Common Sense? No way!

Looks like John Hawkins agrees with Auskunft! Great minds &c.

In other news, ChessBase continues its love affair with Bobby Fischer by claiming he invented shuffle chess:

Fischer Random Chess (also called Chess960, Chess 960, Fischerandom chess, FR chess, or FullChess) is a variant of random chess defined by Bobby Fischer and introduced formally to the chess public on June 19, 1996, in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Tim Krabbe has already totally owned that idea (Krabbe has a great site, by the way; check out the whole thing):

How Fischer ever got the chess world to accept tying his name to this old idea, is a mystery. Shuffle chess has been known for over 200 years under various names, such as Pre-chess, Baseline Chess, Varied Baseline Chess, Meta Chess, Array Chess and others.

In other mythological news, Bobby Fischer's victory over Boris Spassky in 1972 overthrew the Soviet Union; Bobby is a target of Bush's ninja assassins; and, wait, a breaking story! Bobby was just seen slaying the Lernean Hydra!

I'll own FIDE's stupid world championship cycle later.

Maybe.