Uh, excuse me, Lieutenant, but speaking of acting in a bizarre fashion, how would you characterize chasing half a sausage with a helicopter? No comment? Don't blame you.

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And on the other side of the world, Monday's Times of London reported that an American murderer named Bloodgood, Claude Bloodgood, is about to sit down to a game of a chess with a kindly lay preacher from the village of Burntwood in Staffordshire. John Walker, a Methodist "councillor," has been meeting Bloodgood across the chessboard virtually for decades. No, the prison is not Internet-equipped; the pair have been dueling by correspondence sent via the two countries' intrepid mail services. This tradition has been kept up for 30 years, except during a brief period when the convict was an escapee. When Walker travels to the Powhatan Correctional Facility in Virginia this summer, they'll have their first face-to-face match.

"He is very nice, a real gentleman," Walker says of Bloodgood in the Times article. "He asks me about the church and tells me about his health." Bloodgood claims to have matched wits on the chessboard with Charlie Chaplin, David Niven and Humphrey Bogart. Of his murderer buddy's talents on the board, Walker remarks, "He is like a dog with a bone. He will never let go. He is a hustler ..."

Walker, a man of deep and abiding faith whose close connection to a higher power apparently hasn't done much for his gaming skills, explains that the duo's "friendship is fueled by the love of chess. It does not matter to me that he is in prison for killing his mother." Well, right, good of you, and why should it? But the question, Mr. Walker (for you and your God), is why in heaven's name you are traveling all the way across the Great Water to play chess with a man who in three decades you've never beaten, not ever, not once, not even almost?
salon.com | June 3, 1999

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