Whatta Fiasco

I have apparently fallen into a spate of reading about chess. Not about how to play chess or chess theory. Instead I’m finding myself reading books about chess history, culture, and chess players. I’m not a chess player, but it’s difficult not to pick up at least a little about playing the game along the way.

Anyhow, as the subtitle states, this book is about a specific high school chess team. We get to know the major players both in school, in their lives, and in the context of chess. It’s a mixed story. We have the success of a group of seriously geeky kids (and some of the adults around them) pouring nearly everything they have into the game. But you also see kids who are seriously sidetracked from academics by their obsessions. And then there’s the sense that this particular chess culture isn’t something that’s going to survive for very much longer without some major changes.

Of course, you also get a portrait of kids just begin kids and a sense that any sense of value invested in scholastic chess by the outside world is not terribly important to their lives. They play for same reason most kids play most games: they enjoy it.

[powells]

It was a fun film, even if it rushed on by and didn’t have nearly enough Severus Snape. But there are some lovely touches, and the villain of the day (Imelda Staunton as Dolores Umbridge) is delightfully wicked.

[imdb]

Classical Korean folk tale brought to the screen by director Im Kwon Taek. The narrator is a performer singing on a stage before an audience. The film cuts back and forth from the film of the story as it happens, to watching the narrator sing, to watching the audience react to the story. It works very well. And even if you don’t know Korean (I don’t), the singing of the narrator adds a lot to the story. It’s not quite a film about the telling of a story, but it does show some of the relationship between the story and telling and the hearing of it. And the visuals are gorgeous.

Back to fencing again! The new location is not bad. It’s in an old
gymnasium with a stunning end-grain wood floor (which is about to get
refinished) in midtown. It has offstreet parking. It has decent restrooms
and a drinking fountain with cool water. It’s also well located for after
practice dinner and beer. The only downsides so far are a lack of
airconditioning and the gym not being handicap accessible. On the other
hand, we’ve also been given permission to use the cafeteria (which does
have airconditioning, but we have to move all the tbales and chairs out fo
the way and then put them back when we’re done) which is accessible and
will also make for nice overflow space when holding tournaments. The gym
just isn’t big enough to do more than three full strips at the absolute
maximum, and the KC Open really needs at least six strips to run
reasonably. We’ll get it worked out.

So I fenced again, and I fenced like crap. More accurately, I fenced the
way I used to fence. Regression sucks. But by the end of the evening the
fencing brain was starting to work and the body was beginning to remember.
It’s coming back, slowly. Part of the slowness is that, in spite of a
three week break, my foot still isn’t healed. It’s better than it was but
it’s not back to full strength and that’s very frustrating. So I get to be
patient a little while longer. At least I get to fence while I’m being
patient.

In other news, Max learned a life lesson yesterday. About a week ago he
got tired of how long it was taking to walk around town, so a friend of
his gave him an old clunker bike. Max figured it was a crappy enough bike
that, so long as he didn’t leave it sitting too long, he wouldn’t need to
worry about locking it up. No such luck.

Luckily he decided not to go protest the opening of the Dole Center for
Politics. Why he’d want to protest it, I’m not sure. I’m no fan of the
man’s politics myself, but the center isn’t about the man’s personal
politics. At any rate, all his friends who did decide to protest got
arrested. And all that sympathy I might have felt for him from getting his
bike stolen? It all disappeared when I walked out of the house this
morning and found a bag on the front steps with stuff in it that would
have gotten him more than a simple arrest if he’d taken it to the protest.
Not enough to get him kicked out of the house, lucky him.

Other people spent last Saturday reading the last Harry Potter. I spent the afternoon reading about a chess game. Yes, I’m weird. It’s still a good book. Theoretically it’s a history of chess and it’s influence on life and culture, etc. There’s a decent if not very deep attempt to cover the purported topic. But the chapters are interlaced with a description and analysis of a particular chess game that took on the moniker of “The Immortal Game”. Even if you’re not a chess guru (and I’m about as far from being one as you can get while still able to shuffle the pieces around the board), you’re going to find yourself turning the pages quickly as that game progresses. (Brief pause for the chapter on schizophrenia and chess. Eek!) And by the time the end game rolls around (very quickly, in fact) you’ll find the resolution delightful and instructive.

(I have a shiny new copy of HP7 sitting and waiting for me, but I haven’t read HP6 yet, so it will have to continue waiting for a bit longer.)

[powells]

If you’ve read Counting Heads then you’ll be familiar with a number of the stories in this collection, but it’s still worth reading as there’s plenty of (mostly) unrelated material. “Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz” is not my favorte story of the bunch, but it’s oddly compelling and sticks in my brain. Isn’t that the definition of a good short story?

[amazon]

I didn’t find this follow up to be as consistently sharp as the first book, but it’s still a good (if uncomfortable) read.

[powells]

Dinosaurs! Paleontologists! Time travel! Nifty keen ideas about both dinosaurs and time travel and the meaning of it all! This is a fun one. The final plot resolution verges on being overly clever, but it still worked for me.

[powells]

It’s a fun caper book, with plenty of twists and turns and some entertaining characters. But… I could never quite connect with the protagonist. I’m not sure just why yet. I wanted to. I would have been happy with disliking him, but I just couldn’t get fully invested in him as a character. Maybe it’s because he’s supposed to be such a chameleon? Even so, there’s something that doesn’t work quite right. There were a good half dozen of the supporting characters that I enjoyed immensely as characters to the point of wanting more from them. By the end I found myself getting impatient with all the time taken up by the caper working itself out and wishing there was more time to get to know the people in this story.

[powells]

What a gorgeous graphic novel. Beautiful watercolors. Quirky characters. I know I’ve heard this one mentioned before, but I can’t recall where or when. Well worth the time.

[powells]