Blog Number 73

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Back in July I spoke how chess applied to breakfast (at least for my family).  Well it (kinda) happened again.

A few weeks ago, my wife experienced "zugzwang."  In chess, this is where a player is at a disadvantage no matter what move they make.  It would be better if the player could skip their move (were that a legal move).  As you know, we are in Texas now.  In order to get our license plates, we had to get our cars inspected.  This costs about $40.  The cost is the same whether you pass the inspection or not.  There are plenty of certified shops that will perform this inspection for you.

The wife took the Buick in and was told that the car failed on one item.  Whatever the problem was, it was being caused by a bad gas cap.  Now a gas cap is < $10 at any parts store however the inspection place wanted to charge her $20.  Here is where the zugzwang comes in.  She could either pay the $20 (for the $10 gas cap) or drive the Buick to the nearest parts store, buy a $10 gas cap, then have the car re-inspected.  By driving the car out of the shop though, this would cause us to pay another $40 once we brought back the car with the new ($10) gas cap.

Well, the lesser of two evils was to pay the $20 for the gas cap and that is what she did.  This is just one more cost to add up to my "free" Buick.  And just one more time that chess has intervened in our lives.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon