I’ve gotten back to working on Volume Two of the Complete
Nostrum. So far I’ve done the epistles and good/bad guys, and now I’m in the
middle of Tennessee Williams High School. I have very mixed feelings on that
one. In most regards, it’s a piece of Nostrum that should have been in Nostrum
and wasn’t. My expectations for it were higher, though. Maybe if I had gotten
it off the ground it might have turned into something, but as it stands now, it
has some interesting characters, and some really funny bits that I’ll share
here separately, but mostly it’s just evidence that I wanted to write something
at the time that wasn’t Nostrum, but I couldn’t do it. Which, I guess, is why I
eventually went back to Nostrum whole hog (which ought to be either whole whog
or hole hog, as Sean Bean might say). If you’re going to right Nostrumesque
material, let it be Nostrum. (I think the Chicago Manual of Style says that...somewhere.)
Meanwhile, I’ve been in communication with all the college
tournaments I'm involved with, and everything looks peachy for the upcoming season. None of them
seem to want to put me out to pasture quite yet, although some of them are a
little less diligent in their hospitality support than others. I don’t ask for
much, but I do have something of a built-in meter that goes off every time you
make another $10,000 and I don’t even get a box of warm noodles. Let’s face it.
I start working tournaments months at the invitation stage. Every year there’s
something new, some language that needs refining, a better way of doing things,
whatever. The adults working with the colleges (i.e., what CP calls the Traveling Tabroom)
keep things honest from year to year and provide a sort of seal-of-approval. If
we’re in the tabroom and setting up registrations and the like, it’s probably
not going to be terribly screwed up. Or if it is screwed up, we have enough
experience to mitigate the screwing, as a general rule. The internet outage at
last year’s Yale was a one-off, and I don’t think anyone could have done much
about that. We certainly never had that problem again. The result was a bunch
of stinker judge panels in the run-off, but that was what started me
remembering that far distant time (a couple of years ago) before MJP and you
got whatever judges we gave you. As I said back then, most debaters just gird
their loins when they see the panel and go forth and debate. It’s the coaches
who get their knickers in a twist. Maybe they underestimate what their debaters
can do, or overestimate the value of MJP. MJP, at its best, only insures that
the judges are equally satisfactory or unsatisfactory to both sides, not that
you’re going to win because you got a judge you rated a 1, or going to lose
because you got a judge rated a 3. Your opponent also rated the judge a 1 or a
3. MJP can shake the unknowns out of the trees, but it can’t hand you a
guaranteed win. My favorite (not from Yale) was the coach who, facing balanced
panels that were not 1-1-1 but were certainly set evenly, refused to accept a
certain judge because he had rated him low. What? You rated him, didn’t you?
Yeah, but I don’t know anything about him. And this is my fault? Jeesh!
Oh well, no point thinking about that now. Water under the
dam and over the bridge, as they say. And just think, by the end of this week,
forensics will be over for the season.
And the week after that, the camps open and next year’s
season begins. Enjoy you hiatus!
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