BCH

CIPC #106: Ao no ekusoshisuto, Chapter 15

February 12, 2019

Today I’m absolutely in terra incognita, but sooner or later it had to happen. In this day and age, one cannot be a critic of popular culture without ending up talking about manga. So here we go. Okay. Well. Today’s subject is some kind of mango. Sorry, manga. Which is a general term for Japanese comics. That, in a nutshell, was pretty much my complete knowledge about the topic, so I headed to Wikipedia. Apparently, the title of the series means Blue exorcist and, presumably, it deals with an exorcist who’s blue –  whether that’s blue in the literal or figurative sense, or – God forbid, both – I don’t know. And frankly, I don’t care. The only thing I care about is: where is the chess? How is the chess? Where does it come from? Where does it go? 1

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CIPC #105: The bone collector

February 6, 2019

The bone collector. With a title like that, who can blame me that I was expecting a thrilling tale of ruthless rivalry, fierce competition, and enormous piles of bones in a nice Victorian setting, in short, that I was expecting an in-depth documentary about the Marsh and Cope bone wars? But, alas, it was not to be. There are no triceratopses, no allosauruses, in fact, no palaeontological digs at all. There is just a dime-a-dollar giallo knock-of with a magnificently stupid plot centred around Denzel Washington playing a quadriplegic ex-police detective who guides a rather clueless patrol officer (Angelina Jolie) through crime scene after crime scene in search for the murderer du jour because he thinks she’s talented, for a reason which remains more of a mystery than who the killer is.1 At the beginning of the film, before the bodies start hitting the floor (or river, as the case may be), Denzel spends his time playing chess with his voice controlled computer.

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CIPC #104: The Strokes, You only live once

January 29, 2019

This is perhaps the hardest one I have ever talked about. But it’s not my fault! No, the culprit is Julian Casablancas,1 or whoever came up with the name of this band. The Strokes! I understand that they were probably just scrambling to find a noun X which had not been used as The X’s for a band name, but why did they have to go with stroke? Was meningitis already taken? Was conjugacy class not an option? That would be perfect for a group with five members! But no, they had to pick stroke and now I have to somehow avoid making a different strokes for different folks’ joke. Well that’s just great.

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CIPC #103: Bertina Henrichs, Die Schachspielerin

January 22, 2019

The long-time readers of this blog might remember how, quite a while ago, I made a few blog posts about my impressions while watching movies which heavily feature chess. I have also made some others about books. Why not combine both types of blog post? Why not read a book in which chess plays an important role an write down my thoughts while reading? There a few such books, but the most famous ones, like Nabokov’s Luzhin Defense and Zweig’s Schachnovelle carefully avoid the sort of ridiculousness which makes for good blog posts. This is probably not going to be a problem in today’s subject, Bertina Henrichs Die Schachspielerin.1 It was translated by Claudia Steinitz, whose name is probably the closest connection this book has to actual chess. Let’s see what happens. Apart from spoilers, that is.

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CIPC #102: Grand master rabbit

January 15, 2019

I’m not really sure were this cartoon comes from. It can easily be found on YouTube or Dailymotion, but none of the about five bazillion uploads seems to be the original. The internet movie database remains completely silent on its existence. According to the Looney tunes fanwiki, one of the few places that mentions it at all, it appeared first on the official Looney Tunes website somewhere in the early 2000s, but who made it, where, and when exactly I have no idea. The animation is certainly not up to par with the old cartoons from, say, the fifties, it is shorter than the oldies, and many of the jokes are straight copies from the golden age of the Looney Tunes but, as far as webcartoons go, you could do a lot worse.

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CIPC #101: Boyz II Men, Motownphilly

January 8, 2019

In the beginning of the nineties, things were changing fast in the popular music scene. Hair metal and soft rock were going out of style fast, grunge and R&B were taking over. One of the big new names in the latter genre was the ridiculously named Boyz II Men, a group from Philadelphia that attacked the American billboard with the equally ridiculously titled song called Motownphilly in 1991. The main premise of this song is that Motownphilly is back again, a claim on which considerable suspicion is cast in view of the fact that Motownphilly never really was; motown, a contraction of motor and town, as a genre stems from Detroit, not Philadelphia.

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CIPC extra: The best and worst of 2018

January 1, 2019

Another year, another fiftyish posts, another sample set of qualities of blog posts, approximately normally distributed around a far too low mean. Since it is the time of the season for low-effort blog posts, I will parade what I think are the four best and the four worst of these posts in front of you. Why four? Well, why the bloody hell not? And now I will waffle no longer, lest I end up on next year’s list.

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CIPC #100: Vacanze di natale ’91

December 25, 2018

As the number of blog posts you’ve written increases, the speed at which you encounter nice, round numbers unfortunately decreases, so you have to savour the occasion. What better subject, then, for this memorable occasion – a square followed by a prime! And it’s Christmas! And it’s the last post of the year! – than a dime-a-dozen mediocre Christmas comedy in Italian from the early nineties that everyone has forgotten? A capital idea! And nothing fits the bill as well as the critically ignored Vacanze di natale from 1991, a movie so obscure that, at the time of writing, the English Wikipedia doesn’t even have a page on it.

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CIPC #99: The supersizers eat… the fifties

December 18, 2018

I have a rare psychological condition were I have an immediate antipathy against almost anything with punctuation in the title.1 Some things – like periods, colons, and apostrophes – usually get a pass, but if there is a question mark, an exclamation mark, or, as in today’s subject, ellipsis, I immediately become suspicious. How is this questionable? Why does this need to be exclaimed? What has been ellipsed? But I have to grudgingly admit that the show is better than its title. It is about food in different periods of history and this particular episode deals with the fifties. The hosts Giles Coren and Sue Perkins relive the experience of a middle class British family in one of the early holiday camps that sprang up everywhere around that time. In the garden, there is a chessboard.

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CIPC #98: Guido Metsers, Prins Maurits

December 11, 2018

IJzendijke – who can honestly claim to ever have heard of the name? A small Zealandian townlet, little more than a hamlet, tucked away near the Scheldt in the Dutch bible belt, with a mill, a chapel, a pond, and a square with a statue adorned. It depicts prince Maurits who, though the rain may pour its saltless tears on his face, will always remain unfazed.1 Below you’ll find a picture of this stern-looking figure, as he fights off the Spanish horde on the sixty four squares of the board. But after that I will stop rhyming, as my interest in that’s declining.2

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