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Everything we do, every thought we’ve ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find. – Neil deGrasse Tyson CHESS by Ian Rogers Anton Smirnov (right) has achieved an unprecedented honour for an Australian player by being selected for the World Team to take on the USA in a team match in July in Saint Louis. The ‘Match of the Millennials’ will see nine of the talents to emerge from the Kasparov Chess School in the US compete against the best juniors in the world born in 2000 or later. Smirnov’s elevation is not a major surprise. While his world ranking is comparable to many rivals of his age, his two outstanding Olympiad performances – including a double-Grandmaster ‘norm’ in Baku 2016 – and his recent qualification for the World Cup, would have been hard for the selectors to overlook. Smirnov’s rise has been so fast that he has outgrown a series of trainers and is now in the strange position of not being able to afford any of the trainers who would be of real benefit to him. US juniors have no such worries because of the Kasparov Chess Foundation, one of the organisers of the match. The KCF
not only organises and funds trainers for selected talents but also brings the best together for Masterclasses, where the guest coach is sometimes the former World Champion himself. The result has been a growing number of world youth titles, including the World Junior Under 20 title for Jeffrey Xiong in 2016, aged just 15 (but already a Grandmaster). Xiong will lead the US team, alongside other teen GMs such as Samuel Sevian. The US will be favourite to win, not only because their best outrate the World’s best, but also because the organisers restricted the girls’ boards to two U/14 players – a US strength. However, Smirnov has something to prove; with another starring performance maybe a trainer will come looking for him.
netdaily.net.au
Be ready when the time comes Image & story S Sorrensen
When the time comes, I want to be prepared. I hope you are too. When the time comes, it will come rolling in like a dark wave over these green hills. The bird calls will be replaced by the roar of engines, the wail of sirens, and the blat-blat of gunfire. Helicopters will hover above the valley, like once did the wedge-tailed eagles, except that these noisier birds will flatten the corn, snap pawpaw tree trunks, and freak the wallabies into narrow lantana tunnels and copses of ironbark. Trucks or Toyota utes or motorbikes will rumble up your driveway like a scene from Mad Max, or from the social media coverage of Aleppo, Mosul, Baghdad, Kabul, Donetsk, Chibok and Sana’a. (We are separated from these awful realities by the pixelated unreality of our screens. This separation protects us – it can’t happen here, we think.) Soldiers or looters or jihadists or neighbours – you can’t tell who; they all are masked – will jump from their vehicles, armed with legal or illegal firearms, once designated as ap-
propriate for law enforcement, sport or farm management, and will march up to the door of your house in the bush. Or maybe not. Maybe, when the time comes, it will be a slower tide, flooding these valleys with season after season of no rain. The lantana leaves will drop, forming a blanket of fire fuel beneath the ironbarks, angophoras and flooded gums. Your tanks will empty, the pawpaws shrivel and the green turn to brown. Climate change, once a discussion topic around lattes at the local cafe, has come to where we live. Climate change, once a football kicked about to gain advantage in a stupid two-sided game we call politics, is now the kicker and is booting in changes to the great ocean flows. The 11,000 years of predictable seasons (the Holocene) that gave rise to agriculture and civilisation have ended. You will want to move, but everywhere is the same. Drought and flood, fire and famine. No more latte chats over chocolate frangipani and cherry tart. Or maybe not.
Maybe, when the time comes, it will be a disease made into a super sickness by a diet of antibiotics, and will travel from person to person, country to country via mosquito or Boeing – or simply waft on the breeze. Or maybe not. Maybe everything will be just as lovely as denial can make it: higher profits, smarter phones, better television series, cleaner coal, cheaper frangipan- and cherry tarts, and we all come up Trump. (No way. Some scenarios are just too silly...) I don’t know how the time will come, but the time is coming and I want to be prepared. I want you to be prepared. I realise now that all we
have is love. I won’t take my bow and arrows up to the cave behind my shack under the cliffs to set up the last stronghold. I won’t drag cartons of baked beans, jerry cans of water, batteries and a solar panel to the cave, carefully covering my tracks, so as not to be followed by the newly desperate. No. Love is the only preparation. Humanity is not only the human genus, Homo sapiens; it’s the human ability to love despite (or maybe because of) the chaos of our brief existence. Civilised life has crushed our humanity; has replaced love born from the transient magic of our shared moment in the sun with a mundane bundle of fear tied together with the lie of a religious or financial other life. So, when the time comes, I want to be with you – to relearn our humanity, to ignite love in the wasteland of civilisation, to cherish the brilliance of our brief existence together. Maybe the time has already come. Q See more of S’s work at
echo.net.au/here-and-now
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