The only down side was that the awards were covered with wasabi

You should have been there.

The Bronx Round Robin, which probably isn’t called the Bronx Round Robin (that would be too easy), and which didn’t take place in the Bronx (that would be easier still) was this Thursday. Twelve debaters from across your country, down your alley and up your whatever, met to argue whether they should have to actually know anything in order to graduate high school. It was an interesting day.

We met at a very nice venue high above Manhattan on the NYU campus. Nice view, until the rain started. O’C brought in an impressive bagel breakfast, including some serious whitefish. My goal for the day was to prep the Big Jake data; HoraceMann, the Superhero Without any Superpowers, who is now studying film at NYU, was covering my judging obligation. While debaters debated, Anjan and I laboriously pored over the community rankings of the judges, entering the numbers for each job. Pretty straightforward, right?

Meanwhile, before the event, O’C asks me if I can bring a printer down with me. Now, da bruddah weighs about 150 pounds, which is why it’s so amusing to me that the Panivore is our Hardware Engineer: the printer box is bigger than she is (and eats better, as a general rule). Which means there was no way I was lugging that thing around Manhattan (although I wouldn’t have minded if the Panivore were the one doing the lugging, but that’s another story altogether). When we arrived, we put the tournament on Vegas Elvis, but there was still no printer. “No problem,” O’C says. “I live two minutes from here.” This translates into about thirty hours passing before he finally goes out to get the Cruz family memorial printer. While he’s away, he calls half a dozen times to check in. “I’ll be there in three minutes.” “I’ll be there in two minutes.” “I’m buying umbrellas for everybody. I’ll be there in a minute.” I mean, how many tournaments have you been to where they bought you an umbrella? Given that the average high school student doesn’t believe in any outerwear whatsoever, despite weather ranging from sirocco to monsoon to potato blight, this was probably not that bad an idea. This way instead of not wearing their coats they wouldn’t carry their umbrellas. Good thinking on the part of the tournament administration.

Eventually he returned to the Top o’ the Robin with umbrellas and a printer. His final excuse was that it was raining so hard that people kept trying to buy the umbrellas from him. It would have better if he had been able to palm off the printer. In a word, it didn’t. It wouldn’t even come on most of the time, and when it did, it just printed endless copies of its test sheet. It passed the test with flying colors; it just couldn’t print ballots. That O’C had bought this printer back at the same time he bought his original Apple II+, the one with the 48K built-in memory (!), may have been part of the problem. Before the end of the day, it was not just merely dead but really most sincerely dead. As far as I can recollect, either we abandoned it or else Ryan Hamilton lugged it with his dirty laundry back to O’C’s department. It didn’t matter. No one ever wanted to see it again. Trust me on that. By the end of the day, we were asking the judges to write their ballots on, well, whatever came to hand. Used tissues, paper towels, ticket stubs from the local gentleman’s clubs. Whatever.

Lunch was John’s Pizza, of which O’C was mighty proud. It wasn’t bad—as a matter of fact it was pretty good, if you like cold pizza. No doubt transporting it through the blizzard was the problem. This was around the point Lakeland Stefan called us up worried that the snow would cause us to cancel the tournament tomorrow. Good gravy!

For reasons that elude me, the powers that be at NYU decided that we had debated enough rounds at our original venue, and shooed us out to another venue for round 5. This was no real problem. It was only about three or four miles away, on foot, during a typhoon, with twenty people who have never been to NYC before in their lives. What could go wrong?

Actually, this wasn’t as bad as it sounds. We got wet, and frozen, but we made it eventually. The new venue wasn’t half as good as the original one. Rounds were in places like “Igor’s Office” and “Lavatory Next to Abattoir,” but that didn’t stop anybody. Eventually we even had a final. What more could you ask?

After the official proceedings, we all moseyed on over to Japonica, also known as O’C’s home away from home. They know him there. They call him O’C (although with a Japanese accent: it sounds more like O’C, if you know what I mean). Given the amount of sushi that the assembled multitude put away, it’s no wonder they know him there. This is my recommendation to you if you like Japanese food: work hard at debate, and get invited to the Bronx RR. Your reward: the best Japanese food of your life.

And the good news, I was tucked in by midnight. Zzzzzzzzzzz.