Mayor's Cup - Mumbai

A 415 player event. Round 9 is in the books - how's GM Koneru Humpy doing? She's doing great! Currently in second place. Humpy was in 5th place with 6.5 after Round 8. A Round 9 victory over IM Suvrajit Saha (2380), a game she should have won, and did, moved her up in the standings as the remaining five of the top six boards all drew their games. Things are really tight at the top - here are the leaders, all within a point of each other: Rk. Name FED Rtg Pts. TB1 TB2 TB3 1 GM Areshchenko Alexander UKR 2657 8,0 57,5 45,5 50,00 2 GM Koneru Humpy IND 2612 7,5 58,0 45,0 47,25 3 GM Deepan Chakkravarthy J IND 2482 7,5 56,5 44,5 44,75 4 GM Miroshnichenko Evgenij UKR 2680 7,5 56,5 44,0 45,75 5 GM Panchanathan Magesh Chandran IND 2462 7,5 51,0 42,0 42,00 6 GM Deviatkin Andrei RUS 2566 7,0 56,0 44,5 41,75 7 GM Timoshenko Georgy UKR 2550 7,0 55,5 44,0 41,50 8 GM Belov Vladimir RUS 2623 7,0 54,0 42,0 41,50 9 GM Iuldachev Saidali UZB 2497 7,0 52,0 41,0 38,75 10 Thakur Akash IND 2308 7,0 51,5 41,0 38,00 11 IM Himanshu Sharma IND 2403 7,0 51,5 40,5 38,25 12 GM Safin Shukhrat UZB 2485 7,0 51,0 39,5 38,25 13 GM Zinchenko Yaroslav UKR 2531 7,0 51,0 39,5 37,75 14 IM Saptarshi Roy IND 2396 7,0 50,5 39,0 37,75 15 GM Kostenko Petr KAZ 2490 7,0 50,0 40,0 37,00 16 IM Prakash G B IND 2404 7,0 49,5 39,0 38,00 17 IM Kamble Vikramaditya IND 2351 7,0 48,5 37,0 36,50 Humpy will have her work cut out for her in Round 10, when she plays the black pieces against the No. 1 seed in the tournament and currently in 4th place: GM Evgenij Miroshnischenko (UKR 2680). Good luck Humpy! Here are the current standings of some of the other chess femmes playing. I did not have time to check all of the names on the FIDE ratings list to confirm the player's sex (I am sorry, I cannot usually tell by the names alone) and I stopped after I got to player 154! 40 WGM Soumya Swaminathan IND 2307 6,5 46,5 36,0 32,75 50 WGM Meenakshi Subbaraman IND 2303 6,0 50,5 39,5 31,50 62 WIM Thipsay Bagyashree Sathe IND 2177 6,0 47,5 37,5 28,75 63 WGM Ramaswamy Aarthie IND 2191 6,0 47,0 36,0 28,00 65 WFM Swati Mohota IND 2096 6,0 46,5 36,0 28,75 80 WIM Dhar-Barua Saheli IND 2154 5,5 52,0 40,0 29,25 83 IM Harika Dronavalli IND 2474 5,5 50,5 39,0 30,25 87 WCM Gagare Shalmali IND 2117 5,5 49,0 39,0 26,75 119 WIM Priya P IND 2186 5,5 41,5 31,5 22,00 128 WIM Padmini Rout IND 2238 5,0 48,5 38,5 23,50 130 WIM Meera Sai IND 2155 5,0 48,0 38,5 23,75 135 WIM Gokhale Anupama IND 2119 5,0 46,5 36,0 23,75 143 Preethi R IND 2154 5,0 45,5 34,5 20,25 153 WIM Kiran Manisha Mohanty IND 2182 5,0 43,0 32,5 21,75 Very unusual to see IM Harika Dronavalli off the pace of the top chess femmes. I hope nothing is wrong.

Tletl, and Mathematics and the Number of the Goddess and - OH MY

Hmmm, on top of everything else that has happened today, some new men have appeared in my life. I am harried and have too much to do in a short period of time. dondelion (Mr. Don) will be arriving in two days. I have SO much to do, including getting my hands on a new microwave so I can actually cook something other than in the oven or stove-top on my old faithful stove (thank Goddess THAT still works but - come to think of it, the stove is as old as the microwave was. It too could die at any time. EEK!) So these new men have appeared, some sending me emails with mathematical formulae, one posting here under a topic I posted months ago. What is a chess femme to do? Well, I will do my best, that is what I will do. But tonight I need to do online shopping for an emergency delivery microwave. And so, Carlos, I am going to add your website to my list of websites to be visited, because I believe you certainly have the magic of the Goddess. I do not know what to make of you, Carlos. You are rather overwhelming. To HHH and friends who have been sending me emails with esoteric formulae of numerological and gematric significance - I will post some of your information here in due course. You have caught me at a really bad time! So please, be patient. (Not that I will have much to add to the discussions you seem to be intent on generating, since I do not understand most of what you are saying!) My vacation starts on May 7th when Mr. Don arrives, and I won't REALLY be back "here" until May 26th. It is true I now have my new Acer netbook toy, but my intention is to use that primarily to post photographs and notes from our New York trip. My time with Mr. Don comes first and foremost. And when I go back to work on May 26th, my office is going to be pure CHAOS! That may take some time to get things back under control. Carlos, you are being provocative. Cut bones - Yes. As you are no doubt well aware, the earliest gaming pieces were made out of animal bones - knuckle bones were the fore-runners of modern dice. During the long cold winters in caves during the Ice Age, people spent their time carving exquisite ivory figurines of women, birds, animals, and goddesses who were bird-women. Ivory - Yes. The oldest ivory game pieces of which I am aware were carved by ancient Egyptians, in about 3500 BCE. They predate Narmer. Chess going all the way back to the Ice Age? Even I have not dared go ack in time that far! I have said chess is as old as Noah and the Ark, and the place we should be looking for it's origins is in the mountains of Ararat. In the Caucasus Mountains, near Lake Van. Now I really have to shop online for a new microwave. It MUST be delivered Thursday morning.

Tonight Out in the Garden

Hola darlings! Tonight when I got home from the office it was really nice out. The sun was starting to set and my deck faces west, so I get that last blast of sun and warmth this time of year, which is really welcome after the horrid winter and cold cold spring we've had! So I unload my stuff - more about that later on - and pour myself a really BIG glass of cheap wine, grab a hand-full of in-the-shell-almonds for the squirrels, and head to the deck. I settle in and start reading the last quarter of an Amanda Quick novel. I just LOVE Amanda Quick. I toss out the almonds, whistle for my squirrels, who came running, and I settle down to read the rest of the novel. About 10 minutes later, I notice the Crazy Squirrel at the end of the yard. I don't even know if I can begin to describe Crazy Squirrel. I don't know if it is a he or a she. This is the second year that Crazy Squirrel has lived in or close to my yard. He or she is just - crazy. At first I thought Crazy Squirrel had the same disease that Mr. Tipsy Squirrel had. Sadly, since the last time I wrote about Mr. Tipsy Squirrel, I have not seen him, so I think he has died. But the last time I saw him, he was stuffing himself full of almonds and lots of other in-the-shell mixed nuts and he was happy. I could tell. Back to Crazy Squirrel. Crazy Squirrel hops and jerks and jumps and runs; Crazy Squirrel startles at nothing to cause alarm in the other squirrels, and runs a hundred miles a hour straight up a tree trunk, and then turns sommersaults like a Pong Ball in the upper limbs until he finally climbs back down and disappears to - I don't know where. Tonight Crazy Squirrel was bouncing around the yard as usual, and suddenly makes a bee-line for my 18-year old daffodil bunch. Actually, it started out as a house-warming gift 19 years ago from my sister-in-law Heidi. One day in fall, after I'd been here a couple of months (moved here in August, 1990, when construction was completed), Heidi came over to help me paint my upstairs bathroom (the same one I am now attempting, unsuccessfully thus far, to re-paint), and when we took a break she dashed out to her car and then dashed out the "grove" of then really small trees at the bottom of my backyard, and said she had a surprise for me. That day, Heidi planted at least 50 bulbs in that wasteland area that then constituted the grove. The next spring, only five things came up: a single daffodil, two tulips, and two grape hyacinth. The bunnies promptly attacked the tulips and hyacinth. They stopped appearing more than 10 years ago. But every spring since 1991, my first spring here, the daffodils have appeared without fail, each year the clump getting a little bit thicker. Seeing Crazy Squirrel ATTACK my clump of daffodils was totally shocking! He did it for at least five minutes. Flinging himself over and over into the midst of the clump and rubbing down into it! Running around and around underneath the outer-most edge of the greenery, and then casting himself once again into the middle of the clump. On his back, like a doggy rubs his back in the spring-time grass, that is what Crazy Squirrel was doing in my clump of daffodils! When he finished, my poor clump of daffodils was pretty much flattened to the ground. DAMN! But I didn't have the heart to get up and yell, stomping toward Crazy Squirrel, to chase him away. I mean, after all, he IS crazy! So, I drank my wine and finished the novel. When I had finished the novel, I came inside and uncovered my latest purchase and newest toy. A total extravagance that I should not have bought, but I bought it anyway. Well, darlings, it was on sale :) I've got myself one of those tiny netbooks to take to New York! The one I settled on is an Acer and I have totally fallen in love with it. It looks like the daughter of my much larger Toshiba laptop color-wise, a gold sparkle-filled blue (no idea what the color is called). After I unwrapped it I tried the keyboard out - it's small. Really small - the screen is only 8.9 inches wide! But I managed to type "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country" relatively rapidly and didn't make too many errors. I'm so happy. And I'm so bummed. I put a microwave dinner into my faithful old Carousel II that I purchased in 1986 and set it for the requisite number of minutes. When I went downstairs a few minutes ago to retrieve my supper from the microwave, I discovered, much to my horror, that it has died. Totally deadsville. I tried it in a number of different electrical outlets, just in case I blew a circuit breaker (although all of the lights are working just fine in the kitchen). Nothing. Well, it survived nearly 23 years. It would have been 23 in August, 2009. Alas, poor Carousel II, I knew thee well. Tomorrow morning I will reverently carry you out to the curbside and lay thee gently down, where I hope you will be retrieved by an enterprising junkman. You died just in time to miss this morning's garbage pick-up, so you must be destined for greater things than the City Dump. Now I have to buy a new microwave. In a BIG hurry! Mr. Don will be here in less than 2 days, expecting to be fed! EEK!

Southwest Chess Club: Warm-Up Blend-O-Matic

Wooo wooo! My adopted chess club, Southwest Chess Club, is holding a tournament this Thursday night. Be there - be 64 square! (Okay, maybe that's lame. Be there just to show me that despite my being lame, you won't hold it against me). Here's the information: Hello Chess Players, This Thursday, May 7, 2009 we are holding a Blitz Tournament. That means a time control of Game in 5 minutes. The event is the Warm-Up Blend-O-Matic. Sign up by 6:50 PM on Thursday night, so we can start promptly at 7 PM. This will be a round robin tournament with one or more sections, depending on entries. Cash prizes awarded based on entries. These games will not affect your regular USCF rating. They will only impact your Quick Rating. Robin Grochowski will be the Chief Tournament Director and I will be the Assistant Tournament Director. Details follow below. Tom Fogec 414-425-6742 Warm-Up Blend-O-Matic: May 7 10-Round (Round-Robin) in One or more Sections (depending on number of players). Game/5 minutes. USCF Quick-Rated. EF: $5 members, $7 others. TD is Grochowski; ATD is Fogec.

Whoa! Was Seth Right After All?

Those of you who have read Jane Roberts know who "Seth" is - and Seth's mantra - WE MAKE OUR OWN REALITY. Basically, by what we think. Yes, that sounds rather trite these days, doesn't it. But I first read it some 20 years ago (maybe even longer) in a book I think was called "The Nature of Personal Reality," and it's stuck with me ever since. Here is some evidence that suggests Jane Roberts and Seth are correct. From Newsweek.online MIND MATTERS Wray Herbert Just Say No to Aging? A provocative new book from a Harvard psychologist suggests that changing how we think about our age and health can have dramatic physical benefits. Apr 14, 2009 Updated: 10:28 a.m. ET Apr 14, 2009 Imagine that you could rewind the clock 20 years. It's 1989. Madonna is topping the pop charts, and TV sets are tuned to "Cheers" and "Murphy Brown." Widespread Internet use is just a pipe dream, and Sugar Ray Leonard and Joe Montana are on recent covers of Sports Illustrated. But most important, you're 20 years younger. How do you feel? Well, if you're at all like the subjects in a provocative experiment by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, you actually feel as if your body clock has been turned back two decades. Langer did a study like this with a group of elderly men some years ago, retrofitting an isolated old New England hotel so that every visible sign said it was 20 years earlier. The men—in their late 70s and early 80s—were told not to reminisce about the past, but to actually act as if they had traveled back in time. The idea was to see if changing the men's mindset about their own age might lead to actual changes in health and fitness. Langer's findings were stunning: After just one week, the men in the experimental group (compared with controls of the same age) had more joint flexibility, increased dexterity and less arthritis in their hands. Their mental acuity had risen measurably, and they had improved gait and posture. Outsiders who were shown the men's photographs judged them to be significantly younger than the controls. In other words, the aging process had in some measure been reversed. Rest of article. Herbert writes the blog We're Only Human at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

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Wray's "review" of Counterclockwise by Ellen Langer does not give ISBN, publisher or cost! Interesting. So, here it is: Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility Written by Ellen J. Langer Category: Psychology & Psychiatry - Applied Psychology; Health & Fitness Format: eBook, 224 pages On Sale: May 19, 2009 Price: $25.00 ISBN: 978-0-345-51480-6 (0-345-51480-7) Also available as a hardcover.

Zahi Hawass Strikes Again!

But this time, it's a great marketing idea for archaeology :) Now darlings, bear with me, because I have no idea how to embed the code needed to post a You Tube video here (much to my dismay), so I'm just going to give you the url link (I hope). I have to say, it's a good one, and I'm no fan of Zahi Hawass. Found this at The Daily Grail: Restoring the Step Pyramid May 4, 2009 Here's a new video on the restoration of the Step Pyramid of Djoser (and uncovering of his massive granite sarcophagus), featuring - of course - Dr Zahi Hawass. Djoser's pyramid is one of the earliest examples of monumental work on a truly massive scale, predating the Giza pyramids by a couple of centuries.

Bahrain Scholastic Chess News

From the Gulf Daily News (Bahrain) online: Wafa'a and Mansoor claim chess crowns Posted on » Monday, May 04, 2009 WAFA'A Fakhro of Al Noor International School claimed the secondary girls title while Mansoor Bukhalaf of Shaikh Abdulaziz bin Mohammed Al Khalifa School came on top in the secondary boys section in the first Chess Championship at the Talented Students Care Centre Gym. Seventy-four students, representing 36 government and private schools of all grades, took part in the day-long tournament which was organised for the first time by the Education Ministry. Sanabis School students Sara Al Afoo and her younger sister Zaynab, daughters of international chess arbiter Shaker Al Afoo, came on top in the intermediate and primary girls categories respectively. In the boys sections, Khalil Bukhalaf won the boys intermediate competition while Ahmed Essam Al Qazzaz of Busaiteen School claimed first place in the primary section contest. The prize-distribution ceremony was attended by Education Minister Dr Majid bin Ali Al Nuaimi who honoured the winners in each category.

2009 U.S. Chess Championships

It's coming up fast - Round 1 is on Friday May 8. Tickets are free to members of the Chess and Scholastic Center of St. Louis; tickets cost $12 to non-members, with reduced price for full-time students. Information page. My interest in this event is primarily because of the two chess femmes playing: IM Irina Krush and IM Anna Zatonskih, current U.S. Women's chess champion. People may recall the hoo-haa last year during the Armageddon play-off between Krush and Zatonskih that resulted in Zatonskih's winning the U.S. Women's title. I believe a lot of people are hoping to see a lot of drama, maybe even a cat fight between the two women. I'd be very surprised if that turns out to be the case, but I expect at least some members of the U.S.C.F. Executive Board are rubbing their hands in glee over what they anticipate will be a banner event for the first time since America's Foundation for Chess dropped its lucrative sponsorship of the open and women's championships in 2006. Viewership online is bound to be up. Me, I'm interested because other than GM Susan Polgar, who is inactive and therefore not on the list, these two women are the highest rated female players in the United States, excluding GM Alexandra Kosteniuk, who plays for the Russian Federation but now, I believe, resides in Florida.

Marilyn French Has Died

Just saw this at The New York Times: Marilyn French, Novelist and Champion of Feminism, Dies at 79 By A. G. SULZBERGER and HERBERT MITGANG Published: May 3, 2009 Marilyn French, a writer and feminist activist whose debut novel, “The Women’s Room,” propelled her into a leading role in the modern feminist movement, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 79 and lived in Manhattan. The cause was heart failure, said her son, Robert. With steely views about the treatment of woman and a gift for expressing them on the printed page, Ms. French transformed herself from an academic who quietly bristled at the expectations of married women in the post-World War II era to a leading, if controversial, opinionmaker on gender issues who decried the patriarchal society she saw around her. “My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world,” she once declared. Her first and best-known novel, “The Women’s Room,” released in 1977, traces a submissive housewife’s journey of self-discovery following her divorce in the 1950s, describing the lives of Mira Ward and her friends in graduate school at Harvard as they grow into independent women. The book was partly informed by her own experience of leaving an unhappy marriage and helping her daughter deal with the aftermath of being raped. Women all over the world seized on the book, which sold more than 20 million copies and was translated into 20 languages. Gloria Steinem, a close friend, compared the impact of the book on the discussion surrounding women’s rights to the one that Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” had had on racial equality 25 years earlier. “It was about the lives of women who were supposed to live the lives of their husbands, supposed to marry an identity rather than become one themselves, to live secondary lives,” Ms. Steinem said in an interview Sunday. “It expressed the experience of a huge number of women and let them know that they were not alone and not crazy.” Ms. French continued publishing novels as well as books of essays and literary criticism with the common theme of male subjugation of women, whether the arena was Shakespeare or modern history. “Men’s need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it,” she wrote in “The War Against Women” (1992). Critics accused her work of being anti-male, frequently citing a female character in “The Women’s Room” who declares, after her daughter has been raped: “All men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.” In 1992 Ms. French, a longtime smoker, was given a diagnosis of esophageal cancer and told she had just months to live. She chronicled her winning battle against the disease, which included a 10-day coma, in “Season in Hell: A Memoir” (1998). “I cannot say I am happy I was sick,” she wrote. “But I am happy that sickness, if it had to happen, brought me to where I am now. It is a better place than I have been before.” Nevertheless, the disease and its treatment took such a sharp physical toll that, friends said, for a while afterward she questioned whether she should have survived. “She was in pain for 15 years but she was extremely brave,” said Carol Jenkins, a friend who runs the Women’s Media Center, an advocacy group in New York. “She fought through it, she wrote through it and carried on her life. The printed word was a source of life for her.” In the years since her supposed death sentence, Ms. French continued to publish prolifically; she has a novel scheduled for release this fall and was working on a memoir at the time of her death. Her most significant work since her illness was the four-volume “From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women,” published by Feminist Press and built around the premise that prevailing histories had denied women their past, present and future. Despite carefully chronicling a long history of oppression, the last volume ends on an optimistic note, said Florence Howe, who recently retired as director of the publishing house. “For the first time women have history,” she said of Ms. French’s work. “The world changed and she helped change it.” In recent years Ms. French struggled to get published, partly because of the gains in women’s rights she had helped bring about. “It was a source of embitterment to her and outrage to me,” said Robin Morgan, a writer, feminist activist and close friend. Marilyn French was born on Nov. 21, 1929, in Brooklyn, the daughter of E. Charles Edwards, an engineer, and Isabel Hazz Edwards, a department-store clerk. She studied philosophy and English literature at Hofstra College in Hempstead, on Long Island, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1951 and a master’s in 1964. She was an English instructor at Hofstra from 1964 to 1968, then earned a doctorate from Harvard. She was an assistant professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., from 1972 to 1976. She married Robert M. French Jr., a lawyer, in 1950. They divorced in 1967. Ms. French is survived by her son, Robert, of East Brunswick, N.J., and a daughter, Jamie French, of Cambridge, Mass. While Ms. French was pleased by significant gains made by women in the three decades since her landmark novel, she was also just as quick to point out lingering deficiencies in gender equality, friends recalled. “She had,” Ms. Steinem said, “higher standards and higher hopes.”

Added to the Recommended Reading List

"The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype," by Erich Neumann (translated by Ralph Manheim) [Note: this is a soft-cover edition, ISBN 0-691-01780-8) and contains a separate section entirely devoted to photographs, 185 pages long, in addition to the illustrations and photographs integrated into the text. This is a great resource.] "The Language of the Goddess," with foreword by Joseph Campbell, by Marija Gimbutas [Note: packed with illustrations and photographs on nearly every page.] "Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times," by Elizabeth Wayland Barber -- I haven't got my hands on this one yet, I'm buying it from Alibris.com today :) Wayland Barber wrote the fabulous book "The Mummies of Urumchi," also on the Recommended Reading List.

The War Against Women

How well I remember reading Marilyn French's novel The Women's Room. It had an enormous impact on my life in ways I'm still measuring, more than 30 years later. The one phrase in the book that has stayed with me all these years is "shit and string beans." Any woman who has read The Women's Room will know exactly what that means - and why it resonated then and continues to resonate today. Today girls are told that if they get the same education as men, they will earn the same money as men; that they are as good as men; that they can do anything a man can do, barring certain physical limitations. The fact remains that even with an identical four-year college degree, a woman earns 89 cents to a man's dollar. That's better than when I started college in 1975, when it was 74 cents to a dollar. But it's not equal. Why not? Ah, that's the rub. So - now I've got yet more to pile on to my list of books to read, for today I discovered that Marilyn French has written a series on the history (perhaps I should use herstory) of women. They sound absolutely fascinating. Here's the book review I came across at The New York Review of Books. Volume 56, Number 7 · April 30, 2009 The War Against Women By Hilary Mantel From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume I: Origins by Marilyn French, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood Feminist Press, 352 pp., $19.95 (paper) From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume II: The Masculine Mystique by Marilyn French, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood Feminist Press, 477 pp., $19.95 (paper) From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume III: Infernos and Paradises, the Triumph of Capitalism in the 19th Century by Marilyn French, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood Feminist Press, 385 pp., $19.95 (paper) From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume IV: Revolutions and the Struggles for Justice in the 20th Century by Marilyn French, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood Feminist Press, 608 pp., $19.95 (paper)

Who Should Own the Rosetta Stone?

A case is made for keeping looted artifacts in the museums where they are: A museum director fights back The best place for 'looted' artifacts? Right where they are Robert Fulford, National Post April 18, 2009 Ideology, politics and bone-headed provincialism come together comfortably when they make war on the world's great museums. The issue is cultural property. Countries believing that colonialists stole their spiritual heritage are uniting in a send-back-our-stuff campaign. They envision populations and art objects moving in opposite directions: While citizens try to emigrate to Europe and North America for better lives, art objects should travel the other way, delivering national identity and self-esteem through ancient artifacts. Greece yearns for the return of the Elgin Marbles, owned by the British Museum since they were taken from the Parthenon in 1803. Peru wants Yale University to return thousands of Inca artifacts discovered by the Yale historian who uncovered the lost mountainside town of Machu Picchu in 1911. Turkey, China, Cambodia, Guatemala -- they all pine, if you believe their political leaders, for fragments of their distant past that are held abroad and must be brought "home" where they "belong." And then there's Egypt. The government has its eye on the Rosetta Stone, a fragment of rock that opened up ancient Egyptian culture. It was carved for a temple in 196 BC but later abandoned and used as building material. French soldiers accidentally discovered it in 1799 while rebuilding a fort in the city of Rosetta during Napoleon's brief reign over Egypt. When the British moved in, they shipped it to the Brit-ish Museum. The text inscribed on the stone, itself a document of craven colonialism, announces an agreement between Egyptian priests and Ptolemy V, the Macedonian ruler of Egypt, praising the generosity of Ptolemy and promising to demonstrate loyalty by erecting statues of him in the holiest places. It's utterly boring but it's trilingually boring, in ancient Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian demotic (the everyday language of contracts). In 1822 a French Egyptologist cracked the hieroglyphics code and thereby learned to translate ancient Egyptian. Who now deserves to own such a wondrous object? The state of Macedonia, or maybe the Macedonian part of Greece? Unfortunately, populations have shifted so much in two millennia that neither can demonstrate historical continuity with 196 BC. Nor can Egypt. No one pretends that 2009 Egyptians are the same people who pledged fealty to that alien king. Modern France has a case, for guessing the text's importance in 1799 and decoding it just 23 years later. But on fifth thought, perhaps the Rosetta Stone should remain in the British Museum, where it's been well treated for two centuries. That's more or less the argument behind Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate Over Antiquities (Princeton University Press), by James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, and nine fellow professionals. Cuno, the author of another book on the same subject last year, has emerged as the champion of museums who want to keep their holdings -- and not a moment too soon. Rest of article.

Numbers Magic

Within a couple days of each other I received email with information on the number sequence 4-3-2 (the number of the Goddess) and 3-4-5, used by the ancient Egyptians to create true right angles when staking out foundations for buildings, and sometimes this sequence was reflected in tomb paintings and carvings. (Image from Budge, Ch. IV, The Book of the Dead). Here is the information on 4-3-2 provided by RHHannaHH (in two separate emails):

4 x 3 x 2 = 24 24 x 6 x 6 = 864 Circle of Time (432 x 2 ) 360 degrees x 60 min x 60 sec = 1296 Circle of Space 432 x 3 432 x 6 - Equinoctial progression (2592) 432 / 4 - 108 /Pi =343774677 WMS CI 360 / 2 Pi = 5729578 R R / 3/5 = 343774677

(Second email):

.432 / 11111111 ( square ONE) = 3888 / 36 - 108 / Pi = 3/5 R (WMSCI)

[I have no idea what WMSCI stands for]

(Image: Offering table from the tomb of Pharaoh Tutmosis III, "The Quest for Immortality" exhibit. The top, left side, shows 4x3 circular shallow carved depressions; the center shows a 3x3 enclosed square of depressions; the right shows 5x3 depressions). A link to this website was provided by АНДРЕЙ ТКАЧЕНКО. As you'll see, it's in Russian, but it does offer a neat little gadget that translates the site into other languages. The translation into English leaves much to be desired, but it gave me a general idea of what the creator of the website is talking about (not that I understood most of it!) The graphics alone are worth a visit - they are really cool!

"Neanderthal" DNA Sequenced?

An interesting article - about how closely related so-called Neanderthal man was to so-called modern humans. Quote: Paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo and his team from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, may soon provide the answers [to how closely related so-called "modern" man is to so-called "Neanderthal"] as they have undertaken the massive task of sequencing the Neanderthal genome. This is a daunting project, not just because of its scale, and the fact the DNA is old and decayed, but also because the material is contaminated by DNA from microbes and modern humans handling the specimens. Despite these problems, Pääbo is confident he now has a draft DNA sequence derived entirely from 38,000 year-old bone fragments from two female Neanderthals found in Croatia. So far, comparison of three billion human and Neanderthal DNA bases has thrown up a mere 1,000 to 2,000 changes, compared with 50,000 between humans and chimps. [Chimps are supposedly the closest living relative to modern man.] Already, scientists are pretty sure Neanderthals and humans did not interbreed [some believe there is evidence to the contrary], and they ultimately hope to find out how intelligent Neanderthals were, and why they became extinct.

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I am keenly interested in how any scientist can possibly tell how intelligent a Neanderthal human being could possibly have been, given that as far as we known, the race became extinct some 30,000 years ago. What criteria would be used to impute intelligence (or lack thereof) to an extinct race? Would a scientist, perhaps, base his or her conclusions upon the estimated brain size of the extinct Neanderthal person? I believe there were some scientists who said, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, that black Africans, and their descendants scattered about the world because of slavery, were less than fully human and certainly not as intelligent as "white" based upon brain size. 1,000 to 2,000 difference in over 3 billion DNA bases examined. We convict criminals on much less differential in DNA than that.

Hales Corners Chess Challenge IX: More Photos!

Hola darlings! I'm taking a break for the moment from yard work! You just would not believe how many nut shells I've raked up thus far - well, that's what I get, feeding 13 squirrels. Anyway, it's such a gorgeous day that instead of painting the bathroom prior to Mr. Don's arrival from Montreal on the 7th, I'm outdoors and at this break I've got the laptop set up on the patio. A wireless connection is a wonderful thing, indeed :) Here are two more photos from the Hales Corners Chess Challenge IX held last Saturday. The top one (at least, I hope it's the top one, I'm not too swift working with a croll pad rather than a mouse) shows the action in Round 3 on the top tables; the other shows some of the chess femmes who attended this tournament in action. Whoa, the wind is starting to pick up, and the lap top is exhibiting signs of wanting to tip over; time to put a jacket on and put the laptop away, and get my butt back to work.

Hales Corners Challenge IX: Interview with Elizabeth Emery

One of the winners of the special prizes funded by Goddesschess for the Hales Corners Challenge IX is Elizabeth Emery (WI 877) (in the green sweater, during action at the HCC IX), who had a tie score with Sandra Pahl in the Reserve Section and were the highest-finishing chess femmes in that section. Elizabeth finished in 9th place in the Reserve section (out of 51 players), with 3.0/4. Sandra finished in 5th place, with 3.0/4. Congratulations, once again, to Sandra and Elizabeth! Here is an email interview Elizabeth Emery was kind enough to do with me. Enjoy, and thanks, Elizabeth! Good luck and wishes for a knock-out performance at the Arpad Elo Open! Q: Your age? A: I am 11. Q: How old were you when you learned to play chess, and who taught you? A: When I was 8, my papa taught me how to play when we would stay at the lake during the summer. Q: How often do you play chess, and where do you play? At a club? School? Online? A: I play at the Mequon Scholastic Chess Club once a week and online two or three nights per week. Q: What kind of chess player would you describe yourself as - serious? More casual? Somewhere in between? A: I am somewhere in between serious and casual. Q: Is there a study program you follow? A: I have lessons a couple times a week with my step-dad and I try to always analyze my games online, win or lose. Q: What are your goals in terms of where you'd like to be with your chess in say, 5 years? A: I would like to be in the top 100 girls in the country. Right now I am trying to get in to the top 100 girls under age 13. Q: How would you describe your style of play? A: I try to be tactical and make every move do something. Q: What's the next event you'll be playing in? A: The Arpad Elo Open on May 16-17 in Pewaukee, WI. I'll play in the Reserve section, though. Q: How do you think more girls and women can be encouraged to play in tournaments? A: Prizes, like the ones funded by GoddessChess.com, which can only be won by girls are nice. Maybe free entries for girls in reserve sections, too. I think when girls see other girls playing and beating boys they are encouraged and may want to play more. If you'd like to publish your best game from the HCC IX with or without a few comments, I'd be happy to put it up at the Goddesschess blog. Here is the game Elizabeth sent me (in PGN) - ah, she's a chess femme after my own heart, she wins with the black pieces against much higher rated Chao Yang (WI 1370): [Event "HCC IX"] [Site "Hales Corners Chess Club"] [Date "2009.04.25"] [Round "4"] [White "Chao Yang"] [Black "Elizabeth Emery"] [Result "0-1"] [ECO "C50"] [WhiteElo "1370"] [BlackElo "877"] [PlyCount "82"] [TimeControl "G60"] 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 h6 4. Nc3 Nf6 5. a3 Be7 6. d4 exd4 7. Nxd4 Nxd4 8. Qxd4 O-O 9. g4 c5 10. Qd2 Nxg4 11. Rg1 d6 12. f4 Bh4+ 13. Kd1 Nf2+ 14. Ke2 Bh3 15. f5 Bg4+ 16. Kf1 Qg5 17. Qxf2 Bxf2 18. Bxg5 Bxg1 19. Be7 Rfe8 20. Bxd6 Bd4 21. Re1 b6 22. Bd5 Rad8 23. Bc6 Bxc3 24. bxc3 Rxd6 25. Bxe8 Rd1 26. Bb5 Rxe1+ 27. Kxe1 g6 28. f6 Bf3 29. e5 g5 30. Be2 Bxe2 31. Kxe2 g4 32. Ke3 Kh7 33. Kf4 h5 34. a4 Kg6 35. c4 g3 36. Kxg3 Kf5 37. e6 Kxe6 38. Kh4 Kxf6 39. Kxh5 Kf5 40. Kh6 Kg4 41. Kg7 f5 {White Resigns} 0-1 I love it, I love it, I love it! It is evident from her answer to my last question that Elizabeth has the makings of a diplomat. But maybe she'll become world chess champion before taking up diplomacy as a career. I like how this young lady thinks - she has big plans. One of her goals is to make it into the top 100 U-13 girls in the United States. On the April, 2009 ratings list, #1 has a rating of 1972; #100 has a rating of 1190. Step 1: Get into the Top 100 of U-13 Girls. Step 2: Take over the world (well, okay, I made that part up). Elizabeth, Goddesschess will continue to fund special prizes just for the chess femmes at the Hales Corners Chess Challenges as long as the Southwest Chess Club continues to put on those great events (2x a year). Maybe we'll see you at the Hales Corners Chess Challenge X! Well, you probably won't actually "see" me as I prefer to be The Mysterious Woman in the Background with Cash in Her Pockets... The G-chess Magnificent Four are going to tinker with the funding formula for chess femme prizes a little and (don't tell anyone, this is a big secret) increase the prize fund so that more chess femmes can win some Goddesschess cash! Cash is Queen! Thanks for the interview, Elizabeth! Please let us know how you do in the Arpad Elo Open.

New Chess Group Starting

This is great news! Wish it was closer to where I live, drat! A new local chess group is starting up - here's the scoop: Friday May 1 Hi Chess players: The new Lakefront Chess Group, the main initial purpose of which is to simply set up this Alterra Lake front coffeehouse, as a place to find a week-end/Sat game, within an initial time frame (which can be modified). Hope to see you there sometime! Thank you! Paul Edquist Introducing “Chess @ the Lakefront”! WHERE: The scenic Lakefront Alterra Coffeehouse Across from the Marina 1701 N. Lincoln Memorial Dr Milwaukee 53202 Use“MapQuest” as required. Please do not call Alterrra re our group; they are very busy Saturdays! Look for us outside, on the north side area tables or inside, the south room, first floor, if the weather is marginal. Playing outside will be the summer/warm weather default! WHEN: Every Saturday formally commencing May 2 from approximately 11AM -2PM You can come earlier or stay later of course! Alterra Sat. hours: 7AM-10PM (Our hours can be changed via a poll of players consistently attending.) OTHER INFORMATION: BYO sets, clocks, (“louder” clocks only outside); BYO refill mug for $1.25 initial fill; and 50 cent refills! Other food on site. Great outdoor tables for playing; some picnic tables for four players; multi-level seating inside. Smoking OK outside. Free parking in adjacent lot; use their north driveway; but suggest first, parking directly across the street, lakeside, in the Marina parking lot, due to busy Saturdays! Or park on Lincoln Memorial Dr., just north. We hope to grow, hold informal tournaments, and perhaps have a team for USCF or area team competition vs. the local USCF affiliate club and other groups. Ideas and help are always welcome! Tell your friends! Contact: Paul (former president of UWM Chess Club) or Galen

Unique Chess Set at Bonham's June 1, 2009 Auction

This is one of those "gasp" chess sets - absolutely gorgeous. Information from Bonham's website (additional photos of pieces, too): Sale 17502 - Natural History, 1 Jun 2009 New York Lot No: 1234W Carved Ruby, Lapis and Opal Chess Set of Marine Life Designed by Gemologist and Jewelry Designer Sylvia QuispeIdar-Oberstein, Germany The imagination of the artist is seen in the design of this one-of-a-kind lapidary chess set—sure to attract either the chess aficionado or lapidary enthusiast. The creatures are carved of Tanzanian ruby and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, Peruvian pink opal, Brazilian rock crystal quartz, highlighted with faceted rubies and sapphires from Burma and accents of 18K yellow gold. The chessboard is illuminated from beneath the squares of rock crystal and black obsidian, set into an ebony hardwood frame. Chess Board Measures 28in x 28in x 5in; Largest piece measures 6 1/2in. Estimate: $90,000 - 110,000

Design Award Winner

From GQ online: The 10th annual National Design Awards were announced today by Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and while the winners and finalists across the eight categories include the usual greatest-minds-of-our-generation, we'd like to call attention to a particular few: Boym Partners for Product Design (their History Chess set, comprising 32 iconic totems of America's last hundred years, from the Coca-Cola bottle to the Unabomber's cabin and the sinking Titanic, is pictured here). nationaldesignawards.org COREY SEYMOUR Photo: Courtesy of Copper-Hewitt National Design Museum 5:34 PM, April 30, 2009