Because the first game of the world championship match doesn’t give us much to talk about today, I can catch up on one important piece of news from earlier this week: Elizabeth Spiegel (née Vicary) gave birth to a baby boy! His name is Noah. If you’d like to see what he looks like, she has changed her Facebook profile picture to a picture of Noah.
The best thing of all is that Noah was born (I think) on November 4, which happens to be my birthday too! I’m not 100 percent sure, though. That’s the day that she posted the first picture of the two of them on Facebook, but it’s possible that his real birthday was November 3. In that case, we can at least call November 4 his “Facebook birthday.”
No word yet on what openings Noah is preparing for his 2038 world championship match, or whether chess will even exist in 2038. Maybe we will all be playing with neural prostheses then. Perhaps the leading players will have their brains uploaded to the Cloud so that we will be watching Meta-Carlsen winning 100-move endgames against Meta-Morphy. (Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun.) Or drawing 16-move openings against Beyond-Anand, as the case may be.
Okay, I’ve gotta get ready for my trip! My coordinates will be: London from November 10 to 15, taking the overnight train to Scotland November 15-16, Aberdeen from November 16 to 19, then back home.
