The city of Bergen’s stately Statsraad Lehmkuhl, the world’s largest three-masted cutter, at anchor by the reneissance Rosenkrantz Tower. This photo not by me.

The foreign press keeps writing nice things about my medieval hometown, Bergen on Norway’s west coast, and the tourists are milling around downtown in the glorious weather. So I decided to pick up a camera and pretend to be one myself. The results, with an emphasis on wooden houses and funny, eclectic architecture, are seen below (please click to enlarge).

Annotations for some of the photos to follow:

The second picture is a view of the 12th century St. Mary’s church. Pictures #4, 5, and 7 feature the old Hanseatic wharf, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Some of the warehouses date back to the 14th century. The sixth photo is from the open-air fish market nearby.

The fifth picture from the bottom features Mon Plaisir, a temple pavillion from the 1830s that belonged to a mountainside mansion.

The rails on the last photo are those of the famous funicular climbing 850 meters from downtown to Mt. Fløyen at 15-26 degrees incline.

Welcome to Bergen — if not in the flesh, then in the spirit!

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Happy birthday to Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, one of the greatest painters ever.

The Parable of the Rich Man. 1627. Oil on panel.

Philosopher in Meditation. 1631. Oil on canvas.

Landscape with a Castle. 1632. Oil on canvas.

Dr. Nicolaes Tulp’s Demonstration. 1632. Oil on canvas.

Portrait of Saska. 1633. Oil on canvas.

The Night Watch. 1645. Oil on canvas.

Bathsheba at her Bath. 1654. Oil on canvas.

The Knight with the Falcon. 1660s. Oil on canvas.

Self-Portrait. 1669. Oil on canvas.

The World Waterfall Database rates Langfossen in my county, Hordaland, the most beautiful in the world, with an aesthetic score of 100/100.

Its height is over 2000 feet. Legend has it that its water is an aphrodisiac.

A characteristic example of Greenpeace integrity:

Rove should hire these types. Their minds work the same way as his — and differences of view have been settled before.

All hail Lordi, the winners of yesterday’s 2006 Eurovision Song Contest! Capturing the protest vote in the 51st europop kitschfest, the creatures from the vast Finnish forests rocked to sensational victory with their performance of the Alice Cooper-inspired “Hard Rock Hallelujah.” Their all-time record score ended a national trauma for Finland, whose strongest showing in the dreaded competition was heretofore a sixth spot in 1973.

Lordi — the burly lead vocalist whom the press has dubbed “the Bat out of Helsinki” — welcomes the uplifting lack of prejudice against those with fangs, horns, red eyes, and retractable wings. The other band members are Amen the Unstoppable Mummy, Enary the Manipulative Valkyrie, Kalma the Biker Zombie from Hell, and Kita the Alien Manbeast with the Combined Strengths of All the Beasts Known to Man.

Asked by a reporter if the band will ever take off the masks, Lordi replied: “What masks?”

Here is the music video for the winning entry, featuring a commendable turning of cheerleaders into zombies: Hard Rock Hallelujah.

Hyva Suomi — and long live the will to be different!

PS. Equally, if less deliberately, monstrous and entertaining is this Finnish 1980s music video with a dance routine suggesting the Heaven’s Gate sect doing aeorobics on LSD. A must-see!

From the blog of one of Britain’s better print journalists, Andrew Brown.

Astronomers have discovered a giant cloud of alcohol, spanning about 288 billion miles, in the W3(OH) area of the galaxy.

— It’s incumbent upon us to liberate our brothers in W3(OH) from fascism, says a well-known British writer in a comment.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

They say his music boosts your IQ and makes cows produce more milk. I don’t know if this is true, let alone whether he is the “greatest” composer ever. But the unbelievable legacy of the world’s only posthumous pop star speaks for itself!

In a book cheesily entitled Mozart and the Wolf Gang, written for a previous anniversary, Anthony Burgess — who himself was trained as a composer — muses thus:

We often forget how recent is Mozart’s place in the trinity of “all-time greatest,” alongside Bach and Beethoven. It was secured in the post-WW2 era, before which he was mostly thought of as an opera composer. Also, it owes deeply to conductors like Böhm and von Karajan striving to make of Mozart what he isn’t: a Grand Heroic Symphonist in the Teutonic mould. It’s funny to hear these recordings now, when more authentic performances informed by historical research are the ideal. But it says a lot about this music that it remains so stylish even when shoehorned into an alien romantic form.

Burgess concludes:

Today the world is celebrating Mozart’s 250th anniversary. Far better than fireworks is the exuberant final movement from the “Jupiter.”

Update: downloads now closed.

Crossposted with revision from European Tribune and My Left Wing.

“Chess is everything: art, science and sport,” said Anatoly Karpov. During the Cold War, it was also world politics, but those glory days have passed. Although chess is flourishing on the Internet and spreading like wildfire on the Asian continent, where it once originated, the sports dimension of the game is going through some trying times. Argues Daniel Johnson in Prospect Magazine:

Meanwhile, last year saw Garry Kasparov, larger-than-life personality and probably the strongest player in history, retire from the king-hunting business to rather take on a President, namely Ilyumzhinov’s patron, “the dictator Vladimir Putin.” (Listen to an interview with ABC: Windows Media Player; Real Audio Player.) The sport’s only other global icon is exiled on Iceland, barking mad. And as if this weren’t enough, the mystique of the chess Grandmaster is being challenged in the public mind by number-crunching contraptions.

The monsters are coming

Meet a talented young machine called Hydra:

In November, the (unsurprisingly) Dubai-based Hydra joined two of its kind to mop the floor with three former world champions in the annual Man vs. Machine exhibition match in Spain, which ended 8-4. The one game won by an organism had GM Ruslan Ponomariov blundering a pawn by forgetting, no less, the en passant rule (how’s that for human error?). In a strange fluke, however, his opponent – perhaps busy pondering whether meat can be sentient – suddenly threw the game.

Not that it takes 3,000-rated supercomputers to make mincemeat of the strongest gray matter. The 10th edition of Ubi Soft’s popular Chessmaster, which runs in the background as I write, features a 2002 online exhibition match in which its immediate predecessor scalps the then US Champion, GM Larry Christiansen, while by turns imitating three other previous world champs – Alexander Alekhine, Bobby Fischer, and Mikhail Botvinnik (who said machines are short on personality?). It is not known whether the hardware also balanced itself on one corner, juggling balls.

“Thank you for a very enjoyable game.” HAL 9000 crushes Dave in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

OK, we get it: the silicon stuff beats the natural, at least in this department. But then, who made the silicon? As John Searle, the famous philosopher of mind, remarked upon Kasparov’s deep blue day in 1997 (full report here), if the machinery in question were built by Martians or chimpanzees, then we might be in for some competition. As far as known, the IBM team didn’t include any chess proficient Martians; and as to chimpanzees, one must agree with Edward Lasker: “It has been said that man is distinguished from animal in that he buys more books than he can read. I should like to suggest that the inclusion of a few chess books would help to make the distinction unmistakable.” (The Adventure of Chess, 1949.)

In fact, as IM Eric Schiller pointed out to me: “The computer programs have extensive opening strategies which are 100% human-designed. Without these “opening books” the machines play terribly…. No computer unaided by a human-crafted opening book has ever defeated an accomplished chessplayer.”

Anyhow, for those still concerned about the pride of humankind, there remains the 4,000 year old game which Lasker helped introduce to the West: Go. It has been said that Go stands to chess as philosophy to double entry book-keeping, and though the rules are simple enough for a 3 year old to learn, the play emerging from those rules is too complex for a computer to best even a middling human.

Magnificent Magnus

There’s something special about prodigies that brute machines and mad dictators lack. At the moment, my country is seized by a modest chess fever on account of Magnus Carlsen, “the Mozart of Chess.” At 13 – about the time his biography appeared - he became the world’s youngest Grandmaster, the second youngest ever. By then the fearless attacker had drawn with Kasparov and defeated the likes of Alexei Shirov and Anatoly Karpov. Days after turning 15 on November 30 2005, Carlsen became the youngest ever World Championship candidate by sensationally finishing 10th in the FIDE World Cup. Neither Kasparov nor Fischer got that far until later in their careers. Can Magnus make it to the final? And could he be the new charismatic attraction the chess sport needs?

The boy wonder and the tyrant tycoon: Magnus and Kirsan in the FIDE World Cup.

While waiting for those answers, let’s treat ourselves to some belated New Year’s fireworks. Below are three brilliant wins by Carlsen, the last one against former prodigy Gata Kamsky, who lost the FIDE World Championship finale to Karpov in 1996.

If you’re ready for more extraordinary games, check out this annotated one between none other than God and the Devil - undeniably preferable, I submit, to betting on poor Job.

Inspired to play, but rusty on the rules? Try this amusing tutorial.

Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre on the set of ‘Casablanca.’