קלאודיו

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[incidentalcomics]

Color Studies

You can now follow Incidental Comics on Instagram to see my black and white sketchbook drawings and further experiments with watercolor.

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Seas lo que seas,…

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[nevver]

[bao-haus]

a vacation, just the two of us

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[gifsboom]

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Video: Merry Christmas from Charlie the venus flytrap

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[mystic-revelations]

[celestialsloth]

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Bobby Fischer playing 50 opponents simultaneously ,1964

He won 47, lost 1 and drew 2. Fischer was an American chess prodigy, grandmaster, and the eleventh World Chess Champion. He is considered by many to be the greatest chess player who ever lived. He lost to Donn Rogosin, not a well-known player. Fischer was 21 in this picture.

He is playing white, that’s a big advantage in high-level chess. You can choose an opening that you know well and your opponent doesn’t know well. Basically, you get decide which direction the game’s going to go for the first few turns. Openings are by the book so to speak, but there are variations and choices you can make. This is especially obvious in gambit style openings where you offer to sacrifice a piece for position, here the opponent can choose to take it or not. So there is a lot to know even if the best moves in a given position are known. But grand masters will know most of these of course and a lot of preparation goes into finding answers to the opening you expect from your opponent.

After only 4 moves, there are already millions of possible openings. Not all of these openings would be viable or “good moves”. There are a lot of openings that have been discovered and masters of the game would know a lot of those. There are some variations that are more common than others, and those have been logged as ‘book lines’ far past a typical opening sequences. The great thing about chess is there are so many ways to create an entirely unique game for yourself each time. Strategies and patterns often repeat, but positions are rarely equal.

Bobby Fischer started way early, like before he was 10 yrs old. He also had a very unique childhood. Not better than anyone else but just different. These kind of circumstances matter a lot. He also was extremely introvert and eccentric. Chess needs a lot of alone time spent thinking on the zillion ways of making chess moves. He was a genius but his fanatic interest in chess and the countless hours he spent analyzing hundreds of chess games allowed him to do what he is doing in the photo. There is a reason why only there are very few people who turn up like the way he did. It’s a matter of chance, luck and huge amount of hard work.

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Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin

He is recorded as having executed tens of thousands of prisoners by his own hand, including his killing of about 7,000 Polish prisoners of war during the Katyn massacre in spring 1940, making him the most prolific official executioner in recorded world history. Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin, the NKVD major in charge of executing the Polish officers from the Ostashkov camp, was a man who believed in personally doing the killing that his superiors had ordered him to supervise.

Born in 1885, he was known as the NKVD’s chief executioner, having been hand-picked for this position by Joseph Stalin himself. Blokhin personally killed tens of thousand of men and women during Stalin’s Great Purges of the 1930s, so it was only natural that the NKVD would turn to him when it came time to dispatch the officers held in the Soviet prison camps. Along with a team of about thirty NKVD men from Moscow, mainly drivers and prison guards, Blokhin arrived at the NKVD prison in Kalinin (Tver) and set himself up in a sound-proofed cellar room that had a sloping floor for drainage. He then put on his special uniform, consisting of a leather cap, long leather apron, and elbow-length gloves. On a table next to him was a briefcase filled with his own personal Walther PPK pistols, for Blokhin, a true artist at his trade, would use no one else’s tools but his own.

After the prisoner’s identity was verified, he was brought handcuffed into the cellar room where Blokhin awaited in his long apron, like some horrible butcher. One guard later testified: “The men held [the prisoner’s] arms and [Blokhin] shot him in the base of the skull…that’s all.” Blokhin worked fast and efficiently, killing an average of one men every three minutes during the course of ten-hour nights – the killings were always done at night, so that the bodies could be disposed of in darkness.

Although this has never been completely proven, historians suspect that Blokhin shot 7,000 men over a period of twenty-eight days, which would make him one of the most prolific murderers of all time. However many people he killed, Blokhin was consistently promoted by his superiors for performing “special tasks.” He lost his job, however, after Stalin died. The cause of Blokhin’s death, in 1955, was listed as suicide.

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She wrote a few lines in German on the back of the photo. “Chanukah, 5692. ‘Judea dies’, thus says the banner. ‘Judea will live forever’, thus respond the lights.”

The image, freezing in time a notorious piece of the past, has grown to become an iconic part of history for the Jewish community. But until just recently, not much was known about the origins of the photo. Both the menorah and photo survived World War II, with the Hanukkah finding its way to Yad Vashem through the loan of Yehudah Mansbuch. Mansbuch is the grandson of the woman who took the picture, and he retains the original snapshot. When Yad Vashem was putting together its plans to open the Holocaust History Museum, a team of researchers set out to learn more about this famous photo. Their inquiries led to Mansbuch, who explained how his grandmother and grandfather had lived under Nazi oppression in Kiel, Germany, eventually fleeing to then-Palestine in 1934.

Yehudah Mansbuch, the grandson of the family who took the photo, remembers:

“It was on a Friday afternoon right before Shabbat that this photo was taken. My grandmother realized that this was a historic photo, and she wrote on the back of the photo that ‘their flag wishes to see the death of Judah, but Judah will always survive, and our light will outlast their flag.’ My grandfather, the rabbi of the Kiel community, was making many speeches, both to Jews and Germans. To the Germans he warned that the road they were embarking on was not good for Jews or Germans, and to the Jews he warned that something terrible was brewing, and they would do well to leave Germany. My grandfather fled Germany in 1933, and moved to Israel. His community came to the train station to see him off, and before departed he urged his people to flee Germany while there’s still time.”

The couple’s prescience saved an entire community; only eight of the five hundred Jews perished in the Holocaust, with the rest fleeing before the systematic slaughter began. Today, Yehudah Mansbuch lives in Haifa (Israel) with his family. Each Hanukkah, Yad Vashem returns the now famous menorah to the family, who light the candles for eight nights before returning the piece of history back to the Holocaust trust.