In which we look to yet another upcoming weekend

I just posted a little piece on dealing with mixed judge pools over on Adventures in Tabroom, if you follow that sort of thing. Meanwhile—prepping for Lakeland this weekend, one way or another.

There’s the team, of course. Last night the Sailors attempted a practice round, pretty much over my continuing protestations throughout of “What?” “Are you running to catch a bus?” “Is there any link at all between any of what you’re saying and globalization?” and “Would it kill us to actually have a definition of globalization?” and other witty phrases along those lines. As virtually everyone under the PF sun has pointed out, a debate over “Resolved: Globalization is Good” would have been great fun, since you could argue either Glob Good or, on the other side, Glob Bad, and everything interesting about globalization would have been on the table. “Globalization reduces poverty,” on the other hand, being a matter of determinable fact, forces one’s brains to fall out prior to attempting to write cases. Oh, well. I still sort of think that links of some sort from globalization to what one is running in one’s case is sort of a necessity, but most people in the room last night seemed to feel otherwise. What do I know? I’ve made it pretty clear what I think the link chain ought to be, as I’ve tried in vain to explain that a McDonalds in Paris is an example of globalization, and that if you have no definition that excludes a Royale with cheese, you’ve lost me from the getgo.

I just wasn’t made for these times.

On the positive side, they’re mixing and matching teams, so one each of my grizzly veterans is debating with one each of my up-and-comers. I like that. The U and Cs can pick up some pointers in the field as they debate. The confidence level and speaking skills are sooooo radically different; if the young ‘uns can just pick up a nickel’s worth of what the old ‘uns do so well, it will have been worth it.

Meanwhile, there’s the tabbing side of the tournament. They run policy wildly different from the way we run LD and PF, with round-by-round commitments and ordinal prefs. Brian M is the guru of all of that, which he is used to on the college side. He is one of the few certified tabroom.com wizards who run it pretty much every week and know how to make it roll over and beg as needed, so the whole tournament is in good hands, although it’s not an exaggeration to say that the concentration of effort is on the policy side. Duh. Nevertheless, there’s not just novice and varsity LD and PF, there’s also middle school PF and, although we won’t be touching it with the proverbial ten-footer, 3-person middle school Parli. Egads! Kaz and I managed admirably to juggle all of this last year, so there’s no reason why we can’t do it again, although the proliferation of Capitol teams and all the conflicted judges as a result is problematic. Actually, I think Lakeland is the first tournament I’ve worked all year that’s let in club entries, beyond just Capitol. Don’t look at me. I’m just hitting the buttons on the computer.

They’re also looking for total e-ballots. I don’t know if they’ll be able to pull it off in the middle school divisions (they were pretty nutty last year at State), but the rest should be all right. Given that Lakeland fulfills my prerequisite for e-balloting in that it’s location pre-establishes a captive audience, it should be fine, except for the inevitable PF parent who hasn’t brought a computer, tablet, phone, or any other technological device crafted within the last fifty years and who will demand a printed ballot.

Sigh.