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

• A 51-day siege of the Branch Davidian building in [blank] ends when a fire breaks out.
• After a shootout with police, one Boston Marathon bombing suspect is killed and his brother is later found hiding in a backyard [blank] in Watertown MA.
• [blank] is proclaimed as the national anthem of Australia.
• First appearance on TV of [blank] as a series of shorts on the Tracey Ullman Show.
• Prince Rainier of Monaco is married to [blank].

Thus Spoke the ACBLscore database (Part 3, the final chapter!)

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 two days ago, 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. Yesterday we exposed the rest of the Lower Mainland, including "N Van", "N West", "Burnabu", "Coquitland", and other funnies.

Today we have some cities a bit further away...

City Ott                 Players: 1

City Tor                 Players: 7

Visitors from Ontario get abbreviated as much as the locals, apparently. "Ott" is Canada's national capital, Ottawa (accent on the first syllable unless you're Tucker Carlson and don't really care). "Tor", of course, is...

City Toronro             Players: 1

I'm getting the idea that the R key at the Vancouver Bridge Centre is some sort of magnet. But there's more.

City Settle              Players: 2

Two settlers, who are probably in fact from Seattle. And...

City Tocoma              Players: 3

Three ployers from "Tocoma", opporently...

City Port Ludow          Players: 1

That would be Port Ludlow WA, about 50 miles southeast of Victoria across the water...

City Oak Ahrbor          Players: 1

Oak Harbor is about 20 miles westsouthwest of Victoria....

City Pgrgaian            Players: 1

No idea whatsoever. Reminds me of the Bob Newhart line where the experiment to prove that enough monkeys and enough typewriters will eventually produce all the works of Shakespeare requires a monitor to watch for anything interesting: "yeah, just checking number 247 here: he's all over the place. Moving on to 248: wait, there something here: to be, or not to be, that, is, the, ... , gezornenblatt."

Occasionally we see a city which is not a city at all. ACBLscore has a help file with a long list of two-letter abbreviations for all states in the US and Mexico, Canadian provinces, and even all of the countries of the world. Because the states and provinces take precedence, many of the country codes are completely unexpected. But it would appear that at the club level we just make it up:

City HK                  Players: 1

'HK' is the correct country code for Hong Kong. Entering it as the city is not quite right. There's Kowloon, Wanchai, even (not so far from Wanchai) Chaiwan!, among many other communities and several dozen islands.

City Australia           Players: 7

Struth! Very big continent-sized city here.

City France              Players: 1

Zut alors!

City HOLLAND (NL)        Players: 1

There are some cities in Holland that, without even zooming in much on Google Maps, I can see are pretty difficult to spell correctly. I would bet against VBC directors trying to correctly type Amersfoort, Hoogeveen, Groningen, and especially 's-Hertogenbosch. Even more surprising is that the country code for Holland is not NL, which is unused, but NN.

City Bombay (IN)         Players: 1

Bombay is indeed a city, but it is not in Indiana...The ACBLscore country code for India is .... II!

City Brazil (SA)         Players: 1

Brazil is also not a city. But it is a nice try to get SA in as the country code to let us know what continent is referenced, even if ACBLscore unfortunately places Brazil in not South America, but Saudi Arabia!

City NS                  Players: 2

Nova Scotia, presumably. They have some doozies there as well: Musquodoboit Harbour, Tatamagouche, Whycocomagh.

City Ontario (ON)        Players: 2

The trouble with this one is that there actually is a place in California named Ontario. Who knows whether these players are from some unknown spot in Canada's most populous province, or are from the L.A. area?

City Conshohochen (PA)   Players: 1

City Conshohocken (PA)   Players: 1

To be fair, the names involved here have codes attached that I recall was part of some entries added to our database from a tour that visited the VBC many, many years ago (the codes were to help us separate the stronger players from the others and make teams with two of each). So it wasn't one of our club directors who typed this. Conshohocken (k, not h, in the antepenultimate spot) is northwest of Philadelphia, near King Of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

The Punch Line!

Many club databases have entries for directors filling in who wish to remain anonymous. I've been careful not to list names from the report I generated in this series, but this one is a beaut:

Phantom         Squeeze          AreYouKidding?   NO

City AreYouKidding?      Players: 1

"Phantom Squeeze" appears to live in the city of AreYouKidding?, in (according to ACBLscore country codes) ... Northern Ireland!

Attendance So Far

489 tables at the end of Day Three (Wednesday), 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: Signpost

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. Signpost, gives you a grid of cells with arrows, and some with numbers. Cell #1 is in the top left, and its arrow points to Cell #2, etc., through to the final cell (no arrow) at the bottom right corner. You simply need to find the missing numbers, because although the arrow points to the next cell, it could be adjacent or far away! By dragging the mouse from one cell to the next you connect the cells and the corresponding numbers appear; to delete a wrong number, drag it off of the puzzle. The dots at the lower left of each cell show a cell unconnected to the following cell. You can connect an un-numbered cell to another un-numbered cell and the display will give the chain a series headed by a letter: a, a+1, a+2, until it is connected to a cell with a number later. The "full instructions" link below each puzzle when you click the link has more solving tips and useful aids. 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:1min 6sec)
	Medium puzzle (McBruce's time: 2min 10sec)
	Tricky puzzle (McBruce's time: 10min 46sec)

Day Three (Wednesday) Results