Thursday, November 29, 2012

Debate: Ready to Tigger 'em up

I love dealing with CP. Somehow with him it’s always my fault when I screw something up. I prefer to blame everyone else. Given that there’s only one of me and quite a few of everybody else, the likelihood that one of them is at fault versus me being at fault are about seven billion to one. Those are good odds. What can’t CP accept them?

I think Princeton is ready to roll, in any case. We threw in the strikes for PF late. I had thought about these off and on, but more off more often and hence they fell through the cracks. PF strikes are a slippery product. There’s a certain sanctity of any damned fool can judge it, versus the problem that some damned fools always drop you and I’d rather have some other damned fool judge me if it's all the same to you. It’s curious to look at PF from the other side, as in, newcomer parents who I try to toss in there from the Sailors. Everyone seems to want to spend the next three or four years observing. I mean, once, okay, but after that, you’re in. Watch one, do one, teach one. Watch fifty, do one, attend child’s graduation isn’t really how it’s done. This despite how much we insist that PF is intended for their lay adjudicating ears. I’m seeing the same thing with our Speecho-American parents. How many times do you have to observe Dec before you feel competent enough to judge it? (That, of course, is a trick question. Just watching one round of Dec will turn the most profoundly competent adult into a simmering bowl of hyena sweat incapable of ever rustling up another cogent thought.)

At this point the tournament is about to pounce from the gate. Tonight I’ll look at the data and start setting things up in TRPC. Judge prefs close at 9, so everything is ready at that point, aside from the usual memo from You Know Who asking for more time. Or, maybe you don’t know who, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m still getting people asking about the waitlist, which is sort of moot at this point. I overbooked a little as it is, with the aid of a couple of extra rooms that turned up unexpectedly that I hope are still there once the festivities begin. Also, of course, there is the integrity of the tournament. Some schools could fill up an entire division all by themselves, but that does nothing for everyone else. We’ve got the right numbers for the debate divisions, we’ve had them for a while, and we’re going to keep them. I wouldn’t give my own mother another LDer, but then again, she would know better than to ask.

We did move registration time up a bit on the speech side. I’m wrangling the debate side of things, and JV is wrangling the speech side, and he reminded me that when he figures he’ll be done as soon as registration is closed, the next thing that happens is that tabroom crashes and it turns out that all the numbers are not divisible by any reasonable number for assignments and the judges are all taking the day off to work on their macramé projects. He wants to get out at a reasonable time, as do we debate tabbers, and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t. Needless to say, he runs with full autonomy on his side. I really know nothing about tabbing speech.

Then again, CP would claim that I also really don’t know much about tabbing debate. That’s where we disagree. It’s those other seven billion people who don't know much about tabbing debate. Next to them, I'm Mr. Tab incarnate.

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