Chess Tournament

On Sunday Evening I participated in an invitation-only chess tournament at Montrell's Restaurant in the French Quarter. The event is hosted annually by Jude Acers, a local master best known for holding court outside the French Market in a Red Beret and playing all comers for $5 a game.

There were only eight or so participants, who ran the gamut of playing levels. The highlight of the event for me was certainly my first-round victory over Dr. Albert Franklin, Louisiana State Chess Champion. Dr. Franklin is the highest-rated player I've ever beaten in a tournament. I played two games against Dr. Franklin, one loss & one win, which I present below. If the following sequence of letters and numbers is meaningless to you then you can probably just skip to the last paragraph.

1. e4 c5 2. d4 cxd4 3. c3 dxc3 4. Nxc3 Nc6 5. Nf3 d6 6. Bc4 Nf6 7. 0-0 a6 8. a4 Bg4 9. Qb3 e6 10. Rd1 Na5




















A few comments up to this point: I have since learned that one should almost never play a4 to prevent b5 in the this line - the loss of time is not worth it and it weakens b3 and b4 dangerously, as I discover later in this game. Qb3 was also an error on my part. It's not that I didn't see the knight fork; I miscalculated and somehow thought the double threat of Bxf7+ and Qxb7 somehow negate its effectiveness. Of course this is not the case. I was feeling pretty bad about things at this point.

11. Qa2 Nxc4 12. Qxc4 Rc8 13. Qd3 Be7 14. Bf4 e5 15. Bg5 Be6 16. Ne1 o-o 17. Nc2 Bc4 18. Qd2 Bb3 19. Ra3 Bxc2 20. Qxc2 h6 21. Bxf6 Bxf6 22. Qd2 Qb6 23. Nd5 Qd8




















What a difference! At this point I was pretty stoked. I thought and still think that white is better in this position. Despite my missing pawn I have a very dominant position, chiefly owing to my powerfully placed knight which cannot be dislodged by anything short of exchange sacrifice, given that black's only remaining minor piece is a dark-square bishop. A few thoughts on the intervening moves.

14. Bf4 has two purposes: it increases the pressure on the d6 pawn (threatening to capture it, in fact), and if black repels the bishop by the obvious 14...e5, he has a permanently weak square on d5. This is precisely the weakness my knight ends up exploiting.

I don't know if my plan of Nf3-e1-c2-b4, reinforcing d5, was correct. It may be too slow for such an open position. In any case the knight never made it past c2 owing to the previously mentioned weaknesses on b3 and b4. But since the knight was exchanged for the light-squared bishop, another piece influencing d5, the trade was probably to my advantage.

My move 19. Ra3 was a serious error, but was fortunately not exploited. Dr. Franklin missed a major opportunity in 19... Nxe4, winning my other central pawn and probably swapping down into a winning endgame right there.

My opponent made two other puzzling moves here. 20...h6 seems pointless to me, given that it compels an exchange I already want to make. After I swap my dark-square bishop for his knight, My knight settles happily on d5. And 22...Qb6 is a waste of a move, since the knight immediately chases the queen back to d8.

24. Rg3 Kh8 25. Qe2 Rc6 26. Qh5 Bg5 27. h4 Bxh4 28. Rh3 Bg5 29. Rdd3 Rc1+ 30. Kh2...




















I stopped recording the moves here, as we each had about 30 seconds left on our clocks so I had other priorities. Despite my dominating position, I didn't have time to think of a good plan and from moves 24 on I set off on a doomed kingside attack. Probably this was the best way to go though, hoping to confuse him with mating threats and provoke a mistake. Dr. Franklin won the game in a blitz finish, my clock expiring first.

Game 2:

This time I have the black pieces, moving second.

1.d4 e6 2. Nc3 f5 3. g4 Nf6 4. g5 Ne4 5. Nxe4 fxe4 6. Bf4 d5 7. e3 Bd6 8. Nh3 Bxf4 9. exf4 Bd7 10. f3 exf3 11. Qxf3 12. O-O-O Qe7 13. Bb5 O-O-O




















You can already see what this game is going to be about: White has an advantage in space, owing in part to my inability to move my e-pawn and free my position. His bishop enjoys much greater mobility than mine. White's best plan is probably a kingside pawn advance, avoiding a bishop trade.

As for me, I didn't really have a plan at this point. I was mainly trying to avoid being crushed to death. I put off castling for as long as I could so that white wouldn't know where my king was going to end up. By move 13 I realized that it couldn't possibly go anywhere but the queenside; I'm missing my f-pawn, White's Queen and knight dominate the kingside, and he has two pawns bearing down on it as well. In comparison the queenside looks warm and cozy.

14. Rhe1 Rhf8 15. Re3 Rde8 16. Kb1 Qb4 17. Bxc6 Bxc6 18. Qh5 Rh8 19. c3 Qf8 20. Rde1 Bd7 21. b3 h6 22. Kb2 hxg5 23. Qxg5 e5




















Wham! This one must have taken the good Doctor by surprise, as he paused for some time before replying. His entire strategy has just fallen apart. He NEEDED to keep my e-pawn pinned down to prevent my bishop coming to life. And I had been unable to move the pawn because he would simply capture it for free if I did so.

But here, by moving it I reveal an attack by my bishop on his knight! The knight is attacked by two pieces and defended by only one. White must move it or defend it, and in either case has no time to capture my e-pawn. Not only have I busted things open, I've won a pawn as well. I'm now winning.

24. Qg2 exf4 25. Rxe8+ Bxe8 26. Rf1 Rh5 27. Ng5...




















The next I have written down is 27... Rg4, which is illegal. I don't remember what the actual move was, but I stopped recording after 28. Nf3 for the same reason as before. This time the blitz finish was mine.

Jude had been watching the game intently, and when Dr. Franklin's clock stopped he announced loudly to the whole room, "Ladies and gentlemen, a tremendous upset has occurred!" This ended up being the champ's only loss of the night. I was in contention to win the event for a while but ended up with two losses to Dr. Franklin's one. He won the night, and I contented myself with second.

Hi

It's been a while since I've posted on here. Recap:

1. I moved to New Orleans, where I worked at the zoo for a while. I saw a gorilla get a physical, and hung out with a baby orangutan.

























I played with a jazz band.







I wrote for a music magazine, you can read some here.













I was in a stage show with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Here's a teaser for the show.



You can see me at 1:13 and 2:19.


And most recently, the balcony of my apartment was featured in two scenes in episode 9 of "Treme"

Marie

I meant to write this back in May when I actually took the pictures, but better late than never.

If you were in New York around that time, you probably saw a lot of Marie.


















Marie is from the Bronx, and as you can see, she has had about 20 amputations.

Sometimes Marie is very small:



















Sometimes Marie is very big:

















Anti-smoking campaigns are surely a worthy cause, but this one bothered me. How often does Marie's situation actually occur? To treat a rare worst-case scenario as the inevitable consequence of smoking is a troublesome tactic.

By the time I left New York in August, the 'Marie' campaign had ended. The pictures are from the Union Square subway station, a very big station and one which was nothing but wall-to-wall Marie for a good month. This station was part of my daily commute so I got a good long look at Marie twice a day. If I ever start smoking, I will certainly consider quitting.

Robert Pattinson

Wednesday and Thursday are my days off from work. I came back today to learn that Robert Pattinson - whom you may remember as the dreamy, angst-ridden vampire in "Twilight" or the dreamy but angst-free wizard in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" - was in the store yesterday filming "Remember Me." On the way out, he was mobbed by fans and then clipped on the hip by a taxi.

This provides the backdrop for the following phone call, which I received not long ago:

Me: Hello, Strand Books.
Caller (female, sounds about 16): Hi, I heard that Robert Pattinson was in the store yesterday?
Me: Yes he was.
Caller: Is he still there?
(pause)
Me: No.
Caller: Are you sure?
Me: Yes.
Caller: Do you know where he went?
Me: Home, maybe?
Caller: Oh. So he's not there anymore?
Me: That's correct.


She wanted to be absolutely sure he had not camped at the bookstore overnight.

Konrad & Geese

Konrad Lorenz is a favorite writer of mine. In the early part of the last century he pioneered the field of ethology, the comparative study of animal behavior.

Today I began Lorenz's The Year of the Greylag Goose (which I was given for Christmas and have shamefully failed to read until now). This is a large, illustrated volume on the birds that were the focus of his life's work. The following passage from the book's opening pages caught my attention.

Even after having seen it so many times, I always find it utterly enthralling to witness free-flying birds moving toward me from a long distance away. After all, most poor (or perhaps wicked) souls never see wild animals except from behind! In all the lands of the earth where man has come in contact with wild animals, he is recognized as the most dangerous and merciless predator of all. There is hardly an animal, no matter how big and how strong or how effective its weapons, that will not flee when it sees a human being approach. Only in places where man is unknown will the local animals approach him with complete trust, although usually this is utterly misplaced. One must travel to the Galapagos Islands or Antarctica to find animals that can be approached to within a few feet without being provoked to run or fly away.

Anyone who comes upon a large mammal in a wood will be greeted for a fraction of a second by a terrified animal face. Almost all its surface is taken up by sense organs: large, erect ears, widely staring eyes, and flaring nostrils. An instant later there is usually nothing to see but swaying branches, or at the most a rapidly disappearing view of the animal's rear. Birds, particularly the larger kinds, such as raptors, members of the crow family, and water birds, are if anything even shyer than mammals in the wild. In order to see them close up - and take photographs - one must make use of the cunning techniques of the hunters, either approaching very stealthily or constructing a well-camouflaged hide in a suitable place.

Man regards himself as Lord of the Earth, and so he is, though regrettably so in the sense just indicated, and then only on dry land. I remember quite clearly an occasion when I naively tried to chase off a barracuda, which simply adopted a threat posture and bared its teeth. That gave me the opportunity to find out just how fast one can swim backward with flippers!

Apart from such unwelcome exceptions, man cannot closely approach free-living animals without causing them to take flight. He has been exiled from the paradise of peaceful coexistence with his fellow creatures. That is why, when free-living animals approach me from a long distance away, not because they have failed to notice me but for the very reason that they have seen me and have heard me, it is as if this exile from paradise had been lifted.

This is the type of writing that makes one want to study animals!

An Invitation

Today I received a letter from my congressman, Charles Rangel, inviting me to Obama's inauguration.



How thoughtful. I think I will invite him to my eighteenth birthday.

Interview

Here is the interview: