Now, Where Was I?

The first blog post after annual vacation is never easy; see 2011's Moving on after Vacation for a summary of the reasons why. This year I took a full month off, an unusually long time by my standards, but with the intention of blogging at half-speed or so. Unfortunately, reality didn't match plans. For the first two weeks I had time to write, but a very poor Internet connection. For the second two weeks, I had a great Internet connection, but little time to write. Was Caissa trying to tell me something?

When I finally returned home, my first task was to recall what interested me back in mid-June. Following is a list of posts that might merit a follow-up. It excludes ongoing series like Flickr Friday -- last seen in Paul Morphy, 1837-1884, one of the few vacation posts I managed to finish -- which are relatively easy to pick up where I left off.

• 2012-06-14: Gelfand's World Championship Career; the Anand - Gelfand match
• 2012-06-12: Olympiad Size Politics; Ali Nihat Yazici
• 2012-06-11: Quizzes for Check and Checkmate; the About.com series
• 2012-05-22: Unusual 1.e4 Responses According to Khalifman; also 2012-05-29: Losing with Alekhine's
• 2012-05-17: The Man Who Put Chess on Television; Shelby Lyman
• 2012-05-10: Time Enough for Taimanov; Sicilian ...e6
• 2012-05-08: International Chess Journalists & CJA
• 2012-05-06: A Chess Popularity Contest; Wikipedia's WikiProject Chess/Popular pages
• 2012-05-03: Learn from Your Draws
• 2012-03-25: FIDE/ECU Chess in Schools; also 2012-06-03: 'Politicians Who Know Nothing about Chess Know...'
• 2012-03-20: Chess Informant Endgames; a subject worthy of a new blog?

Why the gap in April? I was also on vacation for half of that month, with the same challenges as now. Having put this summary together, I think I'll spend some time catching up on chess news. Whatever happened with the Ali Nihat Yazici story? How about Shelby Lyman and the 40th anniversary of the start of the match that transformed chess?