Wednesday 29 September 2010

Khanky-Panky in Khanty-Manty?

I'm just blogging this because I wanted to be the first to use that headline. Anyone else using it now has to pay me a £10 royalty per use.

But I bet there is plenty of hanky-panky in Khanty today - the day of the vote to decide whether we want four more years of ET's best friend or four years of something slightly more grounded on planet earth. I confess I am not optimistic.

4 comments:

  1. I confess I have a somewhat jaundiced attitude towards references to Kirsan's beliefs about extra-terrestrials, dippy though they are, if only because I'm aware of some of the other weird things some chess players believe and have believed.

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  2. True. Very true. I'm guessing you may have in mind Garry Kasparov and Fomenko's 'New Chronology' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Fomenko)). I can think of a couple of other people who confine their rational faculties to what happens on the chessboard. But I still feel that Kirsan is top of this particular rating list.

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  3. Yeah, that's the one, I was looking for that the other day.

    Also see Holocaust Denial, and for that matter Climate Change Denial, and all sorts of other loopiness. One day a series may spring from this.

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  4. Indeed. If I can make your point for you, perhaps what's wrong with banging on about Kirsan and the little yellow men is that it is lazy journalism (the sort of sloganising I detest when it is deployed against something or someone I respect by a rubbishy newspaper of the Daily Mail ilk).

    One example of a more relevant and serious charge against Kirsan is that he has vandalised chess with his rule changes and tournament formats. I make no apology for trotting that one out again and again, because these things are wrong, genuinely annoy me and will need to be fixed. I like to think we carping critics have helped win some victories - the restoration of matchplay world championships with sensible time controls, for example.

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