My Interests
Games
Chosen Go
(also called Chosen Gomoku, Ninuki-Renju, and Pente) was a
Japanese board game I learned while in Sapporo, Japan on a Visiting
Scientist grant
in Professor Kimio Ohno's Quantum Chemistry Department at the
University of Hokkaido. Assistant Professor Fukashi
Sasaki taught me how to pay Chosen Go and
Gomoku
(known internationally as Renji) as well as
Shogi.
Very quickly I became the strongest Chosen Go player beating all
professors, students, and graduate students in the department.
I could hold my own in
Gomoku, but I never could get the hang of Shogi. Having
played tournament chess in high school and with some rated players at the
University of Colorado, I could easily beat the Japanese at chess because
they had little experience. By the same token, I was no match for them
in Shogi, a game they had played all their lives.
My wife and I learned Mahjong while we were in Japan.
We pay using the Japanese rules. We have enjoyed playing Mahjong
with several Japanese couples and have even taught several gaijin
(Japanese for foreign) couples to play. The card game Ming is essentially the same a
Mahjong; when younger, our two girls enjoyed playing Ming with
my wife and me.
Music
The greater Cleveland area is particularly musically blessed. The "best
band in the land", the Cleveland
Orchestra, is the centerpiece. Other outstanding organizations
contributing to the rich musical heritages are:
the Cleveland Institute of Music,
the Cleveland Pops Orchestra,
the Cleveland Chamber Music Society,
Apollo's Fire, the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra,
Cleveland Opera,
Telarc International,
and the
Oberlin College Conservatory of Music.
We are also blessed with two outstanding classical music stations:
WCLV FM95.5
and WKSU FM87.7.
Both stations vigorously support classical music and the performing
arts in the area; both stations feed their signals to the Internet
using the AudioActive system developer by Telos (also here in the
Cleveland area). My favorite "on air" personality is
Albert Petrak,
the Weekend Host, on WCLV.
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