Caution: Use of French is threatened in the following entry!

Bump is shut down. I could take a few more Pfffters, but otherwise, we’re done. We are as stuffed as we’ve ever been. The new weekend worked! (Damn. Now I can’t dump round 6 and retire into Semis expediency. There’s a down side to everything.)

For the next few days, things are easy. On Sunday I’ll dump everything into TRPC. Fees are set Sunday night, which means posting the final list of LD judges for strikes and rankings late Sunday or early Monday. The strikes get done on Wednesday. And then we have a tournament. We got the usual 36 rooms in the high school, by the way; I guess they’re saving the rest of them for marriage.

Last night we chezzed up on the November Pffft topic. I’ve got enough Pfffters going to Li’l Lex to [insert metaphor here for some really large number of people and their effect on something especially humorous]. No doubt they will take Massachusetts by storm. The real issue with this particular topic is focusing on something neither too obvious nor too obscure; it’s not like there aren’t a lot of examples there for the taking. But of course examples have to derive from something predictive; they are not arguments in and of themselves. The minute you look past Iraq (and why wouldn’t you look past Iraq, insofar as the lessons Iraq teaches us for the future are not multinational vs unilateral but instead, plan ahead, and don’t ever invade Iraq again, you muddleheaded yabbo), there’s a lot of fruitful possibilities. We touched on a bunch last night, while officially banning Termite from ever again discussing Vietnam. For that alone, the meeting was worth it.

I’m going to pass on discussing the rules today. Those suckers need a rest. I still haven’t looked at OMG for their takes on this. Since O’Cruz and O’Jih were actually on the committee, I know where the official heart mostly lies, so it’s only the malcontents that one is curious about. I did, however, take exception yesterday to O’C’s mention of me as a gadfly, a relatively pejorative term. I mean, I refer to him in the glossary here as a Debate Bon Vivant. And I do know other French words, if it becomes necessary. The reason I was visiting Antichrist Central, since I wasn’t checking up on the rules commentators, was to see if anything else of interest was happening, which is how I found reference to myself. It seems as if O’C and one or two other boneheads archaeologists are intent on archiving old schematics. I was immediately and poetically struck by thoughts of The Second Coming, The Hollow Men and Howl, and chose the latter for my comment. Here’s some words to live by: if, a dozen years from now, you still care not only how everyone did in the last novice tournament you attended back in the day, but also who they hit and in which round, then sit yourself down at the computer and type the word “pathetic” into your search bar; any one of those links will be just what the doctor ordered. If you weren’t even at that tournament, then just do us all a favor and have yourself neutered: your genes have gone far enough.

Aaarrrghhh!!!