Rooty Hill, Earth

Did you think Rooty Hill was a Sydney chess club—or on the larger scale, perhaps, even an Australian Chess Club? It's time to think again. If you play at our club you're a member of Rooty Hill, Planet Earth!

No, we haven't been approached by any little green men with four eyes and no foreheads, demanding, "Lead me to your chess board"; but we've been getting an increasing number of overseas visitors to our web site, and in the last week some interesting links have appeared.

Chessmaster who sponsored the 2005 USA Chess Championship no longer have the results on line but they can still offer them to viewers. How? By linking to Rooty Hill. If you were to visit their site at this link and scan down the page looking for the the Championship, you would find this heading:
          USA Chess Championship
          http://www.rootyhillchess.org/gameUSAfrm.htm
Yep, it heads right back here to Rooty Hill, Earth.

In the last couple of days we've managed to join the European Union with a link from Goran Urosevic's Blog. Goran is a leading Serbia-Montenegro player and his blog can be found HERE. Goran liked the Internet Chess feature and had this to say to his readers:

Looking at the site statistics we can see that in the first six weeks of this year our site has had multiple visits from Italy, the Netherlands, India and the Slovak Republic (these were the most frequent visitors), Denmark (thank you, Princess Mary), the UK, Turkey (11 visits), USA, France and Germany. All those countries have registered at least ten visits.

Less than ten visits were registered by Finland, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Belgium, Malaysia, Brazil, Lithuania and Croatia. We've even had the odd visit here and there from places like the Russian Federation, Greece, Austria, Poland, Argentina, Switzerland, Estonia and little Luxembourg.

There were also more than 600 visits from sites whose origins were listed as "unknown", "network", or "commercial", and more than 1000 from sites within Australia.

So Rooty Hill is no longer exclusively the sole domain of Sydney chess players. We've gone international!

                              —Report:   David Evans

And speaking of little green men, if you want to read a short story that has absolutely nothing to do with chess, you might like to try A Crock of Gold on Tomorrowland. It's about leprechauns and space travel and threatening tyrants and ineffectual negotiators, and it's about Crown Prince Bryan who is not only unflappable but manages to conjure up a surprise ending that keeps everybody happy. You can find it HERE.