Yesterday afternoon, I stopped on the freeway ramp to assist a stranded motorist, who offered me his bling and his watch if I’d help him get to Florida. Too weird to be true, and maybe he was working a scam. The funny thing is I look at ads for watches all day, because if you look at one ad for a gizmo, you’ll see all the ads for gizmos. Maybe I should’ve taken a closer look at that guy’s watch. I noticed a chessplayer wearing a wristwatch last week, and I thought: Who wears a wristwatch these days, when the …

I’m a librarian in a chess school. It’s Banned Book Week, so I’ll mention the one time I wanted to ban a book (but didn’t, and didn’t even shelve it so I could not find it later). A chap named Robert J. Richey hit some Bay Area chess clubs years back, promoting his first (there are more than one now, unfortunately) chess book, Blitz Chess Puzzles. I bought one, because if a chess book author is so desperate for sales that he’s going club to club, that dude either needs to sell some books, or be treated at the Burger …

Historian Edward Winter included a bit tangentially pertaining to Go in Winter’s page about Edward Lasker: Edward Lasker I think that Winter included that chunk on his page about Lasker because it’s about a book Lasker wrote. I think the chunk itself is primarily Cecil Purdy’s notion that Lasker should remove an appendix about Go from the chess book. In short, I think that section of Winter’s page of Lasker history could be encapsulated as “Non-chess-related appendix to Lasker’s chess book should be removed, said chess writer Purdy”. Here’s where some trouble is in store: On a Go subreddit, a …

Bob Long was a chess publisher who knew what club-level players needed to read. One of the smartest things he ever did was to buy the rights to Cecil Purdy’s work. Purdy was the best chess teacher for students and average players. There are really two levels of chess teacher: The teachers who turn masters into grandmasters, and bad players into good players. Chessplayers are delusional halfwits who think they need the books written by the first type of teacher, when what they actually need is the material written by the second. Cecil John Seddon Purdy was the best of …

There’s a comedian named Al Lubel. He talked about enjoying the sound of his own name. So he repeated it: “Al Lubel. Al Lubel. Al Lubel. Al Lubel. Al Lubel.” He’d do this for minutes. Then he demonstrated a sense for the right time to say: “Isn’t it funny that the more I say it, the more you wonder ‘who is this guy?’.” I think that’s one of the funniest things I ever heard, partly because when he broke to say “Isn’t it funny that the more I say it”, I was thinking “what the fuck, how long will he …