A Little Touch of Lex in the Night, so to speak. Or a Little Slice of Lex, as CP put it. But then again, he's no Shakespeare.

I’m a big fan of Wee Sma Lex for a variety of reasons. After last weekend, I remain as big a fan. I just like going up there at this point in the season. It gives novices their first overnight experience, without their having to debate two days in a row. They get to eat at restaurants (except for our new novice Panivore, who simply brings a crust of bread in with her and chews on it for an hour or so, hoping no one charges her for the glass of water she occasionally takes a sip out of). They get to be housed (although the whining about housing was from, of all people, SuperSquirrel, who should know that housing is a random action, in no way tied to partnerships and housee desires of any sort; if the housing authorities started attending not only to finding space but to also finding a certain precise space for Polician or Pffffter teams, housing would collapse immediately of its own weight). They get a good four rounds of debate at a decent pace (we even put in a little lunch break). As for the upperclassmen, they all got to play around with Pffft, with varying but mostly satisfying degrees of success. Even though our bus died, it did so Saturday morning, which kept this fact unbeknownst to the Sailors as there was a brand new alternator installed by the time we left for points southwest. What more could you ask for?

CP and I were duly proud of ourselves for breaking after 4 Pffft rounds into an “exhibition final.” Having lots of judges, which was none of our doing, allowed us to do some single flighting, so it worked out nicely. I loved this one judge whose coach had put her in the LD pool, which we took her out of because she knew nothing about LD. Somehow she lit onto PF, and began asking everyone in tab one after the other, including the custodian, to put her in. (This, of course, after the rounds were paired without her even being in the pool.) She was persistent, I’ll give her that. Of course, complaining to us about being put into the LD pool didn’t have the same effect as complaining to the coach that did it in the first place, but that was sort of beside the point. She just endearingly wouldn’t take no for an answer, even when we threatened her with our nerf submachine guns. Finally we threw her into the demo final with 4 other judges, which did make her disappear, which is about the best you can hope for. Still, she was trying to argue her way into and not out of rounds, so you’ve got to love her for that.

CP spent a lot of time improving tabroom for Sara S, now that I’ve finished with it for Bump. He explained that this was the opportune moment; I’d been duly tortured, so it’s time to make the necessary improvements for the good people of the world. Honestly, the only problem issues that remain seem to be on the housing side. Sometimes housing requests disappear, and sometimes they multiply. Knowing that this is possible puts the tournament director ahead of the game; there’s plenty of ways to keep an eye on it, and once you know that an eye must be kept, you’re in pretty good shape. He also spent a lot of time farting around with some other tournament that was taking place even as we tabbed Little Lex, so I’d be talking to him but he’d be talking on the phone to someone and typing away readjusting their placement in After Dinner Speaking or whatever other Massachusettian activity they might be conducting. In response, I’d go online and send vulgar emails to O’C, who was “coaching” out in Chicago, which means hanging out with people in the judges’ lounge while chowing down nonstop and, needless to say, not judging. And he had to go to Chicago to not judge. He could have stayed home to not do that.

Since the new topics aren’t out yet, I’ll be doing a novice-only meeting tomorrow night. We’ll get some advice from the Little Lexers (Panivore actually managed to win the thing despite her diet of unbleached wheat products), while a first-timer managed to achieve a high point loss, which we thought was the sort of thing limited to good old HPL himself. It probably makes sense at the next tutti of the fruttis to do some Pffft debriefing. Maybe we’ll get some more dedicated Pfffters out of this. One of our Speecho-Americans has actually unsworn her previous allegiance and signed up for the debate listserver (AKA "the sorta dark" side). She was lost in a flood of her own “Where has this been all my life?” dismay. Yeah, of course. Pfffft does seem to draw its biggest advocates not from debate but from speech. Interesting. Now if they could only run a counterplan…