Kaintuck

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So, sez you, how was it?

Well first of all, it was colder than usual. Kentucky in the spring should mean shirtsleeves out in the sun, Frisbees flying, the smell of the fresh manure that they always seem to lay down the day before we arrive (sort of like sympathetic agricultural magic, or synecdoche, or however you want to look at it). We started with a raging rainstorm, and although eventually we got sun, we never got Southern Springtime. I was looking forward to that.

We had Scott B as a fellow traveler, which was nice, a little unifying Northeastern touch. We met him at the airport and drove down from Cincinnati together. The usual quick registration and some sort of traditional argument with the tab room (Scott’s judge prefs had arrived three seconds after the deadline) and then off to Jalapenos for dinner. I actually own a Jalapenos tee shirt, which I “won” one year as a cinco do mayo prize, which may have also been tied into having a party of 103 and being the one who handed in the check. Having this as my TOC tee shirt, I’ve never felt the need to purchase one of JW’s. (He still has an assembly that stops the tournament cold on Sunday in order to hawk the latest edition.)

TOC Saturday is a busy day. 4 rounds for the debaters, a lunch and a meeting for the LD committee. The lunch is a TOC tradition, serving Hot Browns (created at Brown’s hotel in Louisville to calm the hungry crowds on derby day) and Derby Pie. This year it was at some club that was formerly a mansion owned by a nouveau rich couple that couldn’t break into the Whitneyesque Kentucky social horse scene, and then the husband died and the wife remarried one of the stable grooms (or something like that – JW regaled us with the story as an after-dinner impromptu). Every dinosaur in debate was there from both policy and LD, including a few who you thought were not only merely retired but really most sincerely retired. It’s a social event, not a rantfest, and as long as the room isn’t hit by a comet, a swell time is had by all.

Following this is the LD Advisory Committee meeting. The main order of business at this session is always evaluating the bids. As JW says, it’s not about rewarding or punishing tournaments, but satisfying ourselves that the bids are doing what the TOC needs in terms of supplying the right number people who ought to be at TOCs. There was not much disagreement this year; JW will announce his conclusions toward the end of summer based on the discussion (the conclusions are his; we literally do advise). The next order of business was judges, and the fact that although a lot of judges were hired for the tournament, the mutual judge preferences had relegated at least half of them to the status of wallpaper. I’ll talk more about judging (and the rantfest that underpinned the weekend) tomorrow, but there is general agreement that TOC judging needs to be of a certain standard reflective of the nature of the event, as compared to, say, the average weekend tournament where the spread of judges can be much more diverse (i.e., a well-trained parent is fine at a regional tournament, but a little less than what we want at TOCs). The solution(?) to this problem is to eliminate hireds altogether. JW will provide a list of acceptable judges for those bereft of them, but it is the responsibility of the entrants to provide all their own judging. I don’t think this will change the judge pool much, but it will aid in the tournament not wasting money on unusable judges, and there is certainly sense to that. Aside from the committee’s slice of the rantfest, the other interesting thing is always seeing how we individually ranked the at-large bids (JW distributes a spreadsheet of our choices). If O’Cruz offered me enough money, I might consider selling the list to MVP, but honestly, it must needs be private to the committee. I will say, however, that uniformly over the years there is general agreement. We’re not perfectly aligned, and we each have one or two in our own private Idaho, but we all read the entries about the same way, and rank the at-larges roughly identically. This is a good thing.

Dinner Saturday was at a pretty good steakhouse. Our social weekend comprised us, Scarsdale and Monticello (and Peter and Jacob on Sunday and in the poker game that couldn’t possibly have happened). Annie, it turns out, orders nothing but potatoes. The steakhouse obliged with a baked potato that was roughly the size of Pip the Wondercat. This was a Ripley’s Believe it or not potato. A Guinness potato. A potato that Annie would theoretically be eating after she worked her way through a three-foot pile of steak fries.

We left a trail of potatoes in our wake this weekend.

Sunday was a long day, marked by my judging two whole flights. I claim that this is a factor of not being particularly well-known as a judge, since I’ve been in tab rooms all year. Justin claims that it is a factor of being quite well-known and being cast off as a result. Whatever. Either way, I got to go to Starbucks to read the Sunday Times, I had a lovely lunch at that nice sandwich place near the school, I worked on the semiotics section in Caveman, I read the pomo book I’ve just listed over there to the right, I did the puzzles… What more could you ask?

The whole run-off thing was difficult. I bit the bullet for the first time since 1995 and watched the round. As you know, the reason I don’t watch HH rounds is that I get too emotionally wrapped up in them, eventually turning borderline homicidal. This was no different, but I did enjoy seeing the round, and was happy to see that 2 of the 3 judges were flowing the same two people I was.

That day I had charged Rose J-T with the chore of finding the best ribs joint in town for dinner. She did, she claimed, and off we all went to a restaurant whose name I have thankfully already forgotten. You know you’re in trouble when you walk into a ribs place and the first thing that the hostess tells you is that they’re out of ribs. As the dinner progressed, they also ran out of carbonation, French fries, bottles of root beer and ice cream. Joe V, in sympathy, ran out of patience, and as Jordan said, we would have liked to have left a big tip, but we ran out of money. Fortunately Justin forgot his tie, so the poor (literally) waiter will have something to wear if he ever receives his high school equivalency diploma.

Monday is the Breakfast of Mispronunciation, which was pretty much the usual. Then, of course, no matter how unpreferred you are, you still get to judge octos. Having scored on the strike parade once again, I used the time to work on Caveman. Lunch that day was at some drive-in where the waitresses come to your car on roller skates and say y’all (the plural of which is all y’all, by the way) and forget to collect the money. Good burger.

And finally, home to New York, watching my first Curb Your Enthusiasm shows on DVD. A fine ending to a fine weekend, and I hope next year that you qualify and I can do it all again. (I want to see what happens to Larry David.)