Bobby Fisher dies in Iceland at age 64

Chess great Bobby Fisher has passed away...

I used to get the magazine Boy's Life (Boy Scout related monthly) when I was about 11 years old. Bobby Fisher had a chess column even back then (he could not have been over 20) and he would present a chess problem, or a story about chess history.

No comment on his politics, but I always thought he was the greatest American player since Pillsbury.

 

It is also interesting that he pretty much turned on Chess itself, not just the United States and the Jews. He proposed a totally wing-nut new chess where a computer (or deck of cards, or something) randomized the rear rank placement of each players pieces. Then you just had to make the best out of whatever poker hand you were dealt!

He felt like all players post 1990 or so (except himself of course) were cheaters who only tried to memorize other peoples moves, so this random thing would allow the true genius to shine.

We were discussing this at lunch - not so very uncommon for the very highest genius savants in their field to live a pretty whacked existence because they couldn't keep ordinary life on track. People like Kurt Goedel and John Nash in math, Vincent Van Gogh in art, Edgar Allan Poe in literature, and you can pretty much toss a dart at the board in endeavors like film and music...

 

Funny you should say that, but it was an "exotic dancer" from Austria (Adele something) who kept Kurt Goedel from going completely bonkers up until her death...then his friend Einstein (fellow professor at Princeton) tried to take over but Godel rapidly declined and essentially starved himself to death after Einstein succumbed to heart disease.

It is said that Adele had to practically spoon-feed the guy and eat some of the food herself to convince him that he was not being slowly poisoned. He also just about blew his chances at U.S. citizenship and tenure at Princeton by a little gem of a letter sent to the regents which claimed that "poisonous gasses were coming out of the refrigerator" in his university provided cottage.

Well, maybe that was not so crazy after all - I sometimes had that feeling, too - back in my younger Bohemian bachelor days.

 

Darth, you mean Fisher, I presume? Sounds like a replay of Truman Capote in a kind of pathetic way.