Business as unusual; tabroom.com follies; goodbye Loquitur, hello Big Jake

I feel as if we have fallen into the rabbit hole and I didn’t even know we were chasing the rabbit. Things at the Day Job are, to put it mildly, complex, and will be for the foreseeable future, meaning that I go home and sort of veg out, which for me translates into watching an hour of something or other on TV and then mindlessly adding album art (I just did the Hs) to my iPod (which I must do manually because I do not believe it is John Lennon but Lennon, John, because who the hell looks for artist by first name other than Jobs, Steve?) while culling Feed articles and sussing Wordscraper, where HoraceMan, TSWAS, and I already have about 10,000 points and we’ve only played one word each.

I seem to have a rather small but comfortable group heading to the Pups, registration for which begins next week, so time is running out. I’ve already been on tabroom.com this season, setting up the first-timers’ event at Scientology High School. Last year we ran JV divisions in addition to first-timers’, which I’m sort of reluctant to do again because we’re expecting a pretty big bang for the novice buck doing this event in New York rather than in Westchester. Eliminating anything in a preexisting template on tabroom (I started with last year’s first-timers’) brings you to a failsafe screen only a CP could have created, telling you you’re about to do something idiotic but, hey fella, you’ve been warned. In my case, he’s added an additional message, pretty much telling me that I’m about to end forensics in our time if I proceed with my usual, devil-take-the-hindmost ways. Very clever. This guy needs another night job.

I am saddened that Loquitur is going on hiatus. I can understand the concentrating on the new project, but I hate to see a good old project go by the boards. Maybe they can incorporate the content of Loquitur into the magazine, which would solve the problem. Topic analysis by the very best topic analysts, the ones involved in living the topic, is too good an idea to die an untimely death.

And speaking of podcasts, I have begun taking notes for what I am sure will be a classic. I’ve done Lexington, and I’ve done Yale, neither of which can hold a candle to Big Jake in terms of pure melodrama. If nothing else, what other tournament can claim rights to “Indiana Jones and the Search for O’C’s Hidey-Hole”? Already there has been high drama and low comedy, and so far all we’ve had is pre-registration. Let the games begin!