What’s going on with the travel to Blake? All these Facebook statuses complaining about canceled and postponed and generally miserable flights, at least going in from the northeast. If you ask me, they have nothing to complain about. They need to look on the bright side, i.e., the possibility of an extra trip through the TSA Underwear Grope. We get so little human contact in our internet-heavy lives these days. Having strangers put their hands down your pants makes up for this deficit. As a matter of fact, we’re going to have underwear groping tomorrow at Regis, just for the sake of parity. We don’t want to miss out on the benefits of being on the $ircuit, after all.
Menick’s Law #428: If you set the closing of registration for 9:00, at 9:02 someone (actually, multiple someones) will email you asking to register their team because they “just missed the deadline.” We’ll be selling alarm clocks at Regis, right past the underwear groping stations. Jeesh.
I haven’t broken the news to my plebes yet that, because they’ve qualified for the state tournament as novices, they will be debating at one-day events, like the one tomorrow at Regis, as JV. That’s usually a jaw-dropper for them, in that it’s almost a guarantee of lots of losses. But if you don’t debate up, you don’t get better. That’s just the way it goes. Plus there’s still plenty of normal novice divisions at invitationals at which they will remain among their peers. You might be thinking that they’ll read this, thus ruining the surprise, but they won’t. Plebes usually don’t enlist in the VCA until they realize that I’m not going to bite their heads off any time soon, usually toward the end of their first year. Some never enlist, and never have any idea what the rest of us are talking about. So it goes.
Their reward, of course, is their first round of Bean Trivia this Tuesday. I hope O’C has his phone all charged up and ready to go. “Ask Cruz” is one of the favorite lifelines. Who won the 1923 novice division of Blake will not be one of the questions, but go ahead. Ask him. He’ll know. Really. He will not, on the other hand, be able to name a sport with bases, nine innings, balls and bats. We all have our specialities.
3 comments:
Re: 9:02 issue.
I believe in the Xeno's Paradox of Tournament Registration. No matter what time the deadline is, given that we we must always get half way there before the deadline, and half again, and half again, the deadline will never be reached. On the other hand, we also know that some people 'just miss' the deadline. What gives?
Thus, I have also come to believe that not all computers are on the time them there English folk set and are so 'mean' (heh) about. More importantly, not all computers are set to the same time as the servers of the tournament host. This is unfortunate, but perhaps this is a place where publicizing a 9:00 close time and actually shutting things off at 9:05 will do a world of wonders. That or MAYBE, hopefully, reduce such emails.
I don't know that I dserve a Field prize for this suggestion. If I do get one, I promise to donate the proceeds to a worthy cause.
I confessed this weekend at Blake (actually, I've confessed this before) that I don't know how football works.
Or baseball either, it would seem...
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