Chess Boxing

There is nothing like a nearly nine hour flight like my wife and I had last week!! Plenty of free time to catch up on reading since you probably won't be able to sleep anyway since the passenger beyond you treats your seat like it is a catapult as they pull on your seat to get themselves in and out of their seat. Then they left your seat go treating you like you were a fire ball to be launched at a castle wall!!! But I digress.

One article I read during our flight was focused on a sport that we never played when I was in school -- Chess Boxing (www.wcbo.org).

Readers can probably guess for themselves what this sport is all about but the basics are this -- a round of boxing is followed by a round of chess and so on until the match is completed. The world championship is set for November 3 in Berlin but I will be at an Iowa State University football game instead (www.cyclones.com).

Chess Boxing's creator (a Dutch guy) got the idea while reading a science fiction/futurist graphic comic book where the sport of Chess Boxing was depicted. Clearly the Dutch culture provides citizens with a lot of free time!!

As a sports enthusiast and aspiring professor this combination of "brains and brawn" captures my attention especially since it was created by an entrepreneur with no known government support that I have seen -- there you knew I could not complete a posting without mentioning the government!!

Check mate,

Todd