October 19, 2017

Table Tennis Cold
Yes, when you catch a cold from some evil player while running a two-day table tennis tournament, you get to call it a cold. I’ve had one since Monday, meaning I must have caught it at the latest on Saturday. However, though I skipped my blog on Mon and Tue, I’ve gotten some work done. (Though I’ve spent most of the time in my lounge chair reading, doing crossword puzzles, watching movies, making funny pictures of cold viruses, and eating chicken soup.)

I had sort of a good break on Wednesday. I normally have four hours of coaching on Wednesday nights, my busiest day other than weekends. However:

  • One student was out of town, visiting Rome on business. (I mistakenly told a few people she was in Australia, but it’s easy to get the two mixed up, right? It was a friend from science fiction, my other world, who was visiting Australia.)
  • One student came down sick and cancelled, not knowing at the time that I was also sick. Maybe we had the same donor?
  • One student cancelled because of Diwali, a Hindu holiday.
  • The parents of the final student saw in my blog that I was sick and told me it would be okay to cancel, so we did so. So I got another full day of rest.

Tonight I normally have two hours of coaching, from 5:30-7:30PM. (There was three, but one moved to the weekend.) However, USATT is having an “emergency” teleconference tonight at 7PM regarding certain matters I expect to blog about tomorrow, but pertaining to the chair of the Ethics and Grievance Committee. So I’ve cancelled the 6:30-7:30 session, and will rush home for the teleconference after the first. On my todo list for today is preparing for the meeting.

Last night I finally did the write-up of the MDTTC October Open I ran this past weekend. Normally I’d do that the day after, on Monday, but that silly cold thing got in the way. I also formatted and put captions on ten pictures of the event finalists, and put them online, linking to them from the results section of the article. I’ll do a final proof of it today and then send it to USATT and Butterfly to publish on their news pages. I’ll link to it tomorrow, assuming it’s up.

Alas, while I was sick work built up. There’s a complication in the tournament accounting from the MDTTC tournament I ran this past weekend, and it looks like I’m going to have to go over all 79 players, one by one, to find the discrepancy. I have to prepare Tim Boggan’s History of U.S. Table Tennis, Volume 20 (you read that right) for online publication, which means taking the 460 page document in PDF form, breaking it into its 28 individual chapters, and then, one by one, shrinking each down in size to publishable size using various filters. I also need to redo the tournament event time schedule for our 2018 tournaments.

And then there are all those calls from President Trump where he desperately asks me what to do. It’s quite Exasperating!!! I tell him how he should build a big wall, cancel lots of health insurance, lower taxes on the rich, go to war with North Korea, pick fights with his fellow Republicans and everyone else, play lots of golf, and have a funny hair style, but he knows I’m kidding.

Liebherr 2017 ITTF Men's World Cup
Here’s the home page. It starts tomorrow, in Liege, Belgium, Oct. 20-22. Here’s the news page with lots of great articles. Representing USA is Kanak Jha.

Which Events Should I Enter?
Here’s the article from Samson Dubina.

My Table Tennis Apologies
Here’s the article from Coach Jon.

Interview with Ferenc Karsai on Long Pips
Here’s the video (4:18).

TABLE Tennis Cartoon
Want to literally play table tennis? Here are earlier versions that didn’t quite work out.

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