Monday, November 05, 2007

Bump it up a notch; notch up another MHL; Nostrum's niche; Where is Tricky Dick when you need him?

I’ll be crawling out of my hole any minute now. I spent all of yesterday finalizing the Bump invoices, and straightening out all of the registrations. I got things set up in E-TRPC (yes, evil TRPC, because I’ll probably want to print ballots after the first round or two). I looked around for all the things in the chez basement, like mugs and extra ballots, and found some trophies but no mugs or extra ballots. Why do I think I have this stuff, if I don’t? I bought some paper and a cartridge for my laserjet. I encumbered all the expenses. I still need to update who’s getting out of school early and the like. And I lie awake last night wondering how this stupid express check-in is supposed to work, since it seems to provide a solid possibility of crack-falling contestants, but at least I can blame my official greeter, Robbie, if anything goes wrong there. I should probably start blaming him now, just to get warmed up. I did find a big box for crappy prizes; Peanuts and his Evil Apprentice are coming over tomorrow to help me sort them out. Housing seems to be covered. Food seems to be covered. I just talked to the custodian at the grammar school, and that seems to be covered. So, as I say, I’ll be crawling out of my hole any minute now.

I just spilled soup on the Great Book of Bump. How fitting.

So the MHL at Monti was an eye-opener. And here’s why. There seems to be an epidemic of schools that put in registrations by the due date, and then change them, and change them, and change them. One school changed virtually its entire (large) entry every day following the closing of registration, plus one last time at the registration table. The MHL, being about as nonprofit as you can get, has no penalties for such behavior. Or, more to the point, had no penalties for such behavior. I’ll work something out between now and the next one, whenever and wherever that is. This last-minute changes stuff doesn’t work. It’s not just the wear and tear on me, but the fact that the data always goes into the system wrong, and the first round is something like a sixth grade mixer, where no one knows where to go or what to do and the kids who get lost have these pathetic looks on their faces as if they’ll never recover and the adults just want to go home. On the positive side, I managed to duck Howard. O’C had it with him, but there was enough tabroom confusion, and gossip, to keep him from loading it up. Thank God he isn’t coming to Little Lex! By the way, it turns out that the Irish O’C interview is making the rounds these days, and that surprised me. The actual interview is available on my podcast page, voila, there it is, but the Irish interview is tricked out as an Easter Egg that you have to find. (Actually, it’s on this page, in one of its incarnations.) Bacon confirmed what I thought, which is that, while it may not be Cruz’s voice, it is Cruz’s answers. And, of course, its very existence drives O’C crazy (which may explain why he likes Howard T. D.) which means that I’ll keep it around as long as I can.

Speaking of podcasts, I heard from the Nostrumite who told me that one of his untold legions of fans had discovered missing pdfs from the Nostrum page, and he asked me to post them. Apparently someone is reading the thing. Who knew? Personally, I consider it unlikely that anyone is listening, but if you’re missing the printed version, you can always listen to the recorded version. Whatever. One of the missing episodes was the Tom Swifties piece; I can’t imagine listening to that, to tell you the truth. (For the uninitiated, Tom Swifties are made up lines reminiscent of the old Tom Swift series, where every speech had an adverb: “I love Kant,” he said categorically. “My favorite kind of debate is where no one discusses the resolution,” she said theoretically. “Debate websites claim victory,” she said briefly. You get the idea.) Then again, the line to the effect, “ ‘It was stolen,’ she said sweetly,” has to be heard to be understood.

And tomorrow is election day. Vote, says I: vote, vote, like you’ve never voted before. My feeling is, a solid show of Republican support will send a message to the White House that it’s okay to invade Iran in these waning months of lame duckness (hey: that’s two lame ducks in one posting). You da man, Shrubby. Let’s back our Commander-in-Chief while we still can. It won’t be long before he’s no longer our Decider, and we’ll be looking back fondly on this Periclean Golden Age. (In other words, who’d have thought that some of us would longing for the Nixon era?)

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