Curiouser and curiouser

The first local tournament of the year, the Bobcat at Byram Hills, has been canceled because of incoming snow. It was fun while it lasted.

I have been there and done that. A number of years ago, when we ran Bump in December, we had a forecast of an enormous amount of snow arriving that Friday. On Thursday I bit the bullet and canceled. On Friday there was over a foot of snow on the ground. And, as the VCA well knows, when the opportunity came to move to November and the old NFA weekend, I was on it like a shot and I’ve never looked back. I do not miss looking at the weather report obsessively every two minutes. It’s bad enough wondering if I’m going to somebody else’s tournament, but wondering if I’m going to me own? Untenable.

What happens when an event is canceled at this point is that the trophies go into storage and that’s about it; if you were smart, you didn’t print a year on them. All the energy expended is wasted, but there’s nothing you can do about that, but at least you won’t have put the debate ziti on the burner to cook or anything like that, so you won’t be out the couple of thousand bucks yet for feeding the multitudes. When I lost mine, I recall I sold my concessions, which I had purchased in advance, to Scarsdale for their tournament a month or so later, meaning that I didn’t have to store the Snickers bars for twelve months and risk sending the entire tournament to the emergency room suffering from butulism picked up in the moldy basements of Sailor High.

But the key here is that frustration. Putting together a tournament is a lot of work. Once you’ve done that putting together, not having it is beyond anticlimactic. I mean, it’s climax-free. All that angst for nothing. My sympathies go out to the Byregians, up and down the line. Better luck next year.

Meanwhile, if you too were going to the Bobberoo and now have all that time on your hands, you might want to listen to the new TVFT which we recorded last night. We only mentioned in passing the idea, which seems to be holding, that you can argue Jan-Feb as if the consequences don’t matter. Curious world, this debate universe. We can turn inherent logic on its head and then claim that it’s the theoretic norm. As Lewis Carroll would have it:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

In other words, to say that the choice of road somehow is exclusive of the destination is a bit…illogical. Oh, well. One argues what one can argue. According to Bietz, the affs were losing so much that it probably doesn’t matter what they were losing on. Still, if you design different systems of punishments, to say that all that matters is the road to the punishment rather than the punishment itself seems peculiar. Then again, what do I know? I only work here.