Long chess game, yielding cool excerpt

Playing my younger son in chess regularly now. Neither of us are more than beginners, but it's fun to see Jerry grind some mental gears because he's got a great mind. If I don't focus, he really attacks and kicks my ass. Lately, I've been bearing down and beating him, but it takes a long time, and I'm trying to teach him to see the valor in that effort--Jerry being the world's toughest loser.

I like that about him; I always was when I was a kid. But I let it really get me down, all those years of playing for the tiniest Catholic grade school in the league and then the almost smallest high school in the league. Jerry's got it bad, to the point where team sports just don't work for him, despite his obvious talents. This year, we start cross-country in the fall (older champion son moves on to HS), and he'll be one of the school's best runners from day one, despite being at the bottom of the age pool. Even then, though, he can't stand losing, which is what will make him a fierce competitor (cross country is the purest willpower/mental domination sport I've ever played) as he builds up racing experience.

Meanwhile, though, as thought experiment, I work him on chess, trying to get him to see his strength gains relative to my extensive advantage--a process that will go about the same speed in the running (i.e., he will close the gap greatly with each year of practice since he'll just get bigger and stronger and smarter and I simply migrate toward 50).

Anyway, today's long game got me fiddling with my book shelf, and I found this bit--randomly--in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography.

Franklin, a natural optimist, says this:

There are croakers in every country, always boding its ruin. Such a one lived in Philadelphia; a person of note, an elderly man, with a wise look and a very grave manner of speaking; his name was Samuel Mickle. This gentleman, a stranger to me, stopt (sic) one day at my door, and asked me if I was the young man who had lately opened a new printing-house. Being answered in the affirmative, he said he was sorry for me, because it was an expensive undertaking, and the expense would be lost; for Philadelphia was a sinking place, the people already half bankrupt, or near being so; all appearances to the contrary, such as new buildings and the rise of rents, being to his certain knowledge fallacious; for they were, in fact, among the things that would soon ruin us. And he gave me such a detail of misfortunes now existing, or that were soon to exist, that he left me half melancholy. Had I known him before I engaged in this business, probably I never should have done it. This man continued to live in this decaying place, and to declaim in the same strain, refusing for many years to buy a house there, because all was going to destruction; and at last I had the pleasure of seeing him give five times as much for one as he might have bought it for when he first began this croaking.

Yeah, Ben, but eventually a recession did come and the guy was finally right!

Comments

[PurpleSlog]

I used to get my chess fix here:

http://www.chessclub.com/

[Louis Heberlein]

Years ago I read a book about Franklin & Pennsylvania. It noted that many of the 'grunt' citizens distrusted the efforts of Franklin and the writers of the Constitution. They were quoted as saying it was a scheme to trick the real people who did the work that made our new country possible (my words of recollection, not a quote). Elsewhere in the book, it discussed the differences, and some distrust, between the 'sophisticated and civilized' Eastern communities of Pennsylvania, and the wild and violent Scots Irish who passed through to Pennsylvania's Western frontier. Despite the two communities differences, and occasional conflicts, they made compromises for mutual benefits.

I think teaching the realities of the anxieties and frictions of Franklin's times is better than teaching students a 'sanctified' history.