In which we update the Gem

You, of course, have been wondering about Columbia. You are not alone.

Since the beginning of time, getting rooms has been uniquely burdensome at the Gem of Harlem. The administration has always kept the Gemmers waiting until the last minute, usually about two weeks before the event. This year, they wouldn’t even do that. No rooms would be available, they dictated, period, the first three weeks of school in January. Including the weekend of the Gem.

Oy.

Let’s face it. If the tournament isn’t its usual weekend, it probably simply isn’t. Every other weekend is booked till March, at which point it would be too late for TOC bids. Also, it’s just sort of too late. People have wound down from invitationals at that point. It’s the season for Districts and CFL Grands and prepping for NDCA and TOC and States. We talked about moving there for a while, but it was pretty much a nonstarter.

So the Gemmers took a backdoor approach, working with Barnard and whoever else they could buttonhole, and are in the process of getting a bunch o’ rooms, but not their usual number. The conclusion was obvious. Given the bid situation, go for debate, plus throw in Congress because, well, why not? And that’s the way it’s going to be, from Jan 25 to 27. We’ve told the Gemmers to get the word out. I’m pretty sure that’s also the weekend of Ridge’s big speech tournament, so it’s not as if IEs will be forgotten in the region. And it won’t be the first odd Columbia. There was that one year when they got blizzarded out and postponed, and somehow we made that one work, albeit on the cheap. I’m not sure yet the number of rooms we’ll have, but I would expect to host a healthy PF division and a not-too-slight LD division, given the traditional hunger for bids at any cost. That’s maybe the only good thing about the TOC. If a tournament does have bids, it gets customers.

Anyhow, when I went to look at something on tabroom today, it wouldn’t come up, and I remembered that it was down for maintenance. My understanding is that CP has flown to the lost city of Kor where he has to get past She Who Must be Obeyed to press the Mystical Reset Button and get everything back on track.

Time to pull out the index cards.

In which we put three novice rounds into stalls 1 through 17

One of the great joys—okay, that’s the wrong word, unless you’re a sadomasochist and have a particularly unique view of joy, but it will do for now—of running a big tournament is divvying up the rooms. The school gives you a spreadsheet, and you try to put the right people in the right place at the right time. The Tiggers is spread out all over creation. It’s a big campus, and we use a lot of it. One of the goals is to not use any of the buildings with exactly one available room. You look for mass migration, which keeps loners from getting too lost, although some inevitably will turn up on the Yale campus at some point in the weekend. Why coaches don’t arm their students with campus maps is beyond me, but then again, in my experience, a sizeable number of students are as good with maps as they are with [insert your own humorous metaphor here; I’m fresh out, having already gone the whole S&M route]. We do try to accommodate the odd lost soul if we can, but usually it’s not possible. By the time we find out about it, we’re into the next round.

Anyhow, PF is in two buildings off in the hinterlands on Friday. Speech is in one of those buildings on Saturday. LD is on the campus on Friday. LD, PF and Congress are on the campus on Saturday. And everyone is on the campus on Sunday. Sorting all this out is called Room Whispering. I used to be terrible at it, but I've gotten pretty good over the years. Of course, with the IEs, JV handles that, since speech tabbing is above my pay grade. I just give him a building or two and tell him to have at it. The good news is that it is now done up through the prelims. Working on elims whispering will be done during the empty hours between coffee runs on Saturday.

The nice thing about high school tournaments is that someone there usually just says, here’s 50 rooms (or whatever), and tells us to divvy them up any old way, because they’re all in the one building and it doesn’t matter much. At which point, we usually just go division by division, floor by floor, with any necessary adjustments for ADA situations. For Rather Large Bronx, Kirby seemed to want to do the whispering, such as it was, and since he understands the layout, it’s better that he took that over. As far as I recall, all the rounds did take place somewhere, so I guess he did a good job of it.

The point of all of this is to report that the room pools have been created for most of the Tiggers. The next order of business is judge hires.

Friday Arts

It's been a quiet week. Some new Spotify cuts:

Country Life, You Won't Get Me, from Savaloy Dip, Alan Price — I don't know how I ended up listening to this. I had no idea who Price was, but I was struck by the keyboard work on the album. When I looked him up, I found out he was the organist for the Animals. Mystery solved. He's not at all bad on the piano, either. I like throwing unfamiliar songs into the playlist. There's more to classic rock (or any rock) than "Stairway to Heaven" (not in the playlist, btw; no one needs to ever hear this song again). It's nice to sprinkle new(-ish) songs among the old favorites.

The Mighty Quinn, Manfred Mann — I was having a conversation with someone about either covers or unlikely composers or something like that, and it occurred to me that I didn't have this Dylan song in the playlist, so I just tossed it in. I can't recall ever listening to Dylan sing it. Come to think of it, I checked, and there's no Dylan at all in the playlist. I think he has recorded a couple of albums over the years. I need to start going through them. I'll start at the very beginning. It should keep me busy.

Valerie, Talking Back to the Night, Steve Winwood — Those of us raised on albums like Mr. Fantasy and John Barleycorn Must Die and AM hits like "Gimme Some Lovin'" are cursed to listen to everything else Winwood does, finding whatever gems one can. Mr. Fantasy was especially exciting when it came out. It was like nothing else. It certainly wasn't like Spencer Davis. It was the sort of album that separated the masses. If you were not an instant Traffic fan, you could go back to AM radio where you belonged.

No cuts, Future Games, Fleetwood Mac — Continuing auditing the career of this band. This one sounds way more like what they became than the rockers they had been. Nothing grabbed me.

No cuts, The Name of This Band is Talking Heads — I like a lot of these songs, but I prefer the studio cuts to the live versions. That's true of most rock recordings. There's exceptions, but mostly I like the sound of studio work.

In which we obligate

Yesterday I tried to explain partial obligations to the hordes coming to Princeton. This is probably unnecessary for the LD side of things, but it’s a big deal for the PFers. This may be their first taste of partials. We want them to be clear on it.

Of course, as I was writing the message, I went and looked at the Tigger sked. Wait a minute, sez I. There’s 7 rounds? Whoda thunkit. Then I went in and fixed the numbers in the setup, replicating Rather Large Bronx, which also had 7 rounds. I put in the traditional 2.3 round obligation, which comes out as 3 then 2 then 2 then 3 then 2 then 2 etc. I do hope people can get their PFish minds around it. Of course, tabroom can get its little computer mind around it, and will hit them with the correct obligation.

I can’t wait for people to start realizing what they’re up against. I always like getting concerned mail from unsatisfied customers.

And by the way, I should have my general note on obligations (AKA, Don’t You DARE Leave on Sunday, You Spalpeen!!!) shortly. I’ll share it here first.