If this looks bad, think what a loss to Karpov in 1975 would have done.

Robert James "Bobby" Fischer, who recently got locked in solitary confinement for punching a guard who refused him a second hard-boiled egg. Really.

Bobby Fischer, once (and to hear him tell it, still) world chess champion, now finds himself, through a series of strange chances, a citizen and resident of Iceland. I have said this before and I stand by it: they can have him.

As an active chess player (patzer), this is a little difficult to bear. The man is clearly a chess genius, an artist of incomparable talent. But like so many great artists, he is also manifestly insane. One has only to read the various tirades on his website to get a taste. Any man who believes the Bekins Moving & Storage company sits at the epicenter of a global conspiracy is not in the mainstream. To say the least.

There has been much commentary about his plight lately, as this collection of articles at ChessBase will attest. Much of it is hand-wringing: Why did the great man fall? How did things come to this? Why should helping out Slobodan Milosevic be so wrong? But most commentators, even the generally sympathetic ones, concede that the man has a box of screws loose--perhaps he needs help, they say. Fine. That's a humanitarian approach. And hell, if he'd wanted to get an apartment in Washington, DC and spout his views loudly, that would also have been fine.

But I was taken by this editorial in Pravda("truth" in Russian), which reads as though the author cut and pasted bits from Bobby's press releases. "Kidnapped in Japan and hounded by Washington for political reasons. Welcome to George W. Bush's version of Freedom and Democracy," it runs. But it should be pointed out that the author also recently referred to Vladimir Putin as "a patriot...[who] stands for, and practices, Democracy."

Ah, yes, that's the Pravda I remember reading...back in the late 1980s.