Friday, December 9, 2022

Mahjong as Part Socialization and Gambling Activity for Filipino Americans

In my latest article/posting, I discussed some tips to consider when purchasing an automatic mahjong table. This was inspired when when my Pinay Home Care Aide informed me that every month as part of her entertainment, she plays automatic mahjong in the residence of a friend ( another retired Pinay) a few minutes away from my house. This activity is also part socialization and part gambling. The last time she played she lost $200 after playing for 8 hours. I advise her to adhere to a monthly budget for this activity.

This incident reminded me of my younger years in the Philippines. At that time automatic mahjong tables had not been invented/manufactured. But playing mahjong in people's private residences as a gambling activity was a very popular activity as there are no public parlors for gambling at that time.

My aide information on this activity did not surprised me. Knowing that mahjong could be addictive I now believe that this is becoming popular in Filipino-American Homes specially for Seniors and Retirees here in the US.

The host of this mahjong parties may make a little money from the TONGs ( contributions/payment/donation) from patrons of the game. During my childhood years in the Philippines, I remember that the tongs varies from 5 to 10% of the winnings of the player per game. Here in Sacramento my aide informed me that the tongs is calculated based on the amount of the winnings of the player and a little bit complicated depending on the complexity of the game won.

Part of the TONGS is spent for the food and drinks provided by the Host to the Players. The rest of the tongs is income for the host. My aide informed me that her friend hosted automatic mahjong games three times a week from 11AM to 9PM. A few of the mahjong players have jobs, so scheduling is flexible. Bets are as low starting at $2/4 per game or as high as your budget allows.

Here are more tips if you are really serious in buying an automatic mahjong table.

An Automatic Mahjong Table works by using magnetism. The table contains 4 powerful magnets which influence the magnets inside of the Mahjong tiles. By using magnetism we can establish which side of the tile will be facing up. This is accomplished by installing the magnets inside the tiles with their poles facing in the same direction of the magnets inside of the table. This will cause the magnets to repel and turn onto the side where the tile numbers are not seen. We also use the magnets to load the tiles onto a small conveyor belt to be distributed to each wall. We then use sensors to count how many tiles will load onto each wall and distribute the remaining tiles to the other walls where needed. This process is repeated every time a new game is played.

https://versatilemachinery.com/automatic-mahjong-table-faq/

Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Tips on Purchasing Automatic Mahjong Tables

Last Monday my home care aide (A Pinay) was 30 minutes late. I was worried as she was always on time even 5 minutes early. She told me she overslept. Later on she volunteered the reason why she overslept was the fact that she played automatic mahjong in her friend's house up to 2AM. Because it was late she did not go home and slept on her friend's couch. Her Friend's house is only 5 minutes away from me. Her own residence ( son's house) is 25 minutes away. I was curious about automatic mahjong table so I did some search here's what I found.

The automatic mahjong table cost varies from the cheapest model of $300 to the most expensive model-$50,000.00. The one I like is described below and can be purchased from Amazon.

https://www.google.com/search?q=automatic+mahjong+table+price&client=ubuntu&hs=rhz&channel=fs&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj306f3juP7AhW4JDQIHQHNACgQ_AUoAnoECAIQBA&biw=1373&bih=719&dpr=1

Amazon.com - Seller · $1,249.99

Amazon.com: 144Tiles 44mm 松乐超大手感牌 Folding Automatic Mahjong Table with 4 Drawers & 2 Sets of 44mm No Number Chinese / Philippine Tiles ( Blue & Green) Not Fit 166 American (Without

USA Mahjong Table 144Tiles 44mm 松乐超大手感牌 Folding Automatic Mahjong Table with 4 Drawers & 2 Sets of 44mm No Number Chinese / Philippine Tiles ( Blue & Green) Not Fit

Visit

下单后您会收到一封确认邮件,请及时回复以便我们尽快发货,谢谢您的理解!You will receive a confirm message from seller, please reply it so that we can ship your order ASAP. Thank you for your understanding! 驰名品牌松乐,品质有保障。Tabletop Dimensions: 39′′ x 39′′ x 30.5" high from floor to tabletop Weight: 220 lb Cable:110v, Length: 5 feet long The folding table automatically shuffle tiles and push a button to roll the dice and start playing in 3 seconds! Comes 2 sets of 144pcs 44mm (43mm x 32mm x 22mm) large size magnetic tiles plus 8 blank tiles. 超大手感牌

Never use MAGNETIC CHIPS! They will cause table breakdowns!We will provide the foldable table assembly instruction and Mahjong Table Convertible Modes electronic document Never use MAGNETIC CHIPS! They will cause table breakdowns!

Contemporary Pedestal Automatic Mahjong Table comes 2 sets of magnetic tiles 144 tiles (1 Blue & 1 Green) The table can be used not only with Chinese mahjong set, but also Philippine style, India style...etc, but please double check the tiles picture and make sure that is what you play, usually not for American mahjong style.

You can easily switch the modes on the table according to your preference : ) Example: Switch the code to "01" --- when playing 144 tiles (Traditional Chinese Mahjong ) Switch the code to "01" --- when playing 144 tiles. Tabletop dimensions: 38′′ x 38′′ 30.5" high from floor to tabletop Weight: 220 lb Cable:110v, Length: 5 feet long High quality table motor was designed by SOLOR Inc. and with the corporation of Panasonic team. The tiles are pretty and it's nice to have the numbers on the Chinese character tiles. Tiles were made of melanmine. 144 tiles Full Size Mahjong Set unfold dimensions: 110 cm x 101 cm x 77 cm Package included 1 automatic mahjong table + 2 sets of magnetic tiles 144 tiles (1 Blue & 1 Green)

Here's a video of how the automatic mahjong table works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpbjH_eHc6A

For the article why mahjong is a Katague clan Tradition read:

https://davidbkatague.blogspot.com/2021/12/playing-mahjong-reliving-my-favorite.html

Here's a video for Beginners-13 tiles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix6DmwP4Ets

The reasons why Mahjong is Addicting:

https://techstory.in/the-science-behind-why-mahjong-can-be-so-addictive-lets-find-out/

Monday, May 16, 2022

The Lunar Eclipse Last Night, May 15, 2022

The Moon from my Front Porch taken Mid Night-May 15, 2022

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — All eyes are on the forecast for later tonight as a total lunar eclipse will be visible Sunday night.

According to NASA, a partial lunar eclipse will be visible starting at 9:15 p.m. By 10:20 p.m., a full lunar eclipse will be visible and remain visible until 11:54 p.m. The partial lunar eclipse ends at 1:20 a.m.

The lunar eclipse will be visible anywhere the moon is visible. Because lunar eclipses occur during the full moon phase, the moon will generally be visible starting around sunset.

That means most viewers on the east coast will see the lunar eclipse in its entirety while those on the west coast will be able to see the lunar eclipse in progress.

The next total lunar eclipse will be in November, which will be visible throughout most of the U.S. The next lunar eclipse after that won’t be until March 2025.

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth gets directly in between the Sun and moon. The shadow will make the moon appear blood red during totality. Here's a live blog of the eclipse from indianaexpress.com

https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/science/lunar-eclipse-2022-live-updates-pictures-visibility-livestream-7919256/

Photo Credit: CNN.com

Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.