Saturday 6 October 2007

The things you see at chess

It is school holidays in Canberra, which means an influx of junior players at Street Chess today. For those that don't know, Street Chess is played outdoors (usually), in City Walk, Canberra City. This means you often get to see some odd things while the tournament in progress.
Today saw competition between the local Animal Rights group, trying to convince everyone to become vegans, and a local Christian group, trying to gain followers through some off-key singing. While all this was going on, one of the local Currawongs (a kind of Magpie) went down with a broken wing and flopped around pathetically on the ground. There was some debate about whether the bird should be rescued by the Animal Rights group, or healed through the prayers of the Christian singing group, before rationality won out over superstition. Fittingly the bird was rescued by a man in a chicken suit.

I had hoped to include some video of a bullet match between myself and Alana Chibnall (check out her blog here) but the very dodgy video player/camera I brought in Hong Kong only records in 3gp format, and converting to something useful like AVI generated a 640MB file. So if anyone knows a good (free) 3gp to avi/wmv converter I'd appreciate a tip.

1 comment:

Alana Chibnall said...
This comment has been removed by the author.