Welcome, everyone, to my forum! I do not get online that often, but please feel free to post whatever you want, whoever you are. (Unless you subscribe to Reader's Digest.)

I play chess not for the intellectual pleasure, not for the sport, not for the glory and honor, but for the money. As I have not won much in many a moon, I no longer play chess. But I do hang out outside the tounament halls and rob the winners when they leave (it was tough shaking down that 8-year-old girl who won the "Best Under 1400" in a recent tournament). But perhaps one day, I'll dust off the old handcuffs and leather mask, and get back into playing. Chess, like love, can make us happy, and it's sometimes even a lot less messy. (It also costs less--all those darned contraptions one finds in the boutiques; hasn't nature given us enough to play with, without all this...stuff?).

The autobiography I'd prepared for this forum ran several hundred carefully-edited pages (not including footnotes and the index). They have been bound and are now in the Smithsonian's exhibit of PreRaphaelite Discourse and other Oddities. There's even talk of a movie.(And don't get me started on the whole oral/anal/genital thing. Don't we have enough of that in church?) However, in a transparently disengenuous gesture of mercy and good will to those unfortunate enough to have stumbled on this page while trying to find the latest stuff on, say, Chuck Conners or George Lukacs (or Gyorgy, for you diehard Lukacs purists--you know who you are, and you know we'll find you soon!--who don't mind the fact that I can't do umlauts or accent marks--just can't get the right timbre in my voice), I have chosen not to recite again the dreadfully boring series of arbitrary and pointless events that have constituted my life. So, here are the gory details reduced to bare bones:

<Chicago: 1955-1969

Santa Fe and Las Cruces, New Mexico, 1969-1979 (With one ten-month period in
Greeley,Colorado, 1973-74)

New York, New York, 1979-1999

Santa Fe, New Mexico: 1999-present

I am a College English and Literature teacher (Ph.D. in English, CUNY). Simply put, people pay me to corrupt young minds.

<Chess highlights/memories>

I learned to play when I was six. I was taught by an embyro during a uteral scan I was conducting of a friend's mother. In the mid-1960s there used to be a PBS show called "Koltinowsky on Chess," which I watched avidly.

I layed [I have left this typo in for <Eyal>] M. Tal in a simultaneous exhibition at the Marshall Chess Club on March 9 (Fischer's birthday)in the mid-1980s (forgot the specific year!). I lost--but I sacced a piece against him.

I have many other interests, but as most are not legal, I am not at liberty to publish them here.

A huge note of thanks for my friends who have helped me negotiate my baby steps through cyberspace: <Jessicafischerqueen>, <Domdaniel>, <Eyal>, <Joe Williams> <CC>, <Niels>, <MckMac>, <Richard Taylor>, <Danielpi>, and others of you as well!