Musings on chess, and lesser things
Addendum: It turns out that Question 30 was based on a popular Pulp Fiction myth. There are, in fact, at least three different times recorded on clocks in the movie. Bugger.
So, here’s a replacement question for you:
Question 30: For what purpose did the Roman Emperor Nero’s wife allegedly keep 500 donkeys?
Ok guys, here it is: the IMPOSSIBLE CHRISTMAS QUIZ. Thirty-two questions of pure, unadulterated festive joy. You’ve got just over two weeks to get your answers in – email your solutions to by midnight, Sunday 19th December, and I’ll give out the solutions (and prizes!) the following week. Use the comments section below to discuss, …
People say that Christmas is the celebration of Jesus’ birth. But most scholars believe that the story that Jesus was born on December 25 is pretty much impossible. In the true spirit of the season, then, I will unleash tomorrow the “Impossible Christmas Quiz”. The questions are going to be, quite frankly, ridiculous. The quiz itself is …
It’s embarrassing, it’s deplorable, and it’s the sort of clandestine vice that would have gotten me beaten up at high school. But, through the tolerant and relatively repercussion-free forum of Blog, I am announcing my addiction to Glee. Glee is basically an extremely cheesy television series set around the musical theatre club at a high …
So I have to once again apologise for a delay in posting. I’ve been flat out over the past fortnight (well, last couple of months really), putting in the hard yards and late nights in search of postgraduate scholarships. My plan to take behavioural economics to infinity and beyond is slowly coming to fruition, and …
My life as a scruffy, impoverished and blasé undergraduate is officially over: I have bought my first vacuum cleaner. Not that my attitude or habits toward cleaning have changed, mind you. My approach to cleaning is to assume that the science of vacuuming is similar to the science of shampooing your hair: if you …
People often ask me why I didn’t become a professional chess player. Basically the answer is because I’m not good enough, but I usually prefer to save face and instead tell them about that other passion that has taken over my career path, behavioural economics. I usually get the inevitable “What’s that?” question, but sometimes …
So I managed to survive my first commentary experience, which probably contained far more koala references than the chessFM listeners are used to. It was a bit of a test of endurance, coming home from work to commentate for seven hours straight, but quite frankly it felt more like a party than a job. And …
It’s 6am, but the guy on the other end of Skype is even more tired than I am – the voice I’m hearing for the first time belongs to a man coming to the end of a 14-hour shift in Italy. He’s a technician for the Internet Chess Club, and I’m doing a quick training …
It’s taken me a while to get to this final Olympiad wrap – readjusting to work, GMT+10 and general life outside of the tournament hall has been difficult. But don’t think I’ve forgotten to report back about the Olympiad’s “Tournament B”. ‘Tournament B’, like ‘Queenside-castling’, is another of those unofficial slang chess phrases. It’s used to …