Artwork © mickeyphantom14
Saturday, January 4, 2025
Happily Ever After
On Saturday, January 4, 2025, in a traditional ceremony (jeans not allowed) held at Holmenkollen Chapel in Oslo, Norway, five-time World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen tied the knot with her fiancée Ella Victoria Malone.
Newlyweds challenge the kiss between Jack Dawson and Rose DeWitt Bukater at the prow of the Titanic under a golden glowing sunset. Photo © NTB/AFP via Getty Images. |
Snakes in the Wood
It’s almost time to say goodbye to the Year of the Dragon (龙) and welcome the arrival of the Year of the Wood Snake (蛇) that will begin on Wednesday, January 29, 2025. If one believes in horoscopes, it is noteworthy that J. K. Rowling is a Wood Snake and that Voldemort’s most beloved companion, Nagini, was a woman turned into a snake due to a curse for twenty years.
Barbarella fends off killer snakes in a panel from Jean-Claude Forest’s original strip. |
Friday, January 3, 2025
Thursday, January 2, 2025
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.
Wednesday, January 1, 2025
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.
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.
