September 1, 2016

Revelations of a Table Tennis Champion
Our My long two-week national personal nightmare work binge is over!!! The book, “Revelations of a Table Tennis Champion” (the autobiography of Dan Seemiller) is edited, proofed, the photos fixed up, the pages laid out, and it’s all done! It came in at 214 pages with 94 pictures, divided into eleven chapters.  Book should be available around Sept. 15.

Unfortunately, it’s not actually done. This morning at about 1AM I sent the interior proofs to Dan Seemiller for him to proof. He’ll likely have changes. (Since I wrote this there have already been two changes.) Plus I haven’t finished with the front and back covers. Plus I have to decide whether it’s worth spending roughly seven hours to create an index. Anyway, today I will try to finalize the covers. Fortunately…

Flu Status
Our My long three-day national personal nightmare illness is over!!! It’s been fun exploring the many symptoms of the flu - I won’t go into that here other than to say that you have never had pain like the pain from flu-induced joint pain. I’m still pretty tired; I feel like I just ran a marathon. But I’m mostly over it just in time for…

ITTF Cadet Camp
It starts tomorrow. A bunch of top juniors – ages 10 to 15 – will be training Sept. 2-5 (Fri-Mon) at the ITTF Cadet Camp at the Maryland Table Tennis Center. Coaches are USATT High Performance Director Cory Eider, Wang Qing Liang, Han Xiao, Canadian Coach Liu Yongjiang, and myself. Players attending include Crystal Wang, Derek Nie, Klaus Wood, Jayden Zhou, Lisa Lin, and Faith Hu, all members of the various USA National Cadet or Mini-Cadet Teams, plus a number of others. There’ll be two table tennis sessions each day (2-3 hours each), plus 90-minute physical training sessions on Sat and Sun.

Windshield Wiper Serve
Here’s the coaching video (2:59) from PingSkills. This is one of my favorite serve variations – I’ll throw it at someone when I need a “free” point. (As mentioned in the video, it’s not a common serve, so players aren’t used to it.) Ricky Seemiller used to do this serve better than anyone. The main weakness of the serve is it’s difficult to get great backspin, though an expert such as Ricky was able to do this. You can get great sidespin with this serve. I disagree with the video where it says you get less spin with this serve than with the pendulum serve – I actually get more with this serve, and Ricky used to have the spinniest serves in the world with this. The wrist really snaps into this serve with a very natural super-spinny sidespin.

The Best Table Tennis Apps (iOS & Android)
Here’s the new article from Expert Table Tennis.

USATT Insider
Here’s the new issue, which came out yesterday.

Stars Named to Attend 2016 Women’s World Cup
Here’s the ITTF press release. (For some reason the ITTF online version is all jumbled, so I'm linking to the Butterfly version, which is identical but formatted properly.) 

Fan Zhendong vs Lin Gaoyuan FINAL Highlights Chinese Super League
Here’s the video (4:18).

Promo Picture for Rio Paralympics
Here’s the picture. The Paralympics are Sept. 7-18.

Really Weird Pong
Here’s the picture!

Realistic Computer Table Tennis Game?
Here’s the table tennis cartoon!

Non-Table Tennis - Manbat and Robin, A Snowball’s Chance
Today’s a big day for me – two of my science fiction & fantasy stories were published today. They are:

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