If this is October, it must be Bronx; One Small Step for a Debater; Qi + Xi = Aaarrghh

So I put up a public Google tournament calendar on my sked page, which may look like I’m doing it for everyone else’s benefit but to be honest, I wanted it to add to my iCal collection. I now have literally every relevant appointment/todo/event in one place, including my vacation plans. I feel so…contemporary. Not being too cheap to buy an iPhone would have provided a similar feeling, but I can’t justify $60 a month when at the moment I now pay $100 a year for phone service (and I’m disregarding the cost of the phone per se). If I talked to more people on the phone, or texted more people, things would be different. But I don’t, and I don’t. And I’m not rich, especially since I just got “the call” from the Honda place where I dropped my car off this morning. “The call” is when they tell you all the stuff they discovered that you can’t even imagine, and they tell you a ballpark figure, which is usually enough to buy yourself a ballpark. Oh, well, Whaddya gonna do?

I see that over at WTF O’C is counting down to Woodward. Whatever. O’C is big on counting down to tournaments. Then again, he is tabbing LD for them, and maybe he really is counting down to the tournament: he is an excitable boy. The only tournament I ever pay much attention to is Bump, for obvious reasons. The rest of them can count themselves down to their little hearts’ content, if you know what I mean. No doubt as soon as Woodward lifts off the platform he’ll start counting down to TOC. Me, I just don’t get excited about this stuff. I also have no March Madness brackets. I have no Superbowl picks. My team is unlikely to know there even is a World Series. I think Obama and Hillary have virtually identical policies, and have spent so much of my life with office-holding politicians ranging from the clincically inept to the downright evil that I have little belief that any of them will 1) Clean up Washington, 2) Win the Superbowl, or 3) Take home the office NCAA pool. I do sort of follow the ponies, though, which is why I always hate going down to TOC, because you always have to judge while the Derby is going on about a mile down the road from you, and most debaters don’t like it when you adjudicate their round with a mint julep in your hand.

Tonight Caveman will move into the birth of the individual, and probably make it into the Modernist period. In other words, the good stuff is about to begin. I mention this in case you’re counting down to the Baudrillard section.

If you’re wondering, my average for Scrabulous is, well, average. CP beats me all the time, although he uses all these Scrabble words that no one else has ever heard of that he picks up hanging out no doubt in unsuitable venues like computer labs (I'm pretty sure that's him in the Hello Kitty outfit, below), while other games go either way. I can strip the moss off a crossword puzzle at a thousand paces with a butter knife, but I haven’t got the hang of Scrabble yet. But I’m working on it. I really am. Feel free to challenge me if you want to help me over the hump. When I can say Bah! to CP, I’ll know that I’ve arrived.