But I'm Still Not Hot For Chess...

This is what happens when young people get purchasing power: they complain that chess, that thrill-a-minute board game for supercomputers, old Ruskies, and homeless guys on a park bench, needs some sexing up. According to this article in the always-superfluous New York Times Sunday Styles section, two Kazakh grandmasters thought it would be good for the so-called sport if they brought in some of the asinine misogyny of the Miss Teen USA pageant, and thus the World Chess Beauty Contest was born. It's basically Am I Hot Or Not but with chessboards in the photos. Seriously. (On the plus side, the WCBC does appear to be a Lorenzo Lamas-free zone.)

I guess the chess club needs some loving too, but can we perhaps have just one thing in the world that's purely an intellectual pursuit? Jay is saddened.

If you're hot, and you contribute to the dumbing down of chess, you can apply for the contest. I guess you need to send in some portraits or something of you, a chess set, and skimpy, totally-inappropriate-for-chess clothes. You also need to fill out a questionnaire, with questions ranging from the semi-understandable — "What attracts you in chess?" — to the unnecessary — "Where would you like to live besides your country?" — to the insipid — "What is your ideal of a man?" What, is this Blind Date all of a sudden? Oddly enough, it doesn't look like your actual ability to play chess factors at all into the judging. So, all you guys with a checkmate fetish, sorry but you're S.O.L.

Let's pretend that this whole chess beauty pageant thing is depressing enough without reading on the home page that the WCBC "arbiters" noticed some statistical abnormalities in the hotties' ELO sexiness ratings. And Diebold wasn't even involved in this election. So you've got some nerd in Romania or Bulgaria or Belarus or somwhere rigging the vote count on a horny chessmaster's website, which is even lamer than, say, rigging the election for class president or chairman of the condo board. Dude, write the Melissa worm or hack into the Pentagon or something, because the chess girls are probably looking for someone with a little... I don't know... ambition.

I should point out that the chess hotties website gets five to six hundred hits a day (or so they claim), while my blog gets about twelve. In that vein, I'm starting the Reasonably Attractive Readers of Jay's Blog Beauty Pageant. If you read my blog, and you're reasonably attractive (no extra appendages, all body parts more or less where they're supposed to be), you can send me a photo and answer this simple questionnaire:

1. Brief bio.
2. What reason for you reading my blog?
3. What are your interests besides my blog?
4. A mundane event in your life.
5. Where would you like to live besides your planet?
6. Who is the American Idol?
7. Do you think that your BFF must read my blog?
8. What is your ideal of a man? (Bonus points for describing me.)
9. If I become a winner of RAROJBBP, I will...
10. Your motto?

I'll put your pics on my site and have other readers rate you, and I'll keep a constant lookout for voting irregularities. Now, since my blog is at least twice as cool as chess, I expect to soon be seeing a thousand to twelve hundred hits a day. While I'm at it, I think I'll set up the Canasta Girls Gone Wild... or maybe I won't.