In which we debrief on Scarswegia

Scarsdale went swimmingly.

Your humble tab team included myself, Father Michael, Kaz and Catholic Charlie. We were working out of the library, which was either hotter than Hades or freezing, depending on the time of day. Friday night they were vacuuming the place for hours on end; my ears are still buzzing. On the other hand, I am pretty dust-free.

It turns out that, if you have a judge named Shipoopi, the song is going to take ear worm residence in your brain, and you will sooner or later listen to the entire Music Man soundtrack, which seams like the perfect sort of music for this group. Fr M offered for our possible entertainment some sort of Irish folk music, which would, I guess, fill a much needed gap on my iPod. I was also roundly chastised for actually having an iPod—until we were all harmonizing on “Good Night Ladies.” It was that kind of tab room.

Mostly everything ran smoothly. The only issue I had with tabroom was my own fault, but it was buried deep. I’d created a pool of judges and assigned some rounds, then replaced that pool with another and assigned the same rounds. Confusion ensued, but CC managed to uncover the discrepancy. Some problems are buried deeper than others. The lesson: Delete pools that you’re not using. I also had some issues drawing from multiple groups into my pools, but it must have been sunspots because I thought I had done it before, and CP told me he was able to do it so shut up, and then I could do it again, so there you are. Gotta love the tabroom help desk! (Actually, we didn’t curse CP much at all this weekend. I did curse Fr Michael though, which didn’t exactly produce the hoped-for results.)

One thing about this year, the number of debating judges was minimal. Whether this was just happenstance, or if people really don’t want their debaters to judge at the same tournament remains to be determined. It does change the nature of the beast, obviously.

Of course, all the usual suspect were up to all their usual shenanigans. I outlined them vaguely yesterday. Why judges believe that they shouldn’t be judging, the job they are at the tournament to perform, is beyond me. And when it’s single flights, which an extremely easy burden for any judge, and they’re still whining about it, well, you just want to boot them in the butt and get them out there doing their job. The number of no-e-ballot Luddites was depressing, although now there’s a big L on the schematic in tabroom next to the Luddite’s name. Loser, of course, is a better ascription of the initial. We also need a letter for people who, A) press the Start button before they get to the round, and B) never press the Start button until a runner goes in and hits them over the head with a frying pan. Curiously, that latter group includes mostly judges who do this every week. By the frying-pan-shaped dents in their heads ye shall know them.

The judge lounge food, as Facebook had hoped, lived up to its billing. And there was plenty of it. I noticed the Paginator in there a couple of times. He had his valet handling his judge duties for him most of the weekend, so he was free to tell tales of great adventure to the assembled hoi and polloi while everyone else was working. (But he’s going to have his work cut out for him at Ridge, where he does PF: they’re breaking down the doors for that one!)

Through it all, JV, wearing taped Harry Potter glasses, seemed to be way less stressed than usual. Not having to give a thought to potential blizzards didn’t hurt. And who can be anything less than gleeful with “Shipoopi” spinning around in their head all weekend?

..

If the tab room staff acted like the judges:

We would completely disappear five minutes before the round is scheduled to start, and no one from our team would have a clue to where we are, if, indeed, you can find our team.

We would get the vapors and be way too tired to do any more tabbing, having tabbed all the rounds all day, even when those rounds were single flights separated by an hour break.

We would leave when we decide we are done, regardless of whether the tournament is expecting us to still keep working.

We would almost finish tabbing a round, and then we would leave the tab room so no one knows where to find us and the next round can’t start until they do.

We would have to take a conference call for half an hour instead of getting out the next round.

We would be in high dudgeon over the lack of cigarette breaks.

We would log into tabroom, erase our login data, and then complain that tabroom isn’t working correctly.

We would not bring any electronic devices to the tournament, and expect the school to provide us with index cards on which to tabulate.

We would complain that we didn’t get to do any tabbing because of our race/creed/gender and/or cookie preferences.

We would arrive at the school fifteen minutes after the posted time for the first round of the day.

We would claim that we have never done this before, so how dare you expect us to do it now.

We would storm into the judges’ lounge with some students on our tail and roundly attack the first persons we run into about some grievance or other, regardless of the importance of our grievance and whether those persons give a rat’s patoot about it.  

And that’s just Scarsdale…

.

Aaaahhhhhhhhhh

Last night I realized that the reason I was feeling normal is that, after 20 years, this is the first mid-November (and formerly mid-December) when I haven't been worrying about Bump.

In which we get all terpsichorean

Been playing around in most of the venues. For the Scarswegians, there’s the question of squeezing out some VPF single flights on Saturday. We don’t have enough pure VPF judges to pull it off, but there are a few impure adjudicators out there, hiding among the NPF or other divisions. Thanks to a little pool juggling, we should be able to pull it off no problem.

Single flights are usually a boon to the tab room. With double flights, you’re usually hard-pressed to move from last ballot in to next round out, schedule-wise, a pressure that normally doesn’t exist with singles. They’re also a boon to judges. Let’s face it. If it’s doubles, and you’re in most rounds, you’re going to judge a lot more than if it’s singles, even if you judge every round. Occasionally we have more PF judges than we know what to do with, but that is not a regular occurrence. For the most part, no division ever has more than enough judges, and we make the best of it. That—making the best of what we have—is, in fact, what tab does to earn its princely or princessly albeit imaginary salaries.

Scarsdale also has the tradition of varsity LD judging novice LD. I’ve always thought this is a great idea, but over the years I’ve noticed some schools simply not doing it, with debaters who are nevertheless more than capable of judging novices. I’ve always wondered if they just haven’t gotten the memo, or if they’re trying to grab some competitive advantage, on the assumption that the judging debaters will be too tuckered out to compete at their best. I know from experience that this will not be the case, but that’s just me. And, of course, I’ve always been a strong proponent of student judging, insofar as it broadens the scope and improves the maturity value of one’s career in high school debate (which, of course, is the guiding value underlying Scarsdale’s system at their invitational). Hell, I’ve even encouraged students who only wanted to judge. Why not? Better that than hanging around in the mall, or wherever it is people hang out nowadays. Some people feel otherwise, I guess. But some people ain’t me…

As for the Pups, I’ve published a revised schedule, slipping in the ideas that, A) we’ll have judge calls in LD and B) you’re obligated through doubles. I will further concentrate on those as we get closer to the event.

Down in Philadelphy (where the fellas chew tobaccy and the women wicky wacky woo—there’s a deep cut for you), one pig in the boa is a contingent of about a billion or so Chinese PF teams, which the school wants to accommodate. Nice, in many respects, and I’m all on board with it, although I’ve alerted the BenFs that they’d better acquire a whole extra slew of judges to handle them.

The Gem, meanwhile, is dragging its feet, but since it always drags its feet, I’m not worrying about it. We’ve been in touch and all systems are go, as much as they ever are there.

And, of course, next week there’s Wee Sma Lex, where I don’t have to do much but hope and pray that, when he set up the tournament, CP made some bonehead mistake so that I can do happy dance. Last year he missed assigning one of the room pools, which sent all the kids into the Lexwegian equivalent of Room 101—heh heh heh. Happy dance, happy dance. Heh heh heh. Oh, yeah. Tabroom is so easy even a dead parrot can do it. Happy dance! Happy dance!

(You know, even for me, this post has been an especially rich collection of hidden and/or not-so-hidden cultural references. And let me tell you, trying to find images for happy dance that are not Pharrell-related? There's a mug's game for you!)

In which we look ahead at this and that

I have fly the dogs of war for Penn. Releasing folks from the waitlists used to be a real chore, as you had to do them individually. Now you can just click ‘em by the dozens and do a whole event in one swell foop. Not bad. One thing I’ll say about tabroom.com, they’re constantly tinkering with it, often for the good. Every time I look at it there’s something new (or something hidden that I’m seeing for the first time, if I want to give CP and co the benefit of the doubt). Mostly these are niceties, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The world needs more niceties. Hell, nicety is my middle name. Sort of.

This is a busy week, for one reason or another. Got some stuff to do around the old chez, plus I’m seriously (or, I guess, more seriously) considering updating my website. If I’m going to roll out a whole new Nostrum, there should be a nice place to put it. The way things are now is pretty confusing, I think, because there are so many options for consumption. I wouldn’t eliminate any of the options, but I think I can organize them better. I have to admit, I am sort of longing to go back into the studio—if my desk in the family room counts as a studio—and record some new episodes. I can already hear the old Nostrum opening music in my mind. Which makes me hope I can find it on my computer. It has been a while… The goal, before getting started, is ten new episodes. That should be critical mass. If I can do 10, I can keep going. The race is on.

And then, this weekend, Scarsdale. Everyone seems to be abuzz about the quality of their food in the judges’ lounge. If memory serves me well, there was an impressive lack of debate ziti. The nice thing about working tab is that you can usually engineer it that you can get your meals while most people are judging. In other words, you get first crack. If there’s only one meatball, that meatball is yours. Plus, you don’t have to wait on line with the hoi and the polloi; let’s face it, debate polloi is the worst kind. If there’s a microwave near the tab room, then you’ve got it made. And there is one in Scarsdale. All we need is a wet bar, but as a general rule, high schools aren’t very generous when it comes to pouring out the liquor. I guess they expect teachers to go home and drink alone. It’s a tough life.

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.