Friday Night Miscellany

There was an interesting article at Chess Life online – yes, darlings, I do read it, at least, I try. I don’t always get there once a week, sometimes it’s a brief fly-by once a month. Anyway, as a result of this article "The Old, the Young & the Classical" by Christopher Kerrigan Damrosch, I found out about the Cross-Generation Chess Program. I really like the idea of a program that not only encourages people of all ages to play chess (the game has benefits for both the young and the older), but encourages the young and the older to play chess with each other. It seems that in today’s "nuclear" families, with parents and their kids sometimes living thousands of miles from their parents/grandparents, children often lack meaningful contact with older people and I think this is a real loss. I look back with much fondness and nostalgia to my childhood where I had close contact with my Grandpa and Grandma Newton. Just about every Sunday at 10 a.m. dad would load us into "Otto" the car (something from about 1934, I believe, lol!) and we would drive to Sturtevant (about a 30 minutes drive before the days of expressways) and the remnant of the truck farm where the Newton family had survived the Great Depression. We would stay until it was dark, summer, winter, spring, fall. There was a big lawn out front, with equally big trees; I spent much time up those trees, much time exploring the remaining acres of the defunct truck farm (some of the acreage was leased to a neighboring corn farmer), and when it was too cold or rainy outside, or tornadoes threatened, or the snow was too deep, I spent glorious hours on the "sun porch" where it got pretty chilly in the winter but that’s where the books were - books, and lots of intriguing souvenirs built up over a lifetime of two world wars, a depression, and raising six children on that rag-tag farm (the family sold vegetables to survive). The sun porch was a short trip through a single "french door" into the living room, where the fireplace was ablaze three seasons out of four, and either a baseball game or football game always seemed to be playing on the black and white television in the corner. My siblings, cousins and I grew up humming the theme song to Hamm’s Beer, and eagerly looked forward to the new adventures of the Hamm’s Bear each season. Hmmmm, seems to me I’ve written about this before, LOL. I could go on and on about those childhood memories. The point is, they’re rich memories of a loving, warm relationship with my grandparents. You know what, when I look back, I’ve really had a wonderful life! Oh my, now I’m getting teary-eyed! Too many kids are missing out on this kind of interaction and the opportunity to build their own wonderful memories. Well, enough of that. I haven’t received my hard copy yet but I see at the Chesslife Online website that the November, 2007 issue of "Chess Life Magazine" is now out. GM Boris Gulko graces the front cover. GM Gulko will be participating in the upcoming 2007 SPICE Cup International Invitational Chess Tournament, In memory of Grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky, November 9 - 16, 2007, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. SPICE, Texas Tech, Susan Polgar, Paul Truong and, no doubt, others, have gone out of their way to put together a grand event, despite the withdrawal of $10,000 sponsorship money by Dr. Erik Moskow. I expect it will be a great success and I salute all of the parties involved for their hard work and efforts to keep the event on track despite the loss of Dr. Moskow’s sponsorship. This seems to be a night for chess news. In perusing Susan Polgar’s blog tonight, I see that she has evidently decided to go to the Executive Board meeting in Crossville, Tennessee after all, despite recently posting that she had cancelled her trip there because of a "security breach." (There are several photos posted at the blog of Ms. Polgar standing outside the USCF’s headquarters in Crossville, TN). I’m glad she decided to attend the meeting after all and fulfill her duties as an elected member of the Executive Board, despite her earlier concerns. I wanted to re-read Ms. Polgar’s prior post about the reasons she’d decided not to attend the EB meeting, which she had posted sometime during the last week or so. Unfortunately, when I went backwards through Ms. Polgar’s blog to find the exact post where she’d expressed her worries about a security breach, I could not find it. I scrolled through all of the October, 2007 postings twice. I could not find it. What the heck? Was I going crazy? I distinctly remembered reading a post where Ms. Polgar said she would not be attending the meeting in Crossville! Shades of "Gaslight!" Then I decided to get with it, and I did a Google search, LOL! Sure enough, good old Google returned a search result: EB Meeting in Crossville I have cancelled my trip for the upcoming USCF EB meeting in Crossville, Tennessee due to a serious security breach. I have asked the USCF to rectify the problems several times but my repeated requests were ignored. 3 days ago by SusanPolgar in Susan Polgar Chess Blog · Authority: 204 However, when I clicked on the link, I got one of those "error" page messages. So, my surmise is that the original blog post was deleted, and Google’s spider hasn’t caught up to that fact yet. Under another google search ("polgar security breach") I found a post that Ms. Polgar did at a discussion board with which she is connected, chessdiscussion.com: Upcoming EB meeting in Crossville ./viewtopic.php?p=2886&sid=3fa48155b2cc32b251ab8d19b0d856db - p2886./viewtopic.php?p=2886&sid=3fa48155b2cc32b251ab8d19b0d856db - p2886by SusanPolgar on Mon Oct 29, 2007 11:25 pm I have cancelled my trip for the upcoming USCF EB meeting in Crossville, Tennessee due to a serious security breach. I have asked the USCF to rectify the problem several times but my request was ignored. I will be joining the meeting via phone conference. Best wishes, Susan Polgar I want to make this clear: I supported Ms. Polgar and Mr. Truong for electon to the USCF Executive Board during the recently-concluded electon for EB seats. I think Ms. Polgar and Mr. Truong have done wonderful things for chess in the United States, and I expect they will continue to do so in the future. But - I don’t understand the need to go back and delete a prior post in a blog that, when it was written, expressed Ms. Polgar’s concerns at that time. It was a legitimate post. Why delete it? This kind of thing just gives fodder to the cows who make the manure that Mr. Sloan so delights in spreading about, peeee-yeeeeuuuuuhhhh! Okay – on a lighter note, darlings, about a week ago or so (before Halloween, in any event), I looked out my patio door about 7:00 p.m. and saw a sight I hadn’t seen before - three critters grazing for the leavings of the critter food I put out first thing in the morning: a skunk to my left (tail up, indicating it was spooked), a youngish raccoon to my right and, down below the retaining wall, what looked like a very large Siamese cat, with red glowing eyes. Wow! I checked about 15 minutes later and they were all still out there, all still in their relative positions to each other (an eternal triangle? LOL!) The cat’s eyes were still glowing red; I could tell because it casually glanced up when I turned on the patio light, which lights up a good portion of the backyard, and then non-chalantly went back to eating. Well, knock me off my barstool! According to something I read today over at the DailyGrail.com, it seems that animals’ eyes do NOT glow read in the dark in the normal course of events. And therefore, if you see a creature in the dark with red glowing eyes, you are seeing something OTHER than a natural living being. Like - something from the "dark land." Hmmmm….