In which we get up

For someone of the insomniac persuasion, one of the great joys of retirement is the lack of an alarm in the morning. One wakes up when one wakes up, as a general rule making up for any disturbances the previous night. You sleep as much as your body wants you to sleep, not how much your job wants you to sleep. I do, of course, still have to wake up early on debate days, and I've got my phone alarm set for nuclear blast to make up for my diminished hearing abilities, but those days are occasional, and most mornings maybe it's six o'clock, maybe it's eight o'clock, and always it's whenever. Then it's a question of easing out of bed as the spirit moves me.

Eat your heart out.

The first activity of the day is reading first The NY Times and then the local Gannett paper. Having conceded that the grifter in the White House can do way more than I can ever cover in ConstiToonies, I've given up looking for fodder in the corners of his administration, my regular source. (There's not much humor potential in an all-out war on Venezuela, for instance, which seems to be the latest news from the center of the administration debacle.) So I read the interesting stuff in the papers. Today my longest article was the piece on the West End's Paddington. I haven't seen the movies, but I have to admit I will probably try to see the play sooner rather than later, along with granddaughter Rowan. My debate colleague Frank O'Bono gave it high marks (as has every critic under the sun), and it sounds perfectly familial. Maybe this fall. As for the local paper, today as usual it was only the funnies, (or comics, if you prefer), but sometimes there's something interesting in there about road closures or new restaurants or new roads or restaurant closures. 

PUZZLING: The second activity of the day is the Times's puzzles. Wordle first (in 2 today, which always seems like a disappointment as it doesn't come close to percolating the little grey cells, although it does earn you a little badge), then Connections (in 6 today, with a lot of staring and seeing nothing), then the Crossword (in about 12 minutes this morning, which is a nicely satisfying time), then the Spelling Bee (always as long as it takes to get to Genius; today was run-of-the-mill with only 1 pangram that I could find). Breakfast usually goes along with the Bee since it has no timer and can be done with one hand on the computer (all of the above is on the Mac, not the phone or iPad) while one shoves egg into the maw with the other. 

And then it's off to face the day.

In which your pedal extremities are colossal

It's been a while since I've done any blog writing. This whole thing started when I was both coaching debate and working my day job, and then I retired first the former and a bit later the latter, and the narrative thread pretty much disappeared. I was busy with this, that, and the other, tabbing a lot of tournaments, creating comix (e.g., ConstiToonies), keeping quite busy, thank you very much, but I did miss just good old-fashioned writing. So here we are again.

LISTENING: I listen to rock/pop/contemporary albums in the morning. Half an hour to an hour, maybe. I create playlists called Audit, followed by a number. Whenever I see an artist or group unknown to me mentioned favorably, I'll go to Spotify and add them to the latest audit list. (I keep the number of tracks of each of these lists roughly at 300, for manageability's sake.) I'll also occasionally throw in an artist or group that I think I know inside and out, because otherwise in the streaming world you end up never listening to your old favorites. And when an artist I've never or only vaguely heard of dies, they too get tossed onto the pile. As I listen to these audit playlists, occasionally a track will strike me as worth saving, and I'l add it to one of my main playlists. (More about them another time.) And if the performer strikes my fancy, I'll add more of them to future audits.

I mention this because this morning I was treated to a compilation of Fats Waller music. As a piano player myself there are certain performers who have a special appeal to me, and Waller is one of them. Obviously his left hand is a machine, but his right hand also intrigues me. There's all these interstitial diddly diddly diddly riffs that he just throws off because he can that make his music light and sweet while keeping it swinging at the same time. And he has that fun entertainer's singing voice that takes over after what is usually a long piano opening to a number. Plus he wrote a hell of a lot of songs, many of them now standards. (Come to think of it, I've seen "Ain't Misbehavin'" a number of times, both on broadway and on tour and I think even on television.) How did he make his way onto one of the audit lists, which are mostly rock? Well, I hadn't listened to him in a while and his name just popped into my head and then I popped him into an audit. No better reason needed.

By the way, if you want to follow up on this, head over to YouTube to watch him perform. There's a decent amount of material, including his Soundies and his performing in "Stormy Weather." 

I just love his work.

(So, apparently, does Maria Muldaur: https://youtu.be/O7RUhBdakx4?si=L1rYpSanwqQqCdbk)

The latest project

ConstiToonies is the latest waste of both your time and mine. Given that our executive branch provides at least half a dozen idiotic and/or disgusting and/or traitorous and/or mind-numbing items a day, we'll go on as long as they do. One does suspect that once golf season starts, His Mightiness will find something else to fill his empty hours other than destroying the country, but one never knows, does one. 

In which we do a little summing up

It was almost exactly a year ago when, after running a perfectly wonderful NYCFL qualifier for CatNats down at Stuyvesant, a bunch of us drove up north and had a nice Italian dinner in White Plains before going our separate ways. There was a lot of discussion of how the coronavirus might affect us, all of it extremely speculative.

Now we know.

 

Needless to say, there’s still a lot of speculation, and no one really knows now next year will play out, but it’s interesting to look at how we handled things in the year just passed. In a word, we coped. In fact, in some cases we more than coped. 

 

We carved out what we think is a good schedule, essentially five single-flighted rounds a day. There were some variations on this, occasionally over our rather vocal demurrals, but that was the basic setup. Rounds started and ended during what one might call the basic workday, to prevent tournaments from bumping up too hard against the family lives of the participants. We found no way to accommodate folks from time zones far away (see 4n6funnies.blogspot.com for 3/8), but to be realistic, some of those folks from the west coast who would, in real life, come to an east coast tournament, probably usually suffered a hell of a lot worst from red-eyes and jet lag than simply having to get up early in the morning. (And my guess is that, IRL, it wasn’t much earlier than the normal school day. Around here, the buses pick up high school kids at around 6:30 in the morning. I doubt if it’s much different in California.) We jumped on the NSDA virtual room software early on, and found that it blended perfectly with tabroom.com. Palmer and Co at NSDA were real heroes with this. I only used competing software once, and while it had some bells and whistles lacking in the jitsi app, the lack of seamlessness was a powerful deterrent: it would take us forever to get into rooms (after identifying traffic lights, buses and motorcycles over and over again), not to mention the missing campus rooms page where one simply saw at a glance the red dots of the missing and the green checks of the present-and-accounted-for. 

 

I don’t think there’s any question that teams took a hit in a lot of ways. One of the values of forensics is its community, and community on a screen is not the same as community in person, not for forensics or anything else. Once we get back to being IRL, teams are going to have a lot of rebuilding work to do. But at the same time, the lack of physical boundaries allowed us to really beef up a lot of tournaments. While on occasion the size of, say, VPF was the same as previous years, the addition of both JV and Novice almost everywhere came close at times to doubling our numbers. VLD was steady, but again, there were JV divisions that had never existed before. Longtime members of the Vast Coachean Army know my feelings about second-years, who traditionally have a really hard time of it against varsity competition; that’s the year a lot of people drift away. As a firm believer that there are benefits in forensics for all 4 years for everyone, I always hated to see that happen. This year, it didn’t. Or at least it didn’t have to. 

 

Overall, I was personally involved in processing thousands of rounds this year. We lost a few things in our activity, of course, but more than anything, we stuck with it. We created one of the few student activities that could go on all year, slightly but not drastically changed. I would imagine some of the interp activities suffered the most, and I feel for them, because I love them too—half of me is a Speecho-American at heart. But they’ll come back IRL. It’s in their genes. If you love to perform, perform you will, one way or the other. 

 

As I said, no one knows what will be happening next year. Probably we’ll get back on track eventually IRL, but maybe not right away. And some tournaments might stick to virtual precisely because of the lack of room issues. Who knows? In the end, I’m proud of us. We did good work—students, coaches, administrators. We kept this activity vibrantly alive.

 

We did it. 

In which we discuss the sameness of things

I know. I haven’t been blogging, and it’s unlikely that many people are left popping in here to see what’s up. To be honest, there hasn’t been much up at all, aside from running tournaments every weekend. The fact that I’m doing it without leaving the home office makes them all fairly much alike. There’s a big difference in shuttling down to Philadelphia for a weekend and zipping up to Lexington for a different weekend, and not much difference at all in doing Penn and Lexington at my desk in the family room, except my level of responsibility. If you're in charge of the whole shooting match, you put together your team, you create the tabroom tournament, you get people to sign up who should sign up, you bar people from signing up who shouldn’t be signing up, and you make sure everyone gets all their judges lined up. After that, it's the same whether you're in charge or not: you pair the rounds, you tell people to hit start until you’re blue in the face, you go to the kitchen to get something to eat, you come back and pair the next round. In between, you spend a lot of time chatting with Catholic Charlie and She(ryl) Who Must Be Obeyed, and there you are. This year we’ve been lucky to have Dammit Janet with us most of the time; she invented the modern room check, and runs the risk of being nicer than She(ryl) Who Must Be Obeyed, despite all our efforts to bring her down to our level. Of course, that level of responsibility mentioned above is meaningful. I spent endless hours in advance working on Penn. I haven’t spent two minutes working on, say, Lakeland, and I won’t until a final run-through because if I don’t do it, it will be a true fustercluck. It’s hard enough to get tabroom straight when you at it ab ovo, but when someone else has been at it, unstraightness is virtually guaranteed. But it’s no big deal, and things will run fine when the time comes, within the confine of the parameters set by the tournament. I mean, if they want 27 double-flighted rounds a day, I can do it. It’ll suck, but I can do it. At those sorts of tournaments, I’m a simple functionary, following whatever orders are given. If nothing else, the lack of pressure is delightful. So is knowing that, if you had the chance and your hands on the controls, it would be a hundred times better. Don’t blame me: I’m only the messenger.

 

Anyhow, one thing I do have control over is the new 4n6 Funnies. I spent some time today on the page design, which is mostly barebones, but at least it’s barebones that I find comfortable. I’m figuring on maybe 3 new strips a week once I get going. A new one is up now, if you want to check it out. I’ve decided that the first frame linking to the strip is probably the best “ad” when I post that there’s an update. Judge for yourself… 

New Project Launching Today

What? You think I've been doing nothing all year but telling people to hit the start button?

 

In which we concede nothing, 'cause we're rough and tough when we strut our stuff

Things have been going along swimmingly. Overall, people are definitely getting the hang of virtuosity. After all, once you’ve done it, you discover there isn’t much to it. If you can turn on your computer, you pretty much know everything there is to know. The number of tech issues is minimal. If nothing else has gone right during the pandemic, at least forensics has not only survived but thrived. So at least there’s one happy story in all of this mess.

The last few weeks for me have been smallish events that have, at times, required a bit of creativity in the pairing creation. Our CFLs have no school limits, so if you have umpty-ump novice PFers on your team, you get all umpty-ump of them into the tournament. Of course, this usually means same-school pairings, but that is the price you pay for having a successful program. (One of the nice things about the invitiationals this year, unlimited in space as they are, is our ability to have V, JV and Nov divisions of everything, to which the response has been very strong. I think the JV divisions in particular have been godsends for people. The limits in the TOC-bid varsity divisions are serious, but as I’ve noted a million times before, not everyone is—or should be—on the bid hunt. Add to this the need for a place for second-year and lightly experienced third-years to go and have a chance to get meaningful rounds at their own level, and there you are.)  With same-school pairings, at least we usually can get neutral judging, which is something at least. We’ve also had to do a little dancing with the pools, throwing LD judges into PF and (if it makes sense) PF judges into CX, and all manner of craziness that isn’t necessary in the normal run of events. It makes tabbing fun (or something resembling fun, in the tabbing sense of the word), but it does keep the judges dancing to different tunes at the drop of a hat. Keeps them on their toes, in other words. Then again, variety is the proverbial S of L, so we’ll leave it at that. 

 

One big problem has been that single flighting has not generated anything close to a surplus of judges. IRL, a 3 to 1 ratio in a double-flighted world where, in reality, you need a 2 to 1 ratio, has obvious overages. In a 2-1 ratio situation where you indeed run at 2-1, overages aren’t so likely. Being in general a devious human being, I’ve been capping the colleges at odd numbers for just that reason. That is, you can have 3, or 5, depending. 2 or 4, I can’t stop you from entering only Castor and Pollux, but if you have both the Gemini twins and the Olsen twins on your team, one of those pairs is staying home. (Sorry, Mary-Kate.) This arithmetic reality is the reason we didn’t hire out judges at Rather Large Bronx, keeping them all to ourselves, and why we won’t be doing it at the Ivies I work either. At the big tournaments we want if possible to give rounds off; the only way to do that is hire extras and work them to death—What? You want me to judge 5 whole hours? What kind of working world is that? If I had a 9 to 5 job I’d only have to work… Oh… Right. I sent out the notice that we were reneging on the judge hire offer for Princeton a couple of days ago, and got zero push-back. Maybe people are waking up to reality. (Or maybe people are not reading their emails. Could go either way.)

 

Coming up this weekend is Scarsdale, where JV will be cracking the whip virtually to get everyone where they belong when they belong there. Then there’s Wee Sma Lex via the Bronx Local, which still could use a few NYers to perk things up, and then the Tiggers, Ridge and the Venial Sinvitational. Ye gods! Fortunately Thanksgiving is in there somewhere to break things up, and everyone will be over the river and through the woods at grandmother's house, although probably most likely only in their dreams, but, as they say in sports ball, Wait till next year!