Does it ever occur to anyone that a voter poll is utterly useless if the major candidates are within 3-4% or each other and the LITTLE TINY WRITING down at the bottom of the screen says: +/- 4.1%
NOT that this stops ANY ONE of the cable "news" nitwits from inflammatory comments and righteous declarations of a winner or ..."total loser".
Honestly, that entire segment of cable news stations, from CNN, MSNBC, & Fox up to and including all their sub-ling channels, are nothing more than shit-stirers. It's impossible to watch, and not at all related to actual news in the least.
I'd call it "News-Related Biased Opinion", except that opinion subtly infers that the person actually BELIEVES the stuff that they say.
I know, I know... "WHERE have I been?"
"Just sittin' here watchin' the wheels go round and round"
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
Why I Never Got the Chicks
OK, ONE of the MANY reasons I never got the chicks....
AMONGST the reasons I never got the chicks.... LOL
I can still remember, with fondness, believe it or not, the summer of 1972, when my friends and I were all of 15, and we spent the summer days listening to songs on the radio by Nilsson, The Hollies, Cat Stevens, Bill Withers and Don McLean ... all the while being fascinated by Bobby Fischer as he played and beat the Russian, Boris Spassky, to become the first American Chess Champion. I didn't know until much later that it was yet another passion play representing the Cold War. I DO know that it made us love chess, and we followed every move, and every eccentric objection and argument that Fischer made.
Life goes like this, I guess. You forget all about things that you spent hours doing in your youth until one thing, usually a death, brings it all back.
The whole culture and mode of our lives as it was then seems so distant now... living on our bikes, summers seeming to last forever, every relationship new and deep and important.
For me, it's like watching the movie "Stand By Me". That was my youth.... OK, except that it was set in 1959 ... and there was no dead kid ... but you know... SORTA.
In my mind I can still see my friend Mark Kenney's kitchen and hear American Pie coming from WPRO-AM ... AM radio, for God's sake! I even remember where that "stereo" was in the other room. And we had a chess board set up to duplicate the moves from each match.
We had nothing to do for the seemingly endless days of summer but be experts in everything under the sun....
Yeah... except get chicks.... LOL !!! Stupid Geeks!
And now we're all old.
Anyway ... RIP Bobby Fischer. Thanks. Really.
Bobby Fischer, Outspoken Ex-Chess Champion, Dies
Friday, January 18, 2008
Associated Press REYKJAVIK, Iceland -- Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who became a Cold War hero by dethroning the Soviet world champion in 1972 and later renounced his American citizenship, has died. He was 64.
Fischer died in a Reykjavik hospital on Thursday of kidney failure after a long illness, his spokesman, Gardar Sverrisson, said Friday.
Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Fischer was wanted in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions. In 2005, he moved to Iceland, a chess-mad nation and site of his greatest triumph.
Garry Kasparov, the former Russian chess champion, said Fischer's ascent in the chess world in the 1960s and his promotion of chess worldwide was "a revolutionary breakthrough" for the game. But Fischer's reputation as a genius of chess was eclipsed, in the eyes of many, by his idiosyncrasies.
Bobby Fischer, shown in 1962, was known for his outspokenness and idiosynchratic tendencies as much as his chess greatness.
"The tragedy is that he left this world too early, and his extravagant life and scandalous statements did not contribute to the popularity of chess," Kasparov told The Associated Press.
He lost his world title in 1975 after refusing to defend it against Anatoly Karpov. He dropped out of competitive chess and largely out of view, emerging occasionally to make erratic and often anti-Semitic comments, although his mother was Jewish.
Spassky said in a brief phone call from his home in France that he was "very sorry" to hear of the death of his friend and rival.
An American chess champion at 14 and a grand master at 15, Fischer dethroned the Spassky in 1972 in a series of games in Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, to become the first officially recognized world champion born in the United States.
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, president of the World Chess Federation, called Fischer "a phenomenon and an epoch in chess history, and an intellectual giant I would rank next to Newton and Einstein."
The match, at the height of the Cold War, took on mythic dimensions as a clash between the world's two superpowers.
Fischer played and won an exhibition rematch against Spassky on the resort island of Sveti Stefan, but the game was in violation of U.S. sanctions imposed to punish then-President Slobodan Milosevic.
In July 2004, Fischer was arrested at Japan's Narita airport for traveling on a revoked U.S. passport and threatened with extradition to the United States. He spent nine months in custody before the dispute was resolved when Iceland granted him citizenship and he moved there with his longtime companion, the Japanese chess player Miyoko Watai. She survives him.
In his final years, Fischer railed against the chess establishment, alleging that the outcomes of many top-level chess matches were decided in advance.
Instead, he championed his concept of random chess, in which pieces are shuffled at the beginning of each match in a bid to reinvigorate the game.
"I don't play the old chess," he told reporters when he arrived in Iceland in 2005. "But obviously if I did, I would be the best."
Born in Chicago in March 9, 1943, Robert James Fischer was a child prodigy, playing competitively from the age of 8.
At 13, he became the youngest player to win the United States Junior Championship. At 14, he won the United States Open Championship for the first of eight times.
At 15, he gained the title of international grand master, the youngest person to hold the title.
Tall, charismatic and with striking looks, he was a chess star -- but already gaining a reputation for volatile behavior.
He turned up late for tournaments, walked out of matches, refused to play unless the lighting suited him and was intolerant of photographers and cartoonists. He was convinced of his own superiority and called the Soviets "Commie cheats."
His behavior often unsettled opponents -- to Fischer's advantage.
This was seen most famously in the showdown with Spassky in Reykjavik between July and September 1972. Having agreed to play Spassky in Yugoslavia, Fischer raised one objection after another to the arrangements and they wound up playing in Iceland.
When play got under way, days late, Fischer lost the first game with an elementary blunder after discovering that television cameras he had reluctantly accepted were not unseen and unheard, but right behind the players' chairs.
He boycotted the second game and the referee awarded the point to Spassky, putting the Russian ahead 2-0.
But then Spassky agreed to Fischer's demand that the games be played in a back room away from cameras. Fischer went on to beat Spassky, 12.5 points to 8.5 points in 21 games.
Americans, gripped in the millions by the contest, rejoiced in the victory over their Cold War adversary.
In the recent book "White King and Red Queen," the British author Daniel Johnson said the match was "an abstract antagonism on an abstract battleground using abstract weapons ... yet their struggle embraced all human life."
"In Spassky's submission to his fate and Fischer's fierce exultant triumph, the Cold War's denouement was already foreshadowed."
The victory made Fischer the first U.S.-born world champion. Paul Morphy, an American, was regarded as the world's best player from 1858 to 1862, and William Steinetz, an Austrian immigrant to the United States, was an official champion from 1886 to 1894.
AMONGST the reasons I never got the chicks.... LOL
I can still remember, with fondness, believe it or not, the summer of 1972, when my friends and I were all of 15, and we spent the summer days listening to songs on the radio by Nilsson, The Hollies, Cat Stevens, Bill Withers and Don McLean ... all the while being fascinated by Bobby Fischer as he played and beat the Russian, Boris Spassky, to become the first American Chess Champion. I didn't know until much later that it was yet another passion play representing the Cold War. I DO know that it made us love chess, and we followed every move, and every eccentric objection and argument that Fischer made.
Life goes like this, I guess. You forget all about things that you spent hours doing in your youth until one thing, usually a death, brings it all back.
The whole culture and mode of our lives as it was then seems so distant now... living on our bikes, summers seeming to last forever, every relationship new and deep and important.
For me, it's like watching the movie "Stand By Me". That was my youth.... OK, except that it was set in 1959 ... and there was no dead kid ... but you know... SORTA.
In my mind I can still see my friend Mark Kenney's kitchen and hear American Pie coming from WPRO-AM ... AM radio, for God's sake! I even remember where that "stereo" was in the other room. And we had a chess board set up to duplicate the moves from each match.
We had nothing to do for the seemingly endless days of summer but be experts in everything under the sun....
Yeah... except get chicks.... LOL !!! Stupid Geeks!
And now we're all old.
Anyway ... RIP Bobby Fischer. Thanks. Really.
Bobby Fischer, Outspoken Ex-Chess Champion, Dies
Friday, January 18, 2008
Associated Press REYKJAVIK, Iceland -- Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who became a Cold War hero by dethroning the Soviet world champion in 1972 and later renounced his American citizenship, has died. He was 64.
Fischer died in a Reykjavik hospital on Thursday of kidney failure after a long illness, his spokesman, Gardar Sverrisson, said Friday.
Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Fischer was wanted in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions. In 2005, he moved to Iceland, a chess-mad nation and site of his greatest triumph.
Garry Kasparov, the former Russian chess champion, said Fischer's ascent in the chess world in the 1960s and his promotion of chess worldwide was "a revolutionary breakthrough" for the game. But Fischer's reputation as a genius of chess was eclipsed, in the eyes of many, by his idiosyncrasies.
Bobby Fischer, shown in 1962, was known for his outspokenness and idiosynchratic tendencies as much as his chess greatness.
"The tragedy is that he left this world too early, and his extravagant life and scandalous statements did not contribute to the popularity of chess," Kasparov told The Associated Press.
He lost his world title in 1975 after refusing to defend it against Anatoly Karpov. He dropped out of competitive chess and largely out of view, emerging occasionally to make erratic and often anti-Semitic comments, although his mother was Jewish.
Spassky said in a brief phone call from his home in France that he was "very sorry" to hear of the death of his friend and rival.
An American chess champion at 14 and a grand master at 15, Fischer dethroned the Spassky in 1972 in a series of games in Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, to become the first officially recognized world champion born in the United States.
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, president of the World Chess Federation, called Fischer "a phenomenon and an epoch in chess history, and an intellectual giant I would rank next to Newton and Einstein."
The match, at the height of the Cold War, took on mythic dimensions as a clash between the world's two superpowers.
Fischer played and won an exhibition rematch against Spassky on the resort island of Sveti Stefan, but the game was in violation of U.S. sanctions imposed to punish then-President Slobodan Milosevic.
In July 2004, Fischer was arrested at Japan's Narita airport for traveling on a revoked U.S. passport and threatened with extradition to the United States. He spent nine months in custody before the dispute was resolved when Iceland granted him citizenship and he moved there with his longtime companion, the Japanese chess player Miyoko Watai. She survives him.
In his final years, Fischer railed against the chess establishment, alleging that the outcomes of many top-level chess matches were decided in advance.
Instead, he championed his concept of random chess, in which pieces are shuffled at the beginning of each match in a bid to reinvigorate the game.
"I don't play the old chess," he told reporters when he arrived in Iceland in 2005. "But obviously if I did, I would be the best."
Born in Chicago in March 9, 1943, Robert James Fischer was a child prodigy, playing competitively from the age of 8.
At 13, he became the youngest player to win the United States Junior Championship. At 14, he won the United States Open Championship for the first of eight times.
At 15, he gained the title of international grand master, the youngest person to hold the title.
Tall, charismatic and with striking looks, he was a chess star -- but already gaining a reputation for volatile behavior.
He turned up late for tournaments, walked out of matches, refused to play unless the lighting suited him and was intolerant of photographers and cartoonists. He was convinced of his own superiority and called the Soviets "Commie cheats."
His behavior often unsettled opponents -- to Fischer's advantage.
This was seen most famously in the showdown with Spassky in Reykjavik between July and September 1972. Having agreed to play Spassky in Yugoslavia, Fischer raised one objection after another to the arrangements and they wound up playing in Iceland.
When play got under way, days late, Fischer lost the first game with an elementary blunder after discovering that television cameras he had reluctantly accepted were not unseen and unheard, but right behind the players' chairs.
He boycotted the second game and the referee awarded the point to Spassky, putting the Russian ahead 2-0.
But then Spassky agreed to Fischer's demand that the games be played in a back room away from cameras. Fischer went on to beat Spassky, 12.5 points to 8.5 points in 21 games.
Americans, gripped in the millions by the contest, rejoiced in the victory over their Cold War adversary.
In the recent book "White King and Red Queen," the British author Daniel Johnson said the match was "an abstract antagonism on an abstract battleground using abstract weapons ... yet their struggle embraced all human life."
"In Spassky's submission to his fate and Fischer's fierce exultant triumph, the Cold War's denouement was already foreshadowed."
The victory made Fischer the first U.S.-born world champion. Paul Morphy, an American, was regarded as the world's best player from 1858 to 1862, and William Steinetz, an Austrian immigrant to the United States, was an official champion from 1886 to 1894.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
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