Sunday night, just a little bit of lighter stuff. On
Saturday afternoon, I found a small street fair outside the Angelika Mosaic
theater in Merrifield VA, most of it commercial. But there was a giant chess set, set up with
the colors off at a 90-degree angle.
I started to set up the pieces correctly, and in a
moment a few small children were helping.
I hope that learning something about the game actually meant something
to them. I then played the first three moves of a controversial opening called
the Benko Gambit. I wonder if anyone
around recognized it.
Later, I saw a couple of Virginia license plates
with odd names possibly related to chess.
One of them read “Ddippy”. Back
at the chess club at George Washington University back in the mid 1960’s, the
term “dippy” was used for openings that didn’t have a good reputation according
to theory. “Unbooked” could have been the
term. But then grand masters like
Kasparov started finding virtue in unbooked openings.
Another license plate read something like “um good”. That was a term we would use when an opponent
had an obvious positional weakness, like a “backward queen bishop pawn” (like
in the Exchange Variation of the Queen’s Gambit after a “minority attack” by
White). There was a little bit of hazing
in all of this. People would “slurp”
when they had winning positions, or maybe find out they had miscalculated, that
a sacrifice was really a patz, and that the mouth sounds amounted to a “reverse
slurp.”
Back at GW in the 1960’s, one of the strongest
players became obsessed with playing chess, to the point of skipping classes
and dropping out of school and getting drafted.
During the era of the Vietnam era draft, this resulted in loss of
deferment and was foolish and dangerous.
The particular guy got signal corps and made it back OK. Another player enlisted for four years and
served in Army intelligence in Vietnam.
People often like to kibitz, which of course cannot
be allowed in tournament rooms. Neither
are skittles games allowed around rated tournament games. The kibitzing issue does track to “real life”,
where voyeurism into the activities of others from those who are less
competitive is often seen as socially disruptive. There are some times in life you have to step
up and get involved.
That does loop back to the problem of “implicit
content” that has surfaced before. If
someone weights in on a controversial issue without having a direct stake in
terms of his own exposure to risk or responsibility for others, some people
will see such public involvement as provocative or as trying to incite others
into undesirable behavior, rather than as just making a debate point.
This does sound like the "Privilege of Being Listened To" problem that I've mentioned before. I realize I have some issues with it. But no one can tell me what issues (or even cases) to take up or "touch" online. My site is not a democracy (maybe a "timocracy"). As in a college course, "everything" is ultimately relevant.
Last picture: a bust stop in Minneapolis, 2003.
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