"How many good documentaries about chess are there?"

That's what I'd been asking myself lately. Finally, a couple of days ago, I actually remembered to google best documentaries about chess, and people, there are a ton of documentaries about chess, and lots of them are really good, and you can see a lot of them on YouTube, the whole movies.

The thing is, I'd seen chess in movies, and while some of the movies were good movies, such as Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows and Searching for Bobby Fischer (meh, it's not terrible), the chess in them isn't really worth much.

So then we go to the documentaries, and in the ones which are made by real chess players, everything that's said and shown about chess is way over my head.

So if I were going to make a documentary about chess, it would have to have the same problem I was just complaining about: it wouldn't be about chess per se, as about the personalities of people involved in chess and what have you.

But maybe I could write about people who make documentaries about chess. And those of them who are half-decent chess players themselves, I could try to find other interesting things to say about them, rather than do something humiliating such as filming them trouncing me in chess.

How about a chess tournament where all the players have made movies about chess? And then make a documentary about that tournament? Eh? Eh?

Let me answer the question many of you are asking yourselves: no, I see no evidence that I would be good at making a movie, about chess or anything else, a documentary or not.

I could write a novel about a fictional chess tournament contested by real filmmakers who have made good documentaries about chess. A novel which actually has nothing to say about chess. "A spine-tinglingly mellifluous melange of fact and fiction, dreamy fantasy and necessary substance. A masterpiece." (The New York Times)

Another idea for a documentary: a documentary about people who are fascinated by chess but who are terrible at it. Like me.

I Know What Big Guys All Over the World are Doing

We're looking into the mirror and saying, "Do you feel me? --Do YOU feel ME?"

I don't know what small guys all over the world are doing. Maybe hoping that Russell Brand will sue The Rock for standing on his foot.

Maybe Russell Brand's character already has sued The Rock's character for standing on his foot. I don't know, because I don't have a TV. But I am still on Facebook, and I'm seeing that trailer for "Ballers" all the time.

Cutting off the Internet as well as TV -- that would be extreme. (And not necessarily in the positive sense in which the term was used by those guys who picked on Harold and Kumar.) That would definitely involve leaving the house more often and for longer periods of time.

Maybe there are much better catch phrases than "Do you feel me? --Do YOU feel ME?" popping off of the tube all the time. Maybe I'm wrong to think that "Do you feel me? --Do YOU feel ME?" is going to join "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me?" and "Everything's a situation" in the tough-guy catch-phrase Hall of Fame.

Anyway... (waving forlornly at all of you from no-tv-land...)

How the Bursting-Into-Color Thing Has Been Going So Far

See my previous post for what I mean by bursting into color.

So far it's mostly been a bunch of big talk. I haven't completely healed yet from the operation. Pretty much the only exercise which is allowed is walking, and I'm not allowed too walk to far from home base, on the off chance that I collapse. But Boy, a couple of weeks from now, (insert more big talk)!

I think I've been spending more time in front of the computer since disconnecting my TV.

Several different people seem to agree that I'm losing weight. In addition to the walking I'm trying to eat less overall, with more veggies and all of that totally annoying crap.

Today, a woman who'd turned me down flat when I asked her out before the surgery -- but had been polite enough to add "--but I'm totally flattered!" -- said that I looked really good. She meant: compared to just days after the surgery, when she had seen me. It was only later that it occurred to me that it was possible that her remark could also possibly be construed as encouragement to ask her out again.

I'm really bad at this subtextual thing that many of you humans often do. I'm also bad at figuring out which of you is more liable to do it. That's autism for you.

I may have been standing up taller than usual lately. That's possible.

I feel much, much better than I did a week ago, when I was wondering exactly how long I was going to be in constant pain. The answer was: about that long. Now instead of the pain, there's a tightness in my lower abdomen most of the time. Sort of like having gas, but not having gas.

Helath-care professionals have been visiting me in my home. They're all really nice. One of them is helping me to install a shower head in my tub. With the shower head, I will be able to sit on the tub bench also provided by them, and spray myself. That will be awesome.

Bursting into Color

Ever since I realized I needed major surgery (I had a tumorous kidney removed on August 1, pathology showed that the tumor was stage 1a cancer originating in the kidney, all indications are that post-op I am cancer-free), I've been telling myself that, if I get the chance, I will change my life. I've been trying to do that.

Decades ago, I was reading a film review, and the reviewer -- it wasn't Pauline Kael, I'm pretty sure, but with my memory, hey, maybe it was -- said that this director -- I don't remember which director exactly, sorry -- specialized in movies about (I'm reconstructing the quote from memory so chances it's not word-for-word accurate) "grey people who suddenly burst into full color." My determination is to burst into full color.

Some of you who've known me for a while may think I'm already pretty colorful, but I assure you, you ain't not yet to have seen nothin yet before this thing here.

You heard me.

Part of the planned burst into color will be sharing more -- much more -- about myself. The way I'm doing in this post. The way I've asked for help after coming back home from hospital to my home all alone, asking neighbors for help even though I barely knew them and was terrified.

As another colorful fellow once remarked, "I don't know what you expect staring into the TV set." You and your TV set are your own business, and I'm not here to criticize the two of you. But I was a major couch potato before the surgery, and now I've turned off my TV, and how has it been? It's been very difficult so far, thank you, but that's in part because my mobility is severely limited and will continue to be for a few more weeks. But I can still step outside, and watch sparrows and doves and cardinals and robins and squirrels including some black squirrels and chipmunks and wild rabbits from right outside my house.

There are other things to look at besides TV, is what I'm saying. I've done this no-TV thing before with good results.

I can try to make more eye contact with people. This is risky for me, a 57-year-old autistic person not used to normal levels of eye contact, because it can lead directly to overpowering emotions. But that's okay. Bursting into color can be risky. Bursting into color is supposed to involve strong emotions.

I'm not going to get louder and more obnoxious and pushy and unpleasant, in case you were picturing that. The goal is precisely the opposite: to become much more pleasant. To become good for something.

I don't have a lot of concrete details yet. I have a lot of general things in mind, like writing even better than I already do, and dancing, and losing lots weight by means of taking lots of long walks (5 to 45 miles or so. That would be 45 or so in one day.) I'm picturing myself with longer hair, even if it is turning greyer and greyer.

And these colorful changes may or may not include public office, but I don't see how politics can be avoided altogether, and if Donald Trump can be President, I certainly can be too.

The Homeric Question: West vs the Oralists

In a blog post I published in February entitled Papyri of the Iliad; Also: Academic Conventions, I mentioned the late M L West (1937-2015) and the 1569 papyri of the Iliad which he consulted for his Teubner edition, which was published in two volumes in 1998 and 2000.

Back in February, I knew scarcely anything about West. Before this, he was, to me, above all one of the two editors of the selected fragments in my 1990 OCT edition of Hesiod. Since then, I've learned that West was involved in a debate over the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey which is very spirited, to say the least, and which has been going on for decades. (I know that you academics who are reading this know much more about this debate than I do. As I keep repeating, my blog posts about Classical studies are written by a layman for other laypeople.) West said that both poems were composed in the 7th century BC, first the Iliad and then the Odyssey, by two different individuals; on the other hand, scholars known as oralists, or proponents of oralism, assert that... let's see -- what exactly do they assert? I believe they're saying that no one person can be regarded as the author of either or both poems: that they were the products of oral composition and performance up until the moment, in the 6th century, when one version of each poem was written down. The oral performances continued for some time after this first written version, and account for the many of the discrepancies among the manuscripts. I believe that's more or less what the oralists are saying.

I know that I don't know anywhere near enough Greek to take an intelligent position on this controversy. To do so, I would have to be able to evaluate the textual variants in Homer, and decide whether I beleive that West or the oralists account for them more convincingly. All I can tell you is that I like the things which West wrote about it in English. Beginning with the first I ever heard about West's disagreement with the oralists: in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2001.09.06, answering reviews of his volumes of the Iliad by Gregory Nagy and Jean-Fabrice Nardelli, West writes:

"My critics are both (though it takes them in different ways) devotees of the Oralist faith, and they reproach me for not paying sufficient regard to the Good News."

That made me smile. West has had me from the moment I read that. Furthermore, unfortunately, Nagy, Nardelli and others representing the oralist standpoint actually do write, at least when they're writing in opposition to West's answers to the Homeric question, in a strident, dismissive, unpleasant manner reminiscent of religious fanatics answering the views of those who disagree with them.

I'm not saying that West is right and that the oralists are wrong. I am saying that West states his case much more persuasively in English than the oralists do. But, of course, English is ultimately not what this is about.

I'm Cancer -Free

Three weeks ago today, I learned that the doctors were concerned that the tumor in my right kidney was cancer, and that they wanted to operate as soon as possible. Today is twelve days after that operation, and I learned that I am now cancer-free. The tumor they took out of me was huge, much bigger than the actual kidney, but examination after it was removed shows that it originated in the kidney. It was cancer, stage 1B, and there are no signs that it spread to other areas.

Three weeks. Not enough time for me to learn as much about cancer as millions of people know. In three weeks, I was in and out of the University of Michigan hospital (main branch, adjacent to the university and to downtown Ann Arbor) three times: once for the surgery, once because I took the wrong medication, and one more time, just to the ER and out again a couple of hours later, with a broken toe.

How did I break my toe? I don't know. Presumably the pain from the incisions in my abdomen kept me from realizing that anything had happened to my toe, until I looked down and suddenly the four smaller toes on my left foot were black and blue all over. That was one week ago today. Now, the toes on both feet look pretty much the same, and the pain from the incisions has faded enough that I notice a slight pain in the middle toe of my left foot.

I feel like I cheated death. I feel like I cheated cancer. I don't feel like a cancer veteran at all, not after all of the people I've known who've lived with cancer for years and decades.

I feel like I've been given another chance at life. I want to live more completely. I've lived more completely at times before. Most notably in the late summer of 1990 in Bonn. I know how to do it.

How? You may be wondering. A moment at a time, is how.

Just three weeks. You better believe I know I'm freakin' lucky.

They Say it Takes Thousands of Gallons of Water to Make a Pound of Beef --

-- takes it where exactly, is what I want to know -- deep into outer space, or to some other place where it is lost forever and ever, never available again for any human, bovine or plant to drink? Is that what they mean, exactly?

Do they know what they mean? Exactly?

I don't mean to minimize water shortage problems, or problems caused by livestock farming. But I do think it is senseless to try to to discuss problems if we don't know what we're talking about. Water is absorbed by plants and animals, and escapes from them again by evaporation and urination and other means, and vaporizes into clouds, and rains down from clouds and is gathered in lakes and streams, and a lot of it goes into the oceans, but some of the salt water in the oceans evaporates into freshwater clouds, and some of that ends up in the lakes and streams again, not to mention the canals and reservoirs -- and yes, some of it actually does escape the Earth's atmosphere and go into outer space -- and my points are 1) that these processes are complicated, and 2) that the problem currently is not so much a lack of water, as a lack of clean, fresh water in certain areas. The problem has less to do with the overall quantity of water on Earth than with the quality of the water in specific areas.

And to make it more complicated, just one example: if we resort to large desalination of ocean water to meet the fresh-water requirements of humans and cows and grass and corn and so forth -- at some point we're going to think about all of that life back in the ocean that needs saltwater.

I'm not asking you to stop caring about such things. Vegans, I'm not asking you to stop raising Hell. I am asking you, however, to ask yourself whether a meme contains solid information before you post it on Facebook. All you can do, by being careful about such things, is make your case stronger.

I Turned Off the TV

Okay, so I contacted my service provider and cancelled my TV. I didn't select a smaller collection of channels, I cancelled the whole thing. Afterward I went outside and stood on the sidewalk in front of my house and watched the birds and listened to them. We've got a lot of birds in my neighborhood. A lot of big trees. And birds are fascinating, that's why bird-watching is such a huge thing.

I'm being a mama bird, pushing myself out of the warm comfortable nest that TV provided for my brain.

I've intentionally gone for stretches of time with no TV of my own before this. It resulted in a more active social life, which is something I could really use now. Now being the past 20 years or so, which come to think of it is also exactly the amount of time since I last voluntarily stopped watching TV.

It won't be exactly the same this time, because, the Internet. In fact, this might be exactly what I need in order to finally learn how to really take advantage of all that my smartphone has to offer, and become one of the people who walks around hunched over with my face glued to the hand-held screen.

I don't think I need to be TV-less forever. Just for a good long mental flush. Months. Or maybe a few years. Or maybe I'll find something which will mean I could never miss TV all that much. When I have a TV, I tend to watch it too much. This setup I just unhooked was U-TV. How much did I watch it? This is from memory. All hi-def: 1002 was Fox. 1003 was a home-shopping network. 1004 was NBC. I don't remember if there was a 1005. 1006 was a home-shopping network. 1009 was CBC (Canadian). 1020 was a local independent station. So was 1031. 1032 was a home-shopping channel that sold Invicta watches. 1037 was another shopping channel. 1038 was a local independent. So was 1050. 1056 was Detroit public TV. (U-Verse in my area recently dropped public TV from Michigan State University in East Lansing. For a long time I had two different PBS channels.) 1062 was CBS. 1104 was an automotive channel. I don't remember exactly what 1105 was.

I could go on past 3000 but this is getting boring and you can see the point: time for me to chill, seeing as how I'm not actually being paid to know a lot about TV.

According to some random website I'd never heard of, Rachel McAdams, Chloe Sevigny and Cynthia Nixon are among the famous, beautiful people who don't own TV's.

Post-Post-Op

I had a slight setback, but I'm good now, and I'm full of a hunger to live -- to really, really live.

Shortly after finishing my most recent blog post, Post-Op, I collapsed at home. My brother was visiting, he called 911. I went back into the hospital then, Saturday afternoon, and got back home again today, Monday morning. It was only a temporary setback. My overall progress is very good.

Friday night, I had made the wrong choice in pain meds, taking an NSAID, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug. Now I know: I should never take an NSAID again, ever. I should never take a medication without first being sure that it is not an NSAID. At first, the NSAID gave me great pain relief; but by Saturday afternoon, it had caused my blood pressure to plummet, which caused me to collapse.

I'm all better now: the NSAID has been completely flushed out of my system, my kidney function has been returned to normal. My pain level drops noticeably daily. The doctors tell me to walk. I'm walking more than they've asked me to, and they're good with that too, and working hard is speeding my recovery.

On the coming Friday, August 10, I have an appointment with my general practitioner. Monday, August 13, a week from today, I have an appointment with the urologist who performed the surgery. Either on the 10th or the 13th, I will find out more about what the chances are that I am now completely cancer-free.

My brother and I have interacted more with each in the past 48 hours than in the past 5 years before that. He and I have really drifted apart, but it seems that both of us want to change that.

Even before my recent stays in the hospital -- ever since first watching Zoolander a few months ago, in fact -- I've been working on singing the song "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother." So far, I haven't been able to sing it all the way through without breaking into full-on body-shaking sobs. Here's my advice: if you and a loved one have drifted apart, don't wait for something as drastic as the threat of cancer to make you try to patch things up.

Post-Op

The earliest thing I can remember after I gained consciousness coming out of surgery on Wednesday was that I saw a lot pagan deities involved in some sort of struggle with the hospital staff in the crowded, bustling post-op ward. The deities looked just like regular modern men and women. After a while I realized that I had just been hallucinating, and that all of the men and women bustling about were hospital staff.

When you have a kidney removed, you're going to have to deal with some pain. My pain didn't become really severe until around midnight, on a second, less-crowded post-op ward. My surgery had begun at 11:30 AM, and before surgery they had given me a nerve blocker in my abdomen. They said the nerve blocker would last about 12 hours. I assume that my severe pain was a result of the nerve blocker wearing off.

On Thursday they said I was going to stand up, go to the chair beside my bed and sit down in it. I couldn't believe they were asking me to do that, and when I did it the pain was truly horrendous. But they said that it would get easier every time I walked, and that I should try to walk farther each time. And it is getting easy. For a while it felt like the pain would never decrease, but it has.

Standing up and sitting down are very difficult. Going from sitting down to lying down is worse. Even harder is picking something up off of the floor. The books I'll be browsing will probably be at chest level or higher for a while. Before I was discharged, an occupational therapist at the hospital gave me a device with which I can pick up articles of clothing, making dressing and un-dressing much easier.

I have 4 surgery incisions, 1 huge one, 4 inches long or more, going between the halves of my main ab muscles. 3 smaller ones where there used instruments to come at my kidney from different angles. The one just to the right of my main ab muscles hurts often and severely. The huge one hurts less often and less severely.