Tim's History of U.S. Table Tennis, Volume 19
It's finally happened - after working nine straight 18-hour days, we're almost done - but to get the thing finished today (Thursday), I was up past 1:30AM, and was up again at 6AM working on the pages. If all goes well, we'll finish today, and then Tim can go home early Friday morning. (We do about 12 hours per day on the book - just reading that makes me tired. The rest is my own coaching and other work.) I plan to sleep 12 hours straight when this thing is done.

But the bad news - no blog today or tomorrow. (Tomorrow's a "holiday," and I'll be recovering from all this.) So see you on Monday! Meanwhile, here's a repeating image of a cat bouncing a ball up and down on a paddle. Let me know on Monday how many times he bounces it. 

Tip of the Week
Coaching and Playing Under the New ITTF Coaching Rule. (As explained in my Dec. 28 blog in the Tip of the Week, I'm putting up extra Tips of the Week and post-dating them for earlier in December so I'll end up with 150 Tips for the period 2014-2016. So today's Tip of the Week is dated Dec. 28.)

Cleaning the Newgy Robot
Last night I spent nearly two hours testing and cleaning our two Newgy robots. We usually have one, and one as a backup. The one we were using had recently started to jam regularly. It was reaching the point where it would do so every minute or so, and then we'd have to turn the robot off, and push the balls up through the feeder tube to unjam the balls. But that wasn't even the worst of the problems - the oscillator broke a couple months ago, so you could only aim it in one direction. Still worse, the shooting head had become loose, and so no matter where you aimed it, within seconds it would drift toward the wide...

The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Ping-Pong Hall: Muscle Memory
Think about it: everything you do when you play table tennis beyond the beginning level involves muscle memory. Muscle memory controls your strokes and serves, your reactions to the opponents' shot, even most of your tactics.

I'm sure there are many advanced studies on this, but what's important here is the practical aspect. And for that, I would say there are two types of muscle memory in table tennis: what I will call "rote muscle memory" and "reactive muscle memory." (I'm sure there are actual technical terms for this, but I'm not going for the technical side here.)

Rote muscle memory is what you use when you tie your shoelaces, play a song you know well on an instrument, do table tennis serves, or hit forehand to forehand with someone who keeps the ball in the same place. It's the first thing beginners learn as they develop into intermediate players. Without this, you simply wouldn't be able to make high-level shots with any consistency. An example of this is a demo I regularly give in my classes, where I put a water bottle...

Timmy and Ping-Pong and Calfie, Oh My!
Tim moved in with me yesterday around 3PM, and within minutes we were hard at work, me doing pages of Volume 19 of his History of U.S Table Tennis, him saying "This goes there! Scan this! Type this! No, you fool, that's not what I meant!" We did the front and back covers and the first 15 or so pages (of a projected 500), plus I scanned and fixed up a bunch of other photos. We then left for dinner at about 5:15 PM, Carrabba's. (It's a nice Italian chain, with lots of authentic Italian dishes with Italian-sounding names. I had pepperoni pizza, Tim had Linguini with white clam sauce.) After dinner, he went to bed (around 7PM as usual for him), and I stayed up late writing. (A new SF story, plus started on the blog.)

I went to bed after midnight, was up by 5:30AM to get the blog down, and to be ready to work with Tim by 7AM. As I write this, I'm looking for more ways to postpone getting started with Tim, because once we start, we'll be at it ALL DAY!!! At least until 5PM, when I leave to coach.

The calf injury is 2/3 healed, but I'm still worried about re-injuring it. But I...