Chants of a Lifetime

To be sure, Edna, there must be a double of you!

Artwork © ZoneX (@zonexanimate)

The Wedding Singer

There, at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Taipei, Taiwan of China, on July 31, 2022, at the wedding ceremony of model and influencer 王詠穎 (Wáng Yǒngyǐng) (a.k.a. Melinda Wang) and actor 楊祐寧 (Yáng Yòuníng) (a.k.a. Tony Yang), a superstar singer known to the public as 9m88 performed her cover of Frankie Valli’s Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.

The Betrothed

The Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang (VG) has announced that this weekend Magnus Carlsen, the king of chess, will be getting married to Ella Victoria Malone, with whom he had been going steady for a couple of years.

Say It Ain’t So

Well, Edna, they just have to pray that he doesn’t fall in love with a woman with almond-shaped eyes

Artwork © ZoneX (@zonexanimate)

One Plus One Equals Three

Magnus Carlsen and Ian Alexandrovich Nepomniachtchi, the two finalists of the 12th World Blitz Chess Championship, being still tied after three tie-breakers, gave rise to an unprecedented outcome as they asked and obtained — on Carlsen’s suggestion — that the title should be shared. FIDE President Arkady Vladimirovich Dvorkovich welcomed the request and proclaimed them both World Champions! The whole story sounds like a terrifying display of strength — not only in chess — by Carlsen, who succeeded in imposing his authority upon FIDE, which was not appreciated by many of his colleagues. But he didn’t care about it. “It feels very good to share gold with Nepo. We reached a point where it had been a long day. We played many games, we had three draws and I felt that I could keep playing. But it was a nice solution to share the win, it was a good way to end it”, Carlsen told to the Norwegian media NRK. For the second time in less than a week, President of Russia Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin took pen and paper and wrote a congratulatory telegram to a Russian World Champion, who “deservedly became World Champion, sharing this honourable title with the virtuoso Magnus Carlsen. Well done!”.
As for the other half of the sky, in the 10th Women’s World Blitz Chess Championship, 居文君 (Jū Wénjūn), the queen of 上海 (Shànghǎi), did not indulge in such magnanimity with 雷挺婕 (Léi Tǐngjié). Once again she defeated her long-time friend (frenemy) in a final, if not classical, to win her first world title in the blitz specialty.
One final consideration concerns the fact or detail that this time, with the exception of Carlsen, all the World Rapid and Blitz Champions belong to countries which are members of the Asian Chess Federation. If anything, it should be something for Western supremacists to think about.

The Year That Follows

Don’t blindly believe anything you hear or read from the mainstream media, Edna. As Hans Christian Andersen said, “The year begins when the spring comes; that’s the course of nature, and that’s the way I reckon”

Artwork © Thayssa Telles Arts (@thayssatelles)