STUFF
Occasionally we find ourselves presented with information that is not easily categorized. Information that can be informative, outrageous, funny (intentionally or unintentionally), uplifting, or useless (Our estimates show a 79.3% probability that the latter will be the case). Information that we just feel MUST be shared, whether the sharee asks for it or not. In a word--Stuff.
Stuff has no limitations. It has no time schedule, no definitive subject matter, no set point of view, or any one author. Its just Stuff.
NOTE: All that copyright blah, blah, stuff you see in other places where folks share ideas by putting finger to keyboard applies here. Anyone wishing to reproduce any stuff found here (Yes, I know. I can't think of any reason someone would want to do that either) must get permission from the author etc, etc...
Until we get enough Stuff to start organizing it on separate pages it will all be on this page ordered by date latest to earliest.
So, here's some stuff.
PLAYING POSSUM
by Mike Kilian
Posted 11/15/02
So there was this short lob and Martina Hingis was zeroing in on it. The player on the other side of the net was doing exactly what conventional wisdom dictates: she waited in the middle until right before Hingis hit the overhead and broke left or right, I forget. The point is that she had a 50-50 chance of guessing right, unless, of course, the over header hits right down the middle.
Any time your opponent has a chance to hit a winner like this, there is a sneaky way of controlling the situation . Play possum. With your opponent about to hit an overhead, stand over to one side or the other and look defeated. You are showing your opponent an obvious opening. Then break to the opening as the overhead is hit. Chances are your opponent will take the bait and you will at least have a shot at the ball.
The possum attitude can be used in any situation where you can show your opponent an obvious opening then cover it as they make their shot. Here’s an example. Let’s say one of your doubles opponents can really nail the forehand down the line. You’ve been burned a few times so you hug the alley to prevent it. But that takes you away from the action in the middle of the court. What to do? Play possum.
Drift toward the middle and show your opponent the opening for his favorite shot. Then cover the opening just as he hits his shot. If it works, and you hit a winning volley, keep doing it until your opponent is afraid to try it. You just took away one of his favorite weapons.
Three Excerpts From Aaronville Dawning
A One Woman Play Written by Linda Byrd Kilian
Posted 9/07/02
Note From Mike: Linda is my sister-in-law. She originally wrote Aaronville Dawning in poetry form, organized by the different characters living in Aaronville, MS. That's the version I have posted here. Any comments or feedback should be addressed to aaronville@aol.com
Preface
(Part of a Press Release from a Montgomery Newspaper)
The state of Mississippi will shine this January in Montgomery,
Alabama, when AARONVILLE DAWNING, by Mississippian Linda Byrd
Kilian, premiers at the Vesta Festival of the Southern Writers’ Project of the
Alabama Shakespeare Festival.
The one-woman play received a Literary Arts Fellowship for a
play-in-progress from the Mississippi Arts Commission for 2001-2002
and was workshopped at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival as part of the
Southern Writers’ Project where it was commissioned for full production.
The Southern Writers’ Project, created in 1991 by Kent Thompson,
explores and celebrates the South’s rich cultural heritage by encouraging new
works dealing with Southern issues and topics, including those that
emphasize black experiences.
AARONVILLE DAWNING revolves around an elderly woman who,
while preparing funeral food for her friend Beasley, dishes the dirt on the
people in Aaronville, Mississippi, while keeping her own secret--secret.
Kilian recently read excerpts from her play at the Ford Foundation
in New York. “I worried that the play was too Southern for New Yorkers,
but I was wrong. Apparently, everyone has a town like Aaronville in their
past filled with the same type of people.”
SAMMY
Used to
Miss Annie Mae and I fixed baby food
There wasn’t a baby born in Aaronville
That didn’t get welcomed home
By my chicken-and-dumplings
And Miss Annie Mae’s sour cream pound cake
That was before Ora Faye gave her that damn hot chicken salad recipe
Course, when Sammy was born
Miss Annie Mae and I had to fix food for weeks
That boy almost killed Hattie
Sammy was born breech
Miss Annie Mae swears breech children
Bring their mothers grief
And Sammy was Hattie’s grief walking
From the time he was a little thing , he was into it all
Flowerbeds, drawers, purses, cabinets,
Anywhere you didn’t want him
Was where Sammy was
Everybody hated to see Hattie come
Her other boys were fine
But then there was always Sammy
Lagging behind
Looking sneaky
Waiting to do
Something to somebody
When he was six,
He sneaked into his Grandmother Ellis’ pig pen
And put rubber bands around the snouts of all her piglets
All eleven of them
Granma Ellis found them dead in the pen
With the old mama sow laying beside them
Grieving
And all them pigs
All eleven of them
Stiff as boards and still wearing
Them big ole brown rubber bands.
Grandma Ellis whipped Sammy good for that
Hattie did, too
But nothing Hattie did helped
And that good-for-nothing she married
Was no help to anybody
Sammy was about twelve, I guess,
When he tied up the Evans boy
Tied him up in old man Amos’ field
The one with the pond on it
Tied him up and left him there
Carl Evans had everybody looking for that boy
All that day and half the next, they looked
And there he was tied up on that east field
They took him to the house
Rachel and Rebecca tried to calm him down,
But all he could say, was,
“Sammy..he..Sammy...he”
Big Clyde took Sammy to jail for that one
Put him in a cell and left him a day-and-a-half
Tied up
Just like he left the Evans boy
It didn’t help
Sammy was Sammy.
We all told Hattie he’d grow out of it
Sammy was just feisty, that was all
But Hattie knew
She knew Sammy would grow into more
Than he ever grew out of
Sammy wasn’t all bad, though,
Nobody ever is
I will say one thing about Sammy
No matter what he did
Or how many people they say he killed
That boy loved his mother
They tracked him here from * Parchman twice,
Once on Hattie’s birthday
And once on Mother’s Day.
------------------------------------------
#
Parchman: Mississippi State Prison
ELDON McHENRY
Mama always said I was a fighter
Not like Rachel and Rebecca, of course
But anybody coming into the world
Weighing only 22 ounces has to be a fighter
I guess
Today,
A baby like that would be hooked up
To all kinds of machines
But in 1913 there were no machines
Mama raised me in the dresser drawer
Made me an incubator by heating bricks in the fireplace
Wrapping those bricks in towels
And putting them in the drawer with me
She used old whiskey bottles, too
Said Eldon McHenry loaded her with whiskey bottles
She’d boil water
Fill those whiskey bottles with hot water
Wrap them in towels
And sorta wrap me around them bottles
She turned me, too
Every hour
Miss Essie, Miss Annie Mae’s mama,
Warned everybody not to touch me
Said touching me would bruise me
So they used towels to turn me with
Mama said Eldon brought her a new bottle every day
Guess he thought she needed a fresh bottle every day
She didn’t have the heart to tell him any different
He’d stagger by every morning
Presenting Mama with a new bottle
Like he was presenting her with medicine or something
He asked about me every morning, too
Asking if his bottles were helping
I was about eight when Eldon got saved
He went from drinking a bottle a day to nothing
Just like that
A preacher came to town, held a tent revival,
And old Eldon walked down that sawdust aisle for salvation
It was a shouting time
Even at Carr Baptist
Everybody knew Eldon was bad to drink
From then on
He testified every chance he got
Told everybody who’d listen
How God used his sin to save a baby’s life
That was when he would point to me
And I would stand
Mama made me
I used to hate it
But it did kinda make me famous
Whenever anybody was bad to drink
They would bring them to Carr Baptist
To hear Eldon’s testimony
About how whiskey bottles saved a baby’s life
Mama never had the heart to tell Eldon
She only needed two bottles
And that daddy buried all those others behind the smokehouse
It would have ruined his testimony
SWEETS JACKSON
I always wondered if Sweets Jackson
Ever gave to Oral Roberts
If she did, she never got healed
Sweets Jackson was club-footed
She was Belle’s cousin’s child
Lived in Vicksburg
Down on Levee Street
She didn’t have much education
Most of them didn’t back then
But Sweets had a business mind
Belle used to say
That child could count money better
Than any grown person she ever saw
When she grew up
Sweets counted plenty of money
And all of it, she made herself
Girls would come from as far away as Memphis
Course,
There were other people who did what Sweets did
Memphis was filled with them
The difference was
Sweets’s girls never died
Sweets charged twelve dollars
Black or white was the same
She never charged whites more or Nigras less
When Charlie Drummond ran for mayor of Vicksburg
He tried to close Sweets down
Charlie was planning on a big political career
Planned to one day be governor
Was going to make a big splash
By closing Sweets down
He told her, too
Warned her
Said she was going to be shut down
By the future governor of Mississippi
Belle said Sweets just smiled
Went into the back room
And got her journal
The name of every girl who ever visited Sweets
Was in that journal
Each one
With $l2 printed neatly in the cash column
She told Charlie Drummond
If he tried to close her down
She’d go to the VICKSBURG HERALD
Surely someone there would be interested in names
Names of senators’ daughters,
Judges’ daughters
Doctors’ daughters
All coming to Sweets
All coming for the same thing
All paying their twelve dollars
Charlie Drummond said
He didn’t care about senators or judges
That right there
Should tell you somethng about Charlie Drummond
Everybody in Mississippi knows
You better care about senators and judges
If you want to get elected
Charlie Drummond said he was going to be mayor
And then he was going to be governor
And closing down Sweets Jackson was the first step
Charlie Drummond never took that first step
Oh, he was going to, all right
Right up until
He saw his daughter’s name in Sweets’s journal
With $12 printed neatly in the cash column
Sweets couldn’t have gotten away with that in Aaronville
Big Clyde wouldn’t have allowed it
He was Catholic, you know
WATER AND TENNIS DON’T MIX
Mike Kilian
8/17/02
There you are in the middle of the State Championships. Its 1:30 Saturday afternoon and your third round match against the #1 seed (How did they rate the #1 seed? You know you can take them!) is scheduled at 1:45. You’re psyched, you’re wearing your lucky blue outfit with matching socks, wrist bands, and towel, your water jug is full, you ate a banana at noon. You are ready.
Suddenly you here multiple cannon blasts behind you. You turn and look up just as the rain comes gushing down on your brand new Nike hat. Oh no...RAIN DELAY!
So there you are, stuck in your highest state of readiness watching the courts dry. What’s the answer? Get out there and help dry the courts! Get one of those roller thingies (They are NOT squeegees as some people insist on calling them, they are roller thingies) and start drying.
Rolling the courts will give you something to do besides fretting about your match. It is also better to be moving and loosening up than sitting around getting stiff.
But wait! Is there a proper method of using your roller thingy? Yes!
This is the method I find works best. Start in the middle of the general playing area on one side of the court. Usually that will be about two feet behind the service line. Place the roller thingy on the court and begin rolling in a spiral. Continue in a circle making it bigger as you go. If you are doing it correctly, you are keeping the excess water on the outside of the circle as you create a larger and larger area.
What you are doing is creating a central dry area while pushing the excess water to the sides where it will be easier to roll off the courts. If you have a partner, its better to do both sides of the court at the same time. If not, do the "top" side first. Most courts are made with a slight slope to one end or the other. For advanced level rollers, as you get closer to the net and baseline with your circle, kind of square it off in more of a square down the sidelines, the baseline and net. This will make rolling the excess off the court easier.
Now, this is the first stage of drying just after the rain stops when the court is still covered with water . We can’t be everywhere at once so there are courts that haven’t been "circled", and now have dry spots and puddles. The thing to do on these courts is spread the puddles out. The best drying machine available is the court itself. Just keep contact with the court and roll through the puddles and dry spots to spread the water around.
Remember, never leave a roller thingy on the ground when you are done. always hang them up.
Good job. While you were wielding your roller thingy, your overconfident opponent was sitting around in the clubhouse reading magazines. As you walk to the court your muscles are warm and limber, and you are buoyed with a sense of completing a job well done. Today the #1 seed is going down!
MK
Is Your Tennis Happy?
Mike Kilian
4/7/03
Those of us who are web surfers routinely find seemingly endless threads of sameness; virtually identical page after page based on whatever thread we are following. But occasionally we find a gem that inspires us, makes us laugh, cry, or just makes us think about our place in the universe. On rare occasions we find a place that does all of the above (except cry. Guys only do that while watching the movie Rudy).
A few weeks ago, I stumbled on such a place. It was a personal web page by a Japanese guy named Akinobu Ono (Your guess is as good as mine). 98% of this site is in Japanese, but curiously, many of the headings and titles are in English. And this, which he titled simply "Column":
Tennis is wonderful sport.
All of you are put on the ball, and you hit the ball to the
partner of the other side of the net. When you felt tennis to
be happy, it’s because you could meet a wonderful companion,
partner and a wonderful friends.
Now, is your tennis happy?
This is the page of column which thought toward my tennis and so on was written in. Please try to read though this may not be interesting
Okay, so the creative use of English rules of syntax and grammar makes it funny. It reminds me of the old Toa Gosen tennis string packages from about twenty years ago. The Gosens' translator didn't quite have a grasp of basic English vernacular. On the packages there would be phrases like, "Gosen brings you the highest strings in the world" or "Good for various curving shots."
But, getting back to Akinobu, you have to admire the guy. Being so motivated as to struggle with an unfamiliar language to express how he feels about tennis demonstrates a level of passion that I for one haven't matched in a long time.
My guess is that Akinobu is fairly young in the game. That edge of wonder and fascination we all had when we were first snared by the fuzzy yellow ball (okay, back in the dark ages where I come from it was white) shines through in spite of his side trips to grammatical anarchy. These days we old timers, especially those of us blessed with the opportunity to make a living through tennis, can become jaded by familiarity, especially now that everything is so structured with so many opportunities to play.
Whenever someone old enough to remember when we all played with pieces of trees starts waxing nostalgic about the "good old days" of tennis I usually laugh. Compared to what we had in the 70's and earlier, these are the good old days--no contest. But I got to thinking after reading what Akinobu wrote.
It could be we are missing something in our super organized three times a week (once to practice with our team, once to drill with our pro, once to play our matches) agendized league world. Something that might have been easier to hold onto back in the days when we hung out at the courts hoping to find an opponent. Something akin to sitting back and taking in the wonder of it all.
Think about it. For many, and I dare say, most of us, tennis is not just a lifetime sport, but almost a way of life. Think of how many friends you met through tennis. How many times have you laid awake in bed replaying a match in your mind. I could make a strong case for tennis being the ultimate middle class networking tool, against which golf pales by comparison—but that’s for another column. I can give you more than a few examples of marriages resulting from first meetings on the tennis court (I know. Some dork out there just said "And that's a good thing?"). For quite a few of us, it’s the only real exercise we get.
Here's the thing. Akinobu reminds all of us veterans and neophytes alike to, in effect, take the time to stop and smell the freshly opened can of tennis balls; Count our blessings and think what our world would be like if we had discovered ping pong or yahtzee instead of tennis.
So-- every so often remember to ask yourself, "Is my tennis happy?"
MK