"Quadibloc" wrote in message
...
On Apr 2, 8:15 am, "Chess One" wrote:
We just had to stop it. 1,000 phone calls and e-mail in 12 hours,
including
the New York Times... ggg

Poor old Hodmezovasarhely!

I thought I stocked it pretty well, with

an old castle
of the Austrio-Hungarian empire
stone chalets
wonderful gardens!
artists and musicians

nuns!
[always add nuns]
all that was missing was the perpetual motion

Naturally MICE was a guffaw.

Oh, so there were hints in the article about going back to Hungary
that indicated it was not true.

I remember bumping across a web site that is selling a book on how to
snap up a castle for a bargain price in Eastern Europe.

Actually, Hohn, when the Wall came down I was working with an East German
physicist [electro-optics] and he told me that the communists left the
infra-structure of old East Germany so 'uninproved' that entire villages and
towns were still essentially medieval in character - and West Germans and
others were touring the place with amazement, and with check-books, snapping
up properties. He himself was content to trade-up his Trabi for 2 Mercs.


But was it that... or, from your description, the comic book "Girl
Genius" - that inspired the spoof?

I see on her site she is wearing a T-shirt that says "Chess Mom".
Going back to Hungary to live in a larger house... if the "true" part
was that she is expecting a new arrival, I will congratulate her.

Not my place to announce what is or is not true in the spoof - though more
than one item of it is definitely true! And that is [BTW] not Sam Sloan's
idea that /I/ can resign Susan Polgar from the USCF board. snort

I think the other idea in the spoof was for a chess-training 'place' to
exist - not unlike what Lazslo Nagy has done in Budapest in creating his
norm-tournaments which attract players from all over the world.

But a slight adjustment on that idea is to have a chess-//training// place
for serious study. About 8 years ago I knew a guy associated with USCF who
would have donated property and buildings to such a program - but our
estimate was that to bring it up to standard and also accommodate enough
people would have cost too much.

I also note that the Brits [or rather the English Chess Fed] have created a
permanent chess studio for themselves, where games and training material can
be recorded, formatted and re-broadcast as on-demand digital video &c.

Cordially, Phil Innes

John Savard