Wednesday, January 6, 2010

GETTING SET UP AND RUNNING

One person told me they couldn't comment on my Blog. Anyone else having trouble with this? (contact me at bob@thinkerspressinc.com) Do you have to be a member of Blogspot to comment? Seems I saw that somewhere. Or maybe be a member of my BLOG? I know in the past there's has been an occasional problem with "whackos" leaving really insane comments. (Look at the Washington Post comments sometimes. It is proof there are zombies among us. George R. take note.)

Two reviews of new books made the pages of The Chess Reports today for the Friday edition. Henry Miskaryan's Armenian Chess in the XXI Century and IM Igor Khmelnitsky's You vs. Bobby Fischer in his Chess Exam series.

Tony Boron gave me a tip on a control to "time" when I want to release the Blog. Thanks Tony, I found it (probably the only triangle flippy I hadn't looked at!).

It was nice to hear from Jerry Nash who was a USCF scholastic consultant. Jerry is top drawer plus he knows all the workings of dealing with FIDE. He's looking for more consulting work and if you know of something, get in touch with me and I'll pass it on. He's spent a lot of time in the Education field so schools looking for help on that should get with Jerry.

Is Chess Life PC (politically correct)? You bet. They fired the columnist online who wrote about "chess problems" because someone raised the issue of some "racial" remark. It was actually a pretty good pun but you have these people who sit around with nothing to do except b&m about stuff. I wonder if I was the editor of content how I would have handled it? Hmmm. I suspect I would have written a letter to the correspondent and told him to "get a life." Then the higher up PC-wimps would have fired me. So I would have to have in my contract, "can't fire me for not being PC unless the firer admits they are a PC-wimp. This month a letter was published about female exploitation using Lev Alburt as the pinup boy (which he has been on a number of his own book covers!). The problem is, Chess Life is still perceived as a family chess magazine, whatever that means. Some dude was worried about younger kids seeing that issue, which, they don't get anyway unless perhaps their bigger brothers gets the regular one!

Howard Goldowsky tells me that Mongoose Press will be publishing some chess fiction including a story of Sherlock Holmes. When it is an actuality I will tell you more about it.

There's been a redesign of The Chess Reports. Subscription price for semester 8 is $50 for 13 issues.

More to be said but I have some other things to work on.

2 comments:

  1. Am doing a test to see if I can comment. I have a Google account.

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  2. Jerry Nash, independent organizer, vs. USCF?
    In India, the new Chess Association of India
    (CAI) is trying to promote big-prize tournaments outside the controlling "All India Chess Federation" and is seeing Indian players threatened with sanctions by the AICF if they play in the "other" federation. What crapola. And there has been a skirmish with the AICF and
    Koneru Humpy, trying to undercut that female GM
    for honoring commitments in foreign tournaments and not changing her schedule to play in local AICF tournaments----who will be the Curt Flood of Chess to free the players from being "owned?"
    Do we hear, "I am Spartacus"?

    ReplyDelete