Coffee, Chess, the FIDE webpage & other Goofiness
Sunday Coffee!
How are you today? This past week has seen me very busy with non-blog business and so I apologize for not updating as regularly. The coming days will see me catch up.
Oh Shut Up!
Tim Hortons, Canada’s answer to StarBucks, recently saw an opportunity to get some free publicity by offering Meghan and Harry free coffee for LIFE if they make good their ‘threat’ to move to Canada!
What makes this particularly outrageous is that anyone with a bit of sense in their head would know that the upper class Brits only drink tea! Needless to say, the Queen was not impressed!
The Luck of the Irish!
Here’s an interesting item that shows you just how good Irish lawyers can be! Last year (2019) the Irish High Court oversaw a 85,000 euros settlement to a young girl who had hot tea spill on her arm at a Dublin StarBucks.
While the spill , it was argued, had only caused cosmetic scarring, it was the psychological trauma for the image conscience youth who would probably have to use long sleeved shirts for the rest of her life (?!) that was the most damning consequence of the accident. The judge obviously agreed.
And just this past week the same Irish court awarded 33,000 euros to another woman when coffee spilled between her legs in a McDonalds, also in Dublin. What did the lawyer argue? That the woman was unable to have sex for 8 months after the accident!
Irish lawyers must be the best in Europe!
My Favourite Coffee Poem
I’ve never been a big fan of poetry, but this poem is really moving and could even bring a ruthless dictator to tears…
Who cares if they are only crocodile tears!
Meanwhile,somewhere in Japan…
The Mad,Mad World of FIDE’s Home Page
Move over Alfred E. Neuman! FIDE’s new website has been almost universally criticized in the online chess community. For one reason or the other, such as requiring too much scrolling to find what you are looking for, unfriendly and difficult navigation, incomplete player information and ratings, too crowded with BIG images and confusing layout, too much in your face, etc.
ADD to this my pet peeve: it is shamelessly ELITIST! From day to day the count may vary but the pattern is unmistakeable: today I found not less than 4 images of Magnus Carlsen, 5 images of Ju Wenju, 4 images of Alexandra Goryachkina and 2 images of Ali Firouzja. JUST ON THE HOME PAGE!!!
Over-kill: the times before someone invented the fly-swatter.
It doesn’t seem to matter if it is ‘News’, ‘Top Players’, ‘Player of the Day’, ‘Calendar’ or ‘Latest Videos’… it is almost always the SAME reproduction of daily images/persona, repeated over and over again, day after day! Reminds me a lot of Orwell’s 1984…keep the message simple for the masses and then repeat ad nauseam.
What gives, Web Master? Don’t they pay you enough to do real work? This is embarrassing and so, so, amateurish!
