March 8, 2017

Celebrities Playing Table Tennis - Want to Host It?
Many years ago, “In a moment of sudden clarity, I realized what this world needed was a web page devoted to pictures of celebrities playing table tennis.” And so I created the Celebrities Playing Table Tennis Page. I maintained and continued to add to it for years, and it now has 1440 photos of 870 different celebrities playing table tennis. Why not browse over it?

How’d you like to take over the site?

A lot of blogs and web pages have links to the site. Here's a list of 68. It was even a "Yahoo Pick," and is one of their "Celebrity Picks.") At its peak, for several months the page averaged over 15,000 downloads per day! (Alas, I’m having trouble accessing the current stats, but I know it still gets a lot of daily hits.)

But it go to be a time-consuming job. A major reason for this was the way I’d set it up, with simple old-fashioned HTML and tables. I think some of the code got messed up, and it became a time-consuming headache adding more pictures. But it’s all there, easy to read, in nine different categories: Politicians/Leaders ... Athletes ... Talk Show Hosts ... Writers ... Actors ... Actresses ... Musicians ... Cartoon Characters ... Other.

I’m just too busy to devote time to it, and so few years ago I stopped maintaining it. And so it just sits there, an orphan in cyberspace, looking for someone it can call “Mommy” or “Daddy.” Yes, I’ve abandoned it; I’m a horrible parent. (I even have a folder of new photos for it that I’ve never added.)

But I’d like to find a good home for it. It would be a great way to attract traffic to your site. You’d have to host it – that means transferring it all to your server, and setting it up in any format you choose. (I'm sure there's a more efficient, modern way of setting up this photo gallery than the way it's currently set up.) Right now it’s a purely non-commercial site – it even says that in bold at the top – and I’d prefer it go to some semi-noncommercial site, rather than a purely commercial one, but let’s see who’s interested and motivated to take it over and maintain it. If interested, let me know.

USATT Young Officials Seminar
Here’s the USATT article – now this is something new and interesting! It’ll take place on Sunday, March 26, at the Lily Yip TTC in New Jersey. Cost is $25. “The one-day seminar . . . will give aspiring young officials 13 – 18 years old the chance to learn the rules of table tennis and earn their USATT Club Umpire Certification. The seminar will be conducted under the supervision of ITTF International Referee and International Umpire Roman Tinyszin, who served as the Deputy Referee at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games.”

And Long Island TTC Makes 90!
With the addition of the Long Island TTC, we now have 90 full-time table tennis centers in the U.S. C’mon, just ten more!!! (I was once laughed at for predicting ten years ago that we could have 100 such centers in ten years – back then we had about eight.)
UPDATE - I just added the New York City Table Tennis Academy, so we're at 91. 
UPDATE - I just added the Houston International Table Tennis Academy, so we're at 92. (I thought I had already added them.) 

How to Recover After Your Service
Here’s the article and podcast (6:31) from Expert Table Tennis.

Top 3 Table Tennis Injuries (and How to Prevent Them)!
Here’s the article.

Best of 2016
Here are the eight best videos from Samson Dubina in 2016.

Young Players Excel at 2017 Maryland Hopes Camp and Trial
Here’s the USATT article – by me! It’s from my blog on Tuesday.

2018 Buenos Aires Youth Olympic Games Initial Announcement
Here’s the news release.

Serious Fun: Augusta Table Tennis Classic to help put food on tables
Here’s the article from the Augusta Chronicle.

History of U.S. Table Tennis, Volume 18 (1990-1991)
Here's chapter 24! Or order your own print copies at TimBogganTableTennis.com, as well as Volume 19!

Ma Long vs Fan Zhendong (Marvelous 12)
Here’s the video (7:12) in the Chinese Team Trials – with links to other matches on the right. Here are the current standings and article – and Zhang Jike (who has dropped to 2-4) has withdrawn from stage one with a foot injury.

Crazy Point!
Here’s the video (43 sec)!

Desperado: Man vs. Cactus
Here’s the picture! (Here’s the non-Facebook version.)

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