By the way, translation: "I'll be right back" = He wanders off for at least 10 minutes

I think I’m turning into an ogre. It used to be that when people annoyed me with idiotic nonsense, I simply ignored them. Now my instinctive reaction is to engage them. This serves no purpose. People whose ignorance expresses itself in hostility are hardly going to become enlightened and gentle upon encountering the brilliance and clarity of my ripostes. In fact, it just encourages them to develop their ignorance in that forge of their hostility, while I just get progressively more hostile myself. Not good. The solution is for me to remember to ignore things that need to be ignored, and let it go at that. I can’t fix them, so why bother? Sometimes it’s hard, though.

Yes, I am working behind the scenes on a tournament, the Gem of Harlem, and people are driving me crazy. I remain amazed at how self-insufficient people can be, and how coaches who have been attending tournaments since the Garfield administration (the President, not the cat) can be so obtuse on the subject of tournament attendance. Oh well. This is the last one of the year like that. College tournaments do tend to attract way too many people, a lot of whom seem to confuse it with a cruise on the Norwegian Princess Line. No, we don’t serve herring in bed. We get them out of bed and then we serve them.

Jeesh.

Last weekend was a small local event that went swimmingly enough. The most interesting thing was putting together a 12-team PF event. After 3 rounds 2 teams from the same school were undefeated, so we byed them in round 4, the first time in a while we’ve byed a team at the top, much less two. But they had already beaten everyone in the 2-1s, or were also from the same school. A double pull-up hardly seemed fair, as it was more than likely to result in a predictable defeat. Fairer rounds were to be found elsewhere, and that’s what we did. But then came the interesting part for tab geeks. After round 4 we had the 2 undefeateds, then 2 3-1s who had already met. One of the 3-1s could have debated an undefeated, but the same school situation literally guaranteed the other 3-1 an elim slot because there was nothing for it but double pull-ups. This didn't seem right. Plus we had a bunch of 2-2s. At first blush we wanted to shut it out and declare it over and go straight to elims because it was so neat, and since every possible fifth round contest was a pull-up. At this point we had to push O’C aside as he had a horse in the race, and Kaz and I sorted it out. With a little snip here and a little tuck there, we managed to get everyone to debate a new singly pulled-up opponent, with the exception of the top 2, who remained byed, and the bottom two, who had debated before and were hence locked on the other side (which makes some sense in the flip-crazy world of PF). I mean, people did come to debate, not to sit around (except for the poor saps who were too good for the room). Interestingly enough, in the fifth round, a 2-2 did rise up to supplant one of the 3-1s, and as a result we had two natural semi rounds that worked beautifully. This is the kind of thing that makes tabbing fun. Most of the time you just click the button and it happens. Here, we shuffled the cards a dozen times. And the result was most pleasing (except, presumably, for the 3-1 team that was pushed out of the running, but that’s hardly a new story in any contest).

On this week to Bigle X with a marvelously full contingent: 1 PF team and 1 novice LDer. We’re going to need a bigger bus!