Where's the Game?

    Clara Peller (1902-1987) was a manicurist and television personality. Born in Russia, she was one of eight or nine children. She spent most of her early life in Chicago after her father left Russia in 1906 when he was being drafted for the second time. 

    At age 20, she married a local jeweler, William Peller. They later divorced and she never remarried. She worked for 35 years as a manicurist at a Chicago beauty salon, and later moved to the suburban North Shore area to be near her daughter. 

    At age 80, Peller was hired as a temporary manicurist for a television commercial set in a Chicago barbershop. Impressed by her no-nonsense manners and unique voice she appeared in a number of TV spot advertisements, first as a comical cleaning lady in an advertisement for a Massachusetts State Lottery game and in 1984, in Wendy’s national commercials. 

    The Wendy's commercial portrayed a fictional fast-food competitor named Big Bun, where three elderly ladies were served an enormous hamburger bun containing a minuscule hamburger. Two of the women were commenting on the size of the bun, they were interrupted by an irascible Peller, who looked around in vain for customer assistance while asking, "Where's the beef?" Peller died on August 11, 1987, in Chicago, one week after her 85th birthday, from congestive heart failure. 

    Peller's "Where's the beef?" line became a catchphrase across the United States and Canada as a way to express a lack of substance or quality in anything. I recently received an e-mail from a reader who, to paraphrase Peller, asked, “Where’s the game?!” in an old post. 

    For many years the games in this Blog were published using a few different online sites which are now defunct and, as a result, the games do not appear. The ogn and notes to the games are on the Blog post, but they don't show up. When I copy the pgn and paste it into the chess program I use (Fritz) it will not work because of some embedded “symbols” which are difficult to remove because there are so many of them. 

    Some time in 2021, I began posting games using the Aquarium program and all was well, but at some point the games began showing up in the posts with the moves and notes, etc., but no board. Unfortunately, copying the game and pasting it into a chess program does not work. 

    In February of 2022, I began using Fritz 17 to publish games. This program generates HTML which can be pasted directly into the Blog. It also has the option of creating an interactive board that is stored on the ChessBase site which is why I prefer not to use it. If, for any reason, ChessBase would no longer supports this feature then all the games anybody has ever published using this feature would be lost.