{"id":206,"date":"2005-01-24T15:56:00","date_gmt":"2005-01-24T21:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/?p=206"},"modified":"2005-01-24T15:56:00","modified_gmt":"2005-01-24T21:56:00","slug":"the-fan-bryanston-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/the-fan-bryanston-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fan, Bryanston"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Monday, January 24, 2005<\/h2>\n<p><i>Service: * * *1\/2<br \/>\n<br \/>      Food: * * *<br \/>\n<br \/>      Ambience: * * * *<br \/>\n<br \/>      Babe Count: * * *<\/i>       <\/p>\n<p>Andreas is sitting across the board from me. I&#8217;m playing the role of       kindly uncle helping him with his game. He&#8217;s just turned 25 or 26, and I&#8217;m       36 and 11\/12s, seeing as my birthday is coming up on 17 Feb. So I&#8217;m not       really qualified to be his uncle figure. But I reckon this is backgammon,       and I&#8217;ll do whatever it takes to win.       <\/p>\n<p>So whenever he makes a completely arseholed play, I feel it&#8217;s my duty       to stop him before he picks up his dice, and ask him to explain the play       to me. As a consequence, he avoids making some seriously stupid,       irrational moves, and starts beating me gently.       <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m okay with that, cos he&#8217;s actually got the potential to be a strong       player, but he&#8217;s blind to his weaknesses, and he sank down to C-division       last year, and didn&#8217;t get high quality feedback. Not that my feedback is       all that high quality. Heck. I was middle of B-div last year. Hardly one       of the greats. But shit, at least my advice makes sense.       <\/p>\n<p>He gets a respectable lead over me, and then I start pulling out the       stops. And I offer him psychologically harrowing cubes. And he sometimes       drops them incorrectly, and he sometimes takes them incorrectly. Both       cases give me more points. Yeah, baby.       <\/p>\n<p>In the end, after sipping a good minestrone soup accompanied by loads       of brown bread, brought by Eric, who seems to have improved over last       week, I slash Andreas&#8217;s jugular, and sacrifice him to the gods of dice by       beating him 21&#8211;17. Very satisfying. My second match of the year, and I&#8217;m       now ready to start winning.       <\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\">Roy Blumenthal is a writer, director, artist, and <a href=\"http:\/\/snipurl.com\/visualfacilitator\">visual facilitator<\/a>. Hire him to make pictures of your meetings or workshops.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Monday, January 24, 2005 Service: * * *1\/2 Food: * * * Ambience: * * * * Babe Count: * * * Andreas is sitting across the board from me. I&#8217;m playing the role of kindly uncle helping him with &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/the-fan-bryanston-2\/\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Fan, Bryanston<\/span> Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p521FP-3k","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}