Monday, October 17, 2005

Why Expedia Doesn't Offer Tours of the Bronx

On Saturday morning I had an appointment to go look at Eagle Academy as a possible MHL venue. Great googly-moogly! McRotty, their coach, sent me directions from MapQuest that were virtually impossible to follow. I spent about 10 minutes just driving around Yankee stadium, agape. Finally I located the street I was looking for, at which point the directions went from virtually to literally impossible to follow (having to make a left turn at a street marked "no left turn"). I finally parked somewhere I thought was nearby. (These streets were one way in both directions, if you know what I mean—you don't? I mean, not one way in either direction, or two way, but one way for a while in one direction then one way in the other. No wonder the Yankees can't win the Series.) Then the building that should have been the one I was stalking, now on foot, was some other building entirely. Then I got back into the car and drove around some more, getting a chance to watch the odd perp walk outside the local gendarmarie, when I thought I'd give the building with the wrong name another try, so I doubleparked and popped in and, lo and behold, that was indeed the right building, demarcated by the sign-maker from hell, I guess. What the signmaker had against me, I don't know. At this point I realized that, A) there was no way to get to this place, and B) if you got there, there was nowhere to park, and C) I might be taking the next perp walk myself if I didn't hustle back to BxSci for the MHL registration.

In other words, that went well. So much for Eagle hosting an MHL. Which means we're still short a venue for 12/3, the week before Bump.

On another note entirely, for those of you with eagle eyes, yes, Burgers is one clever fellow. For those of you without eagle eyes, you've really come to the wrong website.

I continue to find it amusing that BB has been the least reported-on tournament since the impressment of O'C into the DMV navy. Obviously everyone enjoyed the tournament, although the bid discussion is, as always, marvelously misinformed. Since I actually sit on the advisory committee and know all the details, it's interesting to hear what people think we're doing, or to see what myths they're maintaining. The point of the bid system is simply to insure that the TOC is populated by the best debaters in the country. Getting to that population is the goal of the committee. And there's certainly a feeling on the committee that it makes sense to balance things regionally, although few outside the committee ever seem to get their facts straight about which regions have which bids. Also, in order to have bids, you need to have tournaments capable of generating debater pools worthy of those bids. At the moment, the evil Northeast, even if you include the missing NFA bids this year, is not overapportioned in senatorial terms, and is maybe even a little underapportioned in house of reps terms (if you don't understand what I meant by that, go back to the eagle eye comment above and meditate on that some more; you're obviously not TOC material yet). California slash The West is certainly underapportioned in rep terms, even if you think of Cal as one region (although the distance from north to south Cal is much further than from NYC to Manchester). TOC is pretty generous distributing bids out west (btw, it's JWP who makes the decisions, not the advisory board, which simply advises). The problem is, there's not that many predictably bidworthy tournaments, that is, tournaments that run year after year and will continue to run year after year and continue to draw and generate bidworthiness. This is one of the problems that we always face. We would like to make bids available to every around the country on a scale of perfect apportionment, but the tournaments themselves don't exist on that scale. When programs like Lex and Manchester and Hen Hud run year after year after year in virtually the exact same way, they prove their dependability regardless of their evil Northeast location. Ditto the Texas tournaments (although no one ever questions all those Texas bids and they're just one lone state—that was irony, if you need me to point it out), or Apple Valley, or a few others. Where are the high schools in California running regular, predictable tournaments? And if they are out there, why aren't they sending their data to Minh as the officer of the committee to explain their situations and make their cases? The committee can neither make these things up out of thin air nor go by the comments on the WTF website. Of course, there's always the at-large process to take up the slack; that's why the at-large process exists.

Still, it isn't easy to ascribe bids, which is why there's some fluctuation in where the bids are applied from year to year. Is the present system perfect? I doubt it. Is is as good as it could be? I doubt that too. Is there a better way? I also doubt that. Any way you do it will be imperfect. But if you have a system that's about as good as you can decently expect, then that's the system you use. And that's what we do.

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