Phil also made a few thousand calls, and played.
Joe and Sally and Sarah and Matt.
Allan and Faith. Cold, Faith?
Jill played.
Jack and Paula were a team.
"This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."
-T.S. Eliot
Maybe the world, Tom, but not our season. Nope, between drops and deluges and in the cold and the darkness, people are playing. On Saturday, a dreary Eliotesque day in Cambridge, the Mixed Doubles tournament took place. We had twelve teams play. We had a cook-out. People hung out, chatted, ate and drank and made excuses for missed shots. (Next year, next year.) Some glory goes to Rick Rose who made approximately 400,000 phone calls to bring the tournament off.
Good show, CTC. The Finals, by the way, between Michelle Schafer /David Hemenway and Molly Downer/Ken Turnbull, will take place next weekend at a time as yet unscheduled. (The Finals couldn't be played yesterday due to the drizzle.)
The club's Closing Party will take place on Sunday, November 6, from 5:30 to 7:30.
Our season ends on November 11. Please play as much as possible before that date.
We've heard once again from one of our favorite correspondents:
...(The newsroom staff) seem(s) so sad about the season ending. And oh, the riff about the diminishing daylight. So sad. I am sending along some thoughts that I hope will cheer you up.
I worry that you are hung up on the Second Law of Thermodynamics which Law I've already explained. This Law is all about entropy and loss, degradation, wasted energy and so on. I am afraid that you are dwelling much too much on the Second Law, especially at this time of year.
Ponder instead the First Law of Thermodynamics which states that matter cannot be either created or destroyed. Are bells in your brain going boing right now? They should be, those brain bells.
When daylight decreases seasonally, Nature doesn't decrease. it can't! It's Against the Law! What happens is daylight is compressed. All the Nature and all the fun and all the daylight and all the tennis get compressed, cooked down to essences. There is more nature per daylight hour. I have the equation here somewhere.
At this time of year, you should revel constantly in whatever daylight there is and sing to yourself the First Law of Thermodynamics Song.
"Matter can't be created;
Matter can't be destroyed;
The Law can't be debated;
The Law is already deployed.
Your spirits should be buoyed.
Boy oh buoyed."
-Nature Girl
"On the court, tennis players exchange not only ground strokes but lots of information. It’s a richly interactive sport, both verbally and non-verbally. If players communicate clearly, simply, and consistently, the game will proceed more quickly, and with less fuss and misunderstanding. Here are a few guidelines that can make the game more fun, friendly, and fair for all...."
We've had some requests to run Craig Lambert's piece, sampled above, on Tennis Communication. (We'd better leave this link up on the newspage permanently.)
Take a look
Some useful links:
Head of the Charles Regatta (Nifty graphics, dim text, we think.)
And here's a link to the espn site, with pro ranking.
And a club member (let's call him Sol) suggested a link to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I. The site is rich.
The club book, right now, should be right by your hand. The website also has up-to-date info. The Rules section, the Governors and Committees and Activities (tournaments, round robins, etc) sections are current for 2005. Also, the Waiting List (which is not featured in the book) is current and ordered on the website. (The Waiting List and the list of New Members can be accessed through the FAQ page.) We thank the committee heads for making the information available in such a timely fashion and we urge all public spirited readers to proof-read.
'Members', and' Reservation Requests' are not active parts of the site nowadays. 'Timelines' is for adepts.
We'll keep the tournament draws available on-line (including all of the results), thanks to the Java Kid:
And the previous tournaments:
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Tournaments |
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And here's the saga of 2002's tournaments (so's we can compare and contrast):
And the saga of the year before (we're mighty fancy here, and mighty grateful to the Java Kid for doing all this work):
Phew.
The Yearbook link will take you to the last newspage from 2004. From there you can see the whole of the Persistant Archive of last year's news.
Website Note: The time and temperature icon below is a link to a Boston weather site.
Joe DeBassio, Webmaster
Website Note II: The honey-comb icon is also a link. It takes the clicker to an archive of all the past news pages so that you can read the news pages for the whole year (2004). The less-than link (<) next to the honeycomb icon will take you to the last issue of the newspage.
