June 20, 2008
The Mozart of Chess, Rising
[Magnus] Carlsen's winning surge now [in] all the big elite events of the first half of the year—Corus, Morelia/Linares, the Fide Grand Prix in Baku, and now Aerosvit—is simply remarkable. No teenager has ever performed at this high a level in the game. Not even former world champion legends such as Garry Kasparov and Bobby Fischer—Carlsen is way ahead of their teenage feats.
Simon and Mitsuko
I lived in Birmingham, England in 1985 when Simon Rattle was the new conductor of the CBSO (City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra). I was overwhelmed by how well that orchestra played back then, and told Ray Jones, a physicist at the Univ of Birmingham, about it. He nodded knowingly (I didn't know he had season tickets) and we went to quite a few of the CBSO performances together over that year. That same year Ray got me into a BBC studio where we saw Mitsuko Uchida play for a live radio program. There were only fifteen to twenty people present in the room, and I decided in that hour that Mitsuko Uchida would be one of my favorite people for the rest of my life.
Twenty three years later Rattle is Sir Simon and the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and Uchida's still rocking and rolling.
Check out the expressions on Uchida in the first minute and also at 7:30 or so.
Reinkings in the Friday NYT
City on the Trans-Canada Highway (11). I wrote in MEDICINEBOW. It should have been MEDICINEHAT. [ Hmmm—is there a Medicine Bow? Now that I'm done with the crossword, I allow myself to Google, and yes indeed. I'm surprised to learn that The Hat has a population of 60,000.
1.0 (8) Scribbled in BADGRADE on the strength of a couple crossings, but had to go back to DAVERAGE, eventually.
Cricket championships (5). Whoops — I wrote it RESTS. It's TESTS. Who's keeping score anyway. Who's going to know. It crosses Classless one? for which I guess the answer is TUTEE.
Came back together (6). I have REUNED written in, but is that a word?
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