Catholic card-throwing

CFL Grands is a tournament of card-throwing. You can set the brackets easily enough and figure who debates whom as the day progresses, but it is impossible to automatically assign judges because there's simply not enough of them. We've tried to trick the computer into doing it, but it just won't happen. Which means that you print out all the cards of the debaters and pair them, then you print out all the judges and see who can judge which rounds, and then do it again because of the double flighting, and if you're lucky, it all works out. We were lucky Saturday. But it is time-consuming, because you always miss the blocks or that they've already judged this yabbo on that side, and so forth and so on. Plus we're all together, speech and debate, in one big tab room, laity, nuns and everything in between, and everybody's going about their individual business trying not to bother anybody else, which limits the amount of Led Zeppelin you can blast out of old Grandpod to keep up the flagging late-day spirits. Meanwhile JV was charging his mini all day, which made the two of us look like the least up-to-date iPodists in America. Considering that it was a Scarswegian who, in one of those strange j'accuse moments, asked me how I could even listen to music on something that old, we made sure to keep the door barred and the windows shuttered. Perish the thought we get caught listening to our Liberace albums on old equipment.

The tournament had its usual ups and downs. The odd fire alarm. The odd judge (and boy, was this one *odd*), the odd drama. We did not qualify any of the Jolly Tars, I'm sorry to say, although we were a hair's breadth away. One crummy ballot, dang it! Oh, well. At least I got to find out that one of our debater's mother, a former Enron employee, is not under indictment. I hate it when the parents of the JTs are dragged away in chains. It makes finding judges so much more difficult.

The reporter yabbo I meantioned a while ago was apparently there, but he's decided that the smart scoop is in policy. The theory is that this is always the case; they see policy rounds and they are so intrigued by their incomprehensibility that they figure that they're the story. So be it. I really didn't want my picture on the cover of Weekly World News right up there next to Bat Boy and Hillary Clinton, if you want to know the truth. I value my privacy. That's why I don't even have a blog.

I collected bunches of Districts stuff while we were there, which I started sorting out yesterday. Aside from the one packet I lost, I'm in pretty good shape! Numbers are a little down, but we have a couple of new schools replacing some of the old ones, so things should be okay. I'll talk more about this shortly.

And finally, I've committed to teaching Simulacra and Simulation in April. Before you suggest that this is akin to Pat Robertson teaching Darwin, I hasten to point out that Caveman is quite favorable to the old Baudriloo, in a manner of speaking. He is a much better writer than, say, Derrida (but then again, so is Pip the Wondercat). And he writes about fun stuff like Disneyfication. And the non-existence of reality. Of course, if there is no reality, will it actually matter if I give the lecture? Will anyone even know whether I gave it or not, regardless whether they're there when I give it? This lecture may be the coup de grace for the season. It will certainly be the coup de grace for M. Baudrillard.