minding Nemo
Of the 215 Scrabble tournaments that I've registered for, I only failed to attend two of them due to weather. In fact, it had only happened once prior to this weekend, and contrary to the subject of this entry, I didn't mind the snowstorm all that much for these reasons:
1) I managed to get a full refund for my airline ticket
2) Ditto for the entry fee (I never got a refund for my other no-show, but I believe it's a director decision)
3) I didn't have to do any shoveling. Tony Plow does my parking lot, and my car was conveniently at my parents' house. I needed someone to move my car ahead of time regardless of whether or not I would get out of here in time, since our parking lot needed to be carless by the following morning.
4) It gave me ample time to work on Project Scrabboterica.
What's Project Scrabboterica, you ask? Basically a Scrabble project that will likely interest only the most data obsessed people such as myself, but I've gotten more help on it than I had expected. I started this yahoogroup just over a year ago:
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/contestantscorecards
Virtually no activity has taken place on there since ragaman cofounded the group, but I had a few members join, who may have already forgotten that they did so. I figured there would be no harm in advertising it on here, in case I get some unexpected lurker to discover it.
More recently, I've been asking for score submissions. redessence recently told me that he would be sending me scores, which I hope to eventually be able to add to cross-tables.com. In addition to that, I've been searching for every reference in every newsletter, be it the Scrabble News, Medleys, or Lee Cooper's tourney news, I can usually at least find a player or two who attended a tournament that is not yet credited for attending one. Ideally, I hope to at least know everyone who attended each tournament. Most tourneys throughout the early 1990s only have the top half standings from each division, since that was apparently all that the Matchups publication had room for. In certain instances, I receive some either handwritten or typed up standings by the director. The prehistoric cross-tables had no spreads, so it took a combo of standings and prehistoric cross-tables to make them look like today's version of them.
This may all sound outrageous, but I've had several players who had most or all of their game scores going back as far as 1981, including ragaman, Jim Kramer, Steve Oliger, Joel Horn, Louie Muller, and most recently Paul Epstein, who got me into this in the first place. Maybe I should get someone out there to sign the pointiest petitions of them all!
1) I managed to get a full refund for my airline ticket
2) Ditto for the entry fee (I never got a refund for my other no-show, but I believe it's a director decision)
3) I didn't have to do any shoveling. Tony Plow does my parking lot, and my car was conveniently at my parents' house. I needed someone to move my car ahead of time regardless of whether or not I would get out of here in time, since our parking lot needed to be carless by the following morning.
4) It gave me ample time to work on Project Scrabboterica.
What's Project Scrabboterica, you ask? Basically a Scrabble project that will likely interest only the most data obsessed people such as myself, but I've gotten more help on it than I had expected. I started this yahoogroup just over a year ago:
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/contestantscorecards
Virtually no activity has taken place on there since ragaman cofounded the group, but I had a few members join, who may have already forgotten that they did so. I figured there would be no harm in advertising it on here, in case I get some unexpected lurker to discover it.
More recently, I've been asking for score submissions. redessence recently told me that he would be sending me scores, which I hope to eventually be able to add to cross-tables.com. In addition to that, I've been searching for every reference in every newsletter, be it the Scrabble News, Medleys, or Lee Cooper's tourney news, I can usually at least find a player or two who attended a tournament that is not yet credited for attending one. Ideally, I hope to at least know everyone who attended each tournament. Most tourneys throughout the early 1990s only have the top half standings from each division, since that was apparently all that the Matchups publication had room for. In certain instances, I receive some either handwritten or typed up standings by the director. The prehistoric cross-tables had no spreads, so it took a combo of standings and prehistoric cross-tables to make them look like today's version of them.
This may all sound outrageous, but I've had several players who had most or all of their game scores going back as far as 1981, including ragaman, Jim Kramer, Steve Oliger, Joel Horn, Louie Muller, and most recently Paul Epstein, who got me into this in the first place. Maybe I should get someone out there to sign the pointiest petitions of them all!