New noobs? Anchors aweigh, my boys!

Crikies! Two of the late addition plebes returned to the scene of the crime last night! One of them is a new bona fide member, signed onto the listserver. Will wonders never cease?

(I had an author once, a nonfiction sports writer, who in his text described someone as bonified. I assumed, first, that this meant the person had some osteoporotic issue in addition to his legitimate credentials, and second, that my nonfiction sports writer author had a limited understanding of Latin. And yes, I did edit sports books once upon a time, a couple anyhow. This is how I have come to maintain my edge of knowledge of sports over O’C, who may be the only person in the universe who knows less about the subject that I do. Over the years I have come to the conclusion that a good editor can edit anything, but probably shouldn’t.)

Newark finally found this year’s tournament hotel, in the middle of downtown. Traffic around there is abysmal if there’s a game going on, so one hopes that the Newark Bulldogs (or whoever plays in the Prudential Center; given the name of the venue, I would hope for something like the Newark Risk-Averse, but that doesn’t sound likely) have the night off. Usually they find a hotel at the airport, which always takes me about three hours to find, in the middle of the night, after endless driving around in circles. Downtown Newark I can find. Nice pick. I’ll be tabbing again, of course. I’ve also volunteered to help on the RR, but long distance, since I really can’t take the time off from the DJ. That’s always fun; Newark always maintains, shall we say, a certain fluency when it comes to judges…

Speaking of fluency, the use of student judges at Byram allows for incredible movement between divisions. There’s a number of seniors (and above) in the novice divisions. Being able to move people around is always a good thing, especially with smaller fields. This one is not going to be hard to do at all, which means that fitting in the modules will be that much easier. One big problem for them will be finding good big spaces for the Friday events. I don’t think I mentioned that O’C finally came up with an NDCA finalist for the PF module. These are going to be very strong. Plus the whole idea of making this a soph-juniors tournament rather than pretending it’s a varsity tournament has, I think, really made it good and useful, even without the modules. The fields will be level, and that’s a good thing for rising students. They actually have a chance to win something, which always helps solidify one’s forensics career, as compared to losing everything, which has the opposite effect.

Anyhow, getting back to last night’s meeting. We talked at length about China. Rule number one for February: flip con.