Today dawned chilly (40 degrees F) and drizzling rain. All thanks to systems moving down out of Canada and hurtling across Lake Erie.
For the most part, being confined to home hasn’t been too bad, but online chess is getting boring. Yesterday there was a spate of idiots and people with fragile egos online. People who abandoned games, refused to move and several who accepted a game and then immediately resigned. My favorite opponent was a Romanian who sent me a whole paragraph in the chat box. I opened another window and pasted it into Google Translate. It turns out that Google Translate does not do a particularly good job of translating Romanian profanity into English.
The news is still hyping the coronavirus. Yahoo blares that the US remains the epicenter of the pandemic. I am not surprised. Compared to the number of cases among the “leaders”, the US population is 7 times larger than that of Spain, 5.5 times that of Italy, 4 times that of Germany and nearly 5 times that of France. It makes sense that we would have a lot more cases.
Looking at the cases per million shows the United States ranks behind Spain, Italy, France and Germany. Over all, the US ranks 18th in cases per million.
Speaking of being confined to home, Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine’s apolitical, no-nonsense response is praiseworthy because unlike many politicians, he has listened to the advice of medical people, not businessmen or other politicians.
De Wine’s calm, sober demeanor is reassuring and he’s not given to hype, but his response has been based on data. When President Trump tried to set a goal for reopening the economy by Easter, DeWine refused to go along. When the pandemic began some in the media were calling it a hoax and claimed the virus spread was being over-exaggerated. Nevertheless, on March 12, even though Ohio hadn’t suffered a major outbreak, DeWine closed the state’s public schools making him the first governor in the nation to do so. DeWine even defied a court order and delayed primary elections.
I didn't understand the complaints some people hurled at the civil authorities and police in California for arresting a surfer who was on the beach even though it was closed. They claimed he wasn't hurting anybody since he was the only one there. Why don't these people understand that when the beach is closed, it's closed to everybody, no exceptions? There will always be some twit who thinks he is the exception and the rules don't apply to him.
On Tuesday some people were creeped out by a Jeopardy episode that was filmed back on February 3rd and 4th when a clue seemed to foretell the coronavirus crisis. The clue read: From a Greek word for people, it describes a disease that affects many people at one time. The answer was a pandemic. The people twittering and Facebooking panic about it being some kind of prophecy are probably the same ones who are buying guns they don't know how to use, hoarding toilet paper, water and canned goods. I suggest they contact THIS guy!
I had never heard of Fritz Reuter Leiber, Jr. (December 24, 1910 – September 5, 1992), who in addition to the stuff already mentioned was an actor in theater and films and a playwright. It turns out that he was also a near-expert chess player with a USCF rating just below 2000.
Leiber was born in Chicago to the actors Fritz Leiber and Virginia Bronson Leiber. He spent 1928 touring with his parents' Shakespeare company before entering the University of Chicago, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received an undergraduate Ph.B. degree in psychology and physiology or biology with honors in 1932.
From 1932 to 1933, he studied as a candidate for the ministry at the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea, Manhattan, an affiliate of the Episcopal Church. After pursuing graduate studies in philosophy at the University of Chicago from 1933 to 1934, but not getting a degree, he toured intermittently with his parents under the stage name of Francis Lathrop. At the same time he pursued a literary career.
From 1937 to 1941, he was employed by Consolidated Book Publishing as a staff writer for the Standard American Encyclopedia. In 1941, he moved to California, where he briefly served as a speech and drama instructor at Occidental College.
Although he held pacifist convictions when the United States entered World War II, he worked with Douglas Aircraft in quality inspection, primarily working on the C-47 Skytrain. At the same time he regularly published fiction. After the war he returned to Chicago and served as associate editor of Science Digest from 1945 to 1956.
In 1958, he returned to Los Angeles and became a full-time fiction writer. In 1969, Leiber relocated to San Francisco and relapsed into alcoholism and barbiturate abuse.
All of which lead to a life in the 1970s of penury even after he again managed to get his addictions under control. Even so, he lived in squalor in one small room of a seedy San Francisco residence hotel.
In 1992,he married his second wife, Margo Skinner, a journalist and poet with whom he had been friends for many years. His death occurred a few weeks after a physical collapse while traveling from a science fiction convention in London, Ontario, with Skinner. The cause of his death was stated by his wife to be stroke.
As a chess player, in 1958 he scored 7.5-0.5 and won the Santa Monica Open and over the course of the following decade he served as president of the Santa Monica Chess Club and his name appeared frequently among competitors at tournaments throughout southern California.
In the early 1960s Leiber sometimes played Board 1 for the Santa Monica Bay Chess Club in the Southern California Chess League. In the early to mid-1960s he played in several tournaments in California with modest results that were in line with his near-Expert rating.
In 1961 he handed Samuel Reshevsky his only defeat in a simultaneous at the Santa Monica Bay Chess Club. His best results were probably in 1961 when he played in the California Open and defeated National Master Henry Gross and then in the Southern California Amateur Championship where he tied for 3rd with a 6-2 score. His one loss came in the final round.
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