2013 FIDE Women's Grand Prix: Geneva

Going on right now, May 3 - 15, 2013.  Website. 

Let me tell you, if half the male chessplayers in the world were as attractive as this group of ladies, chess would turn instantly into a spectator sport with a majority of female fans :)  I am not so sure of the identities of some of the ladies just from visual, but I'll take a crack at naming this line-up, from L to R: Anna Muzychuk, Viktorija Cmilyte, Hou Yifan sans glasses (looks cute without them), not sure, Anna Ushenina, Fearless Leader Who Speaketh With Aliens, not sure but she resembles Kim Cattrall(!), the always lovely Alexandra Kosteniuk, Nana Dzagnidze(?), Kateryna Lahno, Batchimeg Tuvshintugs, Ju Wenjun, not sure, and Tatiana Kosintseva. 

Standings after R4:

Rank	SNo.		Name	Rtg	FED	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	Pts	Res.	vict
1	8	GM	Kateryna Lagno	2548	UKR	*			½						½	1	1	3	0	2
2	11	GM	Yifan Hou	2617	CHN		*	½		1				0	1			2½	0	2
3	2	GM	Tatiana Kosintseva	2517	RUS		½	*		1	½					½		2½	0	1
4	6	GM	Anna Muzychuk	2585	SLO	½			*			½	½				1	2½	0	1
5	3	IM	Bela Khotenashvili	2505	GEO		0	0		*	1	1						2	0	2
6	1	GM	Nana Dzagnidze	2545	GEO			½		0	*			1		½		2	0	1
	10	WGM	Wenjun Ju	2544	CHN				½	0		*		1	½			2	0	1
8	9	GM	Anna Ushenina	2491	UKR				½				*	½	½		½	2	0	0
9	4	WGM	Tuvshintugs Batchimeg	2298	MGL		1				0	0	½	*				1½	0	1
10	5	GM	Viktorija Cmilyte	2522	LTU	½	0					½	½		*			1½	0	0
11	12	GM	Alexandra Kosteniuk	2491	RUS	0		½			½					*	½	1½	0	0
12	7	WGM	Olga Girya	2463	RUS	0			0				½			½	*	1	0	0

This is a stellar line-up and includes a few "surprise" players (Batchimeg and Girya) who can be dangerous in their own right. 

GM Alexandra Kosteniuk (W) lost her R4 game yesterday to GM Kateryna Lahno (B) and that win put Lahno into clear first place.

In R3, Hou Yifan proved she's not a robot after all and got "spanked" by Mama Hou for dropping a game to the much lower rated Tuvshintugs Batchimeg.  Their game was the featured "Game of the Day" for R3, with extensive analysis.

In R4, Hou Yifan rebounded to defeat Viktorija Cmilyte, but not without some difficulty.  I found this comment by the GM providing analysis for the tournament,  Adrian Mikhalchishin, interesting:  Viktoria used the same approach, playing the former World Champion, as I taught my pupil Betul Yildiz in the last few years. It is simple -Hou Yifan is fantastic, a fine technical player, and the only way to play successfully against her is to challenge her from the start. It means to attack as soon as possible, hmm, but it is tremendousely difficult. You have to show her ,that you are not afraid of her.
 
I can't imagine Cmilyte being afraid of any player, but it's good advice nonetheless. 

Here are the match-ups for today's round:

Round 5 on 2013/05/08 at 14:00
SNo.		Name	Rtg	Res.		Name	Rtg	SNo.
3	IM	Bela Khotenashvili	2505	-	GM	Alexandra Kosteniuk	2491	12
4	WGM	Tuvshintugs Batchimeg	2298	-	GM	Tatiana Kosintseva	2517	2
5	GM	Viktorija Cmilyte	2522	-	GM	Nana Dzagnidze	2545	1
6	GM	Anna Muzychuk	2585	-	GM	Yifan Hou	2617	11
7	WGM	Olga Girya	2463	-	WGM	Wenjun Ju	2544	10
8	GM	Kateryna Lagno	2548	-	GM	Anna Ushenina	2491	9

Some strong pairings, well-matched pairings for this round.  Should be interesting! 

Qatar Covers Nude Statutes in Exhibit, Greeks Take Them Back

Good for the Greeks!  Holy Hathor!  And Qatar is trying to hold itself out to the world as a cosmopolitan center of culture and commerce.  Bwwwwaaahhhaaa!  What's that old saying about you can take a barbarian out of the 'hood...

From the two-way, NPR breaking news

Qatar Covers Nude Statues, Greeks Take Them Back

by Joanna Kakissis

April 30, 2013 3:24 PM

 

The ancient statues depict young men, naked and muscled, in their physical prime. The two sculptures were supposed to celebrate the purity and kinetic beauty of ancient sport in a traveling exhibit, "The Olympics — Past and Present."

But when the Greek exhibit reached the conservative Muslim emirate of Qatar, the two statues were placed behind a screen of sheer black cloth.

"The outlines of the statues were visible, but not the details," says Maria Vlazaki, the Greek Culture Ministry's director-general of antiquities and cultural heritage. "They wanted to hide the nudity." Vlazaki was part of a Greek delegation that traveled to the Qatari capital Doha for the opening of the exhibit in March.

One statue is dated to 520 B.C. and is a long-haired kouros from the sanctuary of Apollon Ptoios in Boeotia, says Evridiki Leka, curator of the sculpture collection at the National Archaeological Museum, where both marble pieces are housed.

The other depicts a young athlete with short curls. It's a Roman-era copy of a famous bronze (now lost) by the ancient sculptor Polykleitos, who designed male nudes with mathematical scale and artistic purity.

Vlazaki says the Qatari organizers of the exhibit asked for the two statues, as well as several small bronze nudes that remain on display. But Vlazaki says there were "objections from above" after the statues arrived. The Qatari organizers refused to display them uncovered, as the Greeks requested.

"So they agreed to send them back," Vlazaki says. "It was all done with minimal drama."

Culture Clash

Both countries are playing down the incident as a minor culture clash.

Greece, which is deep in recession and struggling through an epic debt crisis, needs Qatar. The energy-rich emirate said in January that it would invest up to $1.3 billion in a joint fund with Athens.

Meanwhile, the emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, bought six private islands in the Ionian Sea for his wives and children. [Wonder how long before they start to kill each other off, one by one by one -- all through a series of unfortunate accidents, of course, stretched out over the course of several years...]

Others criticized Qatar, which aspires to be a global center of culture. The country has spent billions on museums and art collection, "a remarkably sophisticated exercise at nation-building through art," Hugh Eakin wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2011.

Peter Aspden of the Financial Times wrote that Qatar must "get over its inhibitions" if it ever wants to host the Olympics. (The country led unsuccessful bids for the 2016 and 2020 games).

"There is no understanding of ancient Greek culture and its invention of sporting competition without recognizing its worship of the human form," Aspden wrote. "You just cannot have a serious exhibition on the ancient Olympics without addressing the theme of nudity."

The Qatar Museums Authority said in a statement that the decision was "not due to censorship" but was rather "based on the flow of the exhibition, awareness of the outreach to all schools and families in Qatar, and desire to be sensitive to community needs and standards."

A Doha Debates poll last year showed that 60 percent of Arabs support censorship of art that could be "inappropriate" and offend "religious beliefs." [Baloney!  If you don't like it, don't go see it.]

Vlazaki says she respects Qatar's decision on the statues and says she still views the exhibit as a success.

"Qatar is still opening itself to Europe and the West," she says. "It accepts a lot, but there are still things that it's not ready to accept." [What else would you expect her to say, duh.]

The statues are now back in Greece's National Archaeological Museum.

"The Olympics — Past and Present" runs until June 30 at the Alriwaq Doha exhibition space near the Museum of Islamic Art.

Early Christian Martyrs Mostly Myths

Notre Dame professor tackles ‘myth’ of Christian martyrdom
By Liz Goodwin, Yahoo! News | The Lookout – Fri, May 3, 2013

Candida Moss, a professor of early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame and a practicing Catholic, wants to shatter what she calls the “myth” of martyrdom in the Christian faith.

Sunday school tales of early Christians being rounded up at their secret catacomb meetings and thrown to the lions by evil Romans are mere fairy tales, Moss writes in a new book. In fact, in the first 250 years of Christianity, Romans mostly regarded the religion's practitioners as meddlesome members of a superstitious cult.

The government actively persecuted Christians for only about 10 years, Moss suggests, and even then intermittently. And, she says, many of the best known early stories of brave Christian martyrs were entirely fabricated.

The controversial thesis, laid out in "The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom," has earned her a lot of hate mail and a few sidelong looks from fellow faculty members. But Moss maintains that the Roman Catholic Church and historians have known for centuries that most early Christian martyr stories were exaggerated or invented.

A small group of priest scholars in the 17^th century began sifting through the myths, discrediting not only embellished stories about saints (including that St. George slew a dragon) but also tossing out popular stories about early Christian martyrs.

Stained-glass window of St Perpetua of Carthage (church of Notre-Dame
of Vierzon, France, 19th century): martyrdom of St Perpetua
and her fellows in the stadium of Carthage; Saint Felicity on her left.
[Information from Wikipedia.]

Historians, including Moss, say only a handful of martyrdom stories from the first 300 years of Christianity—which includes the reign of the cruel, Christian-loathing Nero—are verifiable. (Saint Perpetua of Carthage, pictured in the stained glass window above, is one of the six famous early Christian martyrs Moss believes was actually killed for her faith.)

Moss contends that when Christians were executed, it was often not because of their religious beliefs but because they wouldn't follow Roman rules. Many laws that led to early Christians’ execution were not specifically targeted at them—such as a law requiring all Roman citizens to engage in a public sacrifice to the gods—but their refusal to observe those laws and other mores of Roman society led to their deaths.

Moss calls early Christians “rude, subversive and disrespectful,” noting that they refused to swear oaths, join the military or participate in any other part of Roman society.
Moss can at times seem clinical when attempting to distinguish between true and systematic persecution of Christians for their faith and intermittent violence against them for refusing to conform.

"If persecution is to be defined as hostility toward a group because of its religious beliefs, then surely it is important that the Romans intended to target Christians,” she writes. “Otherwise this is prosecution, not persecution."

With true government persecution, victims have no room to negotiate when trying to convince the government to stop targeting them, Moss said. But when the government’s laws inadvertently lead to the persecution of Christians, there remains room for dialogue and debate over changing those laws.

“The reason I make the distinction is in the case of people seeking you out, torturing you just because you’re Christian—which did happen for a few years—in that situation, you can’t negotiate,” she said. “You have no opportunity to resist or to fight back. In a situation where there’s sort of disagreements … there’s room for debate.”

Moss pointed to the new U.S. health care law's requirement that insurance companies cover contraception as an example of a law that inadvertently targeted Christians but was interpreted as a direct attack on the faith.

Much like the Emperor Diocletian’s edict that all Romans make a sacrifice to the gods (which Moss describes as being like a mandatory “pledge of allegiance”), the contraceptive mandate was not designed to target or single out Christians, she says. (Christians and others who refused to make the sacrifice in the fourth century were slaughtered. Christian organizations that do not want to provide contraception under the 21st century law will be fined.)

Notre Dame is one dozens of religiously affiliated universities that sued over the birth control mandate, saying providing its employees and students with health insurance that covered contraceptives would violate the university's religious freedom.

Some in the religious community framed the contraceptive mandate as a deliberate persecution of Christians, rather than as bad policy, Moss says, in a way that’s made it difficult for them to negotiate.

“Labeling it persecution is saying, ‘We’re under attack, we’re persecuted. The other side has no reason to do this and we have to fight. We shouldn’t have to negotiate or compromise,” she said.
Moss says she is personally against her university’s decision to sue over the mandate.

“I think that the University of Notre Dame does not control how I spend my salary, therefore controlling what kinds of health care people have access to is maybe something we should not be trying to do,” she said. “I think Catholic institutions should trust their employees not to use contraception.”

Moss said the early Christian “persecution complex” influences the present-day political debate in America. The cable news hobbyhorse that there’s a deliberate “War on Christmas” in America is one example of a modern day martyrdom myth, she said.

When former House Speaker Newt Gingrich argued during his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination last year that there was an “aggressive” war on Christianity waged throughout the country, Moss also heard echoes of apocryphal martyrdom.

Moss says she thinks dispelling the myths of martyrdom of the early church will not minimize the true instances of religious persecution occurring around the world.

“I completely sympathize with [my critics'] concern that in writing a book like this maybe I will make people less interested in persecution that is happening around the world,” she said. “I do care. I think we should care about those who are oppressed. I don’t think misusing the category here in America draws attention to persecution around the world. I think it cannibalizes those experiences. It steals their thunder.”

2013 U.S. Women's Chess Championship: R5

Hola darlings!

A day off today, unfortunately, feeling decidedly under the weather. Well, that will happen from time to time with my heart condition, but it still fricking sucks!

The plus is that I was able to boot up a laptop and listen to the live coverage, and sometimes managed to watch some of it (exhausting).

But I'm feeling better this evening.  Much to report, no energy though.  So, cutting to the chase, here is the poop scoop at the moment:

Krush defeated Sharah Chiang, as expected, but Chiang made it easier making a blunderous queen move, from c4 to b3 on white's move 29.  Krush goes into the rest day at 5-0.  Kudos to Krush.

It appeared for awhile that Kats was surprising the hell out of Foisor, but with little commentary on the game and my analyzing skills non-existent, can't really tell you anything other than that Kats went down to defeat behind white before making her 42nd move.

Zenyuk-Baginskaite was a peaceful draw. 

Belakovskaia v. Ni is still going on, woo woo!  Neither lady will back down... (...and I won't back down, no, I won't back down. I will stand my ground...)

The marquis game of the day, at least in my eyes, was Zatonskih v. Abrahamyan, which ended in a draw after move 30.  Only in order to satisfy the Sophia rules in force for this tournament.  I can only wonder what Abrahamyan will do in the second half.  Oh, and I was shocked to Hell and back today (not good for my heart, darlings) when I saw that Tatev had cut off her luxorious gorgeous thick dark long hair to a - bob - of all things.  Holy Hathor!  Not to say it's not a flattering cut, but I haven't seen a photo of her front on yet, so I'm reserving judgment.  But - Holy Hathor!  To my mind, this is a totally rad move and can only signal - a rad shift in mind set...

Tatev Abrahamyan (in pale aqua blouse) - check out the new do! 
Well, it's new to me, anyway. 

That draw is significant, BTW.

Update at 6:38 p.m.:

Belakovskaia lost!  She succumbed to Ni after Ni made her 73rd move with the black pieces.  Quite a battle.

Here are the standings after R5:

Rank	Name	Score	M/F	Rating	TPR	W-We	1	2	3	4	5
1	IM Krush, Irina	5.0	F	2470	2982	+1.17	1	1	1	1	1
2	WGM Abrahamyan, Tatev	4.0	F	2280	2526	+1.54	1	1	½	1	½
3	IM Zatonskih, Anna	3.5	F	2466	2427	-0.14	1	1	0	1	½
4	WGM Baginskaite, Camilla	2.5	F	2278	2246	-0.22	½	0	1	½	½
5	WIM Zenyuk, Iryna	2.5	F	2243	2278	+0.23	1	0	1	0	½
6	WGM Foisor, Sabina	2.0	F	2300	2141	-1.08	0	0	0	1	1
7	WGM Belakovskaia, Anjelina	2.0	F	2263	2247	-0.14	0	1	1	0	0
8	WIM Ni, Viktorija	2.0	F	2262	2207	-0.41	½	½	0	0	1
9	WFM Kats, Alena	1.5	F	2144	2169	+0.10	0	½	½	½	0
10	WFM Chiang, Sarah	0.0	F	2098	1605	-1.05	0	0	0	0	0

Abrahamyan's draw today secured her clear second place and crucial hours more than Krush to rest and restore herself, as well as study-up on the remaining opponents. Round 8 is now looming large for Krush and Abrahamyan, as Krush is perfect with 5-0. 

The Origins of Language: One Mother Tongue

Hola darlings!

Well, this hypothesis just makes so much sense to me. But it's very controversial. 

I've been interested in the origins of language (and words) for a long time.  Linguistics, etymology -anyone with half a brain knows that words are power, and I believe that they can unlock the secrets of the past and reveal things about our herstory that we do not, at present, know, and perhaps may never learn of any other way. 

I have this thought that if only I could study enough, dig deeply enough, work hard enough, and dig dig dig into research, I may be able to find a key or keys to unlock the ancient mysterious origins of chess and its predecessors.  Not something I am able to do, given the realities of making a living.  Four and a half more years until retirement, if I make it that far...

Oh yeah, I know what the accepted theory is, and I think it's full of baloney.  But the Germans keep insisting, year after year, that CHESS WAS INVENTED IN INDIA, and these days most everyone tows that line.   Like they're afraid to speak out otherwise.

Why?

Alas, most everyone who has said otherwise in the recent and not so recent past, are dead: Joseph Needham (China); Ricardo Calvo (possibly Persia).  And some, like Dr. David Li (China), are drowned out by those who claim that only certain "professionals" i.e., degreed historians or archaeologists, or certain "institutes" or "groups" funded by someone with pots of money pursuing a certain agenda, are the sole legitimate sources anyone with intelligence should look to for the answers.  You can check out more alternative views on the origins of chess at Goddesschess' collection of essays and research. 

Anyway, years ago, I read a book by Merrit Ruhlen, published in 1996, that upset a lot of people (i.e., really pissed some people off):  The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. 

This is a book I highly recommend to anyone interested in learning more, and using common sense in looking at how languages actually work and change over time.  Hey, all you nay-sayers and Ruhlen bashers out there, bwwwwwaaaaaahhhhaaaaahhhaaaa!

Before Babel? Ancient Mother Tongue Reconstructed

By Tia Ghose, LiveScience Staff Writer | LiveScience.com – 6 hrs ago

 

 

The ancestors of people from across Europe and Asia may have spoken a common language about 15,000 years ago, new research suggests.

Now, researchers have reconstructed words, such as "mother," "to pull" and "man," which would have been spoken by ancient hunter-gatherers, possibly in an area such as the Caucuses or the modern-day country of Georgia. The word list, detailed today (May 6) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help researchers retrace the history of ancient migrations and contacts between prehistoric cultures.

"We can trace echoes of language back 15,000 years to a time that corresponds to about the end of the last ice age," said study co-author Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. Tower of Babel The idea of a universal human language goes back at least to the Bible, in which humanity spoke a common tongue, but were punished with mutual unintelligibility after trying to build the Tower of Babel all the way to heaven.

But not all linguists believe in a single common origin of language, and trying to reconstruct that language seemed impossible. Most researchers thought they could only trace a language's roots back 3,000 to 4,000 years. (Even so, researchers recently said they had traced the roots of a common mother tongue to many Eurasian languages back 8,000 to 9,500 years to Anatolia, a southwestern Asian peninsula that is now part of Turkey.)

Pagel, however, wondered whether language evolution proceeds much like biological evolution. If so, the most critical words, such as the frequently used words that define our social relationships, would change much more slowly.

To find out if he could uncover those ancient words, Pagel and his colleagues in a previous study tracked how quickly words changed in modern languages. They identified the most stable words. They also mapped out how different modern languages were related.

They then reconstructed ancient words based on the frequency at which certain sounds tend to change in different languages — for instance, p's and f's often change over time in many languages, as in the change from "pater" in Latin to the more recent term "father" in English.

The researchers could predict what 23 words, including "I," "ye," "mother," "male," "fire," "hand" and "to hear" might sound like in an ancestral language dating to 15,000 years ago.

In other words, if modern-day humans could somehow encounter their Stone Age ancestors, they could say one or two very simple statements and make themselves understood, Pagel said.

Limitations of tracing language

Unfortunately, this language technique may have reached its limits in terms of how far back in history it can go.

"It's going to be very difficult to go much beyond that, even these slowly evolving words are starting to run out of steam," Pagel told LiveScience.

The study raises the possibility that researchers could combine linguistic data with archaeology and anthropology "to tell the story of human prehistory," for instance by recreating ancient migrations and contacts between people, said William Croft, a comparative linguist at the University of New Mexico, who was not involved in the study.

"That has been held back because most linguists say you can only go so far back in time," Croft said. "So this is an intriguing suggestion that you can go further back in time."

2013 U.S. Women's Chess Championship: R4

What a bummer!  I missed everything going on in St. Louis while working today.  I didn't even have a chance to put on my ear-phones and catch snatches of commentary here and there.

Here are the match-ups and results from R4:

Table	White	Score	Rating	Black	Score	Rating	Result
1	WGM Foisor, Sabina	0.0	2300	WFM Chiang, Sarah	0.0	2098	1-0
2	IM Krush, Irina	3.0	2470	WGM Belakovskaia, Anjelina	2.0	2263	1-0
3	WIM Ni, Viktorija	1.0	2262	IM Zatonskih, Anna	2.0	2466	0-1
4	WGM Abrahamyan, Tatev	2.5	2280	WIM Zenyuk, Iryna	2.0	2243	1-0
5	WGM Baginskaite, Camilla	1.5	2278	WFM Kats, Alena	1.0	2144	½-½

And the standings after R4:

Rank	Name	Score	M/F	Rating	TPR	W-We	1	2	3	4
1	IM Krush, Irina	4.0	F	2470	3014	+1.06	1	1	1	1
2	WGM Abrahamyan, Tatev	3.5	F	2280	2577	+1.30	1	1	½	1
3	IM Zatonskih, Anna	3.0	F	2466	2471	+0.10	1	1	0	1
4	WGM Baginskaite, Camilla	2.0	F	2278	2247	-0.17	½	0	1	½
5	WGM Belakovskaia, Anjelina	2.0	F	2263	2334	+0.36	0	1	1	0
6	WIM Zenyuk, Iryna	2.0	F	2243	2278	+0.18	1	0	1	0
7	WFM Kats, Alena	1.5	F	2144	2236	+0.39	0	½	½	½
8	WGM Foisor, Sabina	1.0	F	2300	2037	-1.37	0	0	0	1
9	WIM Ni, Viktorija	1.0	F	2262	2090	-0.91	½	½	0	0
10	WFM Chiang, Sarah	0.0	F	2098	1579	-0.94	0	0	0	0

Is everyone now putting money on the Abrahamyan/Krush game in R8? Can Krush run the table?  Who's going to stop her?

From R4:

What do you think of Krush's game against Belakovskaia?  That ending position - Holy Hathor! 

Let's see, it took Baginskaite 79 moves to wrest a draw from Kats...  Viktorija Ni didn't exactly roll over and die against the powerful Zatonskih, either.

Wow, I'm impressed, ladies. 

Here are the match-ups for R5:

Table	White	Score	Rating	Black	Score	Rating	Result
1	WFM Kats, Alena	1.5	2144	WGM Foisor, Sabina	1.0	2300
2	WIM Zenyuk, Iryna	2.0	2243	WGM Baginskaite, Camilla	2.0	2278
3	IM Zatonskih, Anna	3.0	2466	WGM Abrahamyan, Tatev	3.5	2280
4	WGM Belakovskaia, Anjelina	2.0	2263	WIM Ni, Viktorija	1.0	2262
5	WFM Chiang, Sarah	0.0	2098	IM Krush, Irina	4.0	2470

Games I'm interested in for R5 are Zatonskih v. Abrahamyan, and Kats v. Foisor.  Belakovskaia v. Ni (very evenly matched in terms of ELO, but not experience) may also prove to be a hard-fought game. 

No rest day for the ladies until Wednesday!  By now they must be tired, and these long grueling games many of them have been playing must be taking a toll. 

Rare Achaemenid Glass Bowl Sells for Record Price at Bonham's

Astonishing 2,500-year-old glass survivor goes through the roof with £481,250 price at Bonhams

LONDON.- An astonishing survivor – a glass Achaemenid bowl from the ancient Persian Empire, circa 5th-early 4th Century B.C. made £481,250 at Bonhams sale of Antiquities in London on May 1st. The bowl’s pre-sale estimate was just £30,000 to £50,000 and it strong price reflects the success of the sale generally which made a total of £2m.

 

The pale, shallow, greenish glass bowl was produced by the lost wax casting method then ground and polished.
Photo: Bonhams.

The pale, shallow, greenish glass bowl was produced by the lost wax casting method then ground and polished. It has a flaring rim and is decorated with twelve projecting tear-shaped lobes, interspersed with twelve elongated petals.

The bowl comes from an English private collection that acquired it in the 1950s and passed it down through the family.

These luxury vessels, made in the finest quality colourless glass, derived their forms from Achaemenid silver and bronze pieces, and were specially made in imitation of highly prized rock crystal.

The largest collection of Persian glass known, consisting of twenty-four vessels, including a phiale was recovered between 1931 and 1934 from the palace treasury at Persepolis, the royal residence that was destroyed by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C.

A similar bowl to the one just sold by Bonhams is preserved in the Hermitage collection in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Madeleine Perridge, Head of Antiquities at Bonhams, commented: “The price achieved for this wonderful ancient glass bowl is a result of its incredible rarity, excellent condition, and its great provenance from a private collection. There was a great deal of interest in it from around the world.”

2013 U.S. Women's Chess Championship: R3

Hola darlings!  In between bouts of yard work (first really nice day since 10 days ago, and my yard is a MESS) I'm listening to/watching live coverage of R3 at U.S. Chess Champs.com outside on my old table and chairs under my umbrella, all cleaned up after being stored in the garage all winter.  Sure feels good to be able to sit outside and enjoy the beautiful weather and spring after a long, hard winter and nasty cold, wet spring! 

This year's U.S. Championshps commentators are Jen Shahade and Yasser Seirawan as the primary commentary team, withMaurice Ashley giving special indepth analyses and commentary on select positions within various games as well as interviews with the players.

Great coverage thus far!

The marquee ladies' game today is Zatonskih v. Krush.  Can't believe this time is correct (?) but if it is, Anna is in a hell of a lot of time trouble even before the middle game has been reached.  Take a look at this screen shot of their game, just after Anna made her 17th move with white:

This game between Kats and Abrahamyan looks like a crazy game I'd try to play (until I crash and burn because I do not understand relative positioning and leave pieces hanging all over the place, sigh).  Here is the position just after Kats' 17th move, with her knight threatening Abrahamyan's bishop on d6:

Both players appear to be headed toward time trouble...

More later.

Updated 6:12 p.m.:

Well, while all this excitement was going on, I was out cutting the lawn in the front yard.  Looks much better, I have to say.  Even though we've had tons of crappy weather, all the rain we had the two weeks prior to my Las Vegas trip and then some sunshine made the grass grow like crazy! 

Check this out, pairings and results from R3:

Table	White	Score	Rating	Black	Score	Rating	Result
1	WGM Baginskaite, Camilla	0.5	2278	WGM Foisor, Sabina	0.0	2300	1-0
2	WFM Kats, Alena	0.5	2144	WGM Abrahamyan, Tatev	2.0	2280	½-½
3	WIM Zenyuk, Iryna	1.0	2243	WIM Ni, Viktorija	1.0	2262	1-0
4	IM Zatonskih, Anna	2.0	2466	IM Krush, Irina	2.0	2470	0-1
5	WGM Belakovskaia, Anjelina	1.0	2263	WFM Chiang, Sarah	0.0	2098

And while I was copying the results and pairings, Belakovskaia defeated Chiang on move 69 and Chiang resigned.  Belakovskaia had five pawns behinf the white pieces, Chiang had 2 and her King was slowly being boxed in. 

Here are the current standings (after R3):

Rank	Name	Score	M/F	Rating	TPR	W-We	1	2	3
1	IM Krush, Irina	3.0	F	2470	3019	+0.83	1	1	1
2	WGM Abrahamyan, Tatev	2.5	F	2280	2514	+0.85	1	1	½
3	IM Zatonskih, Anna	2.0	F	2466	2408	-0.14	1	1	0
4	WGM Belakovskaia, Anjelina	2.0	F	2263	2413	+0.59	0	1	1
5	WIM Zenyuk, Iryna	2.0	F	2243	2402	+0.63	1	0	1
6	WGM Baginskaite, Camilla	1.5	F	2278	2281	+0.01	½	0	1
7	WIM Ni, Viktorija	1.0	F	2262	2097	-0.67	½	½	0
8	WFM Kats, Alena	1.0	F	2144	2212	+0.21	0	½	½
9	WGM Foisor, Sabina	0.0	F	2300	1539	-1.61	0	0	0
10	WFM Chiang, Sarah	0.0	F	2098	1583	-0.70	0	0	0

I note with interest:

(1)  Abrahamyan, a perennial threat to take the title over the past 3-4 years, has put herself in an excellent position.

(2)  Belakovskaia, rusty, but tenacious!  She lost with black to Zatonskih in R1 -- it would have been an absolute shocker if she'd managed a draw;  R2 saw her win with the black pieces against higher rated Sabina Foisor who, shockingly, has not scored after 3 rounds. 

(3)  I am very impressed with Kats, who, playing white, scored a draw against Abrahamyan today, rated more than 100 points higher.  Kats had a draw (with black) against higher rated Viktorija Ni yesterday.

(4) Krush is perfect thus far, though playing far from perfect games. Can she make a perfect score?  Arguably the greatest threat to defeat Krush was Anna Zatonskih, whom she knocked off today while playing with black!  Who is to stop her now?  Tatev...