Sunday Night Blues

Hola darlings. It's Sunday night and in little more than half an hour the first part of a new production of Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" will be shown on my local PBS station. I'm looking forward to it immensely, but I have to agree with the review in my local newspaper this morning who said that it would take something very special to top the Ang Lee 1995 theatrical release film. I put in my VHS tape probably once a quarter and watch it all over again, it is that good! Anyway, I have now finished my column for Chessville for April and sent it off to the editor for review. The hard work is done again for another month. It's amazing how long it takes to put the column together every month. It's not as if I have to dig up the news from scratch - I don't! I've already reported on it for the most part - here and at Chess Femme News (although I am terribly delinquent there now, I've been putting in too much time here at the blog). So I just do a lot of copying and pasting. Still - this column took nearly 2 full days of work. Last month's column took even longer. What the heck takes so long? Well, I do extensive fact checking to make sure I've got it right (and even with that, when I've gone back and looked at the columns I see a few errors, not to mention typos!) And it seems to take forever to hunt down what I deem suitable photographs of the chess femmes I'm writing about. I consider each and every one of these chess playing women beautiful, absolutely beautiful, and I try to find photographs that reflect that beauty in a physical sense. Now I'm facing having to go back to the office tomorrow. Yech yech. I am at the point in my life where I truly resent the time I have to spend making a living in order to be able to do this - blogging, for instance - and the time I don't have to spend on research into my true vocation, which is pursuing the origins of chess. But I suppose I should not complain, as it seems the majority of people around the world today do not have a passion in their lives, unlike me and my partners and cohorts at Goddesschess. It is that passion that adds the spice of variety to my busy and complicated life. But I'm blue tonight, darlings. Blue blue blue. So I'll no doubt shed many a tear while watching "Sense and Sensibility" - thank goddess I don't have any chocolate in the house - I'd probably eat myself into a coma! And the rains are coming too. We're supposed to get up to 2 inches starting later tonight and all day tomorrow. With the rains come the floods. Argggghh! This has been one hell of a winter. A few things before calling it a night: Chessbase has posted an article about the recently-concluded 2008 Scandinavian Ladies Open. At the Kolkata Open, GM Koneru Humy defeated her fellow countryman GM Dibyendu Barua with white pieces, moving her into a tie for first place with 7 other players with 5.5 points! Alexy Root, who is playing at the 2008 U.S. Open Qualifier, is trying for one of the wild card spots at the upcoming Frank K. Berry U.S. Women's Chess Championship to be held in May. She's blogging for the USCF website. Here's an entry.

2008 Kolkata (Calcutta) Open

One of my favorite chess femmes, GM Koneru Humpy (IND ) is playing in the Kolkata Open on the top boards, against an overwhelming force of GMs and IMs! Here's a list of the chess femmes playing (out of 114 players): SNo. First Name Last Name Title Rating FED 3 Humpy Koneru GM 2612 IND 29 Nisha Mohota WGM 2409 IND 75 Manisha Mohanty Kiran WIM 2270 IND 78 Mary Ann Gomes WIM 2255 IND 88 Rout Padmini WIM 2210 IND 89 Kruttika Nadig WIM 2208 IND I'm sure there are several other chess femmes playing, but I did not recognize the names right off and I'm too tired to run a FIDE name search on each and every name down to player 114 tonight. Sorry!