The Gem is almost there

The weekend blizzard of aught thirteen has gone from 8 inches to occasional snow showers with marginal accumulation. So much for worrying about that. Still, I’ve arranged to train it down tomorrow to Manhattan from Hudville. It’s easy enough to do so.

I love the final lead-up to a tournament. This is when all the chickens come home to roost. Let’s see. First, there’s all the extra judges that I loaded in accidentally back at Lex. Fortunately CP caught them before I assigned rounds to them. Oy. I’ve got one or two schools still pending fixes of that debacle. I only have myself to blame, which is why of course I blame Palmer. Just going with the flow on that one. Anyhow, then there’s the people who just drop for one reason or another, or at least the civilized ones who let us know early. I don’t know if the Gem will hold them accountable or not. They tend to be smallish iffy programs in the first place; it’s almost easier just to let it go, if you ask me. Then there’s the people who wonder, although they didn’t request a hired judge, why they didn’t get any hired judges. One is tempted to lay out one’s response in the form of a debate case—as in, start with the premise that you didn’t request hired judges, show how that links to your not getting hired judges, the impact being that you don’t have any hired judges—on the off chance that they might try for a link turn there somewhere (“I did request judges,” to which the response is, “There’s no request in tabroom”) or an impact turn (“Well, I need judges therefore make it so,” to which the response is, “Good luck with that one”). Need I add that, first of all, there’s a limit to the number of hired judges available, and second, if you're a sketchy school to begin with that has a history of ducking judge obligations then I am less than likely to try to move mountains? I love that the same people do the same things over and over again. For that matter, I get regular emails from people asking the same questions over and over, week in and week out, to which the answers have been clearly posted. Unfortunately their concerns are a little too parochial for lmgtfy.com. Sigh.

Curiously enough, we are still at the exact number of debate entries for the rooms available. I had to let LD shrink a bit to make this happen in order to get in a 6th round, but the benefit of 6 rounds far outweighed the cost of 8 fewer entries (and, therefore, two fewer rooms). I was able to get everyone off the debate w/l though, eventually, which is a good thing. People do change plans toward the end, always, which opens things up. We are at the size we are supposed to be at.

Meanwhile, there’s an MHL down the road at Beacon on Saturday, which we have entrusted to other hands than usual, the coach from my favorite school name: the iSchool. Really. Apparently it’s a cleverly designed institution in the cloud that works well with all your other IOS devices. The only problem is finding a case that fits it. Then again, they probably hear this stuff all the time. But how can you resist?