And the season begins

Last night was the first meeting of the year, with all the new recruits. And the question you immediately ask is, how was the turnout? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but next week I’m bringing in the Hells Angels to work crowd control.

All right, let’s face it. We’ll lose a quarter of this teeming horde by next Tuesday. And then another quarter will drift away in the two or three weeks after that. But still, we’ll easily have 15 left, a flotilla of noble warriors joining the ranks of the Sailors, and I think that’s great. And not only was their number beyond comprehension, so was their gender (and I don’t mean this in the Freudian sense)(yet). I haven’t seen this many girls in one room since [fill in blank with your own clever lots-of-girls-in-one-room metaphor]. Maybe we can be like Scarsdale and have an article written about how we have girls on the team for the first time. Maybe I can get CLG and Kt to co-write it.

Of course, a large class brings out my greatest inadequacies. I’m better with smaller groups than bigger ones. But we learned to handle some of this stuff over the years beginning back with CLG’s vintage, and later with chezzes and split meetings and the like. One way to keep the crowd down is to break it down into smaller groups. Another way is to keep cracking what I consider to be jokes that no one understands (never forget our slogan, “If you were smarter, I’d be funnier”): that usually sends them packing. The biggest problem for me will be the names, needless to say. I have trouble with my two cats, and I’m always calling them either by the other’s name or by yet some other cat’s name altogether, usually one long dead. A couple of dozen new kids with all new names? No question that I’ll be calling all of them the wrong name, confusing them with one dead cat or the other. But still, I’m excited about this. I always want the big group. I like diverse ideas, fresh blood, new minds to corrupt. And this year it looks like we’ll be doing land-office business.

On the business front, I have made Nicole and Robbie our novice directors (backed up by Captains Ben and Eric, of course). This decision is based, first, on their skills and my belief that they will do a good job, and second, by their red hair, which makes them stick out in a crowd (98% of the people in the world do not have red hair, a fact I learned when I was about eight years old, and which is probably either still true or never was). If they work out well, I will make red hair a permanent requirement in the future. I also kept Nicole on as Communications Liaison, because she was doing a fine job of it, and why rock the boat? And finally, ending a year of suspense, I appointed Termite as Hardware Engineer. It just seemed to be the right thing to do. In the past, the HE position has been held by some of our top team members, so Termie is taking on an important and weighty mantle. This day having also been Primary day in New York, it was only fitting that such power be vested at this time. Hillary and Bill did send congratulatory telegrams. As well they should.

It’s the beginning of a new era.