A Beautiful Mind Erin and

Jan 6, 2002

A Beautiful Mind Erin and I saw this spectacular film last night, and I’m still floating in its world of mathematics, madness, mindfulness and maturity. This movie reminds me of My Left Foot and its successes, and I came out of the theater thinking this is an even better film. But a warning: this is a story about genius meeting schizophrenia, and at times it is an overpowering and uncomfortable story to watch. In the end, though, it is uplifting, amazing, redemptive. Click on the link above to visit the official website, which is a very nice interactive site. I especially liked the Code Break game under the Exercise Your Mind tab. This is essentially the board game that I played with my mother and father and brothers when I was a kid … though I can’t remember the name of the game right now … in which you must find the correct sequence of colored pegs, using the codemaster’s black-and-white pegs as clues. We had a lot of fun playing this game, and others, too, such as Boggle and Clue and Risk and Stratego and Sorry (still my favorite!) and Uno. Last Thanksgiving Chris and Elizabeth introduced Nick, Matt and me to double-12 dominoes, and we had a blast playing that. Elizabeth is one heck of a competitive player. The Shaughnessy Family is competetive, too—they introduced me to Scrabble over Christmas. The first word I put on the board was ”shtetl”—which they immediately challenged, and lost—but after that I was stuck with mostly vowels, and I sputtered out. When Nick visited NC last November, he and I played chess on an outdoor board, with pieces made of tin cans and standing about two feet high. Nick is a serious chess player; I won that match, but I’m eager for a rematch. What’s your favorite board game? Click on the Comments link and tell us.

Anton Zuiker ☄