Year: 2008

Welcome to New York. Although, if you’re a family visiting on a shopping trip, then you’d better be careful.

And just as a footnote to my post about Mr. Cruise’s eloquent demonstration of his self-delusion; Julian Baggini asks: Is Cruise Really So Crazy? Well of course, the answer is no, when you consider that the Vatican has a Chief Exorcist, who is clearly as deluded as Tom Cruise. It’s just that the roots of Father Gabriele Amorth’s delusion go back a lot longer. That’s why it’s called a religion and not a cult. Otherwise, not too much to choose between them, I’d say. As Ophelia says of Father Amorth’s writings: "This is nasty, bad, harmful stuff, and the Vatican should be ashamed of itself. It never is, but it should be."  

Johann Hari has an interesting interview with Nathan Shaked, Mr. International Gay for 2007. He’s not what you might think.

 

Oh, and after you’ve read that, you should check out his interview wih Peter Tatchell, a secular saint.

It seems as though the newspapers have been full of stories about the death of Bobby Fischer this week (I count eight in The Guardian alone), and I’m slightly at a loss to understand why. Perhaps it’s the horrendous contrast between his sheer genius at chess, and the fact that he was so piss-poor at playing the game of being a human. It may be that we look at examples like Fischer where the gift of genius comes at the cost of simple humanity and give heartfelt thanks that we were not cursed with such a gift. 

 

Reading some of this week’s articles about Fischer written by writers on the game of chess, I was also somewhat reminded of Charles Harness’ short story The Chess Players (found in his book The Rose).  It’s about a group of chess players who critique the abilities of one of their number, completely oblivious to the fact that he is, in fact, a pet rat. The only important thing, in their eyes, is whether he is any good as a chess player.

I’ve just come across a blog apparently written by a gay Kenyan man. What took me aback somewhat was the entry where he says that commenting on politics was outside of his blog philosophy. Part of me says that I can understand that, but part of me screams that nothing, but nothing, is ever outside of politics. It’s what we are as humans. Politics may be described as religion, or society, but at ground zero – it’s politics. It’s how humans rub up against other humans both physically and mentally.