April, 2019 archive

I’ve been hiding from reality when I’ve not been feeding the blog by doing New York Times Sunday crossword puzzles. (I don’t like little crosswords–just big ones.) But they are getting too easy, so I decided to re-take up chess.

It’s been a long time since I played chess–I pretty much stopped when I learned how to play contract bridge, but it looks like the odds of my finding a bridge foursome are longer than one of Peter Jackson’s movies in his Hobbit trilogy (to tell the truth, after the first two, I couldn’t work up the interest to see the third one, and I’ve read The Lord of the Rings almost as many times as I’ve read The Canon).

At Project Gutenberg, one of the most worthwhile places on the inner tubes, I found a great text on chess written by Edward Lasker. I printed it out and have been working my way through it.

I also needed a chess set; it’s been years since I’ve had one. I tried a couple of local stores and was not impressed. I wanted something similar to the travel chess set I had way back when, because there’s not a lot of room here to leave a chess set sitting open, and the few sets I found were gimmicky–Harry Potter and Game of Thrones sets, for example.

So I nosed around on Amazon and found a great set from an outfit called Wood Expressions–here’s a direct link. It was quite moderately priced and the workmanship is impressive. It’s a little difficult to tell the bishops from the pawns in the dark pieces, but I’m getting used to it; and chess is slowly coming back to me.