Since there was no final round on Saturday, things ended relatively early. JV was already gone, and Kaz was tied into her Policians, so CP and I headed down to Waltham alone for a late dinner. Let me tell you: Lexwegians handle snow the way some really good handler handles things really well, while Waltham simply doesn’t have a clue. You could drive a MacMansion down the streets of Lexington, but you’d have trouble getting an outhouse down Waltham’s roads. Which didn’t deter us from having good food though; nothing does. It was a tapas place, and for some reason CP thought he’d get the livers all to himself. Yeah, right.
No tournament worth its salt is without a visit from the po-lice. At about three in the morning, as I was busily dreaming away about whatever it is I dream away about busily, there came a pounding at my door that jarred me awake, and I mean a pounding. KA-CLACK! KA-CLACK! That will pull you out of bed pretty quickly. When I looked out through the peephole, there were all these people in uniforms. Normally this might surprise me, but half-asleep, I barely registered it. When I opened the door they asked me if anyone was in the room with me because someone they had caught rampaging in the woods had claimed my room as theirs. There was also something about this person wearing a cast on their arm. This made about as much sense to me as you would expect, and we quickly determined that I was a mere innocent bysleeper in this whole event. I would say that about two minutes later I was back asleep, busily dreaming away about whatever it is that I dream away about busily. It wasn’t until the next morning that it occurred to me to thank my lucky stars that I didn’t have any kids staying at the hotel. Can you imagine my response if we had all been housing there, and the cops came to my door about somebody rampaging in the woods? No going back to sleep after that. Visions of the People’s Champion tearing through the woods like a berserker, trees coming down in his wake, or the Panivore tearing the heads off of dear and sucking their blood, making up for all that lost nutritional time… Lexington is an interesting town, I guess, with all its rampaging woodsfolk. Not my cup of tea, exactly, but what can I say?
The Round Robin went off relatively well, although I learned yesterday that I did screw up one ballot and got the speakers wrong. No one to blame but myself, but I do have myself trained fairly well, and I double-checked everything and still missed it, so what can I say but that nobody’s perfect, and my apologies to Diana, whose placement was affected from first to second place. If I had screwed up any other ballot, of course, this wouldn’t have mattered. I guess I could blame her for being such a good speaker: if she had been at the bottom of the placements, nobody would have noticed. Or I could blame Ari for giving bizarre points that didn’t register well enough in my brain, all those 10s and 15s and 8s and the like. Oh, well. Since the top three speaker awards all said Top Speaker, at least they didn’t have to switch around the trophies. I’d like to say that next time I’ll get it right, but I’ve always found that RRs are the toughest things to keep straight, for reasons that elude me, and I always seem to screw them up at least a little bit. Go figure.
And, of course, there was Bean Trivia. We introduced a very popular lifeline, which was CP having 15 seconds to Google a “feeling lucky” answer. But some people wasted this on history questions, quite silly when PJ was in the room. We had PJ handwriting the answers to questions, but those answers were always things like “KKK,” so that wasn’t as baffling as I had hoped. O’C has been hanging his head in shame ever since he was unable to identify Seven Seas Lagoon at WDW. But the best of all was the following exchange, in the animals, real and fictional, category:
“What kind of animal is Rikki Tikki Tavi?”
Private discussion between student and judge. Judge says that the answer is parrot. Student foolishly agrees with judge and says, “Parrot.”
“No, the answer is mongoose.”
“Mongoose?” says the judge. “Well, at least I knew it was some kind of bird.”
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