Canton, Ohio – The professional chess world was rocked today when 13 year old chess prodigy, Bobby Baines, was disqualified from play for testing positive for steroids. Clayton Groman, Director of the United States Chess Federation announced during a press conference from his office in Crossville, Tennessee that Baines was one of 17 professional chess players ranging in ages from 8 to 97 years old that are under suspicion for taking performance enhancing drugs on the USCF list of banned substances. “We’ve had Mr. Baines in our crosshairs for quite some time,” said Groman. “We first became suspicious when we noticed that he was becoming much more violent during matches…
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Kisses Are Like Snowflakes The things my sister never taught me about kissing
By the time I was a pre-pubescent kid, I knew a lot about kisses and kissing. All of it from the movies. Every Saturday afternoon, I’d take copious notes, jotting down the techniques of Humphrey Bogart, Montgomery Clift and Charleton Heston. I thrashed around in my seat as Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr were buffeted about in the surf, clinging to the lip-lock that would make them forever famous in “From Here to Eternity.” Then, I’d go home and practice on Bailey, our dog. When I reached high school things really began to heat up. Kissing was all the guys in the Geography Club ever talked about. “Did you lay…
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Acting is the Life (Sentence) for Me How prison helped me win an Academy Award
With less than seven months go to before my next parole hearing, I decided to get my house in order. Or, should I say my cell. I was doing 15 to life at Sing Sing for a long list of class C misdemeanors, including furnishing cigarettes to my 12-year-old sister and her friends. Since my parole requests had already been denied 7 times, I decided to try a radical approach to making myself appear rehabilitated: taking acting classes. Sing Sing started offering vocational arts classes to career felons like me through the Convicts and Rehabilitated Actors Program. Founded in 1996, CRAP was modeled after New York’s famous Actors Studio and…
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Three Nickels, a Bent Paper Clip and Two Dead Flies Give me enough time and I can lose anything
I always enjoy my visits to Dr. Ramakrishna’s office. Not because I like going to the doctor, but because it’s the only chance I get to catch up on three-year-old issues of Amateur Pilot, Bow Hunters Magazine and Nursing Administration Quarterly. That’s where I ran across an article written for ADHD sufferers: “How to Stop Losing Things and Find Happiness.” I don’t have ADHD, but I do share many of the same symptoms. Like losing things. As a first grader, I never lost anything – largely because I’d wear the same clothes for as long as a month and never owned a watch, earrings or necklace. Six-year-olds usually don’t drive,…