1. FIDE President Kirsan Iljumzhinov has spoken to Kramnik and Danailov (Topalov's manager), but without success as of this report. Iljumzhinov is allegedly neutral, but one bit from the interview suggests otherwise:
Ilyumzhinov: There is only one lever, which I mentioned to both Kramnik and Topalov – millions of chess fans all over the world, who are looking forward to beautiful games and not for legal disputes. This is the most important issue! I told them: break away from your disputes, look around, you are not playing only for yourselves, you are playing for the entire chess world. You are the ones who say that chess is in lack of investors, and now you are doing everything in order to even decrease their number. Yesterday and today I keep receiving telephone calls from the representatives of those companies, which I attract for sponsoring of the chess competitions. They are asking me: “How come, the two most intelligent chess players cannot share a toilet with each other? So no sense for us to interfere, with our millions….” [My emphasis.]
Of course, the bolded passage reflects an anti-Kramnik stance, and reflects a point of view that's in the minority among my readers and the other commentators I've seen around the web. We'll see.
2. GM John Nunn is one of those commentators; you can read his articulate statement of the mainstream view here.
3. I was watching the end of Leno's show to see if Bill O'Reilly's appearance would resemble last year's shootout with Letterman (it didn't), and then stuck around a few more minutes to watch Conan O'Brien's monologue. To my surprise, the world championship came up! The following is my attempt to reconstruct what he said; Conan uberfans who TiVoed the program are welcome to correct any errors.
The world chess championship is underway in Moscow...you're all glued to your sets. [pause] One of the players has filed a complaint. [pause] His opponent once spoke to a girl.
This old chestnut received mild yuks, but I was surprised. Couldn't a comedian of O'Brien's stature (Harvard grad and writer for the Lampoon, one of the top The Simpsons writers in the early 90s, and a top late-night talk show host), to say nothing of his team, come up with a joke based on the actual complaint?
Then I was intrigued. Maybe a bathroom joke would take too long in the setup stage? Would it presuppose too much from his audience? Did he think it would be excessively lowbrow? Would it ruin the overall flow (no pun intended - by which I mean it was a happy accident) of his routine? Would he himself seem too geeky if he seemed to really know the background? Was this an "audible" based on the thought that a bathroom joke wouldn't work for some reason? And perhaps least likely, but interesting: does he care enough about the game to not want to mention the real, incredibly stupid problem? I wonder.
Yes, I hear yesterday the mention of WCC in O'Brien show. And yes, I suppose it is too lowbrow to mention the actual problem as a joke, because this problem is really too stupid. The fact that that a toilet is part of the problem, not only reinforces the fact of the stupidity of the problem, but is also something that does not correspond to usual chess stereotypes.
I guess he knew the problem, but in order to put in the context (and the stereotype), he needed to explain that today computers can be used as a help to play chess, so players might be cheat with them (we are chess fans, but most people does not even know that nowadays computers can play chess better than human), and then continue the history. I guess O'Brien was afraid of reaching an anticlimax ... he needed to explain a bit to make the public understand the problem, but then he was afraid people would get lost, because his routine is based in one line comments... so he mention a classical, mediocre line.
I use to play frequently chess with a cousin (he likes chess, but does not follow chess news) and until recently that I told him, he didn't know there are computers that play good chess, and that one can play chess on the internet. And he didn't know that Kasparov is no longer the chess champion and that he actually is retired.
So, among us, he dramatize about the situation, but if yu look outside, the sad fact is that general public does not care about chess since a long time ago. I wonder when was the breaking point, when chess world lost contact with the majority of people.
That's it. He would have had to explain the whole situation or almost no one would have gotten the joke. How many Americans even realize that a world championship match is taking place? I'd bet that you could do a poll, and a majority of Americans would (like Pascual's cousin) say that Kasparov is still the world champion.
However, he will frequently have monologue jokes about the same story two or more shows, I suppose owing to slow news. I'm still hopeful about this Monday's show for quality late-night chess satire/potty humor in general.