The Black Death; Evil TRPC; I prefer Buddenbrooks; Catholic judging; Brain deficiencies

I had a serious bout of the woozies yesterday. Since practically everyone at Scarsdale over the weekend was also battling the woozies, that was probably the source. In other words, Scarsdale causes plague. Who would have imagined?

The actual tournament was one of those complicated events, in this case because the debaters in varsity judge the novices in alternating flights. In the past we’ve done our best to moderate this, keeping judge requirements minimized, but this year we were running the bad program on two different computers, and because of other issues we never got that far. One of these other issues was the inability to print schematics, either for prelim or elim rounds, for the varsity division. We were able to put together a tab room schematic for the prelims (and managed to remember not to also print for distribution things like team record or judge ranking), but for elims it was totally copied over, manually, to Excel. I’ve railed here against new TRPC in the past, so I won’t bother doing so again, although I will admit that, with all its problems, this is the first time I’ve seen this, so at least it’s creative. Given that I have a spreadsheet that will pass data relatively quickly into old TRPC, the phrase “Never again” is repeated, well, yet again. What I really need is a bridge of the data files from new to old, that would make the whole thing transparent. Given that there’s a little down time coming up, I might work on just that.

As I intimated, there was a certain “Magic Mountain” feel to the weekend. Patients kept being gurneyed into the tab room for one reason or another, or sending messages that they were off somewhere becoming one with the porcelain. La Coin’s portable pharmacy got a good workout on the over-the-counter nostrums, but she kept the serious goods to herself, just in case. Given that she is, indeed, a virtual one-woman Magic Mountain all by her lonesome, this was not surprising. As an aside, it was amusing listening to her and JV figuring out how they were going to find judges for their vast tribes at TOC. Oh, the poor dears.

Speaking of judging, there was much discussion of same at the upcoming CFL Grands, once Catholic Charlie arrived to conduct congress. The rule of the local league is that judges cannot be first-year-outs, but this is a bit limiting, and a bit silly, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone all that gung-ho about maintaining it. Unfortunately, it’s a constitutional rule, so we can’t just toss it overboard like so much cold bouillabaisse. But if we all agree, then we can act accordingly this year and modify the constitution for next year, so CC will touch base with all the appropriate coaches and make sure no one is dead set against, and we’ll launch. I’m pretty certain that will be the case. You can’t have too many judges at Grands as far as I’m concerned, and opening the gates is a good idea. We’ve already hired Scarola as a neutral. Now we could hire anyone. That’s a good thing.

There’s a prediction of snow that may postpone tonight’s proceedings on the ship of Hud. This is too bad. We can’t afford to miss anything heading into the new topic. For some reason Jan-Feb never seemed to take root in the Plebe brain, and we can’t let that happen again with Mar-Apr. My feeling is not so much that they need to kick up their competitive strength a notch, although they do, as they need to understand Mar-Apr at its core if they have any expectation of ever being serious LDers. If I were still riding the Modest Novice hobbyhorse, this topic would be a real contender. The more I think about it, the more I like it, and when have you heard that from me before? I spent some time in Scarsdale reading the charter of the UN and the UHR document, and if there is a more wide open set of papers, I haven’t seen ‘em. Even so, it’s an ought, so even strong proscriptions or prescriptions wouldn’t matter. Anyhow, I ask the VCA to pray for nice weather till after nine tonight. The Plebe brains are depending on it.