A Wisconsin Yankee in Walt Disney's Court

I had to meet a connecting flight in Atlanta to get to the National Scrabble Championship– surprisingly there aren’t a lot of direct flights to Dayton, Ohio. When a guy sat down next to me to wait for the plane while furiously studying a hand-written notebook of 7-letter words, it wasn’t hard to figure out where he was heading. After an introduction and some small talk we looked around and saw plenty of others with word lists or electronic dictionaries all around us– I guess nobody else had much of a reason to go to Dayton.
The city is kind of run-down with nothing much going on downtown and empty buildings everywhere. But it’s still fairly busy, and they’re putting in an effort with new streets and a trolley system going in, a riverfront park that seemed nice (at night, anyway) and a hipster uptown area with restaurants and small shops. The old buildings, classy and kitschy both, give the place an old-fashioned feel that many cities of that size have lost. I wanted to spend some time taking pictures of them , but didn’t have a chance. You’ll have to take my word that the Price department store building, apparently still open for business, is a rust-stained thing of beauty, enough to make the nostalgia hound inside me weep.
I arrived with a suitcase full of my Tilecan bags and Tilecouch racks, the Tilecans mostly only finished the night before (and given a minor design change that solved a production problem). One set of racks came out of the mold as I left for the airport, around the clock production running all week to get out as many as I could. I actually had to sit in the hotel room and trim thread and rubber off the respective items. Remind me not to pack a surgical scalpel next time, or maybe to pack some Band-Aids.
I was given a table during the tournament to sell my goods, before, between, and after games. I’d had a surprising response to my initial post and about half my stock was pre-orders, and it kept me busy tracking everyone down and selling the rest. I went home with only one rack (brown isn’t as popular as I’d hoped) and not even a Tilecan for myself. I did work a deal for a board with Sam of SamTimer fame and a deal for a clock with Gene of Adjucator 3000 fame. And all the other dealers were nice as well, including Mary of tilebag fame who took me out with her clubmates once or twice. All these people have last names that even Scrabble players can’t remember right, coincidentally.
I can blame the distraction of preparing my products and selling them for my mediocre performance play-wise, I suppose, but it’s still frustrating. I had a lot of games with luck going my way, some I had no chance in, but a few losses, in any one of which had I done the smart thing or reacted better it would have put me in the top 10 and I’d have been satisfied. I didn’t challenge a few stupid words, or didn’t yell “hold” quickly enough, or tried a phony word myself when I didn’t need to. In one I opened up the board to avoid a stalemate that might’ve come down to who had the least points on their rack, and of course lost. I think it’s a good sign that the far majority of my losses were to players that finished below me, and I had pretty close losses with the top 2 players (and only lost to the winner of my division because of an unlikely Q being the last letter in the bag). I still can’t deal with supposedly weaker players that clog up the board.
I met up with my buddy from the airport in round 17, and had one of my best games of the week, making the comments and the photo page. Games like that, down to the wire and wide open, are by far the most fun. Another highlight was hearing the story from someone at lunch about learning the word SEAWANT the day before and playing it that day… and I played it the next day myself, as did another player who was there. I’m sure I’ve seen it before but wouldn’t have remembered it or seen it on my rack if it hadn’t come up. A neat coincidence. Sadly, nothing much else too impressive came up, looking over my score sheets. Not a single play over 90 points. Ugh.
My other excitement of the week came when someone had a seizure and had to be hauled away. I heard about it a little later and asked an official who it was, and he told me it was my elderly roommate Stu Goldman! He’d just been given a plaque for playing over 5,000 tournament games, and I feared he’d given up the ghost. A little fact checking showed it to be someone else, though, who recovered and came back to play later that day. He and the guy who was mugged one night are doing fine, or as well as can be expected, I guess.
My products were a success and I made a lot of new connections and friends so overall the trip was worthwhile. It felt good to see people using my bags and racks. Maybe I deserved to lose ratings points (I haven’t had the gumption to check how many) because of my weak word knowledge. Oh well. One of these days I’ll get it right.
One note to Dayton businesses– maybe you could be a little more prepared (I’m talking to you, Subway-with-2-guys-working-the-lunch-hour) or step things up a little. I was a little pissed that the smelly hotel that should be grateful for being filled up maybe the only time all year gave a woman a pissy “The shuttle to the airport is a privilege, not a right” speech on check-out day. You couldn’t run them twice an hour? Or have someone drive the manager’s SUV? You have to talk to someone like that after 5 nights as a paying guest? Jerks.

As usual, I’m consumed with Scrabble. Lately, not so much with fruitlessly trying to learn new words (what the hell’s a QUADRAT?) but with my new products I’ve mentioned here before. The wife is sewing constantly on the Tilecans, my new type of bag, and I’ve been sculpting and pouring mold rubber for my Tilecouch, my all new tile rack.

I just put up a site for them at tilecan.com and I’ll be selling them at the National Scrabble Championships up in Dayton, Ohio next week. As glamorous as it sounds, flying into Dayton might be a little stressful, with 31 games of Scrabble and dealing with this side venture.
I’m rooming with a guy named Stu Goldman, who I didn’t realize is the proverbial “old man of Scrabble” until after I met him and agreed to share the room. He’s played more tournament games of Scrabble than any other person, from the 1960s or ’70s until today, and still attends just about every major tournament. I hope he wins the big one this year, or some year.
I’ll try to blog my results and anything else that happens from Dayton, so keep posted…

Scrabble players came up with what they call anamonics, phrases that remind you which letters will go with particular 6 or 7 letter combinations to make a bingo. I know the 25 or so most common 6 letter “stems” and their phrases, and only a few of the 7 letter phrases. So when I have TONERS and a K on my rack, the above phrase lets me know there’s a bingo to look for, and I should know it. Of course, when it comes time to use my useless knowledge I blow it far too often, and couldn’t find the word this weekend when I needed it. I bingoed the next turn, but then convinced myself that DENIGRATE should be DENEGRATE* (Scrabble nerds always asterisk non-legal words) and passed up another bingo to lose a game that was handed to me on a platter and kept me out of a chance at 2nd or 3rd place.

We had a good time though– one of my club mates just missed first place in the top division, and the venue was in a new community development south of Ft. Lauderdale that was nice, if a little snooty. The guy who won my division (the 2nd of 5) choked up as he donated his check back to the breast cancer foundation that the tournament was a fundraiser for, “For my mom,” he said, so I might’ve felt guilty if I won anyway.

I’m headed back to Wisconsin for a week– I may do a post before we go, but there won’t be anything else until I get back…

Most days I wake up thinking about Brolly Hut, just like everybody else, I imagine. But lately with all the Scrabble tournaments in the area, and the fact that most of the people I “socialize” with aren’t interested in much else, I wake up trying to find an anagram of NOTICED (there are 2!) or wondering how I could’ve stopped some guy from playing the X for so many points the night before.
I’ve given up playing on the internet to try to ease my brain a little, and also because it’s still the internet and not even Scrabble is immune from the anonymous nutball syndrome. I’d expect crazies in World of Warcraft and all that, but even obscure foreign bootleg servers are filled with people (apparently the same people you’d meet in a store or a park any day of the week) who will swear at you, call you a cheater, log off, or just make you run out their 15 minute timer in order to try to avoid losing a game. It’s not too uncommon that they’ll rant something that comes across like Jack Nicholson in The Shining– “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” scrolling down the screen as fast as they can paste-and-hit-enter. I just open another window and do something else until it’s over, but I always wonder if they think I’m paying attention to them. I guess they must.
Anyway, my obsessing payed off at the club this week when I scored 610 points against one of the top players (there’s a new guy who everybody scores 500+ against; 600 wouldn’t be so impressive) including 212 for REQUITES. I’d like a lucky game like that at a tournament; they always have side prizes for high game and high word. I never get the set-up when it counts.
There’s a breast cancer fund raiser tourney this weekend, then we’re off for a while. When I get my head back, it’ll be more Brolly Hut and the usual stuff on the blog. I have some better pictures of Brolly Hut, btw, in books that are packed away, and surprisingly the one above is all I could find on the webs. It was quite a sight in the heyday of Googie architecture, and the sign, the logo, and the name that rolls off the tongue like nonsense from a dream you can’t remember are just perfect. I don’t have the Oxford English Dictionary here, but it seems odd that they ever tried to market burgers with what I assume was an British colloquialism. Did people in Southern California ever say “brolly?” Maybe they sold Fish & Chips and had an English theme to capitalize on the British Invasion, but I don’t know if they pre-dated the Beatles or not. Either way, what America needs right now are more buildings shaped like umbrellas, that’s what I say.

I only won 2 out of the final 5 games on Sunday, overall not bad against such a tough field but it could’ve gone so much better. In addition to the challenges I blew Saturday, I lost a game by 1 point Sunday because I ran out of time and suffered the 10-point penalty. The easy 9-4 would’ve been fabulous. I gained a few ratings points anyway, and head off for a small 1-day breast cancer benefit tournament in 2 weeks to redeem my self.
I never seem to get unusual or high-point words down in tournaments; about the oddest thing I played was FEIJOA, just to get rid of a junky rack and end up losing when I never saw another E the rest of the game. At the club Monday, when it didn’t count, words like PIROGIES and FRONTES rolled off the rack. Oh well.
One of the locals told me my Scrabble invention had more of a buzz going around than I’d realized, giving me a little more impetus to get production moving on that. Yet another U.S. company turned down manufacturing them (or ignored me, actually) so I’m still stuck with Hong Kong, but we’re looking for alternatives…