Emails to the Editor

Thanks to the many readers who sent such great feedback to the first NASPA Tournament SCRABBLE Newsletter! And my apologies to readers asking whether they could get printed copies sent to them; unfortunately, NASPA is not able to do this (I’ve recommended readers wanting hard copy print out articles at their library). Should you wish to comment on any of the Newsletter articles—or make suggestions or corrections—please send your emails to Cornelia Guest at CorneliaSGuest@gmail.com. Snail mail is also welcome at 6A Barry Avenue, Ridgefield, CT 06877. Emails chosen for publication may be edited at the editor’s discretion.

Corny:

I thought friends of the late Sharon Swerdloff would like to see this photograph of her from the late 1970s (I knew her for 30 years). About Sharon: Without getting too gooey about it, had she been able to attend the recent Nationals in Dayton, she would have been a hands-down winner of the Rose Award.

Ann Sanfedele

p.s. This is a photo Sharon gave me, not one I took.

Cornelia:

Thank goodness I decided to check my spam folder, which contained two of your emails. Of course I clicked on the "This is not spam" button so I don't think I'll have to worry about the newsletter ending up there again.

You did a wonderful job with the newsletter. I hope that your efforts did not go into other peoples spam files, too. Is there a way you can alert them about this?

I will be linking your newsletters on my web site so that all of my club members will be able to enjoy them.

Thanks for your hard work.

Sandee Bloom

Thanks so much! I'm glad you liked it.

And thanks, too, for alerting me to the spam problem. I sent the Newsletter to all the club directors listed on the NASPA web site; however, a number bounced back, so I'll need to follow up. I also mentioned the Newsletter on cgp and OSPD, and it was listed in the NASPA "breaking news" section. NASPA has now added a link to the Newsletter on its home page, which should help.

Thanks for sharing the Newsletter with your members. Ideally, I'd like NASPA to send it to all members, but they aren't set up for that yet, so this seemed the best way to try to reach everyone. Growing pains of an organization....

Corny--

Thanx much for a terrific newspaper! The only thing I missed was reference to the passing of Rose Kreiswirth. I'd like to suggest that you ask on CGP for people to send you the names of players and their families who are recently deceased so you can include them.

And here’s an addition to Siri’s Quiz. Some 25 years ago, a player came into the Bronx club that was being held in the home of Carol Clarke, now the late Carol Halper, and stumped us all with it. What short word is pluralized by adding a letter in the interior part of the word?

Stu Goldman

The late Rose Kreiswirth, a warm and wonderful individual and a great SCRABBLE player, was not mentioned in the “Passages” section of the Newsletter because her obituary appeared in SCRABBLE News before NASPA took over from the NSA.

Thanks for the suggestion. Any readers with news about SCRABBLE players are encouraged to send it to me at CorneliaSGuest@gmail.com.

Thanks, too, for your contributions!

Cornelia:

Along the lines of the misadjudication story that cost a player a tourney, we had a similar incident at one of my one-day events in Cambridge, Ontario that made me a fan of computerized adjudications over manual adjudications. For years our tourneys had "runners" (usually teenagers or preteens). A runner's job was to go to any game where there was a challenge, collect the challenge slip, and bring it to the directors' table for adjudication. Once there, one (or sometimes two directors) would examine the slip and manually look up the word(s) to rule on the challenge. The runner would return the slip to the table and show the players what the ruling was. We had a major problem one day because of the illegible printing of a certain well-known player in southern Ontario. I don't recall what the word was now, but his challenge slip had a word containing the letter "C". He printed the word in lower-case letters. He wrote the "c" in such a way that both directors read it as an "e". This, of course, made our adjudication wrong. When his game ended he was upset to find out that an adjudication error had been made, but he refused to take any responsibility for his sloppy handwriting. As an experiment, I circulated the challenge slip to about a dozen people at the tourney. The overwhelming majority read the slip as the directors did--thinking it was an "e" instead of a "c". Nevertheless, we applied the misadjudication rule to the game and adjusted that player's point spread. Needless to say I welcomed the computer technology for self-adjudications.

John Robertson