Wednesday - September 29, 2010

Busy Morning

Up in the morning ‘fore the rising sun
making some money, getting things done

Started my day off by repairing an office door and doing some soldering to repair a lamp for a precision optical instrument. The soldering was pretty easy. I used a good silver solder so that little connection is never ever going to come loose again. Fixing the door was bit harder. It’s another one of those outside hinged external doors, weighs about 200lbs. The top hinge is just a rider. All it is is a floating pin locked in place by a set screw. The lower pin is used to adjust the height of the door above the threshold. So pretty much the entire weight of the door is carried by the 3/4” inch diameter aluminum pin, which is screwed into the door’s lower hinge bracket. Turns out the thing rides on a thrust washer that’s down in the bottom of the frame’s hinge cup bracket, and this one had worn right through. The proper part is about the size and thickness of a nickel and is probably made from hardened steel. I greased two dimes and put them in, because that’s what I had. Seems to be working fine, and now the adjusting pin has some range to work with again. Hey, if it wears out in 6 months I’ll go and spend a dollar on the proper part. Now that I know how to take this kind of door apart, and now that I own a proper gigantic screwdriver to do that with, I can have the door on and off in 4 minutes or less. So both tasks ate up an hour and some this morning, and I was done long before the office opened at 8:30. Cha-ching! Pay me please, thank you!

Bowling mini-blogging: 602. Me!! Last night. First one in ages. And even with a 217 pin net handicap, Team Loser still lay down and died, twice. Once by 3, once by 19. Horry clap.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/29/2010 at 12:16 PM   
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   Tuesday - September 21, 2010

Just Missed, Again

I may have mentioned once or twice that I bowl? Yeah. Well, I was in a downward slump for quite a while, half of last winter season and most of this summer. So I finally bit the bullet and got a lesson, and stopped using one of my balls that was drilled too long.

The lesson stopped me from making me “bowl small”. For years everyone has told me “Slow down Drew, slow down!”. And I did. But it cramped me. My swing was really short and my approach was perhaps 6 feet long, and I wound up muscling the ball up and out to get any kind of hand on it. Moving to a natural approach was like waking from a nightmare. I’m very adaptable, so changing my timing wasn’t a real issue. To keep myself walking slow, I now do almost the entire pushaway before starting my first step. And by taking small steps the timing works out just right, so that I can take my last step and go into a low and slow lunge with a foot of slide just as the ball comes forward past my heel. Thumb out, hand turned, snap those fingers and swing the arm up - elbow locked!! - and drive through the ball. I’m not ready for the “answer the phone” elbow snap yet. Whenever I try to do it I pull the shot, because I’m snapping it too early. It’ll come with time. Patience Drew.

So I’m still not Mr. Rev, but I’m getting a lot more on the ball without any apparent effort. And along with a change in my swing and approach I’ve taken a deeper out and back line. And it seems to be working. At least until my arm gets tired deep in the second game. Then I start to throw inside, managing to spin the ball almost right down the middle. Hey, that gets strikes too. So I move a couple boards to the left and really focus on my target, and that gets me back in the groove for another 6 or 7 frames.

I’m bowling two nights a week now. Monday is my regular league, but I was invited to bowl in the Tuesday group. Sponsored actually. There’s money in an envelope for me at the desk, so it doesn’t cost me a thing. Plus I get a slice of the prize money, though I intend to give all of that back except for gas expenses. It’s free practice for me, and that’s prize enough.

I threw a 576 Monday night, starting with a 213 and then holding in the 180s. We won 5 out of 7. I threw a 588 tonight, but we got slaughtered. So that’s two 600 series I just missed by a single mark. Upset? Bothered? Disappointed? Heck no. I’m throwing a 190 or better average. I’m more than happy with that. It’s a long, loong way up from a 170 average, when half the time I was throwing 140s.

The Tuesday league has some really superb bowlers on it. Really superb. Everyone on the team we played tonight had a 200+ average, and 3 of them threw in the 240s the first game. 2 of those 3 threw in the 240s the second game, and one guy kept it going by tossing a 268 in the third for a 759 series. Horry clap. We fought them pretty well, turning in scores well over average, but they were just on fire; even with a 132 pin net handicap we just couldn’t hold them off across 10 frames. And we lost all 3, 0-7. Actually, my Tuesday team is in dead last place. In 3 weeks of this season so far we’ve managed to win 2 games. Ouch. But we have a rather impressive pin total nonetheless, which shows that we never made it easy for any of our opponents. Not that that really matters. Hey, maybe we’ll win a game next week.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/21/2010 at 09:26 PM   
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   Wednesday - September 01, 2010

More Bowling!

Yes, yes, it’s time for winter league already!

We finished off summer league 2 weeks ago, and wound up in 3rd place ... and collected our massive $19.25 per person prize money. Killer. But it was fun, and that’s what matters.

I got out and practiced twice in the week off between seasons, and spent considerable effort trying to clean my collection of balls and get the oil out of them. Lots of detergent and alcohol later, and they may actually be Ok. A new set of fingertip inserts in one ball, and I’m good to go. I thought. No, the balls seemed to be slipping off my hand. Bad. So I got out the thumb tape tool and put some fresh tape in the thumbholes. And kept right on doing it; one ball now has 4 layers of tape inside. A loose thumb is not good. Sure, you’d think that would mean you could get your thumb out nice and easy, and that’s true. But you want your thumb to come out easy only when you want it to, not when centripetal acceleration pulls the ball off your hand. So with those extra layers of tape, I’ve got a more secure grip. And it turns out that that allows me to put a whole lot more action on the ball. I’m liking that. Nearly double the number of revs I was doing before, and I can now “git ‘er out there’ easier, several feet past the dirt and mess up at the foul line.

Result? Over the summer I was struggling terribly, and managed to drop my average down to 165. First night of winter league, where I have a 170 average, I threw a 542, which is a 180 average - 10 points better.

Then I got called in to be a long term sub for the Miller Lite Tuesday league - I’ll be bowling for free for 8 weeks, perhaps a lot longer - and the first night of that one I threw a 556, which is a 186 average. It would have been over 190, but I blew a few right corner spares. I’ve given up trying to use a special ball and a special throw for that corner, and am just using my strike ball and throw, so I have to learn the new line. Just going 6 boards to the left doesn’t work, because that puts the ball out into the dry way too soon, and it winds up coming back too much, missing either the 6 or the 10 by a frustrating hair. So I’m trying for a more centered line that’s deeper into the oil. I’m pretty close, but those 3 opens in game 2 probably cost me a 600 series. I made all of them in the 3rd game and rolled a 213.

My Monday team went 2-5, boo, poor showing. I don’t know how my Tuesday team fared. 2 of the 5 guys on the other team were bowling for average, and that league uses the 3-6-9 method for calculating entering average, plus their handicap is individual, 80%, based on a 240. Too complicated for me, so I’ll let the Secretary figure it out. But at least the Tuesday league uses your book average for the first 9 games, unlike the Monday league that just uses it for the first 3. I think using the book average for the first 9 or 12 discourages sandbagging, and it encourages getting your bowlers to practice a bit before league begins. All I know is that I’m one beer down to Rick, who was on the opposing team last night. We’d bowled together in this league 3 years ago, and we’re both subbing there now, so we went head to head for beers. He got me twice, I got him once. And that was scratch; Rick is 40 points better than I am, book. I shoulda gotta handi!

Somewhere around mid-season Miller sends the Miller girls around to all their leagues. T-shirts, prizes, free beer, and some amazingly good looking young women in really tight sexy referee outfits. Hope my subbing lasts that long!

Posted by Drew458     on 09/01/2010 at 10:46 AM   
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   Tuesday - July 27, 2010

Interesting Emails and bowling stuff

Here are two of my newer BMEWS fans:

That’s Harold on the left, a domesticated “Rouen” Mallard, and Skokie, a “Khaki Campbell” on the right. I hear that they are Conservative, home schooled ducks, who would rather climb than swim. Their owners go to great lengths to protect them from the leftist turkeys in the woods who try to harass them all the time.

What, you were expecting a bowling post, just because it’s Tuesday night? Ok fine. We won 2 games but lost the wood by 12. My team was utterly dead tonight, so I had to bowl my ass off so we’d win anything. I threw a 166, 188, 224 for a 578 series against that family team of spaz bowlers who is still in first place. So we narrowed the gap by 1. Whoopee-do. Sorry, I’m a bit cranky. Even fun-time summer league is hard to stay completely emotionally detached from, and when your #2 team mate throws 7 opens in a row it gets nerve wracking. Like, Dude, could you do any worse if you tried? Actually, yes he could. He threw a gutter ball on a double in game 2. Then recovered and threw 9 with the 2nd ball.

So I said to hell with it all and stopped off at the beer store on the way home. I’ve got to work in the morning so I’m limiting myself to 2. So I bought the Sam Adams Imperial Double Bock, which turns out to be nearly 10% alcohol. So my “just two” is closer to “almost four”. Tastes great; really really heavy beer. Not overly sweet either. Thick enough to cut slices off of and eat them with a fork. Half a pound of malt goes into making every bottle they say. Yikes.

Harold and Skokie, the home schooled fowl that are BMEWS fans. And yeah, that’s a real log cabin. Ain’t that great? 

Is it true that right wing ducks fly in counter-clockwise circles? They should, if you think about it.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/27/2010 at 08:49 PM   
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   Tuesday - July 20, 2010

Took Six

Another bowling miracle. We won every game tonight. Mostly. Actually, we tied the first game. That’s fairly rare, so in tying both teams get half the points. So we got 1+2+2+1=6.

I gave up on the out & back line, and just went down and in, and threw a 195 and a 203. The oil was strange again tonight. People were leaving splits all over the place. And not the usual splits. Weird stuff, like 1-2-7-9. I think a long even pattern will do that, with a very clean and dry back end. Balls were going too fast, breaking late but really hard. The edges weren’t as grabby as they usually are. I was playing the 5 and 6 boards without any early breaking.

So this will move us up a little, but it won’t close the gap on the leaders. They took 7, against the team that tromped us last week. TANJ.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/20/2010 at 08:53 PM   
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   Wednesday - July 14, 2010

stomped but working

We lost last night, 2-5. It was hard fought, but that’s how it goes sometimes.

Conditions were really strange the first game. I can’t really describe it, but the whole league had really bad scores that game. We did terribly, 3 of us throwing a 139 and me scrubbing the toilet with a 124. Our opponents didn’t fare much better, even though every one of them has a 200+ average - we had a 123 pin handicap. But the lanes just weren’t cooperating. We did a lot better in game 2, but to no avail. One guy on the other team threw 11 strikes. I got lucky and matched him for most of the game, throwing 8 myself, but leaving an open in the 5th, so my 211 came out far shy of his 275. So we got slaughtered in that one, even though our team total was well over 800 for that game. Game 3 saw a lot of splits and lots of weird splits all up and down the lanes. I took a straighter line and pulled a 170 something, while the guys on the other team didn’t adapt. So we pulled ahead a little, and held onto that lead even through their 8th frame surge. Woo hoo, we won a whole 2 points. But it was hard competition so that’s Ok.

Back to work again; I’ve got a 2-3 day window job. It’s going to be a challenge, since it’s raining today and might rain more tomorrow. That makes going up on a ladder a no-no, so I’ll be working inside. Hope her A/C is working well; doing windows in high humidity is difficult because nothing evaporates. That leads to a whole lot of wiping, which tends to leave streaks. See you in a couple of days.

Update: Rats! Customer called me up as I was loading up the Satrun. It’s pouring for the 2nd straight day at her place and her windows are all fogged. So let’s push the job back. And she has carpet cleaners and painters coming in next week, so let’s push it back further. Hey, that’s how it goes. I try not to let customers push me around, but I can’t control the weather. And it really does suck trying to do windows in the rain. Well, at least I got up nice and early, so maybe I’ll spend the day doing stuff around here. Or go bowling. Or something. I know, I can call Sears for the great Dishwasher Recall Event

Incidents/Injuries: Maytag has received 12 reports of dishwasher heating element failures that resulted in fires and dishwasher damage, including one report of extensive kitchen damage from a fire. No injuries have been reported.

Description: The recall includes Maytag®, Amana®, Jenn-Air®, Admiral®, Magic Chef®, Performa by Maytag® and Crosley® brand dishwashers with plastic tubs and certain serial numbers. The affected dishwashers were manufactured with black, bisque, white, silver and stainless steel front panels. The brand name is printed on the front of the dishwasher. The model and serial numbers are printed on a label located inside the plastic tub on a tag near the left side of the door opening. Serial numbers will start or end with one of the following sequences.

SERIAL number STARTING with
NW39, NW40, NW41, NW42, NW43, NW44, NW45, NW46, NW47, NW48, NW49, NW50, NW51, NW52, NY01, NY02, NY03, NY04, NY05, NY06, NY07, NY08, NY09, NY10, NY11, NY12, NY13, NY14, NY15, NY16, NY17, NY18, NY19

OR SERIAL number ENDING with
JC, JE, JG, JJ, JL, JN, JP, JR, JT, JV, JX, LA, LC, LE, LG, LJ, LL, LN, LP, LR, LT, LV, LX, NA, NC, NE, NG, NJ, NL, NN, NP, NR

Sold at: Department and appliance stores and by homebuilders nationwide from February 2006 through April 2010 for between $250 and $900.

Consumer Contact: For additional information, contact Maytag at (800) 544-5513 anytime, or visit the firm’s website at http://www.repair.maytag.com

It took us 5 years to wrangle a new dishwasher out of the landlord. And it’s a pretty decent model that works well and is fairly quiet. And it hasn’t set the condo on fire, not even once! But a recall is a recall, so you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.

PS - 6 different “brands” of dishwasher listed are all actually the same company. So much for competition in the free market, what what?

Posted by Drew458     on 07/14/2010 at 06:29 AM   
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   Tuesday - July 06, 2010

Down and then up again

I should have just given up years ago. Seriously. I seem to only be able to bowl well when I don’t try. Go figure.

We played “Mr. 300’s” team again tonight, and whupped them severely in all 3 games. After being in first place last week, then losing all 7, we dropped to 4th. This 7 will put us back up again. Hey, it’s a very tiny, short league, so the numbers can change really fast.

I did Ok the first game. Nothing great, about a 150 I think. Maybe a 130. All I recall is that I could not get the ball to move. I even gave up my out-n-back line, and went with the down-n-in line I thought I’d put behind me ages ago. Even that didn’t help much. Mr. 300 pulled a 223, our anchor Rex went 222, and with the bit of handicap we had (39) we managed to win by about a dozen.

Game 2 I quit trying. Since the ball seems to zoom off my longer than average arms no matter how slowly I walk, I decided to hardly walk at all. No step-out on the push away, wait until the ball is down in front of my knees, then take a baby step a mere half a shoe long. Swing free, the ball goes back, and I take another baby step. Coming forward I’m not crouching or bending forward, and I take another very short step. Eyes down on the target as the ball comes through, my last step is not a lunge, just another short step. Turn the hand, elbow locked, pull the thumb ... feel it, feel it ... now! Snap up on the lifters and carry through all the way, one smooth motion and “answer the phone”. And the ball launches off my hand, glides through the air a good 6 or more feet while building up some decent rev, hits on the 14 and skids out ... still revving strongly ... finds the breakpoint and turns in, almost, almost, yes! Into the pocket. BLAMM! Strike. And again. And again. And again. Then I pulled it a little and left the 10, so I tried the same “grandpa” approach with a flat hand, thumb up. And drove my strike ball right across the lane with no hook and nailed the 10er right in the middle. Dink. 9/! But I kept grandpa-ing it, and the strikes kept coming. I finished with a 223. Nice! And that served to get my team hot, so even though Mr. 300 pulled a 243 and the rest of his team did well, we smeared them. By 138 pins. Woo hoo!

I am not going to mess with a good thing, so I kept right on bowling like I was 129 years old. My entire approach, from the middle dots, was about 40 inches. I was letting go of the ball at least 5 feet behind the foul line, so I guess my ball was gliding - I wouldn’t call it lofting - at least 12 feet before touching the boards. At this point the other team started doing some serious drinking, and never came closer than the 97 pins we were up by the 3rd frame. I finished with a 211. We won that one big time, I think by 173. Total destruction!  Our team total was an 759 for the 3rd, plus handi for an 798. Not bad at all!!

I try really hard to use a free swinging arm, but I’m wondering if I’ve been muscling the ball the last bit. I want so very much to come “through the ball” and to “rip the cover right off” to get some rev ... have I been lifting up too early this whole time, when my hand is still moving forward not upwards? That would explain the excess ball speed. Come on, a grandpa approach and a release from 5 feet back? The ball should have hooked 2 lanes over by the time it got to the pins. Not tonight! Tonight it either went out easy and back hard, or, if I threw inside a bit, it went straight down and broke hard really late on a very inside (15 board) line. Whatever!  I want to have a good technique, but sometimes it’s just nice to blast the crap out of the pins and get some good scores.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/06/2010 at 09:02 PM   
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   Wednesday - June 30, 2010

Skunked

Ratz. We got trampled at bowling league last night, 0-7. We were in first place for 1 whole week. Alas, no more. If I can ever stop totally sucking at this game maybe we can get it back. The cash prize for first is “huge” in this little league, a whole $100. The league started with 7 1/2 teams, which was 8 teams in the rotation. That’s the perfect size for a 15 week season; everybody plays each team twice, then you have 1 week for the finals. That didn’t last. Now it’s 6 teams, and at least 1 pre-bowls each week. And the schedule is all screwed up too. I guess they made the adjustment by just snipping out the teams that dropped or something, I don’t know, but we’ve played a couple of the other teams twice already while not playing the last team at all yet. And 5 doesn’t go into 14 evenly, so there will be 1 team we only play twice. Bah. But that’s summer league sometimes. I’m starting to think that the Wednesday night group might be better, as they have 18 teams. The Tuesday night league might be dying.

If I ran things, I’d get all the teams together on one night, but have several small leagues of 8 and only 1 week of position rounds. That way you get a fair rotation. 18 teams in a 15 week season means there will be 4 teams you never even bowl against, and that’s BS. It’s 1 team worse when such a league does the typical 2 weeks of position rounds.

We played that family team last night, the folks we opened the season with. The ones who were sandbagging it totally. Looks like they have stopped doing that; they creamed us by 126 the first game, then hung back in the second game waiting for us to finish and then beat us by 2. We tried to rally in the 3rd game and were actually ahead in most of the first 9 frames, but then they “miraculously” came from behind with a 10th frame that was mostly Xs and took us by 20 or something. I didn’t even bother to note the score.

There are an infinite number of ways to bowl. There is no one style or method that gets the job done best. There are crankers and strokers and tweeners, but those are only loose categories that fit the better bowlers. In a rinky dink league like this one you see everything under the sun. It can be interesting and amusing to watch, but anyone who has had a bit of training in the classic methods can find it irritating after awhile. Especially when they get their asses whupped by Ugly Bowling. That was us last night. Arrggh! I did get one domino strike that provided some comic relief.

This family team does everything “wrong” and that makes me grind my teeth. They do it consistently though, so it works for them!! Dad weebles up to the foul line, his timing varying by hours. He plants his left foot, comes to a stop, and then slangs the ball, coming over the top and around the ball so far that his right arm goes horizontal. His throw looks like he’s wiping down a table. Every bit of coaching I’ve ever had says that this is a disaster waiting to happen. And yet his ball hooks, and goes into the pocket. Son uses a pinch grip that squeezes the ball between his thumb and middle finger. He races to the line, almost running as his arm swings out and away from his body like a sidearm pitch in softball. And then he fires the ball down the 15 board as his hand comes up and makes a window wiping arc to his left. Another disaster in the making? Once again, every bit of training I’ve ever had says yes. But that arc and that wipe put a bit of counter-clockwise rotation on the ball, thumb hole to the rear, and with it’s great speed the ball flares in a few boards and hits like a thunderclap. He rolled a 223 last night. Big sister is their least bowler and uses something like a classic straight ball approach, throwing from near the right gutter down and across the lane into the pocket. She isn’t putting any sideways rev on the ball and I don’t think it’s even rolling forward faster than the ball is moving. Her throw isn’t fast, isn’t slow, and isn’t superbly accurate, but if her ball finds either pocket most times it will strike. The part that makes me roll my eyes is that she can nail the headpin square on and also get strikes. This isn’t supposed to happen. Or is only supposed to happen once in a while. She manages it more than half the time. Maybe her ball weighs 30 pounds or something. Little sister throws through the deepest oil. She uses a luggage throw, the weakest possible release that will impart a little rev on the ball. 3 step approach, stop, ball swings forward at waist height, thumb comes out and ball falls off her stiff fingers. It gets about 4 spins in as it goes down the lane. Her release point is right down the 20 board, dead center in the lane, and my guess is that she aims somewhere down the 15 board. But with a slow throw, those 4 little revs are enough to move the ball in, and since she launches through the deep oil, the ball moves in late. Into the pocket. For a strike. But her ball is going at the wrong angle!! Every bit of coaching, training, or pity aid I’ve had from the alley employees tells me the same thing: to get a strike you want your ball to come in to the 1-3 pocket at a 19 degree angle to the center line, revving axis 45 degrees to the left, so that deflection is minimized and the ball hits the 1-3-5-9 pins. At best she is hitting 1-3-6-9. But that gets her strikes and her average is higher than mine.

Wonder boy, the kid who lives and works at the alley, threw another 300 last night. He’s a super cranker, and throws out between the 3 and the 4 arrow, really deep right out to the edge of the lane. We’re talking his 2 board, or even his 1. But he revs the daylights out of his ball, and it comes back hard. It accelerates into the pocket, parallel to the front row with a matching angle on the ball and a perfectly vertical rotation. Which means his ball (he’s left handed) take out 2 fulls rows by hitting the 1-2-3-5-6-9-10 and usually blasts 2 messengers from each side across the deck and back. Without trying too hard he usually carries a 245 average. At 23 I think he has over 200 perfect games to his credit. Bastard.

I have decided that there are no experts or coaches worth listening to. Everything that they say is a bad thing is actually a great thing for somebody. I don’t think it matters a jot how you throw the ball as long as you can repeat that throw frame after frame. Use the heaviest ball you can hang onto and just chuck it. The pros you see on TV? Bah. They’re just the pretty style boys and girls, all throwing minor variations on the classic methods. I really am beginning to doubt that they bowl any better than the ham handed oafs who trounce us at league. And I’m beginning - no, long past just beginning - to come to the conclusion that my years worth of trying to learn those styles has been a total waste of time.

Posted by Drew458     on 06/30/2010 at 07:33 AM   
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   Wednesday - May 26, 2010

Summer League Confusion

Well, I think we won 5 out of 7 last night. It’s hard to say.

Last week, I figured we were beat bad, 2-5. But it turned out that our new guy didn’t have an established average, so the scorekeeper went with what he rolled, which cut 42 pins off of our team total. And that turned the ex post facto handicap around to our advantage, so we are on the books as having won 5-2.

Going into last night, it looked like we were picking up 56 pins worth of handicap. But it turned out that 2 of the guys who had played on that team last week were just subs. Temps. They weren’t back this week, and won’t be on that team, but they did pick up Mel Jr. I know Mel - there’s a whole family of them, and he’s actually Mel Senior even if his name is Mel Jr - from way back. And the 4th position became a vacancy. Recalculate everything, and we ended up giving away 46 pins in handicap instead. It didn’t matter, as my wife pulled out a 200 in game 2, and our anchor Rex really came through at the end of game 3. So we took two games, plus wood, for a 5-2. Next week that team will replace it’s vacant slot with Mel Jr’s son Mel 3. And yes, there is a Mel 4 out there, although he’s still in diapers and won’t be old enough to bowl for a few years yet. Then again, maybe Mel Jr’s daughter will join up instead. Mel-isa. Slight shortage of names in that family.

I sucked. I’m so tired of that. Time to clean my ball and try and get a bit of practice in. I’m crossing the 2nd arrow, using an angled approach, trying to roll to the outside of the breakpoint box. But instead of turning my hand from the wrist and snapping the ball off inline with the swing, my hand goes slow and I wind up pushing the ball down the line my turned hand is in. Which means straight down the old 2nd arrow line, and in. Low angle, low rev: low results. So I try to “git ‘er out there” by delaying my release a bit. That kinda works, giving me the line I want and enough revs to get the job done, but the ball tends to stay airborne for a good 10 feet and often breaks late because of that. Must slow down my approach. Must NEVER pull my elbow back. MUST figure out when to pull my thumb out, and to pull it out fully. Must complete the follow through and not jerk to a stop. Bad habits are hard to break.

So we think we did well. We’ll have to see how the secretary scores things ... I’m not sure if Mel’s book average from 2 years ago will be acceptable, in which case he was rolling for average last night, and I really have no idea what impact that will have, since I didn’t keep a copy of everyone’s scores.

I’m also thinking that this Tuesday night league might be dying this year. We’ve got 8 teams. On paper. I’m not sure that 2 of them even came last night. Maybe they prebowled. Whatever, it’s summer league. But the Wednesday group has a solid 18 teams. Yeah, there’s an imbalance. And with a 15 week season, 8 teams is the perfect size for a league. Play each team twice, then one night for finals.

Posted by Drew458     on 05/26/2010 at 09:44 AM   
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   Tuesday - May 18, 2010

Curses, out-tacticalled again

Summer bowling league started tonight. For the 4th year in a row we’re doing the Tuesday night group. Maybe this isn’t such a great idea, because it’s only 7 or 8 teams. The hardcore men’s league comes in on our heels, so the squeeze is on us to finish early and skeedaddle. Although with stale lanes, I can’t say just how really hardcore they’re going to be. Bunch of nonsense IMO, as our lanes were seriously breaking down after just 2 games. Hey alley folks, how about actually spreading some oil out there?

And we started the season off by losing. Hey, this is a different team. My wife and I, our friend Rex, and whoever. This year whoever is this fellow John. Together our team has a 694 book average. We played a family team tonight. Father, son, two daughters. We know these folks. Been bowling against them in leagues for ages. None of them bowled in a winter bowling league this year, but son bowled in a Sport Bowling league. And the USBC does not yet have the averages up for the winter season. ( Boo hiss, lazy ass USBC. Take our money, screw us over by eliminating lots of the fun awards we used to try for, and fall down on the job when we need you. ) But these folks have all been bowling for ages, and if you go back an extra year looking up their numbers, then their team average is 691. Just 3 pins less than ours.

Problem is, any league can write the bylaws that define entering averages, and the boilerplate bylaws for the summer leagues are really lazy. So they just say this year’s past winter league. And that’s as far as they go. They don’t count any summer league, or any winter league older than last season, or anything like that.

So the whole family had to “bowl for average”, even though we knew it was a total crock. And for extra fun, the league had voted at the start-up meeting to use a 90% handicap. So we bowled. Scratch points, we won the first game by a little bit. We were about 30 pins over average, they were about 24 pins behind us. Son bowled a 214. He’s a junior in college; I’ve known him since he was in high school. He’s a 200+ average bowler, always. We stayed pretty much on course for the 2nd game and their scores dropped. We were sitting down by the lanes, they were up on the tables behind us. We could hear them talking averages and running numbers on their cell phone pocket calculators. One sister even reminded the other, right on the approach, that they were bowling for averages. To put it bluntly, they totally sandbagged it. We took the 2nd game by maybe 50. Rex made the 6-7-10, and that’s a thing of beauty. No prize for that anymore. Son bowled a 179. We won the 3rd game scratch as well, but not by a lot. Our new guy is a major cranker, and he couldn’t adjust to the rapidly declining lane conditions and was over-hooking like mad. Having gone a mere 3 over average in the first 2 games, I finally got all my shit in one sock and threw 20 over for a 190. Happy me. Son threw a 114.

These kind of scores are pretty much expected; their team is just as good as ours is. It’s just that we had to bowl against our averages, and they didn’t. Because of loose rules. So when we added up all the numbers, their “actual” against our book, and took 90% of that, they got 47 pins per game. Which means we lost at least 2, possibly all 3 games, and they also took wood.

You know, I’m getting more than a bit tired of the BS built into league bowling. The handicap system, unless it’s 100%, is strongly weighted towards the higher average team. In a typical 80% handicap league, they can bowl below average and still win. The lower average team has to have a superb night just to break even. That can’t be right. It’s a false handicap. Hey, you can run the 100 yard dash in 5 seconds. I can run it in 10 seconds. Let’s race! But to make things “fair”, you’ll give me a 3 second head start. Nice. Who’s going to win almost every time we run? You are. That’s how bowling league handicap works. It only looks fair. It’s a sucker’s game. Even a 100% handicap still favors the better team, but it goes a longer way towards leveling the playing field than the 80% handicap.

And there has to be a way to stop this sandbagging. I don’t know what the solution is, but I’m mulling over ideas. Perhaps a universal rule for entering averages that a league can’t rewrite? “Any sanctioned league you bowled in, anywhere, in the last 5 years, as long as you bowled at least 21 games, we take that average and use it. And if you’ve bowled in multiple leagues in those 5 years, we take the highest average and use that. And that average will be your average for the first 4 weeks/12 games bowled for this league.” That would allow summer league averages to count for winter leagues, winter league averages from a couple years ago to count now, etc. Ok, maybe it should be only 3 years, or maybe only 2. But there has to be a fixed way that can break the fix. Or the fixing. Because, yes, sad to say but true, most folks are smart enough and immoral enough to use the rules, any rules, to their advantage. It isn’t honorable, it isn’t sporting, but it is legal. And everyone wants as much advantage as they can get, whether they need it or not.

Posted by Drew458     on 05/18/2010 at 10:03 PM   
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   Tuesday - April 27, 2010

End of Season: meh

Finished off the winter bowling league last night. Got outbowled “tactically” yet again. Which means we lost the first game by 2 pins, won the 2nd game by 4 pins, then lost the 3rd game by about 14. We are going to have to find a way to beat that next year. Somehow force our opponents to win by huge amounts.

It is to any team’s advantage to win by just a tiny amount. And if they have a real ability to do so, a skill which is generally known as sandbagging, they can amass a serious number of wins without driving their averages up hardly at all.

We haven’t mastered this skill. Heck, we’ve never even attempted it. Silly us, we get out there each week and roll the best that we can every game, and then fate and luck work together to decide who actually wins. Which is why we often wound up giving away handicap points to better teams. And it’s also why we finished in 11th place out of 16 teams, even though our team average and the total number of scratch pins we bowled for the season would put us up around 7th or 8th place. I don’t know our pins with handicap total, but it may have been enough to raise our expected final position another slot or even two.

I’ve got a bit of research to do. Not that it’s my responsibility to do so, I just want to learn things for my own benefit. This league, and indeed most of the leagues at this bowling center, uses the old team handicap method. USBC, the national bowling association, wants everyone to use the individual handicap method. I want to look them both up and see if one is more fair than the other. I’d like to see what kind and what amount of handicapping makes things most fair. In horse racing, the heaviest jockey rides clean, but all the other horses have to carry weight so that they are carrying the same amount. In bowling, handicap usually stops at 80%, which gives the team with the better average a 20% advantage, at least in theory. That theory didn’t pan out too well for us this season, either because a) we suck, b) everyone else in the league is a sandbagger, or c) we forgot to sacrifice a couple of chickens back in the fall and, thus offended, Fate conspired against it. Probably more a) than c), but there sure seemed to be a lot of b) sometime weeks.

I think the problem with the individual handicap method is that it has to be based on a higher average then anyone in the league has. We’ve got one guy, young Mr. 300, who is carrying a 244. And that’s without really trying too hard half the time. So the individual method might have to be based on a 250. And what happens when he gets his average above that mid-season? You can’t give him a negative handicap. The rules say that specifically. And how does the individual method work? Is it 100%? Like I said, I’ve got a bit of research to do.

Nearly 3 weeks off and then summer league starts. Woo hoo!

Posted by Drew458     on 04/27/2010 at 02:53 PM   
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   Saturday - April 24, 2010

Forming A New Group Identity

Ok, bowling season is just about over. Monday night is the final round. After a really poor season, where our team sunk from 4th all the way down to 12th in a league of 16 teams, we won all the points last week, so we will face the final round in about 10th, with a chance to win our way into 9th. Middle of the pack, but right below the fold. Better than last place.

On this particular league all the teams are sponsored. That means that some business or group ponies up $25 for the prize fund, and the team is named after them. We’ve been After Dark Design for a number of years, since that’s Ann’s husband’s lighting design company. This past year was poor for them - and plenty of other small businesses, thank you government! - so we each chipped in $6.25 for the sponsorship fee. But we kept the name. Next year we’ll have to all chip in again, but I’m thinking there would be no reason to keep that name. So I’ve been thinking about a new team name.

There is an art to coming up with a good name for a bowling team. For a non-sponsored team I mean. It should have some relation to bowling, no matter how vague. It should also have some kind of pun in it, and if you can work in a mildly sexual or naughty word innuendo that’s all to the better. You don’t want it to be too intellectual because no one will understand it. eg - we named our summer league team Stercus Stercus Stercus one year, and carried that over into Stercus Maximus the next year. Not one person understood that stercus means shit. Oh well. After that we used Revved Up as a summer league team name, followed by Still Revved Up last year. Revving the ball means making it spin, and spin gives you hook, and hook makes for more strikes. Maybe this year we’ll use We’re Still Still Revved Up. And if you come up with a really perfect team name, you can make a graphic based on it, and get awesome team shirts printed up. It doesn’t make you bowl any better, but it gives you a small psychological advantage over the other team because they don’t have cool shirts.

Bowling league is a bit of an unusual mix of people. You have fun, you do silly stuff, you get drunk sometimes, and you compete every week. Sometimes odd words and phrases creep in. Sometimes odd sound effects as well. In the middle of the winter one of the teams was rather plastered one night and started calling each other biscuit. I have no idea why, but my guess is that it was a scatological replacement word. Like ass biscuit. For the next few weeks everything was biscuit. Biscuit this, biscuit that, you’re a biscuit with extra buttermilk. It’s a bonding thing I suppose. A month later it was “it’s bacon!!!” whenever anyone got a strike. It’s fun, and it embarrasses the children who get dragged along when it’s mom & dad’s league night. Cool!

Our team is noted for being especially crazy. We’re talking cartwheels on the lanes and rapid fire jokes and stuff. And sound effects. Once upon a time, Ann had done some international animal relief work, rescuing penguins. In South Africa. Mike and I gave her grief for weeks about African penguins. They don’t exist. They can’t swim. What’s black and black and red all over? African penguin roadkill! We even invented the mythical Inland Siberian Penguin and gave it all sorts of special features and abilities. So she started doing penguin noises at us. Well, it turns out that African penguins actually do exist. They’re also known as Jackass penguins. And we’ve all started doing the penguin sound - oooo-ah! oooo-ah! - whenever anyone gets a strike. Middle aged folks cutting lose. It’s a bonding thing, and it embarrasses the children. Cool!

So now we’re thinking about penguin bowling. After all, what could be cooler than critters that live in the antarctic? Chillin’. So I looked it up, and there is a bit of penguin bowling stuff on the internet. A couple games for your iPod, a few plushy toys for little kids. And I got to thinking (always a dangerous thing) that the one thing just as cool as penguins bowling would be polar bears bowling. Combine the two and you’d have polar bears bowling for penguins. Hey, penguins sorta look like bowling pins anyway. And then I thought ... what would the coolest possible polar bear look like while bowling? Answer - he’d be wearing sunglasses and an open hawaiin shirt. Like Magnum PB (polar bear) only without the mustache. The seeds of a design were being planted. Still thinking, but now at a far more dangerous level, I realized that these two critters never actually meet. Polar bears live at the north pole, penguins live at the south pole. Lightbulb time! That makes it bi-polar, right? So we’ve got the pun to work with, and although it isn’t sexual or scatological it’s in-your-face enough to offend some folks. And bi-polar describes our team perfectly. On or Off. Win Big. Lose Big. Happy or distraught. Well, more internet research shows that “bi-polar rollers” has already been used as a bowling team name, and is recognized as one of the cooler names. Better than “alley oops” or “spare us”. But nobody has used that name and the polar bear/penguin combination.

So I ran with the name and did the most important job: design the t-shirt. I can draw, but I am not a cartoonist. Thankfully, the internet is full of great cartoon drawings, and it’s “fair use” to borrow (ahem) them for my own personal group’s use. Or I could pay the artist if the cost is low enough. Like $5.

So, variations on a theme ... see below the fold. Opinions? I’m not married to the fonts, the team names, or the tag lines, but I like the overall graphic. I can move the penguins around too, and I’m thinking maybe I should move their feet down their bodies a bit.

This is the happy penguin from the skuzzo website. Isn’t he just the cutest thing? I’ll name him Skuzzo, which is foreign for “excuse me!”

This is Skuzzo stretched, tapered, turned and snipped to become a fallen bowling pin. Maybe I tapered him too much, but I wanted the shape more than the penguin.

Here he is with as a chubby bowling pin, wings folded, feet lowered. Still not 100% with the feet, but this version might be bowling pin enough, and it’s a lot more penguin. Penguiny? Last version emphasizes the chest stripe, so he looks more like a real African penguin. That’s just an insider’s touch for Ann’s benefit.

The neat part about Skuzzo is that he actually is an African penguin. Look at the “widow’s peak” and the stripe across his chest ...

put him in the graphic and away we go. Hey, 3D is all the rage, so let’s try for a bit of that. It’s adds a little perspective to things (nyuk nyuk nyuk) ...


I like the bear. I couldn’t find a cartoon polar bear in a bowling pose, and I gave up on the sunglasses and Hawaiian shirt idea. I tried the Charmin bears but they didn’t work even when I recolored them. Still, this guy is strutting off the lane in surprised elation at getting a strike, and that suits us to a T. Or to a T-shirt. Right now he’s ice blue, but I guess I could make him white. Some people don’t have the imagination to realize that an ice blue bear is still a polar bear. You have to help them out a bit.

I made the penguin pins and the ball bigger in this version. I’m going to try another one with the lowered feet version. He may not really need to be stretched and tapered to look like a bowling pin so much; you lose the laughing face. I’m also tempted to sneak the Linux penguin in there as well, but he doesn’t seem quite as happy. Not sure about that one.

Ice Down The Lanes ... it’s what you have to do, because we’re so hot. Or it’s the way we bowl, because we’re so cool. Either way. These things have to be brash, otherwise why bother?

( eww factor: a bi-polar roller is also a medical tool used by gynecologists to cauterize internal surfaces. It’s sort of a rolling arc welder on the end of a little stick )



Polar Express was a popular movie a couple years back. Any time a word with an X in gets used in bowling you can put 3 of them in. XXX is a turkey, three strikes in a row. It’s also the symbol for porn, so that adds a small naughty bit.

At first the tag line was “Chillin With XXXtreme Latitude” then “Xtreme” ... since the most extreme amount of latitude you can have is pole to pole, which ties in with the bi-polar pun. Hey, creating cute and funny is hard work! I figure we’ll have to explain that to most people.

Both these designs are shown here on white background, but there are actually transparencies. The “production” version will be limited to 16 or 32 colors for making T-shirt appliques.

I’ve got all summer to work on this, so ideas, comments, etc. are more than welcome.

Oooo ah! Oooo ah!

Posted by Drew458     on 04/24/2010 at 11:28 AM   
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   Monday - April 19, 2010

A Minor Miracle

For the first time in a long time - maybe 15 weeks - my team took all 7 points at bowling league tonight. And, toot toot toot, I have to say it was mostly my doing. Instead of some lackluster 140-160 game, I just kept my head clear and let the ball do the work, and threw really well the first two games. 69 over for a 238 in the the first, even with one open frame, and we won that one by 100. 64 over for a 233 in the second, and we won that one by 108. Both games I had 6 strikes in a row in the mid game, but didn’t pick up the 7th. Mental pressure I guess. I’ve never made more than 6 in a row, even in practice. But I converted the spare, then went back to throwing strikes. 9 of them the first game! Come the third game, we all were tired, and we all screwed up. Both teams. I was going into the third with a 471, and knew if I could roll a 239 I’d have my first 700 series ever. Ever! Duh. I let my head get in the way, and the next thing you know I’m coming around the ball, I’m pushing the ball, I’m slanging my arm around. Geex. But everybody else was sucking too, so it was a low scoring shootout until the end. I recovered a tiny bit with a mark in the 9th and XX9 in the 10th, but I screwed the pooch so badly I finished with only a 150. Still, that gave me a 621, my second highest league series ever, and only my second 600 series ever. But game 3 was very close. It was right down to the wire, last game, 10th frame. Last bowler on each side. We’re down by about 8, and our anchor Mike is on a spare. He rolled a great strike. There guy rolled a strike, but on an open in the 9th. Mike rolled another strike. Their guy hit for 8, then missed the spare and got 1. With no pressure on him, as the game was now won, Mike rolled his last ball. And it hit like a one-winged duck. 5 pins down clean, 2 wobblers, and the 4 pin spinning ... spinning ... knocked over both of the wobblers as it went off the back of the deck, but one of those pins fell into the 9 which teetered, teetered, and fell against the 10. The 10 pin didn’t fall. No, it got gently pushed off the side, and dropped just as the bar was coming down. So it was the world’s slowest domino strike; Mike finished XXX and we won that game by a small handful of pins. It was a minor miracle.

This is the next to last week of the season, so it was the first position round. We’ve had a terrible season, going from a high of 3rd to our current 12th place. Out of 16 teams. But tonight’s win of all 7 was enough to push us up and over, so if we do well next week we could wind up finishing in tenth. Which isn’t grand by any stretch, but it’s back in the middle of the pack again.

I really have to learn to make my hand behave and my brain shut up. I screw up because I try too hard; I try to force things to happen. You can’t. Let the ball do the work, and just relax. At least my approach speed has evened out, and I’m throwing my line very consistently. If I can get my release in order, I can be back in the game and get 200s all the time. Well, if I can get some better percentages on those damn 10 pin leaves. Like almost everyone else, I hate that spare. I try to throw the angle, but once again my hand gets in the way and turns the ball in. And while that might be better than dumping it in the gutter 20 feet out, a miss is still a miss. The 10 ought to be a gimme. Gotta work on that.

Summer league starts in mid May I think.

Seein as I’ll be away for awhile Drew, I just couldn’t resist this when I found it. And I wasn’t even looking but when I met her she said she was looking for you.
LOL ...
Cheers from The Prisoner

Posted by Drew458     on 04/19/2010 at 08:34 PM   
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   Wednesday - March 03, 2010

Yeah, but will it hook better now?

Richard Gross, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and colleagues calculated that Saturday’s quake shortened the day by 1.26 microseconds.

Earth’s days may have gotten a little bit shorter since the massive earthquake in Chile, but don’t feel bad if you haven’t noticed.

The difference would be only about one-millionth of a second.

Richard Gross, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and colleagues calculated that Saturday’s quake shortened the day by 1.26 microseconds. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second.

The length of a day is the time it takes for the planet to complete one rotation — 86,400 seconds or 24 hours.

An earthquake can make Earth rotate faster by nudging some of its mass closer to the planet’s axis

From this the obvious conclusion was that the land involved in the Chile earthquake moved downwards. Since that region is a subduction zone ( duh, the Andes mountains are volcanic, made primarily from andesite, the thick gooey lava that creates really explosive stratovolcanoes that go off in Plinian eruptions, ie BOOM!! ), the earthquake was caused by the Nasca plate under the ocean moving further under the South American Plate.

Bowlers implicitly understand this. The planet now has a lower RG (radius of gyration). That means that more of the mass has been moved closer to the center of the ball. So given this new, lower RG, the earth is spinning a little bit faster. Which could mean it will hook a bit more when it gets traction, and should carry a little better when it finds the pocket. I don’t want to be around when we figure out what the pins are for this analogy.

On the other hand, this bit of subduction was very local in scope, so the DIFF ( the Differential RG ) changed more than the overall RG. Which means the planet’s ability to flare ( move laterally inwards while rolling forward, instead of hooking which is an actual turning-around-the-corner motion ) is likely increased. Think of this earthquake as a new balance hole. So yeah, the planet is now a shorter ball, more suitable for playing on heavily oiled heads.

So, given a faster rotation and thus a shorter day, along with a bit more hook and flare, will the rate of climate change be increased or decreased? Will we get more or less 10-pin leaves?

Posted by Drew458     on 03/03/2010 at 11:39 AM   
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