The life of a former World's Worst District Chair

At the local Cineplex, popcorn is $1.00 on Tuesday nights. This is a savings of about $50 per movie trip. (I gather that Wednesday is dish night, as any Jean Shepherd fan can tell you, but I’ve already got enough gravy boats.) I learned this startling fact this week when I went to the movies Tuesday night when I would normally have been attending a meeting of the Sailors (we are devolving into mostly chezzes for the rest of the season). Of course, you only get the discount if you have a card from the theater. The only reason I had gotten the card was to shut them up every time I went to the movies when they would get on my case for not having a card. But who can argue with $1.00 popcorn? Thank you, Barack Obama!

Regarding TNC last weekend, I forgot to point out that we told PJ to print up the registrations in advance and then just mark any changes on the printouts when people arrived. After I arrived I discovered that we had asked…PJ…to write… changes…on the registrations. By hand. Anyone who has ever read seen a PJ ballot will realize that this could only to questions like, “Is this name really Mxyzptlk?” The answer, of course, was always, “No, it’s quite clearly Kltpzyxm.” PJ, as it turns out, is actually able to read PJ’s handwriting. Formidable! I always thought he was just as much in the dark as the rest of us.

This weekend is the New York State District tournament, in its usual Scarsdale venue, which I am not running for the first time in years, and which I will presumably never run again. I have exactly one entry, and I am judging. Any wonder why the Cheshire cat is one of my favorite characters in literature?

Meanwhile O’C is tabbing Woodward this weekend, but he’s tabbing it O’C-style. That means he will show up when it’s half over, arriving on the back of a white elephant with mahouts aplenty, dressed in his finest sweater vest. Meanwhile Kaz will be doing all the heavy lifting of the early rounds. At TNC he showed up Friday just in time to get dinner. He’s becoming the number one flaneur in high school forensics.

Some day I want to write a novel with a character named Mahouts Aplenty.

And now that I’ve used “flaneur” in two posts in one week, you have no choice but to look it up. My favorite warning sign is, indeed, NE FLANEZ PAS! It’s become my life’s philosophy.

I hope to use the down time at Districts, if any, working on questions for one last Bean Trivia bash next week and the next installment of Great Debate Adventures. But I’ll probably mostly end up judging, or maybe getting beaten up by JV for abandoning my post, not to mention what the rest of the hoi and the polloi might have to say about it. It’s tough being tossed from the heights back into the general population, even if it was self-tossing. But somehow I will stiffen the upper lip and make the best of it.

I just got a ballot from Rippin’ to vote for next year’s chair. Anybody want the job?

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