Can you fill in the blanks and then put them into the correct chronological order? (Answers at the bottom of the page...)

• A massive earthquake and fires destroy much of the city of [blank].
• French aviator [blank], for whom a Paris tennis stadium is named, is shot down and lands safely in Germany (and later escapes to France to fight in the final stages of the Great War).
• Inaugural meeting of the International Court of Justice in the Dutch city of [blank].
• Seven and a half years after becoming the first national broadcaster, the [blank] announces that there is "no news" in their evening report.
• The Republic of [blank] comes into being with new president Canaan Banana, for whom a law was later passed prohibiting jokes about his name.

Thus Spoke the ACBLscore database (Part 2)

A good reason to get yourself an ACBL number!

At the previous version of the Victoria Regional, while making the Daily Bulletins and looking for errors to correct, I noticed a player from Spoke BC. I had never heard of this place, but there is a lovely place a short drive from Victoria called Sooke, and I made the correction in the Bulletin. The reason these things happen is that when a player who has no ACBL number plays, his or her name and city/province/state (and occasionally country) need to be entered into the computer's database by a Director, possibly one from a different part of the country without local knowledge of nearby places. Since this data comes from an entry form, legibility and handwriting enter into the mix, and errors sometimes happen. Players who get themselves a guest membership a few days before the tournament will be added to the database in time and their details will be automatically available inside ACBLscore. Guest memberships are free now if you have never had a number before, by the way.

But at the club level, when a player comes in for the first time and has to be added to the database, the club director must add the details manually. And after a recent Mentor-Mentee game that I was scheduled to direct before being sent to a sectional in Kamloops, I had to get the file upon my return. Most players had played at our club before, but a lot of the mentees had not gotten an ACBL player number yet. And I discovered that a majority of these players were from an unknown city: Van BC. I can see a busy director trying to save a bit of time by entering this quicker version to get the names in quickly, but I think I would go back and correct them with the missing six keystrokes later when there was time. We're not talking about a bunch of people at the same time, we're talking just one or two or rarely three per game. They didn't all come in at the same time! By the time they were eager enough to play in the Mentor-Mentee game, they had played dozens of 0-500 games at the club.

So at a recent club game I had a closer look at the Vancouver Bridge Centre's database of players, which probably contains data from the earliest days of ACBLscore in the mid 1990s, only a few years after the VBC's opening. The club database has been kept going from infrequent backups where needed through computer disasters, for at least thirty years. I wanted to see how many players were from "Van" and asked for a report by city.

"Van" was near the bottom of a very long and entertaining alphabetical list. We covered the Vancouver variants yesterday, from "Van" to "Vaan" to "VAN" to "Vab."(!) to "Vancouvr" to "Vanacouver" and "Vanouver" and even "ancouver". But that was only the main city in a group of cities and municipalities and other places.

Compass positions combine with 'Vancouver' in various ways that only the natives can completely understand. North Vancouver and West Vancouver are across the water north of the city...

City West Van            Players: 2

City North Van           Players: 2

We'll type the compass position, but Vancouver is right out!

City NorthVancouver      Players: 1

Good try...

City North Vanacouver    Players: 1

So close!

City No Vancouver        Players: 1

Yes Vancouver; No to typing "North"...
This begat a whole army of abbreviators of North or West...

City W.van.              Players: 2

City N.van               Players: 3

City N.van.              Players: 2

City N. Van              Players: 3

City N. Van;             Players: 1

City N. Vancouver        Players: 4

City N.vancouver         Players: 1

In case you're wondering, South Vancouver and East Vancouver are part of the main city. There is also 'The West End' near Stanley Park and the 'West Side' which is the space west of Main St., both within the city proper. Other nearby communities in the Lower Mainland were similarly mangled...

City New Westminster4    Players: 1

The 4 is pretty close to the R key....

City New Wesminster      Players: 1

City N. West             Players: 1

City Abbottsford         Players: 2

One 't' only. Abbotsford is about eighty miles east of Vancouver on the Trans-Canada Highway. In May 2011 I ran a non-Life Master tournament for former TD Richard Dunn, who was called away to Edmonton on short notice for a friend's memorial service and promised to stop by the Bridge Centre on the way back following his flight on Sunday. This was my first experience with the ACBLscore financial system and I was having some trouble. I knew I had collected the right amount of cash, but I did want to get it all entered correctly so that the program would print out a balanced and correct financial report without anything missing or wrong. Richard arrived, solved my problems, and off we went to a nearby restaurant for dinner on me. We walked in and stood at the entrance and slowly it dawned on us that the staff were all intently watching a wall-mounted TV with CNN on. Finally we got someone's attention, took a booth, my seat facing away from the TV, and after a quick hungry perusal of the menu, I looked up. "OK, Richard, what's the big news story?"

"Well, it looks like they've found and killed Osama Bin Laden," said Richard, "and we're waiting for the president to appear, to confirm the rumours that have leaked."

"Really!" I exclaimed. "And wherever did they find him?"

Richard took a long hard look at the fairly distant screen. "I can't quite read it," he began, "but it seems to say on the ticker that he was holed up in Abbotsford!"

"OK then," I said, signalling a waitress. "Let's eat." (It was only much later that evening that I learned about the compound in Abbottabad ... which does have two 't's.)

City Burnaaby            Players: 1

City Burnabu             Players: 1

City Burnzby             Players: 1

My last move was from Burnaby to....

City Coquitland          Players: 1

...Coquitlam.

City RICHMOND            Players: 2

City RICHMIOND           Players: 1

Not sure why Richmond gets all-caps, however you spell it.

City Surry               Players: 1

City S Surry             Players: 1

Surrey, with an 'e', is probably the fastest growing city in the Lower Mainland, both in population and in area, since it has convinced South Surrey (not S Surry) and White Rock (see below) to join it.

City W. Rock             Players: 1

City Whire Rock          Players: 1

Coming up tomorrow, more misspelled cities, a few interesting whacks at the two-letter ACBLscore Country Codes, and more...

Attendance So Far

267½ tables at the end of Day Two (Tuesday), 59.9% of the 2019 total. For full details, check out the new Table Counts page!

Bridge clubs and tournaments throughout the ACBL are struggling with returning to live play, so comparing this tournament's attendance to one before the pandemic is not really fair. We'll be very happy if the tournament hits 60% of the 2019 table count of 1932 tables, so 1159 is the target number, but maybe we'll do even better!

Brain Warmup Department: Rectangles

For those of you who used to like the puzzles I printed in the old bulletins, here is a link to an online version: one of the puzzles that I used to feature in the old paper Bulletins, but it is easy to play on a computer as well. Not so easy on a tablet or phone, since most of the puzzles require right-clicks, not easily done in a tablet or phone environment. Rectangles, gives you a grid of cells, some of which contain numbers; your objective is to divide the grid into rectangles of various sizes so that each rectangle contains exactly one numbered square which is the number of cells in that rectangle. Remember that squares are specific types of rectangles: a '16' could be a 4x4 rectangle. Strategies: look for numbers that can only be one shape; larger such numbers may have only a few ways to fit without overlapping another numbered cell. Click on the puzzle you want to try at the right (or the caption below) to go to the page with all the instructions you'll need. These puzzles come from Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection (see below) and there are links there to apps for most devices. You can make puzzles of any size and difficulty level!	Easy puzzle (McBruce's time: 0min 48sec)
	Medium puzzle (McBruce's time: 0min 46sec)
	Tricky puzzle (McBruce's time: 2min 33sec)

Day Two (Tuesday) Results