Not to mention JT's shoeshine head

The heat paralyzing the northeast doesn’t warrant much discussion here—it’s hot, deal with it—but it does slow one down. Plus we had houseguests for a few days, and we’re moving offices at the DJ, so one’s concentration is sort of elsewhere. Still, the roads must roll…

CP tells me we can now run an RR with the tabroom software. I only tab one of these a year, at Newark, which I usually do long distance, although this coming year I’m going to try to be there just to look the judges in the eye before assigning them. They’re an evanescent group, if you know what I mean. To be honest, I like to do my RR pairings in Excel because I’ve got a perfectly good schematic for various numbers of players, and all I have to do is find and replace the names, then I pour it into tabroom. I don’t think I’ve ever actually used TRPC’s RR functionality; it’s never the right number of contestants, and I just don’t trust it. Still, the software determines who wins, as if it were a regular tournament, but one does need to keep an eagle eye on it because, well, one tends to be sloppy with data entry in RRs because it always looks easier than it is and it’s so much more relaxed than a tournament, and even with raptor vision, the tiniest error can throw things into turmoil. Anyhow, I’m ready. See you in February.

For the overly interested, we run a listserver for the DisAd (as you can see from the countdown, we’ve tripped over into the 300s). We are presently arguing the merits of the actors Nicolas Cage, John Travolta and Tom Cruise, which at least makes sense for the first two as they both have bona fide Disney credentials (I can see O’C furling his eyebrows trying to figure that out, and having done so before reaching the end of these parentheses and feeling really proud of himself). Meanwhile, I just found out that they’re going to update Star Tours in 2015, which means that O’C will have to spend a whole day on it during the DisAd before it goes away again. Life is tough. At O’C’s birthday party, we picked up a potential fellow traveler who claimed that her dream in life is to get stuck on “it’s a small world” for 24 hours straight. She really said that. I hope that, if she comes and if she wishes on a star, and if I happen to be with her at the time, her dream does not come true. I’m sure I’m not alone in this.

On the home front, I’ve goosed the Sailors again about Yale, given that registration opens August 1, and more to the point, hotel arrangements need to be secured. I have rooms already, of course, but probably more than I need, and we have to dump the overage at the earliest moment to make the space available for other schools. The popular places do sell out for the Pups, as they do for the other college tournaments.

Next week I’ll get back to The House on Summer Street, to release it, I hope, by the end of the week. And then I’ll start my annual update of all the debate sites, such as they are, heading into the new season. Meanwhile, I need to go back to our DisAd listserver as we compare the acting skills of Messrs. Cage and Travolta. Some people in the group think that these two are the world’s two worst actors, but they nonetheless enjoyed watching them in Face/Off. They seem to forget that, in that movie, the world’s two worst actors were faced with the challenge of pretending that they had changed places, i.e., each of the world’s two worst actors was playing the part of the other of the world’s two worst actors. That is either the easiest or the hardest acting job in Hollywood. (And you don't want to know what O'C thinks about Legend.)