The Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) was recognized as the oldest such group in the American Contract Bridge League, the governing agency for contract bridge in North America. The club had more than five hundred members before the pandemic. Unlike most bridge clubs, it was a member-owned organization. The club had a manager, but her contract specified no salary.1 The decision makers consisted of the usual four officers—president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer—and six “trustees” who usually served three-year terms. Nominees were selected by a committee and elected at the club’s annual meeting in the fall. Additional nominations were possible, but usually the entire slate was elected.
In the fall of 2021 I was asked to serve on the HBC’s Board of Trustees. My three years on that board have been chronicled here. One of the most frustrating experiences for me and for everyone else was the fact that the club, which, had no definite notion of which people were actually members. The count done by the treasurer, Trevor Reeves, was significantly less than the “official” number reported by the club’s manager, Donna Feir. Both were well short of five hundred. No one could find a way to reconcile the two in a systematic manner.
Donna kept track of membership using the ACBLscore program provided by IBM. Its primary purpose was to set up different types of games and tabulate results. It was written decades ago, and it had been updated occasionally. It was written in dBase or something similar that ran in DOS or windows. It did not employ a relational database. The files were in a proprietary format.
The discrepancies persisted throughout the next two years. Near the end of 2023 I decided to try to provide a solution. I interviewed most of the major players. I did not interview Donna because my experience was that she was very nervous about anything that might upset her day-to-day activities. I learned the following:
The club had several lists of members. No automated method connected them:
The ACBLscore list that Donna maintained. It could be used to print phone lists and masterpoint lists if those fields were kept up to date.
The contact list associated with the club’s gmail account.
The “audience” used on the MailChimp account for mailings to all members.
The list used by the financial people.
Other ad hoc lists.
Layout of the member file.
Transaction layout.
I determined that a relatively risk-free system composed of a membership file and a transaction file stored on relational database that everyone could access could probably address many of these issues without a great deal of work. In addition to the main files, I envisioned three background tables:
A table for transaction types that contained the fiscal year2, a description, and a code designating the main type.
A main type table to discriminate between memberships and contributions. There were not many of the latter, but better to plan than neglect.
A user table for security.
I envisioned only one output program that could produce a list on the screen, a count of the number of items selected, or create a csv3 file to be downloaded. If that proved insufficient, I felt confident of being to add more options later.
I also saw an opportunity to integrate data from my ACBL roster. So, users could easily compare what was on the system’s members file with what the ACBL had: address, phone numbers, email address, masterpoints, etc.
In my heyday I could have whipped this sort of thing out on the AS/400 in less than a week. However, I had done almost no programming at all since the beginning of the pandemic and precious little in the previous four or five years. Furthermore, I would be working in a less forgiving environment than what I was accustomed to. I would not have the AS/400 tools and support, and I had never designed an Internet-based system to run on php scripts, a MySQL database, and an Apache server. It also did not help that I was in my mid-seventies and becoming more senile every day.
In early 2022 I had asked for a csv file that contained one record for each active4 member of the club. I received it in early February. I was able to use it to populate the “HBC?” field on the players table. I used this information to provide the club with accurate breakdowns of the number of active players in various masterpoint ranges.
1. An annual “honorarium” was voted annually to the manager and other officials.
2. The club’s fiscal year began on November 1. Thus fiscal 2025 ran from 11/01/24 to 10/31/25.
3. A file with the extension “.csv” contains rows that are formatted identically. Fields (columns) are separated by a comma or another delimiter. Spreadsheet programs such as Excel can read these files.
4. Some club members were not required to pay the prescribed annual dues in order to participate as members. I assumed that every person on the file had paid the dues, but there were doubtless some who were not required to.
By the end of 2022 Americans were still contracting Covid-19, but very few died or became seriously ill. Most people had either contracted the virus already at least once or had been immunized with boosters. I still wore an N95 mask outside of the house for the first few months, but by the end of that period few people joined me.
January
For decades I have been an avid college football fan. New Years Day was ordinarily one of my favorite days. In 2023, however, it fell on a Sunday. The semifinals of the four-team College Football Playoff had occurred on December 31 Only pro games, in which I had little interest, were held on January 1. I was in my office in Enfield for most of the day.
On Monday, January 2, I played with Nancy Calderbank as part of the mentoring program at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC). She had asked me to coach her through the transition from Standard American to Two-Over-One (2/1). Our results were not very good that day, but there was one memorable hand, which is shown at the right.
I had the dubious privilege of holding the cards in the East hand. When I received a miserable collection like that one, I like to add up the number of pips that are on my cards. In this case the total was 59, the second-lowest that I have ever seen.1 What made it really amazing was that more than half of the pips were clubs. Also, if deuces were aces, threes kings, etc., this hand would be worth 30 high card points. West’s monstrosity has only 70 percent of that number.
On the day after this bridge game I learned that one of my regular partners, Peter Katz, and an occasional partner of both Sue and me, Fred Gagnon, had contracted Covid-19 over the holidays. Neither became seriously ill, and both were back at the tables within a week or two.
On January 5 I sent the first email to the committee for the Weiss-Bertoni Award. The details of this project have been chronicled here.
The garbage disposal in the new kitchen had been stopped up. Apparently it was my fault. Sue said that all fat and grease must be removed with a paper towel before scraping the garbage from plates and cooking utensils into the sink. A plumber came out and fixed it on the 14th. He returned three days later to address a leak under the sink in the old kitchen. Tennessee Ernie Ford came to mind.
On the 15th I started work on a third-person autobiography entitle Cowboy Coder from Kansas. When the blog entry for this project is completed, I will link it here.
My wife Sue informed me that someone had told her years ago that we could get a break on our real estate tax because I am a veteran. That program exists, and we might have been able to use it in the first few years that we lived in Enfield, but our income, which is primarily from social security, seemed much too high.
On January 18 Sue was in a funk all day.. She played at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) with Maria Van Der Ree in the evening game. Even though they came in last out of eight pairs, Sue seemed chipper at the end. She needs to be out with people much more than I do.
The infamous Tonto email went out on the 19th. The tale is told here.
Bob: Several early entries in the 2023 notes for the pandemic concern the demise of Sue’s cat, Bob, our last surviving pet. The notes for January 3 reported: “Bob drools a lot and smells bad. Sue gave him a bath of some kind, but his saliva is rancid. He sleeps most of the time, but he bothers Sue when he is awake.”
The litter box in the basement. The grey items near the box are pieces of litter that absorbed water when the basement flooded. The water later evaporated.
We had cats in Enfield from the time that they moved there. Throughout this period all of them were able to use the cat door installed in a basement window to go outside when they felt like it. They could be relied on to make use of it whenever they needed to relieve themselves. However, in 2022 it became necessary to make a litter box available to them. At first it was in the basement. By the beginning of 2023 I had to move it upstairs because Bob was no longer able to negotiate the stairs.
Bob finally died on January 28. In some ways it was a sad occasion, but neither Sue nor I thought that he enjoyed the last few months of his life the way that our other cats seemed to.
Sue and I get a reminder about Bob every evening at 8:55. Her phone announces “Eight fifty-five Meds Slash Bob”. We call this announcement “Slash Bob.”
February
The coldest day of the year, by far was February 4. It approached 0 in Connecticut, but it was much colder on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. The temperature was 8 below but the windchill index was an incredible -109° Fahrenheit.
February 7 was the first day of the regional bridge tournament in Southbridge, MA. Sue played with Mark Aquino in the Open Pairs. They did not do well. My adventures in the tournament have been described here.
In Sue’s absence I took my car in for the emissions test at Mad Hatter Auto Repair. Afterwards I calculated that we would owed $500 in income tax for 2022. The biggest reason for this was the cost of the cruise (described here) that necessitated a fairly large distribution from my 401K.
On February 10, only six days after that extremely cold day, the temperature reached a balmy 62°.
March
The first post-pandemic limited sectional was held at the HBC on March 26. It drew an incredible fifty-seven tables. The whole story is revealed here.
“Donald, my book will be coming out soon.”
On March 30 Donald Trump was indicted by the state of New York on 31 counts of business fraud! The indictments were in regard to Trump, through his fixer at the time, Michael Cohen, paid Stormy Daniels $150,000 to Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about their affair during the run-up to the election. Trump misused corporate funds to reimburse Cohen. That is what made it a crime in New York, which was, at that time, the official location of the companies. It was being filed as a felony because it was an illegal attempt to influence an election, which was a felony in New York.
An important Zoom meeting was held for replacement of the relational database that I had designed and implemented for the district. Details of that meeting have been posted here.
April
The income tax situation worked out better than my preliminary calculation had indicated. I had to pay the IRS $181. However, we received a refund from CT of $1996 I used one of the free filing services, but I had to pay $15 to file electronically in CT.
For the 2023 National Debate Tournament, U-M’s top team of Rafael Pierry and Kelly Phil won the Copeland award and were seeded #1 in the tournament. I could hardly believe that seven assistant coaches were going to attend the tournament in Chantilly, VA. Pierry and Giorgio Rabbini had also won the Copeland award in 2022 and were second in 2021.
Pierry and Phil.
Pierry and Phil were 7-1 in the preliminary rounds with 21 out of a possible 24 ballots. The U-M second team of Rabbini and Joshua Harrington also was 7-1 with only one fewer ballot. Pierry and Phil made it to the final round, but they lost to Wake Forest. Pierry attained the final round in three consecutive years, an achievement that will probably not be duplicated in my lifetime. I was nearly as disappointed with this result as I was with my own failure to qualify for the NDT in 1970, as described here.
There was quite a bit of activity about the Weiss-Bertoni award.
On Saturday, April 8, we went to see Tom, Casey, and Brian Corcoran in Tom’s house in Wethersfield. When we came back I found a dead mouse in the toilet of the bathroom in the older part of the house. I set traps the next day, but I caught nothing. Some mysteries are never solved.
On April 13 the temperature reached 90°. I walked five miles, but I had to stop, rest in the shade, and cool off three times. The next day it reached an incredible 96°, breaking the previous record by fourteen degrees. That temperature was never exceeded in the summer months.
The first CBA sectional was held in Orange on the 21st through the 23rd. I played all three days. Descriptions of my adventures were posted here. My most memorable achievement was the 512 miles that my Honda logged on a tank of gas. It took over 13 gallons when I filled it, but it claimed that it could have gone another fifteen miles. .
May
It was about this time that I discovered Bosch on Freevee. Sue and I watched it nearly every evening, and it didn’t cost us a penny. This and other ventures into the land of streaming are cataloged here. We could not believe that Amazon, which purchased the service from IMDB, was allowing people to view this high-quality police dram for free.
It was very hot on May 1 when I mowed the portions of the lawn that face either North Street or Hamilton Court. I was not able to mow the rest until three days later.
On May 8 I volunteered to send out the HBC’s emails for the summer through MailChimp. Lori Leopold had been doing it, but she had a lot of travel scheduled for the upcoming months. I somehow also was saddled with creating the official calendar from Donna’s handwritten version.
On May 11 the national health emergency for the pandemic officially ended. For several months I continued wearing my mask wherever I was likely to be in fairly close contact with others.
The day-by-day blog entry for the rest of 2023 has been posted here.
1. The lowest total that I have ever seen was an incredible 53 at the Simsbury Bridge Club fairly early in my bridge career. Unfortunately, although I often had my camera with me in those days, I did not record this event, and no hand record was available because the SBC was not yet using a dealing machine.
Since 1972, when Sue and I first got together in Hartford, we had spent many evenings together watching television. I liked a few shows (including wrestling and Mystery Science Theater 3000) that were too silly for her. She liked a few shows (such as Grantchester, Gilmore Girls, and many old flicks on Turner Classic Movies) that were too schmaltzy for me. On the whole, however, our tastes were mostly compatible. During most of this period we watched whatever was on the major networks or we did something else like jigsaw puzzles or two-person games.
Not for me.
Two developments changed these habits: the ability to schedule broadcasted programs to be recorded easily and the ability to watch programs at will through streaming services on the Internet. Streaming, in this context, means watching over a rather short period of time all (or at least a large portion) of the episodes for a television series in order. In the twentieth century the characters on most television programs evolved very little over the life of the series. Basically the primary characters might change within an episode (or occasionally a few episodes), but eventually they returned to their basic original state. So, if a viewer had missed a few episodes, the plot of the current episode was easy to follow.
In the twenty-first century some series still followed that format, but many others deviated. In those shows plot lines might not be resolved within the episode, and characters might have life-changing experiences or even be seriously injured, contract a chronic illness or die. In any case it was much more enjoyable to watch these shows in order once that became practical.
During the year of isolation for the pandemic Sue and I developed a habit of watching a couple of hours of television together every evening. Sometimes we watched public television or a movie on Turner Classic Movies, but our mainstay was streaming. The research for this entry tuned up a surprisingly large number of shows. My comments about the ones listed below are almost all overwhelmingly positive. The reason for that is simple. If either Sue or I did not like a show, we stopped watching. So, the list includes only well-acted shows with interesting plots and characters and a minimum of violence and schmaltz.
Masterpiece/Mystery
For decades Sue and I had been watching the PBS programs shown under the titles of Masterpiece Theater and Mystery (later combined and labeled “Masterpiece”). Four or five times a year very good British shows were presented, one season1 at a time. The first one that I can remember watching was the version of Sherlock Holmes that starred Jeremy Britt in thirteen episodes that closely followed the plots of Doyle’s famous stories. We also enjoyed the first version of All Creatures Great and Small. These two shows appeared on PBS at about the same time in the second half of the eighties.
Here is a list of other Masterpiece shows that I can remember. They are roughly in chronological order.
The Poirot show in the mid-eighties that featured David Suchet was. in my opinion, far better than any of the movies based on the many Agatha Christie novels. We found this show on Amazon Prime in November of 2024, but the network announced that Season 1 would only be available for a few more days. We watched all ten episodes and enjoyed them as much as we did previously.
Lewis was the sequel to the wildly popular Inspector Morse series that I later watched on YouTube both on the television and on my laptop. My favorite characters were Laurence Fox as Hathaway and Clare Holman as Dr. Hobson.
Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch was a spectacular updating of the Holmes stories. At times it got a little too spectacular. My favorite character was Una Stubbs as Mrs. Hudson, the landlady at 221B.
Endeavour was a clever prequel to the Morse stories set in the sixties and early seventies. The supporting cast was great, especially Roger Allam and Anton Lesser as Morse’s bosses.
Sue and I both really liked Baptiste with Tchéky Karyo, but it only had three seasons. This show was a continuation of a British series called The Missing that was never shown on Masterpiece.
We also really liked Press, which focused on the conflict between two of London’s newspapers. The BBC did not renew for a second season.
We struggled through a whole season of Broadchurch. It had its moments.
Unforgotten was a great series. The first episode after Nicola Walker’s departure was a little disappointing.
Guilt was a quirky show about two brothers in Scotland and their dealings with a crime family.
A new version of Around the World in Eighty Days appeared on Masterpiece in 2021. It was obviously shot before the Pandemic.
Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders, which I consider the best detective novel since A Study in Scarlet, was magically transformed into a great television series on Masterpiece. AH’s comments at the end of each episode were a special treat. The sequel, Mayflower Murders, was somewhat disappointing, both in print and on the screen. At the end of the last episode Horowitz announced that there would be a third book, but he was noncommittal about a third television series.
The biggest disappointment was was Roadkill, which starred Hugh Laurie (the star of House and the British show Jeeves and Wooster), as an ambitious member of the British parliament.
A second version of All Things Great and Small on Masterpiece resumed the story just before World War II. The new Mrs. Hall, Anna Madly, was great. Tristan was disappointing.
Mr. Bates Versus the Post Office was an interesting documentary on Masterpiece about a British scandal. The legal ramifications were still ongoing when it was shown in 2024.
I liked Nicola Walker’s showpiece, Annika on Masterpiece, better than Sue did. It also starred Jamie Sives, who played a principal role in Guilt.
Maryland on Masterpiece was a fairly interesting portrayal of two sisters’ responses to the surprising news of their mother’s secret life and death on the Isle of Man.
The Marlow Murder Club, which was shown in the fall of 2024, was about a group of amateur sloops who solved a set of three murders and narrowly foiled a fourth. The setting is the wealthy Buckinghamshire town of Marlow, a town on the Thames about 35 miles from London. The plot gimmick (three murderers with air-tight alibis for two of the three murders) had previously been used in a season of Unforgotten. In that case the killers had all suffered somewhat similar abuses. In this case they were just former members of a rowing team who met by happenstance and decided to form their own murder club. I was not too impressed. A second season was announced before the first was shown in the U.S.
YouTube
The quality of shows on YouTube has always been hit and miss. Most of the ones that I have seen were recorded and uploaded one at a time by individuals, not the owners of the material.
The cast of Vera in season 13.
Inspector Morse was so popular on ITV in England that in 2008 it was named the greatest British crime drama of all time by readers of Radio Times. It also generated a long-running sequel and a very popular prequel. As far as I know, it has never been shown on free television in the U.S. Fortunately someone uploaded every episode to YouTube, and I watched them all.2 I liked both Lewis and Endeavour a little better.
If the poll were run again Vera, which started in 2011, might win. Brenda Blethyn’s performances were just outstanding. Many, but by no means all, of the shows have been uploaded to YouTube, probably illegally. I tried to read a book by Ann Cleeves, who wrote the Vera novels, but I hated it. We got to watch the first season again when it was shown on Amazon Prime.
Sue really liked Rosemary & Thyme, which was about a pair of middle-aged women whose main business was consulting about gardening. People tend to get killed wherever they tended shrubbery, and they solved the crimes. Somehow it worked.
MHz Choice
I am not sure when or where I heard about Mhz Choice, the streaming service that provided (very well done) closed-captioned versions of European mysteries and other shows. It only cost $8.50 per month. The only drawback was that you could either watch on Cox or on a computer. If you wanted to do both, you had to buy two subscriptions. It was difficult to set up the computer to display on the television screen through Cox. In any case Sue didn’t enjoy depending on captions. So, I watched all of the below on my laptop in the basement while using the rowing machine.
The Montalbano series spent a lot of time on balconies of Sicilian restaurants.
I learned about the Detective Montalbano made-for-television movies (called “fiction” in Italy) while on our tour of Sicily (documented here). Every one of them (except the last) was outstanding. I tried reading a few of the books written by Andrea Camilleri, but the use of Sicilian dialect in the dialog was off-putting.
The prequel Young Montalbano was pretty good, too.
I watched the Norwegian drama Acquitted through all of the episodes. By the end I was quite tired of it.
Detective DeLuca was a slow-paced crime story about the Mussolini era.
I really enjoyed the quirky Swiss show called Allmen. It was about a down-on-his luck thief/con man and the butler who kept him out of jail. There were only four episodes, and they have been pulled from MHz Choice. I discovered that a fifth one was released in 2023, but I have no idea how to watch it.
In 2024 I have made it through several seasons of The Undertaker, a story about an undertaker who formerly was a cop. The premise holds up surprisingly well, although I had the impression that he solved more than 100 percent of the murders in the area.
BarLume, which means “glimmer” in Italian. was a comedy about an owner of a bar in which three old guys hang out. The two women in the show were fantastic. The premise sort of fell apart after the first season.
I absolutely loved Vanessa Scalera’s performance as the title character in Imma Tataranni: Deputy Prosecutor. I would watch her in anything. I also enjoyed the depiction of the amazing town of Matera, which Sue and I visited in October of 2011 (documented here). However, the basic story line went off the rails in the second season and never recovered.
I watched two seasons of The Bastards of Pizzofalcone. That was enough. Pizzofalcone is a neighborhood of Naples.
Beck was a well-made Swedish cop show. I have watched several seasons. Most of the shows were stolen by Mikael Persbrandt as Gunwald Larsson. I will probably watch more.
The only two French shows that I liked featured very quirky women, Corinne Masiero as the title character in Captain Marleau, and Isabelle Gélinas, who has appeared in ten episodes of Perfect Murders.
There were a great many German shows that I have not yet watched. Two that I really enjoyed are the Borowski part of the long-running Tatort franchise and Murders by the Lake. Both have very interesting settings that I would love to visit—the port city of Kiel and Lake Constance. Axel Milberg was outstanding as Klaus Borowski, and the show paired him with three intriguing female colleagues. Nora Waldstätten was stunning as Hannah in Lake. She also appeared in one of the Allmen episodes. Unfortunately, she left the show in the third season. I watched a few episodes, but the chemistry was gone.
The Bridge was a Swedish production about cooperation between Swedish and Danish authorities concerning serial killers who drive across the long bridge that connects the two countries. The best reason to watch was to see the performance of Sofia Helin as the Swedish inspector who is clearly pretty high on the autism spectrum.
I watched one season of the German version of Professor T. It had no magic. I was very disappointed. For some reason MHz Choice does not have the Belgian version.
The four seasons of the German period piece Babylon Berlin were mesmerizing. It was set in the Weimar Republic years that followed World War I. The production values were absolutely incredible. Evidently there will be one more season, probably in 2025.
I got hooked on a bizarre show from Finland called Reindeer Mafia. It was about a group of guys in Lapland. Their gang was called The Wolverines. They were tangentially involved in a large land deal that may or may not have involved mining in the land of the reindeer herd. The ending was very strange. Almost everyone except the Wolverines got killed. I had to wonder if there will be a second season.
Peacock
NBC’s streaming service was available for free on Cox Cable for over a year during the pandemic. Sue and I took advantage of this nearly every evening. We were disappointed when they started charging for the service, but by then we had watched most of the good series.
Jim, Freddie, and Lance in “Nice Guys Finish Dead.”
The Rockford Files, which was broadcast in the seventies, was my all-time favorite television series. The only bad episode was the pilot. James Garner was, of course, outstanding throughout. The two episodes that featured Tom Selleck as Lance White, and James Whitmore, Jr., as Freddie Beamer were truly outstanding.
Monk was a notch lower, but the humor surrounding Tony Shalhoub’s character was generally good. I especially enjoyed Monk’s second assistant, Traylor Howard as Natalie Teeger, and Monk’s brother Ambrose, played by John Turturro.
The best thing about Psych was the premise that most people can be deceived into believing in paranormal powers. The cast was good, too. The only really bad episode was the musical.
30 Rock won an Emmy almost every year, and it richly deserved each one. The cast was exceptionally good from top to bottom. Nobody but Tina Fey could have played Liz. My favorite character was Dennis Duffy, the Beeper King, played by Dean Winters. Every episode was golden, and they were just as funny the second and third time.
Parks and Recreation was not quite as good, but Amy Poehler held it together with her spiral binders. Nick Offerman as Ron Swanson stole most shows. The last year or two were not up to par.
Leopard Skin was an extremely bizarre set of eight beautifully shot episodes. I enjoyed it; Sue missed an episode or two, and could not make sense of it after that. I would gladly watch it again, if only to see Gaite Jansen as Batty.
The Resort was almost as bizarre, but the plot held together fairly well to a very strange ending
The comedy Rutherford Falls started out pretty well, but the last few episodes were tiresome. The best characters were the Indians.
The Capture had an interesting premise about being able to doctor the transmission of surveillance videos. I was not that enamored by the principal characters.
Vigil was about a murder aboard a nuclear submarine. It was very well done. Shaun Evans (Endeavour) appeared as a navy officer with a beard.
Five Bedrooms was an Australian series about five single people living together. I found it very engaging, and Sue absolutely loved it. We saw season 1 and 2 on Peacock. Season 3 and 4 were supposed to be on Amazon Prime, but the only place that they seemed to be available in 2024 is on Apple TV+.
Intelligence was a silly low-budget British comedy about the worst intelligence agency imaginable. Parts were funny.
The first season of Hitmen, a British show about two female freelance assassins who are also lifelong best friends, was hilarious. I watched every episode twice. The second episode, filmed during the lockdown, was disappointing.
Code 404 was a moderately funny British comedy about a cop who died and then was resuscitated with an electronically augmented brain. Sue did not like it much.
AMC+
Sue and I watched several seasons of the extremely popular show, Mad Men. on FreeVee. Amazon pulled it from the lineup when we were in the penultimate season. We bought a monthly subscription to AMC+. Almost all of the shows were good, but it was clear that the wind was going out of the writers’ sails in the last few episodes.
Before we canceled the AMC+ subscription we also watched the first two seasons of Dark Winds. It was based on the the novels of Tony Hillerman that featured native American cops Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee, and Bernadette Manuelito. The third season will reportedly be shown on AMC in 2025. I will look for it.
Freevee
I take back all of the bad things that I have ever said about Amazon. The Internet giant bought IMDB’s free streaming service (with commercial interruptions), added a great deal of content, and relabeled it as Freevee. Some of these shows were really outstanding, and the price was unbeatable.
Giovanni Ribisi was the central character.
Many shows and movies have been made about con men, but Sneaky Pete might be the best. Every member of the cast was really outstanding. Sue and I also enjoyed the fact that it was largely set in Connecticut. My idol, Ricky Jay, had a small role in the final season. Because he died during the filming, the last episode needed to be rewritten.
Sprung was a very funny show that was about one of the side effects of the pandemic—people being released from prison in order to reduce the spread of Covid. This show only had one season, and the ending precluded any chance of a second season.
Alpha House was a comedy created by Gary Trudeau, the cartoonist of Doonesbury. It centered around a house in Washington in which four Republican senators stayed. I found it fairly funny, but it only had two season. Trudeau’s wife, Jane Pauley, appeared in one show.
Bosch was a treasurer. It was probably the best cop show ever. It certainly was the best that I have ever seen. Titus Welliver was perfect. The rest of the cast was also outstanding. Crate and Barrel, two detectives whom everyone addressed by their nicknames, were hilarious. I read one of the books by Michael Connelly and was severely disappointed.
It was hard to believe that Bosch Legacy, the sequel that focused on Bosch’s daughter Maddie, would be nearly as good as the original. Sue and I kept asking how the producers could have known that Madison Lintz, who appeared on Bosch as a gangly teenager, would grow up to be believable as a female version of Bosch.
Jury Duty was a “reality” show that was played for laughs. The judge, bailiff, witnesses, and all but one juror were actors. It was fairly amusing.
Taboo was a bizarre British show about one man’s bizarre encounter with the British government and the East India Company in the early days of the United States. Tom Hardy was compelling as the main character, James Delaney. It only had one season.
Sue and I both liked Eric McCormack in Perception. He played a schizophrenic professor of neurology who solved crimes as a hobby when he wasn’t writing seven books, teaching postgraduate classes, or doing crosswords while listening to Mahler on his Walkman.
The Amazing Mrs. Maisel was probably the best home-grown Amazon show that was migrated to FreeVee. The entire cast was very impressive, and the writing was very sharp. It was set in the late fifties and early sixties. The title character was good friends with Lenny Bruce. Many Emmys were won by this show. We watched season 5 on Amazon Prime
We also both liked Mary McCormack and the rest of the cast of In Plain Sight, a show about the federal witness protection program. It was filmed in and around Albuquerque, which made it a little more interesting for me.
The premise of Person of Interest was that it would be possible for a genius to write a program that simultaneously monitored all forms of electronic data and analyzed it all person by person in order to recognize people who were a threat or being threatened. Plus, it was completely secure, and only one person knew how to use it. This was, of course, preposterous, but if you suspended disbelief, the writers and actors could get you interested in the plots. Michael Emerson was perfect as the genius. We watched three and a half seasons of these shows before Amazon suddenly pulled them from Freevee and started charging $2.39 per episode in December of 2024.
The Mallorca Files was a British show about the police on the island of Mallorca. Ellen Rhys and Julian Looman were cops. She was English; he was a native of Munich who moved to Palma and has gone native. The tone was just right. The second season ended abruptly when production was stopped for Covid. However, a third season is in the can and will be shown on Amazon Prime.
Tubi
Tubi was another free streaming service that was available on Cox. Its commercials were a little more annoying than FreeVee’s. The selection of programs were not as good, but we (or mostly I) found a few good ones.
Robert Carlisle played Hamish. He had two different dogs. Both were named Wee Josh.
We originally watched Hamish Macbeth, a show about the constable for a remote Scottish village, on the local PBS station. We recorded the episodes when they were shown late (for me) at night on Saturday and watched them together on Monday evenings. We saw the entire series again on Tubi. This series was very loosely based on a series of novels by Marion Chesney. I read one of the books and hated it.
The Prague Mysteries was a short but intriguing detective series set in Prague after the dissolution of the Austrian empire. I thought that it was pretty good.
The story line for Vexed was similar to that of The Mallorca Files. A straight-laced blonde female detective was paired with a wise-cracking lazy guy. It only lasted two seasons. The blonde in the first season was much better (and hotter) than the one in the second season. For some reason several of the shows in the second season were captioned in Portuguese.
Tubi has been my go-to site for Mystery Science Theater 3000. I did not realize that they had made so many of these shows. I also did not realize that there were so many really bad movies. I mean horrendously awful movies that someone presumably paid to watch. I liked the shows with Mike Nelson better than the ones with Joel Hodgson. The real stars were Joel’s robots, Tom Servo (voiced by Kevin Murphy) and Crow (Trace Beaulieu). I was impressed with Kevin’s singing ability, but Crow held a special place in my heart.
Amazon Prime
I subscribed to Amazon Prime just so that we could watch the second season of Mallorca Files. I intended to drop the subscription after we finished watching. However, we discovered quite a few series that we enjoyed quite a bit.
I watched Season 1 of Reacher on Freevee. I did not think that she would like it because it was so violent and she is not into body-building types. However, we both watched season 2 together and enjoyed it immensely.
In Plain Sight told the story of a small group of U.S. Marshals who managed members of the federal Witness Protection Program in Albuquerque. The writing was good. Mary McCormack and Fred Weller were both charismatic as the two stars. We watched all 61 episodes and liked them all.
We had watched an episode or two of Raising Hope on Freevee. It was created by Gregory Thomas Garcia, the brains behind the one-season wonder, Sprung. Two of the principal actors in Sprung had also appeared in RH. Sue and I liked RH, but Amazon wanted us to pay $3 per episode after the second one in the second season, and we demurred.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith won many awards in its first season. Donald Glover and Maya Erskine were exceptional. as was the writing.
I rewatched all of the episodes of Endeavour, some by myself and some with Sue. This time around I was greatly impressed by the writing of Russell Lewis, who wrote and “devised” every single complicated episode.
We both greatly enjoyed the first season of Deadloch, an Australian comedy/mystery about a serial killer in a beach town in Tasmanian that is dominated by lesbians.
In the fall of 2024 Prime Video began showing one season of shows from other streaming services. We took advantage of this to watch Poirot (as mentioned above) and My Life is Murder, the story of a retired female detective in Melbourne, Australia. Lucy Lawless was engaging as the principal character. I was not willing to subscribe to Acorn to see the rest of the seasons.
Recorded
I had read Lonesome Dove, the truly epic novel by Larry McMurtry, twice before it was shown as a four-part made-for-television movie. It was the most entertaining book that I had ever read, and the movie was just as good. It was very true to the novel; only one character, Charles Goodnight, was left out. It won seven Emmy awards, but somehow Robert Duvall was denied one. We bought a tape of it and watched it a few more times. Prequels and sequels have also been made, but none was as good as the original.
Tom and John Barnaby hardly made a dent in the ongoing bloodbath in Midsomer.
Midsomer Murders has been on British television for over twenty years. It was set in an imaginary county called Midsomer that had only one town, Causton, which seemed to be surprisingly crime-free, and a large number of villages in which murder was as common as gossip. For the first decade of the series every single actor was white. Then the producer was changed, and subsequent every episode had one or more actor who was not white. Many of the murder weapons were outlandish. My favorite one was an episode in which two people were trampled to death by dairy cows in a barn.
Elementary was another Sherlock Holmes update. This one was set in New York City and featured a Dr. Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) and a suitably British Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller). This was a really good show that ran on CBS for seven years. The last few shows were weak. We recorded reruns on an off-brand network.
Sue and I discovered Resident Alien on Peacock. We watched the first season there and the second two on recordings of showings on the Syfy channel. Alan Tubyk played the title character, who came from another planet who took over the body of a doctor in a town in Colorado. Tubyk has been perfect throughout, and the rest of the cast has also been very good. It must have been difficult to come up with plausible scripts with this premise. The second and third seasons were, however, only slightly inferior to the first.
One of the first British shows that we watched on PBS was Father Brown, based on the mysteries written by G.K. Chesterton. The shows were set in a village in the Cotswolds. Mark Williams was perfect as the priest, and I especially liked Nancy Carroll as Lady Felicia.
Shakespeare and Hathaway was set in Stratford-Upon-Avon. The shows were mildly amusing, but the plots were never gripping, and—aside from haircuts—the characters never developed.
We watched two different versions of Wallander. The first season of the Swedish version was excellent, but it went swiftly downhill. I did not like the British version that starred Kenneth Brannagh. He even changed the pronunciation of the chief character’s name.
The Belgian version of Professor T. was weirdly delightful. Koen De Bouw played a criminology professor with extreme mental problems that included frequent interactions with hallucinations. The rest of the characters put up with him to varying levels. I missed some of the episodes. If I had a chance I would love to see them. Apparently it is available on PBS Passport.
Sue and I enjoyed the first season of Marie Antoinette, which focused on the teenager shipped from Vienna to live at Versailles. Evidently a second season has been filmed.
1. On the major networks a “season” once consisted of twenty-six or even more episodes. It was designed to run from the middle of fall to the end of spring. In the summer reruns or pilot productions were show. In other countries a season might consist of just a few episodes. Most of the Masterpiece and Mystery shows had only four or five episodes, but sometimes they exceeded the expected length of just under one hour.
2. I did not provide a link because when I looked on YouTube in 2024, I was unable to find the set of uploaded Morse episodes that I had watched.
3. I was astounded to discover that the screenplay antedated the novel. Many years earlier McMurtry tried to get it made as a feature film with John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda. The project was scuttled when Wayne insisted on playing Gus McCrae.
In “Pro-Am” events one player in each pair has a limited amount of experience, usually short of Life Master rank. Bob Bertoni ran such contests on Friday evenings at the sectionals sponsored by the Eastern Mass Bridge Association. As an … Continue reading →
In “Pro-Am” events one player in each pair has a limited amount of experience, usually short of Life Master rank. Bob Bertoni ran such contests on Friday evenings at the sectionals sponsored by the Eastern Mass Bridge Association. As an officer of District 25 he brought them to regional tournaments. The first one few were moderately successful. The last one before the pandemic, held in Nashua in June of 2018, was a huge success—21 tables! I attended the first Pro-Am, the last one, and all in between.
The last item discussed at the district’s Executive Committee meeting at the 2023 Gala in Marlborough, MA, was how to attract people to the evening games. At the last minute I, remembering that the Pro-Am had attracted so many players before the pandemic, suggested trying a Pro-Am pairs game. Susan Miguel, the district’s vice-president at the time, asked after the meeting if I would volunteer to “run it.” Thinking that she meant at the next tournament in February in Southbridge, I agreed.1
Well, the district’s February tournament was not held in Southbridge; it was in Mansfield, MA. Furthermore, it was not a real regional—it was limited regional with a simultaneous open sectional. So, there no Pro-Am was on its schedule.
There was a tournament in April in Southbridge, but Susan, who by this time was the president, wanted to have the Pro-Am at the June tournament, the Granite State Getaway, in Nashua, NH. I guess that I could have said no, but I did not want to go back on my word. She let me choose whether the event would be on Friday or Saturday. My wife Sue, who agreed to help with the project, and I selected Friday. I sent the first promotional mailing on Saturday, April 6. It is posted here.
While researching the 2016 event I discovered that one of the big attractions was the half-price entry fee. I emailed Sue Miguel to ask whether we could offer a similar incentive in 2024. Here was her incongruous reply.
This time we’ll charge the full amount BUT we’re going to make sure we have LOTS of things making it fun and are will be [sic]great to advertise.
For starters we’ll have special food. We can also offer raffles, prizes and a little trinket everyone can receive just for playing.
As soon as we wrap Southbridge, we’ll put our minds on it.
Let’s see if we can find a theme to run with…
This sounded horrible to me. The atmosphere at a Pro-Am is less relaxed than the atmosphere in an Open Pairs game, but the theme is well established. Pros are there to give tips and confidence; Ams are there to get better. Both are there to get acquainted with someone from the other group.
That’s the theme!!!
I’ll make an ad but I need a couple of days to regroup and recover.
Directors in Hawaiian shirts, themed party food and gifts. Everyone gets a lai [sic] at the door.
Can’t wait….
Anyone for bridge?
I had to wonder if she had ever been to a luau. Most people who vacation in Hawaii for a few days attend one, but no one ever goes more than once. The hula dancing and the juggling of flaming torches are rather spectacular, but the food is secondary.
When I told my wife about this scheme, she had the same reaction that I did: “Are they going to make people eat poi?”
Anyway the only way that I could imagine to connect luaus to Pro-Am events was that professional hula dancers in grass skirts often tried to train unsuspecting (and usually intoxicated) amateur tourists in the art of hip swiveling. I doubted that we could persuade many people at a bridge tournament to participate in anything similar.
So, I decided to keep promoting it as an event with interesting bridge and painless learning without emphasizing the luau angle. Several people responded to my first email. Two volunteered as Pros. I was able to match Curtis Barton up with the only Am who responded, Daniel Sheinen. So, counting Sue and me, we now had one full table and one extra Pro.
On April 29 I received an email from Stuart Showalter, who had been appointed editor of a newsletter that Sue Miguel dreamed up.
Sue Miguel tells me you could write a short piece for the District 25 newsletter concerning the Pro-Am returning to Nashua. I think something about 250- 300 words would work well. See the attached copy of our March issue. Your article could be along the lines of the “Bridge Fest Returns” article in that issue.
Thanks, and let me know if you have any questions.
I composed about 250 words and sent them to him with a bunch of photos. He thanked me, but I never saw a newsletter that contained any of them. Before writing this I looked on NEBridge.org for newsletters, but I found nothing.
On May 20 I sent an email to all of the non-Life Masters in the district with less than 750 masterpoints. It featured a photo of the hotel, some gold bricks that I found on the Internet, a full-width photo of the Pro-Am event in 2018, and a photo of a wahine throwing a shaka. I argued that Friday was the best day for a non-LM to attend the tournament. They could pick up some gold in the morning and afternoon at the Bracketed Open Pairs and get some tips from “pros” in a fun setting. It is posted here.
This email received quite a few responses. The one that I received from Sue Miguel was totally unexpected.
The countdown has begun to the Pro-Am. I can’t wait. Already have a date to play with Denise.
As much as we appreciate everything you’re doing to make the event a success, I have to remind you that the only person who is authorized to send out emails on behalf/for the District is Neil Montegue.
In addition, we added a new communications protocol to our governance routine…..ALL emails from EVERYONE (even me) need to be reviewed by Denise before they are sent. In this case, she would have pointed out you omitted Bridge FEST! from the list which is now going to create much confusion. Also, we already had an email scheduled to go out today. We promised our members we wouldn’t be over sending emails and we need to adhere to what we promise.
Let me know if there is anything you need for the Pro-AM and keep us in the loop about the level of BUZZ you’re feeling.
Thanks again,
I immediately crafted this response:
I was unaware of any such “protocol”. I certainly never tried to edit or approve emails sent by authorized others when I was Communications Manager. Nobody approved any emails that I sent.
The only BridgeFEST event on Friday is the bracketed pairs, which I definitely highlighted (although I did not use the term because I sent the email to all “Ams”, some of whom would presumably not be considered “New and Advancing Players”). It is difficult to promote a full-price red-points-only event held in the evening at a regional. I expect few (if any) players to participate who did not play on Friday. The only other event on Friday is an Open Swiss that is unlikely to appeal to many Ams. So, the focus of the email was on the unique bracketed pairs and the Pro-Am. I mentioned the Hawaiian theme, but I could not think of a way to tie it in to the Pro-Am, and the best Hawaiian foods are fresh fruits and freshly caught fish, neither of which are likely to be served in Nashua.
I hope to send out an email to Pros by the end of the weekend. I plan to emphasize three things: the bracketed pairs, the pleasure of playing with “advancing players” (unless you are married to one), and a wager that Sue and I have made as to whether more pros or ams will attend. I will send it to you and Denise for approval.
I had a few positive responses to the first email. One person asked if the pros could play for free. I matched up one pro with an am.
I did not mention that if she had told me that I would not be able to do my own marketing, I would never have agreed to manage this process in the first place. For the last couple of years I have submitted my emails for the Connecticut Bridge Association to the unit’s Communications Committee. The only negative comments were from Esther Watstein, and they always encourage more “WOW!”
The email that I proposed was ready to go on May 26. Denise, whom I hardly knew at all, kept it a few days and then sent it back to me with much of it rewritten. I was frankly insulted. Who did she think she was? I have written scores of emails promoting bridge. No one has ever tried to rewrite one. One of her complaints was that it was redundant. Nothing was internally redundant. Did she mean that it repeated information that was available elsewhere? It certainly did, but is that wrong? Of course not.
I replied as follows: “This is lifeless.”
She replied:
I am not sure what you are stating. Most of your email has remained. The lei insinuations have to be taken out. Some of our members would be offended. Pls consider a happy medium and let me read another draft. I have offered to help. I am at the partnership desk every morning and during the break between games. I would be happy to discuss this.
She left her phone number. The last thing that I wanted to do was to “discuss this” with her over the telephone. I would be trying to persuade her that I had much more experience and knowledge about how to persuade bridge players than she did. What do you think were the chances of being able to do that?
I wrote the following: “I am not going to argue about this. Send whatever you want, but leave my name off of the bottom.”
What they did send, a few days later was the following image with no text whatever:
Please note that it does not say anywhere where this will be held or the date. The email address on it was mine, but the reply-to address was not. Every inquiry that I received asked where and when it was. I had to apologize to them that that information had not been included.
I would never have sent an email that used the word “kahuna” to refer to a bridge event. Since the word has religious connotations, I probably would have avoided it entirely. Also, I noticed that the definitions of the three categories had changed from what Sue Miguel had told me previously. I had relayed the (suddenly erroneous) information to a few people who had asked about the event. All of this made me pretty angry because it made me look stupid or incompetent.
I decided to compose my own email and send it using my free MailChimp account. I made sure to make it clear that it was my personal requests, and I used my personal database and account. It did not violate the dictum: “the only person who is authorized to send out emails on behalf/for [sic] the District is Neil Montegue [sic].” On June 7 I sent it to all Life Masters in New England with more than 750 masterpoints. It is posted here.
910 people (68.3 percent of the addressees) opened this email, an astonishingly high number. I received many very positive responses. Some people volunteered to be Pros. Others said that they would have volunteered if they were going to be at the tournament on Friday.
On Monday June 10 I received an extremely disconcerting email from the ACBL. I scanned it and decided not to let it ruin my tournament. I postponed dealing with it when we returned from Nashua. The email and my response are discussed in the section below.
Sue and I divided the partnership task into two parts—making sure that everyone knew about the event and matching up “Pros” with “Ams”. Before the tournament we primarily used email to achieve the first goal. At the tournament we primarily relied on word-of-mouth. Sue also was asked to give an impromptu speech at one of the “”Fest” events.
I decided that we should use index cards to keep track of the people who wanted to play. There may be other ways of organizing a Pro-Am. If anyone had ever documented the process, I was unaware of it. I bought a pack of 100 at Target for the astounding price of $.80. According to the rules that Sue Miguel published, there would actually be three categories. Group 1 was composed of all non-Life Masters. Life Masters with over 750 masterpoints were in Group 3. Group 2 was the other Life Masters. In actual fact the only player in the middle category who contacted me was John Lloyd. He played with an Am.
We filled out a card for each player. I bought a Sharpie with a very wide nib. On each card we placed a very prominent P, A, or 2 to designate the category that the play was in. I waited until June 7 to do this so that I could use the most up-to-date rosters for the ranks and masterpoints.
If both a Pro and an Am contacted me, I sent an email to the Pro and asked him/her/them to contact the Am. Only one Pro told me that “it was not a good fit”. Every other Pro contracted the Am in question and both agreed to play. By the time that the tournament started we had matched up enough Pros with Ams that we were fairly certain of at least a four-table game. I used a paper clip to keep the matched-up pairs together.
I had also heard from several Pros who reportedly were not only coming but were actively working to increase attendance. I expected to discover a lot of activity concerning the event in Nashua. When we left on Tuesday afternoon I was projecting ten or so tables, a very respectable turnout that would mean that we could have a standard Mitchell movement.
Sue had a different idea about contacting people. She asked me to provide her with a database of Ams that she could manipulate on her ancient Hewlett-Packard laptop. She had somehow obtained a copy of Word and Excel, but she had almost no idea how to use them. I made a CSV file for her, put it on a flash drive, and gave it to her. I then showed her how to upload it into Excel. She spent several days working on this, and I had to be available for technical support for this entire period to teach her the control keys, how to select a large number of cells rapidly, and the vagaries of sorting.
She planned to contact people whom she knew personally, but she apparently ran out of time. As far as I know, she only talked with one or two people and received no commitments. Still, she invested a great deal of time, at least as much as I did.
This poster was attached to the mirror behind our table when I arrived on Thursday morning.
On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings I arrived at a table in the information/partnership area of the hotel at 9am. I brought with me a resealable plastic bag that contained all of the index cards and the Sharpy. On all three mornings I got a cup of coffee and, except on the morning that Sue and I ate breakfast together, a bagel or roll from the concession area that was right across the hall from our table. No one ever approached the table to inquire about the Pro-Am game. It was a complete waste of time.
A better strategy would have been: 1) create handouts that explained the essence of the events and 2) wear something that identified me as the Pro-Am guy. I should then have gone out at 9:10 and 9:40, milled about with the players seated at the tables, distribute handouts, and inquire about interest and questions. This might have gotten a few more Ams interested in playing and would have made me feel less like an idiot for sitting idly at the table.
Meanwhile my wife never made it downstairs before the games started at 10. I was never sure what she did all day long while the rest of us were playing, but later discovered evidence that she had tried to put together her own list of who was going to play with whom on Friday evening.
Friday was different. By that time I had four or five unmatched Pros lined up and no Ams to pair them with. I abandoned the card system and instead kept two lists—one of unmatched Pros (memorized) and one of unmatched Ams (written). As soon as I learned of an Am, I chased down a Pro and tried to create a match. By Friday evening I still had a few matches to make. I was not too surprised when four or five pros came to the event unannounced. They were all friends of mine or friends of friends. I matched up as many as I could. In the end we had thirty-three pairs.
Even though someone allowed a pair of Pros to play together to avoid a sitout, I still had to send away a handful of unmatched Pros. The dismissal that bothered me the most was John Berry, a New Yorker who often attends events in New England. He had contacted me earlier in the week. I had given him a card with the name, email address, and phone number of an Am2 who had contracted me just before we left for Nashua. John tried both methods of communication, but he received no replies.
Three or four times I encountered an unmatched Am in the few minutes before the game I immediately sought out John Berry. On every occasion I could not find him in the chaos, and instead I placed them with the first unmatched Pro that I encountered. When I saw John on Saturday I apologized to him.
The Pro-Am game was a seventeen-table Mitchell. We played nine two-board rounds. Sue and I sat at table #2 North-South.
Every few rounds Sue Miguel interrupted play to present Hawaii-oriented door prizes to people. One went to the oldest player (99); one went to people who had been to Hawaii since the pandemic. I don’t remember the others.
The winning pair consisted of two guys from New Hampshire, Dan Maguire (one of the very first Pros to tell me that he would attend) and Graham Woerner. Note: When putting the finishing touches on this entry I tried to use the index page for the winners boards on NEBridge.org to find a photo of Dan. It had been deleted without warning.
I brought my camera, but I never felt like taking any photos. I didn’t feel like playing either, but I had committed to do so.
The “hospitality” consisted of two items. I tried the pizza that contained chunks of cheese and pineapple after the event when it was quite cold. I found it abominable. The other was chicken wings kept in a metallic semi-cylinder that clanged shut with a very large bang several times during the event. Neither Sue nor I tried the wings, but Sue noted that someone sitting South who had played the cards that she received must have. Her cards were sticky.
There was no coffee. I asked Sally Kirtley, the Tournament Manager, about this. She said that she thought that she had ordered it.
A renowned party-pooper, I found the interruptions and the theme-oriented food quite annoying. However, I must admit that everyone else seemed to be having a good time.
Here is the email that I received on June 10 from Gwynn Garthright, who identified herself as a “Marketing Specialist at the ACBL”:
Dear Mr. Wavada,
We have been informed of a recent communication you distributed to members of District 25 regarding an upcoming bridge event, which appears to have been sent on behalf of a club.
As stipulated in our Terms of Use, clubs are only permitted to use the personal contact information of members who have played at that specific club. We have received complaints from members who have not played at this club but nonetheless received your email.
Furthermore, while you are member of the District 25 Board of Directors, only district officers are authorized to use this list to promote a sanctioned bridge event. According to our records, you are listed as a teacher, and any communications you send to this list should be restricted to matters related to learning bridge.
Please remember that privacy laws regarding email marketing are very strict. When a member joins the ACBL, they only consent to what is outlined in the privacy policy and terms of use. Violations of these policies may result in disciplinary action by the ACBL, as per the ACBL’s Code of Disciplinary Regulations, and could potentially lead to civil lawsuits.
Note that merely having an unsubscribe option does not suffice. The policy explicitly prohibits contacting members who have not played at your club.
Any further violation of the ACBL’s Terms of Use may be reported to the ACBL’s Ethics Department.
Thank you for your attention in this matter.
I deliberately postponed researching an answer to this email until after the tournament. I did not want to spoil my concentration, and I did not want it to make me so angry that I was unable to enjoy anything about the experience.
I checked the “Terms of Use” that are currently posted on the “My ACBL” website that allowed me to download roster. Sure enough, the version dated September 2023 stipulated that only officers of districts and units could send out emails and that club owners/managers could only send emails to people who had already played at the club.
I sent this email in response:
It is hard for me to respond to this email since I do not know who you are. What does a Marketing Specialist do? I find it surprising that you would be involved in suppressing marketing.
Let me introduce myself. I have been a member of the ACBL for over twenty years. I belong to two clubs. I am on the Board of Trustees of the Hartford Bridge Club, which is the oldest in North America and the largest in New England. The other club is the Simsbury Bridge Club, an informal group that tries to scrape together a game on Wednesday evenings. I have been on the Board of Unit 126 for at least a decade. I am also on the Board of Delegates and the Executive Committee, the governing organizations for District 25, and have been so for several years. Prior to 2023 I spent ten years as the webmaster, database manager, communications chairman, and bulletin writer for the district. I also served as the email marketing director for the Summer NABC in Providence, RI. I have been on the ACBL’s Goodwill Committee for about a decade.
I apologize for the delay in responding to this email. For the last week I have been in Nashua, NH, at the regional tournament. My wife and I organized and promoted the Friday evening Pro-Am game, which attracted seventeen tables.
Over the last decade I have sent well over one million emails promoting bridge events in New England on behalf of both clubs, the unit, and the district. I think that it is fair to say that I actually invented email marketing for bridge events. Before I began downloading rosters in 2013 I read the Terms of Use very carefully and consulted with the officers of the district and unit to make sure that what I was doing was within what was allowed. I have never made a penny on any of these projects. Incidentally I have received hundreds of complimentary comments about my email projects. NO ONE has ever complained to me about them except for two people who thought that I should not have mentioned the Lone Ranger’s faithful Indian companion, Tonto, in one of them.
I am not really a teacher. For two years I volunteered to teach bridge at two middle schools in Springfield, MA, with the late Bob Derrah. I received no pay, but they did honor us as the Volunteers of the year in the Springfield school district. I have mentored many newer bridge players over the decades officially as part of the HBC’s mentoring program and unofficially because I love the game. I am NOT a professional teacher, and I have never received a penny for my efforts in that area.
I have sent no emails for the unit in the last year or so. The only emails that I have sent for the district were to promote the Pro-Am game described above. I probably will never send another email for the district. It took over a year to find people who were willing and able to do what I had done for a decade, but they are now handling those areas. I sometimes advise them on technical matters, but they make the marketing decisions.
That leaves the clubs. I have promoted two events for the HBC. The first was a set of limited sectionals that were held at the club’s building. These one-day events were wildly successful, drawing 57, 35, and 50 tables of non-Life Masters. The other was to promote the beginner lessons that were conducted by one of the club’s teachers. I wrote to players within fifty miles of Hartford asking them if they knew anyone who would be interested in taking these lessons. Unfortunately, the response was less than we hoped to achieve.
So, I must assume that the complaint is about my emails to potential players at the Simsbury Bridge Club. I have no access to any list of players at the club, which struggles to attract more than three or four tables to its weekly games. So, I have sent invitations to players in the area. Does the ACBL really want me to stop doing this? I have received dozens of replies from people who received them. Nearly all expressed thanks. A few people asked me to take them off the list (which they could have done themselves with one click). I, of course, promptly complied in every case.
The SBC has only one game per week on Wednesday evenings. No club within driving distance conducts games at that time. No one could conceivably have been materially injured. Could you please provide me with the name of the coward who contacted you about this? In America people are allowed to confront their accusers. I can hardly believe that someone would take legal action about something as innocuous as inviting people to play bridge on Wednesday evenings. If he or she had contacted me in person–nearly all bridge players in the area know me–I am sure that I could have addressed their concerns. If they wanted help with their own marketing, I probably would have helped. I have done it several times.
I must say that the rule that clubs can only contact people who have already played in their games is profoundly stupid. How in the world does the ACBL expect existing clubs to attract enough people to sustain the game if they cannot use direct marketing? Moreover, what if I wanted to start a new club? I have been asked to do so in my home town of Enfield, CT, many times. Are you telling me that I would not be able to use my email marketing skills and experience to promote it? If your specialty really is marketing, can you not realize how inane this is?
If the ACBL decides to take civil action against me, I should warn you that it will not be lucrative. I have never received any income whatever from any of my efforts.
Emails like yours infuriate volunteers like me and often impel us to wash our hands of the bureaucratic nonsense that has caused appreciation of our beautiful game to to deteriorate over time.
I copied Bronia Jenkins, the ACBL’s Executive Director, Regional Director Mark Aquino, Donna Feir, Sally Kirtley, and Peter Marcus3.
The only one who replied was Peter. His harangue included an accusation that I was hostile to Hawaiians because I made fun of poi.
In the end I told Gwynn that I would never do any marketing for the district and that I would only send emails to members of the clubs to which I belong. Only the second bothered me; I had no plans to volunteer for anything at the district level ever again. The restriction on club mailing will, in my opinion, probably lead to the demise of the Simsbury Bridge Club. It may also have a severe effect on the success of the HBC’s limited sectionals.
Nobody with whom I have talked thinks that the concern about privacy is a reasonable justification for the ACBL’s restrictions on direct marketing.
This whole affair left me depressed about the state of bridge. I had a hard time convincing myself to get out of bed in the morning.
1. This was a mistake. I should have remembered the admonition from my drill sergeant on the very first day of basic training: “Never volunteer for anything.” Of course, he amended that a few minutes later, as described here.
2. Suresh Subramanian, of Action, PA, attended the tournament and received .55 masterpoints. I do not understand why he did not return John’s calls and messages. I searched through the results to try to figure out what event(s) he played in, but I was unsuccessful.
3. At first I thought that this might have been about weekly emails that I sent for the Simsbury Bridge Club. However, Peter’s vituperative response made me think that it was actually prompted by my “personal” email about the Pro-Am. Sue Miguel probably talked with Peter about it and the emails that I sent out promoting the Hartford Bridge Club’s fantastically successful non-Life Master Sectionals (documented here). I could be wrong, but it now seems clear to me that she and Peter ratted me out to the ACBL. She was probably upset that I bypassed the “protocols” for emails that she invented, and he still felt enmity about the humiliation that resulted from the brouhaha about Tonto. They both were, in my opinion, bullies.
My notes from 2022 are rather comprehensive. Tournament bridge finally started again in that year. My experiences at the sectional tournaments in New England have been recounted here. The events sponsored by District 25 (D25) are described here.
I decided to organize this blog entry chronologically. Several other major events that occurred during the year received their own entries. Links to those entries can be found in the appropriate month.
I was looking forward to 2022 with hope of a return to some degree of normalcy. Both of the bridge clubs in which I played regularly seemed to be doing fairly well, and tournaments were scheduled nearby at the unit (state), district (New England), and national level. Furthermore my wife Sue, my friend Tom Corcoran, and I had an exciting trip planned for May. Finally, although the U-M football team lost its last game of 2021 badly, it was a gigantic improvement over the team that won only two games in the first year of the Pandemic.
January: On New Year’s Day the temperature reached 50 degrees. I walked five miles outdoors with only one stop. I also found René Conrad’s (introduced here) LinkedIn page.
Ohio State was lucky to beat Utah 48-45 in the Rose Bowl. Both teams had great offenses and terrible defenses.
On the next day I received an email from René. I wrote back to her, but there was no further interaction.
On January 3 I brought the car into Lia Honda because the windshield washers were not squirting. The service guy told me that mice had chewed a hole in the hose. He put in a new one and advised me to put traps in the garage in which the car was stored.
On the morning of the 4th I used the Dealer4 machine at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) for the Wednesday evening game at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC). I encountered no problems that I could not immediately resolve. On the way home from bridge I bought some mouse traps.
At the Zoom meeting of the HBC Board of Trustees (BoT) the big news was that Linda Starr, the director who had sent out so many clever emails during the shutdown via MailChimp, was resigning from communication duties. I thought about volunteering, but at that point I was still busy with my work for D25.
On January 6 I caught a mouse in a trap that I had set near the wooden chest on the northern wall in the garage.
I suspected that I might be charged by the BoT with finding and/or training a replacement for Linda. So, I asked for and received copies of Linda’s write-ups of what she did in MailChimp. It was certainly nice (and unusual) to work with someone who had thoroughly documented her responsibilities.
The traps for the first two mice were set just to the left of this chest.
On January 7 I caught a second mouse in a trap set in the same spot.
I had ordered a blue sweatshirt with Michigan spelled out in yellow (actually maize) from someone on Espy. I received it on January 8. I already had on that I liked a lot, but the collar and the cuffs were quite frayed, and it was a little too big. The color was right and it seemed comfortable, but the letters were not precisely yellow. They had blue specks in them. I decided that it was close enough, and I did not send it back.1
On the 10th I caught a third mouse. By then Bob (the cat) seemed to have moved into the new bedroom with Sue. Bob and our other pet for 2022, Giacomo, were black cats. They were both introduced here.
The plain old mousetrap of decades gone by still worked perfectly well.
I cooked carne asada tacos using a seasoning packet that Sue had purchased, but I did not think much of them. In the national championship game Georgia beat Alabama with s fourth-quarter rally. U-M finished third in the final voting, the highest that they have been since the shared national championship of 1997-98.
On January 11 a fourth mouse was executed for illegal residency in the garage.
The computer in the office at the HBC was on the fritz. I had to make the the boards for the SBC game on Wednesday manually. John Calderbank and I somehow finished first out of twelve pairs.
On the next day I trapped mouse #5. In the morning game at the HBC the boards did not match the hand records. Somebody messed up when making the boards
I caught no more mice in the garage, but on the fourteenth I trapped one in the kitchen. They can run but they love cheese too much to hide.
On January 18 Giacomo had trouble getting to his feet. That was also day on which I learned that after the latest rebooking of the cruise for May, Tom was not on the same flights as Sue and I. Tom remembered that we had paid extra to be on the same flights.
Linda had made .pbn files on Tuesday evening for me to use when making the boards. On Wednesday the 18th at 9 am I made boards for the Simsbury game. We had four tables at the SBC.
On the 20th Giacomo was frantic when he could not get to his feet, but he finally made it. He could get around OK after that. Obviously his 19th year is going to be a difficult one for him. He had never been ill or injured. Occasionally he coughed up a hair ball, but that affliction is common to almost all long-haired cats.
On the next day I made a MailChimp “audience” (the MailChimp word for contact list) for the HBC using my laptop. I had to reuse the audience that I had previously created for emails from the president of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA) that welcomed new members.
Not a litter box.
On January 22 Sue’s cat Bob had for some reason spent the last three nights in the bathtub in which I take a shower every evening. This morning he left behind a turd when he departed. I did not thank him for it.
Tom negotiated with Viking and got us all on the same flights: SwissAir to Budapest and British on the return.
On January 23 I walked nine laps (five miles) wearing a mask in the Enfield Square mall to investigate using it as an option for exercising in foul weather. What a sad place! Hardly anyone was shopping in the few stores that were open. The two restaurants each had one table occupied. No one seemed to be in the movie theater. I encountered a dozen or so walkers, some with dogs! An obese guy in a white strapped undershirt with a shopping cart full of stuff was at the Asnuntuck kiosk. He had plugged in some kind of weird machine. This trip inspired me to keep a rather complete log of my subsequent walks. It has been posted here.
On the next day my left lower back was sore in the morning, but it did not prevent me from walking another five miles.
On January 25 both sides of my lower back were sore when I woke up. If I did not know better, I might conclude that I was getting old.
The Tournament Scheduling Committee (TSC) for District 25 (D25) scheduled another meeting for Wednesday night, the only time all week that I cannot attend! This infuriate me. I complained, but I did not know whom to be angry at.
I learned that Unit 126 (Connecticut) was facing the possibility of holding two major face-to-face STaC2 games a week apart.
On the 26th I could barely walk with the pain in my left lower back. For some reason lying down made it worse. I immediately took an ibuprofen tablet. It helped a lot.
On the next day I spent an hour and a half on the rowing machine; the back felt OK.
On January 28 a “bomb cyclone” was predicted to arrive at about 10 pm. I forgot to pay the bill for the Chase credit card because Sue was “checking” the charges. I received a nice email from Rick Cernech. He was living in Florida and was either working as or had worked as a cruise planner.
There was plenty of snow on January 29. I decided while using the rowing machine that the creaking sound that I could hear in my bedroom was really coming from the shelves in the basement directly below it.
Joe Brouillard, a co-chair of the committee that was running the event, reported that the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) had finally posted the schedule for the summer North American Bridge Championship (NABC) that was scheduled for July. The preparatory work that Joe and his team (of which I was in charge of email publicity) did for the NABC has been documented here.
On the last day of the month I decided to try to bleed as many of the radiators in the old section of the house as I could. Since boxes, bags and furniture were virtually everywhere, this was not an easy task. One that I was able to get at in the living room started pissing after I bled it. It was extremely difficult to get the screw back all the way in. The hot water burnt my hands pretty badly, but I finally prevailed.
I watched episode 1 of season 2 of the series “Resident Alien.”3 It didn’t seem as good.as the first season, but I still enjoyed it.
February: On Groundhog Day only five pairs registered for the evening bridge game at the SBC. I had to cancel the game. Eric and I were first at 68% in the morning game at the HBC. In the afternoon game online Sue by tied for first. Her partner was John Willoughby.
In the evening I went to see Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Cinemark in Enfield Square. About ten people were in attendance. I thought all of the performances were quite good, especially Rosa Feola’s portrayal of a more Gilda who was more mature than usual. However, I hated the production decisions in the last act.
On February 5 I sent 20,000 emails for the NABC. I played pretty well but got a bad result at the HBC game with Peter Katz. I realized that I had forgotten to send the invitational email to SBC players on Friday. I set Outlook up to remind me to do so on Fridays and Mondays.
On February 8 I received the toner that I had ordered from Ink Technologies LLC.
February 11 was astoundingly warm—55 degrees. I walked 3.5 miles outside. Sue’s left big toe was very sore from gout.
The next day was 60 degrees! I finished the blog entry on Enfield Square, but I planned to update it as stores closed and (hopefully) opened.
On February 13 I received a mysterious email from Floyd Smith in response to my query about the name of his boss at Stage Stores (introduced here). It said “Sure. She is also on Facebook. Good luck and great to hear from you!”
Two inches of snow appeared on the grass, but the surfaces were clear. I drove Sue to the Urgent Care place on the north side of Hazard Ave. for her toe. They prescribed some drugs for her.
On the next day Sue’s toe was much better. I drove her to heart doctor. The appointment was for 10:15. I made sure that she was awake by 7:45. Nevertheless, it was 10:50 by the time we reached 1699 King St., which is just north of East Windsor. They would not see her. We were home at 11:30. The temperature only reached 20 degrees, which made it one of the coldest days of a very mild winter.
On February 15 I received this email from Floyd: “Suire is her last name. Sorry about that; spell check changed it last time. “
That evening the HBC’s Planning Committee held a Zoom meeting. Earlier I had committed to playing in the Swiss game at the HBC on February 27 with Ken Leopold, Y. L. Shiue, and Frank Blachowski. Frank and Y.L were very good players with a lot of masterpoints.
On the 17th the temperature reached 60 degrees, but it was very windy.
At a Zoom Meeting the D25 Executive Committee (EC) approved the Gala tournament on May 19-22 (coinciding with the dates that I planned to be in Europe on the cruise). The plan was to charge full price for events with lots of hospitality. I abstained; the other representative from Unit 126 (U126), Sonja Smith, did not attend. She may have already moved to North Carolina.
On February 18 the temperature hit 55 degrees in the morning but it fell throughout the day. I had to return the toner to Ink Technologies. I ordered the wrong thing. The company gave me a partial refund of $31 out of the original charge of $78.
On February 21 Russia sent troops into breakaway provinces in eastern Ukraine. I walked four miles outdoors in the rather warm 52 degrees. Rob Stillman and Y. C. Hsu agreed to play as the third pair for the Wednesday evening game in Simsbury. Sue will play with Maria Van der Ree.
On February 23 it was 72 degrees when I left the HBC after winning the open pairs game with Eric in morning. An email at 3:00 from Judy Larkin informed me that Ida Coulter could not play. Minutes later Renee Janow and Lucie Fradet asked to play. Sue was too tired to play, and so Judy ended up playing with Maria. I played terribly. I was stressed out from juggling the schedule.
On February 24 Russia invaded Ukraine. I walked nine laps in the mall.
In the Swiss on the 26th we lost our first two matches on flukes. We came back to win the last three by 18, 18, and 20 victory points to finish second out of twelve. YC made 6NT after he underled his ♠A.
March: For Sue’s birthday party on March 2 at the SBC she brought cupcakes for everybody. There were only 3 tables, but we had a good time.
On the next evening Sue and I went to supper with Tom at the Puerto Vallarta Mexican restaurant. The tacos al carbon were not as good as I remembered them. Tom ordered his usual gigantic bowl, which was no longer on the menu. I don’t remember what it was called.
On March 6 I walked 5 miles outside. The temperature was 62 degrees, but I needed to circumvent many puddles from the snow melting.
On March 9 about two inches of snow was on the lawn. The streets had been cleared, but Eno Hall was closed, and so the SBC could not hold a game.
By March 10 I had read the following books from the Enfield Public Library: T.C. Boyle’s Talk Talk; Max Barry’s The 22 Murders of Madison May and Lexicon. I liked Lexicon the best, but they were all good.
On March 18 the temperature hit 76 degrees, a new all-time record for the date. I walked five miles in a tee shirt. I learned that the Xiaos (aged 10 and 13) won the 0-10K Swiss at the NABC in Reno. The two youngsters
On March 20 Sue and I played in the “8 is enough” Swiss with Mayank and Aarati Mehta. Finished in the middle because of a hand in which Rob Stillman and Ronit Shoham bid 4♥ against Sue and me, but the Mehtas let Y. C. play 3♦.
On March 27 there was no pee or poop in the litter box. I brought the box upstairs, and Giacomo took a pee and then lounged in the box. He had never done this before. It was not a good sign.
On March 30 Ken and I won a five-table STaC game at the SBC. Sue and I could not find Giacomo when we returned to Enfield.
The cat’s door as seen from the back yard.
On the next morning I found Giacomo’s body lying in the back yard just outside of the cat door. He had not gone outside in weeks, maybe months, and he had not been downstairs for days. Nevertheless, he must have used up all of his remaining strength to descend the stairs, walk over to the ramp, climb up the ramp to the cat door, and exit through that door.
He was a wonderful cat. I really mourned for him, and I still miss having him on my lap while I watch television. More details about long relationship with Giacomo before the Pandemic can be found here.
In the last few years of Giacomo’s life I apparently became allergic to something about him. Several times I had rather severe outbreaks of hives, and I got the sniffles when he sat on my lap. After he died these symptoms disappeared.
I did the income taxes using FreeTaxesUSA.com. My federal tax was $0, and I received a refund of over $900 from Connecticut.
A lot of other things happened on the last day of March. An oil bill for $780.52 arrived. I brought the litter box, which now is officially Bob’s, back downstairs. While I was doing so, I fell into some empty boxes and bruised my left hand. It hurt, but it was not fatal. The Sony audio recorder that I ordered for the cruise arrived. I played with it enough to feel fairly comfortable using it.
April: On the 2nd of the month M&T Bank took over our previous bank, Peoples United Bank, which had a few years earlier purchased United Bank. United had purchased Rockville Bank, from which I negotiated our final mortgage, as documented here. This changeover seemed to go rather smoothly, and I like the new website slightly better than the old one.
Bob has found the litter box. Thank goodness.
Peter and I won the six-table STaC game at the HBC. On consecutive hands grand slams could be made in hearts. We only bid one of them, but no one else took all the tricks on the other one.
On April 6 the switch for the lights in the basement did not work. Two days later I got it to work, but it was difficult. Eventually this problem disappeared or maybe I just adjusted to the toggle.
On April 11 I received the second booster shot at a pharmacy in Springfield. Sue had already gotten hers
On April 15 I downloaded the VeriFly app that Viking had recommended for my phone and eventually got it to work. This was a complete waste of time, and it stressed me out. It was never needed or, for that matter, useful on the entire trip.
On April18 Ken and I learned that we had been dumped as teammates for the upcoming Grand National Teams (GNT) online qualification tournament by Felix Springer and Trevor Reeves again. Details can be found here. I was not looking forward to the online part again, but I thought that we would have a pretty good chance of qualifying. Playing in the GNT in Providence in July had been my goal for many months, and I had avoided accumulating masterpoints throughout the Pandemic in order to maintain my eligibility. I ordinarily do not hold grudges, but I still feel bitter about this more than a year and a half later.
On April 29 Peter Katz and I won the last Saturday game at the HBC before it went on hiatus. There were only three tables. I faked out Y. L with a terrible overcall.
The huge hump of hair on Bob’s back was an embarrassment to all of us.
May: Something incredible happened on May 2. Sue took Bob to the veterinarian. She learned that the big clump that had been on his back for years was just hair. The vet shaved it off, and it never grew back. How can this be? He would not let us touch it; why was it so sensitive? What cat has that much hair? What made it keep growing for such a long time? Sue said that the vet said that it was just bad grooming. He also said that Bob was at least thirteen years old.
That cat never ceased to amaze me. After his haircut he suddenly liked to be petted, he also became more friendly to me. One untoward result was that I developed very small bumps around my ankles that were itchy and a little painful. I must have been allergic to him or at least his dander.
I downloaded the Uber app for possible use in Vienna to get back to the ship from the opera. The rest of the bizarre preparation for the European cruise has been catalogued in some detail here.
I learned that thirty staff members of Henry Barnard School have Covid-18! I did not realize that the school even had that many employees. The state of Connecticut was showing a 9.4% positivity rate. The good news was that Germany’s level, which I had been following closely, was down by quite a bit. The other three countries on our itinerary were also improving.
The European cruise trip began on May 5. The incredible story of that day and the rest of the journey is well documented here. One thing that is not related there is the fact that the little bumps on my ankles cleared up while I was in Europe. The ones on my right ankle began to reappear in June or July.
On May 23 I mowed the lawn, which had by then become a jungle. While doing so I realized that I had to attack the poison ivy, which was much more prevalent than in 2021. I ordered some Roundup that could be sprayed on the plants from Amazon.
Only five pairs had registered for the Wednesday night game in Simsbury, but I had not yet heard from Lori Leopold. She could usually find a partner on short notice.
The next morning brought another frustrating bridge game. When I got back to the house I needed to cancel the Wednesday evening game at the SBC because only five pairs had registered.
I brought to the Verizon office on Hazard Ave. the Pixel 2 cellphone that had failed me on the cruise. The tech guy at Verizon showed me that the phone was considerably thicker in the middle than on the edges. He explained that this was a symptom of overheating. So, the phone was officially dead. In retrospect I concluded that the transformer in the cable that connected the phone to the outlet in my cabin must have failed to convert the current to 110 at least once on the cruise, and the European current fried the battery or something. I kept the phone plugged in virtually all of the time that I was in my cabin.
We planned on eating at the Kebab House before entering the Cinemark at Enfield Square to see the opera, but it was not open. We watched the rust-belt production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The character of the priest just did not work. Otherwise, the first two acts were very moving, but the third act was a total mess until Javier Camarena’s outstanding performance near the end. The many interviews during the breaks. were insipid. Sue and I settled for popcorn for supper. Incredibly she stayed awake throughout the performance.
On May 25 I discovered that our mortgage on the house was completely paid off! I was not expecting this news for several months.
June: At some point in June Sue purchased for me a new (well, new to me) cellphone. This one was a Samsung Galaxy S7. It was similar to Sue’s, and so she could sometimes help me with it. A year and a half later I still hated it, but not as much as I loathed the Pixel 2. The Samsung had not ordered any pizzas for me, but, then again, I had not downloaded the Slice app. I could almost never figure out where the app that I wanted to use was hiding, and it randomly plays YouTube videos and other stuff from the Internet. I figured out how to answer the phone in a minute or two, but it took me eighteen months to figure out how to hang up.
On the 1st I learned that Sally Kirtley, the director at the SBC, had tested positive for Covid-19. Ken had to direct at the Wednesday night . Ken and I won easily.
On the very next day Sally came to the ACBL’s walk-through in Providence. I very much enjoyed talking with old friends like Paula Najarian.
On June 13 I received two bottles of Roundup that I had ordered from Amazon. I immediately went outside and sprayed the poison ivy that was growing along the fence on the north side of the yard. Two days later I sprayed the poison ivy again. I wore a mask during both sprayings, and I was careful not to get any on my skin or clothes.
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates to combat the serious inflation that began after the country reopened. Any moron could see that the main culprit had been pent-up demand from the shutdown, and the secondary cause was shipping holdups. Nevertheless, I had to peel a sticker off of a gas pump at Costco that claimed that “Biden caused this.”
I met Mike Barke, a geography professor at the Northumbria University, and his wife Vivienne on the cruise. Mike had recently published a book entitled Newcastle upon Tyne: Mapping the City. As soon as I got back to the U.S. I ordered a copy. It finally arrived on June 17. It was both beautiful and interesting. It made me want to visit the Tyneside area.
The Longest Day game on June 21 at HBC very annoying. There was much too much noise. Donna Feir pressed everyone to play faster and then canceled the last round because the pizza had arrived. This turned out to be a super-spreader event for Covid-19.
From an email from Cindy Lyall, the treasurer of the CBA, I earned that U126 lost $4,000 on the tournament in Orange. Ouch!
On June 23 Mary Whittemore reported that her name was missing from the “Top 200 List” on the CTBridge.org website. I asked the CBA board members if anyone knew why. Don Stiegler sent me a correct list. It showed that many names were missing from the one on the website. Evidently no one knew how that page got updated on the website. Bob Bertoni, who died in 2021, set up the website and, because the unit had no webmaster at the time, did all of the updating.
Graham Van Keuren.
On June 29 Sue and I attended a potluck supper at Sue’s church, the Somersville Congregational Church. I always feel very uncomfortable at these religious gatherings, but this one was tolerable. After supper we listened to Graham Van Keuren’s presentation on his vacation with his spouse Eric in Israel. I recorded it on my audio recorder. It was a good presentation, but it certainly did not make me want to visit what I considered to be an apartheid country.
On June 30 Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that he had Covid-19 for the second time. This news astounded me. Did he take no precautions? The Pandemic was finally running rampant at the HBC. Only five tables were occupied on Tuesday morning, and the evening game was canceled. Only three tables appeared on Wednesday, and the Simsbury game was canceled. Both of the games at the HBC on Thursday were canceled.
July: The big event of the month was the Providence NABC. I attended most of the event, but Sue decided not to go. I kept notes on my laptop and wrote them up a little later. They have been posted here and here. It was good to see some familiar faces, but the bridge games were not much fun.
The tournament was another super-spreader of Covid-19. Almost everyone with whom I played or associated caught the virus. I almost ripped the driver’s side mirror off of my car, and the hotel rooms were never cleaned. However, I avoided getting the disease. So, in a period of about two and a half months I had survived three super-spreader events—the cruise, bridge at the HBC, and the NABC. I credited my collection of free N95 masks that I had amassed from giveaways at various retailers.
August: I was hoping to have a party at the SBC to celebrate my seventy-fourth birthday. Not enough people were able to attend on the 17th. Instead, I decided that the SBC would have a Christmas party on August 24. Twenty people attended, and so we had five tables and lots of food. The players gave me a $100 Amazon card and $20 in cash. I was a little upset that Sue and I arrived so late because she, as usual, was not ready on time. I had made beef Stroganoff that needed to be heated up in the slow cooker. I crawled under the table and plugged in the pot, but I neglected to turn it on.
On August 26 the refrigerator stopped working. Panic set in. Sue and I resolved to deal with it the next morning. By then it had resumed functioning. If we ever figured out the cause of the outage, I made no note of it.
Throughout the period from my arrival back in Enfield after the cruise up to the end of August the weather had been hot, and I had spent every spare minute working on the journal for the Grand European Tour. On August 28 I finally finished it and sent an email to quite a few people announcing that the journal had been posted on Wavada.org. I was quite pleased to hear back from both the Barkes and the family from Saskatchewan.
A Big Y Express replaced the Shell station.
I noticed that the Shell station on Hazard Ave., which had been operational since we moved to Enfield in the late eighties, was closed.
On August 29 I received a long email from Tom Caputo, whom I had worked with at both Lord & Taylor (described here) and Saks Fifth Avenue (here). He was looking for a job at the age of 60. He asked me if I knew about anything being available. Since he knew very well that I had had nothing to do with retail for at least eight years, he must have been desperate. Maybe he thought that I had kept in touch with people more than I had.
I also received an email from Mike and Vivienne Barke.
August closed with an incredibly disappointing Ocean State Regional tournament in Warwick, RI. I had a rotten time, the attendance was abysmal, and the district lost money. The details have been posted here.
September: On September 13 Bob decided to take over Giacomo’s old position atop the back of the couch in the living room. On the next evening he lost his balance (something that Giacomo had never done in eighteen years) and tumbled off the back. He was in a panic and tried unsuccessfully to climb up the drapes to regain his perch.
On the following evening Bob had clambered back into Giacomo’s old spot. When I seated myself in my chair a few feet away, he obviously wanted to come join me, but he was evidently afraid to land on the pillows that were arrayed on the couch’s cushions. I moved them out of his way. He then descended to the sitting level and, after executing calculations in his walnut-sized brain, made the “mighty leap” to the armrest of my chair. He sat peacefully on my lap for a few minutes. Then he got nervous, peed on me, descended frantically to the floor, and did his “breakdance.” Much more has been written here about the misadventures of this very strange feline.
After sleeping comfortably for a month or more on beds in hotels and cruise ships, I judged that I needed a new mattress. The one that I had been sleeping on was more than thirty years old and was a little too short for me. Sue selected one for me as a late birthday present. It arrived on September 14. The delivery people set it up and took away the old one. Sue, of course, kept the obsolete pieces that held it off the floor. I found them leaning against the bookcase in the hallway. The new mattress was considerably better than the old one, but I still woke up with a backache more often than not.
On September 16 I talked with someone from the town of Enfield about the tax bill that I had received that day. It contained a significant interest charge because I did not pay the July installment. The simple reason for my delinquency was that I had never received a bill. It turned out that the mortgage holder, Peoples United Bank, had payed the portion due in January. The mortgage schedule indicated that five payments were remaining when the bank declared that it was fully paid. I was sent a notice of this, but I was never apprised of the bill from the town that the bank must have received. The lady with whom I talked refused to waive the interest charge. Since the bank that held the mortgage at the time that the bill was sent no longer existed, I did not have any recourse except to pay.
On the same day using my free MailChimp account, I sent an email that I had previously composed to try to improve the attendance of the players with less than 500 masterpoints at the upcoming sectional tournament in Orange.
The bookshelf fell onto the bed in 2023. The light is now attached to a screw in the wall.
On September 17 two items that I had ordered from Amazon were delivered. The first was a reading light that I would be able to clamp to the bookshelf above the new bed. The second was a book by Daryl Gregory entitled We are All Completely Fine. I liked this book much less than the one by Gregory that I had read on the cruise, The Spoonbenders.
Bob had mysteriously disappeared on September 16. He returned two days later and spent all day and night by the stove. Something was apparently wrong with him, but we were not too concerned. His behavior had always been eccentric.
Eric, Motoko Oinaga, John Debaggis, and I finish second out of ten in the Swiss event held at the HBC on September 18. We were the #8 seed. Eric and I bid and made slams on two of the last three hands to win the round by 24. We lost only to the winners—Lesley Meyers, Laurie Robbins, Felix, and Trevor.
Sue made an appointment at the vet for Bob on September 20. I heard him at some point after 4 a.m. on the 19th. At 5:45 I brought the litter box upstairs and shut the door to the basement, but when Sue woke up Bob was nowhere to be found. I opened the door to the basement. He came in about 9:30, and I shut the door to the basement again.
Before my bridge game on September 20 I placed Bob in the cat carrier, but at some point he somehow escaped. Sue was able to get him back in and took him to his 12:30 appointment. We found out that he had a tumor in his mouth or throat. There was not much hope for him, but the doctor gave Sue some medicine for him. Sue gave him the drops when I got back from bridge and could hold him. He needed them twice a day. I was so involved that I forgot about my Zoom meeting of the HBC Planning Committee.
We probably should have put Bob down when we heard about the tumor. He had always been Sue’s pet. She had to make the decision, and she could not do it.
On the last day of the month I sent a second email for the CBA.
October: On October 3 Sue started giving Bob antibiotics and steroids. He started eating a little better. Sue took him to the vet again on the 18th. He was still not eating much even though Sue was diligent about preparing meals that were both nutritious and easy to swallow.
Southbridge Hotel and Conference Center.
The October 19 Simsbury game was canceled. I drove Sally to Southbridge to check out the hotel that we would be using for the tournament in October, which was named the Spectacle Regional because the hotel was the administration building of the defunct American Optical Company. The ground floor was very modern, but the the playing area not very large. The restaurant, which was called Visions, was not open except for groups.
On the same day Sue’s cousin Robby Davis was found dead in his apartment.
On October 21 I had breakfast with Sue and Mark Davis. Mark was very involved in a gigantic project involving his ancestry. For some reason I have almost no interest in exploring mine. Someone from the Spokane branch of the Wavada sent my dad a lot of research that she had done. Sue got it from him and put it somewhere. I have never seen it.
On October 22 there was no game at the HBC. I went by myself to see Cherubini’s Medea at Cinemark at the Enfield Square. Sondra Radvanovsky gave an outstanding performance in an opera that had not been performed since Maria Callas played the title character. A carnival was set up in the mall parking lot.
On October 24 I drove to the mall for a walk. I forgot my little blue mp3 player, and I wore the wrong shoes. I had to drive back home and start over.. A girl in a red suit made of balloons and a small backpack was walking stiff-legged around the mall. I think that she was supposed to look like an astronaut.
November: The first week of the month was unseasonably warm. On the 7th it was 67 degrees at 5 a.m. and 80 as I drove through Hartford at 1 p.m. after playing with Nancy Calderbank for the first time in the mentorship program. She had asked me to teach her 2/1.
On November 8 I finished writing the Bulletin for Southbridge and sent it to Sally for printing.
In the mid-term elections the Republicans, as expected, won the House of Representatives, but the Democrats held onto the Senate after Senator Warnock won another runoff.
I received a bill from Somers Oil for $798.86!
The hilarious postscript to the Grand European Tour occurred on November 8, almost six months after I departed. Sue and I were in the living room when we heard the unmistakable sound of claws shredding paper. Sue rose from her chain, hurried into the kitchen, and yelled, “Bob, what have you gotten into now?” She snatched a paper bag from beneath his claws. When she looked inside she found the passport for which she had searched for several days back in early May. She should have just asked Bob where it was.
11/23 Sue and I spent Thanksgiving alone. I sent the following email to the Barkes and Steve Flamman:
I hope that you are all doing well.
I thought that you might be interested in this. Two weeks ago my wife Sue and I were watching TV in our living room in the evening when we heard the unmistakable sound of our cat Bob shredding something made of paper in the kitchen. Sue sprang from her chair to prevent further damage. She found that Bob had somehow discovered a small paper sack and had pulled it out onto the floor. Sue retrieved it from him and discovered her current and expired passports as well as a few other items that had been missing for over two years.
Incidentally, I included two photos of Sue unsuccessfully trying to negotiate a deal with Viking on the Day 0 page of my journal and one that she took of Bob on Day 12.
Today is Thanksgiving in the U.S. It is hard to find things to be thankful for lately, but I am definitely thankful for the friends that I made on the cruise in May.
I had more to be thankful for three days later. Michigan defeated Ohio State 45-23 at the Horseshoe in Columbus to win the eastern division of the Big 10 for the second year in a row. They did it without the Big 10’s best running back, Blake Corum. Donovan Edwards filled in for Corum very well. The Wolverines finished the regular season 12-0.
December: A week later the Wolverines beat Purdue in the Big 10 title game 43-21. They have qualified for the four-team College Football Playoff for the second year in a row.
December 8 was the tenth anniversary of our wedding ceremony. Sue and I are about as unhappy as we have ever been. Sue blames her health and various inanimate objects. I blame the house.
Curtis Barton, the president of D25, sent an email to members of the Executive Committee indicating that all senior employees of the ACBL had been fired. He then sent a correction that said that, according to Mark Aquino, who as Regional Director should know, “fired” is not the right word.
On December 9 Sue suddenly screamed, “I hate my life!” I was thinking that I hated our house, which was a pigsty. I also resented that almost whenever I needed something I must ask her where it was. Usually she did not know and said that she would look for it. In addition, we had so much junk everywhere that every time I that I went to get something I must remove four or five other items and then replace them in the right order. The refrigerator, for example, was always full to overflowing. THERE ARE ONLY TWO OF US!
However, as always, I said nothing because I did not want to trigger a tearful reaction or a panic attack.
December 12 brought the first snow of the season.
At 5 a.m. on the next day the weatherman on WTIC AM reported that it was 8 degrees in Granby and 19 in neighboring East Granby.
On December 17 I bought a rib roast. Sue forgot about Tyesha’s confirmation. Then she also bought a rib roast because she forgot her shopping list, and my phone was off because I forgot to turn it back on after bridge.5 I discovered that for weeks she had been leaving me voicemail messages that I did not know about. We have become two incompetent old farts.
On December 21 we had five tables at the SBC game. Sue and I arrived too late for the holiday party because Sue went to the store at 4:30 p.m. to buy the fruit that she had promised to bring. The players gave me $130.
On December 23 very strong winds uprooted the pine tree in the front yard. I heard a loud crashing sound at about 5 a.m. The tree fell straight towards our house, but there was no damage at all because the top section landed harmlessly on the patio between the old section of the house and Sue’s garage.
The high temperature the next day was only 19. I got a letter from ConnectiCare. The premium for my dental policy went down from $79 to $56.
We did nothing special on Christmas day. Sue may have watched It’s a Wonderful Life,6 but I didn’t.
Crystal Lake Construction, the company that cleared the snow from our driveway and sidewalks chopped up and removed most of the fallen tree. They came back later for the stump.
On the same day I received an email from Mark Aquino about the new training required for directors at sectionals, On the 27th I met with the HBC directors after the bridge game. Peter Marcus, who generally knew these things, had reported that the new rules applied only to events with masterpoint limits in excess of 500.
On the last day of the year Michigan lost to TCU 51-45. Early in the game J. J. McCarthy threw two interceptions that were returned for touchdowns. It was a wretched end to an awful year.
A week later TCU got clobbered by Georgia in the championship game. U-M would have done better, but they probably would have lost.
1. By the fall of 2023 a small spot had appeared on the front of the sweatshirt. It looked like a grease stain, but on closer inspection it was obvious that the exterior had worn thin. I could hide the blemish with ink from a Sharpie pen, but that was not a good permanent solution.
2. STaC stands for “sectional tournament at clubs”. These were games held at clubs that awarded more points, and the overalls included all of the participating clubs. Regular STaCs paid silver points. The points in Royal STaCs were evenly split between black, red, gold, and silver points.
3. “Resident Alien” was originally shown on the Syfy channel. Sue and I watched season 1 and season 2 on the streaming service called Peacock. At the time it was free on Cox cable. Eventually they wanted people to buy monthly subscriptions and restricted the free option so much as to make it worthless.
4. Apparently Peoples United Bank wanted our mortgage off of its books when it was taken over by M&T bank. The five mortgage payments that I saved by this action more than covered the cost of the July tax bill, but someone should have told me that that amount would be due.
5. I did not learn how to put the Samsung cellphone on “vibrate” until much later. It was easy to do but not a bit intuitive.
6. All year long Sue watched TCM during every waking (and many sleeping) moment.
