The lighter side of TOC

You may have figured this out by now, but TOC was, as weekends go, all business. I prefer my debate weekends to include a little more fun.

Arriving late on Friday meant that I couldn’t hook up with anyone. The only advantage to sitting around LaGuardia for those extra years was that I threw all the PF pool into Excel and randomized the teams and then manually plugged in the random pairings back into TRPC. I’ve never believed that TRPC is all that random, which normally doesn’t matter, but at TOC, I figured I might was well be holier than the pope. This hearkens back to the old Bietz effect, which I’ve talked about before, where singletons hit singletons. TRPC also used to put big school with lots versus other big school with lots. I like best what we did at NDCA, breaking the field into 4 groups that you could only hit any two of (other than your own) in the presets. In any case, at the very least, my pairings were damned random, as random as I could possibly make them. My time had not gone to bad use.

Our hotel was about ten minutes away from downtown, and about half the cost of the downtown hotels. It was lacking in, shall we say, the amenities, but the soap entertained me no end because no matter how much you rubbed it against yourself, nothing happened. It was like washing with a brick. But if you let it sit overnight, in the morning it was a little pool of ick. It made you immediately want to wash your hands but, uh, that was the soap… Devin and CC complained about all manner of lack of housekeeping, although Kaz and the P didn’t seem put out. My room was marginally tidied up every day, which was good enough for me. As I say, at half the price, who complains? There were no varmints, and that was good enough for me.

Tabbing was pretty straightforward, especially with the three of us. I commanded the computer, and both Kaz and Aves are good readers, plus we doublechecked up the wazoo (again, because it was TOC, and there is a pretty high premium on accuracy). In the beginning we were shunted around a bit as there weren’t enough rooms for both us and the tournament. At one point we were tabbing in the main lobby, giving new meaning to the term open tab. Finally we had our spot for Sunday, which wasn’t so bad. We had a big jar of mixed nuts in among the tabroom supplies, plus some UK yabbo running the table who was quite smart, although he did wander off now and again on tournament business, and we kept thinking that we were tournament business and that wandering off was, shall we say, counterproductive. Mostly we worried about whether or not our cars would be towed, but they were always there where we left them. We harbored some thoughts about meeting up with the traveling tab folk on Saturday, but everyone was buried in a war room or something, so we just moseyed back to the hotel and ate at a local chain restaurant where Kaz kept throwing glasses of wine at CC for some reason. (Okay, only one glass, and she didn’t exactly throw it, but who am I to let a good line go by?) Sunday night we tried again, and this time we ended up at some local burger joint, the best we could come up with. I had something I think was called the Big Ho burger, which was not as hilarious as it sounds. While I ate it I watched Desperate Housewives on one TV and some sports thing on the other TV, thus getting my cultural allowance for the day. This was during the notorious eighth LD round which, when all was said and done, was absolutely pointless. By now the cold I had been attempting to fight off was winning, and I drove myself home, leaving Kaz to handle the chilluns who were all set to go to a Korean restaurant (the Panivore’s favorite cuisine) until it turned out there wasn’t an open restaurant within a hundred miles unless one wanted a big ho or something comparable. They settled for something comparable back near the hotel. They didn’t miss anything. I didn’t mind the Ho, but I wouldn’t go out of my way for one.

Sunday was the breakfast and the break rounds, and they deserve an entry of their own.