is also a frequent chess commentator for Rex Sinquefield’s chess tournaments. Jen was , along with Yasser Seirawan, one of the principal commentators of the tournament where Kasparov tried to make his comeback.
Steve Giddins, however, a well known figure in the chess world, has rarely appeared on this blog, except from time to time when he writes something really stupid. Which he did just a few days ago:
Link to Steve’s twitter
I suppose that Giddins must have felt that he wanted to impersonate Donald Trump. He succeeded, and in the process created a shit storm on chess message boards in the US. I believe that some not very subtle threats were also made…Jennifer has a very large and loyal fan base.
To be continued…
