From EBTH to EBAY

What's this? Back-to-back posts on Top eBay Chess Items by Price? That's what happens when a vacation starts at the beginning and ends at the end of the fortnightly series 'Top eBay Chess Items'.

The item pictured below was titled 'Large 19th C O/C French Genre Oil Painting, The Chess Game, Original Frame'. It sold for US $475 after 45 bids from 18 bidders.

The description said,

Hand painted on stretched canvas this 19th century, Victorian oil painting depicts an 18th century chess game between a young lady and a gentleman. They are sitting in a lavish French parlor with a parquet floor, French painted screen, and gilded hanging chandelier. This original Painting is signed in the lower right hand corner, "Jules Brenton". Although this 21-1/4" by 27-1/2" Painting has been professionally wax lined there are no in-painted restorations. The 19th century frame measures 32" by 38-1/4" and has some gesso chips, plus a rebuilt upper left hand corner and an old gold painted surface.

By coincidence I found the same painting (and frame, which I cropped out of the image shown above) on Jules Brenton Oil Painting on Canvas of an Interior Scene (ebth.com). On that auction, which ended about two months before the eBay auction, the painting sold for $9 after 10 bids.

Napoleon and Josephine Biscuit

Here on Top eBay Chess Items by Price, we often see porcelain figurines or figural groups, as in Soviet Propaganda Porcelain (August 2016), but I don't recall seeing bisque porcelain. The auction for the piece below, titled 'Napoleonic Biscuit Group of Napoleon & Josephine playing Chess, Scheibe Alsbach', said 'Sold for US $2100', but the eBay index of closed listings said it sold for $1500, 'Best offer accepted'.

The description said,

German bisque or biscuit figural group of Napoleon and Josephine playing chess. Early 20th century, marked. Nice quality, every detail well worked out.

Signature & Marks: No signature. Crossed S for Scheibe
Origin / Artist / Maker: German, Scheibe Alsbach porcelain factory
Material: Bisque porcelain, biscuit porcelain
Size: H/W/D: 20/23/13 cm or 7,87/9,05/5,12 inch.
Condition: This figural group in very good condition with a small restoration done to her left little finger. Furthermore no restorations, no cracks, no hairlines.

According to The chess games of Napoleon Bonaparte (chessgames.com; 'Number of games in database: 3'), 'Napoleon fostered a deep love for chess throughout his life'. According to Napoleon Bonaparte and Chess (chesshistory.com), 'Each of the three "Napoleon games" conveniently comes with a nice story, but nice stories are not chess history.'

No Monkey Business Here

Is this a drawing or a photo?

What's My Next Move? © Flickr user Maureen Barlin under Creative Commons.

It's neither. The description said,

Street art in London, Shoreditch, June 2017. Artist?

The tags said,

London, East End, Shoreditch, street art, spray can art, painting, chimpanzee

and of course,

chess board

The position on the board is decidedly strange, but what do you expect from a chimp?

***

Later: Another, uncropped view of the same street art is called Move in silence... (flickr.com). Do the names Spitalfields, Brick Lane, or Trafik mean anything to you?

Browne: 'I got this aggression that never quits'

After last week's Fischer: 'I'm not seeing people', let's squeeze one more post out of the aging Sports Illustrated (SI) reports on chess. The American magazine tends to spotlight American sports celebrities and chess is no exception.

Sports Illustrated, 12 January 1976

The article starts,

It is amazing.There he was, a child lost in the concrete anonymity of Brooklyn, solitary, restless, different. And then he cultivated a demanding friend: chess. Obsessed, he would stay up half the night replaying the games of the masters, scorning school and withdrawing deeper into himself. Distressed by his isolation, his protective, foreign-born mother introduced him to the famed Manhattan Chess Club where he became renowned for his killer instinct. A sometimes petulant prodigy, he was given to gloating about "destroying the weakies" when he won and scattering the pieces off the board when he lost.

At 16, declaring that "teachers are stupid," he quit Erasmus Hall High School and became a chess vagabond. He toured the world, winning tournament after tournament, complaining about playing conditions and accusing the Russians of conspiring against him. And then, after settling in California, he mounted an all-out assault to wrest the world chess title away from the vaunted Soviet champion.

What's that? You heard it all before? But that is the amazing thing: you have not. Though the stated facts of their careers are exactly the same, the prodigal son of Brooklyn referred to is not Grandmaster Robert James Fischer but Grandmaster Walter Shawn Browne.

For the rest of the article, see Making All the Right Moves, where the photo shown above is captioned, 'Walter Browne is briefly motionless, not the normal state for this go-go grandmaster who feels he can beat anybody at anything -- and the Russians at chess'. For more about Browne on this blog, see Six Times U.S. Champ (June 2015).

July 1967 'On the Cover'

Unlike the previous edition of this series on American chess 50 years ago, June 1967 'On the Cover', which featured a crosstable on one side and Bobby Fischer on the other, this month we have two subjects which were (and still are) covered less frequently.

Left: '1967 U.S. Women's Champion'
Right: 'In Montreal, at Expo, with Care-ease.'

Chess Life

Edith Lucie Weart, left, presents the cup which she donated in 1951. 1967 U.S. Women's Champion Mrs. Gisela Gresser accepts the cup immediately following the tournament.

The winner has her own Wikipedia page: Gisela Kahn Gresser. The presenter was recently featured on a top American blog: Edith Lucie Weart (tartajubow.blogspot.com).

Chess Review

Paul Keres, as member of the Estonian delegation to Expo, the World's Fair at Montreal, played twelve clocked games simultaneously at Sir George Williams University. On the cover, he is considering his game with Max Guse and the move which he made, 24.RxP+.

In case you're wondering, the phrase 'Care-ease' used on the cover of CR mimics the pronunciation of 'Keres'. Only one game from the simultaneous exhibition has found its way into Chessgames.com; see Paul Keres (1967).

Site Stats and Security

Let's have a recap of this series on site statistics:-

• 2017-06-05: Chess Stats Year-Over-Year • 'In the past few months I've noticed a big drop in the number of daily visitors and I would like to know why.'
• 2017-06-12: Site Stats and Adsense • 'I doubt that these Adsense issues are responsible for the decline in visitor traffic, but they don't help.'
• 2017-06-19: Site Stats and Images • 'My server log only tells me that nearly all of the accesses were from Google.'
• 2017-06-26: Adsense Stats Year-Over-Year • 'That makes a downward trend on the server log and an upward trend on ad impressions.'

Google Blogspot, Google Adsense, Google search. It's not hard to see the common denominator here. Google everything? While I was compiling that list of recent posts, I noted a typo on one of them and opened the post in edit. On checking the correction, I got the usual error message 'Your preview failed to load' (which has been happening for a few years already), followed by another usual error message:-

This page contains HTTP resources which may cause mixed content affecting security and user experience if blog is viewed over HTTPS.

Fix / Dismiss / Learn more

Instead of the ususal 'Dismiss', I accidentally clicked 'Fix'. Preview then showed a broken image, so I closed the edit without publishing. The post had disappeared entirely and the source of the post was marked 'DRAFT', so I again opened the post in edit to republish it. The image link had been changed from HTTP to HTTPS. I changed it back to HTTP, saved, and everything was OK (except a Google+ duplicate, which I deleted).

All that rigmarole occurs because I store the blog images on my own m-w.com domain. The 'Learn more' option on the last error message leads to Fix mixed content on your blog (support.google.com). While researching this I discovered the page HTTPS as a ranking signal (webmasters.googleblog.com; August 2014). It says,

We're starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it's only a very lightweight signal -- affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content --while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

Is this the reason for the drop in the number of daily visitors on my site? One of the links in that article goes to Youtube.

Google I/O 2014 - HTTPS Everywhere (45:44) • 'Published on Jun 26, 2014'

The description of the video says,

Data delivered over an unencrypted channel is insecure, untrustworthy, and trivially intercepted. We must protect the security, privacy, and integrity of our users data. In this session we will take a hands-on tour of how to make your websites secure by default: the required technology, configuration and performance best practices, how to migrate your sites to HTTPS and make them user and search friendly, and more. Your users will thank you.

That promises more work that has nothing to do with the content of the site, but I need to look into it at some time in the months ahead. In the meantime, I'll review the recent article How you can cut Google out of your life ... mostly (yahoo.com). I'm afraid it won't be so easy for webmasters.

Do Cheerleaders Play Chess?

Every few months the short list for Video Friday (last seen a few days ago in Chess on Network Television) includes an episode of 'Cheerleaders in the Chess Club'. For various reasons it never gets picked for the final post, but maybe it works for this series on 'The Sociology of Chess'. You be the judge.

Cheerleaders in the Chess Club - Ep1 / S1 (10:55) • 'Published on Dec 17, 2015. Cheerleaders in the Chess Club - Episode 1 / Season 1'

The first chess sequence starts with the making of a video within this video:-

Gwen: Welcome to the Bulldog Chess Club. In today's episode we will be talking to Garth about a series of opening moves called the King's Gambit. Garth, what can you say about this exciting style of play? • Garth: Well, Gwen, the King's Gambit is not for the light of heart. Exposing your King so soon might seem risky but there's a reason why it was the third most popular opening of the 17th century. • Howard (holding cue cards): 19th century. That is a '9'! • Garth: It looks like a '7'. Some people put a line through their '7's...

That's shows more knowledge about chess than a previous Video Friday pick this month, 1.h4 h5 2.g4 g5, so we're off to a reasonable start.

In Cheerleaders in the Chess Club (TV Series 2015–), the IMDb informs, 'Country: Canada'. I'm a day late, but Happy Sesquicentennial, Canada!