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.
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.
ReplyDeleteTrue. 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.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's the one, I was looking for that the other day.
ReplyDeleteAlso see Holocaust Denial, and for that matter Climate Change Denial, and all sorts of other loopiness. One day a series may spring from this.
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).
ReplyDeleteOne 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.