He also had the iPhone 5, Avatar 2 on DVD and a photo with President Donald Trump

In any battle of boys with their toys between me and Bietz, I lose. He’s got the iPad 2. He’s got 2 11-inch Airs. He excretes printers and PC computers. So needless to say, we both want to drive when it comes to tabbing, but he beat me down there, and hence, he won. Tarnation! On the other hand, he is adept, so I didn’t want to cut off his hands at any point and feed them to my novices. And as I’ve said, there’s plenty of work to go around when it comes to MJP, enough to keep me and Kaz and Bietz more than busy when the time came for pairing.

The thing is, Tim Mahoney, who was the tournament director, tried to get judges, and just couldn’t. I know, because I worked with him on it. It was spring break or something everywhere we went. We addressed this for the future as best we could, but there is no blame on NDCA’s part for the small number of judges. We did our best; there was no lackadaisical attitude to LD while beating the bushes for Policy. It just was what it was. This means that MJP was hard. You can just go so many a+ judges in a small pool. Obviously we prioritized mutuality over anything else, which meant that in places where we could (NDCA has a clear set of rules for judge placement), a 3-3 judge might sneak in but not where damage could be done, while the rounds with damage potential got, as best we could, 1-1 prefs. However, it wasn’t completely possible, because of the usual divergence of one or two teams who pref opposite of everyone else, plus, of course, there was the small pool. What we did was start a running tally of screws. That is, if you were the winner in a 1-2, you got into the plus column while the person getting the 2 judge went into the minus column. Then, next time around (and given that there were 8 rounds, there were lots of next times around) we would try to rectify the imbalance. It didn’t come out perfect in the end, but at least we kept track of things so that no one got screwed over and over. More to the point, the results were not particularly screw-related. Just because it’s not your top pref doesn’t mean you lose, in other words. Presumably when you pref you put your guaranteed losses into your strikes. It just means that it’s not your first choice while it is your opponent’s first choice (or second, or whatever). You can still pick up, and the numbers proved that it didn’t matter much. Still, we didn’t want to overscrew anyone, as I said, because it just didn’t seem fair, regardless of the consequences. So, we kept track of it and did our best. People coming into the room and seeing the board didn’t know what to make of it, no doubt, but then again, no one asked aside from the coaches who wandered in. Kids looking at it simply assumed it was another example of “they,” as in, “They are up to something…”

Through all these rounds we posted things into the warm room, which is quite simple. You just run a little app and drag a file over into the Goy. End of story. But the Sailors asked me on the way home why we didn’t post speaker points. To which I responded, “Say what?” For some reason wins and losses went across but not speaks. I’ll look into this when I get a chance. If someone had said something we might have fixed it on the spot. But you know how “they” are…

Interestingly, though, we sort of fell off warming in the break rounds. Simply enough, we weren’t thinking of it, probably because all the people involved were right there, rarin’ to go. Our audiences at home—if any—would have suffered an info deficit, however. I know that when Sailors are on the road without me, I like having warm room updates. Now I know how they work, and why sometimes they don’t happen. Life is like that, I guess.