So much for the Brotherly Lovers.
Since I only had 5 Sailors, I hauled them up into steerage on the CRV and drove them myself. This allows me to inflict the pain of my
randomized iPod on them for hours on end. They screamed in agony when a Green
Day song came on and I immediately skipped it, given that I have a limited
tolerance for those particular three chords played by non-guitarists at full
volume. I’m not quite sure why that group is even on the old podderoo in the
first place, but then again, that’s true of a lot of the music on there.
Anyhow, apparently the Sailors are happy with those dreadful three banged-out
chords, and it wasn’t until a while later when the Black Keys popped up, a
group I rather like, given that somewhere in their youths at least some of them
took guitar lessons or at least looked up how to play on YouTube, that peace
was restored aboard ship. Curiously, the Sailors later pooh-poohed a song that was
playing when they saw the words Frog and Primrose on the little screen in the
car, but when I told them it was both Sondheim and NPH they oohed and aahed in
utter albeit confused glee, and then a whole slew of show tunes hit the
airwaves, and sing-along happiness reigned until we saw the traffic between the
Betsy Ross bridge and downtown Philadelphia, at which point at least half of
them abandoned ship. I almost joined them.
We stayed at the old tournament hotel, being too late in
trying to get into the new tournament hotel (which is actually even the older
tournament hotel, if you go back far enough). I tucked them in early and met up
with some of my fellow wizards to prep for the morrow, in a manner of speaking.
Actually, speaking was rather difficult because Change of Address, the
tournament director (keep in mind that I’m in the direct mail business at the
DJ, and the chad list is, well, what it is), picked the place at random, little
knowing that while the food was fine, the volume level would have made Green
Day’s three chords right at home. Given that on top of the chitter chatter of a
seeming million of diners there was thumping background music that genuine
could have been Green Day’s Greatest Hits for all I could hear, well, there you
are. But we all got ourselves into the mood for the morrow, and there you are.
My ears stopped ringing roughly ten minutes ago.
Saturday morning the Sailors and I trolleyed over to the
school, and began the festivities. Unlike last year, tabroom did not seem to be
overwhelmed by the confluence of us, Massachusetts and California all running
mega events at the same time. That’s a very good thing. We may have had some
issues with people not getting their e-ballot notifications, but I’m agnostic
about this, as some of those people looked pretty hinky on the digital front,
if you get my drift. Maybe not. Transmittal of e-ballot info is really hard to
track, and certainly impossible to pin down on the back end, i.e., pass along
to CP. In any case, the only actual problem we had was when, for a few minutes,
instead of getting the VLD schematic screen we got an It Sucks to Be You error
message, but that cleared up quickly (sunspots?) and that was that.
The big story of the tournament was the weather. We really
didn’t have any, except for the fact that if you look up the word cold in the
dictionary, they have our picture there. (Although nowadays I guess you have to
google it.) We could have enjoyed a tad of schadenfreude over the horrors
in Boston, but given that it was 60 degrees or so in California, we left that
to CP running their tournament. And we took our own hit when a school with a
big entry was called home early Sunday morning due to an impending blizzard in the south, and we had to scramble to pull
results without them. This is the sort of unexpected, unpredictable event that
requires whatever solution you can come up with as quickly as possible, and you
just rebuild from there. To wit, if four or five of the judges and a comparable
number of debaters are pulled from the middle of a double-octa round, literally,
well, let’s see how you would handle it. I think we managed pretty well, all
things considered. We did have to sacrifice a goat to the god of
fustercluckery, but it seemed to work. Meanwhile, the speechfolk, working on
SpeechWire seemingly without any issues at all, were no doubt enjoying their
own local schadenfreude at our expense, although they wisely kept mum about it. By the way, the
use of two different systems seemed to have no ill effects, and no
Speecho-Americans were harmed in the making of the tournament, so there you
are.
We’ll talk about some other
Quakerian issues (not limited by any means to the Quakers, however) tomorrow.
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