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Victory for Tihomir "Tigertad" Titschko in 1st European Chessboxing Championship!
"Fighting is done in the ring, wars are raged on the board" was the motto of the 1st European Championship in Chessboxing held October 1, 2005 at the Salon Ost in Berlin. The Bulgarian Tihomir "Tigertad" Titschko achieved his victory in chess during the ninth round of the fight.

The WCBO (World Chess Boxing Organisation) organised the event in cooperation with the firm treffer.ag, simultaneously opening the world's very first Chessboxing Club (CBCB), which was recently founded in Berlin's Mitte district. Chessboxing's mastermind is the Berlin-based Dutch artist IEPE.

The lights were dimmed, music pounded from the speakers, the crowd of 500 onlookers welcomed the opponents with cheers as they made their way into the ring, and the 1st European Championship in Chessboxing began after the Bulgarian and German national anthems were played. Chessboxers go through interchanging four-minute rounds of chess and two-minute boxing rounds. In a maximum of eleven rounds, a K.O. or checkmate can lead to an early victory.

During the first round of chess, "Tigertad," one of the world's ten best players in bullet chess, was able to disorganise his opponent's preparations: a skilful move adaptation of the Dragon variation of the Sicilian Defence caused confusion for Andreas "D" Schneider of Berlin.

Woot! This is a long post - Read the rest.

I just finished reading a Spider Robinson book I'd never even seen before, called Night of Power. It's about a race riot - race war - and some people caught in it. It's excellent and you should read it, but that's not the point of this post. What struck me most, while reading it, was the simple observation that every time I crack Spider's work I am astonished by the depth and breadth of his grasp of the human heart. The fact that he can write of it with such eloquence, with an unfailingly hopeful ring of truth, moves me. Occasionally to tears.

This intersects with a conversation Star and I were having earlier, about poetry, and the incredible line between good and bad in that medium. (She's reading Tanith Lee at the moment, you see.) And my observation that, perhaps even more so than prose, poetry as a form requires a mastery not just of words, but of language - the context and nuance that allows you to say things with what you do not say.

Interestingly, I intersect this with a near-criticism of Spider's style. I notice that he has two quite distinct ways of writing dialogue, with basically no middle ground. On the one hand you have dialogue as game. One-liners, puns, wit and cleverness. Never more than a couple of lines per utterance. On the other hand you have dialogue as exegesis - sometimes of plot, more importantly of wisdom and of soultruth and being human. And when writing in the latter form, Spider is prone to a flaw of my own: each point is invested with paragraphs or even pages, built by a kind of exchange of soliloquies.

Crystallizing out of this I have a single thought about wisdom. About why it comes so seldom, to so few, with such difficulty. Wisdom requires, above else, a completeness of perspective on an issue. Patient and thorough examination of it from many sides; understanding of the repercussions, corollaries, and assumptions underlying each of those angles; synergy of the whole into true comprehension. To me, that's a big part of the essence of wisdom. Very different from analysis, and I don't presently have the precision of diction to explain the distinction properly. But it implies, and demands, the level of detail and focus that Spider gives to the dialogue form described above.

Most likely this is the root of why wisdom usually comes so late in life. We are, on the whole and through the bulk of our lives, inefficient, unfocused thinkers. I class myself in this group, with certainty. As such, the kind of comprehensive study of an issue which gets you to the threshold of wisdom has to be built up gradually over a period of (usually) decades.

But I also class myself with those who can see the glimmer of it far more quickly. And it brings me, for closure's sake, to an exhortation. When you have children, if you have children, teach them to take pleasure in the investment of thought and the completeness of understanding. Teach them the concentration skills and the discipline which will allow them to layer thoughts - quicker than by decades' scale - into the kind of measured whole which gives full understanding. Teach them to focus, to think critically, to think expansively.

Without it, one cannot be a scientist. Cannot be a scholar. Cannot be an artist, I think. And cannot be both wise, and young - a condition which I wish most devoutly (and I use the word precisely, for those who know me) upon all your blessed spawn.

Amen.

...

On a tangentially related note, I also have a message to my worthy readers from Star. She tells me that what you really want is not this blather of design, of politics, of philosophy. Then she took off her shirt to demonstrate what you do want.

Y'all can have the philosophy. Sorry. This is a long post - Read the rest.

Tee-hee. The Infinite Cat Project. There's your link of the day (apart from the post below). Just goes to show you don't have to be a batty old spinster anymore... This is a long post - Read the rest.

Oh, wow. This is just too damn funny. "An uncivil war rages inside the walls of the West Wing of the White House, a bitter, acrimonious war driven by a failed agenda, destroyed credibility, dwindling public support and a President who lapses into Alzheimer-like periods of incoherent babbling." Woot! Go read the whole thing.

The source? Questionable. In fact the link that brought me to this article is here, where a blogger I don't know says, "Would it be irresponsible to link to a Capitol Blue story simply because it bolsters my belief system, even though Capitol Blue has been egregiously wrong in the past? It would be irresponsible not to..." and then the link.

So either it's the distant sound of highly satisfying thunder... or it's a well-spoken daydream worth reading. You decide. This is a long post - Read the rest.