Another Doonesbury "Say What?"

"I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that's what we need to do is amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than trying to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family."
-- Mike Huckabee

Not that I was considering him, but this definitely seals the deal.

RIP: Bobby Fischer!

Huh. I didn't know what was going on with him, last I heard he was in an immigration tussle with the US. Apparently he died in Reykjavik, Iceland, where he defeated Spassky in '72 to become the world chess champion. He did a re-match in Yugoslavia in '92 and sort of became a criminal as at the time Americans weren't allowed to travel there. He moved around a bit, settled in Japan, where he was arrested in 2004 on immigration violation charges. It seems I heard about Iceland offering him citizenship, but the story fell off my news radar at that point.

He was absolutely brilliant at chess, but kind of screwed up otherwise as a person. He was strongly anti-Semitic, even though he was a Jew, might have had some mental health problems. Strange person. I never met him (I've met Karpov and Kasparov), and I really wasn't interested in meeting him.

One chess-symmetry thing is there are 64 squares on the chess board, and he died at the age of 64. A chessie to the end.

The story


If you want to see how twisted his mind was, take a look at his home page.