Clive Waters: Insecure Euroweenie

I love ChessBase readers, because they're so predictable. Take this "person":

Clive Waters, Blyth, Northumberland
Just to correct your artical (sic): Northumbria is a old British county which no longer exists. The new county of Northumberland has similar but diferent (sic) bounderies (sic). Being a county of England we are sadly not eligible to enter a team in the Eurupean (sic) championships, which is for countries. Your corrospondent (sic) dare I say must be from the USA (everyone else knows better) and may not understand the difference between a country and a local county ("state" to him I suppose). This may explain things like the American World Open and their 'World' football series – games which nobody else in the world play except Americans! Only the USA invents games so they can win and then claims 'world'. I guess they just dont (sic) like losing in real football!

Wow, a whole lot of layers of non-sequiturlicious anti-Americanism here! I took the liberty of pointing out this third grade kid's spelling errors, but his ignorance of other cultures is astonishing (American football has a world series? Whoops!).

Anyway, while Little Clivey Waters was pontificating on American stupidity, he missed something rather...major:

The correspondent is from Germany, and Northumbria was ironical. The problem is that we cannot for the life of us understand how England, Wales, Scottland and North Ireland can have separate teams in the soccer world cup. Could Germany have Nordrhein-Westfalen and Bayern participating as separate teams? – Editor.

Oops! Guess that defeats the entire purpose of your psychotic rant, huh, Clivey?

Like all fools, Clivey couldn't leave well enough alone, and had to make even more of a fool of himself:

Reply from Clive Waters: "Because Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own individual football associations as recognised by FIFA and UEFA. As simple as that. In much the same way as they – and other countries – have individual chess associations as recognised by FIDE. Northumbria hasn't (at least not as far as I know, certainly not internationally). Your sarcastic throwaway comment adds nothing to your article."

Look, when I say something stupid (it used to happen, many years ago), I try not to draw more attention to myself. Clive had other ideas. So, I'll give him what he wants - an immortalization of sorts, spelling errors and all.

Somehow, being smarter than Clive must prove I'm a stupid American. Somehow.