August 20, 2012

Tip of the Week

Covering the Middle.

Table Tennis Busy

Today starts the last week of our eleven weeks of camps at the Maryland Table Tennis Center. It's going to be a pretty strong camp, with I believe eleven players over 2050, seven players over 2250, and six over 2330.

It's going to be a very busy week for me as well. Besides coaching at the camp and some private and group coaching, I've got a junior player from out of town staying at my house, so I have to take care of him. There's a local cable TV show coming in to film us on Wednesday. A local music group is doing a table tennis music video, and tentatively will come out sometime this week or next weekend. Plus this blog and other writing work. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to get back to work on the page layouts of my Table Tennis Tactics book.

By the way, if anyone has any suggestions for a cover for the book, let me know! I'm still not sure what the cover picture should be. (The book is tentatively titled "Table Tennis Tactics: A Thinker's Guide.")

I've gone through approximately 15 bags of candy (Jolly Ranchers and Chocolate Kisses) during the summer camps in my now expected Friday morning 30-minute candy giveaways, where I put piles of candy on a table and feed multiball, and if you knock one off, you get it. (You can trade for a different one on the table if you choose.)

Meanwhile, I'm still actively writing science fiction and fantasy - see segment below. In fact, I'm about to start work on one for an upcoming Halloween story contest. Hmmm . . . maybe I can do the first Halloween table tennis story? (I wonder if any kid has ever dressed up as a ping-pong player for Halloween?)

An Endangered Ping-Pong Species

Back in April during our Spring Break Camp we were running out of training balls. At the time we had only used orange balls for all of our twenty years. However, Butterfly (a club sponsor) was temporarily out of orange training balls at the time, and so we had to make due with white ones. We discovered the white ones actually showed up better against the new red flooring, and decided to stick with them. Slowly, very slowly, the orange balls have been breaking - we go through about 100 balls each week, with 5-6 full-time coaches plus group sessions and open play, seven days a week. We're now down to about five. The deathwatch has begun to the final orange ball, after which they will join the trilobite and the passenger pigeon and be extinct at the Maryland Table Tennis Center. (Perhaps we should send the last few to a zoo so they can breed them and try to recreate a viable population?) Perhaps I'll post pictures of the final aging orange ball as it struggles to survive in a club of young, up-and-coming white balls, and of course the final funeral pictures as we pay our last respects.

Ariel and the North American Championships

Here's an article about Ariel Hsing and the upcoming North American Championships in Cary, NC, Sept. 1-2. Includes links to videos of defending champion Mo Zhang against Ariel and Lily Zhang.

Bjorn Borg vs. Jean-Michel Saive

Here's a video (1:25) of the superstar tennis player versus the superstar table tennis player playing ping-pong for a hospital charity.

The Onion on Table Tennis

The Onion has done a few table tennis parodies. I did a search of their site, and came up with the following.

• Dec. 20, 2000 - Ping-Pong Somehow Elicits Macho Posturing
• Feb. 13, 2007 - Ping-Pong Rules Adjusted For Girlfriend
• July 20, 2009 - Table Tennis Star Wang Hao Out 4 Weeks With Sprained Knuckle
• July 20, 2009 (Audio) - Ping-Pong Champion Credits Victory to Diet of Nutritious Fish By-Products

There were also these two excerpts from articles:

• Aug. 28, 2008 - Great Olympic Moments From The Lesser-Known Sports -
  "China wins gold medals in every table tennis event at the breathtaking $120 million Basement Stadium."
• Aug. 13, 2010 - Recent Highlights From Lesser-Known Sports
  "The 2010 Hong Kong Junior & Cadet Open international table-tennis tournament is delayed indefinitely, even with the officials also getting down on their hands and knees to look for the missing ping-pong ball."

And Jerry Goldman emailed me about two pop-up headlines:

• "Table Tennis Refs Will Rely on Replay to See What the Hell Happened."
• "Table Tennis Final Delayed as Storm Floods Olympic Basement."

Non-Table Tennis - Email from Publisher

I wrote two novels in the last three years, a SF political satire/drama ("Campaign 2100") and a humorous fantasy ("The Giant Face in the Sky"). (Both feature table tennis, especially the SF one.) I was actually made an offer by a small publisher for the latter, but they gave me the okay to spend some time sending it to the major publishers first. I'm toying with just going with the small publisher offer, however, and just publicizing the heck out of it. However, the breaking news is an email I just received from a somewhat larger publisher about Campaign 2100. Here is what she wrote - I'm crossing my fingers!

"I've been reading through the manuscript you sent me, and so far, I'm liking what I'm reading! I've not finished making a first pass through the novel, and unfortunately I can't estimate when I'll have word back to you. CAMPAIGN 2100 continues to hold my interest, and it's far and away the best science fiction manuscript I've received thus far. I remain hopeful as I make my way through the novel. Please keep me appraised if you receive an offer from another publisher or if the manuscript becomes unavailable for any reason."

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