It’s over
Done. Finished. Kaput.
10 days, over 10,000 tables, the Orlando NABC is history.
We almost qualified for the third day of the North American Swiss–if I had just made that 4Hx on the last round, we would have gotten into the finals. So instead we played the A/X Swiss teams, and almost had a good game there. On the last round, Mike picked up the AJxxxxxx of clubs and some other cards, and opened 3C. The opponents then got to, and made 3NT. At our table, the person with that hand opened 5C, and played it there, down 2. We lost the match, and probably a place in the low overalls of the event.
I claim distraction, since I spent the day trying to identify the security people for Bill Gates, who was playing quietly in our event. Couldn’t do it. His security is as discreet as he is–I know darned well that they are there, but I was completely unable to find them.
Iris Libby planned to play in the pairs, but Carol was ill and she ended up at he partnership desk. She met some old guy who said he had 4000 points and talked her into playing the the A/X Swiss, too. Welcome to the big leagues, Iris.
I scanned all the results, and didn’t find anyone else from our unit who did anything–but then, there really weren’t many of our unit members there.
Tomorrow I hang out in Orlando in the daytime, and take an evening flight home. STAC week is here, so I guess I have to play in the club a bit more than usual.
NABC’s are always great, and this one was no exception. It was incredibly well run, the facilities were first rate and the information desk was especially helpful. Next up, Louisville. See you there in March.
Friday night late
Okay, it’s 1:30 am and I’m about to hit the sack, but there’s news, and who can sleep when I have something to dish?
Iris Libby and Carol Cottam played in the Orange Blossom game today, had TWO section tops and came in 5th overall.
Heidi Lippitt and Linda Gross played in the BC side game and came in 4th in B and 2nd in C.
Micky and Linda and Tom J and I earned our big Q for the second day of the North American Swiss.
Now I can get to sleep.
The Happiest place on Earth
Lynne Humphreys, Trisha Oconnor and Marj Russell, Life Masters all
Ambushed at the concierge desk last night by Lynne, Trisha and Marj, glowing in victory because Lynne got her Gold Card. They were too excited to tell me exactly what event provided the magical gold points, but I guess that will turn up sooner or later. Randy Corr is the fourth on their team, but this was a girls celebration so he got left out of the picture literally and figuratively.
Grant Robinson and Terry Boyd are here, and they took 2nd place in the morning side series.
I played with the same lady Thursday (in a regional Mixed Pairs event) that I did on Tuesday–and with basically the same results. A great first session, 60% section top, ghastly second session. If they still scheduled horizontal events, two afternoon sessions, we’d be unbeatable.
The concierge mentioned above did a great job–I ended up at a seafood house and had stone crab for the first time. Stone crab is an interesting product–you only get claws. They catch the crabs, break off the better of its claws, and throw the crab back into the water to regenerate. Then the next season they can catch it again and break off the other claw and repeat the process. It sounds strange, but no stranger than Lorin Waxman flying to Montana just to torture trout by catching them, laughing at them and then throwing them back. And at least you get to enjoy the claws, which are really good, not as sweet but more flavorful than the Dungeness we get in California.
Today we, me, Mike, Linda and Tom J, start the North American Swiss. Just your average 3 day Nationally rated Swiss teams. Although still brutally difficult, it is considered “easy” because the very top teams will all be in the Reisinger Board-A-Match, so we won’t have to face Hamman, Zia, et al. If you see us at the club on Sunday, you’ll know it didn’t go well.
SR strikes back
There was a note waiting for me at the information desk when I got back from dinner tonight. It was from Susan:
1). The atomic weight of cesium is 132.904529
2). The pluperfect tense of to creep is “had crept”
3). The complimentary color of puce is aqua.
I will never doubt her talents again.
Early Orlando report
This is the big room, but not the only room. Regional events here.
Thursday, the start of the first session.
Yesterday started on a high, ended in the gutter. I put out feelers with all my contacts to find a partner for the Blue Ribbon pairs, and Billy Miller came through, introducing me to Arline Fulton. She’s played forever, was born in Berkeley but now lives in New Jersey and is easy to play with.
Our first session was a 55.6% and I was ecstatic. Our second was an unmitigated disaster and we didn’t Q.
Seeing lots of good players also not qualify is no consolation or excuse. As is too often the case, I think my focus was poor; if I could keep my head in the game more I’d win more. It’s that simple, and that difficult.
The good news is that Linda Gross and Heidi Lippitt DO focus well, they qualified 31st in the mini-Blue Ribbon. I had dinner with them last night. They ordered the sliders–three tiny filets-on-a-bun. Because they were sharing and have different tastes, they ordered one rare one medium and one well done. You just gotta love them.
Mike B missed the cut yesterday, too, though nowhere near as spectacularly as I did. Today we have a Swiss team of Mike, Tom J, Linda, Billy Miller and me. They graciously added me at the last moment because I had nothing else to do today and they wanted to save me from the perils of going to Disneyland.
Gail isn’t here because her friend Susan Rowley is in charge of the information desk and wouldn’t have any time to play or hang out. I keep going to the info desk and asking questions but she never has the answer. “What is the atomic weight of cesium?” “what is the complimentary color to puce?”. “What is the pluperfect tense of the verb “to creep””? I don’t think she has this information thing down just yet.
Time for mention play. More later.
A most un-Fair Game
Okay, so I’m in Orlando, not having much luck in the Nationals. The least I can do is tell you about the movie we saw last Sunday—you wouldn’t be interested in my bridge game anyway.
Sister Susan (as opposed to BFF Susan) recommended we see Fair Game, and I’m glad she did. It’s an excellent telling of an important story.
The time is 2002, the country is reeling after the 9/11 attacks, and Vice President Cheney wants to go to war with Iraq, for reasons we may someday understand.
Meanwhile, the CIA is trying to find out what sort of things are really happening in the world. To this end, they send former Ambassador Joe Wilson, the husband of Valerie Plame, a CIA covert operative specializing in the middle East, to Niger to check out a rumor that Niger is supplying yellowcake uranium to Iraq for the production of nuclear weapons.
Wilson reports back that they are not: there is no shipment of uranium to Iraq.
Then, surprisingly, President George Bush gives his state of the union address and says that there is proof that there IS uranium being shipped to Iraq, and we have to go to war to stop the production of these weapons of mass destruction.
This makes Ambassador Wilson cranky. He starts telling everyone he knows, and that’s almost everyone in Washington and the media, that the prez lied us into war. Since there were no WMD’s found, people are listening to him and making Darth Cheney look even worse than usual.
So the spin machine goes into high gear, Wilson gets slimed, but that isn’t enough. To complete the sliming, the identity of his wife is leaked to Robert Novak, destroying her career. This is a felony, and the ceaseless work of Ambassador Wilson brings the felony to light and eventually Scooter Libby gets to take the fall for the White House. Of course a deal was cut in advance, so although he was found guilty and disbarred, his fine and prison term were commuted by the President, who at least didn’t pardon Libby at the end of his term.
All of this makes a darned good movie. Having Sean Penn portray Joe Wilson makes it better. Naomi Watts does an excellent job as Valerie Plame, carrying the burden of trying to do her very important job while the government she works for is trying to destroy her for political purposes.
The only real problem with issue advocacy movies like this is that they are preaching to the choir. If you don’t like Bush and Cheney, you’ll probably love this movie. If you are one of the 25% of Americans who still swallows the lie that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks, you might not enjoy it quite so much.
Why I love California
Dinner tonight at our favorite, Nibblers. As is his custom, Chef Daniel presented us with an amuse bouche, in this instance a small, perfect piece of watermelon.
Where else in the universe are they enjoying fresh, crisp, tasty watermelon a mere three weeks prior to the winter solstice?
I love California.
Not quite enough material
Isabelle Huppert and Christopher Lambert, in search of a plot
Have you been to the Shattuck Theater lately? They’ve redone the place, and the chairs are these large, reclining comfortable wonders that remind me of a first class airline seat. The armrests are so wide you don’t need to fight your neighbor for them, and the built in cupholders are in just he right place.
The bad news is that the chairs were the best thing about going to see White Material this afternoon.
As many foreign films as Gail and I see, we are pretty accustomed to the slower pacing and exposition. But when you can’t stay awake looking at Isabelle Huppert, there’s something wrong with the movie.
White Material , set in an un-named, generic African nation, is the story of a plantation owner, Huppert, who clings relentlessly to her farm and its ready-to-pick crop despict the massive civil unrest that has the French Army leaving, dropping survival kits from their helicopter as they urge her to flee. All the African clichés are here: there is the typical corrupt mayor, the children’s army of rebels, children too young to understand the meaning of the death they so easily dole out. The honest shopkeepers, trying to protect their pharmacy, slaughtered for their drugs. The ex-husband (Lambert) who has gone native with a local wife and son. The obese plantation owner luxuriating in his tiled bath. The crazy son, who goes completely mad and joins the rebels. If only there was a discernible plot, or rationale, or something to make all this hang together in some interesting fashion.
David Denby, reviewing this movie for The New Yorker, said it was:
Dreadful, in an aimless, intentionally disjointed way that some people have mistaken for art.
Not everyone hated it. Somehow White Material managed to earn a 90 on the Tomatometer, meaning 90% of newspaper reviewers gave positive reports. I can only think of the story of the Emperors New Clothes–there just isn’t enough material here.
It’s beginning to look a lot like……….
I’m not much of a Christmas kind of guy–Ebeneezer Scrooge is my hero on this most commercial of seasons.
I’ll make an enormous exception for the Smuin Ballet Holiday show. We saw it last night, for the 4th consecutive year, and it just keeps getting better.
There are two acts, divided into the “Classical Christmas” and the “Cool Christmas”. Both are wonderful.
The Classical Christmas is the more serious of the two, featuring 16 separate pieces with music from J.S. Bach, Prokofiev, Leonard Bernstein, traditional carols and Mozart. The dancers are in toe shoes, the girl’s hair is up in the traditional chignon, there was even, gaaack, a tutu or two. In particular, Veni, Veni, Emmanuel, (O come, O come Emmanuel) was a masterpiece of slow, minimalist dance that entranced me.
The second half, the Cool Christmas, is a riot. Seventeen pieces, ranging from classical ballet to jazz, rock, zydeco, tap, Irish step dance and just plain silliness. Music from Elvis Presley to Eartha Kitt, Lou Rawls, Louis Armstrong, Linda Ronstadt, Ray Charles, The Chieftans and finally, inevitably, Bing Crosby.
They do this show every year, and there are both old and new pieces. The season isn’t complete without their brilliant interpretation of “Santa Baby”, I wait all year to watch Shannon Hurlburt do his tap version of The Bells of Dublin.
Two years after Michael Smuins death, the company continues strong and vibrant, with new talent and new works by innovative choreographers. You can still get seats for this weekend at the Lesher–don’t miss it.
Hot damn!
(Travel Guard asked me to blur the signatures, and I can’t do that right now so I took the photo down)
Remember the saga of the lost luggage in Ethiopia?
Well, I had insurance. A cheap $32 travel policy I bought purely for the medical repatriation benefits–if something happened to me in Africa, I wanted to get the hell out of there and get home with decent medical care.
It turns out that there was lost luggage insurance included. And that completely saved my butt from a big loss.
Ethiopian Air, the carrier legally responsible for the loss, just said they weren’t dealing with it and walked away. Claimed that I had not filed a claim in the proper amount of time, even though I was in their office EVERY SINGLE DAY trying to get my luggage. These are not good people.
I dragged my feet for months on making the claim to Travel Guard Insurance, fully expecting the same treatment. I thought that they would claim my suitcase was used and only worth $7.65, that they couldn’t verify the value of my jockey shorts because I didn’t have the original receipts, etc, etc. My complete expectation was that I would put a lot of time and energy into filling out silly forms and get $33.12 back.
Gail nagged. Beth Eiselman, the travel goddess, nagged, and then offered to fill in the forms herself. Then she went to a convention and nagged the insurance company rep. Beth is a great travel agent.
And today I got a check for $1800!!!!!
Thanks Beth. Thanks Gail. Thanks, Travel Guard Insurance.
Totally Unauthorized 