Forensics: The new season develops

Okay, after a lot of grunts and groans, things heated up so much at the DJ over the last couple of days that I'm lucky if I even remember where the computer is, much less think about random postings. Meanwhile, things really are kicking in for the new season.

First of all, I noticed that the Pups invitation is up on tabroom.com. To be honest, it’s last year’s invitation with the date changed, meaning that it’s close but no cigar. I have communicated this to the proper authorities, and hope to update at least the parts that are relevant to LD. I’m especially interested in getting everyone on-board with MJP, as I’ve been discussing here, and I’ll introduce that better there. I don’t know how many people have actually seen the invite, to tell you the truth, since the link is only visible on the opening page of tabroom before you log in. But still, it’s the only link we’ve got. It should roughly reflect the tournament.

The good news is that we have a lone, lorn Sailor all signed up. My heart pitter-pats at the thought. I’m thinking there is an extremely good chance that I’ll be traveling up with at most 3 Speecho-Americans and no debaters. Oh, well. It’s a carload.

And we’ve officially kicked off Princeton, in that the Tigs have made the initial contact. What I’m hoping for more than anything there is getting PF back off campus on Saturday. I did like the 2 on and 2 off for LD, though, the old schedule from the dark ages. It’s extremely civilized, and resulted in judges showing up in unrecognizable droves in plenty of time. A lot easier on everyone, if you ask me. We’d have a little more space for everyone, too, if we got the extra out-building. We’ll see.

Come to think of it, the Gem of Harlem has also made contact, and we connected on the need to do the January 25 weekend (as in, there’s absolutely no other possible weekend). So, we’re in good shape with the colleges, but January is otherwise a fiasco. We lose the MHL, theoretically, although I’m thinking that we can run it with Columbia, but down at Beacon, with the expectation of smaller LD/PF entries. (Come to think of it, there might be some way of tying in Policy to the Gem. Hmmmm…)

The other big hassle for the coming season is September and October. For reasons that elude me, October has meanly decided to have only four weekends, putting the first-timers’ way early, but there’s no way around it. There will need to be big adjustments in the NYCFL to accommodate the confluence of CFL and MHL debate, which we all want. So, nutty times are coming, but at least we’re all aware of them.