Bigle X: Debate Babylon!

Of course, you want the raw underbelly of Bigle X, the stuff you won’t read in the Facebook comments.

You’ve come to the right place.

First of all, the traffic was ridiculous, as in, no one was on the road, in either direction. Danbury was dead. Hartford was virtually deserted. The Mass Pike didn’t have a single vehicle between our bus and Scarsdale’s van twenty minutes back. It was as if the entire northeast was getting out of the way of the tournament. I thank them for that.

CP had the tournament all prepped and ready for copying into TRPC, which removed a lot of the aches and pains of startup. We ran everything in the registration auditorium and printed up the ballots, and the only thing that held us up was waiting for Mizz Beal to park so she could (deservedly) get the Michael Bacon Award. There was a look in CP’s eyes that he was willing at any moment to renege on it, weighing in his mind her dedication to forensics against her ability for find a parking space, but the former won out. And then the games began.

I would like to say that PF was a veritable nightmare (that’s what I was doing, with Sarah D), but it went as smooth as a goat. We put out ballots, people picked them up, we entered the data, and there you were. The tabroom.com notifications were working fine, and every time I pressed the button to publish on my computer my phone lit up for my guys, so I assume others were in the same situation. We managed to pull off a few single flights (most dramatically a single-flighted doubles round), and finished nice and early on both days.

Not so LD. There was a glitch in the prefs that forced CP to pull the second round and have them re-pair it. On the negative side, that slowed things down a bit, but on the positive side, the glitch was discovered and everybody went on to have their prefs reinstalled. I’d like to say there was a tabbing lesson in there somewhere, but I gather there isn’t. The system isn’t perfect and it can’t be programmed around. The moral of the story is, check your prefs coming and going. Then again, how long ago was it when you got the damned judge we gave you and you ate it and went on? There weren’t too many complaints about this, as far as I could tell, but I did hear some grumbling. Get over it. The system failed on its own, and as soon as it was discovered, great effort went into fixing it. Maybe a half hour was lost. This is a tragedy? Especially when the judges went into single-flight mode the next day, which for all practical purposes is like forensics staycation? Jeesh.

Anyhow, they set up a mattress in a corner of tab, but as far as I can tell, no one used it for anything much. Maybe if they had handed each of us slippers and a nightgown and a sleeping cap, things might have been different. Then again, Chavez brought his legendary salsa and about 50 bags of chips, which is worth staying awake for. We managed to get a walk in on Saturday to get an ice cream, and it wasn’t 50 degrees below zero, not that that would deter me from getting an ice cream, but when the weather at Bigle X isn't apocalyptic, you remark upon it. This ice cream break helped me overcome my deep depression at not coming close to completing the Friday puzzle. I barely started it. Saturday was okay but not perfect in that regard. I’m not quite sure where my brain was all weekend, but it wasn’t with Will Shortz & co. And finally, we noticed that policy tab is much like PF or LD tab, except that they have two additional people whose job it is to play first-person shooters on their PCs while everyone else is tabbing. We haven’t had to resort to that on our side of the aisle yet. Maybe it’s coming and I’m just not aware of it.

As always, we stopped at Reins on the way home, and I was lounging at the chez before 11:00. Not bad, all in all.

And thus another Bigle X goes into the history books.