Women's World Chess Championship?

What's this - has Kirzan finally decided it's going to be held after all? This is an excerpt from a report at The Week in Chess, who got it from the Russian chess site chesspo.ru. The report is about Kirzan guaranteeing the prize fund for the Kamsky-Topalov match to go forward in Lvov. That's great, but that's man chess stuff and I don't care about that! The important part is bolded:

The latest is that in a new phone interview with FIDE President Kirsan Iljumzhinov with Yury Vasilyev (who reliably reports the FIDE line) reported at the chess site chesspo.ru. The match Topalov - Kamski takes place in Lvov. Just I has called the president of International chess federation Kirsan Ilyumzhinov who has arrived to Athenes from Moscow for participation in Presidential Council, and has asked him a question which excites now all fans of a chess. . . .

KI: I give my personal guarantees. The prize-winning fund will be such what has been specified in the application of the manager of the grandmaster Gata Kamski Alexander Chernenko: 935 000 dollars. The players will receive together 750 000. Besides I shall declare tomorrow the world championship among women. It will take place in Nalchik from August, 28th till September, 18th. The prize-winning fund will be 630 000 dollars.

This was posted on Friday, May 30, 2008. So does that mean we can expect an official announcement from FIDE today about the Women's World Chess Championship? Who is putting up the money? What happened to the Turkish Sport Federation's indication that it would be willing to host the Championship? Where the heck is Nalchik?

An Open Letter from IM Irina Krush

Published at Chess Life Online (USCF).

I have not yet read the commentary this letter is sure to have generated. My initial feelings upon seeing that such a letter was published was surprise! Sharing the title seems an equitable solution, but not for the reasons stated. I'm in agreement with others that using rapid, blitz and an Armageddon game to decide the title was, under the circumstances, ridiculous.

Now, people will be "taking sides" and it bothers me the amount of ill will that this open letter will generate and, of course, those who disdain women chessplayers and "women's chess" will be sneering even more than usual. I can just hear them now "isn't that typical of the stupid cows" they're be hooting to each other. My opinion at this time is that IM Krush's letter moves a matter that is essentially a private dispute that should be addressed by the organizers and TDs at the Championship and the officials of the USCF into the arena of public opinion - where nobody wins and women's chess loses. The haters will now be rubbing their hands in glee waiting for a cat fight between the two highest rated female players in the United States.

Great, just great.

Friday Night Miscellany

It's warm and humid and the outdoors is calling. This will be short - very short. Last night it stormed like all get out about 3 in the morning, and kept me up with non-stop thunder, pounding rain, high winds and constant lightning flashes until nearly 4:30 a.m. I'm exhausted! I hate lightning, and now with every storm that comes I fear the giant elm out back will come crashing down on the house. But I hate the thought of having it taken down.

The noise of the storm is what woke me up from a satisfying deep sleep. At first I thought it might be hail pounding against the house so, and so I staggered out of bed to the nearest window, lifted the curtain and peered out, just as a gigantic jagged flash of booming lightning crackled across the sky and, from the trajectory, into the ground, less than a block away. But I didn't stay at the window long enough to check it out. I jumped back into bed and it was all I could do not to pull the covers over my head like a scared little kid! I WAS scared!

You probably thought I was kidding last week when I mentioned the next big thing - mining poop for gold dust (due to the increase of the uber-wealthy eating food dusted with gold). Darlings, you ain't see nothing yet!

Bird poop wars

Stealing Used Grease

On a more somber note, a former Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Geremi Gonzalez was killed last Sunday by a lightning strike in his home country. I heard about this a couple of days ago on the radio as I was getting ready for work and wasn't paying particular attention, but I thought I heard that lightning actually struck a necklace he was wearing at the time. How likely is that??? I did not find confirmation of this on the internet, but there are over 400 stories and I'm not going to look at every one. There are several news releases on the internet, all about saying the same thing, but this one does report that there are several different versions of what was actually going on at the time of Gonzalez's death. Believe me when I tell you that hearing stories like this one does not put my mind at ease about my fear of lightning!

I'm outta here!

Body kept hidden to appease Goddess

From newindpress.com (don't click on the link unless you have a very good pop-up blocker)

Wednesday May 28 2008 10:01 IST
Express News Service
DEOGARH: Raghu Adha (55) of Aadash village under Reamal police limits had died on May 24 after suffering from chicken pox and other ailments. But instead of cremating him, his family members confined the body in bales of neem leaves hoping that it would appease god.

With folklore associating chicken pox to wrath of Goddess Mangala, villagers felt that if fire would be lit to the body, it would enrage the goddess, which would attract curse for the village. The family, hence, wrapped the body with neem leaves and hid it in nearby forest.

However, after the incident came to light, a team of doctors led by Chief District Medical Officer, Rajarajeshwari Devi accompanied by BDO Biswamohan Ray visited the village and provided medical treatment to other chicken pox-affected patients in the village.

They also facilitated cremation of the body through the Aadash panchayat.

Chicago Open

Final standings (chess femmes) for 2008 Chicago Open:

Open:
(19) Iryna Zenyuk (USA 2186), 4.0

Under 2300:
(3) Tatev Abrahamyan (USA 2296), 5.5
(13) Tatiana Vayserberg (USA 2132), 5.0
(27) Yulia Cardona (CUB 2179), 4.0
(31) WFM Chouchanik Airapetian (USA 2143), 4.0
(74) WFM Hana Itkis (USA 2082), 2.0

World Zoroastrian Organization Seminar June 1, 2008

Short notice - I only just received it in email today.

WZO’s 2008 Seminar on Zoroastrian Religion, History and Culture
Held in association with the World Zarathushtrian Trust Fund
Sunday 01.06.2008 - 10.00 - 16.00

Venue: Gulbenkian Room
The International Students House,
229 Gt. Portland Street,
London
W1N 5HD
(nearest Underground station: Gt. Portland Street)

Sunday 1st June 2008
10.00 - Registration and coffee
10.25 - Welcome and opening address by Darayus S Motivala, President of WZO
10.30 - Morning Session commences
13:00 - Break for Lunch
14.15 - Afternoon Session commences
15:30 - Q & A with the panel of today’s speakers chaired by Ms Shahin Bekhradnia.
16:00 - Closing address by Ms Soonu Engineer.

Speaker: Shapour Suren Pahlav
Chairperson: Mr Noshir Umrigar
“The conversion of Zoroastrian Shrines and Temples in Iran to Islamic Ones”

Speaker: Prof Stanley Insler
Chairperson: Mr Farrokh Vajifdar
"Zarathustra: The Man and the Message"

Speakers: Prof Kejia Yan (China)
& Dr Takeshi Aoki (Japan)
Chairperson: Ms Shahin Bekhradnia
“Zoroastrians and the Sassanian Royal Family in the Tang China (618-907)”

Please reserve your place by telephoning Mr Darayus S Motivala on +44 (0) 1844 352 887 or email: darayus ‘at’ motivala.uk

Achaemenid Era Gold Cup in Taunton

An unbelievable but true story - this priceless cup was once used for airgun target practice! Notice the inter-twined serpents on the foreheads of both faces.

Story from Yahoo news
Childhood 'toy' revealed as ancient Persian relic
Wed May 28, 8:26 AM ET

LONDON (AFP) - An ancient gold cup mysteriously acquired by a Taunton scrap metal dealer is expected to fetch some 500,000 pounds at auction after languishing for years in a shoe box under its current owner's bed.

Owner John Webber says his grandfather gave him the 5.5-inch (14-centimetre) high mug to play with when he was a child, back in 1945.
He assumed the golden cup, which is decorated with the heads of two women facing in opposite directions, their foreheads garlanded with two knotted snakes, was made from brass.

But he decided to get it valued when he was moving house last year and was told it was actually a rare piece of ancient Persian treasure, beaten out of a single sheet of gold hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus Christ.

Experts said the method of manufacture and the composition of the gold was "consistent with Achaemenid gold and gold smithing" dating back to the third or fourth century BC.

The Achaemenid empire, the first of the Persian empires to rule over significant portions of Greater Iran, was wiped out by Alexander the Great in 330 BC.

Auction house Duke's, in Dorchester, south-west England, will put the cup under the hammer on June 5, with an estimate of 500,000 pounds.

Webber, 70, told The Guardian newspaper that his grandfather had a "good eye" for antiques and picked up "all sorts" as he plied his trade in the town of Taunton in south-west England.

"Heaven knows where he got this, he never said," he added, revealing that as a child, he used the cup for target practice with his air gun.

* * * * *

The only two-faced god I know of is the Roman Janus. Is this a goddess? Is the cup a cult implement of some kind or was it used in worship? Is it purely a decorative object, a wine cup? Is there significance to the two faces? What does the entwined serpent emblem on the forehead of each face mean? Are there any other artifacts like this one published in any museum or collector's catalog? So many questions - and no answers!

Lombard Warrior Buried with Horse

From the Telegraphco.uk
Thousand-year-old Lombard warrior skeleton discovered buried with horse in Italy
By Malcolm Moore in Rome
Last Updated: 11:44AM BST 28/05/2008

Italian archaeologists have discovered a perfectly preserved skeleton of a 1400-year-old Lombard warrior, buried with his horse.

The skeleton, which was found in a park at Testona, near Turin, is of a 25-year-old Lombard who died of a fever. Unusually, his horse was buried alongside him.

"This is a very rare find," said Gabriella Pantò, the archaeologist leading the dig. "We have not seen many precedents in Italy. We have seen horses' heads buried with warriors, but this find shows the area is vitally important," she added.

The Lombards were a nomadic tribe of Germans who settled near the Danube and launched an attack on Italy in the sixth century.

Under the leadership of King Alboin, the Lombards stormed across the Alps in the spring of AD568 with an army of around 500,000.

Vicenza, Verona and Brescia were quickly conquered from the Byzantines, who were still suffering from battling the Goths. Lombardy was established across the whole of the north of the country, an empire which lasted for around 100 years.

The dig revealed a Lombard camp had settled at Testona, and the skeleton of a dog was also found nearby. The invaders had built an aqueduct and irrigation system and a series of small wooden huts, without any foundations.

The warrior was also buried with a treasure chest being x-rayed by archaeologists. In addition, a small bag held a pair of pincers, a bronze belt buckle and some armour.

He wore a ring on his left index finger and also had both a knife and a "scramasax", a short sword designed for close combat.

Terracotta Warriors Damaged by Quake

From the Sydney Morning Herald
May 29, 2008 - 10:10AM
Photo from ChinaTravelGuide.com)

Temples, ancient pieces of pottery and the famed Terracotta Warriors were among priceless cultural treasures damaged or destroyed in this month's earthquake, state press reported today.

The May 12 quake measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale damaged 1,645 cultural relics in worst-hit Sichuan province alone, including 148 regarded as precious, Xinhua news agency said.

One of those severely damaged was the 2000-year-old Erwang Temple, in the same area as the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Dujiangyan irrigation system, which also suffered some impact, Xinhua reported.

The temple was built to honour two ancient kings and was until the quake a popular tourist destination.

A further 239 relics were severely damaged in the neighbouring provinces of Shaanxi and Gansu as well as in the Chongqing Municipality, Xinhua said, citing China's Cultural Heritage Administration.

Tong Mingkang, the administration's deputy head, said experts from all over the country would gather in the affected areas to help restoration work.

"Relics restoration in the disaster area is at the top of our agenda for our bureau in the coming several years," Tong was quoted as saying.

A team of 20 leading experts was already assessing the damage, Xinhua said.

In Shaanxi, to the north-east of the quake zone, seven of the world-famous Terracotta Warriors sustained minor damage and were among 41 precious cultural artefacts affected, according to the Beijing News.

The discovery of the more than 2000-year-old Terracotta Warriors, buried along with China's first emperor, counts as one of the great archaeological sensations of the 20th century. There are an estimated 8000 warriors.

The earthquake cost the lives of more than 68,000 people, according to the latest official toll, making it China's worst natural disaster in a generation.

AFP

The Kings of New York

From Ch. 10, "The Women in the Room":

The circuitous route to America took Irina Krush and her family from the Ukraine through Austria and into Italy, and while they waited in limbo for their papers to arrive, with nothing else to do, Irina's father, an accountant, taught her how to play ches. This was in 1989; Irina was four and a half. When she was six, she won twenty dollars in a tournament at the Manhattan Chess Club, playing against men six and seven times her age. When she was twelve, she became a master. by the time she was fourteen, Irina's rating had risen above 2400, and Murrow's reputation as a home to exiled Eastern european chess talent had been firmly established. If you were a competitive chess player from Brooklyn, you just knew, the way Irina did, that this was where Anna Khan had gone, and this was where you belonged.

Maybe she could have taken the test and gotten into Stuyvesant, but what did she want with Stuyvesant? She had no desire to spend her formative years doing complex mat homework and competing for college admissions. to tell the truth, she'd never much liked math. This might have been due to her eyesight, which started to degenerate somewhere around the third grade; in the five years it took her to get over her pride and admit that she couldn't see the equations on the chalkboard, any passion she had for numbers died.

And what did she want with numbers, anyhow? The reason her eyesight had deteriorated must have had something to do with all the reading she did in poorly lit rooms. She loved to read; she still does. If only she could have been a writen, or even a dancer - but for reasons she couldn't explain (maybe becuase she was an accountant's daughter), chess became her mode of self-expression. This has always been the way she's viewed the game, not as a clash of egos, not as osme grand metaphor for war, not like Fischer and Kasparov have characterized it, as an opportunity to emasculate another human being. The best games, like that time in Buenos Aires when she sacrificed her knight and then her rook (and still managed to win), form like pearls do, over time, over a series of moves, which is why she does her best work in games with longer time control, games that unfold in four or five glorious hours. Oh, she knows there's an inescapable logic at work here, and she doesn't deny it, and she can respect that sort of thinking as well. But this is not the essence of chess. The essence of chess is all wrapped up in beauty. Even if you lose. And maybe this is a feminine perspective, but hell, she's known plenty of men who can apreciate the beauty of the game as much as she can. Otherwise, why would they spend all those hours studying by themselves? Otherwise, what would be the point?

Ratatoskr, the Messenger Squirrel

Thanks to dondelion for passing along this information on Ratatoskr.

In Norse mythology, Ratatoskr (anglicized Ratatosk) ("drilling tooth", an apt description of a squirrel) is a red squirrel who runs up and down the Great World Tree Yggdrasil, carrying messages between Veorfolnir, the Eagle who lives at the top of the Tree, and Niohoggr, the Dragon who lives in the Great Tree's roots. This entry from Wikipedia says Ratotoskr not only carries messages among the worlds, he also carries gossip.

Not being able to read Old Norse, I am unable to vouch for the translation that is provided at this website. I don't know who put the website together, and I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information. Still, it's a fascinating look at the world of the skalds back in the old old days. Skalds were, I gather, the carriers of ancient oral tradition, troubadours, poets, entertainers, diplomats, teachers and carriers of the old ways. This is (evidently) the only line in Snorri's Edda that talks about Ratatoskr:

Ikorni sá er heitir Ratatoskr, renn upp ok niðr eptir askinum ok berr öfundarorð milli arnarins ok Niðhöggs. (The squirrel called Ratatoskr runs up and down the ash-tree, carrying hateful words between the eagle and Nidhogg).

My initial take on this is that Ratatoskr has some aspects of Lokki, the mischief-maker - but I wasn't able to find anything else under a quick search on the internet. Anyone out there know more about the traditional role of Ratatoskr in Norse mythology???

Women in Archaeology: Theresa Goell

From the Jewish Women's Archive (online):

Biographical Information: Theresa Goell, an archaeologist best known for her work as the the director of the Nemrud Dagh excavations in southeastern Turkey. was born in New York City on July 17, 1901. She grew up in Brooklyn and spend summers at the family's house in the Catskills Mountains.

After graduating from Erasmus High School in Brooklyn, Goell entered Syracuse University; she later transferred to Radcliffe College, from there she graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1923. While at Radcliffe, she experienced permanent hearing loss, diagnosed as otosclerosis. She initially overcame this handicap by learning lip reading; as technology developed, she took to wearing hearing aids. During her junior year at Radcliffe she married Cyrus Levinthal; after her graduation, they both studied at Cambridge University. They had one son, Jay, and were divorced in the late 1930s or early 1940s.

Having earned the equivalent standard B.A. in architecture from Cambridge in 1933-35, Goell began doing archaeological field work in Jerusalem and Gerasa, Trans-Jordan, under the auspices of the American School of Oriental Research. In Jerusalem she made drawings of ceramics and restored terra-cottas, and worked as an architectural assistant. Theresa returned to New York in the late 1930s. She did interior architectural design and display work at department stores in the Bronx and in Newark, New Jersey. During World War II she did drafting for Naval Contractors in New York City and Brooklyn. While working, she took courses in prehistoric and European art at Columbia University, 1944-45.

It was Professor Hartley Lehman at New York University who suggested that she look into the heretofore little studied contents at Mt. Nimrud on the Anatolian plateau of southeastern Turkey. Her own NYU Research from this period led to her life long pursuit to excavate this site, now known as Nemrud Dagh. Goell undertook her first professional archaeological field work during 1946 to 1953; it included a position at Tarsus as the architectural and archaeological assistant the the professor of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and work with other archaeological expeditions in Palestine, Jordan and Turkey. An active Zionist, Goell worked on numerous buildings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Goell's first arduous journey to Mt. Nimrud was in 1947; she returned for a second visit in 1951. Little was known about this site before she began excavations there in 1953. The Bollingen Foundation and the National Geographic Society supported the excavation; in March 1961 The National Geographic published an article about Nemrud Dagh and later the National Geographic Society produced a film about it. Goell became the Director of Excavations at Samosata, the city of Antiochus I of Commagene. In 1973, on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic, the Cultural Ministry of Turkey awarded Goell in recognition of her contributions to Anatolian culture and art. She died in New York City in 1985, after a long illness.

* * * * *

This information about Goell is from a summary on a documentary film produced by Goell's niece in 2005, "Queen of the Mountain":

Theresa Goell embarked on her career as an archaeologist with four strikes against her: She was a woman, divorced, extremely hard of hearing and a Jew working with Muslims. But all that didn't deter her.

Born in 1901, she could have had a comfortable life as the wife of a lawyer and the sister-in-law of a prominent rabbi in Brooklyn, but she left her husband and son for a lifelong adventure that led her to a desolate mountain in Southeast Turkey.

Martha Goell Lubell, who has lived in Wynnewood for the last 28 years, chronicled the life of her aunt Theresa, a pioneer female archaeologist, in a new documentary, Queen of the Mountain, filmed mostly on location in Turkey. Since Goell was hard-of-hearing, the film will be screened with open captioning to make the film accessible to hard-of-hearing and deaf viewers.

Acclaimed actress Tovah Feldshuh, who recently starred in Golda’s Balcony on Broadway, is the voice of Theresa Goell. In addition to Lubell, who produced and directed the film, others from the Philadelphia area who had a role in the film were Sharon Mullally, the editor and writer; Carol Rosenbaum, who did additional writing; John Anthony, the sound designer; Kevin Diehl, the graphic designer, and Sumi Tonooka, who wrote the music.

Lubell says, “I started hearing stories about my aunt’s exploits when I was a little girl growing up in New York.” The idea of putting the saga on film occurred to her while she was making her last film, Daring to Resist, which she produced with Bala Cynwyd filmmaker Barbara Attie.

After Theresa Goell’s brother died in the late 1990s, Lubell’s cousins found boxes full of photos, letters, audio tapes and film relating to Theresa’s unusual career as well as her personal struggles: Theresa was nearly deaf, divorced, pursuing a career in what was then a man’s field and a Jewish woman working in a Muslim country. “There was a film in those boxes,” says Lubell. “And I decided to make a film about my aunt, knowing it would take me to those places that I had heard about from her decades before.”

Theresa excavated the spectacular burial site of King Antiochus on Nemrud Dagh, a 7,000-foot-high mountain three days’ walk from the nearest post office. Antiochus ruled the kingdom of Commagene, and controlled the trade routes across the Euphrates River in the century before the birth of Christ. Theresa first learned of the site when she wrote a paper in graduate school in 1938.

“Finding the tomb of Antiochus at Nemrud Dagh was always something Theresa wanted to do,” reports Donald Sanders, editor of a book on her work at Nemrud Dagh. “We know Antiochus was a very wealthy person. He would have had very elaborate materials buried with him. The contents of the tomb could have rivaled that of King Tut.”

Theresa was determined to get to Nemrud Dagh and it took her six years to get permission to excavate, raise money for her excavations, find scholars to collaborate with her and equip a mountaintop camp for 50 people. In 1953, at age 50, she finally got there and kept working there over the next twenty years.

Theresa was to work very closely with the Kurdish villagers who became the backbone of her excavations and were almost like her family. “They treat me like a mother,” Goell remarks in her oral history, “ And they’re very kind to me.”

“She was thinking on all different levels,” according to Martha Sharp Joukowsky, a professor of archaeology at Brown University who is featured in the film. “Not only of what had to be done in the archaeological sense but also in the human sense, of the people who worked for her and were so devoted to her.” She brought clothing and medicine from New York and treated the medical problems of her workers and their families, and taught their wives hygiene and birth control. Her nephew, Jon Goell, relates: “She was considered queen of the mountain.”

Goell never found the tomb but Nemrud Dagh has become a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most famous archaeological destinations in Turkey.

The Glass Ceiling

It's hard to say why there aren't more women at the top of the ladder
Mark Anderson, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Last week's column on women in business -- or the lack thereof -- garnered some interesting reader feedback, most notably a letter from an Ottawa researcher who claims women simply aren't smart enough to out-compete men for top executive positions. Among the "evidence" he uses to support this assertion, the letter-writer notes that 95 per cent of Nobel prize winners are male, and men outnumber women two-to-one on Mensa rolls.

Needless to say, only the rashest of fools would agree to weigh in on this particular debate. So here goes.

Are men smarter than women? Who knows? And in the context of corporate ladder-climbing, who cares? Because in most, if not all, businesses the smartest people in the room tend to be nowhere near the executive suite.

Case in point: For years, the smartest person in a newsroom where I worked was not the editor-in-chief or even one of the section editors, but a lowly columnist. The guy, who I won't name, was a flat-out genius, able (and all-too-willing) to deliver hour-long, extraordinarily erudite monologues on virtually any subject. His evident brilliance aside, no one, himself included, perceived him as "management material" because, well, he just wasn't.

Likewise, the IT geek with the PhD in electrical engineering, the accounting nebbish who can recite pi to 23 decimals, the archivist with the photographic memory, the custodian who plays chess at a grand master level. All might out-score the boss on standard IQ tests; none might be suited to the rigours of running a company or department.

As long ago as the Renaissance and as recently as the Industrial Revolution it was posited that the world would be run either by intellectuals or scientists, neither prediction ultimately panning out. Indeed, surveying the current political scene, you could even argue there's an inverse relationship between brain-power and leadership: Michael Ignatieff and Stéphane Dion are by all accounts brilliant individuals and less-than-brilliant leaders. Paul Martin is a smart guy who failed spectacularly in the role of national leader. Ditto Kim Campbell.

South of the border, Ronald Reagan was a revered leader few would confuse with an intellectual giant -- the Great Communicator rather than the Great Cogitator.

So if raw intelligence isn't keeping women from top corporate jobs, what is? Could it be something as simple as testosterone? A recent study out of Britain found that the performance of financial traders varies with the amount of testosterone in their bloodstream.

The higher the testosterone level, the more money they make on the trading floor, likely because they're more aggressive and daring in pursuit of their goals.

Likewise, controlled aggression, risk-taking and the ability to make hard, fast, unilateral decisions are hallmarks of leadership, without which the corporate ship tends to drift and list, ultimately becoming prey to more ruthless competitors.

Do women have this cut-throat combativeness encoded in their DNA, coursing through their veins? Some do. I wouldn't want to meet PepsiCo boss Indra Nooyi in a dark alley, much less Alcatel-Lucent CEO Patricia Russo or tobacco maven Susan Ivey, chairman, president and CEO of Reynolds American.

Rest of article.

Need for Coal "Forces" Excavation

Well, at least they're excavating in an attempt to save something, and not just blowing up the mound to get at the coal.

From Today's Zaman
May 24, 2008

Energy needs spark resumption of mound excavation in Kütahya

The urgent need for coal buried beneath an ancient mound, in the Aegean city of Kütahya has forced the resumption of excavation at the site after 10 years

In a statement to the Anatolia news agency, Professor A. Nejat Bilgen from the Dumlupınar University (DPÜ) archeology department said they had located a 15-million-ton coal reserve under the protected archeological site of the Seyitömer mound, which is 30 meters high and 200 meters wide.

"Upon the demand and initiative of the Turkish Coal Enterprises [TKİ] in an effort to make use of this coal reserve, the Eskişehir Archeological Museum began excavation in 1989, subsequently taken over by the Afyonkarahisar Museum, which continued the project until 1995. Then there was a long interval of 10 years [with little or no excavation taking place]. After a protocol was signed between our university and Seyitömer Lignite Enterprises as a result of the TKİ's efforts, they resumed excavations in 2006. The market value of this huge reserve is YTL 500 million, and it can meet the energy needs of the Tunçbilek thermal power station [near Kütahya]. With the utilization of the reserve under the protected mound, about a total of 10 billion kilowatts of electricity will be produced."

Bilgen noted that they planned to finish unearthing all the historical artifacts and cultural strata of the mound at the end of an intense five-year period of work, adding that all the artifacts discovered would be given to museums. Also emphasizing that they would determine to which cultural strata the archeological findings that formed the mound belonged, he said:

"We are making drawings of the archeological structure in the mound for the benefit of the world of science and Anatolia. All our efforts are being exerted to that end. We have also established a new archeology department at the university. There is a team of 40 people consisting of experts, archeologists, lecturers and students working on site. Including the workers, we are a team of 100 people who work for six months out of the year. We are trying to contribute to the history of Kütahya in a fast and lasting way," he said.

World’s oldest ceramic workshop
Bilgen said archaeologists had so far discovered layers from five different cultures at the mound. According to their findings, the top stratum belonged to the Romans and included a temple and sacrificial altar. "The excavation has so far revealed that the mound is about 5,000 years old. We have found that the site was densely inhabited during the Bronze Age and during Phrygian and Roman times. We have also found ceramic moulds that suggest there was a ceramic workshop around 3,000 B.C. in addition to some other uniquely important artifacts. The ceramic moulds have proven to be one of the world's oldest ceramic workshops," he said.

Bilgen went on to say that containers, pitchers, earthenware pots, ceramic moulds, lamps, seals and other artifacts they found during the excavations were already on display at the Kütahya Archeology Museum. "By the envisaged end of excavation, we will have found enough artifacts to fill three or four museums."

2008 Chicago Open

I'll have to check to see if any other chess femmes played in this event (there were several sections) - this is the day I normally do updates for Chess Femme News so I'll let all know tonight.

Jen Shahade wrote about Iryna Zenyuk's performance at the Chicago Open at Chess Life Online, shortly after playing in the U.S. Women's Chess Championship in Tulsa.

There's a nice photo of Zenyuk and near the bottom in Betsy Dynako's mini photo-gallery, a nice photo of Hana Itkis.

Okay, I'm looking at the cross-table for the Chicago Open - I don't think it reflects the final round. As it stands (without being updated), Zenyuk was in 31st place with 3.0 after Round 6.

A quick look at the cross-table for the U-2300 shows Tatev Abrahamyan in second place with 5.0 after Round 6 (way to go Tatev!) Tatiana Vayserberg from Wisconsin (my home state) was in 24th with 4.0. Go, Tatiana! Chouchanik Airapetian, who did not have such a good U.S. Women's Chess Championship, was in 45th place with 3.0. Hana Itkis was in 67th place with 2.0.

Pengs are Prodigies in Chess

From YorkRegion.Com

Michael Power, Staff Writer
Published on May 26, 2008

Despite their young ages, Jackie and Janet Peng are clear on what it is about chess they enjoy.

“The strategy and how you have to think what to do,” says Jackie, 10, who travels to Quebec City with her sister next month to compete in the

Canadian Youth Chess Championship.
Her younger sister Janet, 7, also enjoys the challenge the game offers.

“The harder you play the harder you have to battle,” she says.

The Richmond Hill sisters recently competed in their age groups at the Ontario Youth Chess Championship in Kitchener, organized by the internationally recognized Chess Federation of Canada.

Not enough competitors signed up in the under-eight division, so Janet moved to playing against players 10 and younger, said the girls’ mother, Xuekun Xing.

Both girls won in their age groups, she said. They can now continue to a national chess competition in Quebec City from July 14 to 17. Winners from that competition move on to the two-week World Youth Chess Championships in Vietnam this October.

Jackie started playing chess about a year-and-a-half ago, Ms Xing said. She and her husband, Henry Ping, signed her up for a community program in the game and her school has a chess club.

Jackie took to the game quickly, showing an ability to concentrate and think logically, said Mrs. Xing.

“She got better and better and played more and more,” she said. “We saw she has a lot of potential in chess.”

Jackie played in tournaments in the GTA representing Crosby Heights Public School and her parents signed her up with a private chess teacher two months ago.

Janet learned the game largely by watching Jackie play with their father, Mrs. Xing said. She began playing regularly this year, as well, and soon gained skill.

When the family arrived at the Kitchener tournament, her younger sibling asked to participate.

They hadn’t expected to enter Janet, but registered her on the spot. Like her older sister, she won.

“She has some talent, too,” Mrs. Xing said.

The sisters also played in and won the Ontario Girls’ Chess Championship May 17.

Jackie, especially, is studying hard for the Quebec City tournament. She takes two private lessons per week in the game, said Mrs. Xing.

And according to their Thornhill chess teacher, the sisters could be a force during the competition.

“I believe they have chances,” said Iuri Lebedev, noting it’s tough to say how good a chance that might be.

Janet started playing more recently and does well for her age, while her older sibling competes among the best in her age group, said Mr. Lebedev, who has taught the game for 25 years..

Competing at that level is an achievement, given thousands of children play the game. But like sports, you have to be well-conditioned and healthy to play the game well, he said. Sitting for hours and thinking strategy takes more stamina than it might seem. And training beforehand and being well prepared add to the sisters’ chances.

“We have some work to do,” Mr. Lebedev said.

The Kings of New York

From Michael Weinreb's The Kings of New York, this is from the chapter "The Women in the Room." (The photo is 2003 U.S. Women's Chess Champion Anna Hahn, from an event in March, 2002.)

Anna Khan was sixteen years old and the reigning women's chess champion of Latvia when she enrolled at Murrow High School, the latest pubescent prodigy to arrive in Brooklyn from a distant corner of the crumbling Soviet empire. This was in 1993, ten years after Eliot Weiss founded the school's chess club and a few months after it won its first national championship. And for reasons entirely beyond Weiss's control, Anna Khan was the first female ever to compete on his traveling team.

Anna Khan would lead Murrow to two more national championships, in 1993 and 1994. Eventually, after changing her name to Anna Hahn, she won the U.S. Women's Championship in 2003 and earned the title of WIM, which is the abbreviation used for a "Women's International Master," a less stringent title than "International Master," and one that many of the best male players in the world deride as a second-class designation. On a Web site that archives past games from top players, the comments under Hahn's entry and photograph are a catalog of puerilities ("Anna Hahn can mate me any day. Growl.") But then, this is the way it has always been. Since the inception of competitive chess, the upper eschelons of the game have reeked of sexism, and women who dare intrude upon this sanctity are often treated with as much subtlety as if they'd wandered into the back room at Scores. "Guys aren't going to stand around and watch a guy's game because he's a guy," Bruce Pandolfini says. "Maybe if he's Bobby Fischer, but not for any other reason. But that's not why they stand around women. And if they say it's for any other reason, they're lying."

Forty-five years earlier, when a U.S. women's champion named Lisa Lane drew a sudden barrage of media attention (she was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and was profiled in Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine, which described her as "comely" and "shapely"), Fischer, an equal-opportunity bigot, dismissed her and her entire sex with a barrage of insults. "They can't concentrate, they don't have stamina, and they aren't creative," he said of female chess players. "They're all fish." And that attitude didn't cease with Fischer: in 2002, Garry Kasparov told the Times of London that "chess is a mixture of sport, psychological warfare, science, and art," and that "when you look at all these components, man dominates. Every single component of chess belongs to the areas of male domination."

Of the top players in the world, only one, Hungarian Judit Polgar, is female, and fewer than ten of the world's 950 international grandmasters are women. [This information is somewhat dated.] Some efforts are being made to alter this: in recent years, Kasparov's own foundation has sponsored an all-girls national championship. But there remains a consensus among many of the best male players that this imbalance exists for a reason, that women are not wired for chess in the same way as men, that they they are, by nature and through societal pressure, more social creatures, and that they would prefer to interact with others than be locked in a room by themselves, poring over esoteric middle-game theory. Which is why most of these girls, when they reach the age of twelve or thirteen, an age that Bruce Pandolfini calls "crucial" to one's development as a chess player, simply fade away. Which is why approximately ninety-seven percent of competitive chess players in the United States happen to be male.

Of the thirty-five participants in the high-school varsity section at the city championships, two were girls. One of them was Anna Ginzburg, who came up through the Chess-in-the Schools program and landed one of those coveted spots at Stuyvesant High School. Ginzburg wears wire-rimmed glasses and has a tangle of thick brown hair and a penchant for feminine accessories, like her "Mrs. Affleck" tote bag. On the back of her Chronos digital clock, she's written her name in permanent marker, dotting the I with a flower and underlining the whole thing with a feminine flourish. when she was younger, she was painfully shy, but now she's gotten used to it, to being out-numbered and overlooked. At times, she is able to assimilate into this boys' world, beating them at cards and surprising them over the board and returning their banter when necessary. (Anna's rating is 1656, about the same as Oscar's whom she defeated at cities after an overconfident Oscar hung a rook). But the worst part, she says, is that when she travels to tournaments, she has so few people with whom she can share a hotel room. In that sense, she is very much on her own.

Because there is such disparity in numbers, the women who break through to competitive chess, the women who can manage to thrive amid a sea of testosterone, tend to be unique and forceful personalities. Some, like Elizabeth Vicary, admit that they thrive on the attention (one Russian women's GM, Alexandra Kosteniuk, has posed for so many risque photo shoots that she's been called "the Anna Kournikova of chess"). [Actually, Kosteniuk is a GM who just happens to be a woman]. Many say they've never felt discriminated against, and that if anything, it's just the opposite: men are so deferential, so cowed by their presence, that their brains often seize up and start melting when they play. Adults turn into randy adolescents. They make silly moves they would never make against other men, and when they are called on these things, they attribute their carelessness to the sex of their opponent: Against a man, I would never make such a move. "In most games, I am thinking about girls for fifty to seventy-five percent of the time, another fifteen percent goes to time management, and with what's left over I am calculating," grandmaster Alex Shabalov once admitted to Jennifer Shahade, the strongest female player ever to be born in this country.

* * * * * * *

I'll bet Shabalov never figured those words would be immortalized in such a way. Har! Oooohhhh, Alex, Mr. Ladies' Man.

The "Key Holders," Heroes of Afghanistan

Another compelling article about the current "Hidden Treasures of Afghanistan" exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The article contains photos of some of the treasures - check them out!

2,000-year-old treasures tell wild story
NEELY TUCKER; The Washington Post
Published: May 25th, 2008 01:00 AM
An exhibit in Washington, D.C., reveals gold, intrigue and jewelry once buried in Afghanistan. The finds have survived looters and wars.

WASHINGTON – You can go see Indiana Jones and the temple of whatever if you like, but it’s probably not going to be as good as the Bactrian Gold and the Secret of Tillya Tepe.

The former is at any multiplex. The latter is at only the National Gallery of Art.

It’s one of those ripping good yarns of yesteryear, the kind you used to see on cliffhanger serials before the main feature. This one is set in a dusty corner of Afghanistan. It’s about ancient art, looters, gravediggers, the Russians, the French, the Taliban, an invasion or three, civil war, the Silk Road, the Dragon Master and 22,607 pieces of gold and ivory and lapis and turquoise. There’s a surprising role played by pink Chinese toilet paper and six mysterious safes in a sealed underground vault at the presidential compound.

OK, so the plot gets a little crowded. That tends to happen when your story is true and covers more than 2,000 years.

The show is “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures From the National Museum, Kabul,” and it is a remarkable display from a remote outpost in the world of antiquity: a dusty land of foreign traders, violent nomads, dangerous women and the unmistakable glint of gold. It has a great subplot of archaeologists winning one against the black market. It plays until Sept. 7.
Like any good archaeological thriller, this one features valuable antiquities and modern twists, set into world-shaping international politics. After being covered by dirt and mud for nearly 2,000 years, most of the artifacts in this show were discovered in digs made during the 1930s or the 1970s. Then, once found, they were lost again, as the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the rise of the Taliban in 1996 raised successive clouds of dust over their whereabouts. Most archaeologists feared they had been lost forever to the black market or destroyed by the Taliban.

Then, three years after the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent defeat of the Taliban, the sealed cases and footlockers were opened in vaults in the Arg, the Afghan presidential compound in Kabul.

Nobody was sure what was in them – the keys had been lost – until they were broken open with a hammer, crowbar and finally a power saw.

“This power saw starts going – bbbrrrzzzzttt!!! – and the sparks are flying, and at first I thought we were going to open them to find a couple of potatoes in a sack with a note saying, ‘We got here first! Your friends, the Taliban,’” says Frederik T. Hiebert, the show’s curator, who was representing the National Geographic Society when the safes were hacked open. “Or I thought the sparks would set something on fire, and it would burn up all these great artifacts inside.”

Hiebert’s worries were well founded. It turned out much of the ivory and gold and glasswares had been packed in pink Chinese toilet paper. Which did not catch fire, and instead had preserved tens of thousands of items the wider world has not seen since the time of Christ.

Here was the fabled Bactrian gold, named for the region in Afghanistan where it was found, in the graves discovered at a place called Tillya Tepe (“hill of gold”): Bracelets. Necklaces. A golden belt. A woman’s crown, thin hammered orbs of gold, designed to be pulled apart into five pieces and stored flat. Pendants depicting the Dragon Master of lore, a nomadic man holding a dragon’s foreleg in each hand. Here, in another case, ivory carvings from the ancient warehouses found in archaeological digs in the city of Begram. A woman astride a mythical leogryph. A fish-shaped flask, made of glass, stunningly blue. A bronze statue of the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis-Heracles. More than 23,000 objects in all.

“This is probably our best picture of how the Silk Road actually worked,” Hiebert is saying, giving a walk-through of the exhibit. He gets enthusiastic, pointing to a series of decorative plaques. They are flat and rectangular and carved of ivory. They depict women in various poses, sitting, standing, reclining. All these were part of an elaborate chair or throne, the rest of which is missing. On the adjacent wall, a flat-screen monitor shows a rotating three-dimensional re-creation of how all the pieces would have been placed together on the throne. “This is the first time in 2,000 years anyone has seen that throne,” Hiebert says.

The Silk Road of which you’ll hear much in this exhibit was not actually a single thoroughfare, but a series of trails, pathways and trading routes that ran from Rome, Greece and Egypt, and stretched all the way to China, with connections to Siberia, India and Persia. Those roads pretty much all ran through northern Afghanistan.

“Nowhere in antiquity have so many different objects from so many different cultures – Chinese mirrors, Roman coins, daggers from Serbia – been found together in situ,” Viktor Ivanovich Sarianidi, the Russian archaeologist who made the historic find at Tillya Tepe in 1979, wrote in National Geographic in 1990.

As recounted in that article, he was the leader of a joint Soviet-Afghan project that had been digging among ancient ruins in the region, off and on, for nine years. In 1978 he spotted a bit of painted potsherd on a nearby hillock.

They dug beneath it. They uncovered a confusing site, as layers of villages from about 300 B.C. were lying atop the ruins of a massive edifice of walls and turrets more than 1,000 years older. That edifice had been built and collapsed and rebuilt, and apparently sat unused for more than 600 years. And amid these ancient ruins, they made a remarkable discovery: Tombs, from perhaps the 1st century A.D.

It was a historic find, but civil war and the Soviet invasion were closing in. Sarianidi got the artifacts from the first six graves to Kabul before war broke out. He left in February 1979.

In the intervening years, the national museum was bombed. Tons of Afghan artifacts turned up in Europe, traded on the black market. The Taliban, which did not allow graven images, destroyed more than 2,500 pieces of artwork in the museum. Archaeologists figured Sarianidi’s historic find had been sold off, melted down or destroyed.

The find was thrilling in its day, but again, war intervened: World War II ended the dig. The artifacts were shipped to the national museum in Kabul and duly lost.

It turns out they were in the footlockers in that vault in the Afghan presidential compound, the same place the goods from Tillya Tepe were taken. A small society of “tahilwidars,” or keyholders, had kept them safe, never saying a word about the treasure. Omara Khan Masoudi, the director of the national museum, was one. After the country was stabilized, they informed Karzai, and the world found them again.

“To me, this exhibit isn’t just about archaeology, it’s about keeping culture alive, about real heroism in hiding and saving these artifacts,” Hiebert says.
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The tahilwidars are heroes.

Women Warriors

I've made a point in this blog of writing about some of the history of women in war and women warriors. It is a tradition that goes back into the mists of time, something about which I am still learning (for we sure didn't study any of this stuff in school!) and now studying.

(A few good resources to get you started: "Warrior Women," by Jeannine Davis Kimball, Ph.D.; "Women Warriors: A History," by David E. Jones; "Woman As Force in Long History: A Study in Traditions and Realities", by Mary Beard)

Women have always fought, usually side by side with their husbands, fathers and brothers. History has given short-shrift to them, but there are examples from every age of women warriors who have made it into the history books. The thought of women being "too fragile" to fight seems to be a peculiarly late 19th century concept out of the age of Victoria that, at some levels, still seems to hold root in popular imagination in western cultures today but which denies a very different reality.

Now, with the advent of "modern" warfare, more women warriors than ever are being injured and killed in the line of duty. This op-ed piece from The New York Times brings home some bitter truths about a different kind of injury in today's reality of women in war:

For Women Warriors, Deep Wounds, Little Care
By HELEN BENEDICT
Published: May 26, 2008
THIS Memorial Day, as an ever-increasing number of mentally and physically wounded soldiers return from Iraq, the Department of Veterans Affairs faces a pressing crisis: women traumatized not only by combat but also by sexual assault and harassment from their fellow service members. Sadly, the department is failing to fully deal with this problem.

Women make up some 15 percent of the United States active duty forces, and 11 percent of the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly a third of female veterans say they were sexually assaulted or raped while in the military, and 71 percent to 90 percent say they were sexually harassed by the men with whom they served.

This sort of abuse drastically increases the risk and intensity of post-traumatic stress disorder. One study found that female soldiers who were sexually assaulted were nine times more likely to show symptoms of this disorder than those who weren’t. Sexual harassment by itself is so destructive, another study revealed, it causes the same rates of post-traumatic stress in women as combat does in men. And rape can lead to other medical crises, including diabetes, asthma, chronic pelvic pain, eating disorders, miscarriages and hypertension.

The threat of post-traumatic stress has risen in recent years as women’s roles in war have changed. More of them now come under fire, suffer battle wounds and kill the enemy, just as men do.

As women return for repeat tours, usually redeploying with their same units, many must go back to war with the same man (or men) who abused them. This leaves these women as threatened by their own comrades as by the war itself. Yet the combination of sexual assault and combat has barely been acknowledged or studied.

Last month, when the RAND Corporation released the biggest non-military survey of the mental health of troops since 2001, it unwittingly reflected this lack of research. The survey found that women suffer from higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression than men do, but it neglected to look into why this might be, and asked no questions about abuse from fellow soldiers. Terri Tanielian, the project’s co-editor, told me that RAND needs more money to explore these higher rates of trauma among women.

As the more than 191,500 women who have served in the Middle East since 2001 return home, they will increasingly flood the Veterans Affairs system. To ask those who need help for post-traumatic stress disorder to turn to a typical Veterans Affairs hospital, built in the 1950s and designed to treat men, is untenable. Women who have been raped or sexually assaulted often cannot face therapy groups or medical facilities full of men.

At the moment, the Department of Veterans Affairs operates only six inpatient post-traumatic stress disorder programs specifically for women. And although all 153 department-run hospitals will treat women, only 22 have stand-alone women’s clinics that offer a full range of medical and psychological services.

This number of clinics may seem adequate for the 1.7 million female veterans currently at home, especially since they represent only 7.2 percent of all veterans at the moment, but it isn’t. Many clinics are miles from where soldiers live, and many more are open only a few hours a week and lack staff members trained to deal with sexual assault, let alone assault combined with combat trauma.

The Department of Veterans Affairs says it plans to open more clinics for post-traumatic stress disorder, but how many will be only for women remains undecided.

Women are the fastest-growing group of veterans, and by 2020 they are projected to account for 20 percent of all veterans under the age of 45. Not all of these women will have suffered sexual assault, but many will have medical or psychological needs that conventional department hospitals cannot meet.

The Department of Veterans Affairs must open more comprehensive women’s health clinics, designate more facilities for women who have endured both combat and military sexual trauma and finance more support groups specifically for female combat veterans. The best way to honor all of our soldiers is to do what we can to help them mend.

Helen Benedict, a professor of journalism at Columbia, is the author of the novel “The Opposite of Love” and the forthcoming “The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq.”
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I did not publish this piece to denigrate the service of our male warriors. They, too, are being short-changed by inadequate funding of veterans' support and medical services. The situation as it exists today is absolutely appalling! If our President is willing to send our brave members of the armed forces and the armed forces reserves into dangerous combat situations, we as a nation should do whatever it takes and fund whatever it costs to serve them and treat them when they are injured as a result of service for their country. Anything less is just a disgrace, pure and simple.

If we have trillions to fight wars in foreign lands, why don't we have trillions to treat and provide services to our veterans? Shame shame on the President. Shame shame on Congress.

News from the Ken Whyld Association

Photo: Isis and Ken Whyld, IGK Symposium, Amsterdam, November, 2001. From personal album, taken by dondelion.

From the Ken Whyld Association website:
New Chess Literature

Alessandro Sanvito has written a new book about old chess manuscripts: Scacchi manoscritti (120 p.; price: 22.-- €) has been published by Caissa Italia editore where you will find further details.

A new Correspondence Chess Database on CD Ultracorr 2 has been announced by Tim Harding for June/July 2008 which will only be produced if at least 60 advance orders will be received by end of May. The advance price is 32 Euro. Orders can be made via his web site, here the direct link to the order page. Moreover a new book on olympiads has been announced by Mario Tal, you will find more details (in English / German) in this pdf-file!

A number 9 of Dr Hans Ellinger's series "Tübinger Beiträge zum Thema Schach" a reprint of the Lasker drama Vom Menschen die Geschichte [The History of Man] has just been published, you will learn all essential things from this flyer which also contains an order slip (in German; pdf-file).

The KWA serves a worthwhile cause, originally championed by chess historian Ken Whyld (d. July, 2003). Ken spent the greater part of his life researching and writing about chess and its history (including the elusive origins of the game) and amassed a huge collection of chess literature and writings on chess that were, after his death, donated by his widow to the Swiss Museum of Games, curator Dr. Ulrich Schadler (a friend of Goddesschess). Please consider supporting the worthy goals of the KWA via membership.

Goddesschess

Mr. Don has put together this week's edition of "Random Round-up" at Goddesschess (it's on the main page, on the right hand side, underneath Access Mundae).

Mr. Don has outdone himself this week, LOL! Please visit and check out the poster he put together for "Arkansas Smith and the Temple of Chess," featuring stars of Goddesschess from left to right: Isis, Mr. Don, yours truly as the Woman in Dark Glasses and our resident beautiful young person, Michelle. Rock Crystal is his theme this week, and he takes us on an adventure in chessly directions...

Memorial Day 2008

My Dad died in early November, 2002, at 80 years of age. He was a WWII vet, like the fathers of so many of my baby-boomer generation. I think about my Dad all the time, but especially on Memorial Day.

This year, I noticed for the first time that there were no veterans out in the shopping malls and the stores selling red poppies. Why not? What happened? I've always bought a poppy, even when I was just a kid and I didn't even know what it meant, just because Dad said we should always remember and buy a poppy from a veteran. Even when I was a punk-butt teenager who thought she knew it all, I always bought a poppy (although I would hide it inside my purse). As I got older and learned something more about life and the world, I would seek out the veterans who'd be out on the street corners or inside shopping centers selling their poppies a few weeks before Memorial Day. But I saw no veterans selling poppies this year. Is it because so many VFW posts have closed, all their members either dead or too old to participate any more? Where are the younger veterans? Do they not care to carry on the tradition (at least, in my hometown)?

This is my Dad in his uniform (Army, enlisted man). He sure was a handsome guy. He had light blue eyes and curly hair. As a kid his hair was light blonde but it grew darker as he grew older. By the time I was born in 1951 all vestiges of his blondness had gone, leaving him with brown curly hair, but he passed on the blonde hair and blue eyes to several of my siblings. In the strange way of genetics, I inherited the "dark" streak from the Newton side of the family - olive-toned skin, dark auburn hair, brown/hazel eyes and a petite bone structure, like two of my "Italian" looking Newton aunts! My hair was always stick straight until a few years ago, I noticed a definite "frizz" starting to develop, much to my horror! Now when I wash my hair and let it dry naturally, it is quite wavy (and it frizzes in the humidity of the Wisconsin climate, eek!) A legacy from my Dad, I guess, that is showing up in my "mature" years (no comments from the peanut gallery about my age, thank you very much!)

To all of our veterans and their families, my heart is with you today. I miss my dad a lot, but I'm glad to have known him. He was a wonderful man.

Mehen

Mehen was both a goddess - the protector of Ra - and one of the earliest known board games played in Egypt. (Image: Mehen, British Museum, c. 2800 BCE). While online you'll find many references to Mehen as a "god," in her archaic form Mehen was definitely a female protectoress of the Sun God, perhaps closely allied with (or perhaps, an incarnation of or subsumed into) the Egyptian serpent-goddess and protectoress of Pharaoh, Uadjet. Upon the uniting of Upper and Lower Egypt, the vulture goddess Nekbhet of Upper Egypt and the serpent goddess Uadjet (also known as Buto) of Lower Egypt were united in one of the ceremonial crowns worn by Pharaoh to protect the physical incarnation of Ra on earth.

Stone Mehen board games have been recovered from First Dynasty Egyptian tombs but it's origins lies somewhere in the pre-dynastic period. The game gradually lost favor over the ensuing thousand plus years after the founding of the united Egyptian kingdom and ceased to be played in Egypt during the Intermediate Period. According to Peter Piccione, "Later in the Saite Period, the play of the game is again depicted on the walls of two tombs, as part of the neo-Memphite revival--when Old Kingdom artistic motives and themes were temporarily revived for socio-political purposes. The pattern strongly suggests that the *mehen*-game ceased to be played in Egypt after the Old Kingdom."

By that time, Senet and the 58-hole game (or Hounds and Jackals) were very popular in Egypt and Senet had taken on religious significance and mystical connotations that may have been appropriated from Mehen.

A form of Mehen evidently continued to be played by the Baggara Arabs of the Sudan called "the Hyena game." The modern "Game of the Goose" which also employs a spiral playing board is not, however, related to ancient Mehen.

For general information on Mehen:
P.S. Neely's website entry on Mehen (including post done by Peter Piccione in 1994 on the old ANE network)

Pascal Romain's website entry on Mehen (he posits a date as far back as 6000 BCE for the game outside of Egypt)

See also Board Game Geek, although it really is not known just why Mehen ceased to be played in Egypt, Neely's speculations (based on Kendall's) aside.

Mehen the Enveloper from Barbara Walker's "A Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets:" Egyptian serpent-goddess who enclosed the Phallus of Ra every night, as Hindu phallic gods were enveloped in their sleep cycles by the serpent-goddess called Infinity. See Serpent.

Walker's entry under "Serpent" is 7 pages long! There's a thunderstorm going on here now, I'm going to power down for the night -

2008 President's Cup

Held in Baku, Azerbaijan
May 12 – 20, 2008

I'm a little late reporting the final standings - it took me awhile to work my way down the list and confirm the chess femmes because I was not familiar with most of the names!

1 9 GM Najer Evgeniy 2627 RUS 7,5 ($7,000) (not a chess femme!)
16 24 GM Stefanova Antoaneta 2538 BUL 6,5 ($600)
43 38 IM Paehtz Elisabeth 2449 GER 5,5 ($500)
56 52 WGM Khotenashvili Bela 2333 GEO 5,0 ($400)
57 54 IM Zozulia Anna 2332 BEL 5,0 ($300)
59 59 WIM Batsiashvili Nino 2304 GEO 5,0 ($200)
64 56 WGM Mamedjarova Zeinab 2322 AZE 5,0 ($200)
67 128 Abdulla Khayala 1982 AZE 5,0
69 63 WGM Mamedjarova Turkan 2271 AZE 5,0
74 80 WIM Gavasheli Ana 2191 GEO 5,0
83 111 Kazimova Narmin 2072 AZE 4,5
87 83 WFM Mammadova Gulnar 2188 AZE 4,5
88 102 Agasiyeva Fidan (AZE 2095), 4.5
90 98 Huseynova Sahar (AZE 2106), 4.5
91 79 Isgandarova Khayala 2193 AZE 4,5
98 99 Khudaverdieva Afag 2104 AZE 4,5
102 95 WFM Ni Viktorija 2120 LAT 4,5
112 118 Asgarova Turan (AZE 2020), 4.0
117 130 Babazade Jale (AZE 1974), 4.0
120 119 Guliyeva Sabina 2020 AZE 4,0
121 147 Soyunlu Narmin (AZE 1784), 4.0
128 132 Agayeva Gulshan (AZE 1956), 4.0
129 140 Hasanova Turkan 1897 AZE 3,5
131 74 WIM Umudova Nargiz 2222 AZE 3,5
134 131 Mammadova Aysel Alishiraz qizi 1962 AZE 3,5
139 124 Agayeva Aytan 1989 AZE 3,5
142 121 WCM Fataliyeva Ulviyyya (AZE 2003), 3.5
146 172 Kazimova Firuza Bakhlul qizi 1700 AZE 3,0
156 Khalafova Narmin Ilgar qizi 1954 AZE 2,0
174 156 Khalafova Narmin Ilgar qizi 1954 AZE 2,0
180 171 Karimova Nazrin Faiq qizi 1700 AZE 1,0

2008 U.S. Senior Open

I looked down the final standings table for chess femmes in this 78 player event held in Boca Raton, Florida April 28 - May 3, 2008. I found one - and only one, Hannalore Catania (1800), who finished in 69th place with 1.5

The event was won by IM Larry Kaufman (2383) with a perfect score of 5.0/5. Here are some familiar names who also played in the tournament:
(5) IM Joseph M. Bradford (2467), 5.0
(7) GM Dmitry Gurevich (2594), 5.0
(16) Jerry Hanken (2200), 3.0
(30) Eric D. Moskow (2248), 3.0 (a very young "senior")
(36) Al Lawrence (2000), 2.5
(38) Tim Redman (2000), 2.5
(78) Joel Channing (1283), 0.0

Chess in Africa

We don't see much news about chess in Africa. Here's an article about a tournament that Johnnie Walker Black Label Company sponsored in Ghana.

Story posted at ModernGhana.com

Hasford wins Chess Championship
By GNA Sun, 25 May 2008
Sports News
John Kojo Hasford scored 4.5 points, to win the Black Label National Chess Championship played at the Coconut Grove Regency Hotel in Accra on Saturday.

Peter Anane-Nsiah, Francis Anquandah, John O’Neil and Kees Hoogenda scored four points each to take the second, third, fourth and fifth positions in that order.

The one-day competition, which attracted about 80 players, was sponsored by Johnie Walker Black Label Company. Mr Eddie Thompson, Vice Chairman of the Ghana Chess Association said the association would do everything possible to ensure that the game was developed. He appealed to corporate bodies and institutions to help the association in its developmental efforts.

The next competition will be held on July 1.

A History of the Governess

As an avid reader of "historical" (a/k/a romantic) fiction, particularly period Regency romances, I am intimately acquainted with the poor lot of the governess. Of course, the most famous governess in literature is probably the fictional "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte (at least, I think it was Charlotte - well, it was one of the Bronte sisters). There have been several "made for t.v." movies and some theatrical releases made of Jane Eyre's story - and I've watched every single one. My personal favorite is the one that stars the ugly George C. Scott as Mr. Rochester and the fabulous actress Susannah York as Jane (1970 made for t.v.) I've yet to see a performance equal hers as Jane Eyre.

So, here is a book on the history of the British governess, aptly titled: Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres, by Ruth Brandon. Sounds rather fascinating, if uneven (according to the New York Times review).

Exhibit to bring temple of Artemis to İstanbul

From Today's Zaman
May 22, 2008

Archaeological finds from Artemision, the Temple of Artemis in the ancient Aegean site of Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, will be exhibited for the first time in İstanbul.

The exhibition, "Artemision: A Temple of a Goddess," will be inaugurated today at the İstanbul Archaeology Museum with a ceremony that visiting Austrian President Heinz Fischer will attend.

The exhibition will showcase 453 items on loan from the Ephesus Museum in Selçuk and 72 works from the İstanbul Archaeology Museum's own inventory, reported the Anatolia news agency. The artifacts to be displayed include bronze, glazed, precious metal, ivory and amber findings from the archaic period and about 100 electron coins created in the oldest known coin minting in history. Some of these artifacts were preserved in the treasury room of the İstanbul Archaeology Museum and have not been on display since 1970. Likewise, a majority of the artifacts brought from the Ephesus Museum will be put on public display for the first time, Anatolia said.

The Temple of Artemis, or Artemision in Greek, was designed and built by Cretan architect Chersiphron and his son Metagenes in 550 B.C. The construction of this all-marble temple was financed by Lydian King Kroisos.
The temple was unearthed by British archaeologist John Turtle Wood in 1870 after a long search that lasted for seven years. Upon application by the British Museum, David Gorge Hoghart started conducting archaeological excavations in 1905 on the temple and its surrounding area. These excavations unearthed not only parts of the temple, but also thousands of amber, bronze, ivory and glazed objects and coins dating back to sixth and seventh centuries B.C. Since 1965, the excavations at the site have been carried out by an Austrian team of archeologists, who discovered new findings that helped shed more light on the architecture of the temple. By expanding the excavations, the team found important evidence that relates to the early period of the temple dating back to the second millennium B.C.
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More information on the Temple of Artemis (a/k/a Diana) at Ephesus, including photographs. This information makes it clear that this incarnation of Artemis was actually related to the Anatolian mother goddess Cybele, who wore a tower on her head as a crown (representing city walls).

A Grieving Nation Asks: Why?

A picture is worth a thousand words. This is what's left of the school talked about in the article.

From The New York Times
Chinese Are Left to Ask Why Schools Crumbled in Quake

By JIM YARDLEY
Published: May 25, 2008
This story was reported by Jim Yardley, Jake Hooker and Andrew C. Revkin, and was written by Mr. Yardley.

DUJIANGYAN, China — The earthquake’s destruction of Xinjian Primary School was swift and complete. Hundreds of children were crushed as the floors collapsed in a deluge of falling bricks and concrete. Days later, as curiosity seekers came with video cameras and as parents came to grieve, the four-story school was no more than rubble.

In contrast, none of the nearby buildings were badly damaged. A separate kindergarten less than 20 feet away survived with barely a crack. An adjacent 10-story hotel stood largely undisturbed. And another local primary school, Beijie, catering to children of the elite, was in such good condition that local officials were using it as a refugee center.

“This is not a natural disaster,” said Ren Yongchang, whose 9-year-old son died inside the destroyed school. His hands were covered in plaster dust as he stood beside the rubble, shouting and weeping as he grabbed the exposed steel rebar of a broken concrete column. “This is not good steel. It doesn’t meet standards. They stole our children.”

There is no official figure on how many children died at Xinjian Primary School, nor on how many died at scores of other schools that collapsed in the powerful May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province. But the number of student deaths seems likely to exceed 10,000, and possibly go much higher, a staggering figure that has become a simmering controversy in China as grieving parents say their children might have lived had the schools been better built.

The Chinese government has enjoyed broad public support for its handling of the earthquake, and in Sichuan on Saturday, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations praised the government’s response.

But as parents at different schools begin to speak out, the question of whether official negligence, and possibly corruption, contributed to the student deaths could turn public opinion. The government has launched an investigation, but censors, wary of the public mood, are trying to suppress the issue in state-run media and online.

An examination of the collapse of Xinjian Primary School offers a disturbing picture of a calamity that might have been avoided. Many parents say they were told the school was unsafe. Xinjian was poorly built when it opened its doors in 1992, they say, and never got its share of government funds for reconstruction because of its low ranking in the local education bureaucracy and the low social status of its students.

A decade ago, a detached wing of the school was torn down and rebuilt because of safety concerns. But the main building remained unimproved. Engineers and earthquake experts who examined photographs of its wreckage concluded that the structure had many failings and one critical flaw: inadequate iron reinforcing rods running up the school’s vertical columns. One expert described the unstable concrete floor panels as “time bombs.”

Rest of article.

Goddess Kanyakumari

Undated article/editorial.

This isn't a rant on Tibet. I only copied out the part dealing with this interesting Goddess, Kanyakumari. Notice the last part of her name - MARI. That is the same as the Latin root for sea - "mare" - and obviously, Kanyakumari is a Goddess looking out to the sea, and the same word "kanyakumari" also means "land's end."

The Latin word "mare" comes from an older Indo-European language that gave rise to Latin as well as many other languages. As I understand it, Sanskrit is the oldest and most pure form of language that can be directly linked to the original Indo-European language.

Editorial
Road To Liberation
Laxmi Bahadur Vaidya

Both for the Hindus and the Buddhist, India is very popular, prominent and famous tourist destination all over the world. It possesses several sacred pilgrimage places. Kanyakumari, the land’s end, is a charming, popular and unique religious as well as recreational tourist centre at the confluence of the three seas-the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. A large number of tourists are attracted by the serene beauty of this place and the spectacles of sunrise and sunset. The sunset and the moonrise can be seen almost simultaneously on full-moon days from the same spot.

The temple of the virgin goddess Kanyakumari, which is overlooking the sea, is situated at the tip of the land.

Posture
The goddess stands above the pedestal in a lovely pose. She has a crown on her head in which valuable gems and diamonds are embedded. She also is adorned with gold ornaments containing various gems and jewels including brilliant earrings on her ears. The goddess is holding a rosary in her right hand and touches the garland by her left hand. A sparkling nose jewel too sheds lustrous radiance. The image, made of blue stone, is believed to have been installed by sage Parasurama.

According to folktales and mythological stories, the goddess Parasakti in her reincarnation came down to earth as a virgin to annihilate Banasura (king of demons) who has harassed the Gods and tortured the saints, sages and hermits causing them endless misery.

Chess News Update

Hola darlings! I'm just about to go out and tackle the dreaded mess in the back yard. I've updated Chess Femme News, May 24, 2008.

I've begun work on my June Chessville column, as the end of the month is coming up fast and the editor will be knocking on my email door soon politely asking where it's at! But first - to the raking!

An Interview with WIM Padmini Rout

Orissa chess champion Padmini Rout aims to become a Grand Master

KalingaTimes Correspondent Bhubaneswar, May 23:
Chess prodigy Padmini Rout needs no introduction. After becoming the youngest player from Orissa to earn the WIM title she has been nominated for the coveted Biju Patnaik Sports Award which would be presented to her later this year. At 14 she has earned name, fame and money, practically everything that children her age can dream of. She spoke to KalingaTimes.com in an exclusive interview:

KT: What it feels to be the youngest WIM of Orissa?

Padmini: It's a great feeling indeed. More so because very few from Orissa have earned the IM title. Being the youngest makes it all the more special.

KT: You have been nominated for the Biju Patnaik Sports Award this year. How do you feel?

Padmini: Receiving the highest sports award of the state will certainly be a matter of pride and great satisfaction. Awards act as morale booster and I'm sure this will encourage me to perform better and better in my chosen field.

KT: Who have been your toughest competitors?

Padmini: I have played against many but I think in my category I am quite strong. As it is, I treat all my opponents as rivals.

KT: Which was your first international title?

Padmini: It was the Asian championship in 2005 at New Delhi .

KT: Do you think chess players of Orissa are getting the right kind of atmosphere and facilities here?

Padmini: We don't have the state-of-the-art facilities compared to other states. For the beginners they may be alright but when it comes to professional coaching, Orissa lags behind as we do not have any Grand Masters here. A lot depends on self practice. I depend on my own computer and books for the practice.

KT: Is sponsorship a big problem here?

Padmini: Sponsorship is a great problem. It is difficult to find a sponsor in Orissa whereas in other states you get sponsorships rather easily. Getting a good sponsor in our state is difficult even after one performs well and wins major titles.

KT: Who are the players you idolize?

Padmini: My ideal player is Mikhail Tal. I also like Garry Kasprov. Among Indians I like Viswanathan Anand and Sasikaran.

KT: Does chess affect your studies? Ho do you balance studies and chess?

Padmini: No it hardly affects my studies. I study hard at the time of exams. My school also supports me very much.

KT: What are your next big championships?

Padmini: National Women's B at Calicut in June and Asian championship in July.

KT: When can we expect Padmini Rout to become a Grand Master?

Padmini: Within three years, hopefully.

Silent Survivors of Afghanistan’s 4,000 Tumultuous Years

Prior post.

From The New York Times
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: May 23, 2008

WASHINGTON — Art objects inspire many reactions, perhaps most crucially acts of preservation or destruction. From 1979 to late 2001, destruction had the upper hand in Afghanistan. The Soviet-Afghan war, the ensuing civil war and finally the pernicious rule of the Taliban inflicted incalculable losses on active archaeological sites and ancient monuments and artworks.

In March 2001 the world watched helplessly as the Taliban blew up the two giant Buddhas carved from existing rock that had faced each other across the Bamiyan Valley for 1,500 years. The progressive destruction of the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul was less blatant but equally tragic. Its collection of 100,000 artworks and artifacts — one of the finest in Asia — spanned several millenniums of Afghanistan’s rich, multicultural history.

The museum suffered looting, bombing, fire; the Taliban ordered destruction of all depictions of the human figure. By the time they were driven from power in November 2001, the Kabul museum had lost two-thirds of its collection. (Since then the museum has been safe, although looting continues outside Kabul.)

But isolated acts of preservation and some lucky circumstances also prevailed. In 1988 a small group of the Kabul museum’s staff hid crates packed with about 600 of its most precious artworks in the vault of the presidential palace. No one was sure how these crates had fared until 2004, when they were retrieved with their contents intact.

Around 200 of these works are in “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures From the National Museum, Kabul,” at the National Gallery of Art here. At once revelatory and heart-rending, this show, making a four-city American tour, has much to tell about Afghanistan, past and present.

The objects in the exhibition date from 2200 B.C. to around the second century A.D., that is, from the Bronze Age to the height of the Kushan Empire, which reached nearly across Asia and deep into the Indian subcontinent. Included are Indian ivories, Roman-Egyptian glass vessels, Greek and Greco-Bactrian bronzes and carved stone, as well as a trove known as the golden hoard of Bactria, an ancient empire in northern Afghanistan.

The combination offers a picture of Afghan cosmopolitanism, which was fed by the trade routes of the Silk Road, and the ethnic diversity resulting from invasions and peaceful migrations alike. Structured to focus on four important excavation sites, this show is the latest phase in a close working relationship between the National Geographic Society and the Kabul museum. It has been organized by the society in collaboration with the National Gallery and overseen by Fredrik Hiebert, a National Geographic Society fellow.

It begins and ends with gold objects separated by more than two millenniums. The first group consists of three rare Bronze Age gold bowls, one intact and fragments of two others. They were found in 1972 at a single site, Tepe Fullol, in northeastern Afghanistan, but their very different styles reflect influences from across Asia. The designs on the intact bowl are abstract, a square divided by an X; each quadrant contains a stepped square found on artifacts from Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. One bowl fragment is strictly local, with motifs of a wild boar, trees and mountains. The other fragment features a majestic bearded bull, an image common to Mesopotamia, 1,200 miles to the west.

Subsequent displays contain objects from the Greco-Bactrian city of Ai Khanum, founded in 300 B.C. by a follower of Alexander the Great and excavated by French archaeologists from 1964 to 1978. (Destined for Kabul’s Institute of Archaeology, which was completely destroyed, these finds survived, unnoticed, in crates that never got farther than the Ministry of Information and Culture in Kabul.) This gallery contains two leafy Corinthian capitals; lidded, partitioned bowls (for unguents and perfumes); and a full-length statue of a man named Stratos who grasps the folds of his robe in one hand, a gesture that might have influenced centuries of statues of Buddhist sculptures.

The showstopper in this section is a large ceremonial plaque in silver and gold from the third century B.C. that might have been part of Alexander’s entourage (image at beginning of article). It represents Cybele, the Greek goddess of nature, riding in a chariot driven by the winged goddess Nike, seen in profile. Their high, lion-drawn chariot seems Syrian, but the naturalism of the figures is largely Greek. This naturalism is at its best in the priest who walks behind the chariot, carrying a large parasol. He leans back with his head tilted up — making sure the deities are properly shaded — in a pose that has the alert springiness of a circus juggler. Also marvelous: the gold rocks and incised flowers underfoot.

Rest of article.

Friday Night Miscellany

Is summer ever going to come? It's cold here! Today it didn't get above 53 degrees, there was a strong constant wind off the lake out of the east and I wore a winter coat and gloves.

Here's a story that made me go "what?" It's absolutely silly - the Manchester Museum covered it's mummies after someone complained about a partially naked mummy. Hmmm, as if it still looked like anything after 2000 plus years??? Zahi Hawass (I can think of lots of other things to call him, all unflattered takes on his name) chimed in about "respect" for the dead. Yeah, right. That's why ALL of the mummies in the Cairo Museum are naked. Har!

Note to Self: Do NOT, I repeat, do NOT end up in this hospital - the buggers have obviously faulty equipment and totally incompetent staff people and doctors. Woman brain dead for 17 hours suddenly, miraculously, comes back to life? Oh, please. If that story isn't enough, here's another one.

Gold-dusted burgers. I foresee a new industry....panning poop for gold dust...

Evil America's plot to overthrow the communist system in Cuba - send cell phones! Dreamed up by no less than the astounding brainpower of our dearly soon to be departed Prez, George W. Bush.

Could the people at Goddesschess possibly be considered potential enemies of the State? (cue spooky music from "One Step Beyond...) Well, think about this: we advocate a decidedly goddess point of view that is totally subversive to the established patriarchal order; we poke fun of everyone, demonstrating an irreverence for THOSE IN POWER (although I understand Bushy did like my comments some months ago about Chavez and the "waaaa, waaaa" photograph); we have lots and lots of pages filled with subversive, goddess-tainted information at our website - and here, too! On occasion, we (not including, of course, Mr. Don), wear PINK! And - here's the clincher, a few years back we actually discovered in our stats program the trail of a rather clumsy spy front agency that had suddenly developed a passion for all things Goddesschess - I seem to recall the business was selling the equivalent of modern-day "murphy beds" - darlings, I'm not making this up! Sooooo, if a "national emergency" should arise, we might be jacked up and hauled off to Guantanamo. But you know what, if they do that, they'll be sorry. I'll try and convert each and every one of 'em to a Christian Witness of Jehovah...

2008 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

What a kerfluffle last night! I didn't dream it - Anna Zatonskih DID win the Women's Championship after two games of rapid chess, two blitz, and one final "Armageddon" game - what did she and Krush get on their clocks, 30 seconds each???

Congratulations to AZ and to IK for a thrill-filled evening even though I'm really dragging today - 5:30 came REALLY fast this morning when I didn't hit the sack until after 1 a.m.

Here are the final standings for the women:

1 Zatonskih, Anna IM 2490 USA 7.5
2 Krush, Irina IM 2515 USA 7.5
3-4 Abrahamyan, Tatev WFM 2280 USA 6.0
3-4 Rohonyan, Katerine WGM 2318 USA 6.0
5 Tuvshintugs, Batchimeg WIM 2289 USA 5.5
6 Battsetseg, Tsagaan WIM 2251 USA 4.5
7 Zenyuk, Iryna WFM 2205 USA 3.5
8-9 Epstein, Esther WM 2194 USA 2.0
8-9 Airapetian, Chouchanik WFM 2143 USA 2.0
10 Jamison, Courtney 2064 USA 0.5

What an exciting championship! My impression is that all of the women had a real fighting spirit this year and were going all out for wins. There were very few draws. I'll have to sit down tonight and figure out the relative percentage versus the men's draws. As noted last night, Tatev Abrahamyan had an excellent tournament, 6.0/9 and won the Goddesschess Fighting Chess prize of $500.

I am not a good enough player to be able to assess the quality of play but from what I read elsewhere, the games were well-played. Of course there were goof-ups in the play-off games last night, that's to be expected given the exhaustion, overdose rushes of adrenalin during those last grueling minutes and the circumstances of the play-offs themselves. And Krush and Zatonskih experienced that too, har!

I can't wait for the next big event! Will the US be fielding a women's Olympiad team this year? Shouldn't the USCF be getting that together quickly now, given that the women will need time to train and organize and USCF will need to raise some money to send them to Germany? Will FIDE ever organize another Women's World Chess Championship? What happened to the invitation from the government of Turkey to host the WCC there? Will I ever stop sounding like a soap opera? Stay tuned for AS THE PAWN TURNS...

Winner of 2008 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

Irina Krush! She won the third play-off game behind the black pieces in a rapid-chess game (5 minutes on the clock for each player)

Here's the final game in PGN:

[Event "2008 Frank K. Berry U.S. Chess Championship"]
[Site "Tulsa"]
[Date "2008.05.21"]
[Round "12Playoff"]
[White "Zatonskih, Anna"]
[Black "Krush, Irina"][Result "0-1"]
[WhiteELO "2490"][WhiteTitle "IM"]
[BlackELO "2515"][BlackTitle "IM"]
[Source "MonRoi"]

1.e4 c5 2.g3 d5 3.exd5 Qxd5 4.Nf3 Bg4 5.Bg2 Qe6 6.Kf1 Nc6 7.h3 Bh5 8.d3 Qd7 9.Be3 e6 10.Nbd2 Nf6 11.Nb3 Nd5 12.Bxc5 Bxc5 13.Nxc5 Qe7 14.Nb3 O-O 15.Kg1 f5 16.d4 Rad8 17.Qe2 Nf6 18.c3 Ne4 19.Re1 e5 20.Qe3 exd4 21.Nfxd4 Ne5 22.Nxf5 Rxf5 23.Qxe4 Bg6 24.f4 Qc7 25.Qxb7 Qc4 26.fxe5 Qd3 27.Kh2 Rf2 28.Rhf1 Rxb2 29.e6 h6 30.e7 Re8 31.Qd5 0-1

Thanks to Susan Polgar's blog for providing updating posts on the play-0ff games and the denouement. I'm exhausted - it's way past my bed-time and I haven't eaten supper yet, time for this chess femme to call it a night!

STOP THE PRESSES! UPDATED 12:10 A.M. NOT SO FAST! I tried to go to bed before midnight and this is what I get - Irina Krush did NOT win - ANNA ZATONSKIH IS THE WINNER OF THE 2008 U.S. WOMEN'S CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP!!!!!!

At least - I think so - that's what I read at both Monroi just a few seconds ago and at Susan Polgar's blog, so it MUST be true.

I thought game 3, which Krush won (?) was the end - but I guess not. Oh, I'll try and figure it all out tomorrow, or else leave it up to the people who really know about this stuff. Darlings, I just follow along as best I can, which obviously sometimes is not very good!

Okay, now I really must scrub off my crusted on make-up and hit the sack - the alarm goes off at 5:30 a.m....

I Can't Stand the Suspense!

Irina Krush won the second rapid-chess play-off game behind the white pieces against Anna Zatonskih, and so now - what? Another play-off game at even faster time controls?

Help!

WINNER OF 2008 GODDESSCHESS FIGHTING CHESS AWARD!

GM Susan Polgar, who graciously agreed to decide who the winner of this year's Goddesschess prize fund would be, has declared to winner at her blog this evening: TATEV ABRAHAMYAN!

Congratulations to Tatev - she wins the $500 prize for her great performance this year.

Thank you again from Goddesschess to GM Susan Polgar for agreeing to select the winner of this year's prize fund, and for going above and beyond the call of duty in personally delivering the prize money to Mr. Berry in Tulsa.

The Goddesschess folks are already planning how to make the special prize bigger and better next year... Thanks to all our friends and supporters - and - geez! The Championship isn't over yet!

SP reported at her blog that Zatonskih won the first play-off game. As I'm typing this the second game is in progress. I need to hire a GM to sit beside me and explain how all of this works to me, darlings, besides feeding me insightful information on moves and blow-by-blow analysis!

2008 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

Krush and Rohonyan just drew, leaving Krush with 7.5 and Rohonyan with 6.0. I can't believe Rohonyan gave up!

Who's the winner??? Krush and Zatonskih both end up with 7.5 - but someone has to take the title. Is the prize money for first and second added together and split?

Here's the game in PGN:

[Event "2008 Frank K. Berry U.S. Chess Championship"][Site "Tulsa"][Date "2008.05.21"][Round "9"][White "Krush, Irina"][Black "Rohonyan, Katerine"][Result "1/2-1/2"][WhiteELO "2515"][WhiteTitle "IM"][BlackELO "2318"][BlackTitle "WGM"][Source "MonRoi"]1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 c5 3.d5 b5 4.cxb5 a6 5.bxa6 g6 6.Nc3 Bxa6 7.g3 d6 8.Bg2 Bg7 9.Nf3 Nbd7 10.Rb1 O-O 11.O-O Qa5 12.Bd2 Bb7 13.Qc2 Qa6 14.e4 Ng4 15.Bg5 h6 16.Bc1 Qa5 17.Rd1 Ba6 18.Bd2 Nge5 19.Nxe5 Nxe5 20.Be1 Rfb8 21.b3 Qa3 22.h3 c4 23.Ne2 cxb3 24.axb3 Bxe2 25.Qxe2 Rxb3 26.f4 Rxb1 27.Rxb1 Nd3 28.Bd2 Bd4 29.Kh2 Nc5 30.e5 Qa2 31.Re1 Qc2 32.Be3 Qc3 33.Bxd4 Qxd4 34.Qe3 Qxe3 35.Rxe3 Kf8 36.g4 Ra4 37.Kg3 g5 38.fxg5 hxg5 39.h4 gxh4 40.Kxh4 Nd7 41.exd6 exd6 42.Re4 Ra2 43.Kg3 Ne5 44.Rb4 Ke7 45.g5 Rd2 46.Rb7 Kd8 47.Rb4 Kc7 48.Be4 Rd1 49.Bg2 Rg1 50.Kh2 Ra1 51.Kg3 Ra8 52.Be4 Rh8 53.Rb2 Rh5 54.Kf4 Rh4 55.Kf5 Ng6 56.Rf2 Ne7 57.Kf6 Rxe4 58.Kxf7 Nxd5 59.g6 Kd7 60.g7 Ne7 61.Kf8 Ra4 62.Kf7 Rg4 63.Kf8 Kd8 64.Kf7 Kd7 65.Kf8 Ra4 66.Kf7 d5 67.Rf1 Ra3 68.Rf4 Ra2 69.Rf1 Ra3 70.Rf4 Rg3 71.Rf1 Rg2 72.Rf4 Rg5 73.Kf6 Rg1 74.Kf7 Ra1 75.Rf2 Ra8 76.Rf4 Rd8 77.Rf2 Rc8 78.Rf4 Rc5 79.Kf6 Rc4 80.Rf1 Ke8 81.Ke5 Rg4 82.Rf8 Kd7 83.g8Q Nxg8 84.Kxd5 Ne7 85.Kc5 Rg5 86.Kc4 Kd6 87.Rf6 Ke5 88.Rf1 Nf5 89.Re1 Kf4 90.Kd3 Ng3 91.Re8 Rd5 92.Kc4 Rd7 93.Rf8 Nf5 94.Kc3 Ke4 95.Re8 Ne7 96.Ra8 Rc7 97.Kd2 Nc6 98.Ra3 Rd7 99.Ke2 Nd4 100.Kf2 Rb7 101.Re3 Kf4 102.Re8 Rb2 103.Ke1 Kf3 104.Kd1 Ne2 105.Rf8 Ke3 106.Re8 Kd3 107.Ke1 Nd4 108.Kf1 1/2-1/2

Added 9:20 p.m.: Whoa! According to the official U.S. Championships website hosted by Monroi this year, there's to be a play-off between Krush and Zatonskih -- and from the looks of it - it's happening right now. Ohmygoddess! Krush just played a game over 100 moves. How is this fair?

2008 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

Krush and Rohonyan are still playing!

Zatonskih won her game behind the black pieces against Battsetseg to finish with 7.5, securing at least second place for herself and $4,000 in prize money - and a shot at the Goddesschess Fighting Chess Award of $500; Tuvshintugs knocked off Abrahamyan. Tuvshintugs finishes with 5.5 and Abrahamyan finishes with 6.0. She had an excellent tournament, winning six games in a row, but I expect she's disappointed in her finish.

The heat is on Krush - she's obviously battling for a win and clear first place.

I'll have full results and final standings later. I hope Susan Polgar reports on whether any of the women scored WIM or WGM norms.

Added 7:07 p.m.: Krush has 6:53 on her clock, Rohonyan has 17:02. Krush has a rook, bishop and 2 pawns plus her king to Rohonyan's rook, knight, 2 pawns and king.

Added 7:49 p.m.: Zenyuk (W) caved to Airapetian! Zenyuk stays at 3.5 and Airapetian ends up with 2.0.

Krush-Rohonyan still going on...

Female Graves Might be Elamite Royalty

From MehrNews.com

Ramhormoz graves may be Elamite royal burials: experts
TEHRAN, May 20 (MNA) -- A team of archaeologists studying two graves discovered in the city of Ramhormoz in southern Iran said that they bear their remains of a girl and a woman who were most likely members of an Elamite royal family.

The team led by Arman Shishegar was assigned to carry out a series of rescue excavations in the Jubji region of the city in Khuzestan Province in May 2007 after the Khuzestan Water and Waste Water Company stumbled on two U-shaped coffins containing skeletons of a girl and a woman along with a great number of artifacts during a grading operation.

The girl was about 17 years old and the woman was between 30 and 35 years old at the time of death, Shishegar told the Persian service of CHN on Tuesday.

The girl was discovered wearing a golden bracelet embellished with pieces of agate on her wrist. The bracelet bears the female name Ani-Numa.

During the rescue excavations, the archaeologists found five rings of power among the coffins’ artifacts, which were usually used by royals in Mesopotamia.

One of the rings, which bears the name of King Shutruk-Nahhunte of Elam (c. 1185–c. 1155 BC) in a cuneiform inscription was previously surmised to belong to the king, but Farzan Foruzanfar, an anthropologist of the Cultural Heritage, Tourism, and Handicrafts Organization (CHTHO), rejected the theory during his latest studies, Shishegar said.

Due to the large quantity of valuable artifacts found in the coffins, the archaeologists believe that the girl and the woman had most likely been Shutruk-Nahhunte’s relatives or family members, he added.

Another of the five rings, which bears a cuneiform inscription, was handed over to two ancient languages experts but their studies led to different results. One of them deciphered the inscription as a female name but the other said it was the name of a local official.

According to Shishegar, the divergence of opinions is a result of the deformed shape of the ring.

Since the grading operation was continued even after the extraordinary discovery, the graves’ site has been almost completely bulldozed.

A golden armlet with floral motifs, two golden bracelets bearing deer-head patterns at each end, some ornamental stones with floral decorations, 155 golden buttons of various sizes, several statuettes of goddesses, a golden necklace, golden plaques with floral motifs, 99 golden necklace beads, 23 golden necklace pendants of various sizes, three marble stone dishes, earthenware and bronze dishes, several bronze bracelets, a fish-shaped goddess ornament, and a number of other artifacts have been discovered at the site. [I wonder how much was stolen that the archaeologists never saw?]

All the relics were transferred to Tehran to be stored at the National Museum of Iran.

Shishegar said the items are currently in danger, but the report did not provide any explanation of his statement.

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The current regime in control of Iran are barbarians. Notice this quote from the article: the grading operation was continued even after the extraordinary discovery, the graves’ site has been almost completely bulldozed.

Such continued, deliberate destruction could only be sanctioned by the highest levels of government, wiping out evidence of Iran's pre-Islamic past (and perhaps prior evidence of looting) and any chance for future archaeologists to piece together the history of the site in its original context.

Arman Shishegar is a very brave man. Will the Revolutionary Guard make him pay for that last statement in the article about the artifacts recovered being in danger? You betcha. But we won't ever hear about it.

Did Humans Colonize the World by Boat?

Well, this is what I call a "duh" article. Of course they did. There are parts of the world that could not have ever been colonized otherwise. DUH! But I present it here, for what it's worth, as it ties into the ongoing controversy among archaeologists, etc. about how mankind spread where and when.

From Discover Magazine Online
Research suggests our ancestors traveled the oceans 70,000 years ago.by Heather Pringle
May 20, 2008

Jon Erlandson shakes out what appears to be a miniature evergreen from a clear ziplock bag and holds it out for me to examine. As one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient seafaring, he has devoted much of his career to hunting down hard evidence of ancient human migrations, searching for something most archaeologists long thought a figment: Ice Age mariners. On this drizzly late-fall afternoon in a lab at the University of Oregon in Eugene, the 53-year-old Erlandson looks as pleased as the father of a newborn—and perhaps just as anxious —as he shows me one of his latest prize finds.

The little “tree” in my hand is a dart head fashioned from creamy-brown chert and bristling with tiny barbs designed to lodge in the flesh of marine prey. Erlandson recently collected dozens of these little stemmed points from San Miguel Island, a scrap of land 27 miles off the coast of California. Radiocarbon dating of marine shells and burned twigs at the site shows that humans first landed on San Miguel at least 12,000 years ago, and the dart head in my hand holds clues to the ancestry of those seafarers. Archaeologists have recovered similar items scattered along the rim of the North Pacific, and some have even been found in coastal Peru and Chile. The oldest appeared 15,600 years ago in coastal Japan. To Erlandson, these miniature trees look like a trail left by mariners who voyaged along the stormy northern coasts of the Pacific Ocean from Japan to the Americas during the last Ice Age. “We haven’t published the evidence for this hypothesis yet, and I’m kind of nervous about it,” he says. “But we are getting very close.”

Until recently most researchers would have dismissed such talk of Ice Age mariners and coastal migrations. Nobody, after all, has ever unearthed an Ice Age boat or happened upon a single clear depiction of an Ice Age dugout or canoe. Nor have archaeologists found many coastal campsites dating back more than 15,000 years. So most scientists believed that Homo sapiens evolved as terrestrial hunters and gatherers and stubbornly remained so, trekking out of their African homeland by foot and spreading around the world by now-vanished land bridges. Only when the Ice Age ended 12,000 to 13,000 years ago and mammoths and other large prey vanished, archaeologists theorized, did humans systematically take up seashore living—eating shellfish, devising fishing gear, and venturing offshore in small boats.

But that picture, Erlandson and others say, is badly flawed, due to something researchers once rarely considered: the changes in sea level over time. Some 20,000 years ago, for example, ice sheets locked up much of the world’s water, lowering the oceans and laying bare vast coastal plains—attractive hunting grounds and harbors for maritime people. Today these plains lie beneath almost 400 feet of water, out of reach of all but a handful of underwater archaeologists. “So this shines a spotlight on a huge area of ignorance: what people were doing when sea level was lower than at present,” says Geoff Bailey, a coastal archaeologist at the University of York in England. “And that is especially problematic, given that sea level was low for most of prehistory.”

Rest of article.

2008 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

Round 8 Results:

Airapetian - Battsetseg 0 - 1
Jamison - Zenyuk 0 - 1
Rohonyan - Tuvshintugs 1 - 0
Abrahamyan - Epstein 1 - 0
Zatonskih - Krush 1/2 - 1/2

Tentative standings after Round 8 (based on my calculations):
Krush - 7.0
Zatonskih - 6.5
Abrahamyan- 6.0
Rohonyan - 5.5
Tuvshintugs - 4.5
Battsetseg - 4.5
Zenyuk - 3.5
Epstein - 1.5
Airapetian - 1.0
Jamison - 0

The stage is set for the final game tomorrow. Is an upset in the making? Abrahamyan has now quietly won six games in a row. Here are the match-ups for Round 9:

Player Draw (pairing numbers) (key match-ups in bold)
5. Esther Epstein v. 10. Courtney Jamison
6. Chimi Tuvshintugs v. 4. Tatev Abrahamyan
7. Irina Krush v. 3. Katerine Rohonyan
8. Tsagaan Battsetseg v. 2. Anna Zatonskih
9. Iryna Zenyuk v. 1. Chouchanik Airapetian

(edited on 5/21/08 to correct typo)

2008 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

I've updated Chess Femme News through Round 7.

Today is the big game between Anna Zatonskih (W) and Irina Krush (B). Susan Polgar is following the live action at ICC and posting on her blog. When I checked a few minutes ago, it appeared that Anna was losing or had lost the initiative.

I'll be updating Chess Femme News more tonight, but right now I'm anxiously awaiting the results of Zatonskih-Krush!

Updated 8:43 p.m. CST

Zatonskih-Krush drew. Here is the game in PGN:

[Event "2008 Frank K. Berry U.S. Chess Championship"][Site "Tulsa"][Date "2008.05.20"][Round "8"][White "Zatonskih, Anna"][Black "Krush, Irina"][Result "1/2-1/2"][WhiteELO "2490"][WhiteTitle "IM"][BlackELO "2515"][BlackTitle "IM"][Source "MonRoi"]1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nf3 Bg7 4.g3 O-O 5.Bg2 d6 6.O-O c6 7.Nc3 Qa5 8.e4 e5 9.h3 Nbd7 10.Re1 Re8 11.a3 Qc7 12.Be3 exd4 13.Nxd4 Nc5 14.Qc2 a5 15.b3 h5 16.Rad1 Nfd7 17.Rd2 Ne5 18.Red1 a4 19.b4 Nxc4 20.bxc5 Nxe3 21.fxe3 dxc5 22.Nde2 b5 23.e5 Bf5 24.Qc1 Bxe5 25.Ne4 c4 26.Nd6 Bxd6 27.Rxd6 Be4 28.Qd2 Bxg2 29.Kxg2 Qe7 30.Kf2 h4 31.Qd4 c5 32.Qxc5 Rac8 33.Qd4 c3 34.Nxc3 hxg3 35.Kg2 Qxe3 36.Qxe3 Rxe3 37.Nxb5 Rb3 38.Rd8 Rxd8 39.Rxd8 Kg7 40.Nd4 Rxa3 41.Nf3 Ra1 42.Kxg3 a3 43.Ra8 a2 44.Kf2 g5 45.Ne1 Kg6 46.Nc2 Rh1 47.Kg2 Rd1 48.Rxa2 Rd2 49.Kf3 Kh5 50.Ke3 Rh2 51.Kd3 f5 52.Ra8 Rxh3 53.Ne3 g4 54.Rf8 Rf3 55.Ke2 Kg5 56.Rf7 Kg6 57.Ra7 Kg5 58.Ra5 Rf4 59.Ra8 Rf3 60.Rf8 Kg6 61.Rb8 Kg5 62.Rb5 Rf4 63.Rb8 1/2-1/2

2008 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

Round 7 has come and gone - Krush won to go from 5.5 to 6.5; Zatonskih lost to stay at 6.0. Today they face each other in a game that may decide who is the 2008 Champion. Susan Polgar comments.

This is a critical game - but the other women aren't coasting to the finish line. There's an intense battle for third place right now.

Standings after 7:
1 Krush, Irina IM 2515 USA 6.5
2 Zatonskih, Anna IM 2490 USA 6.0
3 Abrahamyan, Tatev WFM 2280 USA 5.0
4-5 Tuvshintugs, Batchimeg WIM 2289 USA 4.5
4-5 Rohonyan, Katerine WGM 2318 USA 4.5
6 Battsetseg, Tsagaan WIM 2251 USA 3.5
7 Zenyuk, Iryna WFM 2205 USA 2.5
8 Epstein, Esther WM 2194 USA 1.5
9 Airapetian, Chouchanik WFM 2143 USA 1.0
10 Jamison, Courtney 2064 USA 0.0

Very exciting!

III International Chess Festival “President’s Cup”

May 9 – 21, 2008
180 players, 9 rounds,
First Place is $7,000, first woman finisher is $600

Standings after 8 Rounds:

28 24 GM Stefanova Antoaneta 2538 BUL 5,5
31 38 IM Paehtz Elisabeth 2449 GER 5,5
40 52 WGM Khotenashvili Bela 2333 GEO 5,0
42 59 WIM Batsiashvili Nino 2304 GEO 5,0
45 54 IM Zozulia Anna 2332 BEL 5,0
50 56 WGM Mamedjarova Zeinab 2322 AZE 5,0
63 111 Kazimova Narmin 2072 AZE 4,5
69 83 WFM Mammadova Gulnar 2188 AZE 4,5
70 128 Abdulla Khayala 1982 AZE 4,5
84 63 WGM Mamedjarova Turkan 2271 AZE 4,0
89 98 Huseynova Sahar 2106 AZE 4,0
94 99 Khudaverdieva Afag 2104 AZE 4,0
97 80 WIM Gavasheli Ana 2191 GEO 4,0
102 119 Guliyeva Sabina 2020 AZE 4,0
104 94 Ismailova Aytaj 2129 AZE 4,0
109 74 WIM Umudova Nargiz 2222 AZE 3,5
111 79 Isgandarova Khayala 2193 AZE 3,5
118 131 Mammadova Aysel Alishiraz qizi 1962 AZE 3,5
120 124 Agayeva Aytan 1989 AZE 3,5
122 121 WCM Fataliyeva Ulviyya 2003 AZE 3,5
125 95 WFM Ni Viktorija 2120 LAT 3,5
127 140 Hasanova Turkan 1897 AZE 3,0
128 172 Kazimova Firuza Bakhlul qizi 1700 AZE 3,0
168 156 Khalafova Narmin Ilgar qizi 1954 AZE 2,0
180 171 Karimova Nazrin Faiq qizi 1700 AZE 1,0

Narmin Kazimova is a young player who caught my eye by her performance at the recently-concluded European Individual Women's Chess Championship.

Mayor's Cup International Open (India)

Koneru Humpy stages a come back and finishes the tournament with 9.0/11, tied with leader Krasenkow (who lost his final game) and several other players. Krasenkow wins on tie-breaks and is declared the Champion. From Expressindia.com
Kransenkow triumphs
Express News Service
Posted online: Tuesday , May 20, 2008 at 04:40:08
Updated: Tuesday , May 20, 2008 at 04:40:08

Koneru finished in second place, and Bangladeshi GM Ziaur Rahman clinched third place. From The Daily Star, May 20, 2008.

Looking for Truth in Beringia

A fascinating article about a mammoth bone discovered in a cave nearly 20 years ago and the controversy it set off about just how early ancient man was in the Americas. The saga continues...

Beringia: humans were here
It was an extraordinary ancient land filled with fantastic creatures and intrepid people.
ALEX ROSLIN, Special to The Montreal Gazette
Published: Saturday, May 17

Beringia is thought by a handful of renegade scientists to be a prehistoric homeland for aboriginal people who later spread across the Americas and the key to one of archeology's greatest Holy Grails - figuring out how humans first got to this continent.

This July, Jacques Cinq-Mars, a renowned archeologist living in Longueuil, is heading to Beringia - a vast territory that once spanned the Yukon, Alaska and Siberia - in hopes of resolving a controversy he unleashed nearly 20 years ago when he chanced upon a curious-looking cave in the Yukon's Keele Mountain Range, perched on a ridge high above the Bluefish River.

Here, at a site known as the Bluefish Caves, Cinq-Mars's team discovered something that would turn archeology on its ear and has fuelled debate ever since - a chipped mammoth bone that appeared to have been fashioned into a small harpoon point. Radiocarbon dating showed the bone to be 28,000 years old.

The find stunned archeologists who had long presumed the first people to enter the Americas did so 13,000 years ago via a land bridge from Siberia after the end of the last Ice Age.

Until that point, routes from Alaska down into the Americas were blocked off by glaciers up to four kilometres thick, which would have cut off any possibility of migration for thousands of years.

But scientists have unearthed a growing number of ancient human sites across the continent that date back much more than 13,000 years. How did those people get here? No one knows for sure.

Cinq-Mars, a retired former curator at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, believes the answers lie in the lost land of Beringia.

Rest of article.

2008 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

I've updated Chess Femme News for Round 6, and will be updating more later tonight for other events. Enjoy!

Egyptian Antiquities To Go On Display At Athens Museum

From PRInside.com
Athens museum to show its priceless Egyptian collection
© AP
2008-05-13 19:09:00 -

ATHENS, Greece (AP) - A priceless ancient Egyptian collection opens to the public Wednesday, featuring a wooden body tag for a mummy, a stunning bronze statue of a princess, and a 3,000-year-old loaf of bread with a bite-sized chunk missing.

The National Archaeological Museum in Athens is putting more than 1,100 pieces from the collection on permanent exhibition, as more of its halls open to the public following years of renovation. The previous Egyptian display, shelved six years ago, included just 350 artifacts. Most of the current collection, which museum officials say is one of the best in the world, has never been shown to the public before due to lack of space. A further 6,000 Egyptian artifacts remain in underground storage.

One piece that made it into the display is the round, brown loaf of bread, which is missing a bite-sized chunk. Baked during the New Kingdom, between 1550-1075 B.C., it was placed in a tomb for the occupant's use in the afterlife. Museum officials are unsure what happened to the missing bit. [Well obviously, darlings, it was the Ka of the deceased enjoying a bit to eat after the grand ceremonies...]

Archaeologist Lena Papazoglou, curator of the museum's prehistoric, Egyptian and eastern collections, said Egypt's dry, hot climate helped preserve organic materials - food, wood and leather - for thousands of years.

"The exhibition includes intact birds' eggs," she said Tuesday. "If you shake them gently you can hear the yolks rattling inside."

The exhibition centerpiece is a bronze statue of the princess-priestess Takushit, dating to around 670 B.C. Standing 70 centimeters (27 inches) high and wearing a gown covered in hieroglyphs, the statue was found south of Alexandria in 1880. "This kind of bronze statue is very rare," said archaeologist Eleni Tourna.

At the other end of the sculptural scale is a thumb-sized bronze figurine of an African boy at a street market. "He has his wares spread in front of him and has dozed off in the heat, his pet monkey perched on his shoulder," Tourna said.

The miniature was made in the 3rd century B.C. in Alexandria, the Greek-Egyptian port city founded by Alexander of Macedon that grew into a major intellectual and administrative center. "Alexandria was the center of the then-known world," Tourna said, "Like the New York of antiquity."

The exhibition includes products from what Tourna calls Egypt's "death industry," such as pierced wooden tags from embalmers' workshops. They were inscribed with the name and designated grave of the corpse, to avoid embarrassing mix-ups.

The core of the museum's Egyptian collection was donated more than 100 years ago by two rich merchants from Alexandria's then-thriving Greek community. "They had access to the art market and were able to buy top-quality pieces," Papazoglou said.

Other pieces were donated by the Egyptian government in the late 19th century, while some were excavated in Greece.

The relationship between Greece and Egypt, two of the ancient world's major powers, peaked in the Hellenistic era, between 304 and 30 B.C. But interaction began some 4,000 years ago, during the Minoan period in Greece. Mycenaean pottery has been found in large quantities in Egypt, while Egyptian artifacts were excavated in the royal tombs and citadel of Mycenae, in southern Greece.

Another display due to reopen Wednesday at the National Archaeological Museum is the Stathatos collection, which focuses on ancient jewelry. In the future, museum officials plan to display important groups of glass, terra-cotta and ivory artifacts. [I'll bet there are some ancient game pieces in that collection that have yet to be identified as such!]

Built in 1866-89, the museum hosts some 20,000 exhibits from prehistoric to late Roman times.

On the Net: odysseus.culture.gr/h/1/eh151.jsp?obj_id=3249

The Eye Goddess Memorialized

Thank goddess for The New York Times, else I would never find out about such exhibits as this one:

From Around the Globe, a Mustering of the Tribes
By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO
Published: May 16, 2008

All art fairs are messy, but the New York International Tribal & Textile Arts Show is messier than most. It assembles a ridiculously broad range of tribal art from Africa, Oceania, Asia and North and South America. It is a forceful, entrancing ensemble nonetheless.

This year’s fair has relocated to smaller quarters in the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, at 26th Street, far south of its former home in the Park Avenue Armory. There is a tighter floor plan downtown — where the fair actually began 14 years ago, under a different name — but it looks and feels pretty good, with 76 participating galleries from 10 countries.

...

The New York International Tribal & Textile Arts Show runs through Sunday at the 69th Regiment Armory, Lexington Avenue at 26th Street; (212) 532-1516, caskeylees.com.
********************************************************************************
Ach! Too bad the show finishes today. I highly recommend checking out the slide show at The New York Times article, which contains a short sampling of some of the art and artifacts at the show, absolutely stunning, wonderful pieces.

The "rug" image I included here is from the slide show. If that isn't a representation of an Eye Goddess, I'll eat my wool beret. Yes, she's from the 19th century - but she's from eastern Anatolia, an ancient hotbed of goddess worship (and I'll bet she's still worshipped there today, despite Islam).

Take and look and see what I see: She's got a sort of diamond-shaped head with two eyes (classic eye goddess iconography), a tree of life in the upper third of her body, and what look to be "chakra" points down the remaining two-thirds of her body. She's also outlined with - for lack of a better term on my part - an "energy mantra" that reminds me very much of the ancient serpent figures we see enclosing/ guarding the Sun God Re/Ra in ancient Egyptian iconography -- the serpents were representations of Mehen, the ancient serpent goddess/protector of Pharaoh as manifestation of the Sun God, as well as the serpent-had fringed cloak worn by archaic Athena. Altogether, She's an excellent example of ancient religious symbolism melding into certain iconic displays over the millenia.

I very much doubt this "rug" was ever meant to be walked upon as we trod upon our rugs today. For one thing, notice the much wider designed border at the "top" of the rug (above the Goddess' head) than at the bottom. I believe it was designed this way to facilitate hanging. The white "zig-zag" pattern across the top (an ancient pattern that is familiar on many goddess icons, I call it "M/V" for the wave-like pattern it forms, or "chevron") forms eight each "triangles" whose bottom edges are formed or closed by two miniature "eyes," also picked out in white threads. Extremely clever design on the part of the female weaver, because these "triangles" in and of themselves each represent a miniature "eye goddess" - diamond shaped head with two eyes!

Notice, too, the use of EIGHT - and the multiple of TWO TIMES EIGHT - or SIXTEEN. Hmmmm, where have we seen those numbers crop up before??? Hint: In chess.

The History of the Horse

Every chess player knows the role that the horse plays in the board game, even if he or she doesn't know the history behind the creation and evolution of the pieces. The "horse" - the knight piece in modern western chess - was a staple in the earliest Persian and Indian incarnations of the game (calvary), and has always had it's distinctive "L"-shaped move. (Image: Sassanid king Khosrau II (591-628 CE) mounted on his favorite charger, Shabdiz. Both horse and rider are arrayed in full battle armor. From Taq-e Bostan, Wikipedia)

In today's game the rook is also known as a castle. But, delving back into the history of chess, the rook was originally a horse-drawn battle chariot (in Persia, it was called a ruhkh after the King's champion) and was the most powerful piece on the board, before the modernization of the game in the late 1400's (probably in Spain) gave rise to sweeping new moves by the Queen and the Bishop. The rook's wide-ranging vertical and horizontal movement has remained unchanged throughout history.

Now, an exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry (I love visiting there and have done so ever since I was a kid) delves into the history of the horse and its relationship with man - a fascinating study. Reported on at The New York Times: Man's Best Friend - Hoofed Department.

One thing I noted with interest: if the horse was hunted to extinction in the Americas by 10,000 BCE, that means that man here had not learned to tame the horse and use it for pulling loads and riding (if man here had used the horse in these ways, it would not make sense that he would hunt the animal to extinction, it would prove too costly to his existence). This provides indirect support, perhaps, for theories supporting the immigration of mankind into the Americas, then, before the taming of the horse in the Old World, which I believe earliest evidence now places some 15,000 to 16,000 years ago in the Eurasian steppes.

The Key-Holders: Guarding Priceless Cultural Treasures with Their Lives

From The Chicago Tribune:

To guard Afghan treasure, silence golden
By Bay Fang Washington Bureau
11:48 PM CDT, May 13, 2008

WASHINGTON—For years they kept the secret. A dozen men, the "key-holders" of a fabulous treasure, told no one about the gold they'd buried deep in a palace vault, hidden from the ravages of war, looting and a regime bent on destroying Afghanistan's cultural heritage.

Now, some 20 years later, that collection thought lost forever is being exhibited for the world to see. Opening in the U.S. with a show in Washington on May 25, it spans the beginning of the Silk Road trade through a country most Americans associate with violence and destruction.

"The story of the hidden treasures is like the story of Afghanistan," noted Said Tayeb Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the U.S. "It is about precious culture and traditions covered by the ashes of war and neglect. You don't know what remains under the ashes, and when you see the glitter of gold, you almost can't believe it."

The exhibition is filled with artifacts of almost unbelievable artistry—collapsible gold crowns that belonged to nomad princesses, a chubby Aphrodite figurine with wings and a forehead mark in the Indian tradition, a golden tree hung with pearls for fruit.

Accompanying the collection as it travels to Washington, San Francisco, Houston and New York are some of the key-holders, the men who protected the collection from the violence of mujahedeen and Taliban.

"In Afghanistan there's a different curatorial system—these men are bonded by law to their collections, and they bear personal responsibility for them," said Fredrik Hiebert, curator of the U.S. exhibition.

Sitting beside him on a couch in the National Gallery of Art, looking somewhat ill at ease, Abdullah Hakim Zada, one of the key-holders, said that when he and his comrades packed away the treasures, they could not have foreseen that there would be a civil war followed by the reign of the Taliban. "At times during the years, we worried that we hadn't put the right materials in the boxes for them to be stored so long," he said.

Throughout his career as an Asian archeologist, Hiebert said everyone in the field thought the famous Afghan collection lived on only in legend. Rumors abounded: that it had been taken to Moscow after the Soviet invasion, that it had been looted or stolen, that the gold had been melted down. Afghanistan's National Museum had been shelled and set on fire, and its storerooms looted.

The so-called Bactrian Hoard, one of the greatest archeological finds of the 20th Century, is the heart of the trove, discovered accidentally in 1978 by Russian archeologist Viktor Sarianidi, Hiebert's mentor. Six 2,000-year-old nomadic tombs, from an area in northern Afghanistan that was once an important crossroads on the Silk Road, contained more than 20,000 beautifully crafted pieces.

Before Sarianidi could study the items, the Soviets invaded, and he rushed the pieces to Kabul, where they went to the National Museum. That was the last he saw of them.

Unbeknownst to him, 10 years later, as the communist government weakened and rockets rained on the city, a group of museum workers packed the most important artifacts into boxes, sealed them with their signatures and brought them to the presidential palace, where they were stored in a vault.

"Only 13 to 20 people knew about the treasures, and as fighting between the different groups got worse we decided not to tell anyone about them," said Omara Khan Masoudi, now director of the National Museum in Kabul.

It was not until 2003 that a new government under President Hamid Karzai entered the palace and discovered — in a massive Austrian-made vault, alongside the government's gold bullion — piles of sealed boxes. Hiebert heard about these and traveled to Kabul that October with his colleague Thomas Barfield, now chairman of the anthropology department at Boston University. They met with then-Minister of Finance Ashraf Ghani.

"The question then was, did it really exist?" said Barfield. The archeologists remained skeptical – until, two hours before their plane was supposed to leave, Ghani took them to the palace basement. " 'Well, boys,' [Ghani] said, 'I can't show you the gold, but I can show you the silver.' And he opened his hand and showed us this two-headed ancient Greek coin, almost as big as his palm, that we had also thought were completely gone. That was when we thought, if this stuff exists, there's no reason to doubt the Bactrian gold was there too."

Ghani told Hiebert that if he agreed to do a scientific inventory on the items, they would open the boxes thought to contain the gold.

A group of ministers and scholars, including Sarianidi, gathered around to open the sealed boxes with a power saw, sparks flying. "We literally didn't know what we would find," Ghani said in a telephone interview. "When we saw that it was actually what we hoped, it was the feeling of regaining a part of your being, of connecting our generation to those who lived thousands of years before us and for millennia to come."

Still, further squabbles erupted before the collection left the country for the exhibit. Some feared letting it out at all. Others thought Afghanistan should negotiate for more money.

"I pushed the idea that no matter where it goes, it should be touring for the next 10 years," said Tim Moore, cultural attache at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

In the end, this is the story of the hidden treasure, and the fact that it survived. "It was our job," key-holder Masoudi said. "Even if we just saved one piece or 100 pieces, we cannot be too proud, because it is just our job. Archeological pieces belong not to one person, but to the world."
****************************************************************************************
See The History Blog for further information on the Bactrian hoard's visit to the U.S.
Info page on the exhibit from the National Gallery of Art.

A Study in Extreme Courage

A book review from The New York Times:

IDA: A SWORD AMONG LIONS
Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching.
By Paula J. Giddings.
Illustrated. 800 pp. Amistad/HarperCollins Publishers. $35.

By RICHARD LINGEMAN
Published: May 18, 2008
If slavery is America’s original sin, lynching is its capital crime. The historical memory dies hard: only last year, three nooses were hung from a schoolyard tree contested by white and black students in Jena, La.

The wave of mob killings of blacks in the South — by hanging, burning, shooting and torture — started after the end of Reconstruction. These public murders were carried out with the real purpose of keeping blacks in their place, economically and socially. The practice was supported by leading citizens and became a popular public spectacle, a carnival of cruelty that drew excited crowds.

According to “Rope and Faggot,” the 1928 study by the N.A.A.C.P. general secretary Walter White, between 1882 and 1927 there were 4,951 lynchings in the United States. About a third of them were aimed at whites, mainly in the West; 92 of the victims were women.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was one of the first African-Americans to raise an informed protest against this outrage. Paula Giddings’s devoted and scrupulous biography is not the first study of this pioneering woman, but it is a comprehensive work that attempts to portray her as part of the progressive movement that emerged among the black bourgeoisie in post-bellum America. Wells-Barnett dedicated her life to bringing lynchings to the attention of America and the world. Determined, outspoken and fearless, an incendiary pamphleteer, she was politically astute, anticipating the tactics of the civil rights movement. Giddings, a professor of African-American studies at Smith College and author of “Where and When I Enter,” a history of black women activists, brushes in the historical context of Wells-Barnett’s campaign ably, if in occasionally numbing detail. Excavating scattered letters, fragmented diaries and second-hand references to her writings for short-lived African-American weeklies, Giddings aims, she writes, to uncover the achievements of a bold woman whose militancy and “dominating style” sometimes cost her allies in her own day and proper credit in the eyes of history.

Ida Bell Wells was born to slave parents in 1862 in Holly Springs, Miss. Her father, a skilled carpenter, and mother, a housekeeper, were struck down by yellow fever when Ida was 16. Giddings writes of this turning point: “Throughout the remainder of her life, she struggled to turn the negative emotions of abandonment into a righteous determination to reform herself and the society that had forsaken her race.”

A precociously mature, bright and pretty teenager, standing barely five feet, Wells took charge of the upbringing of her younger siblings with help from relatives. She got some higher education, became a voracious reader with a love of Shakespeare and showed a talent for writing. She turned to teaching school to support her family, eventually moving in 1880 to Memphis. There she siphoned off some of her energy into journalism, turning out a column for a local African-American paper that regularly challenged the racist libels of the white press. Yet she remained very much the Victorian young lady who admired “noble true womanhood and perfect ladyship” and vowed to curb her “unfeminine” anger.

Her craving for “perfect ladyship” toughened into a demand for respect. Black women at the time were often demeaned as dusky temptresses, which presumably explained their illicit sexual attraction to so many white men. Wells lashed out against the “wholesale contemptuous defamation of black women” and the “refusal to believe there are among us mothers, wives and maidens who have attained a true, noble and refining womanhood.” Her determination to be treated as a lady provoked her first clash with white supremacy, in 1883, when she violently resisted being ejected from the whites-only “ladies car.” She sued the railroad, but the Tennessee Supreme Court, in a preview of Plessy v. Ferguson, ruled she was no lady, merely a “mulatto passenger,” separable and unequal, whose intention wasn’t to ride comfortably but to “harrass” and litigate.

Rest of review.

Spanish Drought Reveals Medieval Ruins

I wonder - is this drought due to climate change caused by global warming? Sort of sounds like it at the end of the article. A fascinating story:

From BBC News Online, May 13, 2008
Ships bring water to parched Barcelona

Climb down the stony banks of the massive Sau reservoir in the mountains above Barcelona and you get a real sense of why this famous city is so short of water that it's resorted to bringing in emergency supplies - by ship.

Nestling in a deep valley of stunning cliffs and forests, this vital source of water has sunk so low it's exposed the eerie sight of a medieval village that was flooded when the reservoir was opened in the 1960s.

The huddle of ancient stone buildings, including a church with its spire, has now re-emerged into the light and stands as a potent symbol of the severity of this water crisis.

In a year that so far ranks as Spain's driest since records began 60 years ago, the reservoir is currently holding as little as 18% of its capacity - at a time of year when winter rains would usually have provided an essential boost by now.

Rainfall figures show a consistent series of shortfalls in recent years - just as Barcelona's population has expanded to more than five million and the region's booming agribusinesses demand ever more irrigation.

For residents here, the arrival of water by ship is a profound shock - normally it's the drier areas further South that are notoriously parched.

Already they are living with restrictions on the use of hosepipes and the filling of swimming pools.

Now the Barcelona authorities are having to take the unprecedented step for any major European city of topping up supplies by the highly visible means of giant tankers arriving in relays, each bringing 28 million litres, up to a dozen ships coming over the next month.

The shipments won't be enough to restore the reservoirs - or make the ancient village vanish again. But they may buy time for a highly controversial pipeline to be completed by the end of the year. That should bring more reliable supplies from a neighbouring region but at a high political cost.

And it may also remind people of the forecasts from climate scientists of still drier conditions to come in the approaching decades.

Mayor's Cup International Open (India)

Round 9 action reported on at DNAIndia.com. As I read it, Koneru Humpy is currently in 9th place with 7.0/9, with 2 more rounds ago. Shame shame on Krasenkow for an 11 move draw. His prize money should be cut in half for such a sorry display!

Kransenkow stays ahead
DNA Correspondent
Sunday, May 18, 2008 03:36 IST

MUMBAI: Overnight leader and top-seeded Polish GM Michael Kransenkow maintained his slender half a point lead over rest of the field as the players on the top boards played safe and agreed for draws to retain their championship chances at the end of round 9 of the LIC — Mumbai Mayor’s International Chess Tournament.

On the top board GM Abhijit Kunte and Kransenkow agreed for a draw just after 11 moves while Al-Rakib drew with his colleague, Ziaur Rahman in 10 moves.

The fight on the third board between GM-norm holder MS Thejkumar and 3rd seeded Macieje proved to be exciting as the Indian player, who is rated much below Macieja, invited complications in the opening by sacrificing a pawn on move 9. The players agreed for a draw after some interesting exchanges.

Second seeded GM Koneru Humpy, renowned for her fighting qualities, tried to quell the challenge of IM Arun Prasad. But eventually, Humpy agreed to a draw after 65 moves.

Meanwhile, Uzbek GM, Anton Fillipov quelled the challenge of IM Venkatesh and Bangladeshi GM Reefat Sattar and Georgian GM Merab Gagunashvili defeated their opponents, Deep Sengupta and B.S. Shivananda respectively. IM Anup Deshmukh of LIC, who defeated GM Elizabar Ubilava, notched up a notable victory.

With two rounds remaining in this 11-round tourney, a group of 6 players, Al-Rakib, Thejkumar, Kunte, Ziaur Rahman and Fillipov are trailing Kransenkow by half-a-point while a big pack of 12-players lead by Humpy are occupying the 3rd spot with 7 points.

Results: GM Kunte Abhijit (7.5) drew GM Kransenkow Michal (8); GM Abdulla Al-Rakib(7.5) drew GM Rahman Zia (7.5); Thejkumar MS (7.5) drew GM Macieja Bartlomiej (7); GM Koneru Humpy (7) drew IM Arun Prasad S (7); GM Filippov Anton (7.5) beat Venkatesh MR (6.5); IM Laxman R R (7) drew Das Arghyadip (7); GM Reefat Bin-Sattar (BAN, 7.5) beat IM Sengupta Deep (6.5); GM Gagunashvili Merab (GEO, 7) beat Shivananda B S(6); FM Priyadharshan K (6) lost to GM Iuldachev Saidali UZB (7); IM Singh D P (6.5) drew GM Safin Shukhrat (UZB, 6.5); FM Vidit Gujrathi (6.5) drew GM Ramesh R B (6.5); GM Bakre Tejas (7) beat Arun Karthik R (6); Ram S Krishnan (7) beat IM Adhiban B (6); WGM Ramaswamy Aarthie (6) lost to IM Satyapragyan S (7); Bartakke Amardeep (6) lost to IM Saptarshi Roy (7); FM Akshat Khamparia (6.5) drew IM Konguvel P (6.5); GM Ubilava Elizbar (ESP, 5.5) lost to IM Deshmukh Anup (7)

2008 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

Coverage through Round 5 has been updated at Chess Femme News.

Krush and Zatonskih are perfect through 5 rounds with 5.0. Here are the match-ups for Round 6, later today:

Round 6 Match-ups (Sunday May 18):
Player Draw (pairing numbers)
10. Courtney Jamison v. 8.Tsagaan Battsetseg
9. Iryna Zenyuk v. 7. Irina Krush
1. Chouchanik Airapetian v. 6. Chimi Tuvshintugs
2. Anna Zatonskih v. 5. Esther Epstein
3. Katerine Rohonyan v. 4. Tatev Abrahamyan

So far, there have been no upsets like last year, when Liz Vicary knocked off Camillie Baginskaite, a performance which earned her the $300 Goddesschess Brilliancy Prize. Who will win the Fighting Chess Award this year - $500, $350 from Goddesschess and $150 from the Susan Polgar Foundation?

Womb - That from Which We Come, That to Which We Go

From Barbara Walker's "A Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Legend."

Womb
The Sanskrit word for any temple or sancutary was garbha-grha, "womb."(1)

The great annual festival of Aphrodite in argos was called Hysteria, "Womb."(2)

The oldest oracle in Greece, sacred to the Great Mother of eart, sea, and sky, ws named Delphi, from delphos, "womb."

Megalithic tombs and barrow-mounds were designed as "wombs" to give rebirth to the dead. [New Grange, for instance.] Their vaginal entrance passages show that Neolithic folk went to considerable trouble to devise imitations of female anatomy in earth and stone. tomb and womb were even related linguistacally. Greek tumbos, Latin tumulus were cognates of tumere, to swell, to be pregnant. The word "tummy" is thought to have come from the same root.(3)

Womb-temples and womb-tombs point backward to the matriarchal age, when only feminine life-magic was thought efficacious. Rebirth from the womb-tomb was the meaning of the domed funerary stupa of the Far East, where the remains of the sainted dead lay within a structure called garbha, the "womb."(4) The parallel with barrow graves, Mycenaean tholos tombs, cave temples, and other such structures is now well known. Even a Christian cathedral centered on the space called nave, originally meaning "belly." [hence "belly button" - navel]. Caves and burial chambers were said to be sunk in the "bowels" of the earth - that is, of Mother Earth. The biblical term for "birth" is "separation from the bowels."

Archetypal womb-symbolism is as common today as it ever was, though not always rcognized as such. Paul Klee said, "Which artist would not wish to dwell at the central organ of all motion . . . from which all functions derive their life? In the womb of nature, in the primal ground of creation, where the secret key to all things lies hidden?"(5)

Notes:
(1) Campbell, C.M., 168.
(2) H. Smith, 126.
(3) Potter & Sargent, 28.
(4) Waddell, 262.
(5) Jung, M.H.S., 263.
****************************************************************************************
I was rather curious about this festival of Hysteria, so I did a little research. At this website, I found this statement: As a matter of fact Kallimakhos (or Zenodotos), in Historical Notes, testifies that the pig is sacrificed to Aphrodite:

"The people of Argos sacrifice swine to Aphrodite and the festival is called Hysteria (Feast of Swine)." - Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 3.95f-96a

"Feast of Swine" certainly doesn't sound anything like "(Feast of the) Womb" - but, curiously, that same web site said that pigs were called hus in Greek. "Hus" as in "husband?"

VI) SWINE (Greek "hus")
Aphrodite had a curious relationship with the pig. The goddess supposedly hated the creature because her lover Adonis had been gored to death by a wild boar. Therefore arose the proverb 'he sacrificed a pig to Aphrodite' used to refer to someone who gave an innappropriate or unwanted gift. However, in Argos and Kypros at least, pigs were sacrificed to the goddess during the Hysteria (of the pigs) festival. The sacrifice was probably to assuage her grief for the loss of Adonis, who was slain by a wild pig.

In other cultures, we know the white sow was sacred as an aspect of the Goddess. According to Barbara Walker, "The white corpse-eating Sow-goddess represented the death aspect of the Great Mother in cults of Astarte, Demeter, the Celts' Cerridwen, and the Teutons' Frya. As a death goddess, Freya had the title of Syr, "Sow." Demeter-Persephone or "Demeter the Destroyer" was sometimes called Phorcis the Sow, mother of the Phorcids or Fatal Women [from which we derive the word "porcine"]. One of these was Circe, swine-goddess of Aeaea, who could turn men into sacrificial pigs. Her island Aeaea meant literally "Wailing," a reference to the ritual laments accompanying sacrifices of the god in pig form."

Stringing this all together, perhaps Adonis' being gored to death by a wild boar was a later Greek gloss of his original sacrificial death as a sacred king/husband of the goddess Aphrodite. Instead of being killed by a "pig," he was, in actuality, sacrificed as a "pig" himself. Therefore, the connection of sacrificing pigs and the "Fatal Women" would make sense in the context of an "hysterical" celebration to the Goddess Aphrodite. The sacrificing of pigs at the Hysteria was a throw-back to pre-Greek goddess worship.

Also from Walker:

Hysteria
"Womb," the orgiastic religious festival of Aphrodite in Argos, where the Womb of the World was adored and symbolically fructified.(1) [by offering sacrifice, in this case, pigs?]

Hysteria was given its present meaning by renaissance doctors who explained women's diseases with a theory that the womb sometimes became detached from its place and wandered about inside the body, causing uncontrolled behavior.

My good old Webster's Collegiate Dictionary has this to say about hyster- or hystero- comb form [French or Latin, French hyster-, from Latin hyster-, from Greek, from hystera] 1: womb.

So, Walker was absolutely correct - the Hysteria at Argos was the Festival of the Womb.

But what about "pig?" I did a quick search for an English-Greek dictionary and came up with these words: choiros, gourouni. However, I believe those are in modern Greek, which probably bears litle relation to ancient Greek. This may be closer - under my Webster's definition for swine is Latin sus - see more at Sow.

Pay dirt! In my Webster's under the definition of "sow": Middle English sowe, from Old English sugu; akin to Old English and Old High German su sow, Latin sus pig, swine, hog, Greek hys [emphasis added]. 1: an adult female swine.

So, hys means sow in Greek; and hystera means womb in Greek. A rather interesting connection.

A few interesting tid-bits:

Sows killed at Yuletide - possibly traced to worship of Freya.

Animal worship in Ireland - scroll about half way down to find extensive entry under Pig.

Lots of intesting information here on Pig, Sow and Boar.

Mount Lykaion Back in the News

Prior post.

The headline reads: Surprise Finds on Wolf Mountain
by Jarrett A. Lobell
How long have pilgrims worshiped at the sanctuary of Zeus?
From Archaeology Magazine Online, From the Trenches, Volume 61, Number 3, May/June 2008

On his second-century A.D. tour of the monuments of Greece, the writer Pausanias visited Mount Lykaion (Greek for "wolf") in Arcadia. He knew that for 1,000 years people had been coming to the site to worship Zeus, the supreme god of the Greek pantheon. In fact, when Pausanias arrived, an animal sacrifice was underway. But what he could not have known is that there may have been religious activity on Mount Lykaion as early as 3000 B.C. New archaeological discoveries are pushing back the chronology of this important sanctuary by 2,000 years.

Excavations led by David Gilman Romano of the University of Pennsylvania, Michaelis Petropoulos of the Greek Archaeological Service, and Mary Voyatzis of the University of Arizona focus on the southeast section of the site's ash altar, a large area of the summit covered in the remains of dedicatory offerings. The team was surprised to find Early Helladic (ca. 3000-2100 B.C.) pottery mixed in with artifacts from later periods. "We were stunned to find this early material," says Voyatzis.

Romano and Voyatzis are making the bold suggestion that the Early Helladic people who lived in the area before the Greeks arrived may have used Mount Lykaion's peak to worship a weather god. They think the deity might be a precursor to Zeus, god of sky and thunder, who is first mentioned in Linear B tablets around 1400 B.C. "Certainly we are not claiming anything like continuity of cult here," says Romano. "But what we are thinking now is that this was a place of worship at an early date."

Along with the Early Helladic material, excavators found offerings from later periods--bronze tripods and rings, silver coins, and burned animal bones--confirming that the sanctuary flourished from the eighth century B.C. onward as a destination for pilgrims. Spectators and athletes were also drawn to the sanctuary's games, which rivaled those of nearby Olympia.

Another tantalizing discovery was a rock-crystal seal with the image of a bull. Zeus is said to have two birthplaces, one at Mount Lykaion and the other on Crete, home of the Minoans. The seal, dating from 1500 to 1400 B.C., likely came from Crete, where bull iconography was popular, suggesting a connection between the worship of Zeus in both locations. Romano's team has yet to determine how the artifact came to the site, but together with the potential evidence for early rituals on the mountaintop, the bull seal is helping them understand the long tradition of worship on Zeus's sacred mountain.

© 2008 by the Archaeological Institute of Americawww.archaeology.org/0805/trenches/zeus.html
********************************************************************************
Duh! It should have occurred to me that "Lykaion" was related to lykos - wolf. In my trusty Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, the word "wolf" is described as having come into English from the Old High German "wolf," but the Latin word was "lupus" and the Greek "lykos."

So - how did the mountain get named "Wolf Mountain" if a weather-god precursor of Zeus was supposedly worshipped on it - a god that was given animal sacrifices by the locals? Weather god my foot! It was probably a goddess originally worshipped on Wolf Mountain, the mountain being named after the goddess' canine companions, who were not only harbingers of death but also thought by the ancients to carry the souls of the deceased to heaven or hell. We know that Zeus expropriated other sites in Greece for his worship as "Father Heaven," including Mount Olympus, former shrine of Gaea Olympia, just as he expropriated attributes of the goddesses and holy priestesses from which he originally derived his office and powers through sacred marriage.

Excerpted from Barbara Walker's "A Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets" under the entry for Werewolf:

Belief in the werewolf or "spirit-wolf" probably began with early medieval wolf clans who worshipped their totemic gods in wolf form, as did some people of the Greco-Roman world centuries earlier. Zeus Lycaeus, or Lycaeon, was a Pelasgian wolf-king who reigned in a nine-year cycle as spouse of the Ninefold Goddess, Nonacris.(1) Virgil said the first werewolf was Moeris, spouse of the trinitarian Fate-goddess (Moera), from whom he learned secrets of magic, including the necromantic knack of calling up the dead from their tombs.(2)

Lycanthropy (werewolfism) was named for Apollo Lycaeus, "Wolfish Apollo," who used to be worshipped in the famous Lyceum or "Wolf-temple" where Socrates taught.(3) Apollo was mated to Artemis as a divine Wolf Bitch at Troezen, where she purified Orestes with the blood of nine sacrificial victims.(4) Pausanias said Apollo was originally an Egyptian deity, deriving his name from Up-Uat (Ap-ol), a very ancient name of Anubis.(5) (see Dog.) [Pausanias – Greek traveler and geographer of the 2nd century A.D. Living in a time of declining culture, he was inspired by a desire to describe the ancient sacred sites for posterity.]

Another Roman version of the wolf god was Dis Pater [Note: Greek Zeus, from the Sanskrit Dyaus pitar], Soranus, or Feronius, consort of the Sabine underground Goddess Feronia, "Mother of Wolves." A certain Roman family claimed descent from her Sabine priestesses, and annually demonstrated her power by walking barefood over glowing coals during the festival of the Feronia.(6) She was also identified with Lupa the She-Wolf, whose spirit purified Palatine towns through the agency of young men in wolf skins, consecrated by participating in the Lupercalia or Festival of the She-Wolf.(7)

The She-Wolf was another aspect of the Triple Goddess, as shown by her triadic motherhood. She gave three souls to her son, the legendary King Erulus or Herulus, so that when he was overthrown by Evander, he had to be killed three times.(8) The Amazons, who worshipped the Triple Goddess, incorporated a tribe called the Neuri, who "turned themselves into wolves" for a few days each year during their main religious festival, presumably by wearing wolf skins and makes.(9) The same story was told of a certain Irish tribe in Ossory, who became wolf-people when attending their Yuletide feast, devouring the flesh of cattle as wolves, and afterward regaining their human shape. "Giraldus Cambrensis relates this great wonder in detail, as in operation in his own time, and believed every word of it."(10)

The heathens’ devotion to ancestral wolf gods in Teutonic Europe is evinced by the popularity of such names as Wolf, Wulf, Wolfram, Wolfburg, Aethelwulf, Wolfstein, etc. ""Beowulf son of Beowulf,""hero of the Anglo-Saxon epic, was called Scyld by the Danes, who said he came from the waters in a basket like Romulus and Remus, foster-sons of the She-Wolf.(11)

Notes:

(1) Graves, W.G., 406.
(2) Lawson, 250.
(3) Summers, W., 144.
(4) Graves, G.M., 1, 201; 2, 66.
(5) Baring-Gould, C.M.M.A., 129.
(6) Larousse, 210.
(7) Wedeck, 174.
(8) Dumezil, 244.
(9) Herodotus, 244.
(10) Joyce, 299.
(11) Rank, 63.

2008 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

I've updated Chess Femme News, including coverage of Round 4 of the 2008 Frank K. Berry U.S. Women's Chess Championship. Enjoy!

Mayor's Cup International Open (India)

An update: Krasenkow defeats Humpy and she drops in the standings (oh no!)

From The Hindu Online, May 17, 2008:

Kransenkow on top
MUMBAI: Top-seeded Polish Grandmaster Michal Kransenkow punished second seed Koneru Humpy for a late error and scored an important victory to become the sole leader with 7.5 points after eight rounds of the Mayor’s Cup International Open chess tournament here on Friday.

On a day when the top five boards witnessed decisive battles, M.S. Thejkumar stunned Uzbek GM Shukhrat Safin to share the second spot with GMs Abhijit Kunte, Abdulla Al-Rakib and Ziaur Rahman.
The results (Indians unless stated):

Eighth round: Michael Krasenkow (Pol, 7.5) bt K. Humpy (6.5); B. Adhiban (6) lost to Abhijit Kunte (7); R.B. Ramesh (6) lost to Abdulla Al-Rakib (Ban, 7); Ziaur Rahman (Ban, 7) bt Tejas Bakre (6); Shukrat Safin (Uzb, 6) lost to M.S. Thejkumar (7); M.R. Venkatesh (6.5) drew with Merab Gagunashvili (Geo, 6); B.T. Murali Krishnan (5.5) lost to Bartlomiej Macieja (Pol, 6.5); Swapnil Dhopade (5.5) lost to Anton Filipov (Uzb, 6.5); Saidali Iuldachev (Uzb, 6) drew with Vidit Gujarati (6); Rahul Shetty (5.5) lost to R.R. Laxman (6.5); S. Mari Arul (5.5) lost to Reefat Bin Sattar (Ban, 6.5); S. Arun Prasad (6.5) bt Ram Prakash (5.5); Deep Sengupta (6.5) bt Atanu Lahiri (5.5); Akash Thakur (5.5) lost to Aghyadip Das (6.5); P. Konguvel (6) drew with Ram S. Krishnan (6); Sriram Jha (5.5) drew with Akshat Khamparia (6).

Friday Night Miscellany

Ahhhh, it was a beautiful day here today, and I loved having the day off! I got a lot done, but not nearly what I had planned :) Instead, after I finished cutting the front lawn, I did some blogging, ate lunch, and then had a nice long nap. There's nothing like a nice long nap in the early afternoon to make one feel truly rich and at leisure!

Here's an article that caught my eye at The New York Times: Los Angeles Eyes Sewage as a Source of Water. Rather behind the times, I think; Chicago has, from the beginning of time, been dumping it's allegedly treated waste water into the Chicago River that was specifically engineered to flow the wrong way and force its waste into rivers that eventually flow to the mighty Mississippi, from which millions draw their drinking water; and in Milwaukee we've been dumping our actually treated waste water into Lake Michigan for about 100 years. After the 1993 mass outbreak of cryptosporidium (blamed on run-off from animal waste, yeah, right) that sickened some 400,000 people, the city spent millions upgrading this and that at the waste water treatment center which now includes something with ozone to kill all the crap (no pun intended) that the prior treatment system did not. Nothing like scientific progress, heh?

What's worse - dying from sewerage passed off as drinking water after being "filtered" or dying from the toxins in the plastic bottles that contain supposedly "pure" drinking water? Pick your poison.

There's something wrong with this picture, folks. This article says that "man" started populating the rest of the world about 60,000 years ago out of Africa. This article says there is evidence of human habitation in the United States from about 50,000 years ago.

If both are true, this means that man would have had to hightail it out of Africa all the way across Europe and then swim over to the east coast of North America, or else trek to the eastern edge of Siberia and then swim over what used to be the Bering land bridge into Alaska, because 10,000 years ago the glaciers were melting and the traditional "stepping off" places that science says existed in order to aid the travel of man from the "old world" to the "new world" would have been under lots of water, darlings. So, both cannot be true!

Under traditional theory, I believe it's still being taught that man first arrived in Alaska some 14,000 years ago, and made it all the way down to South American by 13,000 years ago, and all the latest evidence is routinely ignored, dismissed or - if mentioned at all - ridiculed.

Geez, will the academics ever get it right?

Here's a squirrel story that is just so cute - and the ranger ain't bad, either:
A squirrel's gone nuts over ranger Mark.

A "Don't Eat That Elmer" story: "Snake man" slithers out of prison cell

Spooky video - call me skeptical.

'night!

Harrison Ford and the AIA

This wasn't a press release from April 1st, so I guess it must be true:

Harrison Ford Elected to the Board of the Archaeological Institute of America
© Business Wire 2008
2008-05-16 15:04:57 -

- For the AIA Laura Goldberg, 347-683-1859 lauragoldberg@gmail.com After years of being identified on screen as the legendary archaeologist "Indiana Jones," actor Harrison Ford has won election to the Board of Directors of the Archaeological Institute of America. With his Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull set to hit U.S. movie theaters on May 22, the film star commented on his real world dedication to archaeology, "Knowledge is power, and understanding the past can only help us in dealing with the present and the future."

The Archaeological Institute of America is North America's oldest and largest non-profit organization devoted to archaeology. With more nearly a quarter of a million members and subscribers and 105 local chapters, it promotes archaeological excavation, research, education, and preservation on a global basis. At the core of its mission is the belief that an understanding of the past enhances our shared sense of humanity and enriches our existence. As archaeological finds are a non-renewable resource, the AIA's work benefits not only the current generation, but also those yet to come in the future.

"Harrison Ford has played a significant role in stimulating the public's interest in archaeological exploration," said Brian Rose, President of the AIA. "We are all delighted that he has agreed to join the AIA's Governing Board."

In addition, the current May/June issue of ARCHAEOLOGY magazine, published by the AIA, features a cover story devoted to the mysteries surrounding the alleged crystal skull archaeological finds that inspired the new "Indiana Jones" film. For the complete article, go to: www.archaeology.org/0805/etc/indy.html.

2008 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

A few interesting things have come up:

The Space Controversy!

Susan Polgar commented the other day (5/15) at her blog that a few folks had complained about somewhat tight quarters in the playing venue. I was a little surprised myself when seeing Paul Truong's photos from Tulsa (posted at SP's blog) that the players in a prestigious event were seated at long tables next to each other; I guess I'd expected individual tables with room to circulate in-between; but I can't say that I thought things were unduly crowded. Still - I've never played in a tournament so I have no idea what might or might not be comfortable for a player in a national championship!

The one and only tournament I visited was the 1999 FIDE Knock-Out World Championship in Las Vegas at Caesar's Palace and there was plenty of space for players and spectators - hardly any spectators for the quarter-finals, actually, and I thought that was a shame. For the quarter-finals we were in a large banquet room and, sitting in the front row with Isis and Michelle, I could practically reach out and touch Shirov who was playing right in front of me just beyond a red velvet rope! Khalifman and Polgar were just down the row. I could easily see the wrinkles in her linen suit. It was a sort of pastel peach color, and she had on light tan shoes.

In the semi-finals the venue was set up differently - the four players (Adams and Akopian, Khalifman and Nisipeanu) were at tables elevated at the front of the playing room and the audience was seated below. In both venues large electronic screens were provided where you could watch the games in progress, and headsets were available for free if you provided a credit card or ID card, over which you could listen to commentary and analysis of the games.

Tonight SP gave an update based on Tom Braunlich's report after Round 3.

I sincerely hope that Onischuk does not leave the tournament. I don't know what the organizers can do about the space at this point in the events. Reserving a second room to move players into was probably not the best solution, and I think the women were right to complain that moving them into a separate room was tantamount to saying "you're second class citizens" - the equivalent of having to sit at the back of the bus. I'm equally certain that no insult was intended.

Where on earth is the audience seated? I mean - the Championships were advertised as open to the public and if it was being held here I'd certainly be in eager attendance. So, where is the public being seated? Or are "the public" those folks standing against the walls? Oh my...

For Round 3 the five lower boards were moved to the reserved second room, and they didn't like it. Here's an idea - select pairings to go to the second room by random draw after the end of each round. That way, there's no actual or perceived discrimination taking place, it's just the luck of the draw and unfortunate that a larger room could not be secured - although who knows, the Berry brothers have been doing this kind of thing for years, maybe they can convince the hotel to swap out a larger space (if the Radisson has one available).

A Great Story!

Braunlich reported on 81 years young Beth Cassidy, who visited the tournament. Ms. Cassidy was a member of the Ireland chess team and a journalist with British Chess Magazine. She knew many of the classic GMs from the 40s and 50s. While a manager of the Manhattan Chess Club in the 1960s she wrote extensive detailed articles on the great masters that hung out there, including Fischer, Lombardy, Kmoch, Steinmeyer, etc. She worked for Shell and when she retired chose to live in Tulsa.

Wow! Someone who knew all those greats - someone who managed the Manhattan Chess Club! I'll bet she has some stories to tell... There's a photo of Ms. Cassidy and Susan Polgar in Braunlich's report. She sort of reminds me of my mom, who turns 81 later this month.

Comments About the Prize Structure and Women's Championship

Well of course some misogynists are complaining about the fact that the prizes for the Women's Championship are nearly as large as those for the putative Men's Championship. In fact, some male players will be sent home with $250 less than the women (prize structure). Gasp!

Here's one comment from Chess Life Online:

Post: #102048 by NiceLife on Fri May 16, 2008 2:12 pm
I don’t think it is unreasonable for a top-100-in-the-world player to ask not to play within elbow-bumping distance of another player. The organizers of a national championship should ensure that there is enough space in the tournament hall. It is not a scholastic tournament. I am glad Onischuk stands up for some standards of respect in chess.

By the way, I am pretty sure the last 5 boards of the overall championship (which are still mostly IMs and GMs) are used to being treated as second-class in chess. They might make their expenses back in this tournament, but they will watch while the female players with lower ratings win more in this one tournament than they are likely to make in tournaments all year. [Emphasis added].

See my tears, darling, boo hoo.

There were several comments about the Women's Championship being a separate event and therefore it SHOULD be held in the other room:

Post: #102049 by bradenbournival on Fri May 16, 2008 2:18 pm
Well the most logical solution is definitely to have the women's championship in a separate room. I don't see how anyone can complain about this since they are 2 totally separate tournaments! I don't believe putting the top boards in a different room is a very good idea, other players involved in the same tournament have to walk to a totally separate room to view games that might be very relevant to them in a future game... [Emphasis added].

Anyways, I'm sure having the top games in a different room will also invoke some complaints from Mr. Cry Baby Onischuk... Perhaps the best solution of all is for everyone in the tournament to pitch in for a ticket back to Russia.. [Emphasis added].

Post: #102050 by artichoke on Fri May 16, 2008 2:19 pm
Well the prize funds are what they are, but for this one event I'd treat everyone as first-class. It's reasonable to put the overall championship in one room, the women's in another. [Emphasis added].

Post: #102062 by nocab on Fri May 16, 2008 5:13 pm
The answer is all too obvious, but certainly will be called "politically incorrect" these days. Someone needs to say it, so I will. The women are playing in a completely seperate event. They are not as strong as the men. They should play in the other room. Period! [Emphasis added].

Soooo, the women should be isolated because they're "not as strong" players - or - just because they're women. Are we living in Saudi Arabia??? What's next - the all-enveloping black robes with mesh over the eyes so a woman needs a seeing-eye dog (or a male holding her on a leash) to navigate around? You silly dudes. You should be supporting better playing conditions and better prize money for ALL players. Anything else is a losing proposition. DUH!

Women in Archaeology: Aileen Ajootian

Story from The Daily Citizen (aggregated by Archaeologynews.com)
UM gives special recognition
Wednesday, May 14, 2008 5:51 PM CDT

Ajootian, Showalter honored for service to studentsOXFORD, Miss. — Each day at the University of Mississippi, students are impacted by words and actions of many faculty and staff who know their work extends beyond classrooms, labs and offices.

For the 14th year, two UM members who personify such extraordinary service have been selected for special recognition. Aileen Ajootian, chair and associate professor of classics and art, and Marc Showalter, director of the University Counseling Center and assistant professor of education, are recipients of the 2008 Frist Student Service Awards.

“Ole Miss is a service-oriented, loving community,” Chancellor Robert Khayat said. “To be recognized by students, faculty and staff as a leader in service affirms the extraordinary level of commitment of the Frist recipients.”

The awards, one for faculty and one for staff, were established with a gift from the late Dr. Thomas F. Frist Sr. of Nashville, a 1930 UM graduate. Ajootian and Showalter were selected by a chancellor’s committee of faculty, staff and students assessing nominations. They each receive $1,000 and a plaque and were recognized May 10 at the university’s commencement ceremony.

Nomination letters for the award cite specific examples of how members have gone the extra mile for students. A former student nominating Ajootian wrote about how she encouraged him: “I can remember feeling hopeless, but Dr. Ajootian gave me hope.

“She created numerous tutoring sessions for her students besides the time that she would spend helping students during her office hours,” he continued.

... Ajootian [also] expressed surprise.

“Receiving this award was a complete shock,” she said. “But it is such a great honor. It makes me want to continue doing what I have been doing. I love working in an environment what I can continue to learn and share my excitement for learning with my students.”

A native of Long Island, N.Y., Ajootian joined the UM faculty in 1996. She holds master’s degrees from Bryn Mawr College and the University of Oregon. She earned her doctorate in classical archaeology from Bryn Mawr. She is a member of the Archaeological Institute of America and of the College Arts Association. Her fieldwork in archaeology includes research in Athens and ancient Corinth in Greece.
...

Mayor's Cup International Open (India)

Humpy, Humpy, goooooooo Humpy!

I've been following GM Koneru Humpy's career since I first got online in 1999 and discovered the world of professional women chessplayers. Here's a report on the Mayor's Cup in India from The Hindu Online:

Krasenkow, Humpy in lead
MUMBAI: Top seed Michael Krasenkow and second seed K. Humpy won their seventh round games to share the lead with 6.5 points in the Mayor’s Cup International Open chess tournament at the Goregaon Sports Complex here on Thursday.

The results (Indians unless stated): Seventh round: K. Humpy (6.5) bt Shukhrat Safin (Uzb 6); Reefan Bin Sattar (Ban, 5.5) lost to Michal Krasenkow (Pol, 6.5); Abhijit Kunte (6) drew with M. R. Venkatesh (6); Abdulla Al-Rakib (Ban, 6) bt Vikramaditya Kamble (5); Soumya Swaminathan (5) lost to Ziaur Rahman (Ban, 6); Akash Thakur (5.5) drew with Saidali Iuldachev (Uzb, 5.5); R.R. Laxman (5.5) drew with Swapnil Dhopade (5.5).

R.B. Ramesh (6) bt Shyam Nikhil (5); Tejas Bakre (6) bt D.P. Singh (5); Ram Krishnan (5.5) drew with Deep Sengupta (5.5).

G.B. Joshi (5) lost to B.Adhiban (6); M.S. Thejkumar (6) bt R. Arun Karthik (5); Arghyadip Das (5.5) drew with S. Mari Arul (5.5).

Juniors Chess in Tamil Nadu (India)

From The Hindu Online, May 16, 2008:

(No offense, but I left out the parts about the Under-17 boys)

Muthu, Krithika win titles
Tiruchengode: Muthu Alagappan (Thiruvallur) and Pon. N. Krithika (Kancheepuram) clinched the boys’ and girls’ titles respectively in the Tamil Nadu State under-17 chess championship, organised by the Namakkal District Chess Foundation, at the SKV MHSS here on Thursday.

Results (final round): Girls: Pon. N. Krithika (Kan) 8 drew with P. Uthra (Tlr) 6; S.V. Sathya Priya (Slm) 5.5 lost to C.H. Savetha 7; R. Visalatchi (Vnr) 5.5 lost to J. Saranya (Tlr) 7; M. Poojakanth (Nlc) 5.5 lost to Sithalatchumi Arunachalam (Mdu) 6.5; R. Bharathi (Chn) 6 bt P. Priya Sandiya (Kan) 5; J.G. Nivedhitha (Bca) 5 lost to R. Abirami (Chn) 6; P.V. Nandhithaa (Nam) 6 bt P. Sujitha (Cbe) 4.5; G. Amirthavalli (Chn) 4.5 lost to R. Bhuvaneswari (Try) 5.5; S. Anushya (Nlc) 5.5 bt G. Uma Bharathi (Chn) 4; A. Akshaya (Tlr) 5 bt R. Karthikeyini (Mdu) 4; P. Varshini (Ero) 4 lost to R. Nanduja (Vnr) 5; N. Akshaya (Cbe) 5 bt Swetha (Nam) 4; B. Jeyassri (Chn) 5 bt S. Aarthi (Vel)) 4; R.S. Soundarya (Kar) 4 lost to Srinidhi Sridharan (Trr) 5; M. Vallikannu (Vnr) 4 drew with N.K. Bavithra Midhuna (Tnv) 4; J. Kiruthiga Janani (Nam) 4 bt R. Bala Bagavthi (Tnv) 3; P. Roshini (Kan) 4 bt Manimozhi (Nam) 3; S. Sowmiya (Try) 3 lost to Priyadharshini (Nam) 4; R.S. Harini (Vel) 2 lost to S. Revathi (Kar) 4; J. Pooja (Kan) 1 lost to S. Monica Baarathi (Ero) 3; Sri Rathi (Kar) 1 lost to B. Sudharshini (Kar) 3.

Final standings (girls): Girls: 1. Pon. N. Krithika (Kan) 8; 2. J. Saranya (Tlr) 7; 3. C.H. Savetha (Chn) 7; 4. Sithalatchumi (Mdu) 6.5; 5. P. Uthra (Tlr) 6; 6. R. Bharathi (Chn) 6; 7. P.V. Nandhithaa (Nam) 6; 8. R. Abirami (Chn) 6; 9. R. Visalatchi (Vnr) 5.5; 10. S.V. Sathya Priya (Slm) 5.5.

2008 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

Hola darlings!

I've got a day off today, yippee! So, first thing this morning, I updated my coverage of the 2008 Frank K. Berry U.S. Women's Chess Championship over at Chess Femme News for Round 3. Please check it out and give me lots of visitors and page views, thank you very much!

I'm wondering when Dylan Loeb McClain over at The New York Times is going to write a story on the 2008 championships? Is he on vacation? Is he dead? His last posting (as of the time of writing this entry) at his Gambit blog is May 6th. Hmmm, not good, not good at all. Psssst, hey McClain, I'm giving you a hint here because you have the same surname (albeit a different spelling) as my own wonderful McLean man - you've got to give American chessplayers a little more respect!

$750,000 Purse for Kamsky-Topalov Match

Chessbase breaks the following news:

'Lvov awaits Topalov and Kamsky!'15.05.2008 – Breaking news: Russian chess journalists Yuri Vasiliev has now confirmed that the semifinal Candidates Match between Veselin Topalov and Gata Kamsky will take place in Lvov, Ukraine, for a prize fund of US $750,000. The full story, including Yuri's verbatim interview with Chernenko, will appear tomorrow on ChessBase. Here first details.

Just over a month ago we reported that FIDE had extended the deadline for bids for the Kamsky-Topalov Candidates Match. The Bulgarian Chess Federation protested vigorously, but then the reason for FIDE's decision became clear: a US $750,000 bid to stage the match in Lvov, western Ukraine, had been announced by Kamsky's manager Alexander Chernenko.

There were a lot of doubts if this offer was real.

Today Chernenko has stated that the financial guarantees have now been received by FIDE, at their Swiss bank account: “The sum of US $935,000 has appeared on the bank’s computer screen in Lausanne “, Vasiliev quotes Chernenko as saying.

Rest of article.

More News on Pan American Women's Chess Championship

13-Year-Old Canadian Girl Back Home Bringing the Silver Cup from the Pan American Women Chess 2008

NewswireToday - /newswire/ - North York, Ontario, Canada, 05/15/2008 - During May 5th-12th – 13-year-old Toronto girl, WFM Yuan, Yuanling represented Canada to play the Pan American Women Chess Championship 2008 in San Salvador and won the runner-up with score 6.5 over 9 rounds.

13-year-old Toronto girl, the youngest Canadian women Fide master Yuan, Yuanling represented Canada to play the Pan American Women Chess Championship 2008 in San Salvador during May 5th to 12th. After 9 rounds tough competition, she got 6.5 score and won the silver cup.

WFM Yuanling is just 13 years old. She is the youngest women Fide master and currently ranked 2nd place of Canadian women chess by rating. When she was 9 year old in 2003, she represented Canada to play the World Youth Chess Championship and won 10th place in her age group. And this year, she represented Canada to play the continental women's championship during May 5th to May 12th in El Salvador, the country in the center-America.

There are 28 players from North-America, Center-America and South-America in the tournament. WFM Yuan, Yuanling from Canada is the youngest player and ranked 7th by fide rating before the tournament. The tournament is very tough since there are 2 women Grandmasters, 4 women international masters and 6 women Fide masters participating the tournament.

Canadian women Fide master Yuanling played all the women Grandmasters and the women international masters during the tournaments and defeated one women Grandmaster and two women International masters, drew with the first seed player Arribas Robaina, Maritza, a women Grandmaster from Cuba. Yuanling only lost two games to other two women International masters from Ecuador and Cuba. After 9 rounds chess games, Canadian Yuanling got 6.5 score over 9 and list 2nd place. In the meanwhile, she got 20 games women International master norm by achieving performance rating as high as 2302.

Cuban Crowned Pan American Women’s Chess Champion

Story from the Periodico of Las Tunas, Cuba

HAVANA, Cuba, May 14, (acn).— International Master (IM) Zirka Frometa of Cuba won the Pan American Chess Championship with seven of nine possible points in the tournament held in the Salvadoran capital of San Salvador.

The player from Santiago de Cuba brought back memories of some of her best moments as a player after finishing with a stalemate against host country competitor IM Sonia Zepeda and finishing with six wins, two ties and only one loss.

The loss was against teammate GM Martiza Arribas, who finished third overall with six points. Arribas had four wins, four ties and one loss to Ecuadorian IM Evelyn Moncayo.

According to a report in the Salvadoran media, second place went to the young FIDE Master (FM) Yuanling Yuan of Canada, with 6.5 points, who won her final match against IM Lorena Zepeda of El Salvador.

Moncayo finished fourth with six points and the Zepeda sisters, Lorena and Sonia, had 5.5 each.

Last year’s tournament was held in San Luis, Argentina and the best Cuba was able to manage was a fourth place finish by GM Sulennis Pina, fifth by IM Yaniet Marrero and seventh by GM Vivian Roman.

The title in 2007 went to GM Sarai Sanchez of Venezuela who fell to eighth this time with 5.5. points.

Chess News Update

Chess Femme News has been updated, May 15, 2008 - specifically, updated news on the U.S. Women's Chess Championship!

Pi and the Great Pyramid

An article or post written by Assem Deif is a professor of mathematics at Cairo University and Misr University for Science and Technology

Pi, Phi and the Great Pyramid
Assem Deif investigates the values -- not the symbols -- of the last of the Wonders of the Ancient World
Al-Ahram Weekly Online
March 27 - April 2, 2008
Issue No. 890

We can forget all the ideas crediting Atlanteans or space aliens with building the Great Pyramid of Giza, and instead imagine ourselves travelling back in time in H G Wells's time machine to try and work out not how the ancient Egyptians built this enormous edifice, because this lies beyond our present understanding, but rather what we can best judge to be its most appropriate proportions. Then, however, there were no electronic calculators, only ropes and rods.

Constructing right angles at the four corners of a pyramid is easy. To do it, history tells us that the Egyptians were aware of the ratios 3:4:5 as the side-lengths of a right-angle triangle. Many old kingdom pyramids adhere to these ratios. The Egyptians also knew a rough value of Pi (the value, not the symbol) as the ratio between the circumference of any circle and its diameter. They worked out that 3 _ is less than Pi, and Pi is less than 3 1/7, i.e. Pi lies between the rational number 22/7 and the Babylonian value. This can be done by constructing a circle of diameter AB and laying the latter on its circumference, starting from A, once until C then D then E, to conclude that Pi is greater than 3. The remaining part EA from the circumference is laid down again on the diameter AB, so seven times EA is less than AB which in turn is less than eight times EA, or EA/AB is greater than 1/8 and less than 1/7.

Rest of article.


Leave it to a professor of mathematics to botch the explanation! I was drifting off into sleep just before I copied and posted the last paragraph here - snore... There has to be a better way of explaining the mathematical wonders of the pyramids and Pi, etc.

For instance, WHY does he say it's easy to figure out how to do a 90 degree right angle by using the 3/4/5 method? We actually have NO FRICKING IDEA how the ancient Egyptians came up with this formula, all we know is that they used it to lay out square foundations and that it WORKED! The 3/4/5 method of laying out a 90 degree ("right") triangle was "proven" - much later - by Pythagoras and his "school" of followers in Greece.

So, the ancient Egyptians knew it worked, but how did they figure it out to begin with? We don't know - we don't have a clue. Mathematics cannot speak to that quintessimal moment of discovery - when someone along the Nile River figured it out - had that "EUREKA" moment, some 5,000 years ago.

For those of you (including yours truly, who made it all the way through college advanced mathematics without having a clue - and what does THAT say about the state of universities back in the 1980's, heh?) one of the few things I remember is that mathematical theory says that a RIGHT angle, that is, an angle that measures 90 degrees (1/4 of a full circle, which is 360 degrees), can be found by utilizing a triangle with the following formula: sides A, B and C of a triangle, with "A" being 3 "units" (whatever your units of measurement happen to be), side "B" being 4 units, and side "C" being five units. I'm sure I'm missing something here, LOL!

Now you know why I'm not a mathematician. Using the classic Egyptian formula for figuring out how to make a square (90 degrees) corner of that triangle, the Sheshat Goddess (actually, a priestess representing Sheshat) had a length of rope knotted into twelve equal lengths. A stake was driven into the ground by her consort, the Anubis priest, at a predetermined sacred spot. The Sheshat priestess then looped the rope over the stake such that 3 knots formed one leg of a triangle, which was then staked, and 4 knots formed a second leg of the triangle, also staked. The remaining 5 knots linked together the two sides legs of the triangle previously staked out with the knotted rope, forming the - what I believe is called the hypotenus of the 90 degree right triangle. About all I remember from geometry is 3 squared (9) PLUS 4 squared (16), EQUALS 5 squared (25) - but that was just a Greek way of saying lay out a square corner by doing this...

Local Girl Makes the Right Moves

By Janice Fae Mitchell
Guard Staff Writer
Published: Wednesday, May 14, 2008
The Batesville Daily Guard

Her heart tells her she wants to be a cardiac surgeon, but for now she’d be happy to make the right moves and say, “Checkmate.”

Twelve-year-old Crystal Qian, a Batesville seventh-grader, is the top performer among female scholastic players in Arkansas. She has qualified for the Susan Polgar National Invitational for Girls chess tournament to be held this summer, July 27-Aug. 1, at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

“My dad wants me to place, and personally I’d love it if I place, but I’m practicing because I think it’s fun, and I’m practicing because I think when I go to Texas it’s going to be rewarding,” Crystal said.

She said she’s looking forward to some sightseeing as well.

The invitational is named after Dr. Susan Polgar, a women’s world champion and holder of a number of world championship and Olympiad titles. The tournament will include the top female scholastic players whose ages are under 19 years old from all 50 states. This will be Crystal’s first time as Arkansas’ representative to the Polgar tournament.

“I’m practicing. Every day I do about 100 chess problems. They’re like puzzles, and you determine the best position for the next move,” and then when she’s done she plays against other people on the server, Crystal said.

The Arkansas Chess Federation and the Susan Polgar Foundation are supplying some funds, but she has to earn the rest herself.

“I have enough saved up for that just in case. When I grow up I want to go to Oxford in England and become a cardiac surgeon so most of the money is saved up for that, but I might take some out and maybe do something at the fair like play the piano.”

Crystal started to play chess three years ago when her family moved to Batesville in the summer of 2005.

“I’m glad she is going to play against the older girls with more experience. She will probably learn from them,” said her mother, Xiaojie “Sunny” Shang. “We want to thank the chess program which got her started. It was provided by Jack Sanders, the principal at Central Magnet.”

Crystal’s father, Dr. Jason Qian, said chess is one of his favorite hobbies. Due to a busy graduate school schedule, he was unable to teach her chess until they moved to Batesville. Qian and Shang work at Life Plus International.

With his help, chess club members at Central Magnet learned quickly and became more interested in chess. Within a few months, Crystal was able to defeat all chess club members, including those with a few years of experience.

In April 2006, Crystal won the first scholastic tournament in Batesville. She had the only perfect score. That June, she attended her first United States Chess Federation rated tournament and won first place in the unrated chess classification. Two months later, she defeated an experienced adult player at the Arkansas State Championship in Hot Springs.

Within two years, Crystal has played in more than 20 USCF rated and unrated scholastic chess tournaments, winning first place in the Mid-South Scholastic chess tournament at Memphis and third place at the Arkansas Blitz Championship.

“Passing this talent to my child has long been my dream,” Qian said.
As the 2006 Arkansas G/60 State champion and tournament director of Batesville Chess Club, Qian has promoted local interest in chess among scholastic players.

“Chess can help and influence life. It’s been known for years that chess is a wonderful tool to enhance the minds of youngsters and prevent or delay Alzheimer’s,” Qian added. “You need to recognize the patterns, calculate following moves and manage the consequences. Chess helps nurture and develop critical thinking skills. It is an outstanding preparation for being able to cope with the real world in our daily lives.”

Trophies and plaques line the walls and tables in a room of their home, including a big trophy Crystal won May 3 at the annual Arkansas Scholastic Chess Championship in Bald Knob that won her a slot in the invitational.

Crystal also has “hobbies,” and she takes them seriously. She dabbles in artwork, landscaping and tapestries, music practice (piano and French horn) and a chess game with her father — in between homework.

“Some kids have played this mind game as early as age 4,” her father said. “It is never too late to start.”

2008 Indian Women's National 'A' Chess Championship

Women's National ‘A’ Chess Championship begins this Friday

(Begins May 16, 2008)
The apex tournament of the women's chess calendar, the Women's National A Chess Championship will begin on May 16 at Majestic Tourist Hotel, Ampitiya Kandy and will see the top female players in the country pitting their wits against one another. Defending Champion and winner of many national titles, Vineetha Wijesuriya will be challenged by a host of young players led by Supeshala Thilakawardena who won the National B title ahead of the more-fancied Dilini Umesha (last year's runner-up) and Sachini Ranasinghe (last year's second runner-up). The tournament, organized by the Chess Federation of Sri Lanka is an all-play-all affair held over 13 rounds on May 16, 17, 18, 24, 25, 26 and 27, 2008.

The top performers will be selected to represent the country at the forthcoming Chess Olympiad in Germany. The following are the 14 players who will be in the fray: Vineetha Wijesuriya, Supeshala Thilakawardena, Ayodya Liyanagedara, Navodya Selvaratnam, Anjana Perera, Lihini Wawlallawita, Harshani Konara, Lumbini Ambanwela, Samanthi Wettasinghe, Sachini Ranasinghe, Dinushki Premanath, Mihirani Jayathilake, Iridu Basnayake and Dilini Umesha. The men's National A will begin the following weekend and last year's champion G.C. Anuruddha is expected face a stiff challenge from a host of promising young players in addition to several 'veterans'. Prasanna Kurukulasuriya was the surprise winner of the National B title, coming ahead of former national champion, Athula Russell.

Akhila Kavinda (St. Anne's College, Kurunegala) who performed extremely well at the Sri Lanka Open in March, beating one Indian International Master and holding another to a creditable draw is among several young players expected to perform well at the tournament. Other schoolboys Chathura Rajapakse and Y.D.B. Madugalle (both from Dharmaraja) and Osheen De Silva (Devananda) will not find things easy against 'veterans' Thivanka Mallawarachchi and former national champions Luxman Wijesuriya and T.D.R. Peiris. Incidentally, T.D.R. Peiris' son, Gayan Peiris is also a promising player expected to perform well. This is probably the first time that a father-son combination played in the 'Nationals' together.

Romesh Weerawardena, P.M.R.L. Bandara and C.K.D. Fonseka make up the 14 and these three are also seasoned and talented players quite capable of upsetting the form book.

The Men's event will be held on May 24, 25, 26, 26 and 31, and June 1 and 2, 2008 at the same venue.

Chess News Update

Chess Femme News has been updated, May 14, 2008!

SUCH news, darlings, be sure to catch up on what's been going on at the 2008 Frank K. Berry U.S. Women's Chess Championship - news from GM Susan Polgar, too! The Susan Polgar Foundation has contributed $150 to the Fighting Chess Award prize fund to make a total of $500, to be awarded to the winner of the Goddesschess Fighting Chess Award at the U.S. Women's Chess Championships. There's more -

Suffice to say thank you doesn't begin to say it to GM Susan Polgar - but in order to make sense of this post you've got to read the Chess Femme News.

The Tale of a Broken Pot

From The Hindu:

The tale of a broken pot
May 13, 2008
Iravatham Mahadevan and S. Rajagopal

Today I am a broken pot stored away in a museum. But, about eighteen hundred years ago, I was a shining new kalayam. My proud owner was a toddy-tapper named Naakan. He lived in a small hamlet at the edge of the forest (near present-day Andipatti in Theni district of Tamil Nadu).

Naakan was too poor to own land; but he earned his living by taking on lease some coconut and palmyra trees, tapping and selling the toddy.

There were several toddy-tappers in the hamlet. They would climb the trees early in the morning, make deep cuts on the crown of the trees with their sharp bill-hooks, and tie their pots beneath to collect the sap (juice) that oozed from the cuttings.

The pots, when full, would be taken down and stored for a few days to allow fermenting of the sap into toddy, for which there was a good market.

Etched belongings
Poor he might have been, but Naakan was literate. In order to identify his kalayam and its contents, he scratched this message on it with his sharp iron tool:

naakan uRal ‘Naakan’s (pot with) toddy-sap’

The Tamil word ooRal (from ooRu ‘to ooze’) meaning ‘freshly tapped toddy’ is spelt here with the short vowel u probably due to oversight or reflecting the colloquial usage.

Determining age
Archaeologists who dug me out of the earth near Andipatti a couple of years ago, have determined from examining the fabric of my body, that I was made in about the third century A.D. Epigraphists (who study old inscriptions) have identified the writing on my shoulder as in Old Tamil written in the Tamil-Brahmi script of the same period.

And that is not all. The two-word inscription carries an important message, namely, how widespread literacy must have been in the ancient Tamil country, if a poor toddy-tapper, living in a remote hamlet far away from urban and commercial centres, could write down his name and what he was doing with the pottery he owned.

That is the reason why I am preserved in the museum and not discarded like other broken pottery!

Iravatham Mahadevan is a well-known researcher of the Indus and Brahmi scripts. Dr. S. Rajagopal is a senior archaeologist specialising in Old Tamil inscriptions, who retired from the Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology.

The issue is the controversy surrounding translation (or, to be more accurate, no translation) of the Indus script. Various translations of the script have been put forward through the years, but none of them has been accepted by the archaeological/academic community. In the background is the other always-simmering, sometimes explosive controvesy of the "Indo-European invasion" versus some Indologists' claims that the Indus civilization was not destroyed by this "invasion" but gradually transformed into the civilization of southern India as the Indus people migrated south. There is, frankly, a racist component involved, as the people who live in Tamil Nadu and areas of southern India are very dark-skinned compared to the peoples further north and west. All is even more complicated by the gloss of the Hindu caste system and religious beliefs involving "karma" and reincarnation.

Whew!

Sothis and Sirius

A German archaeologist who has been working on excavations near Askum (Ethiopia) says:

“The results we have suggest that a Cult of Sothis developed in Ethiopia with the arrival of Judaism and the Ark of the Covenant, and continued until 600AD,” an announcement by the University of Hamburg on behalf of the research team said. Sothis is the ancient Greek name for the star Sirius.

Well! dondelion begs to differ, darlings! Check out his take on the subject of Sothis/Sirius at the latest update to Random Round-up at Goddesschess. It will only be there for a week before being whisked into the archives...

A wee bit of info on Sothis I found myself:

Sothis
Greco-Egyptian name of the star Sirius, which "rose in the east" to announce the advent of the Savior Osiris each year at the onset of the Nile flood. "Three Wise Men" announced the rising of Sothis - the three stars in Orion's belt which point directly toward Sirius. As the "Eye" of the Great Dog (Canis Major), Sirius was sometimes called Canopis or Dog-Eye, the same as the holy city of Anubis who, as Dog of Death, kept Osiris' soul in the star Sothis until his rebirth.
Source: Barbara Walker, "A Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets"

2008 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

Hola!

Jen Shahade promises to stay on top of things with coverage at Chess Life Online. She's already reported about Alexander Shabalov (B) resigning after move 18 against Yermolinsky (W) in Round 1 in the "other" Championship (LOL!) I checked Monroi, The Week in Chess, Susan Polgar's blog and Chessdom just a few minutes ago and didn't see any other current news. Stay tuned.

Updated 9:11 p.m. Central Standard Time
Hola darlings! With all due respect, I really don't give much of a hoot what the men are doing in their Championship, although there were a few interesting first round results. What I'm concentrating on is the chess femmes. Here are their first round results:

1 Airapetian, Chouchanik/Jamison, Courtney 1 0
2 Zatonskih, Anna/Zenyuk, Iryna 1 0
3 Rohonyan, Katerine/Battsetseg, Tsagaan 1/2 1/2
4 Abrahamyan, Tatev/Krush, Irina 0 1
5 Epstein, Esther/Tuvshintugs, Batchimeg 0 1

Four out of five decisive results in Round 1 of the Women's Championship! In the Men's event, there were six decisive results out of twelve, and six draws. Hmmm....

Can Crowd’s Wisdom Beat Chess Master?

From The Wall Street Journal
May 12, 2008, 6:00 am

Posted by Ben Worthen
Are amateurs collectively wiser than a single expert? That’s the question the Web site CrowdChess is trying to answer.

The book The Wisdom of Crowds promoted the idea that large groups are often able to make better decisions than experienced professionals. Over the last few years, that idea has been adopted as conventional wisdom: Some businesses have “crowd sourced” projects to communities; Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, grew from this notion.

To put the wisdom of crowds to the test, Stan Oleynick, the founder of CrowdChess, recruited Gawain Jones, a grandmaster from England, to play against the collective intelligence of his site’s visitors. “Chess is the ultimate game of strategy and foresight,” and thus is a good test of crowd theory, Oleynick tells the Business Technology Blog.

Visitors to CrowdChess propose and vote on moves. After 12 hours, the crowd makes the move with the most votes. Jones, the grandmaster, then has 12 hours to make his move. The first to take three games wins the tournament.

Currently, CrowdChess is 14 turns into the first game. Jones, who is playing black, is winning, having captured the crowd’s knight. But Oleynick hopes that as more people visit his site, the crowd’s chances will improve. Now, he says, he has a few hundred participants but he’s adding more each day. (His site was recently profiled on the blog TechCrunch, which has helped increase traffic.)

The game should go on for the next several weeks. Next, Oleynick hopes to pit the crowd against a supercomputer.

Burmese chess players in Subic worried

By Robert Gonzaga
Central Luzon Desk
First Posted 02:12:00 05/13/2008

SUBIC BAY FREEPORT – They spoke haltingly, in fractured English, about the gnawing fear of the unknown.

“We [are] here [because of] duty. We stay [here] for duty,” said Grandmaster Win Lay Zaw, 45, leader of Burma’s (Myanmar’s) six-member team in the 2nd Philippine Open International chess championship here.

While the commitment to represent their country, devastated by Cyclone Nargis as it ripped through the Irrawaddy Delta on May 2, was foremost in their minds, all the Burmese chess players wanted was information – any piece of news – on the fate of their relatives back home.

“Stay(ing) here [is a] duty. We all want [to] go [home]. But no call,” Zaw told the Inquirer on Sunday night.

Zaw said officials of his country’s chess federation had yet to advise his team on whether it would pull out from the competitions here and return to Burma. The team was then in Singapore when it received information that the cyclone hit Burma. The government’s death toll stood at 23,350 with 37,019 missing.

For these sportsmen, who devour every bit of news from CNN and other international news networks or the Internet, the only thing worse than knowing is not knowing what is happening in their country. They left their families, some of whom live in Rangoon (Yangon), the area hardest hit by Nargis.

In the first few days of the disaster, Zaw said he tried calling friends, relatives and even acquaintances in Burma to get news in between preparations and competitions, but no call or email could reach home.

Not knowing whether family members were among the living or dead has become a relentless torture for the chess team. Zaw was worried about his sister in Rangoon. “I don’t know if she’s…,” he said, his voice trailing off.

A ray of hope shone on Saturday when the team received a call from Mgmg Lwin, president of Burma’s chess federation, from Rangoon. Federation Master (FM) Kyaw Kyaw Soc, 38, was told by Lwin that his family was “fine; they [are] OK.” Soc’s mother, four sisters and a brother lived in Rangoon.

Though his worries had somewhat eased, Soc said he and other team members could not take their minds away from their homeland. “[When images from the news reports that] we watch enter our head, [we] can’t think well. But sometimes, [it’s] fine. Sometimes,” he said.

FM Lin Naing Kyaw, 26, who has been married for only three months, said: “Nearly every day my wife calls. [I am] so happy because I think [something] bad happen[ed] [at] first. [My] father is in Yangon. He [is] OK.” In fact, Kyaw is only one of two team members who can breathe easier.

International Master (IM) Nay Oo Kyaw Tun, 32, who lives in Mandalay, has an uncle in Rangoon. “I am sad about what happened. Our people, so sad. My Uncle, no news.” Mandalay is more than 640 kilometers from
Rangoon.

IM Aung Aung, 40, also from Mandalay, said: “My brother [is in] Yangon. No news. Don’t know.”

IM Zaw Htun Wynn, 26, a bachelor and also from Mandalay, said: “Every one [in my] family live in Mandalay. No problem. But news is very, very sad.”

After 10 rounds Monday, the Burmese players’ scores were Wynn, 3.5; W. Zaw, 2.5; Tun, Soc, 2; and Kyaw and Aung, 1.

Their days in this bustling port now follow a familiar routine – long stretches of games against Asia’s best, followed by extended hours of watching CNN and reading news reports on the Internet. They declined to answer questions about acts made by their country’s military rulers during the tragedy.

But when told of reports that the junta allowed the entry of aid from other countries, they nodded and smiled. “We [are] grateful. Yes,” Zaw said.

Chess, the players said, had become a “welcome distraction,” offering an escape from Nargis and its aftermath.

After the competitions wrap up on May 14, the team will return to Burma on May 18. They are, however, uncertain how Burma will rise from the tragedy and how they will rebuild their lives.

“We have no plans. We don’t know what [to] do,” Zaw said.

Copyright 2008 Central Luzon Desk. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Kaupthing Open

May 10 – 17, 2008
Luxembourg

There are A, B and C Groups playing a 9 round Swiss! There is a special prize of 1,500 E for the "first woman" – I don’t know if that means the best finishing woman of all the groups or just the first woman in A Group. (Group A 85 players, Group B 66 players, Group C 21 players). Top prize for A Group winner is 3,000 E.

Several chess femmes are playing – here are the A Group femme standings after Round 4:

8. Dzagnidze,Nana IM 2443 W GEO 3 0 1 3.0
12. Zdebskaja,Natalia WGM 2368 W UKR 2 2 0 3.0
16. Nebolsina,Vera WGM 2345 W RUS 3 0 1 3.0
20. Socko,Monika IM 2505 W POL 2 1 1 2.5
25. Tania,Sachdev IM 2423 W IND 2 1 1 2.5
42. Dembo,Yelena IM 2429 W GRE 1 2 1 2.0
47. Rudolf,Anna WGM 2302 W HUN 2 0 2 2.0
50. Berend,Elvira WGM 2303 W LUX 1 2 1 2.0
56. Schweitzer,Viktoria WIM 2218 W FRA 1 1 2 1.5
73. Bakalarz,Grazyna WFM 2006 W LUX 0 2 2 1.0
76. Wagener,Anna WGM 2266 W LUX 0 2 2 1.0
85. Vogel,Heike WFM 2134 W GER 0 0 4 0.0

Verbena

Weed with a past
May 10, 2008

Vervain (Verbena officinalis), a native to the Mediterranean, has naturalized here as a weed. It isn't really much to look at as a garden plant. It has however a colorful and dramatic history. For instance, the Egyptians believed the plant originated from the tears the goddess Isis shed at the death of Osiris. The Romans went a step farther and consecrated the herb (verbena is derived from the Latin for sacred boughs) to use for the purification of their private homes and temples. Brides picked and formed wreaths to wear at their weddings, and medicinally it was used as a remedy for both diarrhea and snakebite.

Both the Persians and the Druids used vervain as a cure-all, the latter taking it so far as to use it for divination. According to the Druids, the plant was only effective if harvested when neither sun nor moon were in the sky. They also believed a payback was needed for picking and so left honeycombs wherever they removed the herb.

The Christians also embraced this nondescript weed, calling it 'herb-of-the-cross', believing Christ's wounds on Calvary were staunched with the leaves.

In medieval times it was said to be a witches' herb used in many spells, especially love spells. Funnily enough, it was used at the same time for protection against witches and witchery. It was also used during this era very widely as a medicinal herb and the court physician for Theodosius I used it to cure tumours of the throat--although the medieval method of doing so wasn't too scientific. The physician would cut a piece of vervain root in half, tying one part around the throat of the inflicted and the other part over a fire. As the root above the fire shriveled and dried out so too would the tumor. Hmmm, I wonder how many cures he performed.

It arrived in North America with the Puritans and medicinal use continued for years for a panacea of illnesses. Don't experiment with it though as the glycoside content causes vomiting even in moderate doses.

Tip: Sprinkle some aromatic herbs (about 1/2 cup) on the carpet before vacuuming. Vacuum them up and the nice fragrance will remain after cleaning.

Superstition: A medieval method to get rid of pimples instructs to go outside at night with a handful of vervain in a hankie. When a shooting star goes by rub the hankie over the pimples and they'll disappear. The hankie is important because if bare hands are used, the pimples will simply be transferred onto them.
©The Powell River Peak 2008

The Goddess in Everyday Life

The goddess is a living, breathing part of everyday life in India. From Thaindian.news:

Orissa villagers take oath to fight against Posco
May 11th, 2008 - 6:08 pm ICT by admin

At least 100 people Sunday took oath in a village temple in Orissa to fight against the proposed $12 billion steel plant in their region to be set up by South Korean company Posco. The people, mostly from Dhinkia, took oath at a temple of Hindu goddess Ma Sarala at Jhankad village in the coastal district of Jagatsinghpur, some 75 km from here, anti-Posco leader Chitta Swain told IANS.

“They took oath that they will remain in the forefront of the anti-Posco agitation and shall sacrifice their life, if required, to prevent the proposed project - the largest foreign direct investment in India”.

“They took the oath by touching the holy offerings of the deity after the priests of the temple performed rituals,” Swain said by phone from the temple complex.

Swain is deputy general secretary of the Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (PPSS) that has been spearheading the campaign against the proposed plant.

Posco, the world’s fourth largest steel maker, signed a deal with the state government in June 2005 to build the plant near Paradip port by 2016.
However, over 20,000 people from around 15 nearby villages have been protesting against the project, saying that it would take away their homes and livelihood. The company says the plant would affect only 500 families but would create thousands of jobs.

Posco needs 4,004 acres of land, out of which 438 acres are in private hands. The state government said it had sought clearance from the central government so that it can hand over to the firm 2,900 acres that belong to the forest department.

The company is awaiting clearance before it can use this land. It is also waiting to get a prospecting licence for the Khandadhar mines in the state that will provide raw material to the plant.

Illegal to Feed Squirrels in Aurora, Colorado

Boo, hiss, boo! This really sucks. Aren't we living in the land of the free anymore??? If I was living in Aurora, I'd be in prison for life already for feeding squirrels, skunks, possums, rabbits and giant raccoons.

Squirrel saga continues
Aurora man won't give up on feeding them by Audra Ensign, News
2 May 10, 2008

AURORA (KWGN) — The controversy continues for an Aurora man who was told by the city that he couldn't feed squirrels in his neighborhood.

Now, what first turned out to be a warning could end up being a battle in the courtroom. Mark Golden says he's tried everything to get his point across to the city but isn't having any luck.

Golden found out an anonymous complaint turned out to be from someone who doesn't even live in Aurora. "Turns out she lives in Denver, her mother is my next door neighbor," said Golden.

The call lead the city to give him a warning of public nuisance for feeding squirrels in his yard.

"It's my worst nightmare when someone can call in anonymously from another city about something that strictly pertains to Aurora. I think it's wrong," he explaied.

And after finding out about the caller, he confronted the Division of Animal Control. According to Golden if he keeps feeding the squirrels, they said they're taking him to court.

"There are no answers for me, I've sat here until two in the morning trying to figure out what I've done to the city to have the city take such a stand."

According to the city there isn't an ordinance against feeding squirrels. They say they just don't encourage it. City officials weren't able to talk to us on camera but did send this statement: "We received a call concerning the squirrels, we asked him to move his feeders, that's really all that's happened."

"I just want them to dismiss this, to dismiss the complaint, so I can go back to feeding my squirrels," said Golden.

The city says feeding the squirrels is a disturbance and endangers the health and safety of the community. If Golden does not comply he could be fined up to one thousand dollars and serve up to a year in jail.
Copyright © 2008, KWGN

Chess Auction at Bonham's London

From Bonham's website:

Game On… Bonhams Takes Control of Chess Market

Chess is making a come-back. For its very first sale dedicated to the world of Chess and Board Games on 13 May 2008 in London, Bonhams is lining up some incredibly important pieces to be sold.

According to Luke Honey, Bonhams’ Chess and Games Consultant, the collectors’ market in Chess is currently very strong and he says: “The sale will feature lots of private collections from around the world with some very rare pieces that can rarely be acquired at auction.”

Looking like a “united nations” of the board games world, Chess sets from almost every continent will be offered for sale by Bonhams, including an extremely rare ivory inlaid Backgammon and Chess Board from Northern Italy and dated to circa 1500 – the time of the Italian Renaissance. It is believed that when it was new it would have been the treasured possession of either a wealthy merchant or an aristocratic nobleman. Such items are not seen at auction often and as a result it is estimated at £8,000-12,000.

Luke Honey says: “The Italians tended to specialise in high quality carving in ivory and wood and were particularly good at producing “bust” form pieces. Complete wooden sets of this period from Italy are particularly scarce and very attractive.”

Around the world in several moves…from China to Ecuador

Like football the game of chess is played throughout the world, transcending all language barriers and cultural differences. This is reflected in the different examples of chess sets featuring in Bonhams’ May sale.

An especially fine quality Chinese Export Gaming Table from Canton, circa 1830, mounted on a tripod base, delicately carved with dragons’ heads, is expected to fetch £4,000-6,000. The lacquered and gilt chess board is richly inlaid with mother of pearl and is in excellent condition. A Belgian Congo Tribal Chess Set in ebony and ivory, dating from around 1900, is highly stylised with the King as a chieftan, Bishops as witchdoctors, and Pawns as tribal elders. This fine quality set was brought back to the UK from the Belgian Congo by a civil engineer after World War One. It is valued at £800-1,200.

A large Eskimo sperm whale ivory chess set, circa 1950, also features in the sale. Knights are represented by dolphins; rooks as arctic hares, and while the King appears in traditional dress, the Queen looks like ‘Pierrot’ the clown with a ruff around her neck. The estimate for this set is £1,200-1,600.
A circa 1920 Silver Chess set from Ecuador in South America depicts Inca folklore figures. The Queen is Pacha (Princess of the last Shiry to rule Quito). The Rooks are copies of the Ecuador Monument while the Knights appear in the form of llamas. Estimate: £700-900.An 18th century Islamic ivory chess set, stained red and green and decorated with gilding, contains abstract pieces as the Koran forbids figures to be reproduced. The set is expected to fetch £4,000-6,000.

Game on…

Other than Chess sets, the sale will include a variety of other games, such as Mah-Jong and Backgammon, rare playing cards and books. From the Emerald Isle, a boxwood playing set made in Galway, West Ireland, is estimated at £2,000-3,000. It comes with a games box for Backgammon and Chess and carries a plaque dating it to 1808. Irish chess sets are similar to English ones of the period, except for the long-snouted horses of the Knights.

A mid-18th century Southern German Games Board for Chess, Backgammon and Nine Men Morris, made out of pear wood will also be sold. Highly decorated with tulip motifs, it is expected to sell for £1,800-2,200.

The Chess and Board Games Sale will take place at Bonhams, Montpelier Street in Knightsbridge, London on 13 May.

Sign of a Sick Society

One of the things that supposedly makes humans "superior" to animals is that we bury our dead - or burn them and offer them up to the heavens where burial is not feasible. But in Burma, dead bodies are being left to rot because they are "strangers" while isolated villagers wait for help that will never come.

From The New York Times
Bodies Flow Into Hard-Hit Area of Myanmar
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: May 11, 2008
THANAP PIN SATE, Myanmar — The bodies come and go with the tides. They wash up onto the riverbanks or float grotesquely downstream, almost always face down. They are all but ignored by the living.

In the southern reaches of the Irrawaddy Delta, where the only access to hundreds of small villages is by boat, the remains of the victims of the May 3 cyclone that swept across Myanmar are rotting in the sun.

“These people are strangers,” said Kyaw Swe, a clothing merchant who said he expected the tides to take away the six bloated bodies lying on the muddy banks near his collapsed home. “They come from upstream.”

Villagers here say it is not their responsibility to handle the dead. But the government presence is barely felt in the serpentine network of canals outside Bogale and Phyarpon, devastated towns in the delta, one of the areas hardest hit by the storm.

Rest of story.

Chess News Update

I have updated Chess Femme News, May 11, 2008, including special pages dedicated to the upcoming 2008 Frank K. Berry U.S. Women's Chess Championship: profiles and pictures, games and FIDE information for each of the 10 players, along with a page presenting the prize structure/ information (including our Goddesschess Fighting Chess Prize) and the match-ups for all rounds. As they become available I'll post results and standings, as well as links to Championship coverage from other websites and blogs. I hope to give you a comprehensive package of coverage for this year's U.S. Women's Championship.

2008 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

Prior pertinent post.

Hola! It's been a busy day; I spent several hours this afternoon and this evening working on pages at Chess Femme News that will cover the FKB U.S. Women's Chess Championship.

Since I have not been able to find anything else in online searches, I assume that the pages at Monroi will be the only "official" website for the Women's Championship for 2008. I have nothing against Monroi, but I have to say that at this point, what Monroi has put together is disappointing after the excellent website that was presented for the 2007 U.S. Women's Championship. Monroi is a large commercial website that provides coverage on MANY events, and whatever they are being paid (? I cannot say for certain that they are being paid anything, but I assume they are receiving some payment for their services), they are not concentating all of their resources on a website for the U.S. WOMEN'S CHAMPIONSHIP. It would be unreasonable to expect them to do so when they are covering so many other events. It may be that more content (and I assume, lots of photos) will be added as the Championships progress.

On a separate matter, today while I was putting together comprehensive pages that will cover the 2008 FKB U.S. Women's Chess Championship at Chess Femme News (I hope to finish the initial pages and have them online tomorrow), I discovered that I did not have the complete roster or results for the Qualifer event held in March published here. Several chess femmes participated in that event along with dozens of chess hommes, and here are their final standings:

Final Standings of Female Participants in 2008 U.S. Chess Championships Qualifier (104 players, male and female):

31 WFM Zenyuk
NY 2205 2215 L2 W70 W72 L10 W37 L25 W71 4.0

41 WFM Airapetian
WA 2143 2160 L21 W81 W35 W23 L16 =51 L29 3.5

46 WFM Zorigt MGL 2219 2213 W95 L16 =48 W47 L56 W76 L30 3.5

48 WFM Hana Itkis
N J 2084 2104 L14 W65 =46 =49 =50 L29 W76 3.5

58 Courtney Jamison
TX 2064 2072 H-- H-- =97 L60 W92 W73 L26 3.5

64 Jennifer Acon CA 1972 1987 W29 =24 L25 L36 H-- L47 W93 3.0

78 WIM Mokryak
UKR 2175 2161 L16 W95 =55 L56 W87 L52 L44 2.5

92 Julie O’Neill TX 1800 1807 H-- W57 L33 L58 =79 L66 2.0

94 WIM Alexey Root
TX 2001 1985 H-- L26 L49 W88 H-- L71 L74 2.0

Friday Night Miscellany

Bonjour darlings! That's about the extent of the French I remember being force-fed as a school girl. I was hopeless, never did learn to "roll" my "r"s, lol!

Another work week is over, thank Goddess! Free at last! Now I have to try and squeeze into two days of forecasted crappy weather a week's worth of chores, including yard work (the backyard is still an awful mess, and with each storm it gets worse). I always lose that battle...

There is so much depressing news these days - the situation in Burma with the Junta depriving thirsty, starving, homeless hundreds of thousands of people of much needed supplies because "they want to distribute it themselves" - yeah, right - right into the mouths of the army and forget the rest of the people. What's it to them if a couple hundred thousand people die as a result of a cyclone, heh? Less voters to deal with.

And then, of course, there's every prospect of a new civil war breaking out in Lebanon because the Shiites just don't know how to get along with everyone else. Sorry guys - but you are one religion that should be wiped off the face of the earth - along with all adherents of Jerry Farwell. No difference as far as I can see.

Not to be forgotten are our ever-rising gasoline prices, natural gas prices, the cost of food at the super-market, mass lay-offs, the sinking dollar - all blamed on China's voracious appetite for EVERYTHING - well, if the shoe fits. Speaking of China, how many children now have died from a "common ailment" called foot and mouth disease? Say what? I thought that was something cows and sheep caught, for Goddess' sake! The last thing I read, it was something like 223 children dead, and nearly 20,000 more infected. Oh - I know - they'll blame it on the USA - we force-fed tainted Coca-Cola to the babies as a way to kill a few hundred thousand and cut demand for scarce natural resources. What do they call the Politburo in China? Neo-Putinists? Whatever they're called, they'll order that the heads of a few not good-Communist medium level managers (everyone knows they're all corrupt, darlings) are chopped off accidentally in prison where they would otherwise be sentenced for the next 240 years. And the Glorious Leaders and their obedient munchkins in the Chinese press will tell their citizens (and the west) that the problem of fraudulently under-reporting (or not reporting at all) such outbreaks to the World Health Organization (not to mention the Chinese big wigs in Peking) has been solved. Chop chop... All is just fine for Summer Olympics and much propaganda making, tankee bery much. Makes me want to puke.

So, tonight, I'm trying to find uplifting, happy news.

Well, let's see - there's this report that the Sahara dried out "gradually" over a couple thousand of years rather than "all at once" - well, who the heck thought it dried out all at once, anyway? Duh! So, all you folks afraid of dying within my lifetime from global warming-caused climatic changes - relax! It won't happen until your great-grandchildren are grandparents!

Oh, here's good news! The wave of the future - getting rid of the dead with jazzed-up lye! Oh - wait a minute - that's what they used to do thousands of years and, come to think of it, not so long ago - throw people and dead animals into lime pits, or something like that. Then - didn't they fish out the bones and suck out the marrow? Eeeeeeuuuuuuwwwwww!

Okay, okay, I'm not doing so well in the "happy news" department. What about this - cue spooky music from classic Alfred Hitchcock movie "The Birds:"

Crows are taking over Japan - they're rummaging for yummies in the garbage bags piled up on city streets (ooooh, yech), they're nesting in electric power poles and causing continual power outages across the country, and - CUE THAT SPOOKY MUSIC - hungry crows have bloodied the faces of children while trying to steal candy from their hands. Crows have even carried away baby prairie dogs and ducklings from Tokyo zoos, city officials said...

Flocks of ravens on killing sprees in the United Kingdom. Calves, lambs, and sheep pecked to death. Animals not killed have been left in agony as the birds eat their eyes, tongues and the soft flesh of their underbelly. Ohmygoddess! It's a sign of the end, I tell you, a sign of the end!!! EEEEEEEEEEKKKK! Everyone - learn how to use slingshots - QUICK! Maybe if you can pick out the buggers' eyes with a couple of stones you can save yourselves and your children - not to mention your cattle...

Ha ha ha, we can laugh, right, because bird attacks aren't happening here on our home turf (USA) - wrongo! Check this out:

An unusual kind of bird-watching is underway in Downtown Austin (Texas, USA) these days. Several mockingbirds are attacking people as they pass by the Stephen F. Austin building.

On a happier note (yes, I found one, yippee!), tomorrow morning is our monthly meeting of the ladies' investment club. We are now five strong, having added our fifth member formally in March. We are doing great. Our share value, which started out at $10 back in January, 2005, is now close to $20. Our goal is to double our money every five years (to do that we need to make an annual return of 14.9% a year), and we've nearly done that with about 1.5 years to spare before our next 5-year cycle starts. We're not sitting on a ton of cash, either. We're nearly fully invested. Just a day ago we made our latest purchase and now we've only got about $350 in cash left, so we'll accumulate a kitty and pull the trigger again, when we find a suitable investment opportunity.

My investing partners are some smart women! By pooling our resources we accumulate cash in a relatively short period of time and invest by consensus after doing work-ups on likely companies and publicly-traded partnerships within which to invest, following the precepts of the National Association of Investors Corporation. Email makes communication so easy, we can pull the trigger on an investment at the drop of a hat if we wish; but we love getting together once a month for breakfast, gossip, planning our next ladies' outing (we've done Chicago shopping, two spa visits, and Christmas shopping with the carolers at Bayshore Mall), doing portfolio reviews and making and studying investment suggestions. Making money is fun!

One last note for tonight. Spare money is hard to come by these days, but please consider contributing goods and whatever cash you can to your local food pantries. On May 10th locally the U.S. Postal Workers are having a collection here tomorrow for the Hunger Task Force, and I've been busy lugging canned goods home all week (a mile on foot, since you know I don't drive) from the supermarket. Our local food pantries, which depend on the Hunger Task Force, are in trouble because so many more families are visiting each month now. There are severe shortages of goods and cash. There are hungry children here, in Milwaukee, and in nearly every community in the United States. The federal government's in-kind contributions to food pantries across the land has greatly decreased under George Bush's administration. Hunger Task Force sent the word out that they would run out of food and money long before the end of the year.

The Postal Workers' pick-up of food contributions right from your front porch and your mail boxes (like mine, which is at the curb) is only a few years old here, but it's a great idea. It makes in-kind contributions easy - all you have to do is buy the stuff, the postal workers pick it up and deliver it.

It's amazing what you can buy on sale in canned goods with just $20 (and a few coupons) - and I'm not just talking about string beans! I purchased canned tuna in water, sliced peaches, sliced pears (these are treats for food pantries), canned stews, hearty-eating soups with meat and spaghetti sauce with meat in addition to the standard fare of Campbell's Chicken Noodle and Tomato soups. I'll send a cash contribution for those things that shouldn't be put into a food drive - such as packaged pastas and "Hamburger Helper," cereals, etc. etc. Hunger Task Force can pool all cash contributions and buy these items in bulk, along with other bulk goods such as dried milk that the federal government no longer contributes in amounts it used to, despite the growing need.

Tomorrow morning on my way to breakfast with the ladies, I'm stopping by Walgreens, which this week is having a sale on "Taster's Choice" freeze-dried instant coffee (regular and de-caf), and I'll fork over some cash to buy some coffee for the food drive. People don't think about it, but food pantries don't have the cash, usually, to buy coffee to stock their shelves (same for canned fruit), and this isn't something that people ordinarily think to contribute. My driving thought always is - if I have to go to a food pantry, what would I ask for, and what would I want to be able to receive?

I've been so richly blessed by the Goddess - oh, not cash wise - I'm not a six figure a year person (through my own choice0. My blessings are my family, my friends, my loved ones, the knowledge I've been able to acquire about so many different subjects, my "voice." And I've got some $$$ to contribute to those who are in need. Tell me, what more do I need?

It really is true that if you share what you have with others, you will receive so much more back in return. Good night, darlings.

Builder Uncovers Etruscan Tombs

Story reported on May 7, 2008 at The Scotsman:

Italian builders uncover 2,000-year-old tomb
ARCHAEOLOGISTS were yesterday celebrating the discovery of 27 2,000-year-old tombs in Italy's "Valley of the Dead".

The tombs, some dating back to the 7th century BC, were found by chance while builders carried out work.

The whole area was sealed off yesterday and put under police guard to prevent anyone from trying to steal artefacts inside the burial chambers.

Grave robbers, or tombaroli as they are known in Italy, make a lucrative living from selling such objects to museums or private collectors.

Archaeologists say there is also a "good chance" that there may well be other tombs waiting to be discovered. The tombs were discovered at Tarquinia, 50 miles north of Rome in an area named a World Heritage Site by Unesco.

Covering more than 400 acres, the area was the burial ground for the Etruscan tribes who predated the Romans. Maria Tecla Castaldi, an archaeologist, said: "This is the most exciting discovery here in decades. There are frescoes of two figures on the walls, but we need to carry out a proper excavation and search.

"The problem we have is that grave robbers have plundered this area in the last few years, so sometimes we find tombs but they have been there before us. I hope that we have found tombs that are still intact."

2008 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

The pairings for Round 1 for the 2008 Frank K. Berry U.S. Women's Chess Championship (from USCF's Chess Life Online):

Player Draw (pairing numbers)
1. Chouchanik Airapetian (WFM) v. 10. Courtney Jamison
2. Anna Zatonskih (WGM, IM) v. 9. Iryna Zenyuk (WFM, CM)
3. Katerine Rohonyan (WGM) v. 8. Tsagaan Battsetseg (WIM)
4. Tatev Abrahamyan (WFM) v. 7. Irina Krush (WGM, IM)
5. Esther Epstein (WM) v. 6. Chimi Tuvshintugs (WIM)

Play begins on May 13th!

Chessville Column

JanXena's May, 2008 column is now up and running at Chessville. Enjoy!

Goddess Chomolungma

Challenges of ‘Goddess of the Sky’
May 2 2008 by Sarah Manners, Western Mail

Mount Everest, is also called Chomolungma or Qomolangma in Tibetan, which translates as “Mother of the Universe” or “Goddess of the Mother Earth” or Sagarmatha in Nepali, which means “Goddess of the Sky”.

It is the highest mountain on Earth, as measured by the height of its summit above sea level at 8,848 metres or 29,029 feet.

New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay from Nepal were the first people to conquer Everest. They reached the summit at 11:30am local time on May 29, 1953 via the South Col route. News of the expedition’s success reached London the morning of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.

The mountain, part of the Himalayan range in High Asia, is to be found on the border between Sagarmatha, Nepal, and Tibet, China.

By the end of the 2007 climbing season there had been 3,679 ascents to the summit by 2,436 individuals.

There have been 210 deaths on the mountain, where conditions are so difficult that most corpses have been left where they fell; some are visible from standard climbing routes.

Everest climbers are a significant source of tourist revenue for Nepal, whose government also requires all prospective climbers to obtain a permit costing up to US$25,000 per person.

Odyssey Marine Exploration - Spanish Claim Update

Har, me mateys! An update on the sunken treasure, estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, that Spain claims for its own.

From Time Online
Spain Claims Sunken Treasure
By Lisa Abend, Madrid
May 8, 2008

The deep surrendered one of its mysteries today. Ever since May 2007, when the American shipwreck salvage company Odyssey Marine gave its latest and most spectacular discovery the appropriately pirate-esque code name of "The Black Swan," controversy about the ship's true identity has spawned speculation and even litigation about who owned the lucrative shipwreck. Today, the Spanish government submitted evidence a Florida court that the ship was actually Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, a Spanish navy frigate that sank in the early 19th century. In other words, that it was theirs.

"The mystery is over," said James Goold, the lawyer representing the Spanish government, at a Madrid press conference on Thursday. "Odyssey stripped the gravesite of Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes." Although Odyssey representatives said they had sought to keep the shipwreck's exact location secret out of concern for the site's security, in January, the court ordered the American company to reveal its findings to Spain. That information, coupled with the government's own investigations, enabled Madrid to assert today that the sunken ship — and the trove of silver treasure it contained — rightfully belong to the Spanish state.

The ownership dispute first erupted in April 2007, when the for-profit company Odyssey filed claim to and extracted some 17 tons of silver coins and other treasure from the underwater site, moving the artifacts to an undisclosed storage facility near its company headquarters in Tampa. From the outset, Spain believed that the ship was Spanish, and that the excavation therefore amounted to an attack on its historical patrimony. Odyssey, on the other hand, argued that as salvager it had the right to a significant percentage of the reclaimed booty regardless of the ship's origins. And as recently as January 2008, Odyssey CEO Greg Stemm said that the company's own experts were still uncertain of the ship's identity.

But according to the Spanish, both the wreck's location and the booty recovered from it clearly point to the Mercedes. "We have been able to pinpoint Odyssey's operations in international waters, and confirm that they were working where the Battle of Cape Saint Mary occurred," says Goold, referring to the 1804 battle in which a British warship fired upon the Mercedes and blew it up. "The artifacts that remain are spilled in a way consistent with an explosion. There's only one ship that fits that description." Stemm contests Goold's conclusion. "He is either trying to twist the historical records," the Odyssey CEO says, "or he has not reviewed them."

At the press conference, Carmen Marcos, chief coin curator for Spain's National Archaeology Museum, said that limited, preliminary evidence suggested that the pieces of eight recovered from the ship were minted in 1803 in the then-Spanish colony of Peru. "The coins show us that the ship had recently left the port of El Callao in Lima. Of that, there is no doubt," she said. Historical documents that Spain presented today show that the Mercedes left El Callao in April 1804.

They also show that approximately 200 sailors and members of their families were killed in the explosion. "We can consider the site an underwater cemetery," said José Jiménez, director of fine arts for the culture ministry. "It contains the human remains of our sailors." Those remains now look to play a significant role in Spain's legal strategy, as the case drags on in the Tampa court. One of Odyssey's arguments is that Spain had abandoned the shipwreck site — a justification that another salvager, Mel Fisher, used successfully to lay claim to a pair of Spanish ships sunk off the coast of Florida. But by contending that the shipwreck constitutes a "cemetery", Spain can say that it hasn't disturbed the site out of respect for its own dead.

The depiction also makes for good p.r. "People have this idea of treasure hunters as glamorous," says Goold. "But if it involves going down to a gravesite and taking someone's wedding ring, it's a different kind of thing."

If You Haven't Already Heard - World to End in 2012

From Yahoo News
Benjamin Radford
LiveScience's Bad Science Columnist
Thu May 8, 4:55 PM ET

Three children were recently removed from a remote church compound called Strong City in New Mexico. There had been allegations that children at the cult may have been sexually abused, though the matter remains under investigation and charges have yet to be filed.

The leader of the group, Wayne Bent, claims to be the son of God.

In early 2007, Bent said that the world would end on Halloween of that year. That apparently fell through, however Bent was undeterred and has updated his prophecy to say that the Apocalypse will happen at any moment: "The seven last plagues are all falling now and the end of all things is at hand," Bent wrote on his church's Web site.

Failed doomsday predictions are nothing new, of course. There have been thousands of people predicting the imminent end of the world, dating back to at least 2800 B.C. They have all been wrong for thousands of years (or however how long since they spoke), but that doesn't keep people from trying.

End-times claims are often rooted in Bible passages, but also based on everything from schizophrenia to misunderstood astronomy. Most doomsday promoters are quite sincere, genuinely believing that they have discovered a (literally) Earth-shaking secret that must be shared with others.

Doomsday deferred
It seems quaint now, but as the last century came to a close, there was fear of the "Y2K bug," the computer programming glitch that supposedly was going to bring the world to its knees as the millennium turned. The news media ran alarmist stories of possible consequences, ranging from the timing on your coffeemaker being off to a global nuclear war started by mistakenly-launched missiles.

While most people were only mildly concerned, many stocked up on survival gear, and some even headed to remote areas to wait out the impending holocaust.

And it wasn't just the Y2K bug; there were dozens of predictions that the world would end in 2000 (just as there had been a century earlier - some things never change)[a century earlier? How about a millennium earlier? End of the world fever was rampant approaching the year 1000]. For example, author Richard Noone decided that the planets would align catastrophically almost exactly eight years ago, on May 5, 2000. The result would be the end of civilization through the melting and shifting of the polar icecaps.

Noone was so concerned about it he wrote a book titled "5/5/2000: Ice, The Ultimate Disaster." (About 18 months before doomsday, I interviewed Mr. Noone about his book and prophecy; when we concluded, I asked if we could arrange a follow-up interview on May 6, 2000, just in case the world didn't end. He declined. Noone's book is currently for sale on Amazon.com for 1 cent.)

Now what?
So how do true believers react when it's clear that the world didn't end? In many cases, followers have sold or given away all their possessions, assuming that they would have no need of them after the apocalypse. There must be some red faces as the hour of judgment comes ... and goes.

You might also think that followers would decide they'd been fooled and rebel. More often, however, the failed prophecy actually makes their belief stronger. In the case of cults, members have invested their money, time, lives, and sometimes even children in the cult leader. It's very difficult to suddenly reject all that, since their very identity is often linked to the beliefs.

Believers may rationalize away the failure in one or more of the following ways: They may decide that the end is in fact near, but that the time or date was simply misinterpreted and move the true end-times date forward (as Wayne Bent did); they may decide that their faith and prayer actually saved the world and averted disaster; or they may believe that the end of the world did in fact occur, but nobody else noticed it because it was a mystical or spiritual apocalypse, not a physical one. For more on the psychology of failed apocalyptic predictions, see Leon Festinger's classic book "When Prophecy Fails."

The latest fad in end-times predictions is for the year 2012, which (depending on which "expert" you listen to) will supposedly bring about either a new age of global spiritual awakening, or the end of the world. Or maybe something in between.

There are several Web sites dedicated to cataloging hundreds of past doomsdays. One of the best is A Brief History of the Apocalypse. Check the site in 2013 to see what it says.

Viking Trading Center Discovered in Ireland

From the sound of the article, I think perhaps the town may have originally been called something with the god's name "Woden" in it - Wodentown - Woodstown...

From BBC News
May 6, 2008
Irish Viking trade centre unearthed

One of the Vikings' most important trading centres has been discovered in Ireland.

The settlement at Woodstown in County Waterford is estimated to be about 1,200 years old.

It was discovered during archaeological excavations for a road by-pass for Waterford city, which was founded by the Vikings.

The Irish government said the settlement was one of the most important early Viking age trading centres discovered in the country.

Its working group, which includes archaeologists from Ireland's museum and monuments service, said it was of international significance and showed the community was wealthy and sought to remain at Woodstown permanently.

Almost 6,000 artefacts and a Viking chieftain's grave have been discovered at the site, which was established by the year 860. The grave contains a sword, shield and silver mark.

The working group report said the discoveries of silver and lead weights showed it was "apparent that Woodstown falls firmly into the Scandinavian tradition."

"There can be little doubt that many, if not all of the settlement's occupants were either Scandinavian, or had strong insular Scandinavian associations," it said.

"The Woodstown site provides a rare opportunity to study a Scandinavian settlement of this period outside Scandinavia itself."

Superstar Xie Jun Playing in Major Tournament!

From Vietnam News:
Chinese chess and Go regional tournament to open in Ha Noi
(07-05-2008)
HA NOI — Chinese chess and Go players from Viet Nam will be up against some of the best in Asia this weekend when Ha Noi hosts a major regional tournament for the first time

The Chinese chess (Xiangqi) and Go Ha Noi Open has been organised by the Ha Noi Sports Department, and is being jointly sponsored by China’s Guangxi Hualan and the C-Hope groups.

Some 64 players from China, South Korea, Japan and Viet Nam will be competing in the event, which starts on Saturday at Quan Ngua Sports Palace.

At a press conference in Ha Noi yesterday, organisers proudly boasted that Chinese chess stars such as Li Dong Jun and Xie Yun (from China) and Go champs Guangxi Yu Xue Jun (China), Miyata Takeshi (Japan) and Park Kyun-chul and Kwon Kwe-hyun from South Korea would be participating in the tournament.

"We are honoured to be able to sponsor the tournament, which is being held for the first time in Viet Nam," said John Chin, assistant director of the Guangxi Hualan Group.

Danny Kung, executive president of the C-Hope Group, said he hoped the tournament would boost economic co-operation and friendship between China and Viet Nam.

In recent years, Viet Nam has become one of the leading Chinese chess nations in the region.

"[Chinese] chess has been played in Viet Nam for a long time, but this is the first time Ha Noi has hosted such a big tournament, which has attracted top players from chess giants in Asia," said Nguyen Manh Hung, vice director of the Ha Noi Sports Department. "The event marks a new era [for the game in Viet Nam]."

Among Viet Nam’s leading representatives at the competition will be Treng A Sang, Nguyen Thanh Bao, Tran Van Ninh and Nguyen Vu Quan.

At the 10th World Chinese Chess Championship in Macau last year Viet Nam’s Nguyen Thanh Bao won a bronze medal. Also last year in Macau, Nguyen Vu Quan won a silver medal at the Asian Indoor Games.

At the Asian Chinese Chess Team Championships in the southern province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau last year in which Viet Nam finished fourth, Quan caused an upset by beating world champion Lu Qin.

The tournament ends on Monday. — VNS
**********************************************************************************
GM Xie Jun was the Women's World Chess Champion from 1991-1996 and 1999-2001 -- that is, "international (or western)" chess, not "xiang qi" or Chinese chess. All I could find about Xie Jun and xiang qi was this information from Wikipedia: At the age of six Xie began to play Chinese chess, and by the age of 10 she had become the girls' Xiangqi champion of Beijing.

I cannot be sure, of course, but it sounds as if Xie Jun has taken up xiang qi again, but there is no information available via a regular Google search. A search on Chinese Google wouldn't be helpful, though, since I don't read Chinese.

It's great to see a great chess champion's name in print again!

Linear A - An Undeciphered Language

This is one of the exhibits from the Land of the Labyrinth: Minoan Crete, 3000-1100 B.C., which will be on view at The Onassis Cultural Center (645 Fifth Avenue) through September 13, 2008, Monday-Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is free. The catalog accompanying the exhibition is exceptional and well worth obtaining.

Identification: Clay tablet inscribed with six lines of Linear A writing, Zakros, end of Late Minoan IB (ca. 1450 B.C.)(Courtesy Onassis Public Benefit Foundation)

Jiroft Back in the News

Jiroft at Goddesschess.

From the Tehran Times:
Date : Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Jiroft is the ancient city of Marhashi: U.S. scholar
Tehran Times Culture Desk

TEHRAN -- Piotr Steinkeller, professor of Assyriology in Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of Harvard University, believes that the prehistoric site of Jiroft is the lost ancient city of Marhashi.

He developed the theory in his paper during the first round of the International Conference on Jiroft Civilization, which was held in Tehran on May 5 and 6.

Marhashi, (in earlier sources Warahshe) was a 3rd millennium BC polity situated east of Elam, on the Iranian plateau. It is known from Mesopotamian sources, and its precise location has not been identified. An inscription of Lugal-Anne-Mundu, the most important king of the Adab city-state in Sumer, locates it, along with Elam, to the south of Gutium, an ancient polity in upper Mesopotamia. The inscription also explains that Lugal-Anne-Mundu confronted the Warahshe king, Migir-Enlil.

Jiroft is the lost ancient city of Marhashi, which had been located between Anshan and Meluhha, Steinkeller said.

Anshan was one of the early capitals of Elam, from the 3rd millennium BC, which is located 36 kilometers northwest of modern Shiraz in Fars Province, southwestern Iran.

The Indus Valley Civilization has been tentatively identified with the toponym Meluhha known from Sumerian records.

According to Steinkeller, Marhashi was a political and economic power in eastern Iran, which had been in a close contact with Babylonia. This relationship had been developed over two periods, which has influenced the political history of the region for at least a half century.

Steinkeller had previously been searching the Kerman region in order to identify a site from the 3rd millennium BC, which he could consider it as Marhashi. He had found Tepe Yahya and Tall-e Eblis, but he believes that Tepe Yahya is too small to be considered as Marhashi and Tall-e Eblis has been has almost entirely been destroyed over the years.

Thus, he said that Jiroft is the heart of the ancient city of Marhashi and hoped that upcoming excavations and studies would help archaeologists discover other parts of the city.

According to the conference scientific secretary Professor Yusef Majidzadeh, over 700 ancient sites such as tepes and graves have been discovered in Jiroft over the past six seasons of excavation by a team of archaeologists led by Majidzadeh.

Located next to the Halil-Rud River in southern Iran’s Kerman Province, Jiroft came into the spotlight in 2002 when reports surfaced of extensive illegal excavations being carried out by local people who went on to plunder priceless historical items.

Majidzadeh team unearthed a great number of artifacts at Jiroft as well as three tablets in one of the present-day villager’s homes and a brick inscription near Jiroft’s Konar-Sandal region wherein they also discovered ruins of a large fortress, which previously was believed to be a ziggurat. The structure is surmised have been made of more than four million mud bricks.

The pottery works and the shards discovered in the Konar-Sandal fortress date back to an interval between the fourth millennium BC and early years of the Islamic period, Majidzadeh said during the conference.

Once, Majidzadeh had said that Jiroft is the ancient city of Aratta, which was described in a Sumerian clay inscription as an impressive center of civilization. In December 2007, he suggested that archaeologists use the term Proto-Iranian instead of Proto-Elamite for the script found at Jiroft.

He believes that the world should revise its knowledge of the Eastern civilizations due to the inscriptions discovered at Jiroft.

Majidzadeh describes the inscriptions as unique and also elaborates that the tablets and the brick inscription bearing a script which has been invented along with the Mesopotamia script at the same time.

A great number of Iranian and foreign archaeologists and scholars will discuss latest studies on the Jiroft civilization during the conference, which will be continued in Jiroft from May 8 to 9.