Hans Niemann

 Chess is facing an existential crisis, and the poster boy of that crisis is a 20-year-old grandmaster by the name of Hans Niemann. I admit, I hadn't followed chess for a long time after high school, just dismissing it as a hobby I had in high school. Unlike organized sports leagues, it's harder to keep up with chess if you aren't really good, because by college people have moved onto other endeavors, and spending 2 hours on just one game of chess isn't exactly an ideal way to spend the best years of one's life. So I got out of it with some vague understanding of how the game was evolving and the name "Magnus Carlsen" being the best player in the world for a long time and possibly even the G.O.A.T of the game, (greatest of all time) over legends like Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov. "The Queen's Gambit" came out during the pandemic and got me to watch for awhile, but it was more geared towards the backstory of Ana Taylor Joy's character and stood out because of the story of a succesful woman in chess, which I admit is a pretty big deal. Yes, like many folks in the chess world I got sucked back in because of the cheating scandal of late 2022, when Hans Niemann upset Magnus Carlsen, but then was accused of cheating; he counterattacked by suing Carlsen and others for $100 million. It was messy, and both sides had some image problems, but it definitely put Niemann on the map because of the "tactics" he used to cheat (and the body parts he allegedly used in doing so), even leading to him being the answer to a $1000 clue (the hardest question, thus the most obscure character, but still, recognition). 

A lot of drama, showing once again that no publicity is bad publicity. MJ and I watched the Grammy Awards tonight and saw plenty of celebrities on screen who understand that concept: Travis Scott, who gained fame as Kylie Jenner's partner but also a November 2021 incident at Astroworld where fans at his concert died; Billy Joel in the past has had bad publicity, Miley Cyrus has had bad publicity (didn't stop her from winning Best Record of the Year for Flowers); MJ and I learned, having nether watched the Grammys, that "The Big Award" is the Album of the Year award, the equivalent of Best Picture at the Oscars, and that a lot of surprise guests show up from the celebrity world; Trevor Noah has hosted it for the last several years, Meryl Streep's son-in-law is Mark Ronson, Tony Bennett passed away last year (as did Burt Bacharach and many other icons and frequent Jeopardy answers), the awards typically are at Crypto.com Arena (formerly Staples Center), and both Kelly Clarkson and Oprah are thinner now (I wouldn't categorize them as "thin," but noticeably thinner than before). Seems like Ozempic (by Novo Nordisk, rival of Eli Lilly's Mounjaro) does work for a lot of people, so if there was a pharmaceutical industry awards Ozempic would have won Drug of the Year.... Oprah Winfrey presenting. "And the Pharmy Award goes to....." 

Especially for nobodys like Hans Nieman (or for 99% of the population), and especially in today's world where fame is currency, it's not bad to do something noteworthy even if it's not viewed in teh best light or you get labeled a villain: it makes a story out of it with storylines and plot points, which the general public consumes and hungers for all the time. The problem, though, with Hans Niemann's story for chess is: he's not the only one to cheat. Back when I was playing in like 2000, 2001, it was probably impossible to cheat, and even if you need I don't know if chess computer programs were powerful enough to come up with a move right away to suggest for you to win, and even beat the best grandmasters. Now there are tons of them to tell you the right move instantly, so playing online is the equivalent of the Wild Wild West: there are few rules beyond the basic rules of the game, you don't know who you're playing and if that person just has a bot working on another screen that tells them all the best moves to play. 

Fine, just play live chess, right? But that's the problem that Hans created, he actually cheated in a LIVE game. Especially now with Elon Musk and others working on Neuralink where you don't even need a smart device, chips are just going into your brain, who knows who can just program their brain to think like a computer. (Jeopardy might run into this existential crisis pretty soon, too- I better get on the show quick sometime in the next 8 years). And of course AI is getting exponentially smarter every day; chess has definitely already been "solved," it just might lose the resurgent appeal it has now because people give up. I, for one, love playing for fun without hope of ever being good enough to be a master much less grandmaster, but there's already a feeling of helplessness playing people much better than I am, but also playing a game that's been solved that I can never be THAT good at it. It's tough to inspire interest when you can only go so far. 

Thanks Hans. And yes, your name definitely helps you sound more like a villain (think Hans Gruber from Die hard), or "Neumann" from Seinfield. 

Pennywise and Pound foolish

 I may have used the title before, but I find the phrase "pennywise and pound foolish" to articulately describe myself: I'll resist the urge and starve myself for hours to avoid spending $3.00 for a bottle of water and $7.00 for an overpriced sandwich, but then I'll calmly plop down $76.00/ month (that's like $1000/ year) for a Hulu subscription for the sole purpose of watching Jeopardy. I'll refuse to take the $2.00 bus back home and rather wait for the free city circulator bus that comes 10 minutes later, meanwhile in those 10 minutes during that time I'll neglect my stocks and miss out on opportunities to make a lot more money of passive income, or pass up the opportunity to work an extra day for hundreds of dollars in compensation. If you look up pennywise (not the clown) and pound foolish, there'd be a picture of me doing those things for sure. 

I realized I didn't talk much about stocks in 2023, or if I did it was MUCH MUCH less than 2022. The difference? 2022 was a down year most of the year (bear market), 2023 was a straight line back up, like a V-shaped recovery from the depths of the pandemic up to the euphoric days of late -2021 (halcyon days where everyone in the market looked like a genius) to the painful tech busts of 2022, to the January of 2024 we just went through where everything suprisingly stayed up and kept going up despite the consensus view of having a pullback. When everything's going smoothly and there's no stress, the paradox is I don't even enjoy it- I just take it for granted and let it happen, only to pine for these days again when the market does poorly and wondering why I didn't sell earlier. So it goes. Bill Maher is a genius about psychology of money: the people who have money don't worry about money at all (it's like hunger- people who are full don't worry about food at all), where people who don't have money (or feel it slipping away when the stock market's down) care all the time about money. Which is probably why we all silently detest money- we only think about it when there's a lack of it or need for more, like a water faucet that studdenly stopped pumping out water. (Btw, I read today that we're supposed to flush our water heater every year or so? And there's something called "hard water" that makes the calcium deposits worse and makes flushing even more necessary? First I 've hard of it). 

Is Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri too long and wordy of a title for a good movie? - NO, say Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, and Woody Harrelson- a bit of a weird and rough movie, but reminded me of the Wire- truly flawed characters. We can't just have blissfully angelic heros in life like Spiderman or the Barbie movie, we gotta have characters with human flaws so we can relate to them, and also not quietly detest them for being too perfect.  

Crispin Glover

 Over the weekend I engaged in a few activities that reminded me of why it's important to start at the bottom of the ladder in worse conditions, before getting to the good stuff (why I eat the veggies and other lower-quality food items in a dish before I get to the main course, or the juicy stuff). Otherwise known as, "don't spoil your kids." 

When I was a kid, I grew up on Chicago Bulls basketball: it seemed to be the only thing anyone talked about in my neighborhood growing up: Michael Jordan, (maybe) Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman and his weird haircuts, Space Jam, the 72-win season in 1996, and of course, winning the NBA Championship year after year after year after year. I just took it for granted that the Bulls would make it to the championship every season in a path of least resistance, basically spoiling me for any future fandom of any team. So when the Baltimore Ravens lost to Travis Kelce, Patrick Mahomes, and the Taylor Swift-supported Chiefs this Sunday, I realized that a lot of fanbases have it really hard: basically every team except one experiences losing at some point during a season, and for even successful franchises like the Ravens who were at various points the best team in the NFL, it still feels like a loss for fans, another lost year in a string of lost years, failure after failure after failure, the one bad loss at the end of the season overshadowing every other good thing that happened this season. Also, I feel for those young sports fans in Kansas City now rooting for the Chiefs; they've known nothing but success, and at some point they'll realize like me how rare and fleeting sports hegemony can be. Enjoy it while it lasts. 

I did NOT get spoiled, however, about food. My parents are really good at cooking Chinese food, but definitely not expansive about their ethnicity of food (it was a lot of eggs with tomatoes, black bean noodles, Dan-dan noodles, Mapo Tofu with rice, eggplant with sauce, etc., etc., so many sauces), and nothing to take pictures about (MJ loves taking pictures of her food, and her new obsession with cooking and making it LOOK good likely triumphs over the necessity to make it TASTE good). And especially breakfast and lunch, a lifetime of school cafeteria selections (hot dog day! Pizza day! Subway day!) made eating kind of a chore, a routine to get over with at most meals, even into adulthood, with Five-Dollar Footlongs (the Chess grandmaster Hans Niemann said he lived in New York City eating only $5 footlong Subway sandwiches for years, yea OK) so I never really branched out, experienced good food, etc. So eating at a Michelin restaurant really opens my world to actually ENJOYING a meal and paying for the experience of it, the pristinely made food that forces me to reconsider the philosophy of just getting full to "maybe I should cherish the times when I'm hungry because that's when I get to eat good food." It's like being mired in a few decades of .500 mediocre seasons (below-.500 would be like not having choices in food, which I've had, I just haven't taken advantage of them) but then becoming a championship team for just a meal or two. For as much as I complain about some highly-rated (Michelin star) restaurants being overrated and having their own foibles of haughtiness and not even providing enough to make me food, there are certain restaurants that really make me want to go back (back-to-back championships). When a mushroom steak is better than any steak I've ever had, that restaurant is doing something good. 

Finally, Crispin Glover, who played Marty McFly's dad on one of the "perfect" films of the 1980s by Robert Zemeckis (but produced by Steven Spielberg), Back to the Future. First of all, not seeing the movie in my childhood in its entirety as a kid was a missed opportunity (although it does have some adult themes and language in it), but seeing it as an adult made me appreciate the intricacies of what makes it considered to be a "perfect movie." That is, except for Crispin Glover, who refused to be in the 2nd movie because of philosophical differences in opinion with the director, saying the McFlys should not have changed their fate at the end from a messy unsuccessful family to one that drove sportscars and employed Biff. I personally think plenty of movies have gotten away with flawed messages and morality, but maybe Crispin Glover has a point: the McFlys should not have ended up enriched by their gratuitous fortune of having Marty work for Doc Brown who used a flux capacitor to turn a DeLorean into a time machine. They suddenly were enriched in the second version of their lives without having understood what it was like to be at the bottom and work their way up to the top. They definitely did feel like a spoiled family at the end, and would not have been a relatable family to root for had they been like that at the end. Don't spoil your kids! 

UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) - 不明飞行物, 미확인 비행 물체, ユーフォー

 People have some wild imaginations, and there have plenty of myths and legends about UFOs (the technical term now is UAPs- I know, it's news to me but apparently it's like learning Pluto is no longer a planet, and the country of Turkey is now Turkiye...) but my stance is that until there are definite videos of UFOs that are not just weird lights in the sky, fog, a drone flying at night that someone thought was a UFO, a private helicopter, etc., etc., there's so many smart phones with photo and video capability nowadays that if alien life forms did exist in the world, someone should have been able to film a clear video already. And even with video now there are deepfakes, ways to play around with video that an authentic video would be discredited. 

Why am I bringing up UFO's again? Oh yea just a reminder that people in this country and the world in general are capable of believing all kinds of things, and they're also capable of being very, very wrong. I went to my blood donation place the other day and told my vein guy (some people have a plumber guy, or a car mechanic guy, someone I rely on to get a specific task done, I have a vein guy to put needles into my arm) about this theory that another phlebotomist had that she could see if someone's blood was healthy and had enough iron in it by looking at the color.... my vein guy brushed off the theory as a myth immediaely and declared that it had no scientific backing. So it's hard to believe almost anything (yet MJ will believe all kinds of theories about how acupunture helps fertility, or green tea will help fertility, or being less stressed will help fertility, etc.) Or Amy Schneider, 40-game champion, who has great knowledege about all kinds of things from earth science to historical figures to businesses, who believes in the power of Tarot cards, with the Major Arcana and Minor Arcana, Magician card means to keep your imagination open, High Priestess card means you need more spirituality in your life, etc. It's like the biggest placebo effect ever: you go to a fortune teller or Tarot Card reader to get some confirmation about what you believe, and then you act no it because of that thing with no substance affirms that belief and you act on it. So in that sense, I guess Tarot cards can be somewhat effective, as effective as buying a rabbit foot or anything else, but I definitely don't believe there's actually any meaning in the random pieces of paper turned into cards that somehow can be dialed into your fortune and life. 

I just finished watching True Detective: Season 1 with Matthew McConaguhey and Woody Harrelson, 2 of my preferred actors anyway, and I have to agree it's in the running for best season of TV, period. The 2 detectives tackle a weird cult or ritual in Louisiana that's similar to voodoo, and it reminds me of the danger that suspending belief and thinking one is some sort of divine figure can be. 

The Monkey's Paw (猴爪, 猿の足, 원숭이의 발)

 I pride myself as a "bookish" guy who is well versed in classical literature, 20th century literature, and modern-day literature (I go to various bookstores just to browse the covers for this express purpose), but I admittedly am not caught up on every single piece of literature ever written, but especially so for short stories. For some reason famous short stories I know range from melancholy to sad to horrific, like a bunch of Edger Allen Poe's works (Cask of Amontillado where a guy gets buried alive, the Tell-Tale Heart where someone's heart is beating loudly throughout the house), Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, where someone gets stoned to death, or Guy Maupassant's "The Necklace," where a woman spends years trying to repay a debt on a necklace and living in poverty only to find that the necklace was a fake and worth almost nothing..... (sad!) to The Monkey's Paw, which came up as a J6! answer in today's edition. J6! is a fun game, an extra round of Jeopardy that has multiple choice (MJ's favorite) that were written as real clues for a category but were thrown out because each category only needs 5 clues. 

I guess these horror short stories are more engaging and leave a lasting impression, but Monkey's Paw is another scary short story basically about getting 3 wishes, but then being careful what you wish for, as the first wish by the old couple who have the monkey's paw inadvertently kills their son, then the 2nd wish is to revive the son from the dead, but then they get scared by what the son will be as an "undead" that the 3rd wish is spent wishing the son disappear again. Scary stuff but definitely another cautionary tale about wanting things so bad but they might not turn out like you wished they would. Like going on Jeopardy. Or having a child; that's definitely ripe for Monkey's Paw consequences. Or... when I was in law school I was desperate to get a job at a law firm, any job, because that would lead to a career in law, a prestigious field, and give me job security, maybe one day I'll make partner, win a big case, but almost most importantly, get my name on a website as an assoicate at a law firm, to show everyone who googled my name that I had made it. Well, I did finally get a job at a law firm and my name on their website, but it's like Peter Parker aka Spiderman says, "with great power comes great responsibility." I have big responsibilities on the case that I'm working on for the law firm, but because of my position I have to always be on task, always assign the contract attorneys with tasks, meanwhile also reporting to the partner above me who has tasks for me and assumes I am handling everything including leading the contract attorney team. I'm drowning in responsibilities, and all because I wished all those years ago for a law firm job. I almost wish that the case would settle and I would not have the job anymore, but hen that risks the wrath of the Monkey Paw the other way: I might never get a job again and be wishing I still had this current job. Life is cruel. 

Another short story clue today was about an apparently viral short story I missed in 2023, "Cat Person." Apparently the guy in the story is a needy, fake, not-good-at-sex dude in his mid-thirties named "Robert" who eventually stalks the female narrator (much younger woman) over texting and calls her a "whore." I Damn. I mean, I guess it could be worse? Could have had a Poe ending. Maybe I'll write a happy short story and make it famous. Call it "The Bobby's Claw." 

Farro (麦香, ファッロ, 파로)

 Things I learned today: North Korea apparently has the nickname "Hermet Kingdom." An innocent-sounding name, but that regime is one fo the most brutal at punishing defectors or people trying to escape, often torturing and killing those who try to escape but are caught; really terrible stuff. There's a lot going on in the world that's horrible and wicked that feels difficult to comprehend, like the Israeli military forces now using what happened on Oct. 6 to go after Hamas in a brutal way but also killing civilians in the process. A classic "fighting wrongs with more wrongs" scenario. It makes one thankful to be living in America, where immediate death or threat to one's life (some counties excluded), but then again we're entering a Presidential election year where it's almost certain Trump and Biden are going to have a rematch, and more likely that we have President Trump again by next year (even if he's in prison). 2016 (a lot of celebrities died, Trump turmoil) and 2020 were NOT peaceful years.... taking a deep breath that we whistle past the graveyard this year. 

On the bright side this year, MJ has already made some great dishes for us to eat thanks to a meal service called Purple Carrot. Lots of veggies, whole foods, new ideas, and "protein-rich" courses....trying to avoid processed foods as much as possible this year. (I'm also trying to implement anger management control on myself because for aforementioned reasons, there will likely be quite a lot of triggers). Farro was one of the ingredients in an excellent salad dish that didn't make me full but made me feel healthy; no I did not know what farro was before eating. Apparently it's one of these "ancient" foods that have been around since the Mesopotamia civilization, and it tastes, smells, and feels like rice. As a kid in my Chinese food-eating household I would have just called it "rice." There is, apparently, a lot of distinction between grains than just "rice" like basmati rice, jasmine rice, sapphron rice, and then a bunch of rice substitues like farro and couscous, something I warmed up to due to it feeling a little less coarse than rice. Feels like eating Dip N' Dots except without the sugar and ice cream of Dip N Dots. Then there's this Italian dish called arancini or "little oranges" that are just rice balls that I'd like to try. I guess I was just not a very adventurous eater as a kid (although my weight certainly reflected that I was), the sad thing is I got chubby just from eating the same ol' same ol' without even trying new ethnicities of food or learning what I was eating, basically just inhaling food to satisfy my hunger, which is ANOTHER thing I'm trying to do this year, chew food more (fletcherizing) and take my time eating. Not the easiest thing to do on a busy work schedule, but important for health. 

Due to my limited cultural aptitude for fine dining options (if only there was an SAT for food vocab in high school, I would have studied my butt off) I am terrible at the food and drink categories in trivia, and the worst part is some of those meat courses like osso bucco (Italian dish of bone marrow) or beef wellington, I now probably won't experience because I don't want to make MJ feel bad, when I go to a fine dining option it is usually with MJ in tow, unless of course there is a vegan version of them, which is becoming more and more common: we went to a vegan Chinese restaurant in London and if they can make Fuqi Feipian (or husband and wife meat slices) into a vegan dish, anything is possible. Seriously, I'm just waiting for duck l'orange or beef bourgignon or lobster risotto to show up at on a menu of one of the restaurants MJ has on her Instagram feed, and we're in! 

Endorphins (内啡肽, エンドルフィン, 엔돌핀)

 This weekend I realized how important endorphins are to my daily happiness: I often explain that I like dodgeball because it relieves stress and allows aggression to get out; turns out it might just be the endorphins, those "feel-good" chemicals released both by the pituarity gland and the hypothalamus when we feel pain or exericese, and they literally mean "inside the body" and "morphine." The word kind proves the point in "Big Fat Greek Wedding 3," that almost all words in English can be traced back to the Greek language. Actually, a bunch of naturally occuring things in the body sound scary: more than just morphine is "opioid receptor," or the brain's reward centers. And the 4 "feel-good" hormones are dopamine (sounds like a narcotic), seratonin, endorphins, and oxytocin (literally an anagram of oxycotin, a main cause of America's opioid crisis)

 I guess my natural highs all can be credited to these little guys (I'll call them "bobby-dorphins") , and why I can stay relatively happy most days with just an hour of running (in fact, I crave my runs outside to a level of addiction, likely because my body is just itching to let out a burst of endorphins to make me happy again after a long day of working) and why I feel SO good after playing dodgeball, I can't think of anything else: my brain is high on that feeling of natural high and needs to calm down from it, to the point I can't think about anything else. 

I think also that I'm one of those people who gets an Bobbydorphin rush from talking to people: if I go a whole day without talking, I don't get the pleasure boost from communicating my thoughts or laughing or making a joke. So much of everything I do makes sense now! It's why I actively seek out conversation with other people, even though it probably won't be productive and won't amount to much, I still do it because it's fun, and my brain likes it like it likes candy. I took several Ubers this past weekend; I'm the passenger who would select the "likes chatting" option for Ubers, as opposed to "leave me alone" quiet mode. I'll give Uber drivers a chance to earn their tip upon entering the car: I'll initiate a topic, and if they give me a certain response to keep going, I'll strike up a conversation. I play it cool like I'd be OK either way, but secretly I'm definitely hoping for a talkative driver, because really that's the only time you'll ever see the driver ever again. 

One final source of Bobbydorphin-boosting activity that's mostly unique to me: I like reffing. Referees have one of the worst reputations in the world, almost as bad as lawyers and insurance salesmen, or a more apt analogy, like cops, because they are the police of sports and games. If they're doing a good job, you don't notice them. If they do a bad job, everyone hates them, even the side they rule in favor of. It's a no-win situation, yet I'm drawn to it, like I'm trying to right the wrongs of society or prevent the cheaters of dodgeball to get away from it or something. I've done a lot of soul searching on this and haven't come up with a precise answer: part of it is definitely pride, thinking (maybe erroneously) that I'm good at reffing and can get more calls right than the average dodgeball referee (however many there are in the world) but also it's probably the rush of knowing I make a call that will likely impact this game, so I better get it right, similar to playing in a game and having a stake in what's happening in the game. The world is so messed up nowadays and the lines between what's right and wrong and what's fair or unjust are so blurry, it's kind of exciting to do an activity that has a right or wrong answer and try to solve the puzzle, get it right most of the time. I tend to get almost as big of a rush reffing it as playing it, as both have sort of a goal-accomplish hook to it that draws me and the Bobby-dorphins.