Brownian Motion

This Organissimo member, ahead of the pack at the start of final Jeopardy, missed the question whose answer was "Who was Chatterley" and came in second.

Little Jazz Pills? I could use a vial of those!

I'll bet you it was Cannady. I've heard him on record once, and he sounded a lot like Charlie. I think he may have briefly replaced Christian in Goodman's band. You're really giving my memory a workout. He may appear on the recordings Jerry Newman did of Roy Eldridge; the old Xanadu issue. edit: I tried to confirm with Google but couldn't.

I'll bet you it was Cannady. I've heard him on record once, and he sounded a lot like Charlie. I think he may have briefly replaced Christian in Goodman's band.

I'm listening to these sides as I type. I'll bet it's George Barnes.

Does anyone have an educated guess on the identity of the guitarist on this Benny Carter session? Very much a Charlie Christian acolyte... Maybe Mary Osborne? Benny Carter Quintet Benny Carter (as), Sonny White (p), unknown (g), (b), (d) Los Angeles, April 22, 1946 MOONGLOW (3:26) (**) MOONGLOW (2:51) (*) MOONGLOW (2:53) (**) GIVE ME SOMETHING TO REMEMBER YOU BY (2:57) (**) GIVE ME SOMETHING TO REMEMBER YOU BY (2:47) (*) LADY BE GOOD (2:33) (**) LADY BE GOOD (3:00) (**) LADY BE GOOD (2:38) (*) DEEP PURPLE (3:59) (**) DEEP PURPLE (3:07) (**) DEEP PURPLE (3:11) (*)

Secrets of Cambridge 'porn' library revealed By Stephen Adams Last Updated: 6:29am GMT 14/02/2008 For decades generations of Cambridge undergraduates have fantasised about a secret stash of Victorian pornography in the university's library tower. # Stephen Fry's take on the 'pornography library' Many have tried to gain access to the chamber to uncover its illicit secrets. So intrigued was Stephen Fry by the collection that he wrote about it in his first novel, The Liar. Secrets of Cambridge 'porn' library revealed The Victorian treasure trove in the Cambridge library turned out to be books on marriage and the etiquette of romance Despite the brilliant scientists, spies and politicians that the university has produced, no student is believed to have gained access to the closely-guarded hideaway. But now it seems all their efforts have been in vain. For all that is contained within "this magnificent erection", as Neville Chamberlain is said to have described the 1934 tower, are distinctly restrained guides on the finer points of Victorian romantic etiquette. According to the university's authorities, the 17 floors of the 157ft-high tower contain nothing more racy than books with titles such as The Lover's Guide to Courtship (Illustrated). Vanessa Lacey, the manager of the Cambridge University Library Tower Project, said: "The traditional student rumour is that the contents of the tower are pornographic. "In fact we now know it to be a treasure trove for people who want to know more about Victorian society, and among the books are these late 19th and early 20th century lifestyle guides designed to teach young couples the art of courting. At the time they were acquired, they were not considered the sort of thing that serious students should be reading, so they were put away. advertisement "Many of the 200,000 books in the tower have barely been read and some were never opened, but now they give us a fascinating insight into the life and society of the time." The university has made the disclosure because it is in the process of putting all the titles online. The books - likely to be of interest to historians rather than excitable students - that have been unearthed include A Golden Guide To Matrimony (1882). It advises: "It should be the young man's duty to make the first overtures towards a closer relationship than that of mere friendship. "Young women cannot be too reserved in this respect. Prudence is of the highest importance." Other titles include Flirting Made Easy and Courtship And Marriage, which sensibly warns: "The young man who marries not, except in a few exceptional cases arising out of ill health, deformity, malformation, or great perversity of temper, or eccentricity of character, fails in one of the most palpable duties of life." Students of pornography can take heart, however, because more recent erotica is kept there thanks to its copyright library status. Mrs Lacey said: "There's plenty of pornography in the library which is more recent. "People can come and have a look at it - for their research. But there's nothing terribly racy from the 19th century. What we found is the Mills and Boon of the era." Publishers wishing to reproduce photographs on this page should phone 44 (0) 207 931 2921 or email syndication@telegraph.co.uk Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright

Part of the problem is that our pop culture floods our minds with oceans of useless information. And we glory in it! http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=18930

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/12...tml?ref=opinion A Tyrannical Romance If Charles Darwin were alive today, he’d be turning 199: like Abraham Lincoln, he was born on Feb. 12 1809. I considered observing their joint birthday with a discussion of slave making in ants, but rejected that idea in favor of another. For later this week is another Big Day: the feast of St. Valentine. With apologies to Lincoln, I’ve decided to hold a Darwin-Valentine celebration by revealing one of my more tyrannical romantic fantasies. I should say, by way of preamble, that Darwin contributed far more to biology than the “Origin of Species,” in which he laid out how evolution by natural selection works, and the evidence for it at the time. He also wrote (and this list is not complete): a treatise on the formation of coral reefs, which is still held to be correct; a landmark work on carnivorous plants; a definitive treatise on barnacles, extinct and extant; a study of how earthworms plow and aerate soil; and a fascinating speculation on the evolution of emotion in humans and other animals. And that’s not all. One of his other major works, “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,” includes a huge compilation of the sexual decorations and displays of animals, from the jaws of stag-beetles to the tail of the Argus pheasant, which far exceeds that of the peacock in absurd magnificence. From his study of all this, Darwin began to elucidate systematic patterns and principles of the evolution of courtship and sexual behavior. In particular, he developed the concept of sexual selection, which is the idea that cumbersome ornaments like big tails can evolve, even if they make the bearer less likely to survive, if the opposite sex (usually the female) finds them attractive. In doing so, he founded one of the most important and successful branches of evolutionary research. We now have a robust understanding of how sexual pressures — the pressures to find, impress, and seduce a mate — influence the evolution of males and females. So much so that if you tell me a fact, such as the average size difference between males and females in a species, or the proportion of a male’s body taken up by his testes, I can tell you what the mating system is likely to be. For example, where males are much bigger than females, fighting between males has been important — which often means that the biggest males maintain a harem. If testes are relatively large, females probably have sex with several males in the course of a single breeding episode. The skeletal remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex. (Credit: Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press) These forces are so reliable that, if only we could determine the sex of dinosaur fossils, we could begin to infer their mating habits. But alas. Unless the animal died while heavy with eggs, as one oviraptor obligingly did, determining the sex of a dinosaur is close to impossible. At one point, it was thought that the shape of a particular bone at the base of the tail might indicate sex; but a recent analysis has shown it does not. Now the best guesses come from subtle differences in structure of the bone in the hind legs. For the time being, then, fossils are stonily silent about the dinosaurs’ private lives, their methods of wooing, the exuberance of their song-and-dance routines. Which brings me to my tyrannical fantasy. I want to take a journey 68 million years back in time to see a Tyrannosaurus rex couple mating. What was it like? Did they trumpet and bellow and stamp their feet? Did they thrash their enormous tails? Did he bite her neck in rapture and exude a musky scent? Somehow, I imagine that when two T. rex got it on, the earth shook for miles around. And if I could only take this journey, I could answer a question that sometimes bothers me. Did T. rex have a penis? Did he even, as lizards do, have two? I ask the question not out of prurience, but because it’s a matter of scientific interest. There are a couple of reasons why. First, the penis is another important indicator of the mating system. In species where females usually mate with a single male during a breeding episode, penises tend to be small and uninteresting. In those where females mate with several males (whether by choice or by force), penises are typically larger, and come with fancy decorations such as grooves, nobbles, and spikes. Second, the question of the dinosaur penis provides an exercise in evolutionary inference. The reason we don’t know whether T. rex had one is that the organ is generally too soft to leave a fossil trace. (There’s an exception to this: some mammals have a bone in their penis, the os penis or baculum. This can fossilize. Humans are unusual among primates in not having one; in case you’re wondering, it’s not clear whether the bone plays a role in maintaining erections.) Moreover, whether a male has a penis at all varies from one group to the next. Male salamanders, for instance, don’t: they deposit sperm on the ground and the female collects it. Among birds, penises are rare: ostriches, emus, ducks, geese and swans are among the few. The rest just have a cloaca — an all-purpose opening also used for urination, defecation and, in the female, laying eggs. To copulate, two birds bring their cloacae together in what’s called a cloacal kiss. So what can we say about dinosaurs? My guess is that the males had members — but it’s an educated guess. It’s based on an analysis of dinosaur relations. Two living groups are most closely related to dinosaurs. One is the crocodiles. Male crocodiles have a penis — just one — which, most of the time, they keep tucked inside their cloacae. (In most species of crocodile, it’s hard to determine the sex of living animals without an intimate exam, never mind dead ones.) Compared with the mammalian penis, the crocodile’s has an oddity: sperm is transported along an external groove, rather than through an internal tube. The other group related to dinosaurs is the birds. Indeed, to be strict about it, birds are dinosaurs. If you look at a family tree of dinosaurs, birds, and other reptiles, you see that the lineage that evolved into dinosaurs split off from the lineage that evolved into crocodiles. Birds, in contrast, evolved directly from a dinosaur lineage. Birds are more closely related to T. rex than they are to any living form. Birds themselves divide into two main groups, formally known as the palaeognathous and the neognathous. The palaeos comprises the big flightless birds such as ostriches, emus, rheas, and cassowaries, as well as kiwis and an obscure (but flying) group of south American birds, the tinamous; the neos covers everything else. The palaeos have penises; like crocodiles, they keep them tucked into their cloacae. Again like crocodiles, the organ has an external groove for sperm. What’s more, the lineage leading to the other endowed birds, the ducks, geese, and swans, appears to have split off from that of the other neos relatively early. This strongly suggests that the ancestor of all birds had a penis, and that at some point early in the evolution of the neognathous birds, the penis got lost. Since crocodiles have one, and ancestral birds almost certainly did, and since the two groups have such similar genital morphology, I think it’s a safe bet that the lineages between crocodiles and birds — that is, dinosaurs — had one, too. Now, the next question — what did it look like? Was it large or small? Fancy or plain? I wouldn’t like to guess. The blue-billed duck (Oxyura australis) is just a little fellow — he weighs less than one kilogram (two pounds) — but his penis measures 28.5 centimeters (11 inches), and it’s covered with knobs. In contrast, the mighty ostrich (Struthio camelus), which can weigh as much as 160 kilograms (350 pounds), has a penis that’s a mere 20 centimeters (8 inches) long. But at least it’s bright red. If I only had that time machine . . . ***************************************** NOTES: The text of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, along with many of Darwin’s other works, is available from Project Gutenberg. The relationship between male body size and fighting, and between relative testes size, penis morphology, and female mating patterns, is well known and can be found in any recent book on animal sexual behaviour, including my own (see chapters 1, 2 and 4, and the references therein). For difficulties in sexing dinosaurs, and for the uselessness of the bones at the base of the tail, see Erickson, G. M., Lappin, A. K., and Larson, P. 2005. “Androgynous rex — the utility of chevrons for determining the sex of crocodilians and non-avian dinosaurs.” Zoology 108: 277-286. For a female dinosaur heavy with eggs, see Sato, T., Cheng, Y-N., Wu, X-C., Zelenitsky, D. K., and Hsiao, Y-F. 2005. “A pair of shelled eggs inside a female dinosaur.” Science 308: 375. For a method of sexing dinosaurs through differences in legbone structure, see Schweitzer, M. H., Wittmeyer, J. L., and Horner, J. R. 2005. “Gender-specific reproductive tissue in ratites and Tyrannosaurus rex.” Science 308: 1456-1460. The relationships between crocodiles, birds, and dinosaurs are well known; but see, for example, Padian, K., de Ricqlès, A. J., and Horner, J. R. 2001. “Dinosaurian growth rates and bird origins.” Nature 412: 405-408. For ducks, geese, and swans having an early split from the other neognathous birds, see Livezey, B. C., and Zusi, R. L. 2007. “Higher-order phylogeny of modern birds (Theropoda, Aves: Neornithes) based on comparative anatomy. II. Analysis and Discussion.” Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 149: 1-95. For the penis of crocodiles see the extended version of: Ziegler, T. and Olbort, S. 2007. “Genital Structures and Sex Identification in Crocodiles.” Crocodile Specialist Group Newsletter 26:16-17. For the distribution of the penis in birds, for a description of its structure, and for the measurements of various ducks, see Coker, C. R., McKinney, F., Hays, H., Briggs, S., and Cheng, K. M. 2002. “Intromittent organ morphology and testis size in relation to mating system in waterfowl.” The Auk 11

The bridge on the right is the Triborough Bridge, and on the left, I believe, is the Hell's Gate Bridge, a railroad bridge.

I'm pretty sure that the eve of a recession is the wrong time to launch such an exciting new product line...

I disagree. It's a smart and politically astute response.

No two ways about it. I think that most folks on the board as youths took a risk or maybe several that in retrospect appear lacking in common sense; I know I did. Luckily I'm still here to pay tribute to the recklessness of youth.

And "Ride the High Country", the best western I've ever seen.

The New York Times February 2, 2008 Motivated by a Tax, Irish Spurn Plastic Bags By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL DUBLIN — There is something missing from this otherwise typical bustling cityscape. There are taxis and buses. There are hip bars and pollution. Every other person is talking into a cellphone. But there are no plastic shopping bags, the ubiquitous symbol of urban life. In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts. Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog. “When my roommate brings one in the flat it annoys the hell out of me,” said Edel Egan, a photographer, carrying groceries last week in a red backpack. Drowning in a sea of plastic bags, countries from China to Australia, cities from San Francisco to New York have in the past year adopted a flurry of laws and regulations to address the problem, so far with mixed success. The New York City Council, for example, in the face of stiff resistance from business interests, passed a measure requiring only that stores that hand out plastic bags take them back for recycling. But in the parking lot of a Superquinn Market, Ireland’s largest grocery chain, it is clear that the country is well into the post-plastic-bag era. “I used to get half a dozen with every shop. Now I’d never ever buy one,” said Cathal McKeown, 40, a civil servant carrying two large black cloth bags bearing the bright green Superquinn motto. “If I forgot these, I’d just take the cart of groceries and put them loose in the boot of the car, rather than buy a bag.” Gerry McCartney, 50, a data processor, has also switched to cloth. “The tax is not so much, but it completely changed a very bad habit,” he said. “Now you never see plastic.” In January almost 42 billion plastic bags were used worldwide, according to reusablebags.com; the figure increases by more than half a million bags every minute. A vast majority are not reused, ending up as waste — in landfills or as litter. Because plastic bags are light and compressible, they constitute only 2 percent of landfill, but since most are not biodegradable, they will remain there. In a few countries, including Germany, grocers have long charged a nominal fee for plastic bags, and cloth carrier bags are common. But they are the exception. In the past few months, several countries have announced plans to eliminate the bags. Bangladesh and some African nations have sought to ban them because they clog fragile sewerage systems, creating a health hazard. Starting this summer, China will prohibit sellers from handing out free plastic shopping bags, but the price they should charge is not specified, and there is little capacity for enforcement. Australia says it wants to end free plastic bags by the end of the year, but has not decided how. Efforts to tax plastic bags have failed in many places because of heated opposition from manufacturers as well as from merchants, who have said a tax would be bad for business. In Britain, Los Angeles and San Francisco, proposed taxes failed to gain political approval, though San Francisco passed a ban last year. Some countries, like Italy, have settled for voluntary participation. But there were no plastic bag makers in Ireland (most bags here came from China), and a forceful environment minister gave reluctant shopkeepers little wiggle room, making it illegal for them to pay for the bags on behalf of customers. The government collects the tax, which finances environmental enforcement and cleanup programs. Furthermore, the environment minister told shopkeepers that if they changed from plastic to paper, he would tax those bags, too. While paper bags, which degrade, are in some ways better for the environment, studies suggest that more greenhouse gases are released in their manufacture and transportation than in the production of plastic bags. Today, Ireland’s retailers are great promoters of taxing the bags. “I spent many months arguing against this tax with the minister; I thought customers wouldn’t accept it,” said Senator Feargal Quinn, founder of the Superquinn chain. “But I have become a big, big enthusiast.” Mr. Quinn is also president of EuroCommerce, a group representing six million European retailers. In that capacity, he has encouraged a plastic bag tax in other countries. But members are not buying it. “They say: ‘Oh, no, no. It wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t be acceptable in our country,’ ” Mr. Quinn said. As nations fail to act decisively, some environmentally conscious chains have moved in with their own policies. Whole Foods Market announced in January that its stores would no longer offer disposable plastic bags, using recycled paper or cloth instead, and many chains are starting to charge customers for plastic bags. But such ad hoc efforts are unlikely to have the impact of a national tax. Mr. Quinn said that when his Superquinn stores tried a decade ago to charge 1 cent for plastic bags, customers rebelled. He found himself standing at the cash register buying bags for customers with change from his own pocket to prevent them from going elsewhere. After five years of the plastic bag tax, Ireland has changed the image of cloth bags, a feat advocates hope to achieve in the United States. Vincent Cobb, the president of reusablebags.com, who founded the company four years ago to promote the issue, said: “Using cloth bags has been seen as an extreme act of a crazed environmentalist. We want it to be seen as something a smart, progressive person would carry.” Some things worked to Ireland’s advantage. Almost all markets are part of chains that are highly computerized, with cash registers that already collect a national sales tax, so adding the bag tax involved a minimum of reprogramming, and there was little room for evasion. The country also has a young, flexible population that has proved to be a good testing ground for innovation, from cellphone services to nonsmoking laws. Despite these favorable conditions, Ireland still ended up raising the bag tax 50 percent, after officials noted that consumption was rising slightly. Ireland has moved on with the tax concept, proposing similar taxes on customers for A.T.M. receipts and chewing gum. (The sidewalks of Dublin are dotted with old wads.) The gum tax has been avoided for the time being because the chewing gum giant Wrigley agreed to create a public cleanup fund as an alternative. This year, the government plans to ban conventional light bulbs, making only low-energy, long-life fluorescent bulbs available.

It's not a myth. It used to be a traveler's right, until airline deregulation during the Carter administration. Now it's one of those quaint notions from the past, like the notion that high fidelity is superior to low fidelity, or that sewn bindings in books last longer than glued bindings.

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By January 29, 2008 Man Rides Lawn Mower to Liquor Store By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 12:49 p.m. ET ADRIAN, Mich. (AP) -- A man was charged with drunken driving after going through two bottles of wine, cutting through a snowstorm on his lawn mower and riding down the center of the street to reach a liquor store, authorities said. Police found Frank Kozumplik, 49, homeward bound on a John Deere tractor Saturday night, toting four bottles of wine in a paper bag, officials said. He told officers that his wife had taken their car to work, and that the mower was the only way he could reach the store, two miles from home. His blood alcohol level was 2 1/2 times Michigan's legal driving limit of 0.08 percent, police told WLEN-FM. They arrested him and confiscated the mower. Kozumplik declined to comment Monday night. Home

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By January 27, 2008 Art The Capa Cache By RANDY KENNEDY TO the small group of photography experts aware of its existence, it was known simply as “the Mexican suitcase.” And in the pantheon of lost modern cultural treasures, it was surrounded by the same mythical aura as Hemingway’s early manuscripts, which vanished from a train station in 1922. The suitcase — actually three flimsy cardboard valises — contained thousands of negatives of pictures that Robert Capa, one of the pioneers of modern war photography, took during the Spanish Civil War before he fled Europe for America in 1939, leaving behind the contents of his Paris darkroom. Capa assumed that the work had been lost during the Nazi invasion, and he died in 1954 on assignment in Vietnam still thinking so. But in 1995 word began to spread that the negatives had somehow survived, after taking a journey worthy of a John le Carré novel: Paris to Marseille and then, in the hands of a Mexican general and diplomat who had served under Pancho Villa, to Mexico City. And that is where they remained hidden for more than half a century until last month, when they made what will most likely be their final trip, to the International Center of Photography in Midtown Manhattan, founded by Robert Capa’s brother, Cornell. After years of quiet, fitful negotiations over what should be their proper home, legal title to the negatives was recently transferred to the Capa estate by descendants of the general, including a Mexican filmmaker who first saw them in the 1990s and soon realized the historical importance of what his family had. “This really is the holy grail of Capa work,” said Brian Wallis, the center’s chief curator, who added that besides the Capa negatives, the cracked, dust-covered boxes had also been found to contain Spanish Civil War images by Gerda Taro, Robert Capa’s partner professionally and at one time personally, and by David Seymour, known as Chim, who went on to found the influential Magnum photo agency with Capa. The discovery has sent shock waves through the photography world, not least because it is hoped that the negatives could settle once and for all a question that has dogged Capa’s legacy: whether what may be his most famous picture — and one of the most famous war photographs of all time — was staged. Known as “The Falling Soldier,” it shows a Spanish Republican militiaman reeling backward at what appears to be the instant a bullet strikes his chest or head on a hillside near Córdoba in 1936. When the picture was first published in the French magazine Vu, it created a sensation and helped crystallize support for the Republican cause. Though the Capa biographer Richard Whelan made a persuasive case that the photograph was not faked, doubts have persisted. In part this is because Capa and Taro made no pretense of journalistic detachment during the war — they were Communist partisans of the loyalist cause — and were known to photograph staged maneuvers, a common practice at the time. A negative of the shot has never been found (it has long been reproduced from a vintage print), and the discovery of one, especially in the original sequence showing all the images taken before and after the shot, could end the debate. But the discovery is being hailed as a huge event for more than forensic reasons. This is the formative work of a photographer who, in a century defined by warfare, played a pivotal role in defining how war was seen, bringing its horrors nearer than ever — “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” was his mantra — yet in the process rendering it more cinematic and unreal. (Capa, not surprisingly, later served a stint in Hollywood, befriending directors like Howard Hawks and romancing Ingrid Bergman.) Capa practically invented the image of the globe-trotting war photographer, with a cigarette appended to the corner of his mouth and cameras slung over his fatigues. His fearlessness awed even his soldier subjects, and between battles he hung out with Hemingway and Steinbeck and usually drank too much, seeming to pull everything off with panache. William Saroyan wrote that he thought of Capa as “a poker player whose sideline was picture-taking.” In a Warholian way that seems only to increase his contemporary allure, he also more or less invented himself. Born Endre Friedmann in Hungary, he and Taro, whom he met in Paris, cooked up the persona of Robert Capa — they billed him as “a famous American photographer” — to help them get assignments. He then proceeded to embody the fiction and make it true. (Taro, a German whose real name was Gerta Pohorylle, died in Spain in 1937 in a tank accident while taking pictures.) Curators at the International Center of Photography, who have begun a months-long effort to conserve and catalog the newly discovered work, say the full story of how the negatives, some 3,500 of them, made their way to Mexico may never be known. In 1995 Jerald R. Green, a professor at Queens College, part of the City University of New York, received a letter from a Mexico City filmmaker who had just seen an exhibition of Spanish Civil War photographs sponsored in part by the college. He wrote that he had recently come into possession of an archive of nitrate negatives that had been his aunt’s, inherited from her father, Gen. Francisco Aguilar Gonzalez, who died in 1967. The general had been stationed as a diplomat in the late 1930s in Marseille, where the Mexican government, a supporter of the Republican cause, had begun helping antifascist refugees from Spain immigrate to Mexico. From what experts have been able to piece together from archives and the research of Mr. Whelan, the biographer (who died last year), Capa apparently asked his darkroom manager, a Hungarian friend and photographer named Imre Weisz, known as Cziki, to save his negatives in 1939 or 1940, when Capa was in New York and feared his work would be destroyed. Mr. Weisz is believed to have taken the valises to Marseille, but was arrested and sent to an internment camp in Algiers. At some point the negatives ended up with General Aguilar Gonzalez, who carried them to Mexico, where he died in 1967. It is unclear whether the general knew who had taken the pictures or what they showed; but if he did, he appears never to have tried to contact Capa or Mr. Weisz, who coincidentally ended up living the rest of his life in Mexico City, where he married the Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. (Mr. Weisz died recently, in his 90s; Mr. Whelan interviewed him for his 1985 biography of Capa but did not elicit any information about the lost negatives.) “It does seem strange in retrospect that there weren’t more efforts to locate these things,” Mr. Wallis said. “But I think they just gave them up. They were lost in the war, like so many things.” When the photography center learned that the work might exist, it contacted the Mexican filmmaker and requested their return. But letters and phone conversations ended with no commitments, said Phillip S. Block, the center’s deputy director for programs, who added that he and others were not even sure at the beginning if the filmmaker’s claims were true, because no one had been shown the negatives. (Saying that the return of the negatives was a collective decision of the Aguilar Gonzalez family, the filmmaker asked not to be identified in this article and declined to be interviewed for it.) Meetings with the man were scheduled, but he would fail to appear. “And then communications broke off completely for who knows what reason,” Mr. Block said. Efforts were made from time to time, unsuccessfully, to re-establish contact. But when the center began to organize new shows of Capa and Taro’s war photography, which opened last September, it decided to try again, hoping that images from the early negatives could be incorporated into the shows. “He was never seeking money,” Mr. Wallis said of the filmmaker. “He just seemed to really want to make sure that these went to the right place.” Frustrated, the center enlisted the help of a curator and scholar, Trisha Ziff, who has lived in Mexico City for many years. After working for weeks simply to track down the reclusive man, she began what turned out to be almost a year of discussions about the negatives. “It wasn’t that he couldn’t let go of this,” said Ms. Ziff, interviewed by phone from Los Angeles, where she is completing a documentary about the widely reproduced image of Che Guevara based on a photograph by Alberto Korda. “I think it was that no one before me had thought this through in the way that something this sensitive needs to be thought through,” she said. The filmmaker worried in part that people in Mexico might be critical of the negatives’ departure to the United States, regarding the images as part of their country’s deep historical connection to the Spanish Civil War. “One had to respect and honor the dilemma he was in,” she said. In the end Ms. Ziff persuaded him to relinquish the work — “I suppose one could describe me as tenacious,” she said — while also securing a promise from the photography center to allow the filmmaker to use Capa images for a documentary he would like to make about the survival of the negatives, their journey to Mexico and his family’s role in saving them. “I see him quite regularly,” Ms. Ziff said, “and I think he feels at peace about this now.” In December, after two earlier good-faith deliveries of small numbers of negatives, the filmmaker finally handed Ms. Ziff the bulk of the work, and she carried it on a flight to New York herself. “I wasn’t going to put it in a FedEx box,” she said. “When I got these boxes it almost felt like they were vibrating in my hands,” she added. “That was the most amazing part for me.” Mr. Wallis said that while conservation experts from the George Eastman House in Rochester are only now beginning to assess the condition of the film, it appears to be remarkably good for 70-year-old nitrate stock stored in what essentially looks like confectionery boxes. “They seem like they were made yesterday,” he said. “They’re not brittle at all. They’re very fresh. We’ve sort of gingerly peeked at some of them just to get a sense of what’s on each roll.” And discoveries have already been made from the boxes — one red, one green and one beige — whose contents appear to have been carefully labeled in hand-drawn grids made by Mr. Weisz or another studio assistant. Researchers have come across pictures of Hemingway and of Federico García Lorca. The negative for one of Chim’s most famous Spanish Civil War photographs, showing a woman cradling a baby at her breast as she gazes up toward the speaker at a mass outdoor meeting in 1936, has also been found. “We were astonished to see it,” Mr. Wallis said. (The photograph, often seen as showing the woman worriedly scanning the skies for bombers, was mentioned by Susan Sontag in “Regarding the Pain of Others,” her 2003 reconsideration of ideas from her well-known treatise “On Photography,” a critical examination of images of war and suffering.) The research could bring about a reassessment of the obscure career of Taro, one of the first female war photographers, and could lead to the determination that some pictures attributed to Capa are actually by her. The two worked closely together and labeled some of their early work with joint credit lines, sometimes making it difficult to establish authorship conclusively, Mr. Wallis said. He added that there was even a remote possibility that “The Falling Soldier” could be by Taro and not Capa. “That’s another theory that’s been floated,” he said. “We just don’t know. To me that’s what’s so exciting about this material. There are so many questions and so many questions not even yet posed that they may answer.” Ultimately, Mr. Wallis said, the discovery is momentous because it is the raw material from the birth of modern war photography itself. “Capa established a mode and the method of depicting war in these photographs, of the photographer not being an observer but being in the battle, and that became the standard that audiences and editors from then on demanded,” he said. “Anything else, and it looked like you were just sitting on the sidelines. And that visual revolution he embodied took place right here, in these early pictures.”

Were you into the late-60s/early 70s syndicated ones with the outrageous psychedelic sets & hosted by Gary Moore? Those were my favorite! Nothing could beat Bud Collyer and his psychedelic bow ties. Looks as if Bud was into psychedelic ties before psychedelia was hip.

25,000 to 30,000 78s, many of them shellac, would weigh as much as a cement-mixer, and take weeks to pack securely enough to transport. And then you'd have to figure out what to do with them.

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I lived in Durham in the 1980s, and I used to see Peter Nemenyi pushing his shopping cart around town. I don't think he had a car. He was a gentle soul, apparently quite mad in his own right, but friendly and always smiling. Those who knew him a little better said that he had lived an interesting life, but I'm not sure anyone knew that he was Bobby Fischer's brother. When I read this piece earlier today my jaw dropped.

Life is not a board game Bobby Fischer could master chess - if fact, there still isn't a worthy successor. But the world has proved more unsettling, much as it was for his parents. On Sept. 11, 2001, if Americans had not been too shaken to notice, they would have found Bobby Fischer at last. The reclusive chess champion emerged to deliver a message, his voice crackling over the airwaves of an obscure Philippine radio station. "This is wonderful news," said Fischer, who turns 60 on March 9. "It's time for the (([expletive))] U.S. to get its head kicked in." Then he called for a military coup in the United States and a rounding up of Jews. It was awful and sad, all at once. Three decades ago, Fischer wrested the world chess title from the Soviets, single-handedly winning one of the great cultural battles of the Cold War. His name became part of the popular vocabulary - a kind of shorthand for brilliance. In chess clubs, young players wanted to be like Bobby. And why not? Over the black-and-white board, Fischer's genius was unmatched. He could play two dozen opponents in high-speed games and then recite every move from memory - hundreds of moves in total. He racked up unprecedented strings of victories against top grandmaster competitors. Where prudent players settled for draws, he fought to win every time. To this day, chess enthusiasts study Fischer's games with the loving intensity of art historians examining the impressionists' brush strokes. American chess has spent decades hunting for a worthy heir, its obsession captured in the 1993 movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. No one has come close. "There's nobody out there," says Jerry Hanken, a chess journalist. The grade school prodigy featured in Searching, Josh Waitzkin, "was going to be the next Bobby Fischer," Hanken says. "Well, Josh Waitzkin is a hell of a good player, but. . . ." Much of the Fischer story is well-known: his achievements, his games, his role as a Cold War hero, his abrupt disappearance from the game. But Fischer's personal life and family history have been largely concealed; even the identity of Fischer's real father was kept secret. That biography gives insight into both his genius and his disturbance. He comes from a family that included towering intellectuals and self-defeating iconoclasts, who were swept up in major currents of 20th-century history: the rise of fascism; the exodus of Jewish intellectuals from Europe; the Cold War sleuthing of an FBI determined to flush out Soviet spies. Paul F. Nemenyi - Fischer's father, though not listed on the birth certificate - was a Hungarian scientist with a gift for spatial relations, a gift that was clearly passed on to his son. Fischer's mother, Regina, spoke six languages and had studied medicine in Moscow during the Stalin era. A psychiatrist once diagnosed her as paranoid. This is a story about who Fischer really is, about his parents, his origins, his life. The story begins with two Jewish immigrants. They would meet. They would have an affair. Together, they would produce a troubled little boy who would become the best chess player who ever lived. It was 1942, and Regina Fischer was in Denver. Not for good, of course. It was only the latest stopping place for a restless woman who couldn't settle on a permanent home. She was taking classes at the University of Denver and working at a company that made chicken incubators. At 29, Regina had already lived in eight other cities, four other countries. This was her ninth job and her sixth university. She was the mother of a 5-year-old girl, and she was alone. Her husband, Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, was thousands of miles away in Santiago, Chile, barred by immigration authorities from entering the U.S. Into the void stepped Paul Nemenyi. To Nemenyi, Regina would have had obvious appeal. She was dark-haired, with a face that could appear boyishly sexy or plain and serious. There was no intellectual subject she couldn't master. Nemenyi himself was no heartthrob. He was 47, a Hungarian refugee and a theoretical engineer teaching at a nearby college. He made $165 a month and shuffled when he walked. An animal-rights supporter, he refused to wear wool to keep warm. Instead, he walked around in winter with his pajamas poking out from beneath his clothes. Still, he had a compelling mind. "He was smart, very, very smart," recalls Charlotte Truesdell, who worked at a research laboratory with Nemenyi in the '40s. "He had a strange kind of memory. He remembered things by their shapes." Regina and Nemenyi would have had much to talk about. Regina, daughter of a Polish dress- cutter, had moved to the United States with her family as a baby, but returned to Europe as a young adult and studied medicine. Like Nemenyi, she lived in Berlin in the early '30s, when Hitler was coming to power. It was there that she met Fischer, with whom she moved to Moscow, where they lived for several years under Stalin. In Colorado in 1942, Regina and Nemenyi were perhaps drawn together by their political beliefs. Nemenyi had told colleagues he preferred communism to capitalism; the FBI suspected Regina of communist sympathies. Regina didn't share the story of what happened between them even with some members of her family. But it seems clear that in the summer of '42 a romance bloomed. The next year, Bobby was born. There is a terse account of the liaison in the 900-page file that the FBI eventually compiled on Regina. The investigation began in 1942, when a baby-sitter found what she believed to be pro-communist letters belonging to Regina and turned them over to the FBI. Nemenyi told one FBI informant, a social worker, that he met Regina at the University of Denver. But whatever follows in the file, as released under the Freedom of Information Act, is censored by the FBI. When the narrative again picks up, suddenly Bobby is in the picture. The file says, "He ((Nemenyi)) advised he helped support the boy." But by the time of Bobby's birth, Regina had moved to Chicago, while Nemenyi was teaching in Rhode Island. She gave birth to her son alone, in a clinic for poor single mothers. And on the birth certificate, she listed Fischer as the father. She briefly considered putting her newborn son up for adoption. But in talking to a social worker - who would later share the story with the FBI - she broke down and cried, unable to go through with it. Regina then moved into a Chicago home for fatherless families. Ever the nonconformist, she led a rebellion among the other mothers, encouraging them to question the institution's rules. The home called the police, and Regina was arrested and charged with disturbing the peace. She was acquitted. A court-ordered psychological exam found her to be "paranoid" and "querulous." That description might also fit her son. Anyone can play chess. Few can play it well. The aim is simple: Put your opponent's king in check - under attack - in a spot where it can't escape. Checkmate. At the highest levels, the game calls for enormous powers of memory and calculation. No luck is involved. Talented players can look at a 64-square board crammed with a couple of dozen black and white pieces that move in different ways and can visualize how things might look 10 and 20 moves later (knight takes pawn; bishop to bishop-five; rook to king-one, check; king to bishop-one; bishop to king-three; bishop takes queen . . .). Fischer didn't even need a board to play. He could glance at a score sheet of a completed game, play out the moves in his head, and then demonstrate a swifter way to win. That's a different level of intelligence, a special sort of mind. A mind perhaps capable of overload. Some of history's greatest players suffered disabling breakdowns. Paul Morphy, a 19th-century New Orleanian of immense natural talent, could play multiple opponents "blindfolded" - without sight of a board. He kept each game in his head and called out the moves. Toward the end of his life, Morphy unraveled. He was often seen walking down Canal Street muttering to himself. He imagined that his father's estate was being drained by a relative, and would talk of little else. In an obituary, a newspaper speculated that his brain had overdosed on blindfold chess. There is no known clinical diagnosis of Fischer. But a disturbance seems indisputable. At the Marshall Chess Club in New York, chess is normally king. Sitting over inlaid chess tables, members come to play, to kibitz, to analyze games. But in the late '50s, the club's board of governors held an unusual meeting. The subject was Bobby Fischer. He had moved to Brooklyn with his family in 1949, at the age of 6, the same year he learned the game from his sister, Joan. At 11, by his own reckoning, he " just got good." His mother was often working double shifts as a private-duty nurse. Bobby spent countless hours at the home of Jack Collins, a chess teacher and mentor, whom he would even visit during his school lunch hour. "Joan was there, but mostly Bobby was just on his own and Regina was working, working, working all the time," says Allen Kaufman, a New York chess master and childhood friend of Fischer's. "She would work 24 hours at a time, and so Bobby was left rattling around, mostly on his own." At the Marshall Chess Club, no one doubted the teenager's talent. But his prickly behavior was alienating some of the wealthy sponsors whose support he would need to rise to the top. "Some of what he did was so outrageous it was decided maybe he had emotional problems," says Kaufman, who attended the meeting. What to do? Board members talked about finding a psychiatrist. They considered Reuben Fine, himself one of the giants of the game. Then someone raised a question: What if therapy worked? What if treatment sapped Fischer's drive to win, depriving the United States of its first homegrown world champ? Meeting adjourned. No one, Kaufman recalls, wanted to tamper with that finely tuned brain. Bobby's family worried about him even earlier than that. When Bobby was 3, Nemenyi visited a social worker to complain about the way Regina was raising him. By then, he and Regina had split, and he was living in Washington. Regina was "mentally upset," and Bobby was an "upset child," he told the caseworker, apparently without results. Two years later, Nemenyi sought help again, telling a social worker that his son was "not being brought up in desirable circumstances, due to the instability of the mother." Regina herself sought the help of social workers when Bobby was 14. She described him as "temperamental, unable to get along with others, without friends his age, and without any interests other than chess." But this was not just another kid absorbed in a hobby. This was the best chess player in the country. Bobby won the U.S. chess championship in 1957 - the same year Regina complained of his obsession - edging out 46-year-old Samuel Reshevsky, one of the greatest players the game has seen. A year earlier, Bobby had played a game of such depth and originality that it was dubbed "the game of the century." At 15, he would become a grandmaster, the youngest ever, and the best hope for dethroning the Soviets. Social workers offered guidance, but Regina wouldn't take it, preferring to work things out her own way. She did not succeed. Her relationship with Bobby got so bad that they could not live together. In 1960, she moved out, leaving her teenage son alone in a Brooklyn apartment that soon grew filthy - clogged tubs, roaches, dirty dishes. The move would usher in one of the most productive periods in Regina's life. She remarried, and she at last got her medical degree, in East Germany. She used that degree to altruistic purpose, providing medical care on American Indian reservations in the Southwest and working as an emergency-room physician in Nicaragua in the 1980s. To Bobby, her departure was a relief. In a 1962 interview with Harper's magazine, he complained that his mother was a " square." "I don't like people in my hair, so I had to get rid of her," he said. There may have been friction, but there was also love. The same year Regina moved out, she went to Washington on a mission. Outside the wrought-iron gates of the White House, she staged a solitary five-hour protest, urging President Dwight D. Eisenhower to help send a U.S team to the chess olympics in East Germany. Bobby would wind up leading a U.S. team to the tournament in Leipzig. "She was a fierce lawyer and supporter and protagonist of Bobby," Kaufman says. "And in the beginning, that was very valuable. And then eventually it embarrassed Bobby. For that and other reasons, he broke with her." By the end of her life, mother and son had reconciled. Susan Polgar, a Hungarian grandmaster whose family befriended Bobby in the early '90s, said at the time that the two were speaking regularly by phone. Regina died in 1997, at 84, near her daughter in Palo Alto, Calif. (The FBI had closed her case years before, concluding she was not a spy. Agents never seemed quite sure of what to make of her.) The complexity of the mother-son relationship emerged in the 1962 Harper's interview. At one point Bobby displayed the anti-Semitism that would become his fixation in middle age. He said chess was peopled with too many Jews, who dressed poorly and detracted from the "class of the game." The interviewer asked, "You're Jewish, aren't you?" "Part Jewish. My mother is Jewish." Actually, both parents were Jews. On April 1, 1933, the Nazis came for Paul Nemenyi; it was also the day of a general boycott of Jewish shops and businesses in Berlin. The charges, when SS troops arrested him, were that Nemenyi had made " calumnious statements" against Hitler's government. He was jailed for a day, then released. Not enough evidence. Still, Nemenyi would lose his university teaching job the following week, when Hitler purged the civil service of Jews. Nemenyi, then 37, had already fled fascism in his homeland, Hungary, where anti-Semitic laws had been enacted. Now he would have to run again. He was being uprooted at a promising point in his career, having just published a groundbreaking textbook on mechanics that would be required reading in German universities. Some of the other Hungarian refugees living in Berlin at the time would flee to America and become some of the most prominent scientists of the 20th century. Nemenyi knew the giants, and they knew him, though he would never be as accomplished. They were all part of an elite intellectual circle being hounded out of Europe. Nemenyi fled first to Denmark, then to Britain. In the fall of 1938, he sailed to the United States to find a job. He headed to Princeton to consult with Albert Einstein. Nemenyi also gave his resume to the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, a New York organization that tried to find work for the hundreds of academics fleeing Europe. But his personality got in the way. "He is an unstable and undesirable person," one note in the committee's files reads. Nemenyi finally found a job working for Einstein's son, Hans-Albert, at the University of Iowa's hydrology lab. It was the first in a string of short-term teaching jobs around the country. Assimilation was rocky. Nemenyi's fellow Hungarian, the great aeronautical scientist Theodore von Karman, proclaimed him a misfit. "When he came to this country, he went to scientific meetings in an open shirt without a tie and was very much disappointed as I advised him to dress as anyone else," von Karman wrote of Nemenyi in one letter. "He told me that he thought this is a country of freedom, and the man is only judged according to his internal values and not his external appearance." Life in America remained something of a disappointment. Nemenyi never landed a job at the most prestigious schools, never wrote the book he had planned on fluid mechanics. He was a physicist and a theoretician. But when he met Regina in 1942, he had a temporary job teaching freshman math at the University of Colorado. The Encyclopedia Britannica commissioned - and then rejected - an article from him on theoretical mechanics. Nemenyi would have the last word, though. One of his last published works was a 1951 review of the encyclopedia in The New Republic. He panned it as out-of-date. On March 1, 1952, Nemenyi was living in Washington and working at the U.S. Naval Research Lab. He felt fine that morning. As was his habit, he went to the library to work. Then he stopped in at a dance at the International Student House in Washington. There, he dropped dead of a heart attack. He was 56. Nemenyi had with him an envelope full of letters, which police later turned over to the FBI. One letter from a female friend cautioned him not to spend too much time worrying about Peter - his older son, from an early marriage - and Bobby. "I am sorry that you have so many sorrows with your children," she wrote. The father would never know what his children would go on to achieve or how sad their lives would become. After Paul's death, Regina Fischer's life was desperate. He had been paying for 8-year-old Bobby's education and sending $20 a week. She had long since divorced Gerhardt Fischer, who had never lived with her in the United States. She was in nursing school in Brooklyn, broke and facing eviction. Regina wrote to Peter Nemenyi, who was then getting his doctorate in math at Princeton. She asked if any money had been set aside for Bobby. "Bobby has not had a decent meal at home this past month and was sick two days with fever and sore throat, and of course a doctor or medicine was out of the question," she wrote. "I don't think Paul would have wanted to leave Bobby this way and would ask you most urgently to let me know if Paul left anything for Bobby." It is unclear what Bobby knew at that point about his relationship to Paul Nemenyi. It is clear that they knew each other. Regina told Peter in her letter, "Bobby is still expecting Paul." Regina didn't want to be the one to tell Bobby of Nemenyi's death. She hoped Peter would do it. But Peter was uncomfortable with that, so he wrote to a family doctor for advice. "I take it you know that Paul was Bobby Fischer's father," he wrote, saying that he didn't feel "qualified" to break the news, having met the boy only a couple of times. "The matter is further complicated by the false pretenses about Bobby's identity and the parents' differences of opinion over this question," Peter wrote. Bobby's paternity would remain a family secret until The Inquirer reported details of the FBI's file on Regina Fischer in November. Friends within the small circle of people who were aware say that as Bobby's celebrity grew, Peter became embarrassed by his half-brother. The author of a respected textbook on statistics, Peter exhibited the family gift for logical thinking. But the similarities with Bobby stopped there. Peter Nemenyi fought to defend minority rights. In the 1960s he was beaten and arrested while integrating coffee shops and helping black voters in Mississippi. His end was unhappy. Sick with prostate cancer, he killed himself last year. He had been living alone in a Durham, N.C., apartment crammed with statistics papers. Friends say they often spotted him pushing a collection of shopping baskets around town, wearing oven mitts for gloves. Peter Nemenyi stored his personal papers in a Wisconsin state archive. The files include statistics papers, address books, tax returns, and memorabilia from his civil rights days. His papers include a lone newspaper clipping about Bobby, one that proved prophetic. It was an article from 1959 about his half-brother's threat to boycott the U.S. championship in a disagreement over the pairings. That was an early example of what would become a destructive pattern in Bobby's life - the escalation of a minor dispute into a crisis that threatened to pull him away from the board. Throughout the 1960s, Bobby Fischer sputtered. He dropped out of high school and stayed in New York for a time, later moving to Los Angeles. He never held a job, instead becoming a professional chess player in a country where top tournament prizes were a few hundred dollars at best. He relied on friends and got money from his mother. There was brilliant play, but there were also unexplained disappearances and a persistent fear of being cheated. Fischer played only one tournament game in 1964, and again only one in 1969 - long absences for a chess player in his prime. In 1967, he entered a tournament that was a stepping-stone to the world championship. He was in first place midway through, but then dropped out in a dispute with the organizers. Still, when he was in top form he was dazzling. He hated the quick draws that are so common in chess. When he played, he played to win. He took the 1963-64 U.S. championship with a perfect 11-0 score. No one had done that before, and no one has since. "When he was at the board playing, it was like God was playing," says Shelby Lyman, who narrated the eventual, inevitable world championship match for public television. "The purity of his thought, the search for truth, the ability to go to the core of a problem. Bobby never looked for an easy move that would blow away his opponent. He looked for the truth in chess." He was hard to figure: friendly at times, rude at others. In the Harper's interview, he described women as "stupid." But Lyman remembers a warmer Fischer in New York chess circles in the '60s. The Chess and Checker Club on Times Square was like a set from Guys and Dolls. No guns, but lots of betting. Bobby was a regular. Sometimes he would go in and play a quick game just to win money to buy a movie ticket. One day he took on a talented young player, spotting him a pawn and giving him twice as much time on the clock to complete his moves. A couple of dozen people gathered. Wagers were flying. Fischer handled the action himself. He won game after game, Lyman says, sticking his money in "six different pockets." Finally, his opponent won one - "and you should have seen Bobby go through those pockets to pay everyone off. He was practically looking in his fly. But he did it so good-humoredly." Lyman recalls spending an afternoon with Fischer in 1965, after Fischer drew a tournament game he was playing by teletype at the Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan. Fischer's opponent was in Havana. Fischer and Lyman then sat down at a board and played back the moves. "He was very diplomatic. He listened to what I said, and he agreed. Then he asked, 'Would you like to get coffee?' I said sure." They left the old brownstone and walked through Greenwich Village. "I thought, 'This guy was the luckiest guy in the world,' " Lyman says. "He was young, handsome and going to be world champion. He had everything. "He asked me all these naive questions. He was very enthusiastic. He asked me if he should go to college. People were stupidly pushing him to go. I said, 'Don't be ridiculous. Win the world championship.' And he asked me about dancing. 'Was it just for girls?' Things like that. He had the naivete of a genius. He looked at everything freshly." In 1970, Fischer returned to tournament chess, beginning a remarkable run that would close with his defeat of the world champion, Boris Spassky, in the title match two years later. Fischer had been eyeing the world championship since he was a teenager. But when the chance came in 1972, he did everything he could to spoil it. On a night when he was supposed to leave for the contest in Reykjavik, he abruptly fled JFK Airport, the press on his heels. Once in Iceland, he complained about the lighting and the crowd noise. After throwing away an easy draw in the first game, he forfeited the second in a dispute over the cameras. The third game was played in a tiny Ping-Pong room off the main stage. There he staged his comeback, springing an opening surprise and beating Spassky for the first time. The Russian never recovered. The world was riveted that summer, a remarkable time that saw the Watergate break-in, the nomination of George McGovern by the Democrats, the renomination of Richard M. Nixon, the withdrawal of the last U.S. ground forces from Vietnam, the horror of the Munich Olympics. And the peculiar son of Regina Fischer and Paul Nemenyi transforming chess. In the United States, interest in the game boomed. "Chess was the thing," says Steve Doyle, a national tournament director. "It was the hula hoop of its day. The pet rock. Everyone was buying coffee-table books on chess and onyx chess sets. It was everywhere. And in a couple of years, the whole fad passed." As did Fischer. Bobby Fischer had promised to be an active champ. Then he dropped out. He refused to defend his title in 1975, though the prize fund had ballooned into the millions. "Assuming he won the match, he would have won $50 million in today's dollars," says Leroy Dubeck, a past president of the U.S. Chess Federation and a physics professor at Temple University. But Dubeck says no amount of money would have lured Fischer to the board, because "he simply didn't want to play." Stripped of his title, Fischer disappeared. He lived a secretive life in Southern California under the pseudonym Robert James (using his middle name for his last). He had led U.S. chess out of obscurity. Players were desperate for the messiah's reappearance. "As it is, he changed the face of chess," says Kaufman, the New York chess master who knew Fischer as a teen. "Imagine if he had played another 10 years. Imagine if Mozart had lived to 46. It would have changed things enormously. Thousands and thousands of more chess players. More money in chess. More clubs and organizations." "Those of us who were his contemporaries see it as one of the great sadnesses of our lives," Kaufman says. "Not even bitterness. Just profound sadness." Alex Yermolinsky, a San Francisco grandmaster, calls Fischer's abrupt retirement "probably the worst thing that could happen to chess." "I can't say chess started dying after this," Yermolinsky says, "but something was lost." What? Maybe 1,000 or more Bobby Fischer tournament games, new contributions he could have made to chess theory, and the prestige of having an American as world champion. No one has risen to succeed him. Waitzkin, the prodigy in Searching for Bobby Fischer, never even became a grandmaster. Just last month, the U.S. championship was played to no great notice, and was won by a Latvian-born Pittsburgh resident, Alexander Shabalov, who is probably destined to a life of continued obscurity; the prize was a modest $25,000. In 1992, Fischer surfaced. He was 49 - past his prime. He and Spassky played an exhibition match in Yugoslavia that drew worldwide attention. Fischer won again, though he was clearly off form. The United States alleged that Fischer, in playing the match, was violating a presidential order imposing sanctions against Yugoslavia. He was indicted. He became a fugitive and has never returned to face the charges, which still stand. In recent years, he has hopscotched between Japan, Hungary and the Philippines. Bobby Fischer never liked the media. But in January 1999 he made his debut in a medium that he came to love: talk radio. It was the first in a string of interviews with a Philippine radio host, Pablo Mercado. Both men got something from it. Mercado got an exclusive with the elusive Fischer. Fischer got a forum to rail against his villains. Topping the list were the Jews. Within minutes of greeting the host, Fischer uncorked this thought: "Filthy bastards, they're trying to take over the world. . . . They invented the Holocaust. . . . They're a filthy, lying bastard people." Bobby Ang, a former friend of Fischer's from the Philippines, sighs: "You ask Bobby about chess, he answers about Jews." In his deepening isolation, Fischer has broken with friends. He has even broken with chess. He refuses to play the game in its classic form. Instead, he is pushing a variation in which the pieces are arranged randomly in the back row. There are eerie parallels in the lives of Fischer and his chess forebear Paul Morphy, including claims of persecution and reclusiveness. Toward the end of his life, Morphy, too, renounced chess. He refused even to let friends speak of the game in his presence. In 1879, the American Chess Journal quoted one of Morphy's acquaintances: "The least encouragement will result in being compelled to listen for hours to the same old story that everybody knows by heart - that relating to his father's estate. He talks of nothing else and apparently thinks of nothing else." The great minds that could produce such artistic compositions over the board would ultimately prove their undoing. "It's a double tragedy," Kaufman says. "It's a tragedy for American chess and a tragedy for Bobby Fischer. He could have been on top of the world." By Peter Nicholas and Clea Benson The Philadelphia Inquirer Sat, Feb. 08, 2003 Back to Bobby Fischer Articles

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By January 19, 2008 The Food Chain An Oil Quandary: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories By KEITH BRADSHER KUANTAN, Malaysia — Rising prices for cooking oil are forcing residents of Asia’s largest slum, in Mumbai, India, to ration every drop. Bakeries in the United States are fretting over higher shortening costs. And here in Malaysia, brand-new factories built to convert vegetable oil into diesel sit idle, their owners unable to afford the raw material. This is the other oil shock. From India to Indiana, shortages and soaring prices for palm oil, soybean oil and many other types of vegetable oils are the latest, most striking example of a developing global problem: costly food. The food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, based on export prices for 60 internationally traded foodstuffs, climbed 37 percent last year. That was on top of a 14 percent increase in 2006, and the trend has accelerated this winter. In some poor countries, desperation is taking hold. Just in the last week, protests have erupted in Pakistan over wheat shortages, and in Indonesia over soybean shortages. Egypt has banned rice exports to keep food at home, and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs. According to the F.A.O., food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. “The urban poor, the rural landless and small and marginal farmers stand to lose,” said He Changchui, the agency’s chief representative for Asia and the Pacific. A startling change is unfolding in the world’s food markets. Soaring fuel prices have altered the equation for growing food and transporting it across the globe. Huge demand for biofuels has created tension between using land to produce fuel and using it for food. A growing middle class in the developing world is demanding more protein, from pork and hamburgers to chicken and ice cream. And all this is happening even as global climate change may be starting to make it harder to grow food in some of the places best equipped to do so, like Australia. In the last few years, world demand for crops and meat has been rising sharply. It remains an open question how and when the supply will catch up. For the foreseeable future, that probably means higher prices at the grocery store and fatter paychecks for farmers of major crops like corn, wheat and soybeans. There may be worse inflation to come. Food experts say steep increases in commodity prices have not fully made their way to street stalls in the developing world or supermarkets in the West. Governments in many poor countries have tried to respond by stepping up food subsidies, imposing or tightening price controls, restricting exports and cutting food import duties. These temporary measures are already breaking down. Across Southeast Asia, for example, families have been hoarding palm oil. Smugglers have been bidding up prices as they move the oil from more subsidized markets, like Malaysia’s, to less subsidized markets, like Singapore’s. No category of food prices has risen as quickly this winter as so-called edible oils — with sometimes tragic results. When a Carrefour store in Chongqing, China, announced a limited-time cooking oil promotion in November, a stampede of would-be buyers left 3 people dead and 31 injured. Cooking oil may seem a trifling expense in the West. But in the developing world, cooking oil is an important source of calories and represents one of the biggest cash outlays for poor families, which grow much of their own food but have to buy oil in which to cook it. Few crops illustrate the emerging problems in the global food chain as well as palm oil, a vital commodity in much of the world and particularly Asia. From jungles and street markets in Southeast Asia to food companies in the United States and biodiesel factories in Europe, soaring prices for the oil are drawing environmentalists, energy companies, consumers, indigenous peoples and governments into acrimonious disputes. The oil palm is a stout-trunked tree with a spray of frilly fronds at the top that make it look like an enormous sea anemone. The trees, with their distinctive, star-like patterns of leaves, cover an eighth of the entire land area of Malaysia and even greater acreage in nearby Indonesia. An Efficient Producer The palm is a highly efficient producer of vegetable oil, squeezed from the tree’s thick bunches of plum-size bright red fruit. An acre of oil palms yields as much oil as eight acres of soybeans, the main rival for oil palms; rapeseed, used to make canola oil, is a distant third. Among major crops, only sugar cane comes close to rivaling oil palms in calories of human food per acre. Palm oil prices have jumped nearly 70 percent in the last year because supply has grown slowly while demand has soared. Farmers and plantation companies are responding to the higher prices, clearing hundreds of thousands of acres of tropical forest to replant with rows of oil palms. But an oil palm takes eight years to reach full production. A drought last year in Indonesia and flooding in Peninsular Malaysia helped constrain supply. Worldwide palm oil output climbed just 2.7 percent last year, to 42.1 million tons. At the same time, palm oil demand is growing steeply for a variety of reasons around the globe. They include shifting decisions among farmers about what to plant, rising consumer demand in China and India for edible oils, and Western subsidies for biofuel production. American farmers have been planting more corn and less soy because demand for corn-based ethanol has pushed up corn prices. American soybean acreage plunged 19 percent last year, producing a drop in soybean oil output and inventories. Chinese farmers also cut back soybean acreage last year, as urban sprawl covered prime farmland and the Chinese government provided more incentives for grain. Yet people in China are also consuming more oils. China not only was the world’s biggest palm oil importer last year, holding steady at 5.2 million tons in the first 11 months of the year, but it also doubled its soybean oil imports to 2.9 million tons, forcing buyers elsewhere to switch to palm oil. Concerns about nutrition used to hurt palm oil sales, but they are now starting to help. The oil was long regarded in the West as unhealthy, but it has become an attractive option to replace the chemically altered fats known as trans fats, which have lately come to be seen as the least healthy of all fats. New York City banned trans fats in frying at food service establishments last summer and will ban them in bakery goods this summer. Across the country, manufacturers are trying to replace trans fats. American palm oil imports nearly doubled in the first 11 months of last year, rising by 200,000 tons. “Four years ago, when this whole no-trans issue started, we processed no palm here," said Mark Weyland, a United States product manager for Loders Croklaan, a Dutch company that supplies palm oil. “Now it’s our biggest seller.” Last year, conversion of palm oil into fuel was a fast-growing source of demand, but in recent weeks, rising prices have thrown that business into turmoil. Here on Malaysia’s eastern shore, a series of 45-foot-high green and gray storage tanks connect to a labyrinth of yellow and silver pipes. The gleaming new refinery has the capacity to turn 116,000 tons a year of palm oil into 110,000 tons of a fuel called biodiesel, as well as valuable byproducts like glycerin. Mission Biofuels, an Australian company, finished the refinery last month and is working on an even larger factory next door at the base of a jungle hillside. But prices have spiked so much that the company cannot cover all its costs and has idled the finished refinery while looking for a new strategy, such as asking a biodiesel buyer to pay a price linked to palm oil costs, and someday switching from palm oil to jatropha, a roadside weed. “We took a view that palm oil prices were already high; we didn’t think they could go even higher, and then they did,” said Nathan Mahalingam, the company’s managing director. Growth in Biofuels Biofuels accounted for almost half the increase in worldwide demand for vegetable oils last year, and represented 7 percent of total consumption of the oils, according to Oil World, a forecasting service in Hamburg, Germany. The growth of biodiesel, which can be mixed with regular diesel, has been controversial, not only because it competes with food uses of oil but also because of environmental concerns. European conservation groups have been warning that tropical forests are being leveled to make way for oil palm plantations, destroying habitat for orangutans and Sumatran rhinoceroses while also releasing greenhouse gases. The European Union has moved to restrict imports of palm oil grown in unsustainable ways. The measure has incensed the Malaysian palm oil industry, which had plunged into biofuel production in part to satisfy European demand. Another controversy involves the treatment of indigenous peoples whose lands have been seized by oil plantations. This has been a particular issue on Borneo. Anne B. Lasimbang, executive director of the Pacos Trust in the Malaysian state of Sabah in northern Borneo, said that while some indigenous people had benefited from selling palm oil that they grow themselves, many had lost ancestral lands with little to show for it, including lands that used to provide habitats for endangered orangutans. “Finally, some of the pressures internationally have trickled down. Some of the companies are more open to dialogue; they want to talk to communities,” said Ms. Lasimbang, a member of the Dusun indigenous group. “On our side, we are still suspicious.” Demand Outstrips Supply As the multiple conflicts and economic pressures associated with palm oil play out in the global economy, the bottom line seems to be that the world wants more of the oil than it can get. Even in Malaysia, the center of the global palm oil industry for half a century, spot shortages have cropped up. Recently, as wholesale prices soared, cooking oil refiners complained of inadequate subsidies and cut back production of household oil, sold at low, regulated prices. Street vendors in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, complain that they cannot find enough cooking oil to prepare roti canai, the flatbread that is the national snack. “It’s very difficult; it’s hard to find,” said one vendor who gave only his first name, Palani, after admitting that he was secretly buying cooking oil intended for households instead of paying the much higher price for commercial use. Many of the hardest-hit victims of rising food prices are in the vast slums that surround cities in poorer Asian nations. The Kawle family in Mumbai’s sprawling Dharavi slum, a household of nine with just one member working as a laborer for $60 a month, is coping with recent price increases for palm oil. The family has responded by eating fish once a week instead of twice, seldom cooking vegetables and cutting its monthly rice consumption. Next to go will be the weekly smidgen of lamb. “If the prices go up again,” said Janaron Kawle, the family patriarch, “we’ll cut the mutton to twice a month and use less oil.” Contributing reporting were Andrew Martin in New York, Anand Giridharadas in Kale, India, and Michael Rubenstein in Mumbai.

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By January 19, 2008 An Appraisal Fischer vs. the World: A Chess Giant’s Endgame By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN There may be only three human activities in which miraculous accomplishment is possible before adulthood: mathematics, music and chess. These are abstract, almost invented realms, closed systems bounded by rules of custom or principle. Here, the child learns, is how elements combine and transform; here are the laws that govern their interactions; and here are the possibilities that emerge as you play with signs, symbols, sounds or pieces. Nothing else need be known or understood — at least at first. A child’s gifts in such realms can seem otherworldly, the achievements effortlessly magical. But as Bobby Fischer’s death on Thursday might remind us, even abstract gifts can exact a terrible price. In 1956 Mr. Fischer, at 13, displayed powers that were not only prodigious but also uncanny. A game he played against Donald Byrne, one of the top 10 players in the United States, became known as “the Game of the Century,” so packed was it with brilliance and daring (and Mr. Fischer’s sacrifice of a queen). “I just got good,” he explained — as indeed he did, winning 8 of the 10 United States Championship tournaments held after 1958 and then, of course, in 1972, breaking the long hold that Soviet chess had on the international championship. “All I want to do, ever,” he said, “is play chess.” And many thought him the best player — ever. Garry Kasparov once said that he imagined Mr. Fischer as a kind of centaur, a human player mythologically combined with the very essence of chess itself. But of course accompanying Mr. Fischer’s triumphs were signs of something else. His aggressive declarations and grandiose pronouncements were once restricted to his chosen playing field. (“Chess is war over the board. The object is to crush the opponent’s mind.”) Eventually, they grew in scope, evolving into ever more sweeping convictions about the wider world. After his triumph against Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, he all but abandoned chess, and seemed to replace the idea of a seated challenger pushing pieces on a 64-square board, with that of a demonic Jewish world conspiracy that was (as he said in radio broadcasts from the Philippines) perpetrated by a “filthy, lying bastard people” who kill Christian children (“their blood is used for black-magic ceremonies”) while exploiting that “money-making invention,” the Holocaust. In this vision the circumscribed rules of chess were overturned, and in their place were imagined esoteric plottings of evil grandmasters. In a 2002 essay in The Atlantic Monthly Rene Chun chronicled Mr. Fischer’s “pathetic endgame.” He was reported to keep a locked suitcase with him, containing pills and home remedies: “If the Commies come to poison me, I don’t want to make it easy for them,” he said. He had his dental fillings removed, worrying about the secret signals and controlling forces that might be channeled through his jaw. The 9/11 attacks, he said, were “wonderful news.” What was all this? “I don’t believe in psychology,” Mr. Fischer once said about chess competition. “I believe in good moves.” And yes, without the good moves, he would never have struck the fear in his opponents that he once did. But how did faith in good moves mutate into such perverse psychology? Was there any connection between his gifts in chess and his later delusions? You might of course speculate that his perceptions were affected by never having seen his father, a physicist named Mr. Fischer, after he was 2. A revealing profile in Harper’s magazine in 1962 indicated that Mr. Fischer’s mother, Regina Wender, also had other preoccupations. Bobby’s sister described her as a “professional crusader.” Bobby had dropped out of high school and was a chess wunderkind with a world reputation, while, at the time of the profile, his mother was spending eight months walking to Moscow in a “pacifist” protest. A few years ago the Philadelphia Inquirer, obtaining F.B.I. records under the Freedom of Information Act, also found compelling evidence that Bobby Fischer’s father was not the man named on his birth certificate, but a brilliant Hungarian scientist, Paul F. Nemenyi, with whom his mother had an affair. Mr. Nemenyi apparently paid to help support Bobby, and there is even the record of a complaint he made to a social worker about Bobby’s upbringing. If that identification is accurate, the paradoxes of Mr. Fischer’s virulent anti-Semitism become still more profound, since Mr. Nemenyi, like Ms. Wender, was Jewish. Chess too can seem to encourage a streak of craziness. ( “I like to see ’em squirm,” Mr. Fischer proclaimed.) But for paranoia and posturing, nothing could come close to the 1972 championship match in Reykjavik. In recent years the argument has been made that the attention given to the confrontation between Mr. Fischer and Mr. Spassky had little to do with the cold war. Mr. Spassky himself was no party-line comrade, and Mr. Fischer, with all his idiosyncrasies, was far from a comfort to the United States State Department; moreover, by 1972, such confrontations no longer had the symbolic power they had during the era of Sputnik. But there is still no question that the contest drew its worldwide audience partly because it presented two conflicting national idols. Mr. Fischer, with his demands about money, his finickiness about cameras and chairs and schedule, could seem an extreme example of the American individualist, while Mr. Spassky, with his back to the audience, his stone-faced demeanor and the state support for this national game behind him, seemed an incarnation of Soviet ideology. The Soviets also answered Mr. Fischer’s egomaniacal posturing with their own versions of conspiracy mongering, suggesting that Mr. Spassky’s performance was being deliberately sabotaged by American tampering with the players’ environments; the air had to be tested and the chairs X-rayed. But there is still something about Mr. Fischer’s craziness that is closely connected with the essential nature of chess. The gift of early insight into chess or math or music is often also accompanied by a growing obsession with those activities, simply because of the wonders of connection and invention that unfold in the young mind. The world itself, with its more messy human interactions, its complicated histories, its emotional conflicts, can be put aside, and attention focused on an intricate bounded cosmos. Perhaps we should be grateful that such gifts are so rare, for if they were not, how many of us would prefer to remain cocooned in these glass-bead games? At least in mathematics and music, we may be grateful too that ultimately, with the coming of maturity, the world starts to put constraints on abstract play. Great music attains its power not simply through manipulation and abstraction, but by creating analogies with experience; music is affected by life, not cut off from it. Mathematics also comes up against the demands of the world, as the field opens up to understanding; early insights are tested against the full scale of what has been already been done and what yet remains undone. But chess, alone among this abstract triumvirate, is never tested or transformed. The only way expertise is ever tried is in victory or defeat. And if a player is as profoundly powerful as Mr. Fischer, defeat never creates a sense of limits. Seeing into a game and defeating an opponent — that defines the entire world. So when it comes time to look at the wider world, it might seem a vast extension of the game, only ever so much more frightening because its conspiratorial strategies cannot be discovered in rule books, and its confrontations cannot be controlled by formal tournaments. That was the world that Bobby Fischer saw around him as he morphed from world champion chess player into world-class crank, never realizing that he had unwittingly blundered into checkmate.