Under the Sea

Well, let’s see. Not much going on, I would say. Hosting a totally filled-up tournament in a little over a week. Getting out of the NFL alive. Relaunching the Modest Novice. Aren’t I just the busiest little beaver?

Let us today simply look back at the weekend that was Manchester-Under-the-Sea. I haven’t been up at the Home of the Albino Bagel in many years because I’ve had to be at the CFL that weekend in NYC. But because of scheduling issues this year, I was able to get back up there. This was the first time I’ve actually seen the surrounding countryside. In the past a bus would drop us off and later shuttle me along the highway back and forth to a motel, but I’d never actually visited Manchester. It’s exactly what you expect it to be. Early Nineteenth Century high-steeple church and a stolid old city hall. A rather funky library, where one gets the feeling that the townspeople of the day said to themselves, there’s stone around here and we’re going to use every last rock of it. Very cool. And it really is by the sea, so you look out and see boats and clam restaurants and that sort of thing. We arrived early and walked around a bit just to stretch our legs, and I’m glad we did. Also, I was staying in Ipswich, which meant driving through Essex, which was even more traditional New Englandy. These were the kinds of places you could imagine visiting on vacation. Who knew there was something other than debate going on up there?

There were two divisions of LD, 40 varsity and 33 novices. I’m used to small divisions, fortunately, and I’m used to cards, even more fortunately, because there was no way that TRPC was going to successfully handle this tournament. Each bracket seemed to comprise a single school, which is murder. So, we hand-paired rounds 3 through 5. Fortunately a couple of very bright Manchestwegians were tab slaving, and had already been trained on data entry, and they worked with me to insure side restraints and the like. So it didn’t cost us much time at all, as compared to automated pairing, and the rounds all went out pretty well, on-time, with a minimum number of pull-ups.

Once again I was reminded that this version of TRPC, which I have gotten used to, used to be referred to here as E-TRPC, to wit, E as in Evil. This weekend I discovered (after discovering last weekend that I was creating division-free judges) that if you stopped scheduling someone, they disappear out of either division one or two and go into division five. There was, of course, no division five. And when said Stopped Scheduled soul stops vomiting and wants back in, he or she is unfindable. Needless to say, many hairs were pulled for a while over this one, and once again the full head of hair with which I began a tournament was reduced to the handful of wisps with which I usually end a tournament. (I’ve got to post a picture of me before a tournament some day. Normally I look like Wolverine, and not Gollum.)

So tabbing was unusually complicated, but nothing we couldn’t handle. Fortunately the Manchestwegian parents laid out a judge lounge dinner unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a high school, which made up for any problems we might have encountered. To describe it would be to make you sick with envy, and would raise the bar for everyone, including Bump, so all I’ll say is that it was served by (faux) candlelight. In O’C terms, you might call it Tastes of Luxurious New England. Not an albino bagel in sight. I may have to change the unofficial name of the tournament (except, unfortunately, the other unofficial name of the tournament, The Kingdom of the C.P., isn’t suitable for a family blog, and in the event, the gavel didn’t look all that much like a C.P. after all, I’m sad to report, so I don’t have an alternate name handy, so we may be stuck with THOTAB for all time and that’s just the way it has to be).

CP (not to be either confused with or identified as C.P., by the way) dropped by, but I didn’t bombard him with any tabroom.com issues, aside from a request to track daily changes so that I can see who’s doing what. He said it’s do-able, but so far he hasn’t do-ed it. Oh, well. I was listening to John Hodgman on the radio over the weekend, and he and CP sound exactly the same. Interesting.

Since I only had two sailors along for the journey, we took the car up, which meant that we listened to my usual mélange for a while, but on the way back I kept it pretty clean. Queen, as it turns out, is very good for night driving. Overwrought power ballads are exactly the thing to get you from Hartford to Sailorville. Ooooh, you make me live…