Last week I sent an email to Dom saying “game Wed night?” He responded, “I’m in the UK, how about next Wed?”
So next Wednesday came, and the Dom & I met at the court. When I pulled the ball (our only ball) out of my pocket, I looked at it and exclaimed,”Wow! I thought I had gotten rid of this one!” The ball was green (meaning bouncy) and speckled with grey sticky spots. At one time we had played on a newly varnished court, and this ball had found all the places where the varnish hadn’t dried. It was therefore able to generate marvelous spin, and reflected at odd angles that would have made Snell frown. (Snell was a 17th C billiards player who developed “Snell’s law” of reflection.) Out of exasperation, we had given this ball up long ago, but here it was again.
I made a few hits with it, and saw that it had lost none of its magic. But the Dom was impatient. “Let’s not fool around practicing, let’s just start.” After the regulation Bounce to the Centerline playoff, which I won, I served into the left corner. The ball spun off the side wall, hit the back, and virtually rolled along the back wall instead of bouncing. I chuckled as the Dom swung futilely. This went on for 6 more serves, when finally, the Dom got the serve. He hadn’t mastered the art of playing speckle ball, however, and I got the serve back, and went on violating Snell’s laws for seven more serves before he got a point. I won that game 15-1, and the Dom was sweating.
He hunkered down and mastered the speckle serve, but by then I was getting used to the impossible reflections. We were tied at 12-12 when I threw in some Z shots that the speckle ball used to crawl magnetically along the sidewall. Dom was finished.
We rested for several minutes and went on to play two more games. But The Dominator could no longer dominate. The speckle ball beat him in two more games.
Afterwards, Dom pointed to his belly, and said,”No matter how many situps I do, this belly is still growing. I’m thinking of going for lipo. They say that after lipsuction, your belly fat never comes back.”. Well, maybe he’ll do it, and maybe he won’t. But if he does, I’ll look back and think it was because of my anti-Snell ball.
–rakkity
I was under the impression that Snell’s law governed refraction, unless there’s some other Snell’s law.
Mike,
theblog lacks a defined title, not sure if that’s intentional.Also per some discussion some time ago about bringing back the display of amusing faux email addresses, I find it interesting that the trend of fake addresses started to address the issue of being forced to display an email address.
P.S. Now I see I must Enter a valid email address
Ah you must mean Snell the physicist, but here we’re referring to Snell, the billiards player.
Right now you can play with the url as you did email addresses. Valid is in the eye of the beholder.
rakkity, I was a decent player at one time and I liked lively balls so much I’d heat ’em up first in the sauna. I could pop one off the front wall hard enough for the ball to hit the back wall and almost return again to the front wall. But I never mastered those z-shots as you have.
The Dom does front-rear-front shots quite often. (I can’t) He does it often enough that I’ve made him agree that in those cases I don’t have to hit the ball at all. I can just swing wildly and say “Well, it hit the front wall, didn’t it?”
When I employed those front-rear-front shots the words ingenious and crafty came to my mind. Reading that The Dom uses them makes me think of pitiful and desperate.
To commenter #1: How can you say “blog lacks a defined title” when “mainecourse” is hovering over the water so clearly and reflectively (if just a tad too far to the left wrt the reflection position)? And was that your website, or one that you wanted us to visit? And how’d you put that in there–as a name or website?
If I enable the title it gets embossed right over the fine graphic.
When I said it lacks a defined title, I meant just that.
I was wrong, though. There is indeed a tag follwed by a tag betwixt the head tags, it’s just that there’s no title in between, so when I visit everyone’s favorite blog the text in the title bar of my window is https://mainecourse.com/mt/ rather than something like MaineCourse: The Raddest ‘blog on the ‘net.
I do see a title (the entry’s title) when I go to view an entry’s page with comments.
I was also clearly wrong about Snell. It only goes to show my attention could be seen as misplaced these days.
The links I’ve offered are both a suggestion for wonderfully informative resources and a test of what would happen if I entered a web site with my post.