Adventures in the Frigid North

And so we bid a fond farewell to beautiful, barmy Lexington…

For a while now this has been one of my longest weekends of the year. I need a car, so I met with the Sailors early on Friday and pointed them and their bus toward Boston, then popped into the Menickmobile for a nice quiet trip alone, with no company aside from Keith Richards reading his autobiography. This was on an audiobook, to be perfectly clear. Keith did not come along with me in person. The Stones may be mostly over, but he doesn’t have that much free time on his hands. He would make a good PF judge, though. Then again, who wouldn’t?

I went straight to the hotel where the cool kids were staying, as Kaz quickly began referring to it. When I went to the desk and asked for my rooms, they looked at me as if I were Keith Richards picking up his PF ballot. They had never heard of me or my judge or my bus driver. But I made the reservations on Expedia, I cried. So talk to Expedia, they cried back. Which I did. The first person I talked to did not really speak English. I do not fault Expedia for this, because they do offer flights to India on their site, and maybe they just thought my room was in Mumbai and not Lexington, the two being so much alike in so many ways. After lots of me saying, “What are you saying, you non-American you?” I was switched to someone I could understand. Now there was a lot of back-and-forth of the iPhone to the desk clerk and blah blah blah, and a half hour into this the woman on the other end of the line discovered I was an Elite Expedia person, which is functionally the same as a Hoi Polloi Expedia person except that now she could dump my call to somebody else. We started from scratch again with Expediter (NOT!) Number 3. This took most of an hour, and it was not resolved when I left to go tab the tournament, although the hotel took pity on me and gave me some keys and told me it would all be better in the morning. As it turned out, it was all better in the morning, although it hadn’t looked promising at the point where Expedia said they’d fax the information to the hotel and the hotel said WTF, who faxes in 2011 anyhow?

Nice start.

Things were much more under control at the school. Kaz was already there and I gave her VLD and stayed with PF and NLD, and eventually JV and CP arrived and we got things off to a rousing start. JV and Kaz did the MJP honors, and although I looked over their shoulder once or twice, they had things well in hand. They couldn’t get the music of the matches we had at Bronx because of the smaller pool and some single-flighting, not to mention a couple of schools that had the preferences from hell. (Note: Want to make yourself a sworn enemy of the tab room? Run contrary prefs. You can go from walking on water to persona non grata in seconds flat. You know who you are, you p.n.g. you.) In other words, whereas at Bronx we had almost exclusively 1-1s with the odd 2-2, here they were all over the map. Still, it makes sense with a high-level pool like this to pref them. Some seriously competent $ircuit judges are a 1 or a 6, end of story, because they are well-known in their likes and dislikes. You love ‘em or hate ‘em, in other words, and MJP is the only way the tab room, which would otherwise assume that all of these puppies are A-1s, has no way of knowing that you think they suck eggs. Meanwhile, NLD and Pfffft were their usual selves, and not worth covering in excruciating detail.

One interesting MJP note, while we’re at it. Trying to pair the final round, with only a handful of judges still on the premises, was impossible playing by Hoyle. Using three judges would have meant an imbalance, because we had one mutual and two 1-2s. We then found another mutual, and to balance it off, threw in a 3-1 or a 4-2 (I forget which exactly). The problem with that, although the prefs added up right, is that one girl had two imbalances on her side, and the other had only one. Assuming (theoretically) that you would get the vote from your higher pref, this didn’t look fair. And you couldn’t just throw out the MJP altogether in a tournament based on MJP. So, we held off the round until the next day, when the two were hitting anyhow in the round robin. We wanted them to have the most fair round possible. It wasn’t going to happen Saturday night, unless a lot more judges had still been around. The lesson in this: never let judges leave the building. For anything. Ever. A panel of 2-2s and 3-3s would have still been a fair test of a final round at a major tournament according to the rules of engagement at that tournament. A panel strongly favored by one debater is not. Granted that sort of panel happens often in non-MJP situations, it should never happen with MJP—as I say, it’s against the rules of engagement. So, we took the high road. As I said parenthetically, this whole line of thought is predicated on the loose idea that your pref will vote for you every time, but the pref is the only measurement we’ve got, and you’ve got to use it.

Meanwhile, a high point of the festivities was, in fact, a festivity, the one where Lex bestowed their first Traveling Cruz Speaker Speaker Award, a loudspeaker (red) much like the one he uses to herd the wild beasts at his own tournament. Someone who cares about awards as much as O’C should have an award named after him at every school, if you ask me. At Emory it could be the Hasn’t Taken The Key Off Yet Cruz Award, for instance. Of course, the Sailors were the first with a Cruz Award, and it took years for all the rest of the riff and the raff to take note and follow the trend, but I am not bitter. No, not me (although next year the pressure is on, curse you Lexwegia!). Whether it makes sense that the NFL offer a supplemental event called Wandering Off in O’C’s honor remains to be seen, but I would suggest that everyone get on the Rude Bandwagon now while there’s still room.

That’s enough for now. Tomorrow, the police come to the door, and we run a Round Robin.