(Ever More) FIDE Follies
Maybe in the Netherlands, home base of Chess Vibes, they celebrate an April Fool's-style holiday in early September. (As everyone knows, April Fool's is only celebrated on April 1, right? Who would deviate from...never mind.) The reason for this pretend perplexity is a pair of peculiar pronouncements concerning FIDE.
First, we start with FIDE's Fearless Leader, Kirsan Iljumzhinov. According to this post, Iljumzhinov would like to buy New York's "Ground Zero" plot (i.e. the site where the World Trade Center's Twin Towers used to stand) and put a chess center there. Umm...sure.
Second, we read about the Khanty-Mansiysk (dis)organizers playing crazy, nearly last-minute games with the airline schedule. The closing line of that post is very good, but I won't ruin the surprise for you.
Reader Comments (7)
The news articles about Kirsan's offer to buy land in New York got the location wrong. Kirsan is making an offer to buy the same building, several blocks from "Ground Zero", that is currently intended to house the controversial Islamic cultural center. Donald Trump also recently made an offer for the same building.
Chessbase says that what he wants to buy is the so-called Park51 (or the ground it's to be built on, to be precise), not the actual Ground Zero, and I'd be more inclined to believe that version.
If you think the "Ground Zero Mosque" haters were bad just see the "Ground zero chess club" ones :-P
I have no particular enthusiasm for the Karpov/Kasparov ticket. I believe that neither has any commitment to democracy and due process and both see institutions as something to be exploited for their own benefit but anything must be better than our current leadership. At least Karpov isn't completely bonkers.
As far as I know (and I'm living there), there is no second April Fool's Day in the Netherlands - rather any day can be April Fool's Day in Kalmykia?
The Ground Zero story was reported by numerous other sources, including non-chessic mainstream ones. In the meantime it also appeared on Ilymuzhinov's campaign website, clarifying that it's about a nearby plot of land, not the Ground Zero area itself.
Issues with charter flight schedules were confirmed by several Olympiad participants in the comments at Chessvibes, including Alexei Shirov and Shaun Press from Papua New Guinea (the closing statement is actually a quote from his blog).
The Park51 building has been lumped in with "Ground Zero" because that's how the protestors bend things to make their point. It is 2 blocks away.
Incidentally, "Ground Zero" is IMHO itself an inaccurate and disrespectful name (it properly designates the centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the central courtyard of the Pentagon), but that's what New Yorkers came up with. And it is descriptive in one sense: nine years later it's still just ground.
[DM: I think that's a sort of etymological fallacy. It was originally used to refer to those places, but has come to refer more generally to the epicenter of any sort of explosion or disaster. Indeed, that was the way in which it was used to apply to the bombs dropped on Japan, and it has been used in a generic way from well before the terrorists' attacks on the WTC.]
I agree that building the chess center in NYC is a pipe dream, though why not theme the Cordoba House after chess since the game has such a rich Muslim history, and doing so would make a statement to conservatives who still think a line in the Qur'an entails banning it. However, if Kirsan were game to build a chess center in Las Vegas or Montreal instead, he could Raelly accomplish it!
According to the online Merriam-Webster here, the first known use is 1946, and the primary meaning designates a nuclear explosion. Will check my other dictionaries, but I stand by my feeling which I've had for 9 years anyway.
I did really mean "Raelly" in the last link: I was making an arch reference to fellow-UFO-abductee-claimant Rael, but aside from my dismay at joining up with such a person, I was pointing out that both have money and motive and doing it wouldn't be far-fetched.
[DM: Oops, sorry about the edit! I'm definitely no ufologist. As for the original sense of the term "ground zero", yes, no argument that it was first used in the context of the Japanese bombings. But even back then, in 1946, it didn't refer to Hiroshima and Nagasaki qua those cities, but qua explosion sites, and as such it wasn't much of a semantic stretch to apply it to other explosion sites. This was apparently quite normal even before 9/11.]