They call their sports teams the Eukaryotes

I’m still trying to figure out this whole Crossroads of the Revolution thing. That seems to be what Clark, NJ, home of Arthur L. Johnson HS, likes to call itself. Maybe there was some really big battle here in 1777. Maybe Clark used to originally be Trenton, or Yorktown, or whatever, but then they moved it. God knows that just about every city in the northeast was the site of some battle or other, with the appropriate caps: The Battle of White Plains. The Battle of Long Island. The Battle of Greenwich. The trouble is, every town can’t be Lexington or Concord or Trenton, and the others don’t want to be left out. The Battle of the Middle of Nowhere. The Battle of the Sticks. The Battle of Resume Speed. I’m pretty good on the Revolution in general, but I will admit being stymied by Clark and ALJ. Maybe one of the ALJies (Algae?) who are members of the VCA could enlighten me.

The distinguishing characteristic of the 2008-9 season seems to be serious weather, and ALJ was no exception. The process begins with the withdrawal of the Montwegians from the field, which has become the inaugural for every tournament so far this year. A tournament cannot officially begin until the arrival of the email from Monticello announcing that they will not be coming. The Montwegians had even at one point considered not attending the Monticello tournament, but this was too much even for them. I will admit that they do have their own weather systems up there (for those of you without a map, Monticello is slightly north of Juneau; on a clear day, and with her best binoculars, Sarah Palin can see it from her attic window). And there was, indeed, snow predicted for one and all this last weekend. Going into it, I had arranged with the Sailors’ bus folk that, if worse came to worse, we’d take a train, which has to be the most idiotic idea I’ve had in some time, but I really didn’t want to abandon ALJ in its inaugural year, starting friction always being greater than moving friction (which is true, unlike my previous scientific remark about pi R squared, when everyone knows that, as Gracie Allen once pointed out, pie are round). At least the traveling down on Friday was fine. Our driver, who managed to take the wrong parkway (not that it matters all that much), had a GPS that corrected our error, and to tell you the truth, the back roads were so much nicer than the Garden State Parkway, and didn’t take all that much longer. It’s about an hour and a half from Sailordom, not a bad trip at all. About the same distance from us as Brigadoon Monticello, come to think of it.

The tournament was set up a la Scarsdale, with varsity in one flight and novices in the other, with some of the members of the former field judging some of the members of the latter. To work, this requires a 2 to 1 judge ratio, but Cooper managed to dig up plenty of judges, and work it did. There were some glitches in the operation of the tournament, which were understandable given that it was the team’s first attempt, and a lot of the Algae were Speecho-Americans not used to the idea of pulling the ballots out of the judges’ hands, even if it means cutting off those hands with a machete, but mostly it ran quite well. In answer to the question, doesn’t judging and debating both make things a bit burdensome for the varsity, one answer might be that the top 8 in the field after elims had all judged prelims, so probably not.

Needless to say, we spent much of our tab time watching the weather forecasts, which kept changing from minute to minute. It was impossible to predict what Saturday might be like as the collected adults gathered at the motel for some uncharacteristic conviviality (not that we are not characteristically convivial, but rather that we are seldom together in a place where we can express that conviviality). Even on Saturday morning, it was hard to get a fix on things, but as soon as the sun was up I buzzed the Sailor bus folks and worked out that our bus would come at noon. Byram Hills did likewise. Leaving after prelims seemed to be the thing to do, and as the weather panned out, it was exactly right. As we pulled up the last stretch of HenHudLand the roads were getting definitely treacherous; we had made the right decision. Given the weather, and the need to bail out, there was one elimination round—quarters—to sort out the honors, although octonians were acknowledged and trophied (which is the opposite of being atrophied), as they would otherwise have debated. The Sailors had a pretty good weekend—LPW did not HPL and thus had his best tournament of the year, for instance, and the Panivore got home before she ran out of bagels, and ForWhomTheBen, who is allergic to all the things the Panivore could eat but won’t, went home with enough victuals left over to supply the family until the 2010 off-year elections—and from my perspective, ALJ got off to a good start despite the frightful weather. I like the idea of a tournament right after the break to try out the new topic, and I’m happy to pass the torch from the MHL to this invitational, which services roughly the same market.

This coming weekend, Bigle X. Or, it’s one damned thing after the other!