Linda wins a big one
Linda Gross started playing bridge ages ago, got her Gold Card with 300.15 points and quit the game for 20 years or so.
Now that she and her husband, John, are both retired, she is back playing with a vengeance. Linda can be found across the table from either Heidi or Mike Lippitt two or three times a week.
Playing well and getting your gold card are all well and good, but we like to WIN more than anything else. And yesterday, Linda, for the first time, won a regional event.
The team of Linda, Heidi, Mike, Bob & Nancy Munson won bracket 2 of the KO’s, giving her a big bunch of points and a Blue Ribbon Qualification. Congratulations to the entire team.
Eldonna Dayton makes LM!!!!
- Eldonna carousing in the hotel bar after getting her Gold Card. Photo by Gail
Everybody’s favorite sweetheart, Eldonna Dayton, made it to the third round of her KO event tonight, so she is guaranteed enough Gold points to make her a Life Master. I couldn’t be happier.
Eldonna is a force of nature–she still works full time, bowls, goes to the shooting range, is a notary public, and is now and official ACBL Life Master. She has worked hard and steadily with her partner Joyce, and perseverance has paid off.
There is a big party Friday night in room 2610 of the Hyatt Regency, and we hope everyone come to congratulate her.
Free money
I hate Costco with a passion. I despise their utter lack of customer focus, the way you can’t possibly find anything in the store without just searching high and low, and, most of all, the way they treat you like a thief checking your receipt on the way out.
I shop there for one reason only: the prices. Today, they outdid themselves, selling dollar bills for 80¢.
Seriously. My in the Swiss this morning told me that his wife had found $100 gift certificates for the Hyatt hotel (where the current regional is being held) for $79.99. So I checked with the front desk, called Hyatt Reservations, asked my lawyer, and everyone said the deal was on the up and up.
Off I went to the verdammnt Costco, and promptly purchased $1400 worth of gift certificates, which cost $1120. I took some and Micky B. took some, and we just created $280 out of thin air. We can pay our hotel bills with the gift certificates and go out to dinner with the difference.
They have a variety of these deals–California Pizza Kitchen, Hyatt Hotels, other resorts and restaurants and places you would want to go, and they are all just selling cash at 80 cents on the dollar. Which may just be an indication of how overpriced the Hyatt is, but I may as well take advantage of it.
So maybe today I hate Costco just a little less.
Winning the hard way
- Dan, Keith Linda and Tom celebrating their win
Sometimes to win you just have to keep plugging. Playing in bracket 2 of the Jack Lemmon KO’s in Monterey today, the team of DanRubinfeld, Keith Gunn, Linda Bandler and Tom Jacobson played hard and steady and made it to the finals.
Then, it just got harder. They finished the first 12 boards, compared scores and were tied, 36 to 36. So they played the next 12 boards, and were still tied, 57 to 57. 114 total imps in a 24 board match is a huge number, and it is astonishing to still be tied.
The rules required a 4 board playoff, and that is where consistency and stamina paid off–they won imps on all 4 boards and won the event.
It was a double win day for the Bandler family, as Mike, playing with Danny Friedman, Bruce Tuttle and some fourth they dragged up, outlasted Billy Miller & company to win bracket 1, as well.
Billy Miller is back!!!!
It's great to see Billy back at the table
Back from a 4 year hiatus, Billy Miller is once again playing top flight bridge.
Billy quit playing professionally to play poker and stay home with wife Julie, a court reporter in Las Vegas, and Poppy, their green cheeked conure (like a parrot) Poppy has the run (flight?) of the house, and they can’t take trips together because somebody has to be home to take care of the bird.
. Very shortly, though, he was distracted from play by the plight of the wild ducks living in the ponds in his housing development. Poor management had allowed the water in the three lakes of the 2400 home development to become so foul that the birds were dying of botulism. Billy and Julie threw themselves into the cause, hand feeding and saving individual birds while simultaneously working to improve the water quality to eliminate the problem.
Elected twice to the presidency of the homeowners association, Billy has completely revamped the water management system, creating a completely natural system clean enough that not a single duck died of botulism last year. With the animal problem well in hand, Billy feels comfortable coming back to the card table.
Like so many bridge players, Billy has an interesting and varied background. Enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music at the age of four, he started out as a piano player, switching to guitar with the Beatles invasion of the 60’s. He attended Claremont Mens college in southern California, then worked as a stockbroker for Drexel Burnham Lambert before becoming a full time bridge professional.
One of the pleasures of online bridge is the opportunity to observe top players. Billy (dearbilly on Bridge Base) has been playing internet bridge day and night to get his form back, and always draws a mob of active kibitzers, who hold a lively discussion (which the players can’t see, of course) about every bid and play. Log on to Bridgebase and watch him for yourself
Why?
Do they call it a “price point” when they just mean the price?
We need FDR again
Cowering in fear was not his way
“We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.” With these brave and historic words, Franklin Roosevelt rallied a nation reeling from unexpected attack at Pearl Harbor.
Now we are “attacked” by a single goofball, incapable of igniting the explosives in his underoos. Are we showing bravery, or fear? All I hear are calls for more restrictions on our freedoms, more hassles and delays in the airports, more fears from every direction.
The entire “security” system at our airports is a joke–it is truly more security theater than real security. While they are searching some grandmother because the underwire in her brassiere set off an alarm, a known terrorist is allowed to get on a plane. TSA is good at ‘randomly selecting” a 98 year old orthodox Jew on every flight because he travels on one-way tickets, but missed the 10″ bread knife Gail mistakenly brought to Dallas in her purse.
A single man
If you have your own blog, you get to write about any darned thing you like. Today, the subject is a movie review.
Gail and I just got home from seeing A Single Man at the Cinemark theater in Pleasant Hill. It’s a good thing I look so decrepit to the average 23-year-old ticket seller that I got the senior rate–that’s $3 less wasted on this overblown piece of cinematic self-indulgence.
The movie tells the story of a supposedly very closeted gay English professor in Los Angeles in 1962. Somehow he lived with his partner for 16 years and nobody seems to have figured it out. The lover dies unexpectedly, and our hero decides to end his own life as well. There follows 90 minutes of slow, tedious film-making, accompanied by a portentous score designed to tell us that this is an important movie.
In case you don’t completely get the point, all the scenes where the protagonist is disaffected and not relating to the world are shot in very unsaturated colors, almost black and white. Then when something touches him or he becomes more self-actualized, the colors bloom. This technique would get a C- in film school.
Gail didn’t like the movie any more than I did. Save your money to go see Precious.
My dinner with Margaret
Margaret
I like Wednesdays. They are halfway through the week, I don’t have too much work to do, and then I get to play in Margaret’s game. Who doesn’t love Margaret? She has the greatest people skills of anyone I have ever met–if she told you to go to Hades, you’d hurry home to pack.
Margaret Kozak has been directing as long as I can remember, but I’ve known of her longer than that. Margaret and husband George lived across the street from my mothers best friend in Orinda when I was a kid, and I would see cool cars in the driveway. Twelve year old boys remember cars better than they do people. Her son is still driving the ’39 Ford 5 window coupe Margaret took to school during WW2, as well as a 1960 Bentley she helped him rebuild while he was in college.
That son went on to a career in the State Department. He became US Ambassador to Belarus, Chief of Mission in Havana (which is Ambassador rank, if we had official relations with Cuba) and spent 4 years working in the Bush White House. And he brought both of his children home from the hospital the first time in that very same 39 Ford.
Margaret and her long time partner Bob Harris are the only pair I know who steadily play Precision at our club. It’s an excellent system that takes more work than standard but pays off in more accurate bidding.
Last week, Gail and I went out to dinner with Margaret at our favorite local restaurant, Nibblers Eatery. It is a small plate establishment, run by a pair of food fanatics dedicated to sustainable, organic, local food.
Since it is still truffle season, we even had the treat of gnocchi with duck ragu topped with slices of white truffle–which must be foodie heroin. The pork lechon is to die for, and no meal is complete without the house signature dish of flash fried spinach. The prices there are reasonable and we feel lucky to have such an interesting place so close to home.
Health, wealth and happiness in the New Year
Don Steedman and his new lucky dime
If you throw a party, the bridge players will arrive. Bright and early on the First of the New Year, 38 players found their way to the Bridge Center for a game of cards and a dish of Black Eyed Peas and Ham Hocks.
The feast was magnificent, with won-tons from Ron Kow, pigs in a blanket from Ally Whiteneck, Shirley Marron’s trifle, Iris Libby’s cornbread, Millie’s kraut salad (so good she had to post the recipe on the bulletin board), peanut butter balls from Linda Gross, Jello salad from Heidi and BJ Ledgerwood’s own guacamole.
Part of the tradition is the hidden dime in the kraut salad. While all who partake of the cabbage will have enough money for the year, the finder of the dime will come into wealth–so Don Steedman is a very happy man indeed.
I was glad I opened ♠QJTxxx 2 ♦AQ9xxx —. Just thinking “that’s only 9 points” isn’t good enough. This hand has tremendous trick-taking potential. Our opponents had strong distribution too, of course, and pushed all the way until Mike bid 6♠, which they then doubled. It is generally better to bid one more than to double a wildly distributional contract–6♠x making 7 not vul is 1310, I now know.
Heidi LIppitt and Linda Gross were the NS winners, Herb Constant and Bud Miller EW. Steedman isn’t the only one getting rich this year.
Next year New Year’s Day is a Saturday–we hope to see all of you there for the second annual Black Eyed Peas game.
Totally Unauthorized 