Customizing blues...

It turns out customizing one's journal isn't as easy as it looks, at least not if you want particular features. (Either that, or I'm going about it the wrong way.)

I thought the Flexible Squares theme (Chocolate Milkshake variation) looked pretty good, except that it lacks links that allow editing, etc. each post. I found this a major shortcoming while attempting to link to a previous post, which I do often enough for the feature to be useful.

I thought the Bloggish theme (Beckett variation) looked good and had the links I wanted, but it insists on rendering text using tiny letters, which is a built-in annoyance unless you narrow the display to the point where it's ridiculous. Too, there's no way to vary the appearance of the sidebar.

The search goes on.

Cheers...

An old chess book...

I suppose that my first fling with chess in the eighth and ninth grades reawakened my stepdad's interest in the game. Like most European boys of his era, he learned the moves at an early age, and pushed wood along with all of his friends.

The timing of it all is unclear in my mind. I recall that there was a period when my stepdad played chess during his lunch break at work, much the same way my grandfather did in his day. The only difference, of course, aside from the temporal and physical, was that my stepdad would bring home "adjourned" positions in which he had managed to end up "on the move" at the time of adjournment.

Back in the days before computers ruined the game (which is not to say that computers haven't enriched the game as well, though such enrichment is not as apparent at the amateur level, in my opinion), high-level chess involved fairly slow play (a typical rate was 40 moves for each side in two hours), and an adjournment if the game lasted until the first time control. Upon adjournment, the side "on the move" would write down its next move and seal it in an envelope, thus placing both sides in a situation of equal uncertainty with regard to the question: "What's my opponent going to play?"

It may be that my dad started bringing home such positions because I had become more than passively interested in the game during the ninth grade. At any rate, we'd spend an hour or so after dinner over the board, with me playing as his opponent. I don't recall how useful an analysis partner I was.

The next year, my dad went out and bought a pair of nice Staunton chess sets to replace the plastic pieces we had been using. One set was so large that my dad ended up drawing a board on the top surface of the family bridge table, and in the end, we hardly used it. The other set was more manageable, and we played, if memory serves, on a roll-up board.

My dad also bought some serioius chess books, the selection of which was pretty limited at the time. One of these was Chess Master vs Chess Amateur (a title guaranteed to stimulate... hardly anything at all, I think).

What the book lacked in terms of sexy title it made up for with its content, which consisted of a number of heavily annotated games between Dr. Max Euwe, a former World Chamption, and one Dr. Walter Meiden, a professor of Romance Languages and a chess amateur. Meiden lost pretty much every game, though Euwe did not escape unscathed. And what made the annotations special, for me, was that they were of an explanatory nature, as opposed to an illustrative nature, i.e., words instead of variations.

My dad and I spent a few weekends going over games from the book in detail. Meanwhile, my ability over the board was blossoming (though not to the level of a master, as I had expected). Still, I advanced sufficiently in strength to begin to consistently beat my dad whenever we played. Eventually, our games became less frequent, and eventually ceased. He kept the sets and the books, though. For that I am grateful.

Cheers...