Thursday - August 25, 2016

Finishing Strong

We mopped the floor with our opponents last night, taking all 3 games and a total margin of over 100 pins. They were 2 points ahead of us in the standings, but 6 down from the team ahead of them, so our 7-0 win gave us their slot in the standings but wasn’t enough to bridge the points gap into the top 4. So we finished in 5th, and were rewarded a kingly $40 per person. Sweet. Yup, another 3 weeks and we would have been knocking on 1st place. Still, considering we were dead last by 4 points just 7 weeks ago, I think we came back real strong.

I’ve got a couple of new balls on order; the alley’s summer time discount of 40% off created a better price including drilling than any of the online shops would sell me the same balls for without drilling. Sweet.

Winter league starts in 2 weeks. I’m just going to put those balls aside for a little while, not even have them drilled, until I get my release a bit more squared away. I’ve got to my axis tilt and rotation more where they ought to be. Seems like I can either rev the ball up and throw it straight, or rip threw it on the release and get a totally horizontal axis - ie a spinner. Both can make strikes, but neither will hook much at all, so I’m never going to get the kind of entry angle that a big hook shot gives. And that means consistent strikes with a big safety margin. That’s not me. Not yet.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/25/2016 at 08:50 AM   
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   Thursday - August 18, 2016

Almost Made It

We took 5 last night, going 5-2 against the first place team. Not quite enough to knock them off their throne, but enough to give it a big wobble and leave them vulnerable in the finals next week.

I got to play hero twice, putting myself totally in the zone the last few frames of each game to try and pull out a win. That worked in the first game, where I just fixated on the 2nd arrow and threw 9/ X XXX to finish and put 80 on the board for a fat margin win. Tried as hard as I could in Game 2, rolling X X XX9 to add 89 to our score; not enough for a win, but enough so that we lost small, by only 12 pins or so. It wasn’t really necessary in Game 3 because we were well ahead anyway, but I still did X XX9 just for gits and shiggles. I ended the night with a 557 series, which is about where my bowling ought to be.

Next week ... position round, and the parsing of the money. Money honey, woo hoo. Yeah, like $5 each. Ain’t no money in summer league honey.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/18/2016 at 05:23 AM   
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   Monday - August 15, 2016

rats

Dang, nobody posted nothing today.

Hey, we won 5-2 at bowling last week. And Wednesday is our last day of competition; the finals are next week. We’re up against the 1st place team, and if we stomp them they’ll drop like a rock. We’ll never take the lead, but at least we can trash their dreams and enjoy the schadenfreude. Nasty? No, not really. They really aren’t very good bowlers. They’re in the lead because they get such a huge handicap from everyone. If we can get our duckies in a row again we can drop kick them right off the lanes.

Weather for Wednesday night will be cooler and drier. Still warm but not the rain forest kind of swelter we’ve been having. Which is actually typical NJ summer time. Steam bath. Hmm. So maybe that will mean the lane oil will be a bit tackier, and break a little early for a change? An active back end? Cool. That’s just what we want.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/15/2016 at 11:16 PM   
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   Thursday - August 04, 2016

shattered dreams of ascension

Nope. Sorry.

We got burned last night at Summer League, losing 2-5. So our chances of a total come from behind win are gone. Still, with a bit of luck we can manage to float up from dead last to around third. Good enough I guess.

Damn, I just couldn’t get it together last night. “Woulda, shoulda, coulda, didn’t” describes it perfectly. “Mister 9” all night, with a poor conversion percentage. I did make one awesome spare, after a terrible Big Ugly leave of about 6 pins. Kicked the 4 to the inside and took out the 7; the 4 just lay down and scooted across, knocking everything else down slowly. WTH, and I’m keeping it.  At the end of the night I dropped my ball off for a rejuvenation steaming and a resurface sanding. It’s been at least 100 games since I’ve done that. Speaking of 100 games, the alley does these little Thank You credit cards, where they give you X free games and some virtual money you can spend at their restaurant (but not on beers). Since I never get up there to practice, the games have just been accumulating; at this point I’ve got my own personal season, with 95 free games total. That’s 32 weeks of free bowling, 3 games per week. That’s a league of my own.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/04/2016 at 05:34 AM   
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   Friday - July 29, 2016

Digital Evaporation

I lost two posts! There’s something odd between Firefox and the BMEWS editor that comes up when the browser has been open for half a day or longer. It seems to lose a pointer or something, and the posts I submit go off into the digital ether, never to be seen again. Beats me.

Anyway, we won 5-2 in summer league, bowling against our old nemesis team of Ken and his mom. It was a hard fight even with our 57 pin handicap, but we pulled it off. Just barely. We won small and we lost small, and in the end when all the numbers were added up we took wood. By 9 pins. Phew!

In other, less important news, Hillary Clinton accepted the DNC nomination last night. I saw a couple minutes of it, with Slick Willy up next to her on the podium, and I almost puked. She was the victor from a field of one in the primaries, Bernie’s challenge being little more than blown smoke, and the Democrat Machine running full speed behind the scenes to guarantee her “win” before the primary season even opened. The sitting Vice President had no interest in running. Really? When the heck has that ever happened before? It’s all such BS. If they’re going to be all totalitarian about it, and the benighted citizens who call themselves Democrats want Big Party to tell them who their candidate is going to be, then save a few hundred million and God knows how many million citizen hours and stop with the nonsense of “voting”. There never was any choice, it was a done deal since 2008 and we all knew it. All Bernie’s efforts did was to show just how big a bunch of brain dead communists our children really are. Way to go, helicopter parents. Asswipes, every damn one of you. And now the real fight begins, Donald Trump vs the entire world media (our other “betters’ who decide things for us stupid bitter clingers and losers).

Posted by Drew458     on 07/29/2016 at 05:35 AM   
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   Thursday - July 21, 2016

fish don’t fry in the oven, beans don’t burn on the grill

Movin’ On Up

Last night was our 4th consecutive week of winning 7-0 at Summer League bowling. We’ve just been derping along, doing more drinking than hard core rolling. But we finally got our act together and decided to go for it, and we are. We’ve brought ourselves up out of last place, then up and up. When they run this week’s numbers we’ll probably wind up in about 4th or 5th place, with 5 weeks left in the mini season. That’s perhaps enough for us to clinch it if we keep on winning. And there’s really no reason we shouldn’t be winning; this year’s mix of bowlers is pretty low average. Except for our old nemesis, the team of Ken and his Mom. We face them next week, and if we romp on them there will be no stopping us.

Cool.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/21/2016 at 04:32 AM   
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   Thursday - July 07, 2016

rolling along

We took all seven points last night at Summer League. I did Ok, pulling a 547 series. I just missed a 200 on the 3rd game, getting sloppy with my last ball and hitting only 7, which gave me a 198. “Missed it by that much.”

Right. Up with the moles this morning ... far too early for the damn birds. 3am? No, that’s the time to be dead asleep, not waking up. And now it’s nearly 5:30, which is time to get up. Oy. Well, at least I can sleep a little after 9am. Catch a 2 hour nap or something. But I’ve got to run around and drop off pamphlets today, I’ve got to find time to go to the bank and then to the grocery store, and with this heat, I’ve GOT to get some major water down in the gardens. And I might as well scratch a few hundred marigold seeds into the dirt.

And it’s going to be a real sauna today too.

Crap.

I don’t know what woke me up so damn early. It wasn’t a cat. Got Tami up too. But if I find it, I’m gonna kill it.  And then go back to sleep.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/07/2016 at 04:31 AM   
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   Thursday - May 19, 2016

Finally, The Morning After

Oooh! Arrggh!! Curses!! Crivens!! We got destroyed! Aaaah!

Our new teammate Raf opened the summer season like a man on fire, trying for a perfect 300 game. He threw eight strikes in a row before bobbling in the 9th and leaving an open, then he made at least one more strike in the 10th and finished with a 255. Outstanding. We won that game with ease, even though we were giving away 83 pins with the summer league’s 90% handicap. Yay Raf!

Game 2 and Game 3 we ran into a wall, and I think the wall was the back panel to a porta-potty, because we all fell right into the shitter. We’re talking 50, 25, 75 under average. Ouch. Hurting! Our opponents weren’t much better, or much worse, but we couldn’t pull past that handicap and lost both games and the wood, so we finished 2-5 for the night.

Very few familiar faces in the group this summer. Good! Gives me a chance to meet new people and an opportunity to pimp my regular league, in hopes of getting new teams on board.

I have got to clean my ball and then have it resurfaced and baked. It’s probably time for a new ball, but for a $20 visit to the shop I can get it revitalized enough to get me through the summer.

No talk at all at the opening meeting about sanctioning this league. USBC has pushed away the regular members, and I guess we’re all “going Trump”. Good. Eff ‘em with a big sharp rock.

Naomi shows us how to get under the ball and lift, to get maximum revs and the big hook

Posted by Drew458     on 05/19/2016 at 04:58 AM   
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   Wednesday - May 18, 2016

Finally

Summer League starts tonight! Woo hoo!!!

And we even have a third teammate already lined up, a fun guy who can bowl real well.

I’m heading up there right now for dinner at the restaurant, and then the typical first night chaos of summer league.

Gosh, I haven’t thrown a ball in two whole weeks!! It’s been forever!

Posted by Drew458     on 05/18/2016 at 04:32 PM   
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   Saturday - April 23, 2016

another season of league ending

Yup, we’ve come to the end of yet another year of bowling league.

This year’s team managed to fight our way almost to the bottom, and secured that plummet Friday night by losing all 7. We had a good time, but the bowling was almost all pure suck.

OTOH, I did convert the 4-7-10 split. First time ever. In more than a decade of bowling, I’ve made one 6-7-10, the right handed version of this split. And now one 4-7-10, the left handed one. One of each. In how many thousand games? It’s hard to do.

Once upon a time, back in the day when the sanctioning body, the USBC, was the old ABC there may have been a patch award for this. But the USBC has gone super cheap, and all the “fun” awards are gone. They want all the money for their super center bowling alley (one bowling alley, thank you, albeit a big fancy one) and the rest of the country can go screw. You know, I’m kinda pissed off at that.

We used to get a monthly bowling magazine delivered, at least 10 times a year. Gone. Now they have some .pdf thinger online, some jazzed up crap that “turns the pages” when you click the mouse. Bandwidth sucking garbage IMO. But they must be saving a fortune on printing and mailing.

We used to get annual awards for accomplishments, like the above split, or the Big Four split, or an All Spares game, or a Dutch 200. That died a slow painful death. Once upon a time the award was an embroidered iron-on patch. They couldn’t make up their minds with the designs, so some years we had key chains with lovely cast bronze 3D coin sized award fobs. Some years we got a POS clear plastic fob and the award was a slip of paper that went in the middle. Crap. Luggage tags. Zipper pulls. Patches. One year we had gorgeous enameled lapel pins. Things degraded further, and it became a simple rectangular refrigerator magnet. But at least those were annual awards, so you got something for your dues. Now they’ve decided all that “bling” is lifetime based. Bowl a 600 Series, get the patch once, and that’s it. No recognition ever again. And that’s sad, as I really like the lapel pins and wanted to complete the set. But now it’s over’ once you’ve been in a league for a few years and reached your level of growth, you’ve won pretty much every award you’re ever going to get. I don’t think our secretary handed out a single patch pin or magnet this year. Not one. This kind of sucks.

Oh, but sanction your league because of the insurance!! Insurance?? Yes, your secretary will be bonded, so in case they get mugged with the league cash, or run off to Tahiti with the prize fund money, your league is covered. Dude. Dude. Seriously? I doubt if there is a bowling alley in the country that doesn’t work as the banker for every league that it hosts. Pay your dues every week into the little blue envelope. The treasurer takes the cash, counts it up, and delivers it to the front desk. Who immediately take their linage fee, duh. And then put the rest in your “account” in their safe. And if they get robbed, they have business insurance. So the bonded/insured thing is a dud, and no reason to be sanctioned.

Oh, but we’re the keeper of the rules! We make the rules! If you weren’t sanctioned, how could you enforce the rules? Well let’s see ... oh, this is a tough one ... um ... as honest adults, we could all agree to abide by the rules, and if we had to we could argue it out. Or ask mommy. I mean, make an Appeal To Authority and get the judgement of the bowling center owner. And that’s good enough.

Oh, but tournaments! You need to be sanctioned to carry and official national average and do tournaments!! True. You are correct. So the one guy in 300 bowlers who actually gets involved in tournaments, let him get sanctioned. The rest of us can use the money to fill up the gas tank.

Hey, don’t forget 300 games! Those rings! That bling! The fame, the glory!! Eat me. You stopped giving away 300 rings years ago, even the cheaped out rhodium ones. Your own stats say that more than 50,000 300 games are thrown every year. And with the price of gold being what it is, and the introspective awareness that bowling is, well I don’t want to admit it but, rather a sad activity most of the time ... Not too many people are going to drop a grand or more to get a big jock ring to celebrate the one perfect game they’ve thrown. But one of those enameled pins would be nice, thanks.

Actually it may be the case that USBC never has had an award for the 6-7-10, only the Big Four.

Oh shut up Donny.

Posted by Drew458     on 04/23/2016 at 06:49 PM   
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   Saturday - February 27, 2016

stumbling our way upward

So we managed a win last night at Cheap League, going 5-2 for the second week in a row. Last week’s win was a position round victory over the last place team, which was nice. But this week’s win was against our nemesis team, Ken and his Mom. This is the same group that mauled us every fourth week all summer long last year. So some payback was long, long overdue.

Lane conditions last night were flooded. I was going to say something about Noah, but it wasn’t quite that bad. Although, given all the oil and the lack of traction, it was hard to get the balls to make any kind of ark, nyuk nyuk nyuk. And since we won 5, it means that when they said “gopher wood”, we did. Right. No, it was a slippery mess. And it was one of those nights when you lose by sucking just a bit less than the other team. We were all under average all night. And that’s about it. First game us by 24, second game theirs by 76, third game ours by 65, and that gives us the 5-2. With a little bit of luck we should be rising back into the middle of the standings. Not high enough for us to sing the George Jefferson song, but enough so we at least start think of it. 

Posted by Drew458     on 02/27/2016 at 11:37 AM   
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   Saturday - February 13, 2016

absents make the game go faster

Two guys out on my team tonight, neither one pre-bowled so we had to take the 10 pin penalty off their averages and use that as their scores.

One guy absent from our opponent’s team, and he did pre-bowl ... a 141 pin over series. Which gets him one of those pretty lapel pin awards if he doesn’t have one yet.

Right. So we were a bit slow to get going, and lost the first game. Both of us rolled under average, but I wasn’t too much below with a 151. I think we were down about 30 in the wood.

I found the line early in the second game and did my best to be Mr. Machine. After sparing in frames 1 and 2, I started putting the in exactly the right spot, and threw 6 in a row, a 9/, and then X81 in the 10th to just miss the 250 mark with a 248. Which doesn’t suck. At all. And it was enough for us to win by 12, and take a big chunk off our wood deficit. Yeah, but a 248. A 248!! Woo hoo, yay me!

That line didn’t last for all of Game 3, but I took it when I could find it. 4 opens in a row really hurt me, but I got it together and started the strike hammer again, knocking several off to push a dreary 117 in the 7th up to a 195 at the end. Too bad the other side was bowling too, and their absent guy had pre-d a 226 game. On his 162 average. Sweet for them, and they won it and the wood.

So I managed another series just below 600, with another nice spike score over 240 for one, a “thereabouts 200” for another, and a below average warm up game.  I need to warm up more, and I need to find that special line earlier. Because I want that 700 series pin. Oh yes, I want that one bad.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/13/2016 at 12:13 AM   
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   Sunday - February 07, 2016

I am going to beat it

Getting My Groove Back

I’ve had some pretty severe writer’s block lately. I just haven’t been able to hit the keyboard and throw works at this blog and get the posts out. Sure, there’s been some burnout because the stories don’t change. The Middle East is still a mess, Obama is still a traitor masquerading as a fool, Hillary is still a lying, corrupt, murderous thug. And then there’s Trump. And those damn “rapeugees” invading Europe. I start feeling like what’s his name with the rock ... Sissypuss I think he was called, although I may be confusing my mythological Greeks with Carvel ice cream cakes?

Right. Suffering from “KD”. Keyboard Dysfunction. What can you do? [ take one Sophie  Viagra Vergara and contact your doctor for a blogging session that lasts longer than 4 hours? ] I have ideas for posts. I have all sorts of links. I do background research. And then somehow it all just deflates and goes limp, and I have to go to work or do some housework or shopping or whatever.

But I can beat this. I think I can, I think I can, I know I can!

What’s easy to post on? Ah, Fun League. Our little team pretty much sucks this year, but we’re in it for fun. We manage to hit the bottom of the standings and then bounce back a few slots time after time. I think we’re hovering just below 50% wins, which means we are sinking, but slowly. This week we didn’t quite sink. None of us were quite warmed up enough in the first game, posting lousy scores way below average. I threw a 137. Yikes. A guy on the opponent’s team was having the game of his life - we always bring out the very best in our opponents, go figure - and threw a 260. Awsome. A 260 is 2 spares shy of a perfect game, so that fellow was hitting strikes all over the place. Bastard. So we went down in flames in Game 1, losing by something like 156 pins.

Game 2 we woke up, and the other team had shot their load and forgot to take their ”Sophies” or something. So we shined, and they were flat. I tossed a 214 and we won that one by 79. Look out, here we come, gonna eat up your lead and take that wood!

Game 3, not only did I have all my ducks in a row AND had them wired tight, I must have stapled their little feet to the floor so they couldn’t go anywhere [ just an expression. No actual ducks are allowed inside the bowling alley, and running in and out with a staple gun every frame is severely frowned upon. ]. You know it. It turned out that the elusive strike line was half a damn board to the outside on my approach footing. Once I moved, and kept my eye on the target, I just hammered the crap out of the pins. The other guys on my team did well too, but I threw a 240 [ a pile of strikes on the end of a game that started out as a Dutch 200 through the 6th. So we won that last game big time, I just missed a 600 series for the night, and we ... still lost overall wood. But only by 6 pins!

There. I can so post. And throw in a bunch of links, and crack wise, and tell a story.  Now, if only I could convince myself that politics was interesting again, then I could truly get all fired up.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/07/2016 at 09:20 AM   
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   Saturday - December 19, 2015

I missed the 5 pin

Crap. I lost Game 2 for us last night at Fun League.

I’m the anchor this year. It was my turn, the last bowler in the last frame. We were down by 8 after my first ball took out 9 pins. But I had a strike in the 9th, so I could pick up 2 by making the spare. That would put us 6 down and I’d have another throw, where I was practically guaranteed at least 7. I threw, and the ball went just a hair to the right. So I left the open. Grrr. We won the first game by a little bit, and lost the third game by a big bit, so we lost overall wood too.

Oh well.

Posted by Drew458     on 12/19/2015 at 09:38 AM   
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