In which, with Homeric effort, we refuse to turn debate judges into swine

From the good news, bad news box: It’s looking as if we won’t have PHS for the Tiggers on the Saturday of, which means that all debating that day will be on campus. Which means reverting to the 2-up 2-down schedule. First round at 8, next round at 12 for VLD, first at 10, next at 2 for NLD, etc., as we share the campus with the Pffffers. They, on the other hand, will toddle along one after the other. The up side of this is that it makes LD tabbing ridiculously less harried, plus it gives everyone nice long breaks. The down side is that Sunday LD gets a couple of hours longer, since there’s no way of speeding it up on Saturday. There’s just so much room at the inn, in other words, and no one will agree to, say, breaking to finals after round 3. Oh, well. It wasn’t as if I were planning to run a marathon or something as soon as I got home from the tournament. And I’m even planning on taking the next day off. I’ll survive. So will everyone attending. I used to love judging there in the old days on that schedule. Plenty of time to eat and socialize with the team, and you weren’t stressed out even if you judged every round. After all, you’ve already had a two hour break. You need a six hour break? I mean, really?

I spent much of the final off weekend for a while cleaning up some Nostrum stuff, and prepping up some NCOC (Nostrum, the very special COC edition, that is). I’ve always wanted to write about a stripper named Tempest Fuggit, but alas, there are, at the moment, no plans for any ecdysiasts in Nostrum. This could change, but I’m not counting on it. However, I have just noted that the legendary tournament manager, Tabu LaRasa, has now arrived at Codswallop Pseudo-International Airport (where, for all I know, there’s a stripper named Tempest Fuggit appearing nightly at the Codswallop Pseudo-International Airport Holiday Inn). Some things are baffling, like not coming up with the name Tabu LaRasa in series 1. (Then again, I didn’t come up with Baby Bump for this year’s Sailor tournament in February, either, so I’m not always at the top of my game with these things.) Tabu is not, I’m sorry to say, an anagram, so he will not be actively coaching. But there are those who believe that tab rooms are the Circe of debate, luring folks in who should otherwise be judging and thus causing the ruin of forensics as we know it, although I have to wonder who’s going to be tabbing if we’re all still judging. I guess we could get parents to do it. Nobody likes parent judges much. Maybe parent tabbling would solve that particular problem.

Anyhow, Ultimate Nostrum 2 could appear in Amazon any day now. All I have to do is flip a few switches at this point. It’s about time.