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.
Introduction to opera: It was a very important incident in my life, but I have only the sketchiest memories of the occasion. I am pretty sure that my viewing of the movie The Pad (and How to Use It)1 took place in the TV room in the basement of Allen Rumsey House. The movie was released to theaters on my eighteenth birthday in August of 1966. I am pretty sure that I watched it by myself on Bill Kennedy’s afternoon show. He showed only old movies, and so I am dating this entry as 1969, the year that Kennedy moved his show to channel 50, WKBD. However, it might have been a little earlier, when he was still on CKLW, the powerful station in Windsor, ON.
The movie was based on a play by Peter Shaffer called The Public Ear. In it a guy meets a woman at a symphonic concert ( Mozart’s 40th, as I recall) and invites her to his apartment for supper. I admit that I watched this movie because of the promotions that portrayed it as a sexy comedy. In reality there is no sex at all. Parts of the movie are definitely funny, but the ending is tragic.
This was as racy as it got.`
The guy (played by Brian Bedford), has mistakenly concluded that the woman (Julie Sommars) is an aficionado of “long hair” music. In his “pad”he shows her his sophisticated phonograph system and plays excerpts from Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer and the Humming Chorus from Pucini’s Madama Butterfly.
I was not familiar with either of these works. The Wagnerian selection did not do much for me (and still doesn’t), but I found the Humming Chorus really moving (and still do). The woman, on the other hand, was much more interested in the guy’s neighbor (James Farentino), who had volunteered to cook a romantic supper for them.
This viewing occasioned my purchase of a few vinyl record albums. In those days full operas came in boxed sets of three or more records, which made them pretty expensive. One-disk recordings of the highlights from operas were also available. I purchased one of those for Madama Butterfly, and I really enjoyed it. I also purchased a couple of “greatest hits” albums from famous opera singers such as Renata Tebaldi and John McCormack. I also found some collections dedicated to individual composers. The one that I liked the best contained Rossini’s overtures. I should emphasize that I bought almost all of these records after they had been heavily discounted. I seldom paid more than $2 apiece.
I also frequented the small library of recordings that was available in West Quad. I don’t remember finding anything there that I really liked, but it exposed my ears to some new composers.
I had little or no success in getting any of the other A-R residents to listen to these records. I am not sure that I even tried.
I had no phonograph when I was in training in the army. At my first permanent station, Sandia Base in Albuquerque, I was occasionally able to assemble and conduct a small group of air musicians to accompany my recording of the overture from Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. That was fun. In my final assignment at Seneca Army Depot I finally found a kindred spirit. That experience has been recorded here.
Live performances: Operas have always been expensive. For the first half of my working career my wife Sue and I could seldom afford to purchase opera tickets. After the company became more successful my attitude changed.
The first opera that I ever attended was Verdi’s Aida. In 1981 the Connecticut Opera Company (CO) staged an elaborate production at the home of the Hartford Whalers. I have written about this experience here.
I did not attend another opera until more than a decade later when we went to the Bushnell in Hartford to see a production by the same company of Bizet’s Carmen. Denise Bessette accompanied us. I was interested in the music, Sue wanted a night out, and Denise was hoping to be able to pick up some phrase of the dialogue in French. I do not remember much about the experience. I only recall that we arrived too late to attend the talk that preceded the performance. That put me in a very foul mood. I had purchased a CD of the opera that featured Agnes Baltsa. I was surprised that the performance in Hartford (like every other performance that I have heard or seen) used the recitatives that were added after Bizet’s death.
Willy Anthony Waters.
Sue and I also attended at least one performance before 1999, when Willy Anthony Waters took over as artistic director of the company. I remember watching a very bizarre version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. For some reason the stage director had women dressed in purple wandering around the stage in nearly every scene. They were supposed to represent Don G’s memories of his previous amorous conquest.
At some point in the early twenty-first century I purchased two season’s tickets to the CO. Each year thereafter I renewed the subscription, and each year my seats and the performances got better (in my opinion). In the last year we were in row F right in the middle. I would not have traded seats with anyone.
The CO put on several performances of three operas per year. I am pretty sure that I was able to attend each opera for the period during which I had season’s tickets. However, I can only remember the details of a few performances.
Jussi performed in Hartford! So did Luciano!
I remember a performance of Don Giovanni in which only one set was used. It consisted mostly of doors.
There must have been a production of Le Nozze di Figaro, but I remember no details.
I am quite sure that I watched a production of Die Zauberflöte by myself between two empty seats. That experience was depicted here.
I am sure that I saw Verdi’s La traviata performed in the traditional way with a soprano that I liked a lot. I don’t remember her name. During this show an Italian lady sat next to me. On the other side of her were family members or friends who had purchased the tickets with her in mind. She softly sang along to “Di provenza il mar, il suol”, but she did not seem to think much of the rest of the performance.
A year or two later the same soprano starred in a production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. I remember that the program made the strange claim that the only reason to stage this opera was to showcase a new soprano.
We definitely saw Richard Strauss’s Salome. It had more dancing than singing and was very short.
There was definitely a production of Verdi’s Rigoletto that starred a Black baritone who appeared in several other shows.
He was the star of the (rare) presentation of Puccini’s one-act opera, Il tabarro. It was coupled with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci in which he played Tonio.
I have never been that enamored with Puccini’s Tosca. The one that was performed in Hartford had a very unimpressive climax. It was promoted by Mintz and Hoke, the one agency in the Hartford area that never agreed to talk with us.
I am pretty sure that one year Pagliacci was paired with its usual partner, Mascagni’s Cavelleria Rusticana.
I distinctly remember seeing Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel. I did not like it much.
We certainly saw a production of Puccini’s La bohème. I also remember seeing photos in the lobby of previous productions. Both Jussi Björling and Luciano Pavarotti starred in this opera in Hartford.
Presenting Richard Strauss’s Salome, a short opera with no memorable arias, was a strange choice. The big attractions were the dance of the seven veils and John the Baptist’s head on a silver platter.
I vaguely remember a production of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia.
One of the last operas that we saw was definitely the best, or at least the most surprisingly good. I went to see Rossini’s La cenerentola with low expectations, but I left with a real appreciation for what this company was able to do before its sudden demise.
The last season for the CO was 2008-2009. I attended the presentation of Don Giovanni in the fall of 2008. The attendance in Hartford was pretty good, but evidently the one performance in New Haven bombed. In February of 2009 the company abruptly shut down without refunding tickets already purchased. However, I had paid for three sets of two tickets using American Express, which refunded me the total cost of the tickets, including the portion for the one that we had attended.
I was shocked and very sad to hear about the OC’s demise. I enjoyed every aspect of attending operas at the Bushnell. By this time I was more than just appreciative of opera. Although the list of composers whom I did not like was fairly long, I really could hardly tolerate other forms of music. They seemed trivial by comparison.
In August Sue and I would sometimes drive to Cooperstown, NY, stay overnight at a horrendously overpriced hotel, and attend one or two performances in the beautiful Alice Bush Opera Theater. The theater was a very nice place to watch a show, but it had a tin roof. Those inside could really hear it when it started to rain. It also lacked air conditioning, but it was never intolerably hot.
I remember watching Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Jenůfa by Leoš Janáček, and Verdi’s attempt at comedy. Il regno di un giorno, There were probably others. I think that the last performance that we saw was Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man, which starred baritone Dwayne Croft, whom I had heard many times on broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera. His performance did not make anyone forget Robert Preston.
Sue and I also went to a couple of performances by traveling companies. We saw Carmen performed twice by foreign companies, once in Storrs and once (I think) in Amherst. We also attended a low-budget version of Figaro in Springfield, MA. After I had seen these “war horses” several times I no longer went out of my way to see them.
Sue and I also attended a couple of operas when we were on trips in Europe. We saw Donizetti’s Don Pasquale in Rome as described here on p. 65. We also got to see an entertaining version of Figaro in Prague, as is described here. You can also read here about my adventure in Vienna that was capped off by a performance of the same opera.
Sue and I attended two operas in Pittsfield, MA, La bohème and Figaro. Both included a world class diva, Maureen O’Flynn, and both were extremely professional and entertaining. They were shown in and old-time movie house in downtown Pittsfield. Unfortunately the Berkshire Opera went out of business shortly thereafter.
In 2001 Denise Bessette and I witnessed a performance of Il trovatore in San Diego. That experience has been documented here. In 2006 Sue and I also spent a week in San Diego. On one evening we attended a performance of Carmen in the same theater. I also wrote about that vacation and posted it here.
I attended one opera on a business trip. It was in 2008, and the the client was Lord & Taylor. I walked from the hotel in which I was staying in Manhattan to Lincoln Center to watch a performance of La traviata by the Metropolitan Opera. That aspect of my relationship with L&T has been posted here.
Class: A guy named Mike Cascia2 gave presentations at the Enfield Public Library the week before the Live in HD performances shown at the local Cinemark. I attended a few of these. He also taught classes in opera for the continuing education program conducted by the Enfield public schools. I never enrolled in any of them because they conflicted with the Italian classes that I attended
Mike had a very impressive set of recordings. He played quite a few selections from each of the operas that he covered. However, his presentations did not, at least in the classes that I attended, provide a great deal of insight.
I also saw Mike at the Cinemark at Enfield Square mall a few times. He always sat in the first row behind the horizontal aisle, and so I was four or five rows behind him.
Recordings: In the early nineties I purchased a Sony Walkman so that I could listen to tapes while I was jogging. My cars for that period, the Saturn and my first Honda, also had cassette players. I discovered that Circuit City had a large selection of inexpensive cassette tapes of classical music. I bought a fairly large number of them, mostly just to find out what I liked. They were discarded long ago. I remember that I had samplings of many composers, including opera composers. I also somehow obtained a recording of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
I also bought from The Teaching Company3.several sets of opera courses conducted by Robert Greenberg4. The details are explained below. I really enjoyed listening to these courses, which covered in some detail a few operas and the backgrounds of the composers. The most astounding thing that I learned was that Tchaikovsky was coerced into committing suicide so that his sexual orientation was never made public.
I bought several CDs as well, including the following full-length operas:
Georges Bizet opera: Carmen with Agnes Baltsa and José Carreras. I once listened to this recording, which has dialogue rather than recitative, a lot. That, however, was before I discovered the recording on YouTube in which Maria Callas sings Carmen.
Sutherland and Pavarotti.
Donizetti opera: Pavarotti and Sutherland are wonderful in Lucia di Lammermoor. The quality of the YouTube recording is inferior, but the performances by Callas and Giuseppe di Stefano are the stuff of legend.
Four Mozart Operas:
Figaro conducted by Sir Georg Solti with Sam Ramey (from Wichita, KS) in the title role. This was one of the greatest opera recordings ever. The cast included Kiri Te Kanawa, Lucia Popp, Frederica Von Stade, and Thomas Allen. It also included the arias in the last act by Marcellina and Don Basilio that were almost always left out of live productions. I remembered listened to this recording as I was hiking by myself in the Dolemites in 2003, as described on page 18 of this posting.
Don Giovanni conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini featuring Eberhardt Wachter, Joan Sutherland, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and Giuseppe Taddei. I have listened to and watched a large number of performances of this opera, and none measured up to this one.
Die Zauberflöte conducted by Sir Neville Marriner. Ramey and Te Kanawa also perform in this recording.
Così fan tutte One of the three disks was in the portable CD player that I left at an airport. I was too cheap to replace something of which I already possessed 2/3 of the contents. Te Kanawa shines on this recording, too. I once heard her say that there was no room for error with Mozart. She said that she always strove to hit the middle of each note.
Three Puccini Operas:
La Bohème with Jussi Björling and Victoria de los Angeles. For some reason it is not in stereo, a fact that I did not realize until I played it.
Tosca with Renata Scotto and Plácido Domingo. I am not crazy about this opera, but you can’t beat this performance.
Turandot would have been Puccini’s best opera if he had finished it5. I never tired of listening to Pavarotti and Sutherland. Luciano never incorrectly answered any of the riddles. I often have stopped listening after Liu’s aria. The rest of the opera was written by Franco Alfano after Puccini’s death.
Two Rossini operas:
My copy of Il barbiere di Siviglia featured Domingo (a tenor) in the baritone role of Figaro. He handled it easily. Kathleen Battle is superb as Rosina.
Agnes Baltsa played the title character in my recording of L’italiana in Algeri. I bought this before attending a performance of it so that I would have some familiarity with it.
Three Verdi Operas:
You haven’t heard La traviata until you hear Pavarotti and Sutherland.
The version of Rigoletto that is in my collection features Domingo as the count. This is the only set that I have that did not come with a box and a booklet containing the libretto.
James Levine discouraged Domingo’s ambition to sing Otello for several years. I had a recording of their ultimate collaboration. Renata Scotto sang the Desdemona (which in Italian is pronounced dehz DAY mo nah) role.
Cav/Pag: I bought two recordings of the one-act operas that are often paired in performances, Cavalleria Rusticana by Pietro Mascagni and Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo. The one that features Callas and Di Stefano was recorded in the fifties. The technology for the other one, with Pavarotti and a pair of excellent female vocalists, is several decades newer. I prefer Pavarotti and Mirella Freni in Pagliacci, but Callas’s performance of Santuzza (which she never sang on stage) in Cavalleria is unforgettable. It ruined the opera for me whenever anyone else attempted it.
Singles: I purchased a dozen or so individual CDs. Most of them were collections of arias by various artists, including sets of Verdi arias by Callas by Andrea Bocelli. My best individual CD was probably the highlights from Aida with Leontyne Price and Domingo.
I downloaded some software that allowed me to make MP3 files out of all of my CD’s. I am not sure that I even had a CD player in 2024 when I wrote this entry.
Radio: From the eighties until the time that TSI closed in 2014 I worked at the office nearly every weekend. I often listened to two shows early in the afternoons, the Metropolitan Opera broadcast on Saturdays on WAMC from Albany6 and Sunday Afternoon at the Opera with Rob Meehan on WWUH, the radio station of the University of Hartford.
For many decades the Met broadcast its Saturday matinees live on public radio. The performances were mostly from the standard repertoire supplemented with a few new operas commissioned by the company. The singers and the production values were almost always first rate.
One of my favorite parts was the Opera Quiz that was held during intermissions. When I first started listening, my favorite participant was Fr. Owen Lee, who was an enthusiast of Wagner’s music, but not his politics.
Willy Anthony Waters from the Connecticut Opera often appeared on that program. I remember that he challenged listeners to name the character from La bohème who appeared in another Puccini opera. I never discovered the answer to this question, and it has bugged me for decades. La rondine and Manon Lescaut are also set in Paris, but I could not identify the two-timing character.
In order to enjoy the performances more I purchased a Bose Wave Radio, which remained in my office until TSI was shut down. I still had it in 2024, but I hardly ever used it in the last decade. For the most part streaming supplanted radio listening for me.
Rob Meehan in 1980.
During the months in which the Met was not transmitting, WAMC played recordings of operas from other famous opera houses, primarily San Francisco.
Meehan’s show was quite different. It featured his huge collection of opera recordings, some of which were very obscure. Occasionally I had to turn his show off because the music made my ears bleed.
Met Live in HD: In 2006 the Met began transmitting HD recordings of its matinees live to theaters around the world that were capable of showing them. This was a terrific way to allow people who did not live close to a company that staged operas to see and hear the very best presentations. The Met also showed encore presentations on the following Wednesdays, originally in the evening and currently in the afternoon. They also showed repeats of three or four previous operas during the summer months.
Here are some of the operas that I seem to remember seeing at the theater. I may have actually watched a few on my computer when I subscribed to Met Opera on Demand, as listed in a lower section.
Kristine Opolais filled in with only twenty-four hours of notice and gave a great performance as Mimi in La bohème.
I have watched at least two productions of Rigoletto. The first one was an update to the rat-pack days in Las Vegas. The one shown in 2022 was also modernized, but the most striking thing about it was that Gilda was portrayed by Rosa Feola as a mature woman. That part worked fine, but the problem with moving the opera away from Italy is that the “Maledizione!” declaration that links the first act with the last just doesn’t ring true at all.
James Levine’s conducting of Verdi’s Falstaff was the last of a trio of “great comedies” that he conducted in the teens. It featured Ambrogio Maestri in the title role. The Met’s HD presentations always feature live interviews with the performers. Maestri gave a cooking demonstration. Since he did not speak English, his wife translated. I did not enjoy this opera much at all, and I cannot imagine how Levine could think that it was better than Il barbiere di Sivigla or L’elisir d’amore or several other works.
I enjoyed the 2012 production of Verdi’s Otello featuring S. African tenor Johan Botha, whom I had never heard before, and Renée Fleming, who was, of course, perfect. Botha and tenor Falk Struckmann both had previously specialized in the works of Wagner. In an interview Struckmann said that he had great admiration for the abilities of Bel Canto tenors.
The new opera, Marnie, which was shown in 2018. It starred Isabel Leonard, whom I have enjoyed greatly in other operas. I did not however, think much of this one. Why the composer made an important character in a modern opera a countertenor escaped me.
The Exterminating Angel was supposed to be a nightmare, and it definitely was. It did feature the highest note, which sounded like a honk, ever sung on the Met’s stage.
I was surprised at how dark Jules Massenet’s opera, Werther, was. I watched it mainly to see Jonas Kaufmann, but I liked the music enough to watch several additional operas by Massenet.
I was not familiar with Francesco Cliea’s Adriana Lacouvreur until I saw the performance with Ana Netrebko and Anita Rachvelishvili. They both were good, but I was really impressed by Rachvelishvili.
I liked Massenet’s music in Cendrillon, and I especially appreciated Joyce DiDonato (of Prairie Village, KS!) as Cinderalla. I found the production, which I viewed in 2018, a little contrived.
The Met showed Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci together in 2015. I think that I must have seen the summer encore a few years later. I liked the updated Pagliacci, but CR did nothing for me. I kept comparing it with Callas’s rendition of the Santuzza role on my CD, and it came up very short. The entire story takes place in the piazza of a church in Sicily. I see no reason to stage it on the carousel. The dancing was an unwanted (by me at least) distraction.
I am quite sure that I saw the version of Hector Berlioz’s grand opera Les Troyens that was shown in Enfield in January of 2023. I remember that someone in the audience complained about Deborah Voigt’s performance as Cassandra. I thought that she was OK, but I had nothing for comparison. I recall that I was sure that Fr. Puricelli would have approved of Susan Graham as Dido.
I remember virtually nothing about watching Verdi’s Ernani in 2012 except that the man later known as Emperor Charles V was a central character.
Hvorostovsky also played the title role in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. I enjoyed Renée Fleming’s Tatiana much more. I absolutely hated the stark production. I had been spoiled by the wonderful YouTube video mentioned below.
I also watched Domingo in The Queen of Spades I found it depressing and tiresome. I had missed out on an opportunity to view a performance of this opera in Budapest in 2007. That misadventure has been described here.
I saw Faust, composed by Charles Gounod, in Enfield in 2011. I watched his Roméo et Juliette in Lowell, MA, in the middle of a bridge tournament. In both cases I was by myself. I did not really like either opera very much. Since those are the only operas of his that are ever performed, I have concluded that I do not like Gounod’s operas very much.
I might have watched Roberto Alagna’s performance in Samson et Delila on the computer, but I think that I saw the HD telecast in the theater in 2018. Alagna’s listed height was 5’8″, and his costar Elīna Garanča claimed to be 5’7″. She certainly appeared to be at least as tall as he was, and it was difficult to imagine Alagna tearing down the temple with his bare hands. Still, Camille Saint-Saëns’s music was enjoyable, and the performances by both leads were impressive.
I had purchased a record album of highlights of Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chenier in the sixties or seventies. I never saw that opera until I watched the Met on Demand version during the pandemic. In 2023 I went to the theater to watch Giordano’s less familiar Fedora with Sonya Yoncheva and Piotr Beczała. I enjoyed it immensely.
I had seen the same two stars (along with Domingo in a baritone role) in Verdi’s Luisa Miller in 2018. I had never heard even one aria from the opera before that occasion. I don’t know how I missed it. The Met’s performance was very good. The only thing that I found hard to take were the duets by the two basses.
Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow is an operetta, not an opera. I only watched it in a summer rerun of the 2015 performance because Fleming sang the title role. She was great, but the story was tiresome.
I decided to attend Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in 2014 primarily because I had heard that it was Fr. Owen’s favorite opera. It was also conducted by Levine as part of his trilogy of great comedies. The third reason was to hear Botha in an opera. I enjoyed it, which I cannot say about any other Wagnerian opera that I have seen or heard.
If the Met showed a Puccini opera, I went. In 2014. Sue and I saw Kristine Opolais fill in for the artist scheduled to play Mimi in La bohème on 24 hours notice. I liked her performance, and I really liked the staging by Franco Zefferelli. I appreciated that Opolais was thin enough to pass as a victim of consumption. I went back to see her in the puppet production of Madama Butterfly and a traditional Manon Lescaut. In the latter she kept taking her shoes off in every scene that included her costar, Roberto Alagna, who was reportedly the same height but appeared considerably shorter even in his lifts.
I don’t think that I ever got to see Zefferelli’s production of Tosca, but Sue and I did attend the presentation of La fanciulla del West in 2018 with Kaufmann and Eva-Maria Westbroek. We both enjoyed it immensely. I could easily understand why Puccini considered it his best opera. The Met’s production actually included a brawl in the saloon.
One of the very few modern operas that I really liked was Nixon in China by John Adams. I saw it in 2011 with James Maddalena in the title role. Parts of it, especially the parts that included Henry Kissinger, who was portrayed as a clownish figure.
I came late to Vincenzo Bellini’s operas. The first one that I saw on the screen was Norma, which the Met showed in 2017. It starred two of my all-time favorite performers, Sondra Radvanovsky and Joyce DiDonato. It was an amazing performance of beautiful music and a pretty good story. It caused me to search for performances of the other three famous Bellini operas.
When Sue and I went to Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier in 2017 there was a problem with the transmission or perhaps with the equipment. We got to see most of the part of the opera that I was most interested in, namely Fleming’s performance as the Marchelin. The theater gave each person in the audience a voucher that was sufficient to pay for another performance. We used them for a different opera. I later watched the entire performance of this one using Met on Demand.
Nobody thinks that Roberto Devereux is Donizetti’s best work. Met on Demand has no audio recordings of the work and only one video. I doubt that there will be another any time soon. Sondra Radvanovsky game such a memorable performance in 2016 that no one is likely to want to undertake the role for decades to come. For some reason her renditions of the other two queens that year, Anna Bolena and Maria Stuarda were not selected for Live in HD. I had to watch performances by others on Met on Demand.
I absolutely hated the production of Verdi’s La traviata that the Met staged in 2012. For some bizarre reason a big clock was in the middle of the stage and a bright red couch that was carried around. However, there was one saving grace, the absolutely brilliant performance by Natalie Dessay as Violetta. It caused me to seek out her other performances on Met on Demand and YouTube.
Levine’s 2014 version of Mozart’s Figaro was updated to the Roaring Twenties, and it worked marvelously. This was the third of his Levine’s comedic trilogy. The entire cast was good, but Marlis Petersen stole the show with her phenomenal interpretation of Susanna. I was so impressed that I made myself watch her in her famous role as the focal character in Lulu.
I saw the live version of Don Giovanni in 2023. The title character (and nearly everyone else) was a gun-toting gangster. I hated the production, but the singing was good.
The production of Massenet’s Manon that was screened in 2019 may have exceeded my expectations more than any other. Lisette Oropesa was absolutely outstanding in the title role, and the production was superb. I had seen her in several smaller roles before in Werther and Rigoletto, but she just knocked me out in this one.
I did not think that I would like the updated version of George Frideric Handel’s story of Nero’s mother, Agrippina. However, there were a lot of good reviews. I found the whole thing silly, and I must conclude that I just don’t like baroque opera.
I had low expectations for Akhnaten, by Philip Glass, as well. I am sorry, but I cannot stand listening to a countertenor for nearly three hours.
The latest version of Lucia was set in Detroit in the twentieth century. It did not work. The character of the priest is critically important in this opera, and it made no sense in a drug-infested Detroit neighborhood. The tattoos did not help. Javier Camarena nearly saved this disastrous production with Edgardo’s arias in the last act.
I hoped to see George Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess when it was show in 2020 just before the .pandemic hit A few years later it was shown as a summer encore, and I went. The singing was fine, but the story was embarrassing. If this was a great American opera, it says a lot about American opera.
It is doubtful that anyone will attempt to put on Luigi Cherubini’s Medea again in my lifetime. Nobody had attempted it since Maria Callas, and no one could hope to match Radvanovsky’s stunning portrayal in 2022. We can only hope that she finds a few more plum roles before retiring.
Verdi’s La forza del destino was once part of the Met’s standard repertoire. The Polish production that Sue and I drove to Buckland Hills in 2024 to watch attempted to update it to the twentieth century. Parts of this approach worked; parts of it did not. What really upset me was that important aspects of key arias were (presumably deliberately) mistranslated.7 However, it was still worth the cost of admission to listen to the fantastic singers, the orchestra, and, more than anything, the chorus. I always have hated Peter Gelb’s idea that current audiences cannot appreciate the historical background of the original story. It certainly requires a little education to enhance appreciation of the traditional presentations, but if it takes something like this to get some outstanding operas back on the stage I am for it. By the way, this production included the worst knife fight that has not yet appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
The Met used this shot from the worst scene in the opera to promote the telecast.
On April 24, 2024, I canceled my bridge game with Eric Vogel so that Sue and I could drive to Buckland Hills to see Puccini’s La rondine with Angel Blue and Jonathan Tetelman, who, according to Gelb, had to make his Met debut with allergy problems. I just love this opera, and they, the other principals, Emily Pogorelc and tenor Bekhzod Davronov, the orchestra, dancers, and chorus definitely did it justice. Tetelman will surely be an international star if he was not already. He has a fine voice, is a good actor, and is 6’4″. A tenor! The only cringy part was when Blue and Tetelman were obviously uncomfortable dancing in the second act. After the women of the dance troupe had been flung around on the stage, the timid swaying of the stars seemed out of place. I was also a little put off by the problems that Blue’s appearance created. The maid, who was certainly less than half her size borrowed her clothes, and Ruggero failed to recognize her after meeting her in a group where she certainly stood out for her size and complexion. On the other hand, Pogoreld and Davronov were delightful, and a special treat was the analysis of the score by conductor Speranza Scapucci during the intermission.
Video Recordings: I subscribed to the Met on Demand service before the pandemic. This allowed me to watch some of the large number of operas recorded by the Met while I was walking on the treadmill. I set my laptop up on top of a cabinet that Sue once used to hold shoes. I then started plugged in my earphones, started the opera and then turned on the treadmill. Here are some of them that I remember watching.
Pavarotti, a harpist, and Guleghina.
I definitely watched the 1996 rendition of Andrea Chénier that featured Luciano Pavarotti in the title role. It was perfect for his “park and bark” style of acting. I was also quite taken with Maria Guleghina’s performance. I had never heard of her.
I also enjoyed Guleghina’s performance in Verdi’s Nabucco, which I had never gotten around to seeing. I think that she was wearing the same wig that she used in Andrea Chénier. I wasn’t crazy about the opera in general.
I guess that I must have seen Bellini’s I puritani with superstar Anna Netrebko, but I don’t remember much about it. I have never thought much of Netrebko’s acting prowess. However, her performance in Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur was fairly impressive. She insisted that her interview be conducted before the day of the opera because, she said, she wanted to concentrate on her singing.
I liked the other Bellini opera a great deal more. La sonnambula starred my favorite soprano, Dessay, and the champion tenor of the Del Canto world, Juan Diego Flórez. The attempt to update the story to the twenty-first century did not work at all, but it was still better than nothing. The story depends upon the notion that an entire town would be unfamiliar with the concept of sleep-walking. This premise seemed even less valid in the updated version.
I also watched the same pair in a traditional rendition of Donizetti’s La fille du régiment with the same stars. Dessay was outstanding, and Flórez was given an encore to showcase his rendition of a string of high C’s.
Flórez was much less successful in the 2018 production of La traviata. He just did not seem right for the dramatic role of Alfredo.
I was surprised to discover that Teresa Stratas played Marie Antoinette in John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles. I did not recognize her. A young Fleming was also in this production, but Marilyn Horne stole the show as the exotic entertainer Samira.
As I mentioned above. I was able to view the rest of Der Rosenkavalier on my laptop.
I watched the Met’s 1979 production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Don’t ask me to explain it. I think that this was the show that made me a fan of Teresa Stratas.
Fleming made Antonín Dvořák’s Rusalka an enduring part of the Met’s repertoire. It did not exactly showcase her skills. She was mute during one entire act. I am pretty sure that I also watched the Opelais rendition of this opera, either at the cinema or at home.
Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice was very short. There was not a single break. I was familiar with the famous aria “Che faro senza Euridice?” from my recording of arias sung by Maria Callas. The star in the Met production, Stephanie Blythe, was a virtually unknown mezzo, who reminded no one of Callas. It was a big disappointment.
For some reason the Met decided to record Joyce DiDonato’s rendition of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda in 2013 rather than Radvanovsky’s in 2016. I like DiDonato a lot, but I would have liked to see what Radvanovsky did with the role. Likewise I wish that Radvanovsky’s portrayal of the title character in Anna Bolena had been recorded.
Marlis Petersen was fabulous as the central character in Alban Berg’s Lulu, but nothing would make me listen to another Berg opera.
Watching Natalie Dessay in Lucia was a big treat for me, even though it was that horrible production with the giant clock. She claimed in the interview that she had missed a note in the mad scene, but I doubt that anyone noticed.
She also starred in the 2003 production of Richard Strauss’s fantasy, Ariadne auf Naxos. I found it weird (twenty-foot tall women) but enjoyable. I probably would enjoy anything that she was in.
I thought that I might like Wagner’s Parsifal, if only because it starred Jonas Kaufman and René Pape. It also featured the so-called Lance of Longinus, which I was quite interested in. I was wrong. It was unbearably long and, in my opinion, just silly.
I did not think much of the 1989 telecast of Bluebeard’s Castle either. I have enjoyed other works of Béla Bartók, but I think that this one deserves its obscurity.
The Met has three videos of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera. I watched the film of the oldest one that starred Pavarotti. It used the Boston version in a production that I could barely tolerate. I did not realize until I researched this that the Swedish version was shown in 2012, and it included Radvanovsky. I have put it on my bucket list.
I was disappointed with Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. It had two things going for it. The doge actually wore that peculiar crown, and the female lead was Kiri Te Kanawa. The story, however, did not keep my interest.
A large number of video files of full-length operas have been uploaded to YouTube. I have watched quite a few of them. I have also used some software that I downloaded to make MP3 files out of dozens of operas. I have listened to them on a tiny MP3 player that I carry with me while walking as well as in my 2018 Honda, which can play MP3 files stored on flash drives.
Here are some of the YouTube videos that I could stand to watch from start to finish. In many cases I started and gave up on operas in which either the video quality was bad or the production was bad.
By far the best one that I watched was Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore performed in 2005 at the Vienna State Opera House. The stars were Rolando Villazón and Netrebko. She was OK, but he was unbelievably good. I often listen to his rendition of “Una furtiva lagrima“, for which he was allowed an encore. You can watch it here.
The second-best one was also fantastic. “Best Tosca Ever”, a film shot in 1976 featured virtuoso performances by Domingo, Raina Kabaivanska, and Sherril Milnes. The real star, however was the production. which was somehow shot in authentic locations—the church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle, Palazzo Farnese, and the roof of Castel Sant’Angelo. The video has been posted here.
Number 3 for me was the version of Eugene Onegin that was televised at the New Year’s Music Festival in 2014. This one does not have famous names as performers. In fact it has Russian singers for most roles and separate actors who were lip-synching. For me the most outstanding performances were Michel Sinéchal as Monsieur Triquet and the fantastic John Aldis Choir. The film lasts less than two hours, which meant that parts of the original score has been cut, but that did not bother me much. What was left told the story in a remarkably effective way, as you can witness here.
One of the comments written by a viewer of the Eugene Onegin film led me to discover Cherevichki, the comic fantasy written by Tchaikovsky about Christmas in the Ukraine. When I first sought a recording on YouTube, the only one available was a video of a concert performance. Later an audio recording of Russian singers was added. I have listened to it dozens of times while I was out walking. The tenor is exceptionally good. I later discovered the existence of an obscure DVD of a performance of Cherevichki at Covent Garden. The singers on the DVD are not as good as the ones on that album, but the finale is great.
I am sure that I watched one of the recordings of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, but I don’t remember much about it. I think that it might have been the BBC telecast.
I really enjoyed Ramey in the 1987 production of Don Giovanni that can be watched here. It is the only one that I have seen or heard that measures up to the one on my CD.
I also enjoyed watching Te Kanawa at the Glyndenbourne Festival production of 1973. Dame Kiri herself posted it here so that you could see it.
I am almost positive that I saw a British film of Verdi’s Macbeth on YouTube that starred a black woman as Lady Macbeth. When I researched this entry I could not find it. It was striking, but I did not enjoy the music much, and the filming was very grainy.
Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio did nothing for me. The plot seemed preposterous to me, and none of the music was memorable. At the Met’s previous home Beethoven was one of the few opera composers memorialized in an exhibit. In retrospect this seemed ridiculous. He only wrote one opera, and it was seldom performed.
Puccini’s La rondine has become one of my favorite operas. At first there was only one video with English subtitles. It was posted by a Russian woman who starred in it. Her Italian pronunciation was horrible. She even got her lover’s name wrong. The second version that I saw got the ending wrong! They had Magda walking into the sea. I wanted to watch the Angela Gheorghiu version, but the captions were in Japanese. I did find a wonderful recording of the entire opera that featured Anna Moffo and Daniele Barioni. You can listen to it here.
I was disappointed with the production of Massenet’s Le Cid with Domingo. I can understand why it is not part of the standard repertoire. I dimly remember the movie with Charlton Heston. At the time I had no idea of the historical context.
Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor is not often performed. When it is, the part that everyone is interested in is the ballet known as The Polovtsian Dances. The performance at the Bolshoi Theater that was posted to YouTube (here) is the only ballet that I have ever seen that I considered worth watching.
My fondness for Natalie Dessay was put to the test by the version of Jacques Offenbach’s insufferable Les contes d’Hoffmann. I skipped to Dessay’s section and quit when it was completed.
My recording of arias sung by Maria Callas included one from Gluck’s opera Alceste. I forced myself to watch a production on YouTube. I did not like it at all.
Tom Rollins was voted the greatest intercollegiate debater of the seventies
Recorded Lectures: The Teaching Company was founded by a great debater named Tom Rollins. I watched him in an elimination round one. It was something to behold.
His company contracted with academics from around the world to produce recordings of series of lectures about specific topics. The professor that he signed up to explain the world of symphonic and operatic works was Robert Greenberg. Each course came in several book-sized boxes that contained a number of magnetic tapes8 and booklets that were less than transcripts but more than outlines. The format provided a good way to learn, at least for me. The prices were very high, but the company often had sales. I paid between $20 and $30 for each course. I found four of these courses on the shelves in the basement.
The first course that I purchased were How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. Its forty-eight (!) lectures were organized chronologically. So, it was essentially a history of western concert music. A list of the titles of the lectures can be found here. Greenberg included musical samples of many of the periods. I don’t remember much of this but I do recall that the sonata-allegro form and explained that it was derived from the structures of three- and four-act operas. He also presented a great deal of historical information about various composers. The most striking story was the dastardly tale of how Tchaikovsky’s contemporaries coerced him into committing suicide rather than reveal his sexual orientation to the public. The other amazing revelation concerned how productive Mozart’s career was even though he died at the age of 35. Greenberg said that the best way to think of it was that Mozart was twenty years old when he was born, and he was therefore a productive composer from the age of twenty-five through his death at fifty-five.
Concert Masterworks contained less history and more details of compositions. Included were piano concertos from Mozart and Beethoven. A major part of the differences between the two styles was accounted for by the presence of much better pianos after Mozart’s death. There were several lectures on Dvořák’s ninth symphony, which I really liked. I preferred Beethoven’s violin concerto to Johannes Brahms’. In fact, I don’t think that the work of Brahms has held up at all. The last two composers were Felix Mendelssohn, a child prodigy who seemed to burn out in middle age, and Franz Liszt, who was a genuine rock star.
My favorite course was How to Listen to and Understand Opera, a subject that had haunted me since my college days. I learned in this course that the ancient Greeks apparently had what we would consider as opera, but the technique of combining music with plays was lost for centuries. A small group of men in Florence (including Galileo’s father) in the early Renaissance resolved to bring it back. Claudio Monteverdi’s9 L’Orfeo was still being performed in 2024. I learned about recitative (or recitativo in Italian)10, which refers dialogue that was sung at a conversational pace. Greenberg contrasted Mozart’s ponderous opera seria, Idomeneo, with his comic masterpiece, Figaro. He also played and discussed Il barbiere di Siviglia, Otello, Carmen, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Salome, and Tosca.
The twenty-four lectures of The Operas of Mozart inspired me greatly. They brought the young genius to life in my mind and also explored the details of Cosìfan tutte, Figaro, and Don Giovanni. I was quite surprised to learn about the Masonic elements of Die Zauberflöte, which technically was a singspiel, not an opera. It contained a great deal of dialogue.
Robert Greenberg
During the pandemic I purchased one more course, Understanding the Fundamentals of Music. These lectures, which catalogued the various elements of musical composition came on CD’s. Although Greenberg considered them his most satisfying set of lectures, they did not enhance my appreciation much. For example, I still could not recognize key changes.
Books: I found six books about opera on the shelves in my office. Several of them were gifts from people who knew that I liked opera.
The one that I have consulted the most is John W. Freeman’s Stories of the Great Operas. It has short histories and synopses of 150 operas that have been performed the most often. My only objection is that it included the laughable Boston version of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera.
Johanna Fiedler’s Molto Agitato was an entertaining read. It included a lot of gossip about Kathleen Battle’s off-stage shenanigans.
Jacques Chailley’s The Magic Flue Explained provided a lot of details about the Masonic influences in Mozart’s masterpiece.
Italian for the Opera by Robert Stuart Thomson was something of a disappointment. It explained a few things that had puzzled me, but it hardly helped me to listen more attentively at all.
The A to Z of Opera has synopses and short histories of hundreds of operas, many quite obscure. I had forgotten that this book came with a CD set that I had not played for decades.
I likewise had no recollection whatever of a short book called Quotable Opera. It was a collection of quotes by and/or about people involved in opera. I must have gotten to page 48 at some point. That is where I found a bookmark. My favorite quotes were both about Wagner. Mark Twain quoted Bill Nye, the humorist from Wyoming, as saying, “I have been told Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” Rossini opined that, “Wagner has some beautiful moments but terrible quarter-hours”
Miscellany: I discovered while doing this entry that Google capitalizes every major word in German and English operas. However, it only capitalizes proper nouns in Italian and French operas. I never discovered the reason for this discrimination, but I followed the same rules in this entry.
I did not mention in the YouTube section the recording that I listen to the most. It has fifty arias performed by Maria Callas.
1. The movie has apparently disappeared. As far as I can tell, the two images displayed here are the only traces of it on the Internet. I have found no recordings in any format. Its IMDB site is here. Presumably if recordings are located, they will be listed there.
2. Mike Cascia died in June of 2020. His LinkeIn page says that he worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston until 2008. His obituary, which detailed his efforts to promote opera, has been posted here.
3. The Teaching Company was founded by Tom Rollins, whom I knew of as a legendary debater. I only got to see him in action once, but It was an awesome experience. He was extraordinarily talented. He later was chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Relations. The company was sold in 2006 and now operates as Wondrium and The Great Courses. Tom’s LinkedIn page can be found here.
4. For several years Robert Greenberg had an arrangement with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. He supplied the lecture; the orchestral provided the music. Sue and I attendedseveral of these performances. His webpage is here.
5. Puccini could not think of an ending to the story that work. I think that I could write a good one, but it would require rewriting at least one of the trios by Ping, Pang, and Pong. It would also require staging a murder by an arrow that appeared to be shot from a bow. That could be done, right?
6. Because of its powerful transmitter located on Mt. Greylock in the Berkshires, the reception of WAMC in Rockville, Enfield, and East Windsor was much better than that of WNPR, the local public radio affiliate.
7. In Don Alvaro’s primary aria, in which he provides the motivation for his character, he says the following (in Italian):
My father wished to shatter the foreign yoke on his native land, and by uniting himself with the last of the Incas, thought to assume the crown. The attempt was in vain! I was born in prison, educated in the desert; I live only because my royal birth is known to none! My parents dreamed of a throne; the axe awakened them!
I could not locate a transcript of what was in the captioning at this performance. It certainly was nothing like the above. For me the acid test of a novel production is whether its captioning needs to lie about what the characters were actually singing. Incidentally, the word “last” in the third line is feminine Italian (“ultima”). So, in the original version Don Alvaro’s father married the last surviving Inca woman. So, the “forza del destino” driving Alvaro. The forces driving Carlo are family pride, racism, and Church-sanctioned colonialism. This version muddles all of this in favor of blaming everything on war.
8. During the period in which this transpired I had a Walkman and a cassette player in the Saturn and my first Honda.
9. Monteverdi in Italian means “green mountain”. Greenberg in German means the same thing.
10. Greenberg used the Italian term “recitativo”, but he pronounced the “c” like an “s”, as it would be pronounced in French. He mispronounced numerous other Italian words.
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.
By the beginning of September of 2023 I had become quite frustrated about the time that I had been wasting because my Lenovo desktop computer, on which I had keyed in the great bulk of the entries in the 1948 Project (introduced here), was intolerably slow. The biggest problem was that the system would quite often lock up for as long as ten or fifteen minutes. During these periods the disk light was on continuously. I had tried to determine the cause by examining the output available in Windows’ Task Manager, but I had no luck. I had also asked the Greek Squad to look into it. The agent signed on to my system, deleted a lot of temporary files. That seemed to help for a day or two. However, it reverted to its previous behavior shortly thereafter.
Another problem was its connection with the Cox modem/router. The connection would be lost for no apparent reason, and it was often difficult to recover. A few years earlier I attached a modem that I had previously purchased to a USB port. That did not seem to help much
So, in desperation I decided to purchase a new box. I did some research on the Internet. The new systems seemed to have much faster processors than my Lenovo desktop. The hard drives were in most cases a little smaller, but that did not concern me much. The amount used on the Lenovo was far less than the capacity of any of the available machines.
I had had pretty good experiences during my last two computer difficulties (outlined here) with the Geek Squad people at the Best Buy store in Manchester, CT, which was about a thirty-minute drive from my house. I therefore decided to buy one there.
I cashed in the points on my Bank of America Mastercard for a Best Buy gift card in excess of $300. The units at Best Buy started at about $600 unless I was willing to settle for an obsolete model that ran Windows 10 or an “open box.” I decided to put a new system on order shortly after I received the gift card in the mail.
Unless I did not mind making several trips to the store, I figured that the easiest way was to order it online and pick it up at the store. Before I did so I had an electronic chat with one of Best Buys sales agents. I told him which model (an Asus) I was interested in, but I also expressed my concern about the difficulty of migrating the programs that I used. I specifically emphasized that the one that I was most worried about was Outlook, Microsoft’s email product. The agent assured me that the Geek Squad people at the store could help me with that. That convinced me to put the system on order. It was scheduled to be at the store on Friday, September 21. I actually received an email that it had arrived a day early. I had a big project to work on over the next few days, and so I planned on picking it up on Monday.
I had a long and strange electronic chat with agents from Best Buy on Friday. When I explained my concern about Outlook I was transferred to a different agent who allegedly specialized in this. A little later I was transferred again. This agent assured me that the Geek Squad would do the entire migration for me and made an appointment for me for 3:20 in the afternoon on Monday.
I left for Best Buy at 2:30 on Monday and arrived at 3. I had no trouble obtaining the new computer. I had brought with me a bag that contained the Lenovo that I had been using as well as a very old external hard drive for which I had lost the power cord. I intended to ask the Geek Squad people after they had migrated the programs and data if there was any way extract the files that were on the external drive onto something usable.
The Geek Squad guy was very friendly, but he said that they only did data, not programs. This was very upsetting to me. The only reason that I had purchased the machine from Best Buy was for the help that I expected to receive. Migrating the data was no challenge if you had a large external hard drive, and I did. I was so upset about the lies (or maybe misunderstandings) that I left Best Buy without remembering to ask about the hard drive. As I drove out of the parking lot I was so concerned about what should be my next step in making the system in my trunk operational that I almost ran a red light and caused a serious accident. The rest of the drive home was uneventful.
Plan Z: In my research I had come across a company name Zinstall (website here) that markets a downloadable program called WinWin that the website claimed was able to transfer all of one’s programs and files from any Windows computer to a new Windows 11 computer. It cost $129 plus tax.
On the evening of Wednesday September 272 I started an electronic chat with someone named Paul from Zinstall. He assured me that they installed software, called WinWin, that could transfer all the programs, but it was possible that Microsoft would demand proof of ownership in the form of a serial number or program key. A little more research convinced me that this was quite unlikely. Besides, I could not see an alternative. So, I purchased the software. I received the following email:
Thank you for choosing Zinstall.
A. DOWNLOAD LINKS 1. CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK to download the SOFTWARE: (link) 2. You should download and run the software on BOTH computers: OLD and NEW. 3. IMPORTANT: before taking any further steps, you should carefully read the USER GUIDE. CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK to download the user guide: (link)
B. ACTIVATION INFORMATION: Below is your Zinstall license activation key serial number. You will need to supply this information when prompted by the software. Serial number: WNPV-XXRR-BJDK-VJK6-USOP-I2XP-LGXO-6UEV-74 Registered email: Mike@Wavada.org
C. SUPPORT AND SERVICE We are glad to assist you with your transfer. 1. SUPPORT QUESTIONS & TROUBLESHOOTING: For any support questions or assistance, CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK: (link) where you will find answers and solutions for your questions, as well as options to contact the Support Team. 2. If you require TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE, please submit the “Support Case Form” and run the Diagnostic Tool on both computers (old and new). Both the Form and the Diagnostic tool are available at the link above.
D. FULL SERVICE – REMOTE ASSISTANCE: IF you prefer the convenience of having an expert tech perform the whole transfer for you, you have the option of a Full Remote Service add-on. It is available here at a discounted “bundle” price: (link).
E. BEST PRACTICES: HOW TO PERFORM A MIGRATION? Before starting the migration process: 1. Make sure you have a backup of your computers. 2. Save all open files and close all running applications. 3. Completely uninstall all Internet Security Suites, Firewalls, and Antivirus on both computers – OLD and NEW. 4. You don’t need to purchase any special cables or external hardware to do the transfer. If your computers are connected to a home network, you don’t need to do anything – Zinstall will use the network for the transfer. Otherwise, you can just use a regular network (aka Ethernet) cable – you probably already have one – to connect the computers directly. Here is what it looks like: (link). 5. While wireless is usable as well, if you have an option to use Ethernet – use it. Wireless is inherently slower, and may be interrupted by network disconnects. 6. The migration process requires “Administrator” user privileges.
IMPORTANT: The transfer may continue for a very long time – DO NOT INTERRUPT the process, even if it seems that nothing is happening for a while. REMEMBER: Once started, the migration process is completed unattended – you are not required to stay near the computers, and may leave it for the night to complete.
One thing that had not previously been clear was that I needed to connect the two computers via an Ethernet cable if they were not already on a network. I thought that it would be sufficient that both used wi-fi. I had been planning on sending the data through the modem/router from Cox Cable.
I asked Sue if she knew if we had an Ethernet cable. She said that she had at one time put all of the miscellaneous cables in a big plastic tub. I naturally asked where it was. She said that she didn’t remember. I was not surprised. I made a mental note to drive to Target on Thursday morning to purchase one. Target’s website offered a seven-foot cable for $10, and they seemed to be in stock..
In one of my dreams that night, however, I had a revelation that there might be one in the north end of our basement near the AS/400 that I brought home in the summer of 2014 after we closed TSI’s office in East Windsor.
When I awakened in the morning I hastened downstairs and discovered that there were indeed two Ethernet cables in a snake’s nest of cables near the computer. I wrested one away and without too much difficulty I was able to connect the two black boxes on my desk. When the yellow lights appeared in the sockets for both, I rejoiced. I had saved $10!
The migration: The instructions sited above were thorough and instructive. As someone who wrote such instructions for users of his code for thirty-five years, I have one quibble. Users expect the written instructions to be in the order in which they are to be executed. In this document some of the most important pieces of information are near the end. I admit that I never read sections B, D, and E until I started writing this account on Friday.
I downloaded the WinWin software to my old system, Lenovo. I found the executable file in the Download folder and ran it. According to the instructions I should have run it as administrator, but I didn’t. The program churned for a few minutes and then asked me whether this was the old computer or the new one. After I selected “old” it told me to do the same thing on my new computer Asus.
I had planned to use the same display on both computers.3 So, at this point I needed to detach it from Lenovo and insert it into Asus. This turned out to be a much bigger pain than I thought that it would be. In the first place the lighting in that area of the office was not good.4 The head of the cable was held in place by two screws. No screw driver was needed, but it took longer than I remembered to screw and unscrew them with my fingers.
After I attached the display I turned on Asus for the first time. It came up rather quickly. Among other things it asked for a PIN. I used the same one that Sue and I use for the garage door opener. It invited me to take a tour of Windows 11, but I postponed that adventure until some undisclosed point in the future.
Instead I selected the Edge icon on the desktop, downloaded the WinWin executable again, found it in the Download folder, and ran it. The same window came up, and, when asked, I said that this was the new computer. The program then searched for the old computer. This was the moment of truth, or I should probably call it the first moment of truth.
It was not to be. The screen displayed a sad message (#324) that indicated that it could not find the old computer. The likely cause, it said, was either that the two boxes were not connected or that security software on one of the boxes was preventing the connection.
I checked the back of both computers. The Ethernet cables seemed to be securely attached. I then uncabled the display from Asus and reattached it to Lenovo. By coincidence almost as soon as I could see the display again a window appeared for the Webroot program that the Geek Squad had installed. It had options to end three types of security. I did so. Consequences be damned.
I then sent to the support team at Zinstall an email explaining the situation and identifying the error message number. I received two identical “high importance”messages one minute apart: “Hello Michael Wavada, This is an acknowledgment we have received your email. We will contact you soon. Best regards, Zinstall support team”
I would have preferred something more specific than the word “soon”, even if it was “within the next 24 hours”. I felt that Zinstall recognized the urgency of the problem, and I could expect an email with specific instructions within the next five minutes, or five hours, or maybe five days. I stayed at Lenovo’s keyboard4 and won game after game of two-suited Spider Solitaire while intermittently checking the Inbox in Outlook. At about noon I fixed myself a ham sandwich and ate it in front of my desk while I kept my eye on the Inbox.
I almost always took a nap after lunch. Mine on that day was a rather short one, and I rushed back to check the Inbox as soon as I was awake. No dice.
At 1:47PM I sent a short missive to Zinstall support: “How long is soon? It has now been over four hours.” Nearly an hour later I was about to send another email when this showed up in the Inbox. It was signed by Sam R.
Thank you for contacting us.
You have Webroot still active on the old computer.
Please disable Webroot firewall on the old computer (or simply remove Webroot from the old computer), and run Zinstall again on both.
Please let us know how we can assist further!
I replied as soon as I could: “I believe that I disabled it before running Zinstall. I tried to delete the folder named Webroot, and it said that I need permission from SYSTEM to do so. I do not know how to do that. Actually I seem to have two copies of Webroot. One in Program Files, and one in Program Files x(86). The Geek Squad installed them.”
Sam R. must have been horrified about what I had attempted. He wrote back rather quickly.:
You should not delete folders directly; instead, you can typically right click on the Webroot icon in system tray (bottom right corner, near the clock) and select “Shut down” or “Exit”.
Or, to uninstall it, go to the list of installed programs and select Webroot there.
Alternatively, if you cannot get rid of Webroot, another alternative is to use Zinstall with a USB external drive instead of network.
Do you happen to have a USB hard drive available?
I did have an external drive with a great deal of storage, and it was within two feet of my right hand. Nowhere in the emails or the online instructions booklet was there any mention of this option. Maybe that could be plan Z2 if we could not get past the security issue. In the process of disabling Webroot in the way that he described I noticed that the system clock was off by more than two hours. While I was in the same system tray I also found a Malware icon. There was no option to disable it. I select “Quit” instead. Both icons disappeared from the tray.
Uncertain whether Sam R. would still be working, at 5:04PM I sent the following message to describe what I had done since receiving his (her? their?) last email:
I tried this twice. On the first try I received the same message as before even though Webroot was not listed in the Apps. The second time I removed Webroot again (the system had rebooted on its own) and Malware Bytes from the Apps in the lower right corner. This time the program on the new box found the old box, but it warned that I was using a wireless connection that might be slow or fail. The lights for the Ethernet ports are on on both machines. Is there a way to verify the connection? I do not have a network (other than the Cox Cable modem/router). I just ran a cable between the machines.
Later I became convinced that Lenovo had not, in fact, rebooted on its own. I was pretty sure that the AC cable had been jostled loose while I was moving the display cable back and forth between the two boxes.
I decided to try it again, and I was cautiously optimistic. However, the email sent at 6PM told a different story: “It is now showing message #11. This is SO FRUSTRATING!” Message #11 said that my account had reached the limit on the number of tries. I did not receive an answer on Thursday.
I was poor company all evening. I was close to giving up on Zinstall, but I had no alternative at this point. I began to consider contacting American Express to tell them not to pay for the service. I went to bed at about 9PM, which was quite early for me.
On Friday morning I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Sam R. The time stamp was 4:14AM.
Thank you for the update, it’s great that the connection issue is solved now that Webroot is removed!
Regarding wireless, you do not have a huge amount of data on the old computer, so you can transfer via wireless as well.
As long as the wireless network is not abnormally slow, it will complete just as well.
Note also that you can use the old computer while the transfer is in progress, if needed – just press the Windows key on your keyboard to get to your apps / desktop.
Please let us know how we can assist further!
I asked him about error #11. He said that that had been cleared. I did not respond to his comment about being able to use the old computer. Once the process started, I intended to monitor it on the new computer. I had no intention of touching any of the cables once the migration was under way. He probably did not remember that I was switching the display from one machine to the other.
Before I ran the WinWin program on Lenovo I made certain that neither security program was in the system tray. When I moved the display’s cable, I was very careful not to jostle the AC cable on Lenovo. I then checked to see that both Ethernet lights were on.
At about 8:20 (I know because I always awaken Sue at 8:30) I initiated the WinWin program on Asus. This time it found Lenovo, and it did not present the warning message about using a wireless connection. It must have been using the Ethernet cable.
The process took about three hours. I used part of the time to go through the papers that had been accumulating on my desk for a few months. That was a worthwhile activity. I found a year-old credit from Costco for $1.48 and the paperwork for applying for a discount on the real estate tax levied by Enfield. I also found my hanging file for income tax for 2019. I had no idea why it was out of the filing cabinet.
I was very impressed with the window that displayed the various steps in which the program was engaged. It also showed two percentage bar graphs that indicated the portion of the step being executed and the total process that had been completed. At the bottom were statistics about things like the rate of data transfer and the size of the files that had been copied.
When it was finally finished, it congratulated me on a successful migration. I have seen many such messages before, but this was the first time that I really thought that we had accomplished something important together—I mean the program, the computers, the cabling, Sam R., and I.
I restarted the system as directed. It came back up rather quickly, and I entered the PIN. The desktop looked almost the same as it had before. The program tray was missing two icons. One was definitely for Spider Solitaire. I purchased a new copy for Asus, for $0, and it popped back up in the program tray. The other one might have been for a program that I had downloaded to convert YouTube videos to MP3 or MP4 files.
Outlook. etc.: It was time for the second moment of truth. With some trepidation I clicked on the blue Outlook icon. Microsoft somehow recognized me and asked me to key in the password associated with the account associated with my email address. I found it on my password list. Microsoft approved it and immediately installed updates to the software. I then needed to key in the passwords for my two email accounts. I got the Cox one on the first trick, but I made a mistake on the one for Wavada.org. Once I got it right all the emails that I had received from both accounts showed up after the next Send/Receive.
Everything seemed to be there, and I liked the new look and feel of the software.
Problems: After one day’s use I had encountered only three problems. As I mentioned, I had left one program open on Lenovo. It took me less than five minutes to bring the Asus version up to date. At one point while I was surfing in Firefox Windows11 interrupted and reported that it needed to restart. I had no choice but to let it. It came right back up, but I lost about an hour’s worth of work in WordPress. I don’t know why it had not been saved, but I will need to be more careful about updating these long blog entries more regularly.
The strangest problem was encountered using the editor of posts in WordPress in Firefox. Below is the screen for editing a blog entry in Chrome. This is also how it looked in Firefox on Windows 10:
Notice the blank area to the left of the text and the slide bar on the right that is now most of the way down the “Post” area on the right.
Contrast this with the same screen on Firefox.
The Firefox version shows a frame from the Dashboard on the left. The two slide bars are both so thin as to be effectively invisible to a septuagenarian. The one to the right of the text works correctly, but the one to the right of the Post column only raises and lowers the Dashboard on the far left, even though it is long enough to need a slide bar. Furthermore, it has no effect on the Post area. This makes it almost impossible to add more tags after a point.
I don’t know if this was a problem in Windows 11 or WordPress. I planned to install a new version of WordPress soon. I later learned that it was neither. The slide bars in Windows 11 were much smaller. Sometimes they were nearly invisible.
Performance: The new box is lightning fast, and so far it has never locked up.
1. The technical experts at law enforcement agencies on television often extract files from hard drives that survived plane crashes, arson, floods, and the like. Surely the agents of the internationally renowned Geek Squad had similar tools at their disposal.
2. I ordinarily played bridge on Wednesday evenings, but the game on 9/27 was canceled because only three pairs planned to intend.
3. Sue thought I might be able to use a gigantic display that she had squirreled away in the three-season porch. I was thoroughly skeptical even before I learned that it had no cable.
4. I did NOT need my cataracts removed. That will probably come some day, but not before my subsequent appointment with the retina specialist on October 18.
This entry, like the process that it describes, is absurdly long. In fact, it is much longer than it looks because it has links to a large number of documents that have more details. I don’t expect anyone to read this entry. I did it out of a combination of determination to leave nothing out and a sense of catharsis.
I really loved my job as webmaster for District 25 and all of the other functions that I had added (as described here). The only aspect of it that I found tiresome was the assembling of photos for the Winners Boards. I had decided unilaterally that I would no longer do that in 2020, but I was still enthusiastic about everything else that I did.
The pandemic struck New England in March of 2020. The game that I loved that involved card tables, chairs, playing cards, bidding boxes, human beings, and conversation vanished almost overnight. Some people enjoyed, or at least tolerated, playing on the Internet, but I did not like it at all. It did not seem like bridge to me.
At first I enjoyed my new life of leisure. As I described here, I started walking a lot, occasionally traversing as much as ten miles per day. I also read books much more frequently than I had previously, and I invented a method for the people who had played together in Simsbury to describe what they were doing in the new world of isolation. I discovered that a very large number of operas were available free on YouTube. I downloaded a free program, MP3Studio, to make mp3 files that I could download to my mp3 player. So, I could carry forty or fifty operas in my pocket.
In June of 2020 my schedule changed dramatically. I undertook the gargantuan 1948 Project that is described here. From that point on I sat in front of the computer for several hours per day writing and researching, and the more time that I spent on the project the larger that it grew.
Bob Bertoni.
In the summer of 2021 my friend and boss in District 25, Bob Bertoni, died after a long and debilitating illness. At that point almost all of the people with whom I had enjoyed working for so many years were no longer involved in the district’s leadership. Moreover, the ACBL had taken strong measures to promote online play as an alternative to real bridge. It seemed almost certain to me that the game that I knew was doomed.
The Hartford Bridge Club tentatively reopened in the summer of 2021, and Sally Kirtley and I figured out a way to schedule games of the Simsbury Bridge Club. However, no tournaments were held in New England except the poorly attended sectional in December sponsored by the Eastern Mass Bridge Association (EMBA). At the time I was a member of both the district’s Executive Committee and the Tournament Scheduling Committee. Both held occasional Zoom meetings. I wrote this about the decision-making:
I have been on the scheduling committee for a few years, but two crucial online meetings were held in the winter on Wednesday evening, the one time that I am committed to play at a very small club. Evidently a lot of decisions about the three tournaments in 2022 were made at those meetings or at the one in May, during which I was in Europe.
Sally and Helen
In the last quarter of 2021 I notified the Executive Committee that I intended to resign my positions tied to the webmaster job at the end of 2022. I modeled my decision on this with how Helen Pawlowski handled the termination of her long tenure as the district’s tournament manager. She had given a year’s notice that she was leaving. A committee was promptly formed, people applied for the job, Sally Kirtley was chosen, and Helen showed her the ropes at several tournaments.
After I resigned not much happened for several months. When I had started in 2013, absolutely nothing was documented in writing. By contrast, I had already produced on NEBridge.org about forty web pages that documented everything that I did in every area. Thereafter, I spent an enormous amount of time making sure that each of these pages was up to date. They can all be reached from here.
The oldest email that I could find about the subject of the transition was dated November 30, 2021. In It Curtis Barton, the president, asked me, “Do you have a candidate to replace you?”
The one thing that I did not want to do was to become an active participant in the search for my replacement(s). I thought that it was incumbent upon the people who would be running the district going forward to determine which of those functions was still important and to find people who were willing and able to perform them. I did not want to prejudice this effort with my own ideas.
I felt that I had done everything that I could to smooth the process. When I was chosen to be the webmaster, Bob Bertoni had assumed the responsibility of finding someone for the job, mostly because he was the only person who knew how the site worked, and there was no documentation whatsoever. In the intervening years had thoroughly documented how my various functions were performed.
So, on December 31 I sent the following reply with four attachments.
As promised, I have produced and attached documents that outline the duties of four functions that I currently perform: • Webmaster • Database Manager • Email Manager (MailChimp) • Bulletin Editor (printed, online, and Day 1).
Someone needs to decide on who, if anyone, should perform these functions in 2023 and following. The Database Manager and Email Manager are not official positions.
I am not sure if the Communications Committee still officially exists, but I formerly set the agenda for and presided over its meetings.
I also have been composing a high percentage of the emails used to promote tournaments. Whoever assumes that function in 2023 and following will need to work with the Database Manager on the selection criteria to be used and the Email Manager on the format to be used for text and images.
At some point Gary Peterson, who was a Tournament Director for the ACBL, expressed an interest in becoming the webmaster. He negotiated with Curtis about how he would be compensated for his efforts. I was not privy to those exchanges. My assumption was that he would be responsible only for maintaining the website. I suspect that Curtis expected him to do much more than that. It is also possible that Curtis only glanced at my write-up.
In April of 2022 I sent all the members of the Executive Committee an email that detailed open issues in areas that I was involved. I attached to this email a spreadsheet that served as the index to the documentation pages.
It has been a long time since I made a report, but I have been keeping a list of developments and issues.
Website: 1) I removed four items from the main menu in the left column that appears on every page of the site. Three of them I moved to the “Archive” tab: District Director Info, District Director Report, and Learn from the Experts. The other one was a link to the ACBL’s Partnership Desk, which the ACBL’s webmaster told me is no longer supported.
2) There are three issues. The Tournament Location option is a custom program that uses a list of the district’s tournaments to create a map. For a while it was broken, but Megahertz fixed it. I removed Cromwell and Sturbridge. I added Providence and Marlborough. I left Mansfield and Hyannis on, but added notes that they were canceled for 2022. This will need to be maintained (using the “Clubs” option in the admin section) when the 2023 schedule is set.
The second issue is the banner, which currently says “Exciting New Event Schedules for 0-2500 –Click Here for Tournaments”. It links the NEBridge.org calendar. I don’t know how to change it. Bob always did this. We should probably be highlighting Providence. After that, I don’t know.
The third issue involves reports from the Regional Director. The DD reports had their own custom option. Should I add the RD reports to this program (and bring it back from the Archive)? Should I create a new tab for RD reports? They are now emailed to members; posting them on the website is less critical than it was ten years ago.
3) The list of winners of NABC and NABC+ events has not been updated since 2019. The source of data was lists provided by the DD. I have not received any such lists since December 2019. What should the policy be for the future?
4) I have decided not to post Winners Boards (photos) for the 2022 tournaments. It is a lot of work, and I won’t be attending one of the three events. If someone else wants to take the photos of winners and solicit photos from the ones that were missed, I will post them. However, I don’t want to do this if the percentage of missing photos is high.
I also decided not to award the Best in Class prizes in 2022. With only three events, all in the eastern half of the district, it did not seem worthwhile to me.
5) Someone should check the conditions of contest on the website. I don’t think that the first five documents on the Conditions of Contest tab have been checked in a long time.
Database: 1) A decision should be made about whether the MySQL database, which I maintain on both my iPower account and my local server, will be used in 2023. If not, a suitable substitute to be used as the basis for emails should be found. The current database includes all ACBL members–active and inactive, living and dead–since 2014. It also contains pretty good records of who attended D25 and NABC tournaments since then. It also has a history of achievement of ranks of D25 members and points by month of everyone.
2) In the past I have received .LZH files from Keith Wells at the ACBL to use as the basis for the attendance (at tournaments) table. He did not respond to my last request. Does anyone know if he still works for the ACBL? If not, from whom could I get these files. I used the attendance tables both for targeted emails and for the attendance breakdowns after tournaments.
Email: I currently create the emails by using a text editor on my PC to write HTML statements. I then use the “Code your own” method to paste the code into MailChimp. As I was writing up the documentation for this process it occurred to me that it will probably be very difficult to find someone is who is both willing and able to do this. MailChimp has a lot of templates for emailing that would presumably be much easier to use, but I have never investigated them because I already knew how to make the emails look exactly as I wanted them to.
If templates are used exclusively, it will affect Sue Miguel’s emails. She sends me an email that looks the way she wants it. I extract the HTML from it and then post it using the “Code your own” method.
Bulletins: I was told that there will be neither a printed nor an online bulletin for the Gala. Eventually decisions should be made about the other two tournaments in 2022.
Documentation: I have documented almost everything that I do in “pages” on NEBridge.org. I have created a spreadsheet that serves as an index to these pages. I have attached a pdf of it to this document. I am confident that by later in the year it will be complete and as accurate as I can make it. I suspect that the person or persons who do these tasks will want to simplify the processes, but whatever process is used, it should be documented, and I think that the format that I chose is optimal, since anyone can see the most current version.
The starting page is 342. It can be accessed with the URL NEBridge.org/pages/342. All pages can be reached from there, but if you want to look at a particular page, the easiest way is to key in NEBridge.org/pages/ppp in your browser, where ppp is the three-digit page number on the spreadsheet for the index.
Communications Committee: I think that consideration should be given to restarting the CommComm in 2023 or maybe sooner. I am willing to serve on it, but I don’t want to be chairman in 2023.
Two regional bridge tournaments in New England in 2021 had been canceled because of the pandemic. The Presidential Regional that was scheduled for February 2022 was also canceled because no suitable site in the southwestern part of the district was available. A new event, which was called the Gala, was scheduled for late May, which was the time that my wife Sue and I had planned to take a cruise in Europe1. We had deliberately chosen the second half of May because, in all the years that I had been going to tournaments, the district had never held an event then.
Curtis Barton.
Meanwhile Curtis was trying to figure out if, as an ACBL Employee, Gary would be allowed to be both webmaster for the district. Curtis finally determined that he could. In early July he asked me to set up a Zoom meeting with Gary, Peter Marcus2, and himself. I told him that I had no idea how to set up a Zoom meeting, and that I was very busy at the time.
The second half of July was dominated by the Summer NABC that was held in Providence. Curtis decided that he needed two people to replace me. He offered one of the jobs to Gary in this email sent on August 10.
The other candidate wasn’t interested. That puts you (Gary) back where you’ve been – my choice for NEBC Database and NEBridge.org Webmaster. If you accept the position we will discuss compensation (Mike gets free plays and some other stuff – not too valuable for you) on a per tournament basis.
I suggest you contact Mike for his write-ups on the efforts. If you accept I will also begin the search for a Communications lead to supplement (not replace) existing efforts.
Communications Lead:
• Voting member of the TSC • Cannot be an ACBL employee • Essentially a volunteer position; may, in the future be compensated with free plays or similar consideration. • This primarily a marketing function with technical considerations as agreed with the NEBC Database/NEBridge.org Webmaster • Coordinates the electronic aspects of tournament advertising and execution • Works with the Database/Webmaster • Edits the Tournament Bulletin as required • May use MailChimp email system to create messages as required.
NEBC Database/NEBridge.org Webmaster • Does not and cannot be a voting member of any NEBC Committee • Can be an ACBL employee • This is a compensated position on a “per tournament” basis • Maintains the NEBC website • Maintains the NEBridge.org database • Works with the Communications Lead and Tournament Coordinator to maintain Calendar
This was by far the longest communication that I had ever received from Curtis. It appeared that some progress was being made. The fact that he was conflating the webmaster and database jobs was, of course, disconcerting. The webmaster job had gotten easier over the years. The database job was quite another matter.
This missive pretty much confirmed my notion that no one wanted to revive the Communication Committee. The “as required” appellation applied to the bulletin position was also ominous.
Peter Marcus.
An email from Peter asserted about the database that “It might be work, it might cost money, but I think we really don’t want to abandon it.” Nobody ventured a different opinion. The question then became where the database would be kept. I did not want other people with administrative authority to sign on to Wavada.org.
I am not sure that my next contribution was helpful, but I did not want anyone to claim that I was not forthcoming about the difficulties.
Now that I think about it, iPower is not a critical element. Assuming that two copies of the database (one live and one for testing/backup/disaster recovery) are used, what are needed are two installations of WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, php) or the equivalent. I used iPower for the live version because I already was using its server for other projects on my personal website, and there was a lot of capacity. WAMP is available as a free download for windows-based computers. iPower uses a UNIX version of the three products, but they do not charge extra for MySQL and php.
Mark Oettinger.
Mark Oettinger, the newly elected (sort of) vice-president of the district, suggested that Sue Miguel could do some of the work of the Communications Lead. No one objected.
Gary officially accepted the job of webmaster and indicated that he and I might be able to meet together at the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI, (documented here) scheduled for the end of the month. I responded with the following:
I have created a user profile for you for the admin section of NEBridge.org. The user ID is GaryP. After I send this email, I will send the password in a separate email.
I will be in Warwick for all five days. I will be attending the meetings of the Tournament Scheduling Committee and the Executive Committee. I will have the other evenings free. I will be pretty busy until then.
I have documented almost everything that I do on numbered pages (the ones that have the green menu on the left) within the NEBridge.org website. The starting page for all communications functions is #342. The starting page for webmaster functions is #85. The full URL’s are https://nebridge.org/pages/342/ and https://nebridge.org/pages/85/, respectively. The easiest way to get to them is to go to NEBridge.org, click on “Tournament Results” and change the /3/ to the page that you want. I have attached a spreadsheet that has all the page numbers.
There are wysiwyg tools for editing the numbered web page. It is also possible to enter HTML code. I resort to the latter when the former doesn’t provide what I want. The concepts are pretty straightforward. When I started in 2013 there was no documentation, and Bob Bertoni’s training session only lasted thirty minutes.
I am looking forward to meeting you in Warwick.
I introduced myself to Gary when I played in the side game, but I never met with him in the evening. I did meet Steve Ackerman, a player from Vermont. Mark Oettinger had recommended that I get him involved in the transition. I sent him essentially the same email.
In September Curtis sent Gary and me a short email asking whether I could teach them to use MailChimp. I did not envision either of them using it much, but here is what I responded.
MailChimp is not hard. I will set up a user ID for NEBPres and for NEBWeb. I will send the passwords in a separate email. The steps for using MailChimp are documented on NEBridge.org. I will provide training if necessary. I know nothing about using Zoom for training.
The big issue is what is going to happen to the MySQL database that is used for, among other things, populating the lists on MailChimp. The database currently resides on an iPower server on which I have leased space for about ten years. I am willing to give the php scripts that I have written to maintain the files to the district, but the database and the scripts somehow need to be copied to a server owned or leased by the district. That is unlikely to be an easy task. However, there is a great deal of other stuff on my website on iPower, and I don’t really want anyone else to have read/write access to it.
The other big issue is that Keith Wells, who is now a contractor for not an employee of the ACBL, has not answered any of my emails in five months. His last one said that he was still the person that I should contact in order to obtain the .LZH files used by the scripts that update the attendance table. On the advice of Tim Hill I sent an email in September to tournaments@acbl.org. The unsigned response, with a cc to Keith, said that Keith was still “at the ACBL”.
So, I have been unable to maintain the attendance table by my usual methods. Someone needs to decide whether it is still necessary for the district to maintain the attendance table, on which I formerly recorded who attended each regional and sectional in New England and each NABC. If not, it might not be worth the effort to continue using the MySQL database to keep a comprehensive roster of players, their advancement, their attendance, and a few other things. In that case the whole emailing strategy may need to be rethought. Maybe it could be done with spreadsheets or some other method. To my knowledge no other district goes to so much trouble to target emails.
It is possible to update the attendance table without the LZH files. The alternative method uses the “Master Point Winners” report in the posted results on the ACBL tournament schedule. However, 1) It is both kludgy and very time-consuming because there are no ACBL numbers, and 2) there is no way that I know of to account for people who earned no points at the tournament. So, I have been reluctant to resort to that method.
I am doing what I can to help the transition, but I don’t want to be the one who makes important decisions that affect how the mailings are done in 2023 and following.
The first sentence was a mistake. The way that new user profiles are created in MailChimp is to “invite” other people through an option in MailChimp. They then are sent an email from MailChimp that explains how new users can create their own profiles.
As of this writing in June of 2023, I have still not been able to gain access to the LZH files.
Shortly thereafter someone brought up the possibility of using the Pianola software that a third party had customized for the ACBL When the product was introduced several years earlier, I had looked into this and shared my low opinion of it with the members of the Executive Committee. I repeated those points for Curtis and Gary.
Addendum: The ACBL allows direct but very limited access to its active player database for emails, but there are several limitations that render this approach less effective in targeting. I have not investigated this approach recently, but the limitations that I remember are:
1) You must use Pianola. My understanding is that it does not support images, tables, font changes, and other tricks that I sometimes have used within messages. Both Sue and I use a lot of embedded images.
2) You can only access the records for a limited number of districts/units.
3) The format is, to say the least, unimaginative. It is black on grey.
4) I am uncertain of how much targeting can be done. I seriously doubt that one can target (as I did for NAP) based on the May 6 ACBL roster. I also feel certain that targeting based on attendance or zip code (Cape, for instance) is not possible.
5) The rate charged U126 is four times what we paid, and the last time I looked that rate is still available.
6) Access to the database can only be for the purpose of emailing. If you want to use it for some other purpose, you must keep your own files somehow.
7) I am not sure that Pianola has all the reporting tools that MailChimp offers. People who have complained to me about not receiving an email are sometimes surprised that MailChimp knows whether each email was delivered, whether it was opened, and whether any links were clicked on.
8) A small number of people have provided me, but not the ACBL with their email addresses.
9) I think that if someone unsubscribes on Pianola, they can no longer be reached. MailChimp has the same rule, but because we have lots of lists, we can control the effect. For example, if a club manager unsubscribed to the recent club mailing, he/she would still receive emails about tournaments, letters from the president, surveys, and other types of emails. On the other hand Pianola does support attachments, and MailChimp doesn’t. I have not found this to be much of a limitation, but if we did not have a website on which to post the attachment so that we could link to it, it would be.
Nobody mentioned Pianola for quite a while after that. Somehow someone got the idea that I would host the database for the district. On October 28 I wrote the following to Curtis:
I don’t host the database now. I pay $200 per year to iPower to host it. I know very little about hosting databases. The district could get an account with iPower or some other hosting service that supports MySQL and php and has a way to import databases and programming files. I contracted with iPower a long time ago. I don’t remember why I picked them.
I will help with migrating the database and the scripts over. I don’t really want to support the php scripts, but if you cannot find anyone who knows php, well … I would have to think about it.
If you are really asking me if I would agree to set up user ID’s for others on my iPower account, the answer is no. I have a great deal of other stuff on my account, and I have spent hundreds of hours on it.
So, the first decision is whether it is worth the effort to maintain a relational database. If the district cannot find a reliable source for getting the lzh files, I would be inclined to doubt it. The roster files, which are the source for most of my selections, can easily be downloaded from ACBL.org and then opened in Excel. Someone who is a wiz at spreadsheets could probably do the selections from the spreadsheets. The uploads to MailChimp require csv files, and spreadsheets could–after some slicing and dicing–be saved as csv files for that purpose.
When the above issue has been addressed, one other remains: How many lists on MailChimp will be used and reused? I suggest at least one for presidential communications, one for regional tournaments, one for NAP/GNT, one for clubs, and one for I/N. We now have a very large number of lists–one for every email (as Bob recommended). This has been feasible because the database has a field to flag players who have unsubscribed. I never select these people for any mailing promoting a tournament. Without that field I would need to reuse lists, as I sometimes do now for other types of emails.
If you decide to reuse the lists, you should add fields for masterpoints and rank description so that you can “segment” the lists as required for the email. This is the way that I handled the five emails promoting the 2022 NAP. The only problem is that someone would need to decide whether people who unsubscribed in response to those emails should also be unsubscribed from one of the other lists.
Curtis put the burden on Gary and Steve with a short reply: “We need someone to host our data base, and we need that someone now. You guys are the experts. Figure out what we need to do, and let’s get it done. “
Gary said that he was not a database engineer, but he was an “Excel weenie.” Steve set up a Dropbox for me and asked me to put the database and the php scripts in it. It took me most of a day to do this because a great deal of what is on Wavada.org is related to my blogs, journals, and other projects. Even after I culled those out, the remainder barely fit in the Dropbox, and the company that sponsored it kept sending me emails that I should upgrade my subscription.
Not much else happened until I wrote up the following summary on November 28:
General: All of the tasks have been documented on pages of NEBridge.org. The appearance of a few MailChimp screens has changed, but the work flow has not. All the documentation pages can be reached from https://nebridge.org/pages/342/.
Webmaster: I have given the credentials for the email redirecting to Gary Peterson. I have also set the emails for webmaster to redirect to his email account.
Action item: The ad on NEBridge.org for the ACBL online regional was still there today.
Database: Peter said that LZH files should now be available from ACBL somehow. If so, it is still probably a good idea to keep up the database if someone can learn how to maintain it. Those files can help with both targeted mailings and analysis of attendance at tournaments.
Action item: I will communicate with Peter about how to get the LZH files from the ACBL. When I do, I plan to upload all of the files for D25 sectionals and regionals in 2022 as well as the Providence NABC. I will then submit attendance reports for the Providence and Southbridge regionals and the Providence NABC to the Executive Committee members via email.
The current database is MySQL. The scripting language php is used for maintenance and reporting. I will create a copy of the database, the php scripts (including the Javascript and CSS), and a file of the SQL statements that I have used for lists and other purposes. I will then send them to wherever the new home is. I will also help with the migration as much as I can.
Action items: If the database is to be continued, 1) Who will maintain it and use SQL to select lists for mailings? 2) Where will the data and programs be stored? The system can actually be run on any Windows or Unix computer that has the free download WAMP or XAMP, but I chose to run it somewhere that provided support, which I have used four or five times per year. 3) Will the person who manages the database also manage MailChimp?
MailChimp: Policy decisions need to be made about how many lists will be used. The issue is how to handle “unsubscribes”. If a person unsubscribes from one list, should they simultaneously be unsubscribed from all? This will not happen automatically on MailChimp, but there is an “OK to email?” field on the database. The “actives” view of the players table, which I often used for selections for email lists, eliminates players with an N in this field or any other disqualifying information.
Action items: Who will manage the site? What will the workflow for new emails be? Will there be any reporting?
Email composition: Sue Miguel.
Bulletin Editor: I have copies of all the ones that I have done. I can send in odt or word format.
Action items: Is this worth doing? Who will do it? Will we resume using online bulletins?
This email generated a lengthy thread of responses. Curtis established the parameters:
Mike has done his usual great job in laying out the tasks ahead. I will take the Bulletin Editor3 task for Southbridge 2 (Mike: please send me the last Bulletin in Word format, please.)
Who will take on the rest of the effort? Please advise soonest.
I sent a copy of the Bulletin that I had created for the Optical Regional in 2022 to Curtis.
Curtis sent the following to Steve Ackerman and Neil Montague, who had expressed some interest in handling the emails:
We need a Mailchimp email expert (or maybe two!) to do the email parts of Mike’s current job. You both are great candidates for this. Any interest? Note: this will, in effect, make you a part of Sue’s marketing campaigns. It’s fun.4
Neil told Curtis that someone would need to show him how MailChimp worked. I invited him to create his own account and wrote:
MailChimp is not difficult. I have documented everything that I do in it on the NEBridge.org website, and the MailChimp site has very good FAQ’s and support when one needs it. I figured it out with no training whatever.
The bigger issue is whether to continue using the MySQL database as the source for creation of lists, and, if so, where it will reside.
Curtis wrote that Neil would officially become the MailChimp person and that Sue Miguel would compose the emails. Steve attempted to address the database issue.
As far as the database goes, I’ve taken a look at the LZH files that ACBLScor uses to update its database. Unfortunately, it only ACBL numbers and Points, not names and addresses. We would need more information than that to maintain the database. Another option is Pianola. I understand they are pricey, but it might be possible to work out a deal with them. https://www.pianola.net
I could not let that go unanswered.
I use four sources of information for the database: 1) Once a month (on about the 7th) I download the entire ACBL roster, which has almost all the census information on all active ACBL members; 2) The ACBL sends Webmaster@NEBridge.org a list of the players who advanced in rank during the previous month; 3) The LZH files for attendance at tournaments; 4) Individual maintenance when I learn something such as a nickname, a new email address, or an unsubscribe. Here is what I have for each player:
I described the problems with using the ACBL’s program that uses Pianola on a previous email. I will look for it and resend it if necessary.
This exchange generated an overly optimistic assessment by Mark Oettinger that showed praise on all the participants. No emails were exchanged in December except one from Curtis that asked me how much I would charge to continue to send out the emails “for one more month”. I said that I would certainly continue to do it if it was necessary. In actuality I sent out all of the emails in the first five months of 2023.
In January Neil wrote this to me: “I think I am supposed to send out the e-mails to the district via MailChimp. I have an account but since I’ve never really used it before, some quick help from you would be appreciated.” Neil was referring to the computer-generated emails sent by BridgeFinesse.com to players who had advanced in rank. I explained to him that he did not need to get involved in this process.
On February 11 Curtis notified me and the other participants that there would be a Zoom meeting to discuss the succession issues. He then wrote that Peter would send the invitation. At some point it was changed to an in-person meeting at the Presidential Regional in Southbridge. That gathering was never canceled, but it did not happen.
An email that I received from Sue Miguel got my goat. Here is what I sent to everyone on the Executive Committee.
In November of 2021 I gave notice that I did not want to be involved in precisely this type of thing–promotion of online gold point events, which I am convinced will be the death of regional tournaments. I have not seen one inch of progress in removing this responsibility.
I will send this out, but I AM PLEADING that the district relieve me of this responsibility. It makes me furious to be promoting this sort of thing.
Curtis sent me an email that said that Sue should have sent the email to Neil instead of me. I sent out this email and several more over the course of the next few months.
Neil sent me an email on March 8 concerning an email that he had received from Paul Harris, the president of EMBA. He wanted to know the details of the district’s contract with MailChimp. I answered the inquiry with the following.
MailChimp charges D25 by the number of emails sent. Back in 2015 or 2016 Bob Bertoni negotiated the purchase of 2 million email credits for $2500 in a “pay as you go” plan. We had to purchase that many to get that rate. At the time we had no limits on the number of lists or the total number of contacts. We have about ninety lists (but they won’t let us create any new ones) and a very large number of contacts. In the old days I built a new list for each version of each email, and I had roughly seven or eight versions for each tournament.
808,020 credits remain. I am not sure that MailChimp still allows pay-as-you-go plans. It appears to me that it now sells four or five tiers of plans that require a monthly fee based on the total number of contacts. Each has other limitations as well.
In my opinion MailChimp’s best feature is that it allows you to “code your own” emails in HTML. It is much more time-consuming to do it that way, but you can–with a few small exceptions–make the email look exactly the way that you want it to. Of course, you have to be familiar with HTML and how email clients (as opposed to browsers) interpret various tags. The only thing that I have never been able to do is to get Outlook to show correctly a caption for an image.
Without the “code your own’ feature I do not know how anyone will be able to create the kind of emails that Sue Miguel likes to send. She creates the emails using a program on her Mac and sends me the finished product. I extract the HTML and make a few changes to fit MailChimp’s requirements.
By the way, MailChimp is now owned by Intuit, the QuickBooks company.
I know nothing about Constant Contact.
I have been promised that I will not be required to send any more emails, but the meeting that was scheduled for Southbridge to determine who would do it and (more importantly) how was never held. Then there was supposed to be a Zoom meeting about it, but it never occurred either. At this point I do not know whose responsibility it is to find a way to continue. I am pretty sure that Curtis does not want to hear any more about it.
Another Zoom meeting was scheduled for March 30 at 8 p.m. Peter sent out the following email at 6:56 a.m. on that day to the people scheduled to attend the 8:00 meeting and a few people from the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA).
I just attended a webinar (not sure if any of you did, but I did see Ken there) about their new marketing program, sending out emails, and using Pianola. I don’t know enough to know if this is any good, but, unlike a lot of what ACBL does, it actually looked at least presentable.
One obvious benefit is an immediate access to ACBL data (email addresses, masterpoint holdings, etc.) without having to update them ourselves. A downside, to the extent we do it, is that it doesn’t seem to include information about tournaments attended though they said that could be added.
The tools for developing emails did seem reasonable and it does have the ability to include attachments, like a flyer.
Obviously, one issue is cost. I know, when Bob Bertoni investigated this, we ran from Pianola because of cost. They addressed this and said they are cheaper than MailChimp (what they compared themselves to), though they talked about buying 10K or 25K Mailchimp credits. If I remember correctly, D25 bought something like 250K, which was an upfront cost (almost like a capital cost, buying new equipment) and then it lasts for years.
Anyway, I do not have the technical expertise to make comparisons. So, my questions are
1) They recorded the webinar and are offering a masterclass in developing emails/marketing next Tuesday (for about an hour). I will forward the link to the recording and the masterclass if anyone wants to hear it or sign up for the class. I will not sign up, I don’t have the background to make an informed decision.
2) Where are we with MailChimp credits, i.e., are they about to run out or do we have years to go?
3) They are setting up credits for each unit and district and accounts to send emails will be done individually, i.e., a unit or district says who should have access and they will get their own login, not done with everyone in one organization sharing the login. But, is there any rationale to considering setting up credits for the units and district to share, as a way of lowering costs, particularly for smaller units?
I am not looking for answers, since I wouldn’t know how to evaluate them, just asking questions. We can discuss more tomorrow on the ZOOM call.
Will send out the info from them when I get it.
I watched the webinar later, but I wanted to provide answers to Peter’s questions before the Zoom meeting.
I could not attend the webinar because of a medical appointment. Incidentally, the message announcing the webinar was composed using the new tools. The last word or two of every line on the message was cut off when I opened it in Outlook. I tried changing the width of the window, but it did not help.
D25 bought 2 million credits from MailChimp. Over 800,000 still remain. Attachments, especially ones with images, use up a lot of band width. Requiring links rather than attachments is the main reason that MailChimp delivery is so fast.
I have never used Pianola, but I know where I ran into problems with MailChimp. Some of my questions are:
1) How are unsubscribes handled? If someone unsubscribes to an email sent by one user will other users still be able to reach them?
2) To which districts would we be allowed to send email?
3) Can pre-formatted emails like Sue’s be sent or must they be redone in Pianola’s tools?
Curtis took notes at the 8:00 meeting and sent them to the participants. I have posted them here. It is worth discussing his three “Takeaways”.
“Peter will transfer Mike’s data to a new source.” In fact, I sent an up-to-date copy of the database to Steve. Peter had nothing to do with it.
“Henceforth we will use Mike’s data from Peter’s source for emails and the like.” It was not until May that Steve’s copy of the database was available. In actual fact, the audience that I had been using on MailChimp was still used through the end of June. However, Neil did successfully process a couple of Sue Miguel’s emails in May and June.
“Peter and Steve will attend the Pianola Master Class to determine whether we can easily port the current system and data to that (ACBL) system.” I don’t think that anyone involved in the transition process ever attended the Pianola Master Class.
Peter, with whom I had a bizarre contretemps (described here) earlier in the year, recognized the crux of the problem in a friendly email:
I understand that Mike, who has been so good to do all this for us since forever, and had announced his departure as of the beginning of 2023, is still involved and really, really “wants out.”
If we need help to actually move this to final migration, I think we should consider actually getting a professional in this kind of work to help/do it for us. Even if this group has the skill (and I don’t), finding the time can be a much bigger problem, and, if we have to pay for it, so be it. We could speak first to Megahertz5, to hire them, and, failing that, find someone who could get it done. I don’t think their geography matters though, unlike the ACBL, I would suggest we don’t save money by using IT contractors from Poland.
Curtis favored a different approach:
Here’s what we can do to get Mike OUT of the loop, at least formally.
1) Neil: if you can take Mike’s stuff for storage, please do so.
2) Gary/Steve/Neil: please discuss this among yourselves, and determine whether we should take Peter’s suggestion and hire Megahertz to set things up. Let me know what you decide, and I’ll get it approved.
Then let’s finish this.
Steve immediately reported that he had a copy of the database, and he would find a place to put it. His email on May 3 listed the progress that he had made.
I have uploaded Mike’s database to a server on google as I had some issues attempting to sign up at Oracle.
I’ve created user accounts for everyone on this list. To log in, use your username portion of your email, and the number you enter into the bridgemates (so no letters).
I have updated the masterpoints based on the April version of the MP file available to ACBLScor. I understand that in the past we were able to get a more complete database listing from ACBL, but I don’t know who to contact for that.
Neil & Gary, let me know if you need help generating the queries to populate your mailchimp lists.
A few thing that he wrote were not quite accurate. Here is what I replied:
On your MyACBL page do you have a tab called “Member Rosters”? It should be right below “Ribbon”. If not, I think that either Curtis or Mark Aquino can designate you to have access to that feature from the ACBL.
A new roster will come out on 5/7 or maybe 5/8 since 5/7 is a Sunday. I have a list of email addresses that have unsubscribed in the last year or so. The “OK to email” field for all of them should be set to N. Should I send this to you, or is there some way that I can do it?
After I sent another email for Sue, a player replied with a request to change her email address. I forwarded it to Steve. He replied with some good questions.
Does the normal procedure include asking the player to make sure they also update their email with ACBL? I suspect that when I update next week from the roster this email address may be incorrect if the player doesn’t also notify ACBL.
In addition, I updated the player database to flag not to email the addresses you sent me. However, I found about 20% of the addresses were not in our database. I’m assuming these addresses may not be active ACBL members, or they are for some other list than D25? I’m attaching them for your review.
I was happy to respond to this. It indicated that someone was finally getting into the nitty gritty of the database.
When they give me a new address I also change the “email source” to Player. I should have told you this. My program for processing the the new roster does not change the email address unless the email source is ACBL.
Either the addresses were changed, or the players were added to the database after I sent it to you, most likely the latter. So, after the database is next updated, the update of the “ok to email?” field should be run again. Should I change the email that receives messages about unsubscribes to some other account? I received notice of one more yesterday.
This is only important if a different audience is used for a future email. As long as the audience that I have been using is employed, the fact that they unsubscribed from that audience will prevent them from getting any more emails.
A few days later I sent the following to all of the people involved in the transition.
1. A new roster came out over the weekend. Is there a plan for updating Steve’s copy of the database?
2. One more player has unsubscribed, carl_palmer@yahoo.com. Should I change the owner of all of the audiences (Mailchimp word for mailing lists) so that someone else gets the emails that indicate such changes?
3. Neil, when Sue has another email to send out, do you want to try to do it? NAP qualifiers and Nashua will probably be promoted soon. Since we have not gotten access to the .LZH files, they can all be sent from the audience that I have been using (2209_Southbridge_D3_D24_D25) for the last year, but a new selection should be made from the database to update it. Then already defined “segments” of the audience can be used in the definition of the mailing. If necessary, it is easy to define new segments. That audience includes fields for rank description, masterpoints, and district.
4. I have a folder of files with SQL statements that I have used in the past. I would be happy to share it.
Neil Montague.
Neil said that he would try to send out Sue’s next email, which arrived in my Inbox that same day. Most of my subsequent conversations were with Neil, who had told me that he was very familiar with SQL and had extracted HTML from emails.
Sue has just sent me an email that she wants sent to potential players in Flight B of the NAP.
I will forward it to you. It contains formatted text and an image with a link on it. It does not have a width, but I always set the width to 600px. The link she provided should work, but the image must be uploaded to MailChimp. Sue does not like her emails to have the masthead, but this one is signed by Peter Marcus. So, I would add the masthead at the top. I have enclosed an HTML file that has the width and masthead set. You should be able to paste the text (after removing the instructions in red) into the HTML file. Then find the image (<img) tag and whatever divs or spans are around it. After the physical image (which I get by using Prt Scr and then cropping in an image editor) has been saved as a file and uploaded to MailChimp. The “src=” in the image tag must be changed to the URL on MalChimp. An alternative is to ask Sue to send you the image in a jpg and then upload it.
I almost forgot: the image tag has style=”float: right” in it. Since Microsoft Outlook does not recognize that, I always add align=”right”, which it does recognize. Incidentally, the width in the HTML is set in a table because that was the only way that I could get Outlook to recognize a fixed width.
This is all described in the instructions in detail with pictures on NEBridge.org. The instructions begin on https://nebridge.org/pages/345/. You may very well be able to do all of this using one of MailChimp’s many templates. I have never tried that.
This afternoon I updated the audience (2209_Southbridge_D3_D24_D25) with the data from the latest roster. The SQL statement that I used was:
select familiar_name, last_name, email, name_town_key, rank_desc, masterpoints, district from actives where district in(3,24,25) and ytdpoints >= 1 order by last_name, first_name
It will be necessary to define a segment of the audience that is limited to records in which the district is 25 and masterpoints are less than 2800 or 2900. The limit is 2500, but the check is made against the database as of last August. It would be tricky to get that because there might be people who were not on that roster (late with dues or other reason) but are now eligible. It seems better to annoy people like me who are not actually eligible than to miss some who are.
I should be in most of the day.
Neil, who was still gainfully employed, said that he would work on it over the weekend. He did. He wanted to do the project from scratch, which began by making sure the list (“audience” in MailChimp) was up to date. I was happy to explain MailChimp’s concepts of audiences and segments.
In olden days I created audiences for each email. That made sense when other people (president, I/N director, and district director) were also using MailChimp. If they unsubscribed because of one of their emails, I did not want them to have automatically unsubscribed from mine. In addition I was sometimes using MailChimp for other purposes than event promotion (emails to clubs and for the Best-in-class competition). Furthermore, I also sent to people who had attended New England or NABC events, and the selection was too complicated for segments.
In the last year all of the emails have been composed by Sue, I no longer have access to the tournament attendance data, I did not contact the clubs, and I stopped doing the Best in Class. So, I have been using the 2209 audience for every event. It includes all active players in D3. D24, and D25, and I have updated it every month with the SQL statement that I sent to you. I had previously added the masterpoints, rank description, and district fields so that I could use simple segments to select from this audience for emails for both regional tournaments and Grass Roots qualifiers.
Peter is still, at least in theory, working on getting access from the ACBL to the LZH files again. If we had them, we could update the attendance table as before. This would allow us both to send emails to more people with some likelihood of attending and to evaluate our tournaments better. It would, however, necessitate recycling some of our previous audiences, of which there are 89. MailChimp no longer allows us to create new audiences.
I sent the following to Steve and Neil:
All the “unsubscribes” that I sent to Steve had unsubscribed from the 2209 … audience that I have been using for the last year. When I updated the audience last Monday I selected from the actives view, which excludes anyone with N in the OK to email field. It would not matter for the current email project because they would all be excluded by MailChimp anyway. It is not possible (as far as I know) to send an email in MailChimp to someone who has unsubscribed from the audience used in the campaign.
I got the list of unsubscribes by taking the “export” function in the audience section of MailChimp. It sent to my download folder a zip file that contained three csv files: subscribers, unsubscribeds, and cleaned. The last had email addresses that had repeatedly bounced back. These files all have a large number of fields. I deleted all of the columns except the email address from the unsubscribed file and sent it to Steve. Since I have been using this audience for many emails, and I have previously run this procedure to change the ok to email fields, I am sure that a good number of those on the unsubscribed file already had the ok to email field set to N.
My phone number is 860 930 8784. I am scheduled to play bridge at the Hartford BC on Saturday. I will leave my house at noon and return a little before 5. I have no plans for Sunday, but I wake up early in the morning and then take naps during the day.
I was actually a little excited about Neil taking on this project. It would have been much better if I had been next to him when he did it, as I usually was when I installed a new AdDept system at a client’s. He wasted a lot of time trying to clean up the HTML that had been generated by the software product that Sue used, and some of the things that he did made it worse. He sent me a test copy and an email with the following questions.
I think I have completed the work necessary to send out Sue’s e-mail but I have a few questions:
(1) I thought I put the code into centering the image at the top but it’s not centered. My HTML experience is minimal and from a few years ago, although I did successfully embed the link that Sue wanted in the image. The instructions talk about having text appear when someone is using an e-mail client that doesn’t support images, but when I did it, the text always appeared which isn’t what we want. Do I need to worry about this? If so, let me know what to change.
(2) I followed your instructions of pasting your e-mail into Outlook and saving the source and pasting that into Mailchimp. There are a lot of tags that probably don’t need to be there but probably some of them do. Should I not worry about this or should I eliminate the ones that don’t really belong. As both you and the instructions mention, different e-mail clients require different tags so I can’t really go by how it looks on my machine.
(3) The next e-mail you receive is the test e-mail. I sent it to myself first and verified that I did the href tag correctly (I have experience doing that as we convert statutory references in the law to links to the legislature’s web pages when the Massachusetts budget gets signed so I actually have done this before.
(4) Finally, can you verify that I did this all correctly? The segment should be fine and you shouldn’t have any trouble finding this new campaign.
I looked it over and then sent Neil what I had discovered.
1) The image at the top should be the banner, which was in the HTML that I sent you. It should NOT link to the flyer. The Chicago image should be where Sue placed it. I separated it out on its own line in the HTML editing screen. There is already a link around it. I am not sure if it works. You must change the src= on that image to that of the one that you used at the top. Don’t change any of the other attributes, but add align=”right”.
Also take out lines 8 and 9.
2) The tool that Sue uses inserts a lot of extraneous tags, but I never worry about them. I am worried about the extra line feeds. We need to figure out where they came from.
3) Make the above changes and send me another test. When I say that it looks OK, send a test to Sue.
Neil made some changes and sent me another test along with the following email.
I think I made all of the changes and I eliminated the “excess” html code – at least I think it is excess. I put <br> tags in to force line breaks in the right place. I’m getting three errors (code turns red) but it doesn’t seem to be causing a problem. If I remove the body tag, then the text only goes half way across the page. Please take a look. I also am sending you the test e-mail now.
His remark that “the text only goes halfway across the page” was a reaction to the code that set the width of the email to 600. I looked at the entire campaign more thoroughly this time. Here was my reply.
I had not checked the segment before. I noticed this morning that the total number selected was roughly twice what I expected. D25 has about 6,000 members. The audience also includes D3 and D24. Here is how it currently is defined:
2. From section: As it is,the replies will go to Gary (webmaster@nebridge.org). That should probably be changed to inchair, but Sue may want the replies to go to Peter. It is her call.
3. Subject section: I always have copied the subject from Sue’s emails and pasted it directly into the subject line. That would put it in all upper case. I don’t know if it would increase or decrease the number of people who open the email, but she gets to make decisions like this now.
4. Content: I removed the <html, <meta and the second <body tag. I put “Folks,” inside a <p tag.
On the second <img tag:
I removed align=center and replaced it with align=right. I know that was what she wanted because her original source said style=”float: right;”. I also replaced width=500 with width=400. I also added a ) at the end that she forgot.
After this I expected the test email to look like what Sue sent me, but it doesn’t. This is because you removed all of her <font tags.
You did a lot more work than was necessary. I am sorry that I did not describe this to you very well. Basically, Sue’s email was fine. It was not necessary to remove all of the extra stuff that her program puts in, and, in fact, those font statements were necessary to make it look the way that she wanted.
The only changes that I usually make are:
1) Start with my frame.html
2) Add the banner if necessary
3) Find all of her <img tags: upload the physical image or find the URL if it is already uploaded, change the src= parameter to the location on MailChimp, and add align=”right” if she used <style=”float: right”. By the way, it would make things easier if she sent the image as a .jpg file in addition to the one that is embedded in the message.
In this case the image itself is no longer showing up in my copy of the email that she sent. We may need to have her send it again. I decided to replicate the campaign you made, and show how I would have done the content. The campaign I created is titled 2023 Flight B GNT (Mike’s content). I hope that this makes things a little clearer. I do not understand why Sue’s original image is no longer showing up in the email that she originally sent. I would like to see what her image looked like in Outlook.
Neil replied in detail:
1. Sorry about that with the segment. I have added the criteria that the players have to be from district 25 and now there will be 5466 recipients which is about what you expect.
2. I’ll ask Sue who she wants the from to be. I guess Gary is the default but obviously we can put whatever we want in that box.
3. I’ll ask Sue whether she wants the subject in all upper case. I was taught that all upper case is “yelling” although it probably doesn’t make a difference whether it is all caps or not. I agree with you to defer to Sue on this.
4. There still were some red tags (errors) when I opened my version of this which you edited for me. However, I added a few more tags and close tags at the top and that seem to fix the problem without changing anything.
5. I added back the font tag towards the top. The font appearing on my computer is Helvetica 11 when I put the tab back and when I look at the original e-mail you sent me which was Sue’s e-mail. Yesterday, my version was sending it in Helvetica 10. As you know, fonts are at the mercy of what is on the users computer so what you are seeing might not match what I am seeing. I am looking at these in Chrome.
6. Your version of the e-mail is doing what some of my previous versions did which is only going half way across the page for the image at the top and all of the text. My version has the image at the top the same as yours but the text goes across the page entirely. I think that’s what we want, right? Your change to the Chicago image pushed it to the right and has the text wrap to the left. That’s not what came across in the original from you but I think it looks good your way. I guess I’ll find out how much Sue wants these e-mails to reflect “exactly” what she sends. Not sure what you mean when you say the image from her e-mail disappeared? So we can proceed one of two ways. First, I am sending you my updated campaign test e-mail. If that looks good to you, I will send it to Sue with the question for her from above. If it is still problematic, I guess we can use your version but I will ask Sue about the width issue since it looks weird only going half way across. If it is easier to talk, my phone number is 617-771-2527 if that is how you would like to next proceed. Looks like we’ll get this done today which is what I told Sue.
Our conversation ended with my reply:
3. I am virtually certain that Sue wants the subject in uppercase. When you talk with her, I would not mention about “yelling”. I was taught the same as you. I avoided all-upper case when I wrote emails or anything else. You also should probably ask her about the banner. She did not like it on the ones that she composed, but this one was mostly written by and signed by Peter.
4. The width of the email that I composed was 600 pixels, the standard size of an email window and also the size of the banner. If your window is wider than that, it might have seemed strange that everything everything wrapped at that spot. The 600 px setting was set in both the body and the table. Some email clients respect the one in the body, but Outlook only respects the table. So, if you closed the <body or <table at the top, it would be wider than 600, as it was in Outlook on the test you sent me.
5. On Outlook the font is now Calibri 11. On my version it was Arial 16, which was what was specified in Sue’s. Maybe my eyes were deceiving me, but this morning Sue’s original email had the word image001 where the second image was before. The computer on which her image was stored must have been down; the image is back now. It is smaller and has slightly different writing on it than the one whose URL I gave to you. If I had this to do over, I would try to use it or at least set the width to around 320.
What you sent me is, in my opinion, perfectly fine. You should see if Sue agrees.
Going forward (if you are still game) I advise using the method that I proposed in the replica. I can do one of her emails in about a half hour, and it always maintains her fonts and positions her images where she wants them. Sometimes in the middle of an email she likes to change the font size, color or even the font itself. The only mistake that I have made is failing to find an image that was down at the bottom of an email. If the src= parameter is not changed, it does not appear in the MailChimp version.
You also might want to investigate using a template. When I started, I had several years experience at writing emails in HTML, and I hated the restrictions of the templates.
A few security issues still remained, but the email went out on time. In a few days the security issues were resolved. I had to change the owner of the audience. That will probably need to be redone every time that a new audience is used, but since Neil has been designated as the owner of the account, that should not be difficult.
At the end of the Executive Committee meeting on June 24 in Nashua Neil button-holed me to assure me that he would handle Sue’s emails the way that I recommended. He seemed to enjoy telling me about how he had dealt with the issues. I did not voice my primary thought, which was, “Better you than me.”
After the email went out Neil asked me about the fourteen bounce-backs that were reported. I explained how MailChimp handles them:
The ones that have bounced will have a status of “cleaned”. I generally do not worry about them. They will no longer be sent emails by any campaigns in this audience. If you recycle an old audience for new emails and select them, they will be set to subscribed unless they were already unsubscribed or cleaned on the audience that you archived or deleted. If the first mailing bounces, they will be set to cleaned forever.
Just a reminder: the audience has one record per email address. The database has one record per ACBL number. A lot of players share email addresses.
There is a field on the players table called email_rejected. I have not kept this up, but if you wanted to, you could export the audience. One of the csv files in the zip that it produces will contain all of the cleaned ones. That could be used to make the database more accurate. However, if they later provide the ACBL with a new valid address, that one will appear after the next monthly update. The email_rejected fields are NOT currently automatically reset by the monthly update program. So, the email_rejected field would not be accurate.
The last issue (so far) was that Sue wanted an NEBridge account for TheFairyGOLDMother. I turned this request over to Gary Peterson, to whom I had provided the credentials for the software that redirected the emails. He had lost the password. I sent it to him again.
1. This trip did not come off as planned. However, I did go on a cruise, as is thoroughly documented here.
2. I am not sure why Peter Marcus, who was the principal tournament director for the district was involved at all. Perhaps Curtis thought that because Peter had worked for DEC, he would understand what I did.
3. No Bulletin was produced for the Presidential Regional, the tournament to which Curtis referred. I had produced the Bulletin for the Optical Regional in November. Thereafter the Bulletin, which cost to district $100 per tournament, was considered too expensive to continue after an informal email poll of members of the Tournament Scheduling Committee.
4. Over the years I sent out perhaps twenty email messages for Sue Miguel. I do not remember that any of those experiences was what I would call fun.
5. Megahertz Computer was Bob Bertoni’s company. In theory they supported the district’s website, but it was difficult to get them to respond to problems and questions.
