This and that

1. The 13th Annual Charles Drafts Open will be held this coming Saturday, August 19th at the BCC. More recent readers of the blog not familiar with the Charles Drafts story can read it here.


2. Chessbase has a story about a tournament held on mud flats during low tide. Players attempt to finish their games quickly, before the tide rushes in and drowns them. This got me thinking about an entire new category of chess -- Adventure Tournaments. Some of my initial ideas include matches held in a lion cage at the zoo, tournaments held in active war zones (e.g., 2006 Beirut Summer Open; did they hold a tournament in Sarajevo during the Bosnian conflict?), and blitz at the summit of Mount Everest. Any other ideas?


3. At Chess for Blood, Patrick is out for some of Jeremy Silman's. He reviews Silman's 'The Amateur's Mind', calling it "the most condescending book ever."


4. The Hungarian Knight has some fun with Google search referrals to his blog. At times, we've had some similar amusement here at BCC Weblog.


5. I found a new way to use the Google Blog Search Engine to search for chess-related blogs and discovered about a dozen new ones (new to me, anyway) -- mostly French and Spanish ones. Check out the listings for recent updates. At the same time, we say goodbye to ten bloggers who have become estranged from their keyboards -- most notably, Knight Errant Old Fart; sidebar residents Perceptual Pawn and Der Alter Goniff; King's Gambit, Delaware Chess Weblog, and The Chessic Musings of the Manley Nick.
   
   Update: Still coming across new finds with the search engine approach including a new blog from GM Nigel Davies, a new Knight who seems to have been previously discovered by Generalkaia, and a few others now in the general listings.