A Bridge Day Yesterday
Yesterday I had some folks over to play bridge. Janet is a woman I've played bridge with before. She just plays recreationally, and isn't very competitive. She and I also play a number of different conventions. For instance, she plays strong-two openings and I play weak-two openings. She also only opens 5-card suits (and opens an artificial one-club for good points but no 5-card suit), whereas I play 3-card minor openings. So that's a little challenging.
Janet brought a friend of hers from out of town, who had never played before, but picked things up fairly well and said she had fun playing. The fourth player was Vijay, a guy from work who I hadn't really known before. He seems pretty knowledgable about the game, and said he played a lot when he lived in India.
Amazingly, we didn't have any really spectacular bidding breakdowns. Vijay and I did well, partly due to the luck of the cards. I gained a real appreciation for the Stayman Convention yesterday, as I now realize that pretty much every time I use it we end up in something very close to the perfect contract. I also finally learned Takeout Doubles, which I learned after blowing both a Takeout Double and a Penalty Double during a round I played at a tournament with John. We had a couple of less-straightforward auctions that turned out okay, too.
I had fun, and I'd like to start playing a little more often. Hopefully we can play a few times when John comes back to visit later this year.
Ethan is sort of a side-story to the Miles Vorkosigan series, with Elli Quinn, one of Miles' subordinates in the Dendarii Mercenaries, being sent on a solo mission to her birthplace on Kline Station. But the title character, Ethan Urquhart, is really the protagonist. Athos is a world of men - no women live there, none are born there, and none are allowed there. It segregates itself from the rest of the galaxy.
Naturally, no one is really born there. Rather, Athos has a stock of "ovarian cultures" which generate eggs which are them fertilized and gestate in uterine replicators. (Okay, it's a dodgy concept, but I can buy it as the technology behind the rest of the premise.) Of course, after three hundred years, the original cultures break down and don't work so well anymore, so they have to get more from the galactics somehow. When an order they place through the planet of Jackson's Whole turns up to be botched, they send Ethan out to Kline Station to procure a better order. While there, he ends up being stalked by Cetagandan soldiers who think the shipment sent there was stolen from a genetics project of theirs, and he meets Quinn, who is herself stalking the Cetagandans.
So it's a clever little adventure, but also works as a basic look at an all-male society and how Ethan reacts when he gets out into the greater galaxy.
Next up: Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint.
And tonight I've been watching Monday Night Football, and I'll probably catch up on my videotapes in a little while.
I feel like I've been incredibly productive lately. I wonder why that is?
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