Happy Assyrian New Year

Tomorrow will be a wonderful day. I'll wake up and check the news and know that don't-believe-a-damn-word-you-read-online day (aka 1 April) is as far away as it possibly could be.

This day is painful. Yesterday FIDE (the world chess federation) did YAST (yet another silly thing -- I won't explain that thing, it doesn't have a good length-of-exposition to payoff ratio) and apparently said they weren't going to fix it, or something like that, and there was a protest from the Indian Chess Federation, advocates of the injured party, Vishy Anand, and now Chessbase is reporting that FIDE has reversed its position, except the article in question was published on 1 April, and these Chessbase guys are incorrigible pranksters, they really delight in it -- I mean, they're usually more obvious about it, but I read this thing, this news report, and I'm even doubting the factual basis -- and if I had that kind of doubt when reading a newspaper, why would I waste my time with that? Editorial indiscretion, what a bother.

But, you know, it's more like next week that I'm free, because today's debris will still be there tomorrow. For days yet I'll be checking the dateline of everything I read.


Postscriptum primus. Last entry updated today [1 April] with some pictures, because we haven't had any pictures in a while.

Postscriptum secundus. Turns out they were serious. "I never doubted you," said C-3P0, "much."

Postscriptum tertius. Turns out a lot of people doubted them too :

The day we published our April Fool's prank we also carried an important news item: in view of wide-spread protests FIDE had decided to correct their April 2007 rating list and to include the Morelia/Linares event in the calculations. This, many readers believed, was the April Fool's joke. In fact a colleague had told us on the previous evening that he intended to use it as his prank: "FIDE admits error, vows to correct it immediately" was the hilarious article he was working on. On April 1st we received irate messages from him accusing us of poaching his joke. It took a while to convince him that the FIDE decision was for real.

Well. There it is.

Postscriptum quartus, (since, hey, we've followed up on our story a couple times already.) Thanks to the nonflat nature of the Earth and the roughly Copernican character of our solar system, it turns out that Vishy Anand thought the first part was a prank, until he was informed likewise by a vast number of concerned well-wishers. (Take that, medievalism.) I had no idea they celebrated Assyrian New Year in India.