2002-10-27 - 11:52 p.m.

The New Regime

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it's getting to be crunch time. It is now less than two weeks until I will be leaving for China, and there is still a lot I need to do. Therefore I won't be able to agonize for hours on end over Uberhamster entries; if I can't come up with something decent in twenty minutes or half an hour, I'll just post whatever I have. Maybe the quality will suffer, but it probably won't. I guess my writing suffers from the law of diminishing returns.

I have so much I still need to do!

Today I spent some more time at the Frown Town Public Library, looking up the last pieces of information I needed for my historical chess articles. I had previously made the erroneous assumption that the chess columns that were pasted in the scrapbooks in my attic were all the articles that existed, but this turned out not to be so. What threw me off was the fact that the columns 1) appeared VERY irregularly, sometimes as seldom as once a month and 2) could be almost anywhere in the paper, except on the front page. Since the last two pieces of information I was missing involved the results of the club championships of 1945 and 1946, this meant that I had to go through nearly two full years of the paper, looking at practically every single page.

Those two years were a particularly grim time, and if I saw a photo of a handsome young man in a uniform, the odds were about 6 to 1 that the caption underneath would read "Killed In Action." It's easy to forget that over 750,000 men were killed in World War II. Which is why I can't understand why our dingbat leadership is so eager to start a NEW war with Iraq over some laughably thin pretexts. War, no matter how you look at it, is too serious to be entered into so lightly.

Anyway, even after the war was over, the mood didn't lighten much, what with photos of Eisenhower touring former Nazi concentration camps and news of the post-war trials. However, it really is to Ike's credit that he wanted to document a lot of what he saw, even if it made him sick to his stomach.

Finally I found the articles I was looking for, which was a pleasant surprise. The champions of 1945 and 1946 were exactly who I thought they were which gave me a certain satisfaction. I now have an unbroken list of annual club champions that goes from 2002 to 1937, something very few chess clubs can claim.

And now, back to work.