Go, Chipmunks! (Or is it Polecats? Field mice? Rocky Mountain Ticks? Whatever.)

Details will be provided once they are finalized, but I seem to have solved yesterday’s dilemma. Never underestimate the power of community! I think I’m doing the happy dance.

So, on to a CFL Grands report. As expected, the number of entrants, 24, each with a judge, plus 2 extra judges, ameliorated the 3-judge 2-flight process enormously. We used cards, of course, with the computer on hand simply for the printing of said cards and the ballots, and as the day progressed it took three of us to track everything, but even in round 4 we never had to have a judge adjudicate the same person twice (on the opposite side), and we were still getting clean judges for both flights. My belief that the number of judges in a round should connect to the number of entrants seems to hold, which is why I will recommend 2 judges for 20 or fewer in the future. With PF, where there were only 10 teams, things were a little different, and almost everyone was judged twice by the same judge, although we did port over a couple of LD judges each round to make things work. Given the small PF field, we were able to bring things there to a halt after 3 rounds; there was no way a 4th round would have made a difference in who would qualify, especially given the need at this point to break brackets so much that they’d be screaming in the night. And since a qualification event is all about the qualification, end of story. As for the LD qualifiers, as always New York is among the toughest quals around. Throw in the top debaters from all the schools in our diocese and you’ve got quite a brouhaha. Those who qual’d are good, and plenty who didn’t qual are also good. It can be quite a heartbreaker. Then again, the prize is a free trip to [some state between the Hudson River and San Francisco Bay, exactly which one being unclear to me, which practically made Kaz hit me over the head with a loose Dec trophy but I just can’t help myself—Go Badgers?], so there is the upside of not having to spend Memorial Day there [and you Cornhuskers or Beanbangers or whatever you are needn’t pretend to be offended by my parochialism when you know damned well that you think New York is a hell hole populated entirely by muggers, terrorists and Friends of Spitzer].

So now it’s on to Districts, and I have to say that so far the Goy has proven to work just fine. I attempted to generate some dummy rounds and badda bing, badda boom, there they were. It’s a hefty program, and occasionally ungainly, but if it continues to work the way it has, I’m going to be quite pleased. As a rule, prepping for Districts for me is days upon days of tedium, filling out cards and collecting data and then recollecting it and filling our more cards and cursing and spitting and sacrificing goats on the altar of the Rippin’ gods, but this time I am either befogged in false confidence or sitting pretty, and all the goats in my vicinity are happily grazing away, proud to be cheese producers as compared to stew producers. We’ll know for certain come Friday.

And tonight, Caveman Part One! Get there early for the best seats, and start popping that corn, you huskers!