January 7, 2016

How to Wake Up a Student
I had a one-hour session yesterday with a kid who was half asleep. So what does one do when a student (or yourself) is half asleep, and you need to wake him up? I have my own proven method, which I use both on students and on myself – such as every morning when I have to get up early to work with Tim Boggan on his new volume. (See next segment.) So what is my secret?

You splash water on your face. Really, it works! I do it every morning when I first get up, and sometimes in the afternoon if I'm feeling sleepy. When I have students who are sleepy – and kids are always either sleepy or hyperactive, there is no in between – I have them do so as well. It really works! (Usually. Oh, and splashing water on face to wake up ©2016 by Larry Hodges. If you do it, you owe me $1.)

There are other tricks you can do as well to wake yourself up. One simple way is to simply do a little shadow-stroking. Another is to bounce up and down or from one leg to the other before going out to play or between points – it really wakes the body up.

History of U.S. Table Tennis, Volume 17, Day Two
Tim Boggan continues to hold me captive in my office, forcing me to fix up photos and layout pages for his new volume. He's a merciless slave driver who keeps me in chains and smacks me with electrified ping-pong balls if I slow down. If anyone gets this note, please contact Donald Trump so he can tweet bad things about Tim, and Tim will feel remorse and go away.

Remember how I wrote we'd be working from 7AM-2:30PM? Hah! For unknown reasons, I dragged myself out of bed yesterday at 5AM (or did Tim drag me out kicking and screaming?), and we started at 5:30AM, and went to 2:30PM, when I left to coach. He allowed me a thirty-second lunch break of moldy bread and water that smelled like old ping-pong shoes.

The night before I hadn't finished my own work until 11:30PM, and shortly after that I received a call from a USATT person on a huge issue (more on that next week), which we discussed for over an hour. When I finally got to bed it was 1AM. Let's see, go to bed at 1AM, get up at 5AM . . . I think there's something wrong with this, but I'm too tired to figure it out. And so I simply splashed water on my face every couple of hours all day, and lived on Mountain Dew. (I normally limit myself to one 7.5oz can per day, but until we're done with the book, I'm lifting that limit.)

We did chapters 3 & 4 and the first five pages of chapter 5, 45 pages in all, and 131 graphics according to my quick count. The volume starts off in the spring of 1989 and will go through 1990. We've already had some hints about the upcoming landmark three-way 1990 USATT presidential election (where challenger Dan Seemiller will easily win over incumbent Mel Eisner, who finished third, with George Brathwaite finishing second), lots of tournaments, including the 1989 U.S. Open, and later we'll get to the infamous 1990 U.S. Open ("Tournament of Champions"), run under Murphy's Law. Want to read more? Order a copy when it's available in a few weeks! (Tim made me to write that – he threatened to stuff speed glue in my nose if I didn't.)

I left at 2:30, and coached (plus a 30-minute tutoring session on writing) until 7PM. When I got home, I had over 100 emails, including about 20 that needed action or responses. So while Tim snores away (I think he keeps a rifle under the blanket, or is it a flamethrower?), I'm working away on USATT, MDTTC, and SF matters. He'll be up at 4AM, and I just hope I'm in bed before that.

USATT Insider
Here's the latest issue, which came out yesterday.

Interview with Dimitrij Ovtcharov
Here's the interview.

AITTA Wins 2015 North American Teams Table Tennis Championships
Here's the article. It's a bit old, since the tournament took place the last weekend of November, but better late than never! It includes lots of pictures.

College Table Tennis News

That Time Rockstar Made a Table Tennis Game
Here's the article. "When the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 arrived, people expected open world experts Rockstar Games to come blaring out of the gate with something truly next-gen. What they got was something surprising: a table tennis game. Yes, that actually happened."

Ma Long vs Xu Xin (Chinese Trials 2016)
Here's the video (3:42).

Zhang Jike vs Lin Gaoyuan (Chinese Trials 2016)
Here's the video (3:58).

Ding Ning Tribute 2015
Here's the video (3:04).

Off the Table - Feng Tianwei
Here's the video (6:05).

Any Up For . . . Um . . a Little Quidditch Pong???
Here's the article and pictures. "Quidditch Pong Is The Most Magical Option In Drinking Games." (Dang, I'm a non-drinker…)

Ball and Racket Confusion
Here's the picture. (Here's the non-Facebook version.) "You need to hit the ball with the bat not the other way around."

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