Monday, February 18, 2013

Rick Astley has a lot of Pixar films to distribute

But he's never going to give you Up.

I spent some time today preparing my tax information for our accountant. On his form, he asked for both my date of birth and my date of death. This is why I don’t like preparing my tax information: I can never find all of the required data.

While you were at Harvard (and for all I know, while you’re still there), I was with a bunch of Speecho-American Sailors down at UPenn. Since there was no school on Friday, we got in early, with a little time for me to roam the streets before a team dinner. It was one of those nights: warmer than normal, with no snow on the ground, and people acting a little pixelated over the serendipity of an unusual Friday evening. Emblematic of it all was the copy center with the guy behind the desk playing the cello. It was a cello-playing kind of night. And Philadelphia is nothing if not an interesting collection of buildings, from the corny to the profound, especially all lit up at night. This being the last I breathed fresh air until this morning, I’m happy to say I made the most of it.

The team dinner was peachy, as such events always are. Aside from the one S-A who apparently exists on French fries (obviously a graduate of Paris’s famed Cordon Bleu de Panivoria), people seemed happy to wolf down whatever was in front of them. Some of these folks were new to me, and vice versa. I was happy to see a couple of hearty freshmen giving double-entry a try, it being a hotel-tournament team requirement. They got their heads handed to them, predictably enough, but it’s best to get this out of the way when you’re young, rather than storing up the angst when you might otherwise have a chance of success, and then finding yourself too strung out to use your skills.

The tournament went swimmingly, at least for LD. I managed to switch a couple of ballots in the last round among people who all broke regardless of how I screwed up, and I was alerted early on that I had screwed up, and got out a correct pairing without breaking a sweat, although I gather the folks who were potentially screwed, even just a little bit, were indeed sweating it out. The connection from TRPC to tabroom was well-oiled, no doubt because CP was there and it didn’t want to behave badly in front of Daddy. When he turns his back, that’s when all hell breaks loose. Speaking of which, although he and I had disagreed about the number of rankings we should use, in the event, using 5 rather than my preferred 4 worked out fine. I would submit that we probably had a few lower mutualities than otherwise, but CP would argue that, well, they were in fact more mutual. There is a tendency, until all schools wake up and smell the coffee, if they ever do, for most rankers to rank roughly the same way, so for most teams it’s not terribly hard to find decent 1s or 2s. In other words, when not everyone ranks, tabbing is pretty manageable. Of course, my now famous rant is that when only some schools rank, they get to call the shots on the direction the activity takes as a whole. And, of course, those non-ranking schools are the first ones to moan and groan about the direction LD is taking. You only have yourselves to blame, folks. I run a lot of tournaments, and help set the tone for many others. You won’t get some miraculous chance in the future to turn back the clock to LD c. 1998, any more than Policy can debate like it’s 1966, when each team had its very own shoebox filled with index cards. Oh, well. I’m doing what I can. Oh, look at the time. I’m going to be late for my fortune-telling date with Cassandra tonight…

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