Scarswegia, mostly

Sappy dog stories make me cry. That’s why I work where I do, viz., the day job. And that should answer the question of what I do when I’m not doing this, i.e., debate stuff.

Moving right along…

This weekend was Scarsdale, which began with a phone call from Sailorville telling me that our buses were cancelled in fear of the snowpocalypse. Not a bad call, actually, as a little bit of snow on the ground, as expected Saturday morning, is possibly the most dangerous for driving, and who wants their team to go off a cliff or something? So I headed down alone on what turned out to be the driest weekend in the history of the Scarsdale tournament. The Panivore, a conniver of the first water, also managed to make it, but that was it. With a little planning time I might have been able to make more out of it, but I don’t think my job is to argue with the admins about their decisions over school safety, nor is it to pick and choose students to bring to tournaments. Since the P lives to debate and vice versa, her desire to be there is sort of transcendent. We’ll leave it at that.

On the one hand, Scarsdale, with its alternating novice and varsity rounds, with some of the latter field in the judge pool for the former, is pretty complicated. One needs to balance the judging responsibilities, for one thing, and keep them under control. You don’t want to advantage some yabbo who isn’t judging over the yabbos who are doing their bit as responsible debate citizens, but on the other hand, there’s no reason why everyone has to judge, and you wouldn’t set it up that they have to. It’s not a thoroughbred race with handicap weights, after all. Anyhow, for all practical purposes the tournament is a series of single flights, plus the usual goofiness of PF (which is slower than the slowest thing you can think of if you slowed it down even more and then had parents judge it except they usually don’t show up because, well, who knows why). Which means that ballots are coming in and going out all the time. Every now and then we’d get so caught up in the business of it that we’d forget to put out a posting for a while until JV would saunter by (have you ever seen JV saunter by anywhere? Na’ah) and ask if the pairings were ready, but in the event we went absolutely lickety-split and beat all predictions of when things would happen, and we ended in time for me to go home Saturday way early and have a lovely dinner at the chez. Very nice. Plus some parent had brought in a homemade German chocolate cake to the judges’ lounge. Oh. My. God.

Yesterday I got ready for the grand opening (Wednesday is coming, trust me on that, even though the P rushed the gun on it) and also seriously began sorting out the Unharvard. They’ve got about 500 people coming, not exactly chickenfeed. One of the things I had to do was sort out the cheese steaks. You can order a cheese steak with cheese or a cheese steak without cheese. Now, where I come from, a cheese steak without cheese is a steak. Or maybe, a cheese steak without cheese could also be called a monkey steak or a golf ball steak or any other number of things that it doesn’t have on it, if it didn’t have it on it. (What? Whatever.) Who doesn’t want cheese on their cheese steak? Is there some new bizarre food group like the vegeterribles who eat animals but not animal byproducts? Where is Peter Singer when you really need him?

And one last thing. O'C tells me that today his family finally disavowed all connections to foreign potentates. If you ask me, it's about time!