Chess Master Kasparov Beaten by Level 2 Cleric

he humiliation continues for human chess king Garry Kasparov this week, who lost Friday's game after continually tying computer chess master Deep Junior, a disappointing end to the "Man Vs. Machine" chess series, 16-year-old D&D enthusiast Ronald Wolsey stepped forward Saturday to reveal he had been playing for the computer.

"My conscience has forced me to announce that I have been playing the 'Deep Junior' side of the recent chess matches," Wolsey stated in a written e-mail containing numerous spelling errors. "The deceit was not intended at first, but I wish I had gone public with the truth sooner. I will surely loose some character points for this subterfuge."

Match observers speculate Deep Junior creators at IBM worried about the computer losing and proving inferior to its predecessor Deep Blue after the first game, which Kasparov dominated and judged to offer a draw rather than pursue it to a possible loss. The idea likely occurred to route the chess-playing program of Deep Blue through to the newer model, the original computer that beat Kasparov in 1997 and now owned by chess master Karl Wolsey.

The plot was estimated that with Wolsey's help and an Internet connection, Deep Blue would best Kasparov again and demonstrate the computer's superiority. However, the wrong computer was connected to the match and Karl Wolsey's son Ronald, a Dungeons & Dragon fanatic and occasional chess player, matched the world's greatest chess mind move for move.

Until Friday afternoon, when the junior Wolsey put Kasparov in check with his knight in 43 moves.

Upon the surprising move, Kasparov flipped up the chess board and swore in Russian to the effect of, "I don't believe this bullshit!" When told of the true identity of the computer, the sport's leading player insisted Ronald Wolsey is a future chess genius in the making. Wolsey, who is repeating the tenth grade and has recently flunked his driver's test, would neither confirm nor deny the assessment.

"Chess is fun," said Wolsey, popping a zit near the corner of his eye, "but I have more important things on my mind. In addition to my growing cleric character, I plan on introducing a new wizard character later this year, the first time I've used multiple characters since moving to Advanced D&D. If things are looking better around summer—i.e., I get my license and dad gets off my back—I'm considering writing my own adventure and being GM for it."

Though chess aficionados are calling for a re-match, face to face, between Kasparov and Wolsey, the young opponent is somewhat agoraphobic and says he would not feel comfortable in front of the large audience of 10 or 12 that would come to watch. In addition, Wolsey doubts his chess ability would be at its peak if there were girls in the room.

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The best part of being a professional Research Editor (and if you don't capitalize that you're shit out of luck if you expect a response email) and knowing shitloads about history is that you get to spend most of your time laughing at how stupid people were in the past. Which is even more fun than it sounds. Not that people are any smarter now, but the true scope of any period's idiocy only becomes vividly clear in retrospect.

Most people don't know, for example, that back when X-rays were invented they weren't used for any breakthrough life-saving medical purposes. They used them to X-ray people's feet in shoe stores to make sure their shoes fit right. I shit you not. And it wasn't until the store employees started growing dicks on their dicks like weird sex-cactus nightmares and other Stephen King nonsense that they put two and two together and figured out that all the store employees should run and hide behind a felt tarp when the Foot-o-Scope was turned on. Years later somebody realized that there was a reason all the regular customers were having their feet turn to chalk, so the shoe stores sold all their Foot-o-Scopes to hospitals, which began using them to X-ray pregnant women daily to make sure their fetuses were turning out okay.

Foot-o-Scopes were outlawed by the 1950's, though some were still found to be in use in West Virginia and other third-world states well into the 1980's. Shocking as this may seem, it is important to remember that the state of West Virginia is officially 100 years behind the times, and is kept that way by the federal government to encourage tourism. It's like a giant state-sized Truman Show. The reason there are so many UFO sightings in West Virginia is that the state's residents have not yet invented the aeroplane, and commercial flights passing over the state scare the bejesus out of everyone on the ground.

However, this is an exciting time to be a West Virginian, since the early 1900's were the golden age of misguided medical innovation. Only now are West Virginians experiencing the joys of phrenology, the science of determining personality by measuring the size of your head. Phrenologists used head-measuring devices that look like what you'd use to measure someone's head if you only had a vegetable colander and an acupuncture set at your disposal. It was thought at the time that different parts of the brain controlled different organs, and it went without saying that each of these organs controlled a personality trait (hence the terms "That guy was a dick," "What an asshole," and "Just tackle the wolf, you pussy!"). So if the subject being measured had a lump on his skull in a certain spot, obviously his brain was so overdeveloped in that area it was pushing his skull out like a baking potato.

This theory was soon followed to its logical conclusion when medical marvel and part-time turkey hunter James "Lumpy" Monroe was named President for Life and God Among Men of the National Phrenology Association for his freakishly cauliflower-like skull. This crowning achievement of the phrenology movement was short-lived, however, and the practice was dealt a crippling blow soon after his election when Lumpy Monroe drown while attempting to quench his thirst by leaving his mouth open in a rainstorm.

Part of the reason phrenology proved so popular in the early 20th century was that people had just figured out that bloodletting was bullshit and were eager to find something new to spend their healthcare dollars on, since back in that day all doctors could really do was take your pulse and give you "pills." I say "pills" because all prescription drugs were the same thing back then, capsules containing a mixture of cocaine, morphine and alcohol that were put into different bottles depending on what your problem was. The pills didn't actually cure anything, but nobody complained since they were drunk and high all the time.

Believe it or not, this was actually a step forward for Western medicine, since previously people had believed that the only way to get well was to get the sick out of your body by whatever means necessary. From the middle ages through the 1800's, doctors starved, bled and beat the shit out of sick people both for the patient's health and for their own personal enjoyment. And though the starving and the ass-kicking were the most fun for the doctors, bloodletting was by far the most popular cure for everything from abdominal cramps to bad luck.

Doctors and barbers both got in on the act, though the latter was more a serendipitous accident involving poorly-trained barbers. The barbers had a leg up on the doctors when it came to marketing, however, and they came up with the barber pole to make blood draining out of an arm look fun, while all the doctors could come up with was a couple of scary-assed snakes humping a light pole, which probably drove away more customers than it attracted.

Doctors coined the term "phlebotomy" for the practice, combining "phlegm," the scientific term for throat snot, with "botomy," the medical term meaning the removal of an important body part for no good reason. Phlebotomy flourished despite the fact that a doctor killed George Washington by leaving the former president draining while he went away for a weekend of golf. The American Civil War marked the height of the craze, when over 500,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were cured of aggressive tendencies through battlefield phlebotomy.

The annals of medical dumbshitery are much thicker than could ever be covered in one column, but rest assured this topic will be revisited the next time I have to go see my idiot doctor.

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This is becoming the Rok Finger motif as of late: Taking a rocky path, somehow surviving most of the way, coming to a bump in the road, inhale a huge breath and successfully jump over the bump in the road, just to land in dogshit.

Am I exaggerating? I've known for quite some time God Himself has it in for me—once again, look at the face. But this seems a little sadistic even for the Almighty. To use me as a tool to scare children with this scrapheap of a punum, to break up my 30-year marriage through my paranoia and impulsive temper, to do the same to my second marriage, to make Camembert paralyzed just so my future apartment would be inconveniently filled with ramps and railings, all of it is just so cruel as to make me doubt the existence of God, if I thought someone evil enough like Kathi Lee Gifford had enough power to affect my life. No, there's a God, and He most certainly gets his kicks drowning puppies and kicking Rok Finger's backside like a black and white Spalding.

Now my one little past discretion has come back to haunt me. No, not my out-of-wedlock children—they are neither singular enough in number nor small enough in individual quantity to count as one little indiscretion. I speak of the three month span in the 1980s where I was a professional wrestler.

It's nothing I'm proud of. Even my ex-wife Arvelyn and all my previous column publishers know nothing about it. It's hard to explain why in today's culture, where wrestling clearly is considered a mental disorder rather than a lifestyle choice. Let's just say I needed the money and was going through an unpleasant phase where holding half-naked men down to mats was what was important to me.

My wrestling league, the Dandies of America (D.O.A.), was small and cheap, but so am I; we were a match in heaven, where, I might remind you, the God who hates me so much lives. Our matches were quick and exciting, the way wrestling should have been, and boy, were our costumes fancy! I liked it, but I was always wise enough to wear a mask, to protect my journalistic career and save my cat from abuse on the streets. None of it helped.

I came home from, let's say a massage parlor, the other day just to find Camembert and Lee sitting on the couch and watching some home video wrestling tape. They rented it from a video store under the auspicious title, "Douches of the Ring." You can imagine my surprise when I saw a familiar costume appear in the midst of these badly-edited clips of smaller wrestling events. It was me, under my ring name of The 4-Foot Nightmare, wrestling with an old foe called "Amazing Sack" Ryan. I shuddered in fear, but the next words were what stopped me dead in my tracks:

"Damn, Rok, he's as short as you," Lee said, deadpan face on the TV. "Well, a little bit taller."

That was Saturday night. I haven't been home since. Curse that Lee! He has it all: A handsome face, long, luxurious hair, except for the top of his head, a beautiful apartment with fantastic roommates like me and Camembert, abundant bass playing ability, a never-ending supply of funny weed, and his mother likes him. Now he wants everything I have, to boot—my commune stipend of $36 a week, my fancy desk, my lousy craphole of an apartment with my turd roommates, and worse yet, my pride. I imagine, I didn't really give him time to make any demands after he made me in the video.

Well, I'll be damned to be victim of blackmail! I'm coming out, right here in my commune column, so at least Red Bagel will be reading it. Probably. Yes, America, I used to be a pro-wrestler. It's nothing I'm proud of, though the "Stamp of Approval" move that was my signature was pretty sharp. It was a long time ago. I ask for your forgiveness, and to let me move on. And be quick about it, they won't let me live in the office another day so I've got to get home again.

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