December 12, 2017

Tip of the Week
Push-Button Matches - Playing the Scary All-Out Attacker.

Top Ten Ways to Describe My Weekend with the Flu

  1. I went 100 rounds with Mike Tyson. I lost the first 99 rounds.
  2. Or maybe that was the Chinese team used me for smashing practice. With golf balls.
  3. I alternated freezing and boiling over. Yeah, climate change every ten minutes.
  4. If you’d bought $100 in stock in Kleenex on Friday, by today you’d be a millionaire.
  5. I’ve proven you can live on nothing but cream of wheat, chicken soup, and Dayquil/Nightquil for three days – but it isn’t fun. Just looking at anything else made my stomach explode like a thousand celluloid ping-pong balls in a microwave.
  6. I can’t decide whether I can now check “Flu shot” off my todo list, since I’ve now had the flu. It’s been on the todo list for a month or so, and I was going to do it….
  7. My fever hit 101.5 on Saturday night. That may not seem high, except I normally am around 97, for whatever reason.
  8. At least I could imagine all my poor, forlorn students, tears in their eyes, missing out on their lessons. Misery loves company, even if it’s delusional.
  9. I went in on Sunday for one session where all I had to do was feed multiball. About halfway through I was on the verge of collapse, but I finished the session. I now know what it’s like to be a zombie.
  10. Strangely, my voice wasn’t affected until the worse was over. And then, on Monday, after the fever was gone, my voice went hoarse, and I could barely talk for a few hours. I spent the day in bed reading and running up the stock price of Kleenex. Even more strangely, I had a sudden burst of energy on Monday afternoon, and after mostly lying in bed for three days, I worked for about eight hours straight, almost all on table tennis matters, much of it preparing for meetings at the US Open. (A lot of it was regarding plans for a new Coaches Education and Certification Program, but more on that next year. We’re still in the beginning stages. I also got most of this blog done in advance.) And then I couldn’t sleep, and so, after tossing and turning all night, I went back to my computer at 2:30AM and wrote the first draft of a new science fiction story (my non-table tennis sideline). The story, using a mixture of real science and technobabble, explained the existence of dark matter and involved huge numbers of alien civilizations from other universes using our universe as a dumping ground – yeah, the dark matter, which is nearly undetectable to us because of the differing physical properties of the universes it comes from – and the implications this has on earth, which in the story has reverted to “theoscience,” where the world has become a theocracy that has just awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to a theologian for his theory that our universe is the center of the multiverse. (Turns out he is correct, but only as the central dumping ground.) The story is currently titled, “The Dumping Ground of the Multiverse,” but that sort of gives the story away so will have to change. Then I went back to bed at 6:30AM, got up again at 8:30 AM (crazy hours!), and finished the blog. And now it’s back to table tennis stuff!

North American Teams Ratings
They are up! There were 937 players.

Writers & Bloggers
Tomorrow will be my last blog until Dec. 28. I leave Thursday morning for Las Vegas for two days of USATT board meetings, then playing and coaching in the US Open, and then Christmas with family in San Francisco. (More about all this in tomorrow’s blog.) So if you have something you are about to put up, if you get it to me by tomorrow morning, say 9AM, then it’ll be in the current blog for 15 days.

New From Samson Dubina
He’s been busy since Friday. Here are six new articles or videos. (He put the last three up on Friday after I’d already blogged, but I put up a belated link to them, so you might have seen those ones.)

Pro Table Tennis Team Gives Helping Hand to Youth Education at Topspin New York
Here’s the USATT article by Matt Hetherington.

South Bend TTC Disabled Veterans Camp
Here’s the article and pictures by Dan Seemiller.

Left-handed Sportspeople Have Greater Advantage in Cricket, Baseball and Table Tennis
Here’s the article from ABC News in Australia.

Timo Boll Exclusive Car interview With TableTennisDaily!
Here’s the video (26:58).

Sabine Winter: Ask a Pro Anything
Here’s the video (5:56) from Adam Bobrow.

Moregard Truls – Strong Playing Style? Best of the 2017 World Junior Championships
Here’s the video (10:13) from Arnaud Scheen. Truls is the new sensation from Sweden who made the final of Boy’s Singles at the World Junior Championships. (Here’s the draw.)

T2 APAC: Grand Finals Live Streams
Here are links to the videos.

DHS ITTF Top 10 - 2017 Swedish Open
Here’s the video (4:40).

Vanishing Point: Leon the Magician Makes Table Disappear
Here’s the article and video (1:50).

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