Tennis, Anyone?

Cincinnati becomes a nest of raving tennis aficionados when the nationally recognized tournaments are held here this time of year. There was even a somewhat misguided tennis match played on top of that strange new skyscraper downtown, with tennis balls bouncing down to Fourth Street. So I’ve been thinking about tennis.
Tennis is a complicated game. Did you know that there are two forms of tennis? Yep, court tennis and lawn tennis.
Court tennis, also known as “real” tennis dates back to the Middle Ages, and that great athlete King Henry VIII was a devotee of the game. It is an indoor game played on an asymmetrical rectangular cement court with a sloping roof, a hard ball, a lopsided racket, and windows on the walls that came into play. Only a handful of courts still exist in the United States.
Lawn tennis, which is tennis as we know it today, is barely a hundred years old. A Welshman, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, devised the game as a diversion for his guests to play on his lawn. The members of the Wimbledon Cricket Club adopted Wingfield’s game for use on their own underutilized lawns, which had stood empty since croquet had waned in popularity in the late eighteenth century.
Lawn tennis became the more popular of the two kinds of tennis, but it continued to use the arcane scoring system that came from court tennis, probably because they thought it would confuse the most people.
In court tennis, each score in a game was worth fifteen points: 15-30-45-Game. Lawn tennis kept the same scoring system but changed it to 15-30-40-Game. Why? Apparently, the 45 was changed to 40 to make the scores easier to announce. (Seems to me that everything would have been easier if they just scored it like Ping-Pong.) In court tennis, there were six sets of four games. The match concluded when a player had completed a circle of 360 degrees (24 × 15).
Lawn tennis changed from six sets to three or five. So the scoring system now makes no sense at all. When the game is tied after six points, it is called “deuce.” That comes from the Italian a due, meaning two points needed to win and leads me to wonder how in the “deuce” did I ever get started writing this thing?

Let the Sun Shine on Price Hill

I've been learning about solar energy, solar panels, all that good green stuff. We're looking into putting solar panels on the roof of the Price Hill Historical Society, with the help of Price Hill Will and maybe a little assistance from the state, courtesy of our own Price Hill representative, Denise Driehaus. There's a lot of technical stuff, of course, but we could serve as an example for alternative energy projects, and if what the contractors say is true, the electric company could end up owing us money at the end of the year. Now, that's an idea even a curmudgeon can get behind. So far I've been to a couple of meetings, so we'll have to see how this works out, but it's just another reason why I'll be looking forward to sunny days if we get those solar panels installed.

New Year's Resolutions

What have I been up to, you've probably been thinking, if you read my blog regularly. (Does anyone read my blog regularly?) Well, I haven't been writing it regularly for the past month or so, that's for sure. The holidays are a busy time, I guess (that picture is me waking up from my short winter's nap, so you can see I've been so busy I plumb wore myself out). But now it's the new year, and I've resolved to post things more often on my blog. We'll see how that works out. I've been thinking about New Year's resolutions because we recently put in a display at the Covedale Branch Library about just that topic. Apparently, the tradition of making New Year’s resolutions began with the Babylonians, who resolved to start the New Year with a clean state by returning borrowed farm equipment. There’s a resolution everyone can make and keep—return all borrowed farm equipment by the end of January. As for me, I've resolved to keep up with my Curmudgeon column as well as my blog (I've written a couple of new Curmudgeons in the past couple of days) and I will resolve to finish the model of the Price Hill Incline I've been working on for awhile. It's looking pretty good, and I'm hoping to get it installed upstairs at the Price Hill Historical Society Museum before the year is over. Mark Twain once said that New Year’s Day is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions, then a week later, you can begin paving hell with them as usual. He may be right.