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Haiku, Limerick
Poetry say much with small
but nuance no

There. My first (and likely last) Haiku dedicated to you.

Chess is different from most board game: there is no luck involved beyond being able to take advantage of one’s opponent’s mistakes and having one’s opponent miss one’s own mistakes.

I think when it comes to Ivy creds you could beat me hollow. My only claim to fame is when I figured out that Cornell was basically a displaced neighborhood of NY with shades of Boston/Philly/Berkley/San Francisco for flavouring, and that from a western perspective New Englanders are generally bat sh!t crazy, I decided that ratrher than transfer out, i’d cram four years into three and try to end up on the right side of the Mississippi ASAP. I at least met the first of the two goals.

On the other hand, when it comes to Red Neck culture, and appreciating cultural diversity in general, I suspect I have you beat. You really should try Monty Python. You could also do worse than Louis L’Amour if you want to get into the western mind, but you might find that boring.

To be honest, I have found Redneck culture more useful in many ways than what passes for Ivy League culture, at least post 1968-—while I have my beefs with Buckley, his line about the first 100 names in the Boston telephone book vs. the Harvard faculty was a good insight.

After graduating, I needed to finish paying off my student loans quickly, so I landed a full-time job in contruction along with a part-time job at the Opry (the Grand Ol’ Opry in Nashville) for 60+ hours a week—I’d spent the previous three summers with similar hours but with the full time job being in a plywood mill in Oregon. The mill went down a week after my last summer there, so it is just as well that I was shaving a year off of Cornell, which also helped to save money.

Anyway, the foreman at my construction job just out of Cornell, a former NCO who was a straight shooter, told me after my first day on the job, “I wasn’t too sure about you looking at your resume, and especially your education, but you’ll do.” One of the better compliments I’ve received in life.

Culturally, there are many sailors and backwoodsmen in my family, so the genre tends to be more to colourful stories rather than poetry. I dabbled a bit in poetry in University—but as an Econ major after Cornell’s college of Arts and Science’s had made itself the appropriate case study in Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, last formally studied it in grade 11 and 12 at a backwoods high school.

The one poem I recall ever having written anything on was a sonnet I dug up entitled “Euclid Alone New Beauty Bare”, I believe in grade 11. I’m not sure if I still held the position at that time that I had first articulated in grade 9 that I didn’t want a liberal arts education because I had no intention of being a liberal.

Salud.