Coffee, Death, FIDE and other Nonsense!
Black Coffee: Always Steamy
How are you today? It has been a while since I wrote my last ‘coffee’ blog and a lot of material that I want to share with my readers has been collecting dust on my desk. In the next week I hope to bring things up to date.
Latest Coffee Study: Yes!
CNN reports on the making public of a massive study involving hundreds of thousands of coffee drinkers.
The study, presented Friday at the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology, examined the coffee drinking behavior of over 468,000 people who participate in the UK Biobank Study, which houses in-depth genetic and health information on more than a half a million Brits.
Drinking up to 3 cups of coffee a day has been associated with reduced risk of death from heart disease, stroke or early death from any cause compared to non-coffee drinkers.
It has to be noted that the study concentrated on black coffee (no milk, no sugar), and that the coffee was not decaf.
This is definitely good news for coffee drinkers all around the world! Recent studies have also indicated that coffee reduces the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, some cancers and liver disease.
Historic First by a Woman!
This rather unassuming 1936 photo, called Cavaliers (The Knights; french), by the celebrated French artist Dora Maar is the first known use of a surreal photo-montage regarding chess.
At the time about the only commercially successful woman photographer in Paris, Dora Maar often experimented with photocollages in her magazine assignments, which became very popular.
How did she come about picking chess as a subject? Easy, she knew Marcel Duchamp!
Dora Maar knew just about every artist based in Paris at the time, and is more well known as Picasso’s muse. They had a stormy relationship that started in 1935 and lasted a decade. Picasso featured Dora Maar in many of his paintings, perhaps the most famous being Weeping Woman (1937)
Trying to keep FIDE honest
Here on this blog, and especially since FIDE president Arkady Dvorkovich was first elected in October 2018, I have often written about FIDE’s difficult struggle to distance itself from its long and colourful history of corruption and lack of transparency.
What is so ironic is that Dvorkovich ran his entire entire campaign in 2018 based on a platform of eliminating corruption and improving transparency in FIDE’s financial operations.
He has failed miserably on both counts! Since October 2018 FIDE has become not only more corrupt, but even less transparent. One of Dvorkovich’s first actions after being elected was to expell all journalists, prohibiting them from attending FIDE board meetings, as well as forcing board members to sign non-disclosure agreements!
FIDE today — in numerous ways — very much resembles the Soviet Union under Stalin. You might want to read some older blog articles about different aspects of Dvorkovich’s leadership (Link1 Link2 Link3 ) and there are numerous others if you dig.
The Danish grandmaster Peter Heine Nielsen needs no introduction to my readers. In his more active days as a player, Peter was one of Europe’s crack grandmasters. He later became Magnus Carlsen’s trainer.
Since 2018 Peter has also become one of FIDE’s most vocal critics. On his TWITTER account he regularly points out some of the more glaring examples of FIDE’s losing struggle to even try to pretend to implement some of Dvorkovich’s 2018 election promises. One such embarrassing example is of Mr. Bologan (one of FIDE’s key Dvorkovich advisers) apparently volunteering to allow his personal bank account to be used for depositing FIDE money!
Some more juicy tweets:
To be continued briefly…